Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the benefits of joining data analysis and the cloud.

1. Full 360 Takes Deep Data Analysis Services to New Business
Levels
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the benefits of joining data analysis and the cloud.
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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, as well as
better business results.
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Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Full 360 is using big data and analytics
to improve their financial operations. To learn more about that we're joined by our guest, Eric
Valenzuela, Director of Business Development at Full 360 based in New York. Welcome, Eric.
Eric Valenzuela: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Gardner: First off, tell us a little bit about Full 360 and the role it plays in the financial sector?
Valenzuela: Full 360 is a consulting and services firm and we purely focus on data warehousing,
business intelligence (BI), and hosted solutions. We build and consult and then we do managed
services for hosting those complex, sophisticated solutions in the cloud, in the Amazon cloud
specifically. [Register for the upcoming HP Big Data Conference in Boston on Aug. 10-13.]
Gardner: And why is cloud a big differentiator for this type of service in the
financial sector?
Valenzuela: It’s not necessarily just for finance. It seems to be beneficial for any
company that has a large initiative around data warehouse and BI. For us,
specifically, the cloud is a platform that we can develop our scripts and processes
around. That way, we can guarantee 100 percent that we're providing the same
exact service to all of our customers.
Gardner
Valenzuela

2. We have quite a bit of intellectual property (IP) that’s wrapped up inside our scripts and
processes. The cloud platform itself is a good starting point for a lot of people, but it also has
elasticity for those companies that continue to grow and add to their data warehousing and BI
solutions.
Gardner: Eric, it sounds as if you've built your own platform as a service (PaaS) for your
specific activities and development and analytics on top of a public cloud infrastructure. Is that
fair to say?
Valenzuela: That’s a fair assumption.
Primary requirements
Gardner: So as you are doing this cloud-based analytic service, what is it that your customers
are demanding of you? What are the primary requirements you fill for them with this technology
and approach?
Valenzuela: With data warehousing being rather new, Vertica specifically, there
is a lack of knowledge out there in terms of how to manage it, keep it up and
running, tune it, analyze queries and make sure that they're returning information
efficiently, that kind of thing. What we try to do is to supplement that lack of
expertise.
Gardner: Leave the driving to us, more or less. You're the plumbers and you let them deal with
the proper running water and other application-level intelligence.
Valenzuela: We're like an insurance policy. We do all the heavy lifting, the maintenance, and the
management. We ensure that your solution is going to run the way that you expect it to run. We
take the mundane out, and then give the companies the time to focus on building intelligent
applications, as opposed to worrying about how to keep the thing up and running, tuned, and
efficient.
Gardner: Given that Wall Street has been crunching numbers for an awfully long time, and I
know that they have, in many ways, almost unlimited resources to go at things like BI, what’s
different now than say 5 or 10 years ago? Is there more of a benefit to speed and agility versus
just raw power? How has the economics or dynamics of Wall Street analytics changed over the
past few years?
Valenzuela: First, it’s definitely the level of data. Just 5 or 10 years ago, either you had disparate
pieces of data or you didn’t have a whole lot of data. Now it seems like we are just managing
massive amounts of data from different feeds, different sources. As that grows, there has to be a
vehicle to carry all of that, where it’s limitless in a sense.

3. Early on, it was really just a lack of the volume that we have today. In addition to that, 8 or 10
years ago BI was still rather new in what it could actually do for a company in terms of making
agile decisions and informed decisions, decisions with intent.
So fast forward a little bit, and it’s widely accepted and adopted now. It’s like the cloud. When
cloud first came out, everybody was concerned about security. How are we going to get the data
in there? How are we going to stand this thing up? How are we going to manage it? Those
questions come up a lot less now than they did even two years ago.
Gardner: While you may have cut your teeth on Wall Street, you seem to be branching out into
other verticals -- gaming, travel, logistics. What are some of the other areas now to which you're
taking your services, your data warehouse, and your BI tools?
Following the trends
Valenzuela: It seems like we're following the trends. Recently it's been gaming. We have quite
a few gaming customers that are just producing massive amounts of data.
There's also the airline industry. The customers that we have in airlines, now that they have a
way to -- I hate this term -- slice and dice their data, are building really informed,, intelligent
applications to service their customers, customer appreciation. It’s built for that kind of thing.
Airlines are now starting to see what their competition is doing. So they're getting on board and
starting to build similar applications so they are not left behind.
Banking was pretty much the first to go full force and adopt BI as a basis for their practice.
Finance has always been there. They've been doing it for quite a long time.
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Gardner: So as the director of business development, I imagine you're out there saying, "We can
do things that couldn’t have been done before at prices that weren’t available before." That must
give you almost an unlimited universe. How do you know where to go next to sell this?
Valenzuela: It’s kind of an open field. From my perspective, I look at the different companies
out there that come to me. At first, we were doing a lot of education. Now, it’s just, "Yes, we can
do this," because these things are proven. We're not proving any concepts anymore. Everything
has already been done, and we know that we can do it. [Register for the upcoming HP Big
Data Conference in Boston on Aug. 10-13.]
It is an open field, but we focus purely on the cloud. We expect all of our customers will be in the
Amazon cloud. It seems that now I am teaching people a little bit more -- just because it’s cloud,
it’s not magic. You still have to do a lot of work. It’s still an infrastructure.

4. But we come from that approach and we make sure that the customer is properly aligned with the
vision that this is not just a one- or two-month type commitment. We're not just going to build a
solution, put it in our pocket, and walk away. We want to know that they're fully committed for
6-12 months.
Otherwise, you're not going to get the benefits of it. You're just going to spend the money and the
effort, and you're not really going to get any benefits out of it if you're not going to be committed
for the longer period of time. There still are some challenges with the sales and business
development.
Gardner: Given this emphasis on selling the cloud model as much as the BI value, you needed
to choose an analytics platform that was cloud friendly and that was also Amazon cloud friendly.
Tell me how Vertica and Amazon and your requirements come together?
Good timing
Valenzuela: I think it was purely a timing thing. Our CTO, Rohit Amarnath, attended a session
at MIT, where Vertica was first announced. So he developed a relationship there.
This was right around the time when Amazon announced that they were offering this cloud
platform. So it made a lot of sense to look at the cloud as being a vision, looking at the cloud as a
platform, looking at column databases as a future way of managing BI and analytics, and then
putting the two together.
It was more or less a timing thing. Amazon was there. It was new technology, and we saw the
future in that. Analytics was newly adopted. So now you have the column database that we can
leverage as well. So blend the two together and start building some platform that hasn’t been
done yet.
Gardner: What about lessons learned along the way? Are there some areas to avoid or places
that you think are more valuable that people might appreciate? If someone were to begin a
journey towards a combination of BI, cloud, and vertical industry tool function, what might you
tell them to be wary of or to double down on?
Valenzuela: I'm not really sure. We forged our own way. We couldn’t learn from our
competitors’ mistakes because we were the ones that were creating the mistakes. We had to to
clear those up and learn from our own mistakes as we moved forward.
Gardner: So perhaps a lesson is to be bold and not to be confined by the old models of IT.
Valenzuela: Definitely that. Definitely thinking outside the box and seeing what the cloud can
do, focus on forgetting about old IT and then looking at cloud as a new form of IT.

5. Understanding what it cannot do as a basis, but really open up your mind and think about it as to
what it can actually do, from an elasticity perspective.
There are a lot of Vertica customers out there that are going to reach a limitation. That may
require procuring more hardware, more IT staff. The cloud aspect removes all of that.
Gardner: I suppose it allows you as a director of business development to go downstream. You
can find smaller companies, medium-sized enterprises, and say, "Listen, you don’t have to build
a data warehouse at your own expense. You can start doing BI based on a warehouse-as-a-service
model, pay as you go, grow as you learn, and so forth."
Money concept
Valenzuela: Exactly. Small or large, those IT departments are spending that money anyway.
They're spending it on servers. If they are on-prem, the cost of that server in the cloud should be
equal or less. That’s the concept.
If you're already spending the money, why not just migrate it and then partner with a firm like us
that knows how to operate that. Then, we become your augmented experts, or that insurance
policy, to make sure that those things are going to be running the way you want them to, as if it
were your own IT department.
Gardner: Eric, we're almost out of time. For our listeners to better appreciate the relevancy of
what Full 360 brings to the market for them, what are the types of applications that people have
been building and that you've been helping them with? We're talking about not just financial, but
enterprise performance management. What are the other kinds of BI apps? What are some of the
killer apps that people have been using your services to do?
Valenzuela: Specifically, with one of our large airlines, it's customer appreciation. The level of
detail on their customers that they're able to bring to the plane, to the flight attendants, in a
handheld device is powerful. It’s powerful to the point where you remember that treatment that
you got on the plane. So that’s one thing.
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That’s something that you don’t get if you fly a lot, if you fly other airlines. That’s just kind of
some detail and some treatment that you just don’t get. I don’t know how that could be driven if
it weren’t for analytics and if it weren’t for technology like Vertica to be able to provide that
information.

6. Gardner: Well, great. I am afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been learning about how
Full 360 has been using Vertica in the Amazon cloud to provide data warehouse and BI
applications and services to its customers from Wall Street to the local airport.
So join me in thanking our guest. We've been here with Eric Valenzuela, the Director of Business
Development at Full 360 in New York. Thanks so much, Eric. [Register for the upcoming HP
Big Data Conference in Boston on Aug. 10-13.]
Valenzuela: Thank you.
Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of
IT discussion.
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. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the benefits of joining data analysis and the cloud.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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