After his triumphant return from San Francisco where Profitero won the IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year at the IBM SmartCamp Global Finals, co-founder and CEO Volodymyr Pigrukh spoke to Techcentral.ie about Ireland as a place for start-ups, working with IBM and the move from data mining to business intelligence (BI).
Founded in 2010, Profitero grew from an idea by vice president of engineering, Kanstantsin Chernysh. Based in Belarus at the time, Chernysh was struggling with determining competitive retail pricing for web sites on which he was working. Approaching friends Dmitry Vysotski, current CTO, and Pigrukh, who were both working in Ireland, the three hit upon a scalable method to monitor pricing across a range of retail sites.
Profitero currently monitors more than 27 million products across over 2,500 European retail web sites.
Pigrukh said that the IBM Smart Camp experience had revealed "a lot of synergies" between the two companies and provided an "opportunity to get close to IBM". With support from the technology giant, Profitero is working towards integration with IBM products, such as solutions being developed under the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative.
When asked about setting up the company in Ireland, Pigrukh is unequivocal. "Ireland is becoming a very good place for start-ups," he said. There are a lot of developers here, says Pigrukh. The economic conditions are better as costs are lower, while Enterprise Ireland provides good support.
The presence of developers is key for the company as Profitero is "constantly developing the application and algorithms". "Scalability of collection" in particular is a focus, as the scanned base of items and sites is growing beyond 30 million prices and 3,000 sites.
Data analysis is becoming ever more important as simple data mining becomes business intelligence, Pigrukh asserts. This allows certain operations to become easier and more efficient such as automated product matching. In turn, this will help to move from pure price comparison to dynamic insights, he says.
The partnership with IBM on BI allows Profitero to use IBM data tools in developing its own offerings. But the basis for all of the BI is the data collected, argues Pigrukh, from listings to transactional data, which allow Profitero to determine an optimal price.
Pigrukh said that what the company is doing is unique as yet, and while there are competitors, few are direct.
"Pricing is a very important part of the buying decision," said Pigrukh and getting it right could mean the difference between success and mediocrity for an online retailer.
Retailers are becoming more active on pricing, he said, moving towards hourly changes, with the possibility of it becoming like stock market pricing.
Amazon has been doing this already, argues Pigrukh, and it is beginning to go mainstream.
Profitero will "take a leading role in helping retailers" to ensure optimal pricing, said Pigrukh.
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