Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Julius Černiauskas, CEO at Oxylabs:
Q: What is Oxylabs?
A: Oxylabs is one of the global leaders in the growing public web data gathering industry. We provide premium tools and infrastructure to extract public web data at scale.
The internet is full of public data. By providing reliable infrastructure, we help businesses efficiently collect it, so that they can analyze it and draw insights from it. As the global economy is becoming more data-driven and even more competitive, our tools have become indispensable in many industries. For example, we’ve recently surveyed data decision makers in the UK and US finance industries and found that 71% of finance companies are already using web scraping in their daily operations. The numbers would probably be even higher in ecommerce, another data-heavy industry.
Thus the need for data collection tools is ever growing, which helps us grow too. We started our business in 2015 and have been expanding product-wise and staff-wise at an enormous pace. This year, we were included in the Financial Times list of fastest growing European companies and were the highest ranked external data acquisition company in the continent in terms of our annual growth.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: We’ve got several great news to share. First of all, we’ve just added a new product to our portfolio – Shared datacenter proxies.
Shared datacenter proxies make automated public web data collection more accessible. Businesses can use it to optimize pricing strategies, carry out market research, gather business intelligence, and perform many other novel tasks – all at a reduced cost. Shared datacenter proxies are the cheapest in our portfolio and allow collecting data in a more cost-efficient way.
Secondly, we’ve opened the registration for our annual web scraping conference OxyCon. The online event will take place on the 7-8th of September and will connect leading experts in public web data collection. OxyCon 2022 will cover a variety of technical and business topics, as well as practical tips on how to get the greatest impact with web scraping. This year’s theme is Shaping the Digital Future Through Web Scraping. Anyone interested in web scraping and how it could benefit their business, as well as those who already use web scraping tools everyday and want to discuss their daily challenges, are welcome to join the free event online.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Oxylabs provides infrastructure and ready-made tools for public web data gathering. Our main products are different types of proxies and Scraper APIs – depending on how a particular company conducts its web scraping activities, they might choose one or the other.
Our proxy product list includes: dedicated or shared datacenter proxies, socks5 proxies, static residential proxies, residential proxies, next-gen residential proxies, mobile proxies and rotating ISP proxies. Depending on what type of pages our customer wants to scrape, how challenging these pages are and how much data they want to collect, we recommend a particular type of proxies.
Meanwhile, our family of Scraper APIs – Web Scraper API, Ecommerce Scraper API, and SERP Scraper API – are ready-to-use tools that simplify the data gathering process. The process is very simple – a client sends a request via our Scraper APIs, which allows the client to collect and retrieve the information in several file formats. Using solutions like this, the company’s infrastructure costs will be lower and they will require less human resources.
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: Our focus is on further innovating and tailoring our product portfolio to continue making the data gathering process accessible, efficient and easy. Innovation drives us forward and we strive to always be one step ahead of the market. For this, we are closely listening to the needs and wants of our current and potential customers to make sure their diverse requirements are all met. Thus we’ll be adding new exciting features and products to the list.
Another drive for innovation is artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, which we already include in our products and want to make use of them even more. We even have an AI & ML Advisory Board with leading global experts in the field. Regular meetings with them spurs our hunger for innovation even further.
Recommended: Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Web scraping technology is not that well known yet, leaving many companies that could benefit from it simply unaware of its existence. That’s why we invest a lot into educating the market – we organize webinars, write commentaries and even have our own podcast for developers “Oxycast”.
As market leaders, we also want to change the common misunderstandings of web scraping. Many still think it’s a complicated niche technology limited to the use of large corporations. However, small businesses can also get a competitive edge by using it and there are so many public and social causes that can benefit from web scraping. That’s why we also invest into pro-bono partnerships, making data extraction tools more accessible to those in need. One of the recent examples was our partnership with the Lithuanian Communications Regulatory Authority, where we helped them automate the detection of child abuse content online. We are always open to similar collaboration requests from NGOs, public institutions or academia.
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