Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP tools are helping companies harness big data to provide better risk assessment.

1. Capgemini's Financial Services Global Business Unit in the
UK Depends on Big Data and Analysis to Help Clients
Manage Risk
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP tools are helping companies
harness big data to provide better risk assessment.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big
data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Capgemini's Financial Services Global
Business Unit in the UK is using big data and analysis to help its organization clients better
manage risk.
To tell us more about how they do that, we're joined by Ernie Martinez. He is the Business
Information Management Head at the Capgemini Financial Services Global Business Unit.
Welcome Ernie.
Ernie Martinez: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Gardner: Ernie, risk has always been with us. I suppose it will remain with us in some fashion
or another. Is there anything new, pressing, or different about the types of risks that your clients
are trying to reduce and understand in this climate and market?
Martinez: As you said, risk has always been with us. I don't think it's as much about what's new
within the risk world, as much as it's about the time it takes to provision the data so companies
can make the right decisions faster, therefore limiting the amount of risk they may take on in
issuing policies or taking on policies with new clients.
Gardner

2. Gardner: In addition to the risk issue, of course, there is competition. The speed of business is
picking up, and we’re still seeing difficult economic climates in many markets. How do you step
into this environment and find a technology that can improve things? What have you found?
Martinez: There is the technology aspect of delivering the right information to business faster.
There is also the business-driven way of delivering that information faster to business.
Bottom up
Why Capgemini and our business information management (BIM) practices jumped in with a
partnership with HP and Vertica in the HAVEn platform is really about the ability to deliver the
right information to business faster from the bottom up. That means the
infrastructure and the middleware by which we serve that data to business.
From the top down, we work with business in a more iterative fashion in
delivering value quickly out of the data that they are trying to harvest.
Gardner: Capgemini is a large global organization. Perhaps you could tell us a
bit about what your unit does and the types of clients you have.
Martinez: The BIM practice is a global practice. We’re ranked in the top
upper right-hand quadrant in Gartner as one of the best BIM practices out there
with about 7,000 BIM resources worldwide.
Our focus is on driving better value to the customer. So we have principal-level and senior-level
consultants that work with group-level CEOs in the financial services, insurance, and capital
markets arenas. Their main focus is to drive a strategy and roadmap, consulting work, enterprise
information architecture, and enterprise information strategy with a lot of those, the COO- and
CFO-level customers.
We then drive more business into the technical design and architectural way of delivering
information in business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Once we define what the road to good
looks like for an organization, when you talk about integrating information across the enterprise,
it's about what is that path to good looks like and what are the key initiatives that an organization
must do to be able to get there.
This is where our technical design, business analysis, and data analysis consultants fit in. They’re
actually going in to work with business to define what do they need to see out of their
information to help them make better decisions.
Martinez
Learn more about the HP+Capgemini CIRA Solution:
Click Here
To get a product demonstration, send an email to:
HAVEnAlliancesMarketing@hp.com

3. Gardner: Of course, the very basis of this is to identify the information, find the information,
and put the information in a format that can be analyzed. Then, do the analysis,
speed this all up, and manage it at scale and at the lowest possible cost. It’s a piece
of cake, right? Tell us about the process you go through and how you decide what
solutions to use and where the best bang for the buck comes from?
Martinez: Our approach is to take that senior-level expertise in big data and
analytics, bring that into our practice, put that together with our business needs
across financial services, insurance, and capital markets, and begin to define valid use cases that
solve real business problems out there.
We’re a consulting organization, and I expect our teams to be able to be subject matter experts on
what's happening in the space and also have a good handle on what the business problems are
that our customers are facing. If that’s true, then we should be able to outline some valid use
cases that are going to solve some specific problems for business customers out there.
In doing so, we’ll define that use case. We’ll do the research to validate that indeed it is a
business problem that's real. Then we’ll build the business case that outlines that if we do build
this piece of intellectual property (IP), we believe we can go out and proactively affect the
marketplace and help customers out there. This is exactly what we did with HP and the HAVEn
platform.
Wide applicability
Gardner: So we’re talking about a situation where you want to have wide applicability of the
technology across many aspects of what you are doing, that make sense economically, but of
course it also has to be the right tool for the job, that's to go deep and wide. You’re in a proof-of-
concept (POC) stage. How did you come to that? What were some of the chief requirements you
had for doing this at that right balance of deep and wide?
Martinez: We, as an organization, believe that our goal as BI and analytics professionals is to
deliver the right information faster to business. In doing so, you look at the technologies that are
out there that are positioned to do that. You look at the business partners that have that mentality
to actually execute in that manner. And then you look at the organization, like ours, whose sole
purpose is to mobilize quickly and deliver value to customer.
I think it was a natural fit. When you look at HP Vertica in the HAVEn platform, the ability to
integrate social media data through Autonomy and then of course through Vertica and Hadoop,
the integration of the entire architecture gives us the ability to do many things.
But number one, it's the ability to bring in structured and unstructured data, and be able to slice
and dice that data in a rapid fashion; not only deploy it, but also execute rapidly for organizations
out there.

4. Over the course of the last five or six months, that conversation began to blossom into a
relationship that said, that we all work together as a team and we think we can mobilize not just
the application or the solution that we’re thinking about, but the entire infrastructure derivatives
to our customer quickly. That's where we’re at.
So, we are at a POC stage. What that means is that once we partnered and got the go ahead with
HP Vertica to move forward with the POC, we mobilized a solution in less than 45 days, which I
think shows the value of the relationship from the HP side as well as from Capgemini.
Gardner: Down the road, after some period of implementation, there are general concerns about
scale when you’re dealing with big data. Because you’re near the beginning of this, how do you
feel about the ability for the platform to work to whatever degree you may need?
Martinez: Absolutely no concern at all. Being here at HP Discover this week has certainly
solidified in my mind that we’re betting on the right horse with their ability to scale. If you heard
some of the announcements coming out this week, they’re talking about the ability to take on big
data. They’re using Vertica and the HAVEn network.
There’s absolutely zero question in my mind that organizations out there can leverage this
platform and grow with it over time. Also, it gives us the ability to be able to do some things that
we couldn’t do a few years back.
Business value
Gardner: Ernie, let's get back to the business value here. Moving beyond the POC phase,
perhaps you can identify some of the types of companies that you think would be in the best
position to use this. How will this hit the road up and running? What are the sweet spots in the
market, the applications you think would be the most urgently that make a right fit for this right
away?
Martinez: When you talk about the largest insurers around the world, whether from Zurich to
Farmers in the US to Liberty Mutual, you name it, these are some of our friendly customers that
we are talking to that are providing feedback to us on this solution.
We’ll incorporate that feedback. We’ll then take that to some targeted customers in North
America, UK, and across Europe, that are primed and in need of a solution that will give them
the ability to not only assess risk more effectively, but reduce the time to be able to make these
type of decisions.
Reducing the time to provision data reduces costs by integrating data across multiple sources,
whether it be customer sentiment from the Internet, from Twitter and other areas, to what they
are doing around their current policies. It allows them to identify customers that they might want

5. to go after. It will increase their market share and reduce their costs. It gives them the ability to
do many more things than they were able to do in the past.
Gardner: And Capgemini is in the position of mastering this platform and being able to extend
the value of that platform across multiple clients and business units. Therefore, that reduces the
total cost of that technology, but at the same time, you’re going to have access to data across
industries, and perhaps across boundaries that individual organizations might not be able to
attain.
So there's a value add here in terms of your penetration into the industry and then being able to
come up with the inferences. Tell me a little bit about how the access-to-data benefit works for
you?
Martinez: If you take a look at the POC or the use case that he POC was built on, it was built on
a commercial insurance risk assessment. If you take a look at the underlying architecture around
commercial insurance risk, our goal was to be able to build an architecture that will serve the
uses case that HP bought into, but at the same time, flatten out that data model and that
architecture to also bring in better customer analytics for commercial insurance risk.
So we’ve flattened out that model and we’ve built the architecture so we could go after additional
business, instead of more clients, across not just commercial insurance, but also general
insurance. Then, you start building in the customer analytics capability within that underlying
architecture and it gives us the ability to go from the insurance market over to the financial
services market, as well as into the capital markets area.
Gardner: All the data in one place makes a big difference.
Martinez: It makes a huge difference, absolutely.
Future plans
Gardner: Tell us a bit about the future. We’ve talked about a couple of aspects of the HAVEn
suite. Autonomy, Vertica, and Hadoop seem to be on everyone's horizon at some point or another
due to scale and efficiencies. Have you already been using Hadoop within your POC or how do
expect to get there?
Martinez: We haven’t used Hadoop in this POC, but certainly, with its capability, we plan to.
I’ve done a number of different strategies and roadmaps in engaging with larger organizations,
from American Express to the largest retailer in the world. In every case, they have a lot of issues
Learn more about the HP+Capgemini CIRA Solution:
Click Here
To get a product demonstration, send an email to:
HAVEnAlliancesMarketing@hp.com

6. around how they’re processing the massive amounts of data that are coming into their
organization.
When you look at the extract, transform, load (ETL) processes by which they are taking data
from systems of record, trying to massage that data and move it into their large databases, they
are having issues around load and meeting load windows.
The HAVEn platform, in itself, gives us the ability to leverage Hadoop, maybe take out some of
that processing pre-ETL, and then, before we go into the Vertica environment, be able to take out
some of that load and make the Vertica even more efficient than it is today, which is one of the
biggest selling points of Vertica. It certainly is in our plans.
Gardner: Another announcement here at Discover has been around converged infrastructure,
where they’re trying to make the hardware-software efficiency and integration factor come to
bear on some of these big-data issues. Have you thought about the deployment platform as well
as the software platform?
Martinez: You bet. At the beginning of this interview, we talked about the ability to deliver the
right information faster to business. This is a culture that organizations absolutely have to adopt
if they are going to be able to manage the amount of data at the speed at which that data is
coming to their organizations. To be able to have a partner like HP who is talking about the
convergence of software and infrastructure all at the same time to help companies manage this
better, is one of the biggest reasons why we're here.
We, as a consulting organization, can provide the consulting services and solutions that are going
to help deliver the right information, but without that infrastructure, without that ability to be
able to integrate faster and then be able to analyze what's happening out there, it’s a moot point.
This is where this partnership is blossoming for us.
Gardner: Before we sign off, Ernie, now that you have gone through this understanding and
have developed some insights into the available technologies and made some choices, is there
any food for thought for others who might just be beginning to examine how to enter big data,
how to create a common platform across multiple types of business activities? What did you not
think of before that you wish you had known?
Lessons learned
Martinez: If I look back at lessons learned over the last 60 to 90 days for us within this
process, it’s one thing to say that you're mobilizing the team right from the bottom up, meaning
from the infrastructure and the partnership with HP, and as well as the top-down with your
business needs to finding the right business requirements and then actually building to that
solution.

7. In most cases, we’re dealing with individuals. While we might talk about an entrepreneurial way
of delivering solutions into the marketplace, we need to challenge ourselves, and all of the
resources that we bring into the organization, to actually have that mentality.
What I’ve learned over the last 60 to 90 days is that while we have some very good tactical
individuals, having that entrepreneurial way of thinking and actually delivering that information
is a different mindset altogether. It's about mentoring our resources that we currently have,
bringing in that talent that has more of an entrepreneurial way of delivering, and trying to build
solutions to go to market into our organization.
I didn’t really think about the impact of our current resources and how it would affect them. We
were a little slow as we started the POC. Granted, we did this in 45 days, so that’s the
perfectionist coming out in me, but I’d say it did highlight a couple of areas within our own team
that we can improve on.
Gardner: So, it’s important to either identify or find a culture of innovation?
Martinez: That's correct.
Gardner: Well, great. I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about how the
Capgemini Financial Services Global Business Unit has been entering into a proof-of-concept
phase around big data and some of the choices that they have been making. I want to thank our
guest, Ernie Martinez, the Business Information Management Head at Capgemini Financial
Services Global Business Unit in the UK. Thank you, Ernie.
Martinez: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate your time.
Gardner: Thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT
discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
I’m Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP tools are helping companies
harness big data to provide better risk assessment. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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