Sanjay Mathur, Founder and CEO of Silicon Valley Data Science, discussed data driven businesses and recently launched Silicon Valley Data Science plans live with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the recently concluded 2013 Hadoop Summit.

Silicon Valley Data Science is striving to bring together a team of engineers, data scientists and platform experts in order to “solve problems for data oriented companies,” Mathur explained. The company’s current team has deep background in both data science and engineering, having brought together people from companies as Accenture and Walmart. The main purpose is to create a team of experts that can work well together.

Asked if there were many data driven companies, Mathur said “everyone is data driven,| everyone could be using data for better analytics and business decisions “It’s a question of how to drive your business forward. If you don’t use data today, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.”

Teaching customers

To explain the company’s offering to business customers and convey the value data can bring, Mathur said that one needed to be familiar with today’s tools and technologies and how to apply them. The second fundamental requirement is “to understand the customer’s field. For us to be successful with customers, we have to educate them,” while focusing on delivering a solution to them.

“We are going to teach our customers how to do what they are doing better,” Mathur said. A company should focus focus on understanding technology and how it will be evolving. The second part of the process is to understand how to use data. It will take time to help companies become data drive, as for a company that hasn’t been using data, “they are on a 10 year journey to be data driven.”

“The bigger you get, the more you have to take your people and make them interchangeable,” Mathur explained, asked about his company’s competitive advantage. “We know we’re small,” thus the focus is to create teams of experts that work well together, and keep them together. The reason people choose to work in the company is that it lets them work well in a team and go from problem to problem. Launched in April 2013, the company is now approaching the 10 employee milestone, balancing between data scientists and engineers.

Asked to describe the typical engagement with a customer, Mathur said that they have been approached by all kinds of customers, but the main two categories that they fall into are either people from an architectural infrastructure that have a problem with their data, meaning it’s an infrastructure problem that needs solving, or those who know they should be using their data better, motivated by a business imperative that needs solving.