Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 1)

This discussion is about how Attensity is using unstructured data analysis to prevent churn in customer bases of Telecom, Consumer Electronics, and other verticals.

Sramana Mitra: Howard, let’s start with introducing our audience to Attensity. Tell us what the company does. Also give us some of your background.

Howard Lau: Thank you for this opportunity. Attensity is a Big Data company. The value that we bring is we ingest a tremendous amount of data. With the advent of social networking, a lot of the volume of this data that we ingest is obviously social data. It includes Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. As you know, Twitter has exploded onto the scene. At this point, it generates about 500 million tweets per day. We ingest that information into our system and then we analyze that information so that we can do query analysis based on topics defined by our customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll switch gears a bit. Given all these things that you’re seeing in the market, can you look ahead to the 5 to 10 year horizon. Tell me your thoughts about what’s going to happen. What do you anticipate as new that is going to happen?

Emil Sayegh: We are all heading toward a world where data is being collected every micro second, where wearable devices are going to be common and where data is collected even in our house. Vital data collected from us can be predictive. We’re heading toward a world where massive amount of data is going to be collected. We think we’re collecting a lot of data now. With avant-garde customers that I’m talking to, that data is going to take shape in the form of numbers, videos, and pictures. To accommodate this huge flood of exponential growth in data, we’re going to have to find ways to store and retrieve data very quickly and very efficiently. That’s going to be the next frontier for a lot of us. That’s going to impact storage – the cost and performance of storage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything substantially different in any other segment of customers that you cater to besides the two use cases we discussed?

Emil Sayegh: You have SaaS customers that are similar to the e-commerce value proposition.

Sramana Mitra: These are SaaS customers who are themselves public cloud vendors?

Emil Sayegh: They are public SaaS vendors. They’re leveraging our cloud infrastructure to offer SaaS to consumers.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the number again of where you would say the flip happens from a public cloud to a hybrid cloud.

Emil Sayegh: The flip is starting to happen as companies that started in the cloud are looking at their bills now and they’re seeing the exorbitant prices. I think there’re a couple examples. One of them is Target.com. They were with AWS. There’re a lot of public stories as to why they moved. There’s Moz. You may have read some of the publicity here in the last two months where they left AWS for pricing reasons.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 2)

Emil Sayegh: Fast forward to 2014, what we are seeing right now in the market is both of these models hitting a point where frankly they’re becoming less useful as a monolithic type of offering. Companies out there want to be able to benefit from the ability to grow very quickly with the cloud offering for the right applications but also need a solid performance of what used to come with dedicated servers for certain applications like databases and Big Data applications. All those applications need very high I/O still need traditional infrastructures.

Now, you’re in a dilemma. I put my front-end web infrastructure on something like Amazon cloud or Rackspace cloud, but then where do I put my high performance computing needs? Very few companies have been able to bridge those two elements. What we’re seeing is the emergence of hybrid cloud, which allows customers to essentially spin up front-end web resources in a cloud environment in a utility-based model and then have their back-end on robust dedicated gears. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model? Is there enough deal size to do field sales?

Ali Behnam: We have deals ranging anywhere from $15,000 all the way up. Average deal size is five figures.

Sramana Mitra: So talk to me about your business model and pricing model a bit.

Ali Behnam: Right now, we’re still selling to a lot of Fortune 2000 companies. These are companies that do a decent amount of business online. Our pricing is based on site traffic. The more traffic the website has, the more they’re paying for a service like this. With us going after the top echelon of customers, you can imagine the deal sizes are typically five digits. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What was the sweet spot that emerged out of all these? Where were you finding traction?

Ali Behnam: This is where I’m starting to see the web analytics space all over again. I was in WebSideStory in 2000. That was the early days of web analytics space. The early adopters of web analytics were typically e-commerce sites. They were followed by a lot of media or publisher sites and then some B2B or Fortune 500 websites. We see that same exact pattern with the tag management space. The early adopters were, for the most part, e-commerce sites because they have the most to gain or lose from this technology. They were followed by publishers and media sites and some of the other demand generation websites.

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