Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Mike Byers, CEO of HighRoads (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the data itself. What is in the data, and what are you doing to handle these big data problems?

Mike Byers: The data we manage and collect plays into an entirely new component of the business a fairly substantial opportunity that is in front of us today. The data we refer to is the individual component that makes up a medical plan, for example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Mike Byers, CEO of HighRoads (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of actionable conclusions that came out of this normalizing and big data processing work, what were the highlights of what you were able to do with that data?

Mike Byers: The activity itself shaved off a considerable amount of time that the client was spending just preparing for their open enrollment. It shaved a couple of months off that process. The second thing it gave the client was the ability to look across their 330 different medical plans and get a good comparison of what they were providing to their employees across these 14 business units. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Mike Byers, CEO of HighRoads (Part 1)

Mike Byers is the chief executive officer of HighRoads, a company that helps its clients with benefits plan management and healthcare compliance through its cloud-based SaaS offering. Mike has studied at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management and has more than 30 years of experience in finance and software. In this interview he describes HighRoads’ value proposition in the benefits and healthcare space and gives us a few interesting use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Mike, let´s start with introducing you as well as HighRoads to our audience.

Mike Byers: Thank you for the interview. I appreciate the opportunity. My background is an almost 30-year career that started in finance as a CPA. >>>

Splunk’s Stock Rising Despite Growing Losses

According to recent reports, worldwide big data hardware and software revenues grew 59% last year to $11.59 billion. The market is projected to be worth $18.1 billion this year, translating to growth of 61% over the year. The market is estimated to grow 31% annually to $47 billion by the year 2017. IBM is the market leader in big data products and services, with revenues of over $1.3 billion from the segment. Other smaller players are making their mark in the industry as well.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And these are people who are using online advertising?

Steve Shine: They are all using online advertising. They are not monetizing from membership fees. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That is a really great use case.

Steve Shine: We have a number of exciting use cases where the gaming companies are coming to us. A small or medium business cannot afford the legacy architecture to be able to build up that platform to deal with that much data. It must be on a Hadoop platform, and it must have high-performance technology layered on top of it to be able to consume, digest, and analyze that much data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So your core differentiation is to be able to handle very large volume data at very low latencies and power the business analytics layer on top?

Steve Shine: We enable the business analytics like the BI tools, the analytic frameworks, or analytics applications. We do this all the way, connecting from the original data sources all the way through to offering it up and enabling those analytics capabilities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 2)

Steve Shine: People aren’t tapping into just any ERP system. They are tapping into applications and new forms of data sources that are either machine generated or cloud generated, social media, mobile and streams of data that are on an entirely different scale from anything that legacy technologies can deal with. Frankly, this is why Hadoop has grown. Hadoop is quite good at dealing with massive scale. >>>