Momenta I Digital Thread

#66 a conversation with Tomer Shiran - Dremio's Cofounder and CEO by Moment

Jay Allardyce is the Chief Product Officer and Head of Customer Success at Uptake Software.  Our conversation touched on his extensive background in technology and analytics from his time at HP, Vertica, and GE prior to joining Uptake.  We discuss the evolution of the market around analytic software, some of the key experiences and lessons from working with different types of customers and business problems, and the unique value-add that AI provides when embedded in business process.  We discuss the landscape of IoT platforms and the critical elements for success both in terms of the platform as well as in organizations adopting advanced connected solutions, and dive into some of the aspects of the energy industry that make it a unique, and exciting sector for innovation.  Lastly, he shares his vision for AI-powered transformation and the unique opportunities across different industries today.

SingularityNET – An Open Approach to AI Innovation – a Conversation with Arif Khan Chief Marketing Officer of SingularityNET  SingularityNET is an open source-based platform for developing and sharing artificial intelligence co-founded by Ben Goertzel and David Hanson of Hanson Robotics (best know for the Sophia robot).  In our conversation with Arif Khan, CMO for SingularityNET, he outlines the current challenges relating to the centralization of AI capabilities and the risks that come when bad actors exploit systems that lack transparency.  He shares the open source vision for SingularityNET, a platform and community dedicated to enabling collaborative, open development and sharing of AI and machine learning technologies.  The opportunities and vision of the project, along with the accelerator and incubated businesses, seek to democratize access to innovation and powerful capabilities in a transparent and egalitarian fashion.   Lastly, he shares some of the relevant work ongoing to leverage robots to help people with meditation, a confluence of technology and humanity to provide better outcomes.

Lory Kehoe has scaled ConsenSys Ireland from a single employee a year ago to 42 today to meet the demands of the company’s broad client base.  In our conversation he shares his background in strategy, explaining how Consensys, led by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, is leading the way in enterprise adoption of blockchain technologies.  He shares a number of notable projects including Kongo.im, which is a trade finance company, as well as the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum which is focused on educating and informing policy.   Consensys is focused on leveraging the size and scale of the Ethereum community of developers and stakeholders, which is over 30X the size of the next largest blockchain project.  The company is working to realize the visions of companies as they look to take advantage of blockchain-enabled transformation from physical to digital, from illiquid to liquid assets, how to tokenize and sell previously illiquid, discrete assets in new ways.  Consensys Ireland is at the forefront of efforts in the EU.

Marc Fleury is a technologist, physicist, investor, musician and something of a Renaissance man. We discuss the history of the open source company he founded, JBoss, which was sold to Red Hat, along with some of the advantages, challenges and insights that came from building a business around an open source enterprise middleware product. We then dive into Marc’s focus on Smart Cities and the role that cryptocurrencies and blockchain could play into the future as a critical funding mechanism for Smart Cities projects. He shares is insights comparing and contrasting the current state of the industry in Smart Cities along with the blockchain/crypto community. Lastly he shares his work around the Church of Sound, which combines his deep interest in physics, music and consciousness. Marc is a deep thinker with a broad range of interests that he weaves together in a fascinating conversation.

Sadagopan Singam is Senior Vice President Global, and Business Head, Cloud Native SaaS at HCL Technologies. Our conversation explored his experiences working to implement enterprise applications around the globe, and how the different paces of adoption across regions and key lessons learned have proven relevant for subsequent waves of technology innovation. He shares his methodical approach to breaking down the key priorities needed to effect successful digital transformation, along with the impact of regulation and governance. The conversation explores the evolutionary processes that organizations need to undergo to be able to harness the value captured in their data, then apply analysis and insights to drive not just efficiencies but whole new approaches to their business. Finally, he shares his optimism for human creativity boosted by technology to help solve the biggest problems of our era.

Rob Massoudi is the Head of Rob Massoudi is the Head of Digital Transformation at ABB and our conversation covered a range of topics, including the nature of digital transformation, the value of business expertise in driving change, and the efforts underway at ABB to leverage concepts such as Digital Twins and IoT best practices to create value among the company’s global clients. Rob is passionate about the coming transformation of energy and transportation with the rise of solar, wind and electric vehicles, and our conversation dove into the implications across the ecosystem when autos and fleets become electrified. He shared his insights on who, and where the most advanced efforts are underway to effect change, the role of industry and government, and the implications for utilities and automakers among others. He also provides a view into why Europe and Asia are accelerating the transition, and what the U.S. needs to do to catch up. at ABB and our conversation covered a range of topics, including the nature of digital transformation, the value of business expertise in driving change, and the efforts underway at ABB to leverage concepts such as Digital Twins and IoT best practices to create value among the company’s global clients. Rob is passionate about the coming transformation of energy and transportation with the rise of solar, wind and electric vehicles, and our conversation dove into the implications across the ecosystem when autos and fleets become electrified. He shared his insights on who, and where the most advanced efforts are underway to effect change, the role of industry and government, and the implications for utilities and automakers among others. He also provides a view into why Europe and Asia are accelerating the transition, and what the U.S. needs to do to catch up.

XYO is creating a distributed network for location services leveraging the power of blockchain and IoT devices. In our conversation, Markus shares the reasons why the availability of high-accuracy, verifiable and immutable location records can provide huge potential benefits for industry, particularly supply chain and logistics. In this conversation, he outlines the company’s technology, strategy and vision for using blockchain to deliver the next generation of intelligent, location based IoT services. Markus mined his first Bitcoin in 2013 and has been captivated by blockchain technologies ever since. Markus has over 15 years experience in building, managing and growing companies around the globe. Markus is originally from Germany (with English as his second language), and specializes in getting the most out of companies by implementing data-driven systems and utilizing the key talents of each employee to get the best out of his team. After dropping out of his Ph.D. studies at Bocconi University, Markus began working with companies in hyper-growth industries around the globe. Markus has led cutting-edge technology ventures such as Novacore, 'sterkly', Hive Media and Koiyo.

Rich Stiennon is a long-time Industry Analyst and Author of Secure Industry Analyst: The Cio's Journey. One of the key points of the book is that businesses are currently in the midst of transitioning to Office 365 for email and Office tools. In the book, Stiennon explores journey of 16 leading enterprises around the world including Schneider, GE, Fannie Mae, Siemens, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Our discussion explores how the adoption of SaaS applications becomes a starting point for technological trannsformation, and how Office365 has had the most dramatic impact on enterprise IT infrastructure in decades. We explore how networks are impacted by this transition, and most importantly how the paradigm of security itself is changing, and actually improving.

Julie Albright, Ph.D Digital Sociologist at the University of Southern California and a Board Member of Infrastructure Masons. We discuss her new book, Left to Their Own Devices – How Digital Natives are Reshaping the American Dream. The central thesis of the book is that the rise of the Internet and digital technologies is causing people to become untethered – from relationships, work, institutions, even society itself. This phenomenon is manifesting among Millennials most prominently, though the impact is touching later generations as well. We discuss what it means to be untethered, the emerging values of the untethered generation, how these changes are affecting how people work, live and relate to one another. Digital technologies are “recoding our operating systems” as people become increasingly disconnected from nature and traditional ways of learning. We also explore the impact on businesses such as retailers, along with ramifications of increasing AI-driven automation. Lastly she shares some of the positive outcomes of a connected society and provides a call to action.

Babur Ozden is founder and CEO of Maana, a software based Knowledge Platform. Our conversation explored the origins of the company, which focuses on capturing best practices and tacit knowledge of business processes to provide employees with domain-specific software assistance created through extensive analysis of historical data. He discusses the challenges of deriving actionable knowledge from silo-ed data, and the principles behind the creation of the Maana Computational Knowledge Graph that powers the company’s solutions. He also shares why and how the company turned its focused to the energy industry and provided examples of successful use cases of the platform, shared insights around competition, risks and vision for the future.

Sander Klous is Professor of Big Data Ecosystems at the University of Amsterdam and Partner in charge of Big Data and Analytics for KPMG in the Netherlands. Our conversation explored the key issues of trust, governance and ethics in analytics and AI, following on his books We are Big Data and Building Trust in a Smart Society. He is currently working on creating an ethical framework that would enable auditing of analytics and algorithms in a way similar to how audited financial statements represent a trusted presentation of business results. He shares insights into the current thinking around ethics in AI, outlining key risks from analytics and the value of trust. Lastly, he shares examples of how the City of Amsterdam is leading the field in applying ethical frameworks to analytics.

“JT” Jean Turgeon is VP and CTO for Digital Transformation at Avaya, with a career in technology and communications that spans decades Our conversation explored different dimensions of digital transformation, including the evolution of IoT and the impact across multiple industries. JT shared where Avaya is focusing its digital transformation efforts, in particular in the Health Care, Public Safety and the Hospitality industries. One of the key points he makes is that companies should start small and build on incremental successes rather then trying to “boil the ocean”. He also shares his insights on the compelling opportunities around AI, blockchain, VR and other emerging technologies.

#53 How Crate.io Helps Drive Digital Transformation a conversation with Christian Lutz by Moment

David Bauer has a long career managing risk- as a CTO, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Information Security Officer and COO for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and other institutions. In our conversation he discusses assessing and managing risk to digital transformation strategies, going beyond the topic of cybersecurity covered in our earlier podcast. He shares the complexities involved with ensuring that digital processes are mapped appropriately, how to evaluate the user experience on apps, highlighting failures and successes. He also outlines the strategic risk assessment framework he has developed, offering insights into different criteria – both quantitative and qualitative. Lastly, he provides useful advice for companies embarking on their digital transformation strategies.