Big Data Box and the Black Crayon

SINGAPORE: Ask him what made the founders christen their venture as Crayon, and I Vijay Kumar, CTO, Crayon Data and ex-CTO ofWipro intrigues with a simple and short answer – Because a crayon box is all about imagination and yet without any manuals!
Imagination is certainly the word that is the need of the hour, and acutely so in this space. Big Data is everywhere, in what we generate, consume, in the way IT is sold, bought, leveraged – everywhere. And yet there are these blank spaces around visualization, hardware commoditization, challenges with dark and unstructured data or the various shades of V.
In this interview, I Vijay Kumar fills inside the lines of some question marks and gives us a colorful peek (along with some Mathematics angle about understanding consumers) as he sees it.
A start-up in a big industry. Has it been easy?
If we take conventional model of pushing technology, we know it was capex-driven but now that those barriers have become commoditized there is so much opportunity for start-ups to translate great ideas into reality, without worrying about infrastructure blocks. That’s why even big companies are working with start-ups. But yes you have to offer something sharp and precise to the market. We wanted to simplify both the consumer and enterprise side of a so-much-more connected world today.
What’s you view of changes happening around MemSQL, VoltDB, HANA etc and their impact on Big Data answers?
Well, the way I see it, most of these are related to infrastructure players and distributed systems. Most of these platforms offer a Big Data infrastructure. As a company or user I don’t have to worry where it is running. SAP’s work is a layer above that with in-memory database and other tools thrown in. Adoption-wise it will be a good progress. In conventional enterprises, one would be worried about where their data is but that concern is not relevant now with Amazon, Azure and other options. [Read More]