Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What have you seen in the last five years that are major trends in this space? What are the drivers currently, and what do you foresee will be the drivers in the next two to five years?

Shaun Conolly: I was in the application platform business with JBoss and Red Hat. I was also in the virtualization cloud area with VMware. If we look at the software industry from a high level, four major disruptive movements are going on. The social media space is one of those areas. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services (Part 1)

JR Reagan is the chief innovation officer for the federal practice at Deloitte Services. He teaches innovation and creativity at John Hopkins University and holds a masters in management information systems from Bowie State University and a BA in sociology from the State University of New York. In this interview he talks about Deloitte’s creative environment and how the company creates big data visualization. Furthermore, he talks about his vision of the future of the visualization space and open problems that need to be addressed.

Sramana Mitra: JR, let’s start by telling our readers about yourself and the program you run at Deloitte.

JR Reagan: I am a partner in our federal practice at Deloitte. I am our chief innovation officer for the federal practice, but I also run a unique center called HIVE (highly immersive visual environment). >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 7)

Sramana: It does not sound like you are running a typical exchange or marketplace. The industry definition of an exchange or market place involves new business procurement or referral. Places like eBay are considered marketplaces. I don’t see that happening with your network.

Bruce Johnson: Where healthcare is concerned there is a lot of additional infrastructure that has to be put in place. We have not gotten to that point yet. >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 6)

Sramana: Where are you at in terms of scale?

Bruce Johnson: We handle over 52 billion dollars of healthcare supply chain orders annually. That is a significant portion of spend that we are automating.

Sramana: Are you a profitable company?

Bruce Johnson: Yes. >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 5)

Sramana: In that initial 9- to 12-month period when you were able to leverage the other sales forces, how many customers were you able to obtain?

Bruce Johnson: My recollection is that during the first 12 months we signed up 50 IDNs, or integrated delivery networks.

Sramana: Those were the buyers, right?

Bruce Johnson: Yes. On the supplier side we signed up an additional 30 suppliers during that time. That would be in addition to the 14 owners we had who represented the supplier side. >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 4)

Sramana: You mentioned earlier that your goal is to remove $5 billion from healthcare overrun costs and that you have already delivered on $3 billion. Can you elaborate on that? How do you quantify on that, and how does GHX make money?

Bruce Johnson: We are setup with a subscription fee model. When we were setting up GHX, part of the reason for the funding was based on the need for acquisitions to consolidate the market. One of the key areas of learning for us was that in order to create value in the supply chain, we had to create incentives that would drive utilization and participation. That is where the subscription feed model created that incentive. The more the community leverages the GHX platform the more benefits they receive and the greater the value to the other participants because we have more data and synchronization of data. >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 3)

Sramana: You said the initial group of twelve employees were loaned to GHX by the founding companies. What does that mean? What were your incentive structures? Did you get any stock in the new entity?

Bruce Johnson: For the sake of speed, there were a number of us who were put on loan. What we started working on, which did not get finalized until summer, were the full-time contracts that we would have with GHX. From an incentive perspective, since our origins were from five large multinational organizations, our benefits package was fairly similar to an existing GE or J&J type company in terms of benefits like healthcare. From a compensation point of view, we were competing in a marketplace that was in the dot-com era. >>>

A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 2)

Sramana: What types of companies are part of your supplier ecosystem?

Bruce Johnson: It includes manufacturers as well as wholesalers or distributors. Manufacturers will sell some of their products direct and others will go through distributors. We can automate that process in either case.

Sramana: I imagine that since this is coming out of GE, you also do equipment and instruments as well, correct?

Bruce Johnson: We actually focus more on the medical and surgical space. Capital equipment is not an area that gets as much automation as we would like. The medical and surgical products get most of the activity in this space. We are moving into the implantable space now, which includes things like hips and pacemakers. >>>