Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 1)

For a while, security and privacy concerns around the adoption of cloud computing were eased, which drove huge adoption of public cloud services. In this interview, we explore how the tide is turning and how even early adopters of public cloud are now concerned about security.

Sramana Mitra: Jeetu, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to EMC Syncplicity.

Jeetu Patel: Thank you for having me here. I am Jeetu Patel, the General Manager of the Syncplicity business unit. Syncplicity is the file sync, share, and collaboration business unit within EMC. We made the acquisition of Syncplicity in May of 2012. Since then, we have had sky rocketing growth of this technology that I will describe to you in a moment. That’s essentially what I do for EMC and Syncplicity.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 6)

Naveen Sharma: Many of our current service offerings started off as XTIN projects. Take for example our Ignite offering, which was the result of  a bunch of researchers who had young children who were interested in how to use technology to personalize education. They went to K to 5 classrooms and observed how the teacher and students interact and built a system that helped teachers better assess students so that they can individualize help. Ignite is not only a great example of how XTIN helps Xerox fund and develop new service offerings, but it is also a great example of intrapreneurship. When this idea came about, there was no value-chain yet. We funded and explored it, and now have created a value-chain for this research.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a bit and ask you to put on your Chief Innovation Officer hat on. Let me give you a bit of context about why I want to go in this direction. In our incubator program, one of the areas we’re doing a lot of work on right now is corporate incubation, in partnership with some of the largest companies in the technology domain. We are seeing interest as well as projects. Actually, some of these projects are already in full swing where we are doing incubation of entrepreneurs. In the same way, we invite entrepreneurs to come in to the One Million by One Million program to learn how to build a business, some of our corporate partners are sponsoring intrapreneurs to come in to One Million by One Million and get their projects incubated.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These are  good examples of taking data and doing something interesting with it to produce actionable business value but it didn’t really cover multi-modal data. You say it was one of the issues that you’re trying to illustrate. Can we take a use case where there is actually multi-modal data involved?

Naveen Sharma:  In this particular case, the multi-modality came from call center data. For example, I talked about call center audio files or recorded conversations. Also, meta data is captured as structured data so we had both kinds of data.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 3)

Naveen Sharma: Our challenge is not the question of volume, it’s more of  variety because if you look at our call center data for example, that’s primarily an audio-based database. If you look at transportation services, that’s primarily video-based data. If you look at our call centers, they’re also looking at social media data, which is unstructured. Much of the data we are dealing with is unstructured and multi-modal. The challenge for our researchers is to bring all those multi-modal data streams and fuse it in a way that it is ready for analysis, so that we can actually build a model that can span across and accommodate multiple data modalities. That’s one of the challenges from the research perspective that we are constantly dealing with. Data fusion is the industry term that a lot of the publications refer to, but for us, data fusion really has this special meaning because we deal with this in real time.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Sounds like you have back office services. That’s one of the emerging direction or already in-swing direction for the company, since you are already generating a good $10 billion in revenue from that part of the business. What’s interesting about that business? Where are points of views emerging around the big trends in the industry like Big Data, Cloud Computing and so forth?

Naveen Sharma:  I could summarize in two points. I would say one is automation. When we talk about back-office services automation, the trend is that clients are looking for greater efficiency and save costs. This trend points to the use of the cloud to automate as well as convert capital cost into more of an operational cost. Customers want to invest in back office services only as much as they need it, buy by the pound, enabled by the cloud. There are a variety of Xerox innovations we are actively working on with our business groups, which are aligned with automation.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 1)

We have two interesting discussions in this interview with Naveen: one about Big Data and a second one about Corporate Incubation. As you know, in 1M/1M, we’re working on Corporate Incubation quite extensively. Naveen throws light on Xerox’s strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Naveen, let’s start with a bit of your background and also by setting the context of the old Xerox versus the new Xerox.

Naveen Sharma: First of all, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Naveen Sharma. I have a dual role in Xerox. I manage a resource lab in one of Xerox’s innovation center, which is in Webster, New York. Concurrently, I also have a role as the Chief Innovation Officer, Xerox Retail. As part of my Chief Innovation Officer role, I’m tasked to develop and deliver new innovations that can eventually become new Xerox services. Most people would associate Xerox with printing services, but over fifty percent of our revenue now comes from services. It’s an area that is growing as we take a vertical approach.We are looking to bring some innovations in retail IT, as well as IT applied to some of the specific domains, such as industrial, hospitality, or media.

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Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What would you say are the key milestones that you have accomplished, based on almost four years of being in business?

Matt Pfeil: From my perspective, I think that open source as a business is really hard because you create something as an open source project that you don’t own. You throw up things that you could sell. So we have a clear-cut strategy on what our products will look like. I think we figured out how to sell it and we now have 20 of the Fortune 100 as customers. So the customer list backs that up.
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