Transcript of Interview with DataKinetics CEO Allan Zander
Interviewer – Janet Eastman
DataKinetics customer list has 72% of the Fortune 50 companies.
Why have these companies chosen to do business with DataKinetics?
The companies that choose to do business with DataKinetics have made huge investments in the mainframe they have, and each one of those MIPS have a cost associated with them. Our product is an in-memory tool, in most cases it helps them recover 80% of those MIPS.
When we look to where we're going in the future, transactions are only going to increase- so are businesses looking at DataKinetics as a key enabler to business productivity?
Yes, in addition to the performance aspects already mentioned, in many cases the development of the applications is a very complex thing that represents several man-years of effort for just a single application. When you implement our technology you have the ability to reduce many of the projects you may have from several man-years to several man-months.
Do you have an example of how DataKinetics helps a business decrease cost?
One of the largest credit card transaction companies is our customer; they produce over a trillion transactions a day, using our technology which is right at the heart of their fraud detection group. Every time new laws come out they need to implement new algorithms associated with it, and that is where we are a key part to the business.
One very large insurance company also uses our product- for each and every insurance claim that goes through, there are over 60,000 table look ups that need to get done over the course of a day- you could imagine how quickly that adds up. And for airlines that are out there for each and every reservation that they confirm there’s just a myriad of combinations and permutations of seats and things they can give, so we allow these companies to very quickly and easily implement the rules that they have for their different applications that they use.
Do most of your customers see that increase level of performance?
Absolutely, many applications that are out there that are designed for mainframe are actually created to have a lot of input and output type processes, for particularly those applications, it's not uncommon to see recovery of anywhere from 30% to 80% of the MIPS associated with those applications.
When we talk about large transactions we’re thinking about credit card companies, large retailers, brokerage houses, airlines etc.— are these DataKinetics’ key customers?
Yes, many of those companies listed are very large users of the mainframe, but we're starting to see new trends evolve too, where smaller type companies, not necessary the Fortune 50 or the Fortune 100, but others, are starting to use mainframes as well, and are becoming our customers, and we are seeing ourselves grow this year.
DataKinetics has been in business for 30 years- how has your customer profile changed over those 3 decades?
Over the course of the last 30 years we have many of the Fortune 50 companies. Now with the Green IT becoming a popular thing to look at, companies continue to look for ways to reduce their costs. Mainframe technology is actually making more sense now than it ever has and, as a result, we're actually going through a growth period. When companies do invest in mainframe technology that’s out there, it's usually a long term investment that they make, so having something that allows them to recover that ROI makes a lot of sense. And practically all our situations where we had our customers implement our technology we have never been removed from a single one of those implementations that they have gone through.
