IT Life: James Markarian, SnapLogic CTO

How will the Internet of Things affect your organisation?

As an application and data integration vendor, for us it’s primarily about helping our customers benefit from the information being generated by the Internet of Things.

Each individual generates a lot of data every day, but adding IoT into the mix means that people are responsible for thousands of devices doing something on their behalf throughout the day. We are now ultimately generating far more data than ever before.

So the question is how are you going to cost effectively manage this and get intelligence out of it? It’s a problem to which there is still no fully interoperable solution. For SnapLogic, it is about connecting and scaling intelligence from the data that is produced by the Internet of Things.

What smartphone do you use?

I use an iPhone 6 and I will never upgrade until they bring back the headphone jack.

What three apps could you not live without?

Reddit, I use it daily. Lyft, as it’s vital for transportation. And I also rely on LinkedIn professionally, mostly so I am prepared for who I am talking to next.

What new technology are you most excited for a) your business and b) yourself?

For business, it is definitely machine learning and artificial intelligence. When I think about doing things with computers over the last 30 years, not much has fundamentally changed in the way you write software, however the way it’s been applied certainly has.

Search engines have been running with machine learning and artificial intelligence in the background for the better part of a decade but the technology has only just recently become popular in the mainstream. Everything that you touch on a daily basis, almost every aspect of technology has been shaped by AI and machine learning.

When you think about transformative technology of the past such as the bicycle, the automobile, the old telephone – it’s clear that machine learning, although it might manifest itself differently, is going to be as disruptive in society as any of these and possibly more.

Technology has certainly transformed in recent years, and it is now part of everyone’s daily life. In the past, technology used to be only in the hands of engineers, but what I find amazing is I can now work on projects with my kids. This is a whole new generation, a whole new set of possibilities, and it is incredibly exciting to see where the future leads us.

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you be doing?

Well, I would love to be snowboarding in the winter and mountain biking in the summer. It’s hard to imagine a better life.

Professionally speaking, by education I’m actually more of an economist than a computer scientist. So you would probably find me in an economic research firm studying healthcare economics, or something like that. Either that or I’d be selling high-end audio equipment.