In episode 28 Cory Minton and Thomas Henson talk with Luke Vant Land from D4T4 Solutions to understand how their patented Celebrus platform delivers a real-time capture, connection, transformation and delivery platform powering a GDPR-compliant path to feed your AI and Machine Learning with better data from a variety of sources, including experiential web sources without the pain of manual tagging.  If you want better data that is compliant and easy to work into your pipeline, you really should be checking out what D4T4 has built to help you deliver real time decision support and next-best action capabilities, especially if you work in financial services, government, or retail.  And Luke looks so much like Bill Hader, it’s straight up awkward.
Links:
Music from this episode is by Andrew Belle.

 

Transcript

Cory Minton:
[0:21] Alright let’s see can I talk in your microphone and pick it up out of this and if you like it it’s probably easier and a little better for production quality okay.

Thomas Henson:
[0:32] You’re listening to radio gold.

Cory Minton:
[0:34] You are a knucklehead all right Luke.

Luke Vant Land:
[0:38] Hello from Dell EMC world all right I already said it wrong.

Cory Minton:
[0:43] It’s all right you’re getting closer and Chris how about you.

Chris Belsey:
[0:47] Like golden time.

Cory Minton:
[0:49] Hey I’m talking to the door please yeah I got you leveled up okay okay.

Chris Belsey:
[1:12] Yeah that would be a good idea are so beautiful.
Finally he’s useful Luke Bennett old man.

Cory Minton:
[1:42] Is it raining up there likes any picking up what he can do.

[1:49] If you can get close to it you feel comfortable going nuts all right.
Well this is Cory Minton and I am excited to announce that this is our first podcast episode that we are recording from Dell Technologies world.
We are excited to be part of the luminaries influencer yard we have this really fancy podcast Studio which is.
Conference walls supposed to be sound proof but you know we’ll settle for sound fish proof.
Anyways I am joined by my bearded brother from Alabama Thomas Henson Scooby or co-host today and I’m.
To have a couple of really interesting yes we’ve got Luke vant land from d44 Solutions and I’ve got mr. Chris belsey from Delhi MCS Global line 16 to talk to us today about d44.
Look thanks for joining us so before we get started or where you from.

Luke Vant Land:
[2:43] I’m based in.

Cory Minton:
[2:44] Basin Chicago okay cool we like Chicago make sure you get in there for the mic.
So tell me a little bit about 3:44 Solutions where they’re based in and what you do for them.

Luke Vant Land:
[2:56] Sure Saudi 44 Solutions is a uk-based company.
Founded in 1985 original as a systems integrator and then a Dell EMC platinum-level partner for over 10 years and started really in doing systems integration work.
Started then hosting customers in private cloud and then ultimately now we felt rain just transition scuse me into being a we continue to be a cloud provider and hosting.
Cloud we also.
Closely with Dell EMC on a number of insource cloud projects and then we also are the full owners of the Celebrex customer data plan.

Cory Minton:
[3:38] So syllabus customer data platform.
I don’t know a lot about it I’ll be honest we looked at it high level but it looks super interested in one of my favorite things I heard about it was one of the alumni from bigoted podcast a guy named bills tomorrow.
Had some very complimentary things to say about what you’re doing which made me even more interested so so I’m glad to hear what is the celebration date of life.

Luke Vant Land:
[4:04] So what it really is is it’s a real Time Capture connection and transformation and delivery.
And so what it does is it actually takes we have.
Patented technology that’s been in place for over 15 years what it does is it goes out and without needing any.
It will collect Digital Data from mobile apps and websites ultimately bring that information in you can combine that with data from the programmableweb.
Other sources maybe if you’re a bank for example with ATM data or credit card transaction data and then ultimately it creates individual level profiles.
Either known or.
Or unknown individuals that you can then use to power your artificial intelligence and deep learning as well as feed to your decision engines for Real Time next best app.

Cory Minton:
[5:00] Interest okay so we’re taking data from all kinds of different sources and make it available to Enterprises for things like what like I’m not why would I use the stator.

Luke Vant Land:
[5:10] You would use this data to do things like uncover fraudulent detection patterns right and ultimately of course improve your fraud laws.
Reduce your fried lost you would use it to say I want to make a very specific specific offer to.
Based on the fact that he was browsing for mortgages for example right so it’s all about that individual love.

Cory Minton:
[5:36] So so it’s a lot about the data ingestion right that’s a big piece of it I get so how do you guys get all this it is it something where you guys actually own the the sources so you have the unique access to this data or is it something where your platforms just good at collecting at this type of data.

Luke Vant Land:
[5:51] That’s a that’s a really good question because that is actually a big differentiator celebras which celebrates our customers on the data so one of the that’s one unique thing is that a lot of our competitors yet.
By the data from them when they track.
Is it good one right the other thing that’s unique about sell dresses that can actually be deployed in a number of ways it can be to play in the clouds in a w a sore as you are for example but it can also be deployed on-premise or even in the hive.
A lot of our customers have very strict security requirements around who I saw there were there p i Date A Live where the collection engines live where their decision engines live they want it all to live inside.
So what celebration we can accomplish that which is why it’s a very popular product and financial services large retailers and government Aid.

Thomas Henson:
[6:45] So

[6:46] Uk-based company right now we’re in last day of April coming in coming into May I’ve got to ask the question we’ll talk about retaining date and some of those things gdpr I mean so how.

[6:58] The old watering Publications with gdpr and you know how how do you know if we’re housing the day today or do you have you started looking at how you know how we’re going to do that special in a heavily regulated area with some customers.

Luke Vant Land:
[7:10] Celebrex is fully gdpr compliance and so it actually if you go out to our website you can that you can see how it works so that might work really good for some of the people that really like listening to the.
Touch things in Triumph There’s an actual gdpr demonstrate.

Thomas Henson:
[7:28] Well that’s that’s interesting cuz I don’t know I don’t know how much you’ve looked at some of the stats but like what I’ve seen right now is a lot of a lot of companies aren’t going to be gdpr compliance by the time you know the day goes into so that’s that’s pretty awesome to be able to turn over to your customers and say I got you cuz.

Luke Vant Land:
[7:42] Yes and what we are doing is enabling their DD.
Without taking on the risk associated with saying that we will make them gdpr compliance we can give them the tools to so essentially what happens is when somebody goes to a website that is that has the cell.
We have the ability to set up profiles right at the beginning so we will get their consent.

[8:09] As an example there might be five different levels right one being don’t collect anything about me you know do not.

[8:18] Sing about me when I leave your site all the way up to I’m fine with you tracking whatever because I like getting personalized offers and I like the fact that you remember me the neck.

Cory Minton:
[8:29] So that’s what you’re saying that’s integrated with the platform so if I’m using celebras it actually gives the end user who visit that website that sort of.

Luke Vant Land:
[8:35] Yes and every time too because that’s part of the law they have so you could for example Corey Say the first time you go to a site just say track every.
But you could totally change your mind the next time you come back and say I don’t want you to track anything at all.
So that’s where you need the flexibility of something like celebration on the front end to be able to dynamically in real time change.

Thomas Henson:
[8:59] Yeah so how long have you guys been doing it this is I mean was this something you were looking at from a privacy concern before Judy POF I mean it’s pretty awesome and pretty pretty great that you guys are already compliant there so it is this something you guys are done for a while.

Luke Vant Land:
[9:09] Yes it’s one of the advantages of having a lot of customers that are based in Europe.

Cory Minton:
[9:15] I heard I heard the term regulation dense earlier today I never heard that term.

Luke Vant Land:
[9:21] Spend on it was something that and I can’t take credit for that but you know I think as much as three years ago when people started to hear about it some of our Visionaries.
Make sure that we are fully gdpr compliance frankly there’s been a lot of Buzz about gdpr and there hasn’t been a lot of action in my opinion yeah so it’s going to be very interesting to see exactly what happens here.

Cory Minton:
[9:48] Yeah so so I want to dig into this cuz if this is really understand this ability to.
Collects you get this collection mechanism that can be deployed you said like on a web server on a while that kind of thing.
In a mobile application some lightweight code that gets deployed in the software okay what are those are other data collection methodologies like do you support is there like web or other protocols that are interesting for dinner.

Luke Vant Land:
[10:13] No actually it’s just a very simple line of JavaScript right and then that enables us.
If you want to capture in page events and things like that like some of our we have a global airline as an example and they want the way their website is built where it is same page and essentially what they want to capture is not just what you’re clicking on.
Flight options UFC right which ones are presented to you we call that experiential data in addition to the behavioral data so in that case you mod.

[10:46] But in general it’s designed to be very lightweight collect everything once and that’s actually really nice.
What we seen is a lot of our customers who are used to treat additional web Weber collection capability they if they don’t tag for something then they.
Celebrate is actually capturing everything right that on any of the pages that you choose to let it track so you can always even go back.

Cory Minton:
[11:19] Okay so you got she got this dude ingestion framework that allows you to get data that is about an experience in about an activity on the web writer likes it in a device like an ATM or some like that.
So they’re not collected the data but then you said more things you do as you bring the data into something for like you’re creating in your are you index in the data every time he comes.

Luke Vant Land:
[11:39] So the next thing that happens after we collect the data which can be done either on-premise inside a firewall or in the in the cloud and then we.
Layer down is a transformation server right and that’s where if you think about all the raw data flowing in its.
And so what we do is we have an out-of-the-box library of different events o a click you know.
Submission write things like that you can create your own custom events or triggers as well so then that’s where that transformation.
Into actionable events it may be ads in some other data that we talked about before like gum retailers like to be able to bring in weather data.
What’s the weather like where this person is you know accessing our website from right so and then ultimately one side transformation occurs you have.
And then that can then be said into a number.
Directly to decision engines for real-time personalization and delivery it also lands in our data model so celebrate unlike a lot of other product comes with a data model with approximately 7.

[12:54] You can also add to that and enhance that because it’s an open data model can be deployed in her do as well as traditional commercial data warehouse flavors like Oracle teradata.

Cory Minton:
[13:08] So you’re taking your creating basically an index that has a bunch of metadata about the data.
How are you you said you need serious into the transformation server the output can be sent to do but is it this or some other way that people consume that data or that where they write it to besides just sending out to like I do.

Luke Vant Land:
[13:25] I’m getting ready to do to a commercial data database they can also just stream it into directly into their decision engines so on to an Enterprise bus as an example.

[13:38] Because ultimately that bus is what’s you know orchestrating between you know the different engines that they have in there for things like Mark.

Cory Minton:
[13:46] So how scalable is this thing I guess it cuz there’s a lot there’s a lot of indexing tools out there plenty of data collection tools.
The thing that’s in dog right now is if you build one that did you want anybody to use it needs to be very horizontally scalable is that something that celebrates just incline.

Luke Vant Land:
[14:01] Yeah yeah we can so we’re currently deployed just as an example on one of the largest global Banks has deployed celebras in 26 countries now.
So in their home country and then.
Other so it’s gills out that way we also have a large website in Japan that used to kind of like an amazon.com.
That actually has more transactions flowing through or what we call sessions right on a monthly basis then even that.

[14:38] And as you can as you as You Could See Me Now based on The Sweet Spot of Celebrex right we tend to be in very large.
And so it’s proven its scalability over the years the other thing that I think you bring up a very good point so I’ve been working with Celebrex for for a long time and one of the the key issues with adoption in the past was the fat.
It was capturing so much data and you needed so much compute power to do it right but frankly with the way that your Dell EMC.
Technology perspective now right compute it it’s a lot you can do more with with compute right it’s cheaper you can also store things a lot more.

Thomas Henson:
[15:21] So how fast you’re you’re talking about hate you know you’re on the website and you’re able to see what’s going on you track the events your index in your how fast is real time so like your customers mean are they able to see it you know sexually wooden milliseconds are seconds.

Luke Vant Land:
[15:36] You know it and obviously though there’s a price to Performance ratio so we have we have a bath.

Thomas Henson:
[15:40] No it should be free for to be as fast as possible Right.

Cory Minton:
[15:43] Now it’s what what they say you can have good fast and cheap pick two good faster cheap you get to pick two.

Thomas Henson:
[15:49] I can tell them they can we pick two learn something new everyday.

Cory Minton:
[15:52] That’s right so I’m interested cuz this is this is kind of like this space this whole idea of event like these are its clicks but it’s also a lot of machine generated data and event logs so how did somebody take.
I created this index of y’all this metadata what are my bills on. Like what do I do with all that data in terms of actually pushing it back into it used.

Luke Vant Land:
[16:14] So that’s where the two key use cases for celebrate * on the analytics side and on the dishes.
So and if you think about it from an analytics perspective you don’t need real.
But on the decision inside you do so but going starting with the analytics side what we’re seeing a lot of our customers do in the past they were using it to Power report so what what’s half.

[16:43] Yes versus now being more predictive right and some of the traditional predictive modeling even linear and logistic regression can still make thanks a lot of money.
But now we are seeing customers they leverage this and you know it.

[16:59] Today to hear what we think of celebrates is delivering better data because it big but it actually is very it’s better in that it’s very specific to the individual and they are using that now to power there a i.
Because they both things just want tons of data right and actually some of our best use cases and.

[17:22] The analytics out of the house because basically they’re able to build way better models cuz we’re getting them.

Chris Belsey:
[17:25] Way better.

Cory Minton:
[17:28] Yes that’s interested because one of the things that we never talked to a bunch of bunch of technologist will talk some day to sign.

Chris Belsey:
[17:30] What’s technology.

Cory Minton:
[17:34] What gas and dust in the in the industry in Norton amount of time on is the data wrangling and cleansing of data so you’re saying the platform actually delivers dated it’s already in a usable form at not just this Raw.

Luke Vant Land:
[17:47] In that day tomorrow.

Cory Minton:
[17:48] No in a day tomorrow K Bryant so so I have to assume that the growth.
I guess the popularity in machine learning in this idea of building our algorithms that has to be one of the like the big drivers for people adopting this platform.

Luke Vant Land:
[18:02] That’s right that in the individual level of decision-making that that customers.

Cory Minton:
[18:09] Interesting so decision-support is obviously going! Think of the one of my favorite quotes and and like around Big Data at.
Higher-level was pomerantz chairman of pivotal he said our goal is like 2 years ago 3 years ago conference he said our goal in Big Data is to catch someone or something in the act of doing something.

[18:33] That’s pretty cool that’s pretty song okay so now so I build this model so you must make it you must make it possible that if I if I have this new day tomorrow I can push it you did say into her do but is there any.
Are there other technologies that like our Partnerships that your building in that consumption space that are interesting.

Luke Vant Land:
[18:49] Question 2 so out of the box sell dress comes with the number of connector so we talked about some of the I would call them analytics connectors cuz typically were feeding hoodoo.

[19:00] Or a commercial database.
For the analytics I tried analytics called at the VA I and the reporting but then we also have connectors for the real-time piece so with companies like likes ass.
City management Pega as well as teradata I’m right and so.
And then the other thing is is we have customers now that maybe say we don’t want to use one of those decision engines we already have something else maybe even we built one of our own using open-source well you can take that Jada and as I meant.

[19:37] Play from celebrate so you can power those real-time decisions Racine our customers do more more with that so I mean not necessarily a fully open platform obviously there’s some.

[19:48] The power of the platform is you on that data you can do what you want with it and it lives inside of your firewall if you want it to or in your own.

Cory Minton:
[19:58] They said not to get too much of the secret sauce out but I’m curious like under the covers is this thing built on open source Technologies is built on proprietary.

Luke Vant Land:
[20:07] Yeah and it’s been in the marketplace for a number of years so that actually wear it really took off was in government and security those were some of the main.

[20:18] And then the the former CEO of celebras tells the story better than I do you should have him on here so.

[20:26] He’s a better interview than I am too.

Cory Minton:
[20:32] Automatically sound smarter will let Chris talk in a minute we’ll find out how much.

Luke Vant Land:
[20:37] But anyway he said.
They were doing a lot of work in government and then he was I forget he was at a conference or something and somebody said wow you should really talk to some marketing people about this right it makes a lot of sense for them to be able to use this to to better message to provide better message.

Cory Minton:
[20:54] So okay so it’s just kind of proprietary but scale-out been around for awhile.
What are you like what are you talking to customers about in terms of use cases of the most popular like easy business use cases for you besides just like the high-level analytics decision support is there an industry that you love and that you win all the time and besides obviously governor.

Luke Vant Land:
[21:13] Yeah we win Financial Services because of the security protocols that they have requiring on-premise.
Also the fact that they have a lot of customers and so they recognize the value.
Teach one of them individually they’ve developed mobile apps and they’re trying to do more than just basic things in the mobile app.
And so those are powerful messages retail is another one.
We had some success with a number of retailers Global retailers and same types of things where they again they just want to speak to their customers.
A couple of use cases where companies have completely eliminated their direct mail and their paper catalog and gone to all digit.
Plane celebrates and reducing those those cost from all of the catalog production and direct mail and such.
They caught on record and have a number of customer case studies on her site but they’ve gone on record as saying that their earning $50 more per year and that’s per year.
One time.

Cory Minton:
[22:21] That’s a pretty significant RI.

Luke Vant Land:
[22:22] It is we have some good good customer case study.

Cory Minton:
[22:25] No I like that I like the idea of a power in this this comes up to digital transformation cuz sometimes it’s hard to make the jump from.
No I get it’s big data at school never once talked about Iris machine learning is it but actually be able to translate that to.
By having a better day though they can feed systems better that can that can maybe change the way we approach our customers it has real Downstream impact that’s very very cool I love to hear that.
Cuz it’s interesting that a dude from Dell EMC is so excited about d44 what I know about you is that you you been like the internal evangelist around d44 4044.

Chris Belsey:
[23:01] I mean.
We started working with default cartoon of years ago I’ve never heard of it.
We booked collaboratively with them and they immediately from the boat level down what state they showed an insatiable appetite.
And this is a result of which we have vanished transform a we’ll talk.

[23:35] Taking them down at you I need to transfer more than that that’s ass environment that using.
Multitude of mine’s business a great project for us I mean we we were recently repletes Eve at all.
And I think one of the things quite well in his intro was around.
Deliver those types of business outcomes which which you picked up a ton in your law section.
It is a case of that they like to wrap up our cool hardware and I’ll pull technology spray.

[25:13] Yeah yeah I didn’t hear what it was.
Take me to 88 via what looks great today is to have the opportunity to broadcast it’s because it’s exactly.
Happy to do for any of our customers out that who who misses his off not excited by.
I mean just blown away.

Thomas Henson:
[25:50] Ready to start this party.

Chris Belsey:
[25:51] Working today perricone’s.

Cory Minton:
[26:17] Lisa whenever I ask you a question like you can basically almost put your mouth on it.

[26:22] Show me better on this and you can’t you can’t really get to close these things number 1 what year do you think sky.

[26:35] 2020 not too far on the corner Chris what about you.

Chris Belsey:
[26:37] I would like to think a little bit longer.

Cory Minton:
[26:43] 330 okay what’s the last really good.

Luke Vant Land:
[26:48] Wow blinking I don’t read that much I just kidding.

Chris Belsey:
[26:55] Which looks about how you can try to try to leverage love women business.
Startups talks about why do guys on Netflix when a blockbuster tail transforming grey book.

Luke Vant Land:
[27:12] Actually I thought of it it’s Janesville an American story.
It’s about how a town in Wisconsin lost their GM plant and then they thought that a lot of people thought that retraining all of the workers would actually Empower them to have jobs in the new digital age and frankly admit.

Cory Minton:
[27:32] Alright so besides the.

[27:36] The conference what genre of music are you currently.

Luke Vant Land:
[27:41] Country Inn in fact you made me think of drive-by truckers one of my favorite bands who I think her Alabama based in fact yeah yeah yes I am yes I see him in Chicago every time they come up there and Jason is.
Yeah well if you can get tickets.

Cory Minton:
[27:57] Chris what about you what are you listening to me.

Chris Belsey:
[27:58] You know what I love you but is everything I I shared my Spotify playlist of yesterday.

Cory Minton:
[28:05] Yeah I know so we’re asking it on Twitter I was Leary like literally.

Luke Vant Land:
[28:14] That sounds about right.

Cory Minton:
[28:20] So what piece of technology is actually currently making your life.

Luke Vant Land:
[28:26] Oh wow.

[28:33] Yeah we tried we tried room by with our dog right cuz we’re this lab mix who sheds more than any dog ever on the planet right and so we thought Rumba but it you know the tank is super tiny it if it can’t keep up with all the wood that.

Chris Belsey:
[28:49] Pizza Hut I mean.
I think the piece of technology. Why should I seem to always frustrates me the most is email where you just get you spend your whole life being both down.
Forget how to pick up the phone and talk to each other and I moved it inside.

Cory Minton:
[29:08] Email is of Giants suck Festival I couldn’t agree more alright look what’s your part your your largest personal Money Pit right now your house.

Chris Belsey:
[29:19] My personal money pics Jesus broken too much sun.

Cory Minton:
[29:26] Good choice.
It’s awesome all right are you going anywhere.

Chris Belsey:
[29:39] Going to Atlanta Georgia for the first time next week so I’m super excited.

Cory Minton:
[29:43] Alright not too far from us in Birmingham that’s good alright so last question what show or Netflix series are you currently Benji non-bearing okay I don’t know what what is that.

Luke Vant Land:
[29:54] Barry is the one about the Hitman he’s the ex-marine and now he’s a Hitman and he went out to LA and he was going to do a hit and ultimately got hooked into an acting class and the fascinating show on HBO.
What time does the main guy looks a little like me.

Cory Minton:
[30:12] Alright I’ll bill head.

Luke Vant Land:
[30:13] Bill Hader yeah anyway I recommend highly recommend bury it thank you I’ll take I’ll take that as a compliment.

Cory Minton:
[30:22] My favorite is his it. My favorite girl haters the commercials you did a couple years ago where he’s got the the broken phone screen and he’s like walking around.

Thomas Henson:
[30:31] I can’t believe we book Bill Hader on the show This Is Us.

Cory Minton:
[30:36] Chris belsey what you are you are.

Chris Belsey:
[30:38] I didn’t read it that the Lost just pulled up on the last season of medical Soul so that was my baby.

Cory Minton:
[31:02] And those analytics environment so thank you so much look for spending time with us.

Luke Vant Land:
[31:05] Thank you it was fun I’ll try to grow a beard.

[31:12] Give me a few years it’s going to take that.