Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 1)

Steve Shine is the chief executive officer of Actian, which provides a reliable platform for customers to meet their real-time big data analytics needs. Steve studied at the University of Manchester and has more than 17 years of experience in the software industry. In this interview he talks about Actian and its unique value proposition, and he gives us interesting use cases on how big data analytics influences different industries and how it can be leveraged by young entrepreneurs for future projects.

Sramana Mitra: Steve, let´s start with setting some context for our audience. Tell us about Actian and you. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: OpsViz, Palo Alto, California

OpsViz provides infrastructure source of truth as a service for technology companies. With its flexible back-end and connectors to commonly used open-source tools, OpsViz ‘snaps in’ the architecture of its customers to ‘collect and clean’ the infrastructure data and analyze it. What sets OpsViz apart is that its founder Gülin Yilmaz managed to validate the business and pricing models and has a confident customer base to draw upon.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that is vertical specific and what lots of companies are working on is the heuristics of these analytics. The applications you get out of the big data analytics depend on what you search for, what heuristics you build your models around, and what kind of learning algorithms are on it. There are a variety of things that are very domain specific. That is an area that is active but also underserved. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What have you seen in the last five years that are major trends in this space? What are the drivers currently, and what do you foresee will be the drivers in the next two to five years?

Shaun Conolly: I was in the application platform business with JBoss and Red Hat. I was also in the virtualization cloud area with VMware. If we look at the software industry from a high level, four major disruptive movements are going on. The social media space is one of those areas. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there other use cases?

Shaun Connolly: Let me tell you about the healthcare use case. What it does is show the sensor data use case well. In the healthcare industry we work with healthcare providers as well as university hospitals – the University of California Irvine Medical Center is one example. In many respects, they are looking to optimize patient outcomes at scale. You might have a lot of electronic medical records in existing systems or new systems. The healthcare use cases bring some of the traditional data that might be in systems like EPIC, which is a healthcare-specific database. But they also have sensors on patients that go home. Those sensors collect vital statistics, temperature, etc. So providers are able to monitor patient even after they have left. That information is not only good for keeping track of how patients are doing after they left the hospital, but it can also be useful for clinical trials. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What have you had to do technically to service this use case?

Shan Connolly: In many cases, the enterprise Hadoop platform acts as the landing ground for all those different sources of data. In many cases, if the information is already in existing systems that are powering the business, those systems are not impacted because you can view Hadoop as a catch basin where it will not only flow through the regular systems, but a copy of the data will be placed in the Hadoop cluster. So you are able to collect all the relevant information from the various ways a customer may interact with you. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to distinguish between what is free and what is paid in the product part, can you give some examples of capabilities that are paid?

Shaun Connolly: Whether we are doing operational tooling, configuration, provisioning and management, those capabilities manifest in an open source project called Apache Ambari, which is an Apache Software Foundation project. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 1)

Shaun Connolly is the vice president of corporate strategy at Hortonworks, a company with extensive experience in the application of Apache Hadoop, enabling companies to satisfy their big data needs through their Hortonworks Data Platform. In this interview, Shaun describes the services Hortonworks offers to clients, which include software support and consulting services. Shaun has worked for companies like VMware and SpringSource and has more than 25 years of experience in software. He graduated from Drexel University.

Sramana Mitra: Shaun, let´s start with some of your background as well as that of Hortonworks. >>>