Thought Leaders in Big Data: Incorta CEO Osama Elkady (Part 1)

Terrific PaaS strategy! Osama explains a bunch of use cases that are opportunities for entrepreneurs to build new companies.

All are drawn from their customers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Incorta.

A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What year did this restructuring happen?

Bassel Ojjeh: This was in 2014. 

Sramana Mitra: LigaData really comes together in 2014. What happens next?

Bassel Ojjeh: My biggest focus continues to be profitability. Last year, I was reading something when it struck me, “You want the freedom to innovate and you need to be profitable to be free.” That combination is really important.

A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Bassel Ojjeh: We got our first few customers. We wanted to counter what the software industry is used to. We went open source. The goal was ubiquity. What we found out fairly quickly is, if you’re selling to traditional companies, they’re not used to buying open source software. It became counter-intuitive to them.

A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who were buying at this point when you were doing this company in the early 2000s?

Bassel Ojjeh: I left Yahoo in 2009 and started what I just mentioned to you. That was from 2009 to 2010 onwards. Financial industry, banking, and mobile operators were buying at this point.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said earlier that you are a close partner of Microsoft Azure. Azure is one of the platforms that is really working hard to establish as much abstraction as possible so developers can develop AI applications on top of that. What opportunities do you see emerging out of that trend? Microsoft is investing heavily in this.

Wolf Ruzicka: I’m really glad that you brought it up. First of all, I’d like to toot our own horn a little bit. Two or three weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas at their conference to get the Partner of the Year Award on behalf of my team.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 4)

Wolf Ruzicka: The fourth bucket is anything related to mobile applications. Please don’t think about Flappy Birds type of application. Think of the enterprise-level applications.

If one of the startups gets listed on NASDAQ, NASDAQ will try to upsell that newly-listed company to products that we have developed for NASDAQ around mobile.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a little bit about the way your company is organized? You do generic software development, but it looks like you’re doing specific stuff in AI-related technologies. What percentage of your company is focused on AI-related technologies?

Wolf Ruzicka: Before we go there, we have one more example that we can mention in case you’re eager to have actual customer names here.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 2)

Wolf Ruzicka: We found some very interesting concepts that only the power of big data can bring, for instance, the causality of customer complaints. When a customer complains, you would assume that it is because of maybe heavy traffic or badly-maintained infrastructure. It turned out to be the marital status of the driver. That doesn’t mean that you should hire one set of drivers. You just have to accommodate the different type of personalities and backgrounds through guidelines in order to reduce customer complaints.