AO OnDemand 2014: BeyondCore
by KG Charles-HarrisThis week I attended AO OnDemand 2014—a good conference for understanding how the enterprise SaaS ecosystem and its up-and-coming young companies are developing. The conference also details market changes that are happening around mergers and acquisitions and the strategic moves that large enterprise software players are making to position themselves.
As usual there was an interesting group of people there, everything from startup executives to representatives from EMC, SAP, Oracle and others, which made for good networking with a variety of people from interesting companies.
What I’d like to highlight today is BeyondCore, a very interesting data analytics company I’ve been following on the Internet for more than a year. Since I’m in the big data analytics market myself, I spend a lot of time getting to know the environment and make it a point to follow the most interesting new companies.
I had the pleasure of meeting the newly hired VP Marketing Sandra Peterson and their CEO Arijit Sengupta. They’ve created a brilliant piece of software that truly solves some of the problems in the data analytics world—especially when directed at the business user. Not only does it automatically look for what’s interesting in the data and present it to you, but it also provides you with an automated analysis to help you better understand the relevant points in the data.
These are exactly the types of functionality that Sandra highlighted when I asked her why she joined the company. She had only come on board three days prior, so of course it was interesting to understand why an experienced senior marketing executive would join a young company (other than the options package and pay, of course…).
What she brought up was the unique combination of personal characteristics of Arijit, the founder. His tenacity as a technology visionary to struggle with the problems of building a company against all odds and his infectious communication of the advantages in the product he’d created in a way that average people could understand were clear attractions for her beyond the technology itself. I certainly saw both when he briefly demoed the product for me.
BeyondCore has an impressive product with a good team; I wish them good fortune and will continue to follow their development and successes.