Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with David Gibson, VP of Marketing at Varonis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have been talking to many people in this space. One thing is very clear – all the real opportunities to differentiate in terms of applications are in the layer where there is actual heuristics and business logic that can be created. That presupposes that you have metadata and rules based on metadata. You have to have that domain specific understanding of whatever problem you are trying to solve. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with David Gibson, VP of Marketing at Varonis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there another use case you would like to discuss?

David Gibson: The one thing we talked about is the archiving and migration. All these platforms are a bit different in terms of how they are set up. SharePoint has SharePoint groups, Windows has NTFS permissions and share permissions, etc. What we are able to do with our framework is distill it down to user groups and data and what people can do with those. So for an IT person, you don’t necessarily need a subject matter expert to manage access anymore. That is what our execution engine does with the metadata. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with David Gibson, VP of Marketing at Varonis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some use cases where you can explain how certain customers are using your technology.

David Gibson: The day-to-day operational use cases are answering questions. Who is asking these questions? Often the business user is asking IT, “Who deleted my data?” Most organization have the experience where they call up and IT says, “I can restore it for you, but I can’t tell you who deleted it or if somebody moved it where it has moved to.” This is the basic use case that concerns almost everybody.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with David Gibson, VP of Marketing at Varonis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This whole thing sounds horizontal to me. Are you applying this horizontal infrastructure to IT-specific problems?

David Gibson: Some of the first steps you take is to make sure that the assets you have are protected. Those are many of the use cases people start with, but they branch out from there. Once you have all this metadata and the analysis we bring to it, there are more use cases that follow. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with David Gibson, VP of Marketing at Varonis (Part 1)

David Gibson is the vice president of marketing at Varonis, a company for data protection. David studied physics at Duke University and a BM in classical composition from the New England Conservatory of Music. He has more than 17 years of experience in IT as a systems and sales engineer, having worked for Time Inc. and Tripwire. In this interview he talks in detail about metadata and human-generated data and Varonis’ role in protecting that data as far as user access, tracking of data use and auditing is concerned.

Sramana Mitra: David, let’s start by introducing Varonis. What do you do? What is the company all about? Also give us some background about yourself so the audience knows whose perspective they are being brought into. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: From an industry point of view, when you look around at what people are doing or trying to do, what is missing from the landscape?

Rajat Paharia: If you are running a business or are a manager of a business, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon all probably know more about your employees than you do. It is because they are tracking every single interaction those people have, and they are doing that to make the experience better for the end user and also drive business value for the company. In the consumer space, these guys have figured this out. They have figured out how to take all this activity data and use it to optimize experience and drive business results. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what the big data aspect of this is?

Rajat Paharia: Gamification wouldn’t exist without big data. Gamification is completely based on statistics – statistics about users and the things they are doing. In context to the book I mentioned earlier, Loyalty 3.0, Loyalty 1.0 was about loyalty programs. These programs had one data stream coming in, which was purchase data from your customers, and then one constituent that was being served, which was your customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other application for your platform other than training?

Rajat Paharia: People use it in the employee space. They use it for sales and sales performance, for collaboration, etc. >>>