Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Seth Redmore, VP of Product Management at Lexalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you are taking the fire hose of Twitter data for Datasift and contextualizing it, and then your clients do whatever they do on top of that.

Seth Redmore: Yes. What you do as an enterprise or entrepreneur is get a feed of data sets that is precisely tailored to your requirements and that lets you say, “This is just the stuff that I want to see.” That turns out to be a very interesting problem. It is a filtering problem. How do you filter all this data? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Seth Redmore, VP of Product Management at Lexalytics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few use cases of your partners who are doing interesting applications using your base technology.

Seth Redmore: Are you familiar with a company called Bitly?

SM: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you started your company in 2007. Given that we are in 2013, obviously this big data trend that we are in the midst of. The IT industry operates in buzzwords, and for whatever reason right now big data is a buzzword. In 2007 that was not the case at all. I imagine that you started your company with a different positioning. Or were you doing the same at that time? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Seth Redmore, VP of Product Management at Lexalytics (Part 1)

Seth Redmore is the vice president of product management at Lexalytics, a company that provides an engine to convert unstructured text into structured data. In this interview Seth talks about how Lexalytics provides big data solutions for its customers, the direction of development Lexalytics is taking, and how the company is willing to work with startups to achieve its goals.

Sramana Mitra: Seth, let’s start with some context. Tell us about Lexalytics, what you do, who your customers are, and what value you provide so the audience knows whom we are talking to. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another couple of use cases of your technology.

Sasha Gilenson: Another use case we have is about proactive prevention of problems. One of the frequent activities in IT and the development of agile methods is change transition – the release of a change into a productive environment. When you have a complex environment that is affected at multiple points all the time, one of the big questions is, “How do we ensure that these transitions are implemented accurately and correctly?” Part of the use case, what we call release validation, is ensuring that the transition between environments leaves those environments consistent. When a change is introduced into a productive environment, it shall essentially perform as it was planned and tested. This way you maintain visibility and control after the changes done to the environments when you have automated processes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why is this a big data issue?

Sasha Gilenson: Because when you look at the IT and the amounts of operational information that IT is creating, generic incubation is just one of the aspects that we started to cover because the space was not addressed by any other solution. If you look at the world of IT systems in general – performance and monitoring data, change of configuration information, machine data, etc. – we speak about amounts of information that are tremendous and are also changing rapidly. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Jeremy Howard, President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you make money? What is Kaggle’s business model?

Jeremy Howard: We get paid for running these competitions. Generally, we get paid by organizations that also access this amazing community of data scientists. A lot of people invested a lot of money in data collection and data management, and a lot of CEOs and CIOs are looking at all the money they have spent and the huge strategic opportunity there is in their data. Then they are wondering how to unlock it. So, they need smart people with access to various tools. Those people are hard to find. The McKinsey Global Institute, which did a study a couple of years ago, stated that the number one challenge for organizations in unlocking their data is the shortage of data scientists. We sell the access to that community, whether through competitions or direct work relationships.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So you provide visibility and diagnostics on where the issue might be?

Sasha Gilenson: Yes, and these are related to the changes that happen in the environment and its configuration content. There is a certain angle of diagnostic tools. We bring the angle of the environment, configuration, and changes that happened to the environment. >>>