by Angela Guess
J.J. McCorvey of Inc. Magazine recently shared a story of how one company utilized Big Data successfully enough to find themselves in competition with Google. McCorvey writes, “Ask Bill Demas about the promise of big data, and he won’t hesitate to recount a speech, now infamous in company lore, that he gave in 2009 when he took the reins as CEO of Turn, a digital advertising company. Deciding not to mince words, the new leader declared to his increasingly alarmed-looking staff that everything they’d known was over and that software-as-a-service was the future. ’I call it the ‘burn the boat’ speech,’ Demas recalls. ;The notion was that there’s no going back.’ In his tale, Demas headed Turn in another direction and totally ditched its business model.”
He goes on, “Demas, who has extensive experience in data from managing parts of Microsoft’s SQL Server and the search marketing company Overture, was brought on as a Turn board member in 2007; he became president and COO in 2008. By the time he was named CEO, he was convinced that the key to unlocking massive growth at Turn lay in a cloud platform that would allow clients to upload and analyze their consumer data and execute their own marketing campaigns.”
photo credit: Turn
