UPDATED 11:38 EDT / MAY 01 2013

Accel Fund Doubles Down on Big Data + Academia in IT Renaissance : Symposium Recap

The 17th annual Accel Partners Symposium was held yesterday at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center in Stanford University. The main theme was the Renaissance for enterprise IT, and theCUBE crew was there to bring you latest analysis from the executives and investors who attended the event (full video below).

SiliconAngle founding CEO John Furrier and Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly wrapped up the broadcast with a recap on the most important news and highlights.

Furrier kicks off the session by pointing out that while Accel is well known for investing in high-profile consumer companies such as Facebook, it receives less credit for its strong presence in the enterprise. It’s also worth mentioning that the firm is expanding its footprint in the academia: it announced a program called Innovation Scholars (IAS) at the event, a yearlong project for 12 Standford Engineering PhD students that aims to help them commercialize their research.

Kelly found it notable that Accel is doubling down on Big Data, which was the topic of last year’s Symposium. He says that the firm is expanding its analytics portfolio now because startups like Origami Logic have started building apps on top of existing platforms, a sign that the industry is entering a new phase.

In fact, we learned more about Origami Logic from the founder himself, as Opher Kahane was one of the attendees who stopped by theCube during the event. Cloudera CEO Mike Olson also gave an interview in theCube to discuss the latest from his company’s Big Data initiatives,  as did a number of other executives including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Bud Colligan of Accel Partners, and Aditya Agarwa, VP of engineering for Dropbox.

Rob Solomon, the former COO of Groupon and a newly appointed venture partner at Accel, also spoke to Furrier and Kelly. He brought up an interesting point about data being a differentiator in application development regardless of whether the app is data-driven or not.

See the entire event recap below:


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