Feeds for the new data science keep showing up in unexpected places from weather forecasting to grocery purchases. Bitly, Inc. CEO Mark Josephson has found one such source in his company’s main, deceptively humble-sounding business: Shortening links.

“We started with a very simple problem — links on Twitter were too long,” he told John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM InterConnect 2016. “The link is often forgotten and taken for granted, but not by us,” he said

He added that the oft-neglected link has proven to be a surprisingly powerful analytics tool for the company. “With the corpuses of data that we have and the footprint, it’s so big, we get to start to do some really interesting science around that,” Josephson said.

Following the link trail and being able to see the customer’s journey is very valuable to marketers, who are Bitly’s main customers, he said. “All we do is think about how to make links more powerful for marketers,” Josephson said. He went on to explain, “We’re able with the Bitly network to tell our customers more about their users than they know, because we see them everywhere else that they go.”

Expanding with IBM’s capabilities

“We announced this morning that we’re moving our entire platform over to SoftLayer and the hybrid cloud,” Josephson stated. He named geographic footprint and load balancing as advantages offered by the IBM-acquired company.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE