Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So in this case the gamification application is in the area of training?

Rajat Paharia: Yes, on-boarding, training, teaching somebody a complex process. It is about guiding them through a learning experience in a compelling manner. That is exactly what this did. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are the Hadoop clusters customer-specific?

Prem Uppaluru: The database can be shared across multiple tenants.

SM: So it is a multi-tenant Hadoop cluster?

PU: Absolutely. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations, that is awesome. You were obviously way ahead in terms of coming up with these ideas. Then you had to wait for the market to catch up with you. Who were your investors, and how did they deal with it? Typically VCs have a very hard time dealing with that scenario.

Rajat Paharia: We were very lucky with our investors. Our first investors were Adobe Ventures – the venture arm of the Adobe Corporation. Then there was Granite Ventures, which is a former Hambrecht & Quist venture arm. Chris Hallenbeck has been on our board from there. He has been great. He has been the primary supporter of the company since 2006, when we first raised funding. He is the lead investor in the company. He was able to see that there was something. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So you have the ability to do routing at a granular level.

Prem Uppaluru: Exactly. This brings me to the next use case, which concerns the largest direct response marketing merchant with multiple ways to attract customers. They are the company behind the [skin care product] vendor Proactiv. They get around two million calls per month from customers responding to their TV, radio, print, and web ads. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 1)

Rajat Paharia is co-founder and chief product officer of gamification leader Bunchball. Rajat holds a masters in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Bunchball he worked at IDEO, Philips Consumer Electronics, IBM Research, and ViewStar. In this interview he talks in detail about Bunchball’s gamification platform and how it helps businesses motivate employees and customers to drive better results.

Sramana Mitra: Rajat, let’s start with some introduction for our audience. Talk about your background and what you have been up to, and also introduce Bunchball to our audience. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So the key value proposition is call routing.

Prem Uppaluru: Call routing and matching the callers with the right agents to deliver highest value transactions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It is the call center you are supporting.

Prem Uppaluru: That is right. They offer the 1-800 number to their customer, and they have both consumers and business customers. Many of the business customers tend to be continued customers in the sense that they would do business with Office Depot every month. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Todd Goldman, VP and GM for Enterprise Data Integration at Informatica (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What you described is reasonably accurate as far as my observation is concerned. The pure infrastructure layer is overcrowded and overfunded. The opportunity is in the domain knowledge and knowing what heuristics can move the needle on top of that horizontal infrastructure.

Todd Goldman: What you want to do is combine knowledge of a vertical space and go find a good graphical UI type person who is good at visualization. The difference between the winners and losers, for anybody who enters a particular vertical space, the ability to show results and make those results compelling are going to be the major break. Fabulous visualization on top of good analytics will beat out fantastic analytics with mediocre visualization. >>>