At last week’s O’Reilly Strata Conference, The Cube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante had the opportunity to talk with Ron Bodkin, founder and CEO of Think Big Analytics, about the company’s recent growth and how enterprises approach big data.

Bodkin began by revealing that Think Big had announced its seed round of raising $3 million, aimed at accelerating the company’s growth. He explained that big data is moving quickly in enterprise, and many organizations are realizing how much value they can create from it. There is a tremendous amount of conversation around security and the increased interest in investment in Hadoop and big data technology. As such, Think Big has been consulting with customers and providing data, science, and engineering services to help them assemble analytic applications.

According to Bodkin, there are three stages of investment in big data:

1. scalability and cost containment
2. agile analytics
3. business optimization

The ultimate goal, he explained, is to create new value, giving one’s business a competitive advantage. Think Big helps with its imagined services, helping customers foster ideas that are based on actual use cases. To accomplish this, they focus on “test and learn”. They create, get feedback, and then adjust accordingly. They work with businesses and tech teams and operate within short cycles.

Bodkin said the methodology of imagine services involves pulling together cross-functional teams (i.e. business executives, tactical leaders, and xperts from Think Big) all coming together to brainstorm, talk about opportunities, assess impact, study best practices, and learn from other industries.

Toward the end of the interview, Bodkin spoke briefly about the metric-driven approach that creates measurable value for big data. He explained that there are different metrics for different applications and that they focus on gathering support data for devices out in the field and looking to solve problems.

Before closing, Furrier asked Bodkin to share his impressions of Strata and also discuss his vision for the market over the next 12 months. You can hear his response and learn more about Think Big Analytics by watching the full interview right here.