Rob Metcalf | Strata Data Conference 2012
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 27/04/2012

The Cube - Strata Conference 2012 - Rob Metcalf, Digital Reasoning, with John Furrier and Dave Vellante
There’s plenty of buzz around big data, but it all boils down to being able to turn that content into context.  We can tap all the data the world has to offer, but it means little if we don’t understand it’s true value.  That’s where Digital Reasoning comes into play, applying machine learning technology to contextualize a range of data sets, across languages and sources.  Digital Reasoning COO and President Rob Metcalf stopped by theCube with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante during the O’Reilly Strata Conference to discuss his company’s goals around contextualizing big data, and how this has turned into a viable business for addressing today’s market needs.

Since Metcalf’s last visit to theCube, Digital Reasoning’s brought on John Brennan as a new board member, and benefited from a round of funding late last year.  Metcalf emphasizes the need for good partners when building a business such as Digital Reasoning, and they’re now looking to diversify their core product for more customers across more industries.

That core technology is Synthesis Cloud, a product built to analyze large scale data in a hosted environment.  Metcalf goes on to point out the increasing awareness around unstructured data, and that businesses aren’t making good use of it.  “Digital Reasoning is about taking data from different domains–languages, medical data, emails, blog content, patent data–a bunch of data sources.  We address how to use software to make sense of it.

    “We’re doing things like you and I do when we read sentences–what’s the subject, what’s the predicate, what’s the object?  how do you encode and store that?”  Metcalf goes on.  “We’re doing analysis on top of that.  Who’s this person, what’s he do, who’s he spoken with and what’s he done over a period of time?  We’re taking machine learning to do what we do as humans, and scaling that out.”

From a business perspective, Digital Reasoning stands out with their processes around machine learning, which are highly statistical.  The result is a platform that can take a new domain and teach the computer to read the text and identify its context, with limited customization.  This allows Digital Reasoning to process data in a fairly quick amount of time, and to do so at scale.

Digital Reasoning has been hard at work for a few years now, building its clientele around government sectors including the Defense sector.  They’re now looking to make gains in the finance industry, where they’re seeing an incredible amount of demand.  “There’s worlds of data out there relatively unused, and tools that sit on top of the infrastructure that help customers get to better answers,” Metcalf explains.

And to address the growing demand, Digital Reasoning is also expanding its own team.  They’re looking to build more efficient tools with experts in machine learning, Java, big data technology and of course, business development.  See below for this special Spotlight interview in its entirety.