Regional development: ICT and Innovation
Information technology today represents one of the most important dimensions in our every day life. It has dramatical change the way of communication, the way that we do business, it influences on economy and knowledge growth. As such opens new ways of thinking and is wide open to the innovation. Take into account only last few phenomena that arrised recently – open source, social networking, cloud computing, data mining. These are important topics that brings new opportunities and economy models to business development and economy growth at regional, national and global aspect. The Faculty of Information studies in Novo mesto with support of chamber of commerce of Dolenjska is preparing the second international event on information technologies and information society ISIT2010 wich will be held on 10-12 November in Dolenjske Toplice with excellent keynote presenters that will discuss about these important topics and will bring the latest research and bussines practices from world to the region. We were talking with these year top presenters Ingo Mierswa, the CEO of Rapid-I, a company that growth up from the academia and produce today one of most recognized open source tool for Data Mining, Les Skyper founder and president of Group Commons, USA, and Matjaž Jurič, head of Slovenian Cloud computing centre.
Ingo warm welcome to this interview. You had established innovative and high tech company Rapid-I trough your research work at University of Dortmund. Could you explain us some more facts about how all began and what is Rapid I today.
Sure. The story around Rapid-I is closely connected to the history of RapidMiner. Back in 2001, we first started developing a data mining software environment named YALE as research assistants of Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik at University of Dortmund, Germany. We envisioned a data mining tool that was more flexible and by far more powerful than the tools available in the market. We made YALE available as open source software from the first version on and it quickly attracted lots of users.In 2006, my co-founder Ralf Klinkenberg had already left the university and worked as a data mining freelancer. At the same time, the number of requests for RapidMiner consulting and training increased so much, that Ralf and I decided to start the company Rapid-I, to provide professional support, training, consulting, projects and other data mining services for the software users. YALE was completely rebuild to better meet the scalability and robustness requirements of global corporations with large volumes of data and renamed to RapidMiner to better describe its key features.
I am sure, that there is a lot of advantages for companies using the Rapid-I products. Can you name some examples from your region where Rapid-I was well integrated?
With RapidMiner, we have a widely used analysis solution and Rapid-I has a great team providing all necessary services for professional analysts. We extended our data mining and text mining product and service portfolio as well as our customer base during the last years. Rapid-I now serves more than 250 customers world-wide. By now, thousands of applications of RapidMiner in more than 40 countries give their users a competitive edge. Among our customers are well-known companies as E.On, sanofi-aventis, Libri, and Pepsi and many medium-sized businesses benefitting from the open-source business model of Rapid-I. One of our biggest customers is one of the biggest manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, sanofi-aventis, who supported us a lot and who is really open to new application areas like social media monitoring or network analysis.The open source in Slovenia is probably still less known in business than in Germany. Especial in educational sector there is an important place where we should do more on, so how do you see the open source changing business and innovation policy in general and can you think on Rapid-I development without the open source principles.
Well, the open source model is really special for a software vendor. You give away a world-leading data mining solution for free instead of becoming rich by charging high license fees. So the only way to be successful as an open source company is to be more innovative and to provide better expertise and better services than the competition. The customers only pay for the services they want and that are valuable to them. They do not pay for license fees and there is no vendor lock-in. If there is a better service provider, they can switch. And if the services do not provide a good value, they do not pay anything. So there is no choice for an open source business but to be better than the competition and to provide true value at a fair price. This completely changes the IT business sector, not only because of a lower total cost of ownership but also since the level of service and product innovation is much higher than for proprietary alternatives. Rapid-I embraces this level of innovation and so I could hardly imagine to change to a closed-source model instead.
Your research work on data-mining in PhD was awarded by the best research in ICT in Germany, Austria and Swiss. What is your view of the data-mining research area in future, and what do you recommend for researchers and enterpreuners in this filed when thinking for business applications?
For me, data mining is about similarities and optimization. Many models rely on a similarity measure for the comparison of known events to the current situation. And we are always searching for better ways for finding the optimal model, which often is a trade-off between accuracy and simplicity. I expect that future research will improve in both respects: finding better representations and similarities for complex data structures and improving the optimization in ways so that even high-scale data mining will become possible on large data sets. I would expect that new application areas will also emerge which can recently be seen within the field of social media analysis. And I would expect that data mining will become ubiquitous and that no future mobile phone or future car will work without data mining.Les, you will talk about social networking. As I know the business thinking from overseas is still different and in a way always ahead from Europe, if I only mention Google, Facebook, Linked in, for example. So how is social networking treated in the business overseas, and what are your main points when you are consulting companies for doing their business.
My main point is summed up in one word — collaboration — working together. Too much of the social networking in the 17 countries I have visited this past 35 months is devoted to “individualistic interactions” — what people ate for breakfast, a quotation from a person’s favorite philosopher, getting individuals to attend events, displaying photos from the last vacation, and so forth. Individualism vs. collaboration — that is the question. I spend most of my time workshopping the idea that successful organizations are those which are learning to function as an organism, as a group. Committees, boards, conferences, work groups, teams — all of these entities must learn how to perform virtually and on task. I don’t really care what you had for breakfast, but I do care about the progress of our automotive manufacturing innovation.You have visited Slovenia a few times now, it is very small country indeed, however ICT is very important field here. Do you think that regional skills and knowledge development in ICT is important way to open innovation and business space and that the ISIT conference in Dolenjska region could facilitate the ICT in the region’s and country’s future?
I challenge every region in Slovenia to become a hub for its constituents — to actively gather and organize the farmers, health professionals, leisure industry, manufacturers, small businesses, nonprofits. To do this social networking websites must FOCUS ON GROUPS. Groups to groups (G2G!). “Group development” is a higher form of evolution than “knowledge development”.As very experienced enterpreuner and researcher dealing with an innovation, what would you would advise us for our country as a whole, how we could better facilitate our innovation in ICT considering the opportunities of being “small”?
1. Read and apply the book “WIKINOMICS — How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” by Don Tapscott. 2. Forbid the use of email in your group efforts — email is the place where good ideas go to die. 3. Develop “group think” using Skype. 4. Create a Slovenia Collaboration Hub — a year-round and ongoing collaboration launched in November with the participants from the Novo Mesto conference. Excellent services knows no smallness!Matjaž, cloud computing is a hot topics in the international discussions. As a head of first Slovenian Cloud computing centre, could you tell as something more about it? What are for example the general opportunities for companies, trying out the cloud?
Cloud Computing is much more than just a new technology. I see Cloud as an enabler that will change the way we consume information. Cloud Computing is the enabler for new client devices. But most importantly, it enables the development of new, innovative services. In the recent years we have seen, how innovative ideas in the ICT can result in fantastic business opportunities. Yes, I’m talking about Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. However, this is not the end. The convergence of media, the widespread shift towards smart phones, tablets, and other client devices on the front end, enablement of location-aware services, pervasive computing, and convergence of server resources in form of Cloud Computing on the back end will change the ICT landscape significantly. Therefore, we are telling the companies to look at the Cloud Computing as something that goes beyond new technologies. Rather they should see it as an enabler for new services and new business models. Cloud hides enormous potential for companies and the right time to start leveraging it is now.What about the public sector and academia?
Public sector and academia should also be aware of the Cloud. Public sector can also leverage the advantages of Cloud Computing. In contrast to companies, public sector will probably focus more of cost savings. And Cloud Computing can provide significant cost savings, with consolidation of IT infrastructure on one hand, and smart outsourcing on the other hand. Academia however should realize the potential of Cloud, and make sure it will teach students (and not only IT students) about the opportunities it.As I see, there are plenty of ideas for new services, do you see some of Ingo’s or Les services that could be integrated within the first Slovenian Cloud Computing Centre? For sure there are many opportunities for start and test out a new business, ideas for researchers in Slovenia and from abroad?
Well, I’m pretty sure that Ingo and Les are well aware of the Cloud and that they have already started to think about how to leverage the potential. I can also confirm that there is much potential. Within the Cloud Computing Centre, we have been approached by companies that wanted to develop new services. This has resulted in several very interesting projects, such as Smart Heating, BUMBA, SkyInfo, HEJump, or CloudDocs. All these innovative services have been developed within our Centre and in cooperation with companies. And the interest is growing every month.Anything else that you all would like to tell us at the end?
Just a comment for students and enterpreuners: use your common sense, your imagination, and your creativity to come up with new approaches and applications. That is fun, quite satisfying, and could be the basis for a successful research or business career or for your own business.Thank you for being with us, and we are looking forward for many more disscusions and opportunities on ISIT 2010.
With keynote speakers was talking Matej Mertik, ISIT10 programme chair
