Evangelos Simoudis
Evangelos Simoudis is a seasoned venture investor and senior advisor to global corporations. His investing career started 15 years ago at Apax Partners and continued with Trident Capital. Today Evangelos invests in early and growth stage companies focusing on the enterprise in the areas of data and analytics, SaaS applications, and mobility. A recognized thought leader on corporate innovation, big data, cloud computing, and digital marketing platforms he is a frequent speaker and contributor in these topics. In 2014 he was named a Power Player in Digital Media, and in 2012 as a top investor in online advertising. Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos had more than 20 years experience in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering. He was the CEO of two startups. Evangelos is a member of Caltech’s Information Science and Technology advisory board, the Science Board of Brandeis University, the Advisory Board of Brandeis International School of Business, and the advisory board of New York’s Center of Urban Science and Planning. Evangelos earned a PhD in computer science from Brandeis University and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech. Evangelos blogs at corporate-innovation.co.
Improving corporate planning through insight generation
Data storage and management providers are becoming key contributors for insight as a service.
Contrary to what many believe, insights are difficult to identify and effectively apply. As the difficulty of insight generation becomes apparent, we are starting to see companies that offer insight generation as a service.
Data storage, management and analytics are maturing into commoditized services, and the companies that provide these services are well-positioned to provide insight on the basis not just of data, but data access and other metadata patterns.
Companies like DataHero and Host Analytics [full disclosure: Host Analytics is one of my portfolio companies] are paving the way in the insight-as-a-service space. Host Analytics’ initial product offering was a cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Suite, but far more important is what they are now enabling for the enterprise: they have moved from being an EPM company to being an insight generation company. In this post, I will discuss a few of the trends that have enabled insight as a service (IaaS) and discuss the general case of using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) EPM solution to corral data and deliver insight as a service as the next level of product.
Insight generation is the identification of novel, interesting, plausible and understandable relations among elements of a data set that a) lead to the formation of an action plan and b) result in an improvement as measured by a set of KPIs. The evaluation of the set of identified relations to establish an insight, and the creation of an action plan associated with a particular insight or insights, needs to be done within a particular context and necessitates the use of domain knowledge. Read more…