Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 4)

Amir Husain: There are lots of examples where we found binaries that were not registering on any one of the 60 different anti-virus engines and yet our machine learning anti-virus capability gave them threat rating as high as 80%. As we actually investigated the envelope manually, we discovered that there was an embedded threat, and that it was a mutation. Therefore, a signature-based system was not able to catch it. There’s lots of these examples. Now, we’re also starting to see in the cyber-physical domain where you have large physical systems where both natural problems as well as potential cyber threats can be tracked and discovered before they can cause any damage.

Sramana Mitra: Can we get to the last segment where the question is essentially, what is your view of emerging trends in the industry and open problems?

Amir Husain: I’ll first take a higher-level view above cyber security for a moment. One of the things that’s happening that is very revolutionary right now is >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 4)

Martin Manniche: I also think that the most intuitive way of controlling things is not with having a Swiss Army knife of applications. How many of you don’t have a smartphone with way too many applications where 85% of them are most likely never used? The most intuitive way of controlling things is using your voice for control. I am very confident that voice control will be the driving force that will allow fast adoption of everything. Smart home or home security is not new. It’s been there for many years but it has not really grown. It’s been very stable with slow growth.

If we want massive growth, find a way that is intuitive. The most intuitive and easiest way where people are not taking out their phones or a remote control is using your voice as a way to control. I believe voice control is a game changer in the industry. I hope that a lot of companies will start new >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question in that context. There’s a lot of processing going on midstream of traffic coming in. Is it all happening in real time? How do you deal with delays and latencies?

Amir Husain: First of all, we’re not blocking things until the final answer arrives. In other words, we’re not inserting ourselves as a delay in the servicing of whatever requests our clients or customers are looking to service. All this data exhaust is going into our system and there’s a growing level of confidence being built up as deeper and deeper research is happening. You clearly don’t want to go to real-time NLP research query while you’re waiting on the customer to get their web page back.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right.

Amir Husain: We can do a lot of stuff in real-time, which is quicker. It might be knowledge that we have learned that we can apply. Still, there are things that might look fishy while you may continue to do what the system would have done as long as the action falls in the range of things >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take one of your customers and double-click down. In that use case, what I’d like to understand is where is the traffic being intercepted, how is it being modelled, what parameters is it being modelled against, and what is the nature of the AI algorithm driving this kind of predictive modelling.

Amir Husain: Just zooming out, let me first tell you how we deal with customers and what we provide specifically. We have a product called Spark Secure. Spark Secure can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise. It’s delivered through a hybrid model. Spark Secure can ingest many forms of data. One of those might be, for example, proxy logs or firewall logs.

It looks through that semi-structured information. It can also look at binaries. It can also read articles and texts and textual description of security threats on the web. All of that data is used and fused together by these algorithms to build models of what constitute a threat. Not only is that threat detection capability >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any segmentation of what kinds of customers were finding your product attractive?

Nelson Nahum: First of all, before the customer, I would like to tackle the question of the business model. We created a great technology. We found out that Amazon really liked what we do because it’s enterprise storage and it brings additional functionality to the Amazon cloud. Amazon doesn’t really OEM, but they offered us a cloud that is connected to them. Any customer of Amazon can be a customer of ours.

We said, “This could be very good. We can put in a small cloud and get the first customer.” This is how we got the first customer. We promoted the storage inside Amazon. There weren’t really a lot of options to use storage there as opposed to storage on-premise where anybody can buy from any storage company. The market is much more crowded today and it’s much harder to differentiate. Back then, the only options were either Amazon storage or us. Then people started finding us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business model was a regular subscription SaaS business model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would be the most comfortable for us to understand what you do is if you step us through a customer use case.

Martin Manniche: I can go into a few customer use cases. One is how are we bringing value to a bigger telco? So an operator who is offering consumers home TV services or broadband services are what we call triple-player services. They have been doing triple-player services for a long period of time. What we are doing is we are making the network router in the home—what’s also called the customer premise equipment—and make that smart.

That means that if you’re looking at your phone and services coming to that device, normally when you have a traditional router, you get one release when you get the device. Maybe without your knowing it, there’s a service release going to that product. The only thing that this device does is enabling broadband, voice, and maybe being a connection broker to your TV system in the home. We are changing that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 1)

This interview could just as well be a part of our Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence (TLAI) series. It sits at the cusp of Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence, an area where much is happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SparkCognition.

Amir Husain: I’m the Founder and CEO of SparkCognition. SparkCognition is an Austin-based cyber security company that’s looking to apply artificial intelligence to the security of physical assets as well as cyber assets. There’s this notion of cyber-physical where the world of IoT is now merging with digitally-controlled cyber systems and that creates a lot of new security challenges that our artificial intelligence and cognitive software is looking to address. We’re basically looking at the nexus of the industrial Internet with the use of artificial intelligence to solve security challenges. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You still had $3 million which you hadn’t really started building a product on. You were basically experimenting with the cloud and learning about the cloud.

Nelson Nahum: Yes. I didn’t have the $3 million then. My experiments started the day after I was laid off. It took a few weeks until the bill from Amazon came. The money came later. The idea was we should cover enterprise storage that has flexibility.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? How does the story progress?

Nelson Nahum: One thing that I want to mention is that the two startups came after bad news. The first one was because the company was closing. The second was because I was laid off. It’s easy to get comfortable to be in a VP position in a big corporation. Only when things happen that you do things that are much riskier and much less comfortable. We then had the money. We hired the best engineers. I had 250 people that I could choose from. We got a really good team of engineers. >>>