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MetiStream, Inc. |
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May 2, 2016 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Big Data Consultants Providing Real-Time Data Integration Specializing in Hadoop, Apache Spark and Kafka Solutions |
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Founder & CEO
MetiStream, Inc.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – May 2, 2016
CEOCFO: Ms. Driscoll, what is the idea behind MetiStream? Ms. Driscoll: We wanted to help customers get to their data faster. Our entire focus of the company is to help companies build their analytic data pipelines. What does that mean? From the point of pulling in their data to transforming data, to being able to gain insight into their data, that is how we help accelerate a customer’s process. That is what we do.
CEOCFO: What goes into being able to provide data faster? Ms. Driscoll: If you talk to many enterprises on how they process their data whether it is customer data, product data or whatever they have, the overall process to manipulate that data and make it insightful can be very long. They will often tell you that the entire end-to-end process can be very lengthy because of their data formats, type of applications or the volume of data that they have in their organization. Typically, in that process, customers and enterprises spend at least 60-70 percent of their time getting that data prepared, ready or in a state that can be easily leveraged. We help to decrease that entire process and we do that by having technology experts who understand that data and know how to apply big data technology approaches to help customers accelerate that process.
CEOCFO: What are you doing that is different? Ms. Driscoll: What we are doing that is different is looking at the data that is really the most critical for customers. We focus on it from a use case perspective. Everyone says that they want to do analytics but they do not really know specifically what question they want to answer with analytics. For example, they may want to know why customers are churning from their business but they may not understand what specific data they need in order to analyze and understand why their customers are leaving. Because they have so much information and data within their enterprise, they do not know where to start and they do not know where the pain points are and what critical data that is required. Our experts truly understand not only how to help them pinpoint the right data but how we can pull together the right set of data to do analytics against. Many vendors or solutions providers may know technology or they may be able to do data analysis, but they do not know how to bring all of that together from an end-to-end perspective and that is where our core differentiators lie. The other area of core differentiation is in our specialized focus in open source based big data technologies. We like to drive speed and innovation with the right technology in order to help accelerate the implementation process.
CEOCFO: What did you recognize from the beginning that caused you to look at this direction? Ms. Driscoll: I have been in the technology, product and consulting space for almost 25 years. While I was at IBM leading the Big Data Services Practice, my team was helping to implement big data technologies, and one of the things that drove me crazy was how long technology implementations would take before the customer saw results. Furthermore, I saw the customer, industry and analytics landscape changing. Customers do not have the luxury of waiting months and months to understand their information or see ROI in their projects. Customers are also very anxious and eager to innovate faster. Oftentimes very large systems integrators and vendors struggle to accelerate their implementation process in a very agile and innovative way. It can take anywhere from six to twelve months to be able to illustrate value and for us, our goal and time frame is not six to twelve months, it is in one or two months. Customers want immediate value and insight. We saw a gap in the industry where that was not being provided and that is why I started to think about how we help customers innovate and deliver against analytics faster. That is why we started the company.
CEOCFO: Who is turning you to services? What is the common thread? Ms. Driscoll: The common thread is that there is a gap in the customer’s skills and knowledge internally around big data technologies and they need getting started in implementing big data-related use cases. We have a gamut of customers who come to us in various phases of their analytics and big data journey. Some of our customers are very new in leveraging some of these core technologies and doing analytics. They will come to us and ask us for guidance and expertise around how to get started, what types of technologies they should consider, and what the best practices are in implementation and processing. Those are more of the smaller, midsized companies. We also have larger enterprises that come to us saying they have projects in place with big data but do not have specific technology experts, and ask us to come in and become a subject matter expert in that core technology. They want us to work side- by-side with their team and partner with them and help to train them.
CEOCFO: What would someone search for to find MetiStream? Ms. Driscoll: We provide specialized expertise in an industry leading big data technology called Apache Spark. Many folks will be interested in finding consulting companies that specialized in a particular core area and that is an area where we are experts in.
CEOCFO: What is a typical engagement? Ms. Driscoll: Here are two examples that are very different from each other. The first one is what we call more strategic planning and recommendations. Some customers have been in the world of implementing traditional software solutions like the Oracle and they are really interested in moving to the big data environment and they want to know what type of architecture they should be looking at and what types of technologies they should be focusing on based on their current environment. We do a great deal of big data architecture assessments where we look at the customers’ current environment, what their use cases and requirements are, and then we help them create a new recommended reference architecture of what their new big data platforms should look like. We help them go from point A to point B around big data. That is one example. The second example is around project implementation support where the customer has a particular project whether its around analytics or data integration and they want to engage us to work side- by-side with their team members, and implement that use case form the business requirements to architecture, to design, to implementation, to production deployment.
CEOCFO: How is business? Ms. Driscoll: Business is very good. We have seen a dramatic change in the last two years. We started in April of 2014, and we are seeing many changes in the world of big data. Enterprises are embracing open source technologies and other big data technologies more so much more than what we saw two years ago. We see some maturing and leveling out of the marketplace around big data and we are seeing much more excitement in some of the core technologies that I talked about around Apache Spark as well as around Apache™ Kafka™. I think that is where Confluent is positioned very well. I think the Hadoop market is leveling out a little, but then the ecosystem around Hadoop is growing, which really does impact the uptick in some of those technologies I talked about around Apache Spark and Kafka.
Ms. Driscoll: What we are looking to do is help customers innovate and implement faster. We are going to be looking to do a lot of R&D and prototyping of core solutions, primarily in the healthcare market. We see tremendous opportunities where we can help the healthcare industry build faster healthcare data pipelines, do analytics faster, as well as help the community implement new data interoperability standards. We will be investing quite a bit in driving some solutions in the healthcare market.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about your partnering with Confluent? Ms. Driscoll: As the press release stated, Confluent is driving the commercialization of the Apache Kafka solution. The founders were from LinkedIn, who were the originators of implementing Kafka. Because of their focus around distributed processing, messaging and real-time solutions, and with our expertise in implementing Kafka, we felt that it was a natural fit. We also look at partners who we feel will be industry leaders and will help to expand the big data community. We definitely believe Confluent is in a very good position to drive some of these core solutions around real-time processing.
Ms. Driscoll: We try to give back to the community around open source and brining the community together. Right now, we are very focused around the technology meetups and communities. When we first started the company, we wanted to make sure that we brought the community together. We started the Apache Spark meet-up in the Washington D. C. and Virginia area in May of 2014. We now have over 1,800 members and we very much focus on making sure that the community has information that they can use around technology that they can share with other like-minded individuals in the community. We also help to bring different constituents and vendors to the table. We want to facilitate collaboration, foster innovation and, also, learn from each other. We feel that is so important in the space of big data where there is so much emphasis around innovation and knowledge sharing. That is one area. The other is that we started another meet-up around Big Data Healthcare. We see that healthcare still needs a lot of innovation and collaboration to foster better quality healthcare and we started that several months ago to bring the healthcare community together in this areas as well. We are big on knowledge sharing and community integration. We feel like that is the best way to give back.
Ms. Driscoll: There are very few vendors out there that can bring the expertise around the core big data technologies and real time solutions to the table. Most vendors out there basically evolved from their traditional systems integration, data integration and legacy solution business, but MetiStream was founded on the core premise of delivering big data and open source technologies to the industry. We are specialized not only from a technology perspective but we are specialized in delivering specific solutions around data analytics. |
“We wanted to help customers get to their data faster.” - Chiny Driscoll
MetiStream, Inc.
Contact: 703.679.7443
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Chiny
Driscoll