Interview: Óscar Méndez, CEO of Stratio

Interview: Óscar Méndez, CEO of Stratio

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Here is the transcription of the video:

I’m Óscar Méndez. I’m the CEO of Stratio, an IT product company focused on Big Data products. We make Big Data solutions worldwide, and we’re the only major vendor of Big Data that’s not only in the United States but also in Europe.

These products are primarily used by large corporations in the areas of banking, telco, insurance companies, energy companies and the public sector. Companies that have a high volume of data.

There are hundreds of applications for their use, but mainly they add highly advanced analytics in areas such as prediction, machine learning, algorithms and so on; and in issues of security, fraud, real-time data analysis; they make it possible to customize and recommend things to users while they’re accessing the channels; or very specific issues such as collecting the internal data of a company, a bank or a telco, and selling these internal data to external companies to obtain value, always guaranteeing the individuals’ anonymity in compliance with the law and safeguarding the protection of citizens’ rights.

Spark is a new technology that arose one year ago from the world of Big Data –to give an analogy, it’s a little like upgrading your car. The change between having combustion engines that work with gasoline and electric engines. Almost all advanced engines and advanced cars now have at least a hybrid combustion-electric engine, and the most advanced cars in the world are solely electric.

Spark is the same –it’s a much faster processing engine than the ones that came before. The memory function is between about 10 to 100 times faster than what could be done before.

This makes it possible to do everything from analyzing stored elements to interactive analyses –where I ask a question, and the system returns the answers so fast that with that answer I can ask another question and interactively achieve an insight, obtain a value or even apply algorithms.

This is the best processing engine for algorithms, machine learning, prediction, and thus for obtaining predictions of what products to buy in the future… anything that involves the future of a company. Until 2014 Spain was way behind the United States and Europe.

This is due to many factors, but the main one is that we were caught up in a much more serious downturn than all the other countries. That meant that when the other countries were investing in Big Data, Spanish companies had no budget to do that because of the crisis.

We’ve seen a huge shift since the end of 2014, and companies are now rolling out Big Data projects. Curiously this has even been a good thing, because it has coincided with a change in technology, so the companies and countries that invested years ago now have outdated technology.

They have gasoline engines whereas Spanish companies have a fantastic opportunity –as they started later– to use electric engines.

Spanish engineers can hold their own with engineers in Silicon Valley, Germany and any other country. In fact in Big Data technologies we are doing things at the very highest level worldwide.

We were the first company with Spanish engineers to launch a tool or platform with Spark. Our company is currently gaining the most customers and projects all over the world with this technology, and this is all thanks to the talent of the professionals we have.

Interview: Óscar Méndez, CEO of Stratio

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