As Silectis enters its second month of existence, launches a website, and is actively serving its first customer, I wanted to take a moment to comment on the foundation of the company, some of the core ideas that are driving it, and what you can expect from this blog over the next few months.
Over the course of the last few years, I have been immersed in building products that help customers gain insight about their business. Prior to that, I was involved in either searching for that insight myself or helping companies build the infrastructure they needed support better decision-making. Throughout these experiences, I have run into the same set of barriers over and over again:
- I was spending too much time getting data, organizing it, and understanding it rather than using it to drive business results.
- Within each customer company, there are too few people who both understood the business and could get at the data that they needed to generate insight. This makes getting useful insight fast enough to have an impact almost impossible.
- A lot companies are concerning themselves with big data and predictive analytics, but are unable to analyze the historical data that is already residing in their systems — there seems to be a pervasive tendency to put the cart before the horse.
- Existing enterprise vendors and integrators do not seem to be providing a good value for their customers, particularly with respect to business intelligence and supporting infrastructure.
- Very few companies can afford to build an internal capability that can handle the full end-to-end data management lifecycle. Small- and medium-sized companies in particular struggle to attract the expertise that they need.
- These challenges are compounded by the slew of new technology that is rapidly emerging. Without the right expertise, organizations probably won’t be able to realize the benefit this technology offers and may in fact be hindered by added complexity.
It is this experience that led to the formation of Silectis. There are a few core ideas that form the basis for Silectis and inform both the way the company will serve its customers and the direction of its technology:
- Getting the basics of organizing and managing decision data right is more important than introducing new technology or chasing buzzwords like big data. Quickly achieving value by providing timely, accurate metrics, and a foundation for the future is more valuable than point solutions riding the latest trend.
- Companies of all sizes should be able to participate in this revolution in analytics without breaking the bank or having to build a team of specialists that they will be challenged to attract and retain.
- The cloud and open source technology are radically changing the economics of data management for analytics, making this broad participation a lot more realistic.
- There is an opportunity to accelerate the pace of adoption among these underserved organizations by providing modern, intelligent tools and infrastructure informed by long experience with cloud computing and analytics, and providing targeted support through consulting services.
At the core, Silectis is about striving for quality, efficiency, and thoughtfulness in delivering cloud data infrastructure, and expanding the breadth of organizations that can benefit from the disruptive technology changes that are shaping today’s analytics environment.
For now, the focus is on helping companies get more value from their data, one at a time. In the future, Silectis will be introducing a range of SaaS offerings that will make the organization, integration, and hosting of decision data in the cloud available to more companies, at lower cost, with better performance.
Over the course of the next few months this will be a forum for me and others to share what insight we have been able to glean from engagement with customers and peers, provide updates on Silectis products and services, and delve into the technology that is driving the company’s efforts.
In the meantime, feel free to email me at demetri@silect.is and let me know what you would like to read more about.
Demetrios Kotsikopoulos is the founder of Silectis. You can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.