 Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. Fifth year of coverage of our own event, Big Data NYC, where we cover all the action in New York City for this week in Big Data, in conjunction with Strata Data, which was originally Big Hadoop World in 2010. We've been covering it for eight years. It became Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata Daily, probably called Strata AI tomorrow. Who knows, but certainly the trends are going in that direction. I'm John Furrier, co-host. Our next guest here in New York City is Sergei Rabatai, who's the head of business development at INDATA Labs from Belarus, in town, doing some biz-dev in the Big Data ecosystem. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, good morning. Great to have you. So obviously Belarus is becoming known as the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe. A lot of great talent. You're seeing that really kind of explode. A lot of great stuff going on globally, even though there's a lot of stuff that GDPR and all these other things happening. It's clearly a global economy with tech. Silicon Valley is still magical. I live there in Palo Alto, but you're starting to see peering points within these ecosystems of entrepreneurship, and now big companies are taking advantage of it as well. What do you guys do? I mean, you're in the middle of that. What does INDATA Labs do in context? Well, INDATA Labs is a full-stack data science company which means that we provide professional services for data strategy, big data engineering, and the data science. So yeah, like you just said, we are based. My team is based in Minsk, Belarus. We're about 40 people strong at the moment. And in the recent years, we have been very successful starting this business and we have been getting customers from all over the world, including United States, Great Britain, and European Union. The company was launched about four years ago, and a very important thing that it was launched by two tech leaders who come from very data-driven industries. Our CEO, Ilya Kirilov, has been running several ad tech companies for many years, and our second founder, Marat Karpeko, has been holding C-level positions in one of the most successful gaming companies in the world. So they know data. They're data guys. Yeah, they're data guys. They know data from different aspects, and that brings synergy to our business. And you guys bring that expertise now in a professional services firm. So give me an example of some of the things that someone might want to call you up on, because the thing we're hearing here in New York City this week is, look, we need more data scientists, and they've got to be more productive. They're spending way too much time wrangling and doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. I mean, the old days, CIS admins were built to let people be productive and they ran the infrastructure. That's not what data scientists should be doing. They're the users. So there's a level of setting things up and then there's a level of provisioning, essentially data assets, but then the data scientists just want to do their job. How do you help companies? Well, I would probably, you know, if I take all our activities, I would split them like into two big parts. So first of all, you know, we are helping big companies who already have a lot of data. We help them in managing this data more effectively. So we help them with predictive analytics. We help them with helping them building the churn prediction and user segmentation solutions. We have been recently involved into several natural language processing projects. And one of our successful key studies we helped one of the largest gaming companies to automate their customer feedback processing. So like a couple of years ago, they were working manually with their customer feedback and we built them a tool that allows them to instantly get the sentiment of what the user say. So it's like a kind of a voice of a customer, which means they can be more effective in developing new things for their games. So we, you know... So when was someone engaged? I'm just going to peg a order of magnitude of the levels of engagements you do. Startups come in, is it big companies? What kind of size, scope, work do you do? So I would say that at the moment we work with startups, but it's a bit of a different approach than we have with like big or well-established companies. For, you know, when startups or startups typically approach us with asking to help them to implement some brand new technologies like neural networks or deep learning. So they want to be effective from the start. They want to use the cutting edge technology to be more attractive, to provide, you know, to have like a better value on the market and just to be effective and to be a successful business from the start. The other part are the well-established companies who already have got the data, but they understand that so far their data might not be used that effectively as it should have been used. And therefore they approach us with a request to help them to get more insights out of the data. Let's say implement some machine learning that can help them. How about larger companies? What kind of projects do you work for them? It could be, you know, typical project is like churn prediction. Yeah, that is very actual for the companies who have got a lot of customer data. Then it could be companies from such industries like betting industry, where churn is a very big issue. And well, the same probably applies to companies who do trading. So a scale is one of the different things that you differentiate around. It sounds like your founder's got some ad tech background. Obviously it must be large, your large data set. Is your profile of engagement's large scale? I'm just trying to get a handle of if someone's watching. You know, who, what's the kind of engagement people should be calling you for? Give us an example of that. Like let's say there is a company who has got a lot of customer data, has got some products and they have a problem of churn or they have a problem of segmenting their customers so they can later address the specific segments of the customers with the right offers at the right time and through the right marketing channel. Then it could be customers or requests where natural text processing is required, where we have to automate some understanding of the written or spoken text. Then I should say that we have been getting recently some requests where computer vision skills are required because I think the first stage of AI being really intelligent was the speech recognition and I think nowadays we managed to reach to the level of what we earlier saw in the fantastic movies or sci-fi movies. So computer vision is going to be like the next leap in all that AI buzz we're having at the moment. So you solve it, the problem that you solve for customers is data problems. If they're swimming in a lot of data, you can help them. If they want to actually make that data, do things that are cutting edge, you guys can help them. Yeah, yeah. All right, so here's a question for you. I mean, Belarus has obviously got good things going on per the press you've been getting, the whole area and you guys in particular. So I'm a buyer, one question I might ask is, hey, Sergey, how do I know you can really keep that talent? Churn is always a big problem. I've dealt with outsourcing before and in the US it's hard to keep talent but I've heard there's a churn. How do you guys keep the talent in the country? How do you keep the talent in the projects? Is there certain economic rules over there? What's happening in Belarus? Give us the economic. Yeah, so basically what you're saying, yeah, churn problem has always been known for companies who have their development teams in Asian region. That's a known problem because I have a lot of meetings with clients in the UK and the US and potential prospects, I would say. So they say it is a problem for them. With Belarus, I don't think we have that because from what I know, we have an average churn of under 10%, that's the figures across the industry. In smaller companies, the churn is even less and there are specific reasons for that. First of all, that due to Belarusian's mentality, we always try to keep to a job that we're having. So we do not... Just a cultural thing. That's just the cultural thing. We do not tend to get job offers. You have an honor code, if you will. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the things. Another thing is that the Belarusian industry is very small, so we have, I would say, no more than 40,000 people being involved into different IT companies. And the community is very small, so if somebody is hopping jobs from one job to another, it's gonna be known and this person is not likely to have a good career. So job hoppers is kind of like a code of community honor of like Silicon Valley works that way too, by the way. You get identified, that's who you are. Yeah, and so nowadays... Economic tax breaks going on over there. What's the government involved? So one of the key things is that the special tax and legal regulations that Belarus has got at the moment. I can definitely say that there's no country in the world that has got the same tax preferences and the same support from the government. Like if a Belarusian company, IT company, becomes a part of Belarusian high-tech park, it means the company becomes automatically examined from VET tax, corporate income tax. The employees of that company having the reliefs on their income, personal income tax rate. And there are a lot more reliefs that make the talent stay in the country. Having this relief for the IT business allows the companies to provide better working conditions for the employees and stop the people from migrating to other parts of the world. So that's what we have. So a creative environment where there's not a lot of migration out of the area. And the tech community kind of does its own policing of behavior for innovation. Yeah, but I think that before those initiatives were adopted, there was a certain percentage of people migrating. But I think that nowadays, even if it happens, yes, you're right, it's not that substantial. Great, so tell us, great overview in the company and congratulations, it's a good opportunity for folks watching to explore new areas of talent, especially ones that have the work ethic and knowledge you guys have over there. New York here, Miss Codes here too. Get the job done, be on time. What's your experience like in New York here? What's your goal this week? What's some of the meetings you're having? Share with the folks kind of your game plan for Big Data NYC. Well, yeah, I really enjoy my stay here. It's so far it has been a very enjoyable experience. From the business perspective, I had over 10 meetings with the prospective customers and we are likely to have follow-ups coming in the next couple of weeks. I can definitely say that there is a great demand for professional services. You can see that if you go to a Javits Center, you can see there's a lot of jobs being posted on the job boards. It means that there is lack of knowledge here in the US. One more important thing that I wanted to share with you that from my personal observations that USA, UK and maybe Nordic countries, they have very, very strong background for creating the business ideas. But Eastern Europe or Eastern European countries and Belarus in particular, they are very strong in actually implementing those ideas. Yes, building them. I think we have like lots of synergies and we can work together. So I also got some meetings with existing customers here in the US and so far we had good experience. I can see that New York is moving fast. I travel a lot. I've been to over 40 countries in the previous five years and New York is different. It differs even differs from many cities, other cities in the US. A lot of banks are here, a lot of business in New York. New York's a great town. Love New York City, it's one of my favorites. Love coming here. I grew up right across the river in New Jersey, but great town. I see California Palo Alto is a little bit more softer in terms of weather, but they have a culture there too. It sounds like a lot like what's going on Belarus. So congratulations. And if we get some business for you, should we give them the cube discount? Tell them John sent you and you get 10% off. All right, what do you think? Yeah, sounds great. We can make it a good deal. Tell them John sent you, you get 10% off. No, I'm only kidding, he gives us services. Congratulations. Final question, what's the number one thing people are buying for service from you guys? Number one thing, what's the most requested service you provide? The most requested service is, first of all, many customers, they understand that they have got a lot of data. They want to do something with the data. But before you actually do some implementation, you have to do a lot of discovery or preparatory work. I would say no matter how we end up with the customer, this stage is basically the idea of that stage is to identify the ways data science can be implemented and can provide benefits to the business. That's the most important. And I think that like 95% of the customers, they approach us with this thing in the first place. And based on the results of that preparatory stage, we can then advise the customers what can they do or how they can actually benefit from the existing data or what other things they should collect in order to make their business more effective. Sir, okay, thanks for coming on. Belleru's got a lot of builders there. Check them out. Builders are critical in this new world. Absolutely, the cloud, a lot of great opportunities. A lot of builders in Belleru's. Mr. Q, bringing you all the action from New York City more after this short break, we'll be right back. Hi, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of The Cube. I've been in the tech...