Founded in 2006, Guavus provides a big data analytics platform integrated with a suite of decisioning applications. The California based company has received a total of $79 million in funding from Intel Capital, Sofinnova Ventures, Artiman Ventures, QuestMark Partners, Goldman Sachs and Translink Capital.

Big Data analytics is one of the hottest trends in the market today and for good reason. Big data analytics represents a tremendous opportunity for businesses to innovate, drive new sources of revenue, increase operating efficiencies and more importantly moved toward automated data-driven business processes that will create relevant and meaningful experiences for customers.

There are three stages most customers go through with Big Data — crawl, walk and run. The crawl stage is just finding out what kind of data they are actually producing and how to store and analyze that data.

The walk stage is then developing software applications that can use that data in ways that help the business to run smoother. In Guavas' case that's meant things like predicting how the release of a hot new handset will affect the load on a cell network so that the carrier can be ready ahead of time, or pinpointing how streaming video to taxicabs created a network-crushing data draw.

The last stage, the run stage, is for the software to be smart enough to make these calls on its own. Something like a network that can react to traffic demands in real time on its own, without human intervention. Most companies that are trying to deal with Big Data are at least at the first stage, and there are a lot of hot startups that are trying to go after the second. But not many are ready to go after the third, and that is someplace where Guavus is uniquely situated to succeed.

Scaling Operations is Critical

There are many challenges to being an entrepreneur and starting your own business, but I think the most significant challenge we have faced at Guavus is scaling operations in the face of rapid growth. We have seen tremendous customer demand for our solutions and are scaling operations to support that demand globally, while continuing to execute against our business plan.