Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve already crossed $5 million revenue. Why did you raise money from Accel India?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Two of the four founders are actually Indian, but that’s honestly incidental. Prakash and Dinesh have known each other since 1999.

Sramana Mitra: I can see why Dinesh would be interested in something like this. I’m just surprised by the structure. Accel Partner India was set up to fund venture in India. It’s a bit odd.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You founded it in 2012. We are now in 2014. How much adoption have you had following your methodology and in what segment? Where are you finding the sweet spot of your adoption?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: I’m not at liberty to share the exact customer numbers, but we’re above 20 customers at this point. We have a variety of customers. We basically target five industry segments that we think are right for the types of analysts that we target. The five segments are high tech manufacturing, consumer products, retail, financial services, and public sector. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at use cases now that we understand what you do. Let’s do a before and after. If you were not in the picture, what are they able to do? With you in the picture, what are they able to do?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: I’ll give you a story of my own life because this is actually how we started designing the Paxata product. If you’re an analyst today, your number one weapon of choice is Excel. That has always been the case for as long as Excel was available. When it comes to data preparation, the analyst lifecycle looks like the following. I used to get a request from one of the management teams saying, “I need you to answer this analytical question. I need you to find out which of our accounts in Europe have this many escalations logged against them, find out who is assigned to those cases, and how long they have been in operation.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 4)

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Typically what we find is that once we prepare the data, that data is then pulled by the consuming applications. However, it’s also important to note that we ourselves do persist with data. A very important part of our value proposition is the notion of data governance. We maintain and cache a copy of all the data that actually flows through our system, which means that we also keep every version of data that’s ever loaded into the system, every version of data that is transformed in our system, and every version of data that is exported. The moment a data element hits our system to the moment it goes out, >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It stopped being relational a long time ago.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: That’s right. So if you have S. Mitra in your relational database, Sramana M. in your tweets, and Sramana Mitraa with two A’s at the end in one of your documents, you need to be able to figure out in 2014, regardless of the schema or the structure of the data, that those are all referring to the same entity. Our machine learning techniques are able to introspect the content and come back and make a recommendation to the user so that they don’t have to figure out how to align these schemas together. That’s also an important point of our positioning.

 Sramana Mitra: If you look at the ecosystem map, where would you fit layer-wise? >>>

Domain Knowledge Drives SaaS Unicorns

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks,Kayak, SuccessFactors, and Marketo. Today’s featured company is ServiceNow.

Fred Luddy, the founder, was a classic nerd. After meandering his way through various companies as a programmer, he ended up as the CTO of Peregrine Corporation that built software for the help desk and service desk markets. Peregrine acquired numerous companies and eventually grew to $500 million in revenues, but filed for bankruptcy due to accounting irregularities in 2003.

Fred, however, developed domain experience with the IT service desk market through that process. He decided to start a SaaS company in that space. >>>

How Marketo Built A Billion Dollar SaaS Company

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks,Kayak, and SuccessFactors. Today, we look at Marketo.

Marketo was founded in 2006 with the stated objective of building a high-velocity SaaS company focused on a critical (and then somewhat new) business process called lead nurturing.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the status of that capability in the Big Data industry today to be able to achieve that balance between protection, privacy, and analytics?

Ulf Mattsson: Larger companies and companies providing Big Data distributions like Cloudera and Hortonworks are actually involving third-party security companies like Protegrity to fill the security gaps. For example, Protegrity has partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosphere, Teradata, and other companies to satisfy these new types of security requirements.

>>>