Lenny Blyuhker - BigDataSV 2014 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 13/02/2014

Lenny Blyuhker, JiWire, at BigDataSV 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly

@thecube
#BigDataSV
Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor with Wikibon, and John Furrier, SiliconANGLE CEO, traveled to Santa Clara last month seeking a clear perspective on the future of Big Data from the best minds in the industry.

Lenny Blyuhker, VP of Engineering with JiWire, joined them in theCUBE to talk about a wide range of topics, from the concurrent Strata Conference to the tools and technologies required to succeed in the business.

“What’s your take on the show here, from the tech perspective?” asked Furrier.

“One of the things that is different this year is that everybody is a data scientist or a data wrangler. Last time Strata was focused around scale – how to handle large volumes and big data, how to make this data available for enabling business decisions. This year is all about generating insights and business intelligence; at least that’s why I’m here,” Blyukher confessed. “JiWire means business.”

Invited to talk more about the business, Lenny Blyukher provided theCUBE viewers with some vital stats: “JiWire is a 10-year old company focusing in providing business intelligence to brands and agencies, giving them the means to reach the right audience and measure the results. We started out on WiFi, which became relevant when the industry started shifting from laptops to mobile devices. We invested in figuring out how location could be used to create the right audience.”

“Two years ago we created a product called Location Graph, similar to Facebook’s Social Graph – where people figure out who you are by the people you are connected to and the things you like. In our world we figure out who people are by the history of their location. LocationGraph allows you to understand and look into Big Data (billions and billions of location tags) and figure out what the patterns are and how to cross reference it with other data points,” explained Blyukher.

JiWire’s role in the IoT, Big Data spaces
 .

“The Internet of Things is nothing new to you,” joked Furrier. “All these connected devices and the machine data is really valuable. What have you learned from your business regarding how to handle these connected devices?”

“The interesting thing is actually very trivial: data does not equal information,” said Blyukher. “In the world of Big Data (which is another trivial word these days), you have the three Vs: velocity, variety and volume. The challenge is to infer actionable and monetizable information. In our case it becomes a question of business intelligence that we convey to our clients; we help them understand what their audience is, how to reach it and how to measure the effectiveness of their campaign.”

“In 10 years you’ve seen the evolution of Big Data,” stated Jeff Kelly, who then asked Lenny Blyuhker to walk the viewers through the evolution of the internal workings and some of the challenges the company has met during that time.

The first challenge that Blyuhker confessed to was handling the sheer volume of the data and responding to requests within milliseconds. “Otherwise, you lose business,” he bluntly stated.

One of the first things they needed to take care of was investing in a good platform that could handle the traffic, Blyukher went on to explain. The second thing was understanding how to deal with all the data being collected. JiWire started with Hadoop as the typical ETL process to cleanse the data and reshape it.

“Early on we realized that technologies like Hyve were pretty slow and inefficient when it came to enabling business users to draw a data conclusion. We started experimenting with a lot of technologies and we got into columnary database which allowed us to handle the data in the back-end. We also realized that, in addition to targeting, we had to come up and invest in measurement. Measurement means that you understand what audience and what scale you can reach, helping your client structure his campaign in the right way. Then, during the campaign execution, it also means the ability to look at the dynamics of the campaign,” added Blyuhker.

The JiWire VP of Engineering proceeded to explain another revolutionary product to the audience: Location Conversion Index – the first product in the mobile environment that allowed agencies and brands measure the effectiveness of their campaign ROI.

LCI

After spending a certain amount of money running a campaign, the generated traffic to the store is analyzed. LCI is the first mobile ROI metric that measures the increase in traffic to the store as the result of mobile ad spend, not just total store visits during a campaign.

“You mentioned Hadoop, but we’re increasingly moving towards real-time,” said Kelly. “How do you look at the evolution of these technologies and how do you approach these complementary trends?”