Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about inter-departmental bridging essentially. You are talking about CRM servicing the closing of the deal in sales and then you’re introducing a bridge into professional services on actually implementing the deal. There’s a project management and staffing that you’re now bringing into the CRM workflow.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Absolutely, you got it 100%. This is really building the bridges between departments. Let me give you another example of a bridge that we built. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying of course requires a lot of integration with other systems. If you’re talking about customer interactions, then you’re talking about the CRM system. Now we’re talking about some sort of a portal that brings together all of these integration elements?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Not necessarily, although you’re raising a very good point. We do have an amazing integration, for instance, with Salesforce. Let me describe to you a use case that will clarify this. For instance with regards to CRM, think about an opportunity that is about to be closed at 80% within the Salesforce or the CRM system. We have many companies that are using it this way. Marketo and Bazaarvoice are customers. We have about 25,000 customers. The third biggest bank in the world is using Clarizen. One of the top four auditing companies is using Clarizen in order to run their audit process. Overall, we get a lot of success with the concept that I’m now describing.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 2)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: What we have created in Clarizen is collaboration in context. It’s in context of getting work done and promoting work. If I would just use another term, which is a bit more complex because I come from the area of product lifecycle management, it’s all about the work-life cycle management collaboration. You need to collaborate in context of work-life cycle and not just collaboration for the sake of collaboration. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 1)

Let’s take a look at the future of cloud-based collaboration with Avi Nowogrodski.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background as well as introducing Clarizen to our audience.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: I’m actually a second-timer. The first company I built in 1996 was a company named SmarTeam. It dealt with collaboration for bill of materials. I was the CEO of this company for 10 years. I sold it to Dassault Systems after three years of inception.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned that there’s also feedback going into engineering. Does that imply that you see bug reports on social media?

Howard Lau: It’s not so much bug reports. It’s something like product enhancement request.

Sramana Mitra: That’s for product management though, right?

Howard Lau: Yes, product management.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing a sentiment analysis. If it’s a negative sentiment analysis, you’re trying to take action against that?

Howard Lau: That’s a great insight. It is sentiment analysis. At the most basic level, you’re looking for things like positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Our engine allows us to dive in to another level of data. If what they’re looking to is negative sentiment, they can dive in to what is that negative sentiment due to. Is it due to coverage, pricing, or service level? It is in that fine level of detail that they can then respond to appropriately.

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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. >>>

Finding a Viable Monetization Model: wefi CEO Zur Feldman (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It was hard, but you managed to raise the round. Was it based on the fact that you had a strong team that the investors thought you could figure out how to monetize this user base?

Zur Feldman: I think it was a combination. It was a very determined team. It was clear that the problem that we’re solving is a big problem and it’s not going to go away. As time went by, the problem became very evident. It’s not just a prediction that we’re going to have a problem. It’s actually happening. There was a huge problem in different metro areas, specifically in Manhattan. Part of it was that the market started to give signals that it is going to be an issue and it is going to require innovation and thinking out of the box. Also, we managed to really switch the business and look at this from a different point of view. >>>