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: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re telling me that your go-to-market strategy is OEM?

Don DeLoach: I would say it’s more and more OEM for sure. It had been a combination of direct sales mostly into the ad tech space and OEM sales into the people servicing mobile network operators. Without doubt, that’s over half of our business right now. It is asymptotically approaching 100%. The interesting thing there is that the mobile network operators are really at the forefront of driving the Internet of Things. When you step back and read the various industry analysis or some of the reports coming out of Cisco, they project 50 billion connected devices out there by 2020.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that the structured data integration problem at scale is still an open problem? I’m looking for problems that are unsolved out there, not problems that you’ve solved already.

Bob Renner: I think scale is an unsolved problem at this point. A very difficult problem that you have to solve elegantly is cross-domain master data management (MDM). I think you’ve got a few products and solutions and implementation within a given domain and a less complex domain had been adequately handled, but I think cross-domain master data management is a problem that continues to be very use-case specific, and generally, there have not been a lot of solutions.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 3)

Bob Renner: In one example and use case, we married our sales data with Twitter feeds so that we can access the API’s. We pull the data in, normalize and correlate it, and we created a dashboard that allowed our clients to look at sentiment. We were able to dimension that along with the sales data. We product a very different, simultaneous view of geography, volume of sales, and demographics of who they’re selling to and then generalize sentiment about how people are talking about the data from social media standpoint. The interesting part of that is it uses some forms of natural language processing and parsing to take free-form data and turn it into structured data from the Twitter feeds and marry it up to other structured data.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple more use cases from different industries.

Bob Renner: Let’s go all the way over to distribution. Two of the largest distributors in the US of a variety of industrial supplies as well as paper products leverage Liaison’s technology to pull in information about the products that they then package and sell, normalize that, and synchronize that data to their ERP systems. In one case, one of those two very large distributors has a fairly common ERP model. The other one, a direct competitor, has a geographically distributed ERP model. Both of these companies use Liaison’s cloud-based integration and data management platform as the authoritative data source for all of their products that they pull in and also a variety of attributes related to those products. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 1)

Entrepreneurs in the field of data integration would like to read this interview to get a sense of the state of the union, and identify open opportunities in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Bob, tell us about Liaison Technologies and yourself.

Bob Renner: I’ll tell you a little bit about myself first and then I’ll dive into Liaison. My background is in the technology space. I call myself a technologist by trade. I joined Liaison Technologies almost 15 years ago as a Chief Technology Officer. Then, I moved up from CTO to CEO after being with the company for a couple of years.

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