Entrepreneur Spotlight: Asaf Somekh, Founder & CEO of iguazio
iguazio is a leader in real-time analytics and edge data platforms. What is edge analytics and data processing?
Edge analytics and data processing performs data collection and analysis at the edge of the network, near the source of data. Edge data sources can be anything from a car, or wristwatch, to an industrial component which gathers data from several machines in a factory.
In order to move high volumes of data across multiple edge devices quickly with minimized bandwidth, a centralized cloud is supplemented with several distributed “cloudlets,” or mini clouds. These cloudlets are closer to the edge, meaning their physical proximity is closer and can therefore better serve changing cloud workloads for real-time processing and actionable insights. Since these cloudlets are unattended, they must be simple to deploy and operate, serving as a complete and compact solution.
iguazio is the ideal platform for MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), enabling the greater simplicity, performance, security and agility required by next generation applications.
What kind of business impact have your customers experienced once they’ve brought your continuous analytics platform into their enterprises?
Our customers have seen game changing results, generating accurate, insightful, actionable reports in a matter of seconds instead of hours. Our beta customers are a diverse group of leaders in the fields of big data, IoTand cloud native applications.
In IoT for example, we’ve been working with an automotive multinational corporation on a connected truck project. The truck engines send real-time data to the iguazio platform via sensors for predictive maintenance. This generates value for all parties involved in the value chain, from engine manufacturers to logistics companies.
Another great example is from the financial sector. We’ve built a market surveillance platform for a major stock exchange that detects unexpected market manipulations with sophisticated machine learning methods. iguazio not only handles the data science functionality, but also the runtime detection environment, where models could quickly be developed and deployed to production in an agile, effective manner.
Real-time analytics enable immediate decision making, resulting in increased overall operational efficiency.
When it comes to time to market, enterprises working with us can easily deploy new machine learning models without requiring complex data pipelines and long engineering cycles, at a fraction of the cost. iguazio has also addressed data sharing challenges with fine-grained access control that enables a reduction of data duplication and EMR footprint, making it possible to build a secured data lake where each individual user can view data based on his or her privileges. The iguazio platform elevates the digital transformation of enterprise companies and simplifies real-time analytics at the edge, on-premises and in hybrid environments. The bottom line is faster and more accurate insights, faster time to market, substantial cost reduction and strict security. Our proven achievements have recently been recognized by Gartner in the Data Management Cool Vendor report for 2017.
iguazio’s Series B round brings together a unique group of investors from very different industries. Can you explain why that is?
On the one hand, iguazio’s solution is deployed across diverse verticals such as financial services and IoT, but really, they have many things in common. We’ve focused on these industries because they require the same type of data pipeline, one that has many sources, correlates with large sets of historical data and provides APIs for enrichment. Our investors clearly represent iguazio’s target markets — Verizon Ventures specializes in infrastructure and data, Robert Bosch Venture Capital is heavily investing in IoT and deep learning and CME Ventures, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, seeks innovative financial solutions.
Together with leaders in the venture capital community, we are fortunate to have investors that thoroughly understand our product value as experienced clients and are therefore a great validation of our strategy.
What’s next for iguazio?
We’re moving fast and are excited for what’s to come. This new round of financing will boost iguazio’s global expansion and help us prepare for scale in terms of infrastructure, sales, marketing and operations. We will continue developing additional features and capabilities, focusing on a simple, fast and secure data platform that will make AI and machine learning more accessible for enterprises of all sorts. We plan to keep growing our eco-system of channels by partnering with system integrators and resellers. Additionally, we place great value on our developer community and will be releasing more open source technologies in the near future.
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