Sramana Mitra: Talent acquisition seems to be very active at the moment. Part of the reason is that there has been a lot of seed financing, but very few of those seed deals are getting to the point they state. A lot of those seed-financed companies have done some work, but their talented teams are leaving to find a home in some of the big companies. >>>
One Million by One Million (1M/1M) and Rackspace, the Open Cloud Company, today announced the Rackspace Cloud – 1M/1M Startup Challenge. This competition is designed to give a boost to entrepreneurs growing, developing, and launching cloud-based startups. Through an application process, five cloud startups will be judged finalists and they will present their businesses during an online pitch competition on Thursday, May 30th. Four of the finalists will be awarded $1000 per month worth of cloud hosting for one year from Rackspace. The winner will be awarded $2000 per month worth of cloud hosting for one year PLUS a one-year scholarship to the 1M/1M program. Founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sramana Mitra, 1M/1M will provide extensive incubation support to help the winning startup rise to its potential.
One Million by One Million (1M/1M) is a global virtual incubator that provides budding entrepreneurs methodologies, video lectures, strategy consulting through public and private online roundtables, and introductions to media, customers, channel partners and investors, including pre-seed, seed, angel, VC, bank and alternative financing. The 1M/1M program is all about coaching entrepreneurs on funding, business strategy and execution. The program’s mission is to help a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars and beyond in annual revenue, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and 10 million jobs.
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Sramana Mitra: I talked to some of the Thought Leaders in Big Data interviewees who think that the problem is not so much the data part. The real challenge is designing algorithms, especially the machine learning algorithms that can take the data and do interesting things with it. The data itself is really not as complicated to deal with; it is more about what you do with it.
John Michelsen: At the same time, though, the analytics layer is dependent on capabilities of the underlying big data platform. Therefore, those have to become much more robust and better at being fussy. It is a difficult trade-off between analytics on what you know and unstructured data that you have to apply structure to. There is this very interesting marriage between big data platform and analytics platforms. I would say we are doing more interesting stuff in analytics right now. >>>
Sramana Mitra: I know there is a lot of startup activity going on in that space. What are some interesting startups that you have seen, and what problems are they solving?
John Michelsen: I will start with the security space. You almost can’t talk somebody out of doing interesting innovation in security. My first prescription for going forward is you cannot do anything that is a risk to your security. >>>
Sramana Mitra: We are actually also running a Thought Leaders in Big Data series, which is a very successful series. The big data and cloud stories are interlaced stories.
John Michelsen: Exactly. You just said better what I was trying to say. You aren’t going to think about big data as “OK, let’s go chop down a huge forest and build a huge data center of our own and start thinking about how to store our big data.” In fact, our customers are thinking, “OK, I need access to computing utility models so that I can accomplish my big data activity.” Those are just two simple examples. >>>
John Michelsen is the chief technology officer of CA Technologies. John studied at Trinity University and is considered one of the great innovators in business IT, with over 12 patents awarded to him. In this interview John talks about trends in the business IT world and how it has developed over the years. Furthermore, he discusses possibilities and opportunities for entrepreneurs and gives us his views on innovators in this space.
Sramana Mitra: John, let’s give our readers a bit of context about what is happening at CA these days. We had your predecessor, Don Ferguson, on one of our series a couple of years ago. When we started doing these series, there was still ambiguity on where the cloud movement was going and how much adoption there was in enterprises. Today there is no such ambiguity. >>>
According to Gartner, the cloud-based security services market is estimated to be worth $4.2 billion by 2016. The researcher estimates that by 2015, the cloud will be the delivery platform for 10% of total IT security enterprise product capabilities. San Jose–based Zscaler is one organization working to transform enterprise security by building the world’s largest security cloud so that users can access a safe cloud even outside of their corporate networks.
IDC’s report Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012-2016 Forecast, released earlier this year, estimates the big data market to grow 32% annually over 2012 through 2016 to be worth $23.8 billion in 2016. The services segment for the market is projected to grow 21% annually over the period, and the storage market catering to big data is estimated to grow 53% annually during this period. IDC also projects that there will be strong demand for analytic tools to support big data and an increasing number of companies will search for tools to simplify analytic services.