Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rick Kieser, CEO of Ascribe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The problem you describe is clear and easy to understand: unstructured data that comes through open-ended comment boxes in market research forms. You help process those comments and categorize them.

Tell us more about what other trends are driving behavior change inside the corporations that are prompting you to move more in that direction.

Rick Kieser: This is coming to social media, big data, etc. There are lots of different ways. About a decade ago, nobody could process this data very effectively. It was all generated through survey comments or solicited feedback, either through telephone, paper, or online interviews. The rise of unsolicited feedback coming from the Internet, social media, or call centers in the last decade has posed a challenge for a number of technology firms to enable digital researchers to become more efficient in managing unsolicited feedback. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rick Kieser, CEO of Ascribe (Part 1)

Rick Kieser is the chief executive officer of Ascribe, a company that provides a comment management platform to drive meaningful insights from customer comments and in doing so processes more than 300 million customer comments per year. Rick has more than 20 years of operating, management consulting, and venture capital experience. In this interview he talks about natural language processing and text analytics and explains why Ascribe is different from any other company in this space.

Sramana Mitra: Rick, tell us a bit about you and about Ascribe. What is the business? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about the genesis of the company – how it was built, and a bit of the story of how this company has come about.

Yves de Montcheuil: Talend was founded in 2006. The true founders of Talend are Bertrand Diard and Fabrice Bonan. They were working together for a system integrator, and they were implementing the tools of the large proprietary legacy data integration vendors, who are now our competitors – companies like Informatica, IBM, etc. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what you are seeing from an industry point of view. What is happening in the industry, and where is it going from where you sit?

Yves de Montcheuil: We are seeing the desire to get value from more and more data. What is now called big data is nothing new. Companies have been amassing vast amounts of information and data for years. The issue is that only the wealthiest of those organizations have been able to extract value from those vast amounts of data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the price of the subscription?

Yves de Montcheuil: It varies greatly on the types of features the customer wants. It can start from a simple data integration project in the $10,000 range. A typical MDM [master data management] project is in the range of $70,000 to $100,000. It will scale up on the complexity of the project and the number of developers. Typically it is significantly less expensive than what you can buy from our competitors. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double click into customer scenarios.

Yves de Montcheuil: On the MDM [master data management] front there is a global travel organization out of the UK. They are a global company with subsidiaries all over the world. They are a multi-channel organization by definition. They have big travel agencies. Those have big posters of sandy beaches, cruises, pictures, websites, corporate travel agents, corners in supermarkets, etc. So, they have many ways of selling their travel products. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 1)

Yves de Montcheuil is the chief marketing officer of Talend, a company that provides data, application and business process integration solutions to organizations with the goal of leveraging their data assets. Yves has studied at the Grande Ecole des Sciences de l’Information et de l’Energie, commonly known as Supélec, and has more than 20 years of experience in corporate marketing, product marketing, and product management. In this interview he talks about Talend’s data integration solutions to help organizations leverage their data assets, providing a platform for those companies to specify their own parameters.

Sramana Mitra: Yves, let´s get to know Talend and you.

Yves de Montcheuil: I am the vice president for corporate marketing for Talend. I joined the company in its very early stages – I wasn’t there on day one, but on day two. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are you thinking about this in terms of a platform? Let’s say you provide the platform and infrastructure to bring all this data together in an accessible, manageable, and query-able way. On top of that you are going to need heuristics that are application specific. That brings me back to my original question about heuristics. Where are the heuristics coming from to take that beach and run a business process on it? You are going to need industry-specific heuristics. That requires a tremendous amount of domain-specific knowledge within any industry. >>>