On Tuesday, February 3rd Karthik came to Stanford and met us in the Gates Computer Science. The purpose for this meeting was to get feedback from VMWare's perspective about our "Big Data to Small Data" proposition.
While preparing this pitch, we prototyped an infrastructure schematic we believed would exist when building this product. We felt this would make it clearer to Karthik what we intended to build, and would also help to distill our thoughts so our pitch was more coherent. The result of this effort was the following hand-drawn schematic.
While presenting to Karthik, we explained our proposed product would take your large, inoperable log data, pass it through a "modeling layer", resulting in a small "parameterized" representative set of data with which you could "play" with your data and gain the insight you needed. Karthik seemed pleased with our buzz-word filled pitch, but expressed two main concerns:
- This product was mainly useful for C-Suite executives and managers, and was less intended for the closer-to-data employees such as IT Admins. Karthik stressed that although these executives were the "check writers" in his experience with the enterprise sales cycle the people we need to appeal to are the end-users (the "influencers"). In the case of VMWare this would be IT Admins, and our product failed to address their needs.
- This product schematic was very dependent on the "Models" node. We could make everything else perfectly, but if our modeling fails the product fails.
This input from Karthik was very valuable. Noting the large dependence on modeling, we stressed the need for VMWare to supply us with example data so we could begin modeling. Additionally, we planned our next meeting- a needfinding talk with the dogfood environment IT Admin at VMWare, Denis.