Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Robert Youngjohns, SVP and GM at HP Autonomy (Part 1)

Robert Youngjohns is the senior vice president and general manager of HP Autonomy. Simply put, Autonomy helps organizations understand the meaning of information by applying big data technologies. Robert previously worked at Microsoft and has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry. In this interview, Robert talks about Autonomy’s role within HP and provides an interesting proposal for entrepreneurs in this space.

Sramana Mitra: Robert, let’s start with setting some context about HP Autonomy. Of course, the readership knows very well about HP and the acquisition of Autonomy. Where are things right now? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You had a chance to understand the requirements of that market by catering to the legal industry, and then you went to the larger IT departments with the use case of catering to their legal issues.

Bob Tennant: Exactly. In order to understand how your customer needs to evolve, I would suggest to your readers that they pay attention to the people dynamics within an industry as well as to the technical dynamics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That is interesting. Are there any other major use cases, or are those more or less representative of how you gain accounts?

Bob Tennant: There are others on the license side of our business, also in customer experience optimization. There you basically pull together information from a wide variety of repositories, because often you can get a much more holistic view of the current state of a customer when you draw from the CRM system, the email system, and the marketing management system. Then you can start to build a model of what the customer looks like and recommend how to improve the customer experience or better target sales. This we do relatively frequently. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Could we talk about a few more pain points?

Bob Tennant: We do something called e-discovery, where in the process of responding to a government regulatory request or litigation, you are obligated to provide all pertinent information to that request. To do that, you need to find and identify, then analyze, what information has to be sent over and send it. That process can be inefficient and can be made a lot more efficient with sophisticated technology as well as the capability of doing analysis as we do, with machine learning on top of it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So you built a platform and you let the customers figure out what use case they want to apply it to?

Bob Tennant: No. Our experience in the past has been that it is very difficult to sell a platform. It is very hard to do if you are carrying a big company’s business card. What we are trying to do is to focus on markets and business problems where we think we can help. We sell a solution and we enable that solution with our platform. The nice thing about having a platform is that if you solve one business problem, it becomes very easy to say, “Would you like another business problem solved? That would just be a few more dollars.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 1)

Bob Tennant is the chief executive officer at Recommind, a lead provider of e-discovery, enterprise search and automatic categorization software. Bob has degrees from the University of Victoria, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University. He has many years of experience in the IT business, having worked for Swiftsure Capital and Sun Microsystems, and he is board member at several successful companies. In this interview Bob gives us an insight into how Recommind solves its customers’ problems in terms of data management, e-discovery, and data querying. He also shares his thoughts on gaps in the market and how to fill them.

Sramana Mitra: Bob, let’s start with setting some context about what Recommind does. What is your business, what kind of customers do you cater to and what kind of problems do you solve? >>>

SAP Startup Focus – 1M/1M Scholarships

Entrepreneurs developing products and services on the SAP HANA platform are reminded to submit their completed applications soon. Through this application process, twelve scholarships to One Million by One Million (1M/1M) – valued at $1000 for the annual membership fee – will be awarded by SAP to provide extensive incubation support to entrepreneurs developing products and services on HANA. This effort launches a new partnership between SAP Startup Focus and 1M/1M, a virtual incubation program that will work closely with scholarship winners for one year to help their ventures achieve their potential.

You can find the application form here.

You can learn more about the application process here.
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Apply For SAP Startup Focus – 1M/1M Scholarships

Entrepreneurs developing products and services on the SAP HANA platform are reminded that we are still accepting applications. Through this application process, twelve scholarships to One Million by One Million (1M/1M) – valued at $1000 for the annual membership fee – will be awarded by SAP to provide extensive incubation support to entrepreneurs developing products and services on HANA. This effort launches a new partnership between SAP Startup Focus and 1M/1M, a virtual incubation program that will work closely with scholarship winners for one year to help their ventures achieve their potential.

You can find the application form here.

You can learn more about the application process here.
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