Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 1)

Andres Rodriguez is a rare Latin American entrepreneur in hard core tech. In this era of ‘lean startups’, Andres has built a couple of ‘fat ones’ and in this interview, we discuss what he has learnt, and what he advises other entrepreneurs wrestling with the need to raise money to fund ‘fat startup concepts’.

Sramana Mitra: Andres, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What circumstances did you grow up in?

Andres Rodriguez: I was born in Venezuela, South America. I graduated from high school there and I came to the States to attend an engineering school.

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AppDynamics On The IPO Pipeline

According to a Gartner report, the application performance monitoring (APM) market was estimated to grow 5.4% from $2.01 billion in 2012 to $2.12 billion by the end of 2013. Another research conducted by TRAC on over 600 IT and business professionals revealed that 71% of the organizations surveyed were using multiple solutions to address issues related with application performance.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 6)

Naveen Sharma: Many of our current service offerings started off as XTIN projects. Take for example our Ignite offering, which was the result of  a bunch of researchers who had young children who were interested in how to use technology to personalize education. They went to K to 5 classrooms and observed how the teacher and students interact and built a system that helped teachers better assess students so that they can individualize help. Ignite is not only a great example of how XTIN helps Xerox fund and develop new service offerings, but it is also a great example of intrapreneurship. When this idea came about, there was no value-chain yet. We funded and explored it, and now have created a value-chain for this research.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a bit and ask you to put on your Chief Innovation Officer hat on. Let me give you a bit of context about why I want to go in this direction. In our incubator program, one of the areas we’re doing a lot of work on right now is corporate incubation, in partnership with some of the largest companies in the technology domain. We are seeing interest as well as projects. Actually, some of these projects are already in full swing where we are doing incubation of entrepreneurs. In the same way, we invite entrepreneurs to come in to the One Million by One Million program to learn how to build a business, some of our corporate partners are sponsoring intrapreneurs to come in to One Million by One Million and get their projects incubated.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These are  good examples of taking data and doing something interesting with it to produce actionable business value but it didn’t really cover multi-modal data. You say it was one of the issues that you’re trying to illustrate. Can we take a use case where there is actually multi-modal data involved?

Naveen Sharma:  In this particular case, the multi-modality came from call center data. For example, I talked about call center audio files or recorded conversations. Also, meta data is captured as structured data so we had both kinds of data.

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Microsoft Counting on Azure and Surface

According to the latest Gartner report, Worldwide PC shipments for the fourth quarter of the previous year fell 6.9% to 82.6 million units, making it the seventh consecutive quarter of shipment decline. Despite the holiday season quarter, the researcher found that while sales of technology products in the U.S. and EMEA markets grew, the spending was more focused on tablets. PC sales in the U.S. fell 7.5% to 15.8 million units and in EMEA fell 6.7% to 25.8 million units.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 3)

Naveen Sharma: Our challenge is not the question of volume, it’s more of  variety because if you look at our call center data for example, that’s primarily an audio-based database. If you look at transportation services, that’s primarily video-based data. If you look at our call centers, they’re also looking at social media data, which is unstructured. Much of the data we are dealing with is unstructured and multi-modal. The challenge for our researchers is to bring all those multi-modal data streams and fuse it in a way that it is ready for analysis, so that we can actually build a model that can span across and accommodate multiple data modalities. That’s one of the challenges from the research perspective that we are constantly dealing with. Data fusion is the industry term that a lot of the publications refer to, but for us, data fusion really has this special meaning because we deal with this in real time.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Sounds like you have back office services. That’s one of the emerging direction or already in-swing direction for the company, since you are already generating a good $10 billion in revenue from that part of the business. What’s interesting about that business? Where are points of views emerging around the big trends in the industry like Big Data, Cloud Computing and so forth?

Naveen Sharma:  I could summarize in two points. I would say one is automation. When we talk about back-office services automation, the trend is that clients are looking for greater efficiency and save costs. This trend points to the use of the cloud to automate as well as convert capital cost into more of an operational cost. Customers want to invest in back office services only as much as they need it, buy by the pound, enabled by the cloud. There are a variety of Xerox innovations we are actively working on with our business groups, which are aligned with automation.

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