Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 6)

Jeff Lawson: Now what you’re seeing in Web 2.0 is this more vertically integrated approach where instead of just veneer on top of the existing industry, you actually have companies that are cutting all the way through the stack and existing industry to provide a better solution overall. Coming back to homes, I can now buy a home, end-to-end, using WebGen. I can even buy a Tesla e-commerce on their website. That’s the end-to-end experience of Tesla using software. Look at Airbnb. It’s actually getting me in the room that I’m going to be renting. Same thing goes for Uber. It’s actually the means and the entirety of the customer experience. That’s a fascinating trend. This is the next evolution of using software, the Internet, and technology to disrupt businesses. The first one was just the veneer on top. Now we’re cutting deep into actually providing the service as well, which is on the consumer side. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your developer ecosystem? I imagine that part of your strategy is to unleash the whole creativity of the developer ecosystem on your platform.

Jeff Lawson: Yes, we have over 400,000 developers using our platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are these large companies? What’s the mix of that ecosystem?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very good discussion. Give me some more interesting use cases. What other segments or interesting creative ideas are you seeing in your developer ecosystem?

Jeff Lawson: We’ve got pretty much every sharing account including companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit. In the sharing economy, you use technology to connect supply and demand using the Internet, and now more importantly, using mobile. Part of creating that market involves facilitating the transaction and communication between the buyer and seller. Twilio provides that to all these companies.

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5 Ways Platform Eco-Systems Will Shrink

I found the recent Developer Economics survey results astonishing. VentureBeat published an article titled: 10,000-developer survey: 2% of coders split staggering 54% of all app revenue. Here are some snippets:

A new 10,000-developer survey by Developer Economics says that 50 percent of iOS developers and 47 percent of Android developers are “below the app poverty line” and making less than $500 per app per month. That means “the majority of app businesses are not sustainable at current revenue levels,” Developer Economics says.

88 percent of developers split just 11 percent of all app revenue and make under $10,000/month. Another nine percent split 35 percent of total app revenue, making between $10,000 and $100,000 per month. And the big winners with massive games, who make up just two percent of all developers, split a staggering 54 percent of all app revenue, making over $100,000 per month.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 7)

Ulf Zetterberg: It’s almost like a knowledge management system because if these self-service systems are built the correct way, an intelligent user can leverage this as a knowledge platform and perhaps do advance queries. It becomes almost like a dialogue. There’s a big debate in the legal industry about the automated lawyer or the IT lawyer and how much of legal or lawyer can be replaced by machines. But you can probably replace lots of that in day-to-day work to speed that up. You can save the most sophisticated work for the best lawyers.

Sramana Mitra: I was talking to somebody form the manufacturing industry for our Thought Leaders in Big Data Series and this came up as well. A lot of manufacturing functions could become completely machine to machine, completely ruling out the role of the human being from the process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is actually a good segue to my final question. Where do you point entrepreneurs to look for opportunities for building new companies? I think we’ve already started that discussion. If you take the base layer of unstructured data and then on top of that, you look at the different application areas. You were saying to apply another filter to it, which is try to find things that you can sell to business users without having to deal with IT in the process, and focus on application areas that can take advantage of 20% of the high-impact data that is really going to drive the heuristics value. Can you give some concrete examples of business problems where these apply?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You say it’s broader than that. The unstructured data problem in the enterprise is a broader problem, but I believe it’s going to get solved in pieces just like the contract problem will be solved at the contract lifecycle management level. Then there are other types of unstructured data in the enterprise. There are huge amounts of social media information, which is all unstructured data that needs to be analyzed. It’s a whole different application. It’s going to be solved at the customer analytics level. All these are different applications of different heuristics. What you’re looking for in terms of managing and analyzing the unstructured data is very different.

Ulf Zetterberg: Absolutely. I didn’t mean that there’s going to be one universal tool. There’s a very large farm of data that the customer has very limited insight into today compared to the structured stack they have. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does an enterprise account look like for you?

Ulf Zetterberg: Enterprise accounts are very distributed and fragmented. It could have two or three fairly old legacy data sources. It could be that the applications have been there for five to ten years. The usability and transparency is very poor. It’s a big project for them to try to find information and know how to extract the right information from each contract. One of the use cases that clearly puts this in the center is M&A. When you acquire a company and integrate that or you make a divestiture, it’s probably more troubling for many large companies, because now you need to know what contracts should go with that divestment. >>>