Origami Logic’s Opher Kahane talked about the Big Data app the company is developing wtih theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier (Founder, SiliconANGLE) and Jeff Kelly (Principle Research Contributor, Wikibon) at the recently concluded Accel Partners Symposium 2013. One of Accel Partners’ investment in the Big Data market, Origami Logic raised $9.3 million in its first round of investment last fall to develop an application that targets marketers and the marketing industry.

While the product has not yet been launched, Kahane discussed the specific issues it tackles. “The challenge we’re solving is how Big Data gets really applied to help marketing folks.”  Marketers are struggling with an increasing number of customer touch points, each coming with a marketing system that manages the data and workflow for each channel. The more touch points, the more data gathered, and the more complex a marketer’s work in making sense out of it, a complexity that is not effectively tackled by any existing marketing platform or tool.

Maturing Big Data platforms such as Cloudera‘s are helping companies deal with issues such as how to stores and process data. The next step that is addressed by verticalized Big Data apps is “how business people monetize the data and, we’re a perfect example of how does one apply that trend to marketing,” Kahane says.  Origami Logic is developing a centralized, cloud-based platform where marketers, without requiring the interference of data scientists and IT, have all the relevant data automatically collected and integrated, and receive visual, marketing-optimized user experiences.

Asked how the app development side of Big Data has evolved form the perspective of an entrepreneur with an app idea, Kahane stated it was a lot easier to build such a product than it was a year ago. He also added that it would continue to get significantly easier over the next couple of years. “It appears to me that this is the perfect time for entrepreneurs to think about […] how do you help businesses or consumers, depending on the nature of the app, to monetize the data,” he says. This was, Kahane pointed out, the next step in the evolution of the industry.

Dealing with marketing & misconceptions in big data

Explaining the company’s focus on marketing, Kahane said that marketers are uniquely positioned to tap into Big Data and statistically impact the company drive and profits. “The value we can provide will have impact on the top line of companies,” says Kahane.

His company has chosen a function-focused approach to app development because the complexity of any of the functional data sets – marketing, sales, finance – is becoming so high that it makes any of the generic tools ill-adept to provide palpable results. One needs to apply a lot of data science to create something useful for marketers. Generic ways to visualize data won’t work — you need a marketing-specific approach to data visualization.  Over time, generic VI will diminish, he warned, function specific visualization will need to be added to create value.

Highlighting the biggest misconceptions about Big Data, Kahane said that Big Data-driven changes would be as massive and have an equally significant impact as the development databases had 20 years ago. A key aspect is that Big Data is not as much about size as it is about variety. An often overlooked point is the human/organizational aspect of Big Data – organizationally, how does one access all the available data sets?  The value people should be driving from Big Data lies within small data. “It’s about the individual business user,”  Kahane says, and how fast they can get to those nuggets of value.

From a marketing perspective, the general misconception is that Big Data is something that will solve all marketers’ problems, while it’s just a tool. Intuition is still criticle in the marketing space, as “no machine can empathize with the customer.” From a product development perspective, the Origami Logic solution aims to bridge human intuition and underlying Big Data. The proper balance between intuition and data-driven decision is given by measurement. Targeting the right KPIs, measuring not just volumes, but judginf the business impact and following quality metrics will provide such a balance.