Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 3)

Brian Morin: As you know, virtualization is sweeping the landscape. Gartner has estimated 74% of workloads are virtualized right now. I think IDC is putting their forecast at 71%. Gartner has mentioned that by the end of this year, 80% of workloads will be virtualized. As a lot of companies are virtualizing their most I/O-intensive applications and mission critical workloads, their storage back-end is not able to keep up with the new performance requirement.

They all go into this virtualization process blindly regarding what they need on the back-end storage infrastructure to support it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are you trying to tell me that there is no competitor in the market? That’s kind of hard to believe.

Brian Morin: Our technology is made up of two core pieces of intellectual property. One of those pieces is proprietary. Nobody else is doing it. There is a second core piece of our technology that involves server-side caching. There are a couple of other players in the field that are doing server-side caching like Infinio or PernixData. Those would be two quasi-competitors. Caching is still a tertiary feature for us. It’s not our primary IP in what we do to sequentialize I/O traffic and increase I/O density. There actually was one. We did have one competitor, Virsto, but they were acquired by VMWare about two and a half years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with one use case where you elaborate further how exactly your customers use the product. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Brian Morin, SVP of Marketing, Condusiv (Part 1)

Read how a 34-year old company has carved a niche in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Condusiv. What do you do? How do you map the ecosystem?

Brian Morin: We just turned 34 years old this month. We’re the 12^th oldest software company in the world. What’s interesting though is that for a company that has that kind of legacy, we were rebranded as Condusiv Technologies three years ago, because the company has really transformed itself and IP to really be on the leading edge of what’s going on right now. At least, in I/O performance. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 1)

Real-time, distributed data availability for Big Data use cases is a key issue. Here, we speak with Adam Wray about the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Basho.

Adam Wray: I’ve been raised in companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks. I actually worked for Amazon for several years before starting my own company, but it’s always been in the cloud services space or trying to use some form of what used to be called ASP. I came to Basho via that path with the understanding of what distributed systems mean to your data being moved all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does Basho do? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 5)

Vincent Yang: We use, what we call, topic modelling to analyze every single news. For example, is this company acquiring the other company? Is this news about conference sponsorship? How do we know how strong an implication is? We have no idea. That’s the point where we have to rely on machine learning. Machine learning will be very helpful for us in figuring out the correlation of every single business indicator to the final outcome. We analyze tens of thousands of features and also millions of combination of features to find the correlation factors of all of those.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find your early traction? Was it in the technology industry? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to start asking you very deep questions because I did a startup in the sales lead generation area back in 1997. It used NLP and the whole AI stream. It was a bit early. It was well before the Internet had completely established itself. I know a lot about this area in general. Tell me more specifically about exactly what you do by applying your technology to the sales lead generation.

Vincent Yang: We have two use cases. First, we come into any company. We say, “Let us link to your internal work flow data whether it’s CRM or marketing automation data because we want to learn who, historically, are your good leads and who are the bad leads.” We do this for labeling. Then we start using our crawling engines to crawl every single information about those leads.

The underlying assumption is there must be something in common about those good leads. Why are they all converting? Why do those leads that you interact with never convert? We wanted to use a mathematical formula to describe it. This is what we call audience selection. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you leave Summit to do this?

Vincent Yang: I left Summit in 2012. I didn’t start the company back then. I actually went to Stanford Business School. I already had the idea. We raised some angel money. It was in Stanford where I started the company. We hired a bunch of Stanford Ph.D.’s in the neuroscience team to help us write very sophisticated algorithms. We hired a natural language processing expert to analyze companies. That was the turning point from having the idea to making things happen.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2014?

Vincent Yang: We started in late 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise on which you raised the angel financing? What was the business that you told your investors you were going to build? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Vincent Yang: That brings us to early 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Vincent Yang: Then, I moved to Palo Alto. When I was in JP Morgan, my main job was to analyze companies. In particular, I developed a mathematical model to analyze public companies. It’s very funny. Investment banking is much like the military. If you’re a junior, nobody cares about you. You basically follow the order. For me, it was very interesting because before investment banking, I was actually a CEO. I was not a fit at all at JP Morgan. I remember in the first week, I was telling the partner, “Let me source a couple of deals for you.” The partner looked at me and said, “Now, this is what I want you to do. You just do PowerPoint.” I repositioned myself. >>>