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Venture

Pneuron Finds Itself at the Center of Containers and Microservices

Nate Lentz
October 15, 2015

Pneuron was a new and early solution.  People tried to categorize it incorrectly – ETL, BI, and Big Data, among others – and more than once Simon was accused of black magic or simply lying while presenting to some big brand CTOs.  The company’s approach broke the paradigm of the last generation of data management and analysis because it did not require huge data warehouse solutions as a prerequisite for meaningful heterogeneous system analysis.  Slowly, companies with seemingly unsolvable problems came to find Pneuron, such as banks with a need for comprehensive anti-money laundering solutions that they needed NOW not in five years and financial institutions looking to create full 360⁰ views of their customers for regulatory and account management reasons.  It wasn’t clear what exactly the Pneuron technology should be called, but it worked to solve some of the biggest and most urgent challenges enterprise customers were facing.  Much marketing angst existed as the company sought to find definitions for what it was versus what it was not.

Fast forward to today.  There are now terms for what Pneuron does.  The “Pneural Cortex” is a “Container” and a pretty advanced version of one at that.  The ”Pneurons” are “Microservices”, which are combined together in different forms to rapidly build customer solutions at the point of implementation.  Both “containers” and ‘”microservices” are terms best known to forward thinking analysts, bleeding edge CTOs, and of course to VCs.  The poster boy for containers is Docker.  The poster girl for microservices has yet to be found.  Advanced technology teams are using both in places like Facebook and Netflix, but to date no one has demonstrated the ability to commercialize these technologies into products that are justifying enterprise investment.  No one, that is, except for Pneuron, which has quietly been doing this for years and which is likely the best example of what is possible in this new product category.  Pneuron has an e-book that discusses its perspectives on Microservices and Containers which is quite well done.

Simon and Elizabeth have been joined by an exceptional leadership team including Tom Fountain and Ken Lawrence, and will add another exciting executive in the next week.  I am excited for Simon, Elizabeth, Tom, Ken and the Pneuron team, for they finally have the ability to define themselves by what they are versus what they are not.  From thought leaders to category creators, to market leaders – what’s next?

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