Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your corporate incubation strategy? How do you drive innovation in your company?

Paul Zolfaghari: I think our innovation strategy comes down across a couple of different vectors. We’re very interested in seeing what trends are in the industry. What are the leading visionaries talking about and thinking about? We certainly listen to our deep and very impressive customer base. Honestly, if you get the chance to talk to a Netflix, American Express, or Citibank, you’re bringing together the collective wisdom of trillions of dollars of GDP. That’s a good sample set for us to get from. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are the white spaces right now?

Paul Zolfaghari: In terms of what I think people are looking for in the market that nobody is really working on, I think you’re going to see a more pronounced interaction between gesture and gesture-based interfaces and the ability to interact with analytics and analytics benchmark. I think it’s not that far down the road before you’re going to see gesture-based technologies in the way people are interacting with their proprietary environment. Is that a white space? I don’t know. Maybe somebody’s working on it.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 5)

Paul Zolfaghari: What we have been doing as a company is ensuring that the MicroStrategy analytics and visualization layer can be that primary interface, but that where the data resides for us is becoming less and less relevant because we’re ensuring that we can attach and interact with that data wherever it is. What’s happened from a trend standpoint is that the introduction of Hadoop and Hadoop-like vendors has dramatically lowered the cost of storage and storage of data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s the modus operandi from the point of view of your large customers. Do you have customers who are independent software vendors who are also developing on top of your analytics platform, and are providing the business logic for maybe a particular vertical and then selling? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 3)

Paul Zolfaghari: For instance, yesterday I met one of our customers Netflix, which is actually running MicroStrategy against a very substantial instance of data that actually resides in AWS. Netflix is very public about this. It’s a great example for us and one that we’re very proud of. Netflix is a deep analytics company. It’s also a company that has a substantial amount of data and yet they chose to use MicroStrategy while connecting to a data source in the Amazon AWS cloud.

Sramana Mitra: You have three components to this. One is the data layer where the data is being stored. That sounds like that’s AWS. Then, the analytics infrastructure is MicroStrategy. What about the logic? I imagine what you’re talking about is the recommendation engine. Where is that logic? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Cloud is a very large practice for us. One of the big trends driving both cloud and mobile, and to some extend Big Data, are these platforms. There are lots of platforms now available as a service that you can build upon. We’re seeing that as a major phenomenon because you no longer have to build the whole stack. When you were trying to start a company in the ’90s or even in the 2000 decade, for a long time you had to build the whole stack. Now, you can just take advantage of other people’s stacks and add the value-added layer on top without having to deal with the plumbing. That makes it a lot cheaper to bring a product to market for a small company.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 1)

This interview has a very interesting discussion on the future of user interfaces that interact with data. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Paul, let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as to MicroStrategy.

Paul Zolfaghari: I’m Paul Zolfaghari. I’m the president of MicroStrategy. We’re an enterprise software company that’s been in existence for 25 years. We went public in 1998. As an overall background of the company, we are a global company with global operations. We operate directly in 26 countries around the world. We’ve got north of 4,000 customers across a multitude of industries. In 2013, our revenue was just short of $600 million and we consider ourselves the leader in analytics, business >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. If you were starting a company today, what unsolved problem would you be looking at?

Radhika Subramanian: Education.

Sramana Mitra: What about education? Have you given it any further thought? Education is going through a massive disruption right now.

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