Thought Leaders in Big Data: Derek Rodner, Vice President of Product Strategy, Agilence (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Could you tell me a bit more about how this works from a technological perspective? “Tying an event down to the millisecond level in a video” – how do you do that?

Derek Rodner: That is actually our special [approach]. In addition to being the only player in the retail operations big data space, we started our business doing something called point of sales video auditing, and we have a proprietary [technology] that enables us to take real-time data on the network and attach that with video in real time. In fact, 10 percent of the toll routes in the U.S. carry our technology. Admittedly, it’s an older technology, but it’s the same basic underlying technology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of your market at present, and what segments do you go after? It is a very interesting analogy to cater to that segment. It could be products and services. I just did a story with an HR services provider. They specialize in recruitment technology: job posting and recruiting technology with big data. They are doing it as a service. Everybody is doing job postings, especially when they are managing large scale job posts on a global basis. This provider, for example, rules out much of the visibility into the data implications of this process. It is a very specialized application in terms of rules and data sets, but it is also a large enough market. So, it could be a substantial business. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Derek Rodner, Vice President of Product Strategy, Agilence (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your approach sounds unique. I hear a lot of stories about customer analytics, but you are talking about operations, and that is quite different. The best way to illustrate what happens with using your technology are use cases. Feel free to pick whichever customer you have permission to talk about and take us through use cases of how they are using your technology and how they are benefiting from it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the next broad topic, which is the gap in the market – the open spaces and the opportunities there. What opportunities do you see from where you are? If you were starting a company today, where would you place your bets?

Dale Skeen: I think that if we focus on the topic of big data in particular, there are several levels you can focus on. There is big data infrastructure that provides insights into the NoSQL databases of the world. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Derek Rodner, Vice President of Product Strategy, Agilence (Part 1)

Derek Rodner is the vice president of product strategy at Agilence, an industry-leading company in retail big data. In this interview Derek talks about the implications of more widespread use of big data on retail video surveillance and security systems, and about future trends in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Derek. Could you please start by putting some context around Agilence so that our readers are able to follow the rest of the story accordingly?

Derek Rodner: I’d be happy to. Agilence is a big data and cloud provider focused on the retail space. Our goal is to provide store-level insight across the entire chain at a corporate level. Our customer range is anywhere from small retailers all the way up to Rite Aid, which has 4,700 locations around the country. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Would you like to do a few more use cases?

Dale Skeen: The second thing I wanted to talk about is a customer, who for competitive reasons doesn’t want to be named. It is a large telecommunications carrier that had sensor networks, which I mentioned before. Most mobile carriers would like to give the best service to their best customers and give better service to all their customers. But to do that, they have to manage their cellular networks and be able to [understand] the faults and problems that occur with them. Then they have to prioritize, act on, and mitigate problems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now, let’s take some use cases and work through three or four customers whose cases you have permission to discuss. You may choose which best project your capabilities. The objective is to give our readers a feel of what is happening in your world of big data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you talk about applications of big data in business process optimization or business process management, what kinds of business processes are you choosing to get involved in?

Dale Skeen: We call this [approach] operational intelligence. Some of the places where you might want to apply operational intelligence at the business process level are customer-facing processes or customer service, for example. We work with large telecommunication companies that have cellular networks with hundreds of thousands of cell towers. Those [towers] produce hundreds of thousands of events per second – we are talking about the quality of calls going across them. What the telecommunication companies would like to do is to capture this information, analyze it in real time, and act upon it in real time to serve their customers better. This way, they are able to identify their best customers or maximize processes that control [customers]. This is one example of us helping companies to get smarter about their operations. >>>