Category Archives: Big Data

Big Data, Data Anaytics, News & Analysis, Western Australia

Western Australia redefines itself through cloud and advanced data analytics adoption

John Atkins

Government of Western Australia’s Agent General to Europe John Atkins at Smart to Future Cities Forum

Speaking at Ovum’s Smart to Future Cities 2016 event, Government of Western Australia’s Agent General to Europe John Atkins put forward a convincing case for Western Australia as one of the world’s most innovative regions.

Bringing together cloud technologies, smart cities concepts, data analytics, robotics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence, the region is aiming to transform its economy, which has traditional relied on natural resources. The region aims to create a new ecosystem, with the hub based in Perth, built on the back of future technologies and a redefinition of the basis of Western Australia.

“Perhaps the most exciting project is the Square Kilometre Array,” said Atkins. “It’s combining scientists and engineers from more than 20 countries and now we can explore the universe 20 times faster than any telescope around the world today. More than 4 petabytes of data has been produced by the project since 2013.

“We’re redefining our role in the community by embracing technology”

The project itself aims to utilize largest radio telescope ever seen on Earth, and will be world’s largest public science data project upon completion.  The overall aim of the project is to answer fundamental questions of science and about the laws of nature, such as: how did the Universe, and the stars and galaxies contained in it, form and evolve?

Aside from answering questions which have puzzled scientists for generations, the project is also drawing attention simple because of the scale at which it operates. Once completed it will generate data at a rate more than 10 times today’s global Internet traffic, presenting a unique data collection, analysis and action challenge.

From a transport perspective, the company have taken lessons learned from Transport for London, and built an enhanced passenger experience through citizen engagement on its app, building network intelligence through data analysis and managing the day to day challenges of congestion through IoT deployments throughout the city. Investing in advanced data analytics tools and processes, the team are setting themselves the challenge of taking the region beyond the 21st century.

Western Australia has chosen to diversify its economy, reducing the reliance on natural resources, by embracing the collaborative, and encouraging the adoption of disruptive technologies. Contrary to the traditional policy of government undertaking time-consuming reviews, the Government of Western Australia has put its ambitious foot forward, driving innovation in its agricultural, scientific, transportation and natural resources industries through cloud and data analytics technologies.

Azure, Big Data, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rolls-Royce

Microsoft and Rolls Royce collaborate to build next-gen intelligent engines

Rolls RoyceMicrosoft and Rolls Royce have announced a new collaboration to bring the next generation of intelligent engines to the aviation industry.

Rolls-Royce will integrate Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite into its service solutions to expand its digital capabilities, particularly around its Totalcare service offering, which aims to improve the lifespan of its assets for customers. The partnership builds on underlying trends within the industrial and manufacturing industry in moving from a reactive to proactive maintenance and repair model, using IoT to detect faults in real-time, but also identifying the tell-tale signs of such faults at industrial scale, prior to them becoming a problem.

“Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the digital landscape to increase efficiency and improve their operations,” said Tom Palmer, SVP of Services and Civil Aerospace at Rolls-Royce. “By working with Microsoft we can really transform our digital services, supporting customer’s right across engine-related aircraft operations to make a real difference to performance.”

At the Hannover Messe event in Germany, both Microsoft and Rolls Royce will demonstrate the new capabilities, including using the Azure IoT Suite to collect and aggregate data from disparate, geographically distributed sources and Cortana Intelligence Suite to analyse the data itself. Data sets will include engine health data, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage data, with the aim of increasing the assets fuel efficiency, as well as detecting anomalies and ongoing trends.

“Rolls-Royce has always been a pioneer in engine services, and this collaboration will create a new digital engine for Rolls-Royce to deliver an even better service to its customers across its world-class engine fleet through Microsoft Azure,” said Jason Zander, Corporate VP of Azure at Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced at the event it has been working with the OPC Foundation to ensure industry IoT scenarios is compliant within OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. The OPC UA provides a standardized communication, security, and metadata and semantics abstraction for the majority of industrial equipment, ensuring interoperability between devices, assets and the platform to interpret the collected data.

Microsoft’s support for the standard covers its entire IoT portfolio including local connectivity with Windows devices to cloud connectivity via the Microsoft Azure platform. The announcement also included extended support for OPC UA open source software stack, ensuring any Windows 10 devices running the Universal Windows Platform can connect and openly communicate with other IoT devices via OPC UA.

“As Industry 4.0 reaches a tipping point, we believe that openness and interoperability between hardware, software and services will help manufacturers transform how they operate and create solutions that benefit employees’ productivity,” said Sam George, Director of Azure Internet of Things at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s support of OPC UA in Azure IoT and Windows IoT will reduce barriers to industrial IoT adoption and help deliver immediate value.”

Big Data, data analytics, GE, GE Digital, News & Analysis

GE launches asset management offering for manufacturing industry

Engine manufactoringGE Digital has launched its suite of its suite of Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions, a cloud-based offering running on its Predix platform, to monitor industrial and manufacturing equipment and software.

The company claims industrial customers can now use data and cloud-based analytics to improve the reliability and availability of their GE and non-GE assets. While APM would generally not be considered a concept, GE claims its offering is the first commercially available to support the industrial data generated by a company’s assets, both physical and software based.

The launch builds on underlying IoT trends within the industrial and manufacturing industry to move towards a proactive performance strategy for their assets, repairing said assets before a maintenance issue as opposed to reacting to a fault.

“GE’s deep expertise in developing and servicing machines for industry gives us a greater understanding of real business operations and the insights to deliver on industry needs,” said Derek Porter, GM for Predix Applications at GE Digital. “With the launch of our APM solutions suite, GE is commercialising its own best practices for customers.”

The offering is split into three tiers. Firstly, a machine and equipment health reporting system will provide a health-check on the asset, detailing performance levels in real-time. Secondly, a reliability tool predicts potential problems within an asset, allowing engineers to schedule maintenance activities. And finally, a maintenance optimization tool will be available later in 2016 to optimize long-term maintenance strategies, which GE claim will enable customers to increase the lifecycle of the asset and reduce downtime.

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The company also launched the generally available module of GE Digital’s Brilliant Manufacturing software suite, Efficiency Analyzer, which will be available through a new SaaS pricing model. Once again, the product offering is built on the need to analyse and activate data collected within manufacturing operations, to improve operational efficiency. One of the first use cases advertised by the company has been within its own transportation division.

“GE’s Brilliant Manufacturing Suite has enabled significant reduction in unplanned machine downtime resulting in higher plant efficiency,” said Bryce Poland, Advanced Manufacturing Brilliant Factory Leader, GE Transportation. “As part of our digital thread strategy, we will increase our machines and materials visibility by 400% in 2016.”

acquisition, Big Data, Data as a service, News & Analysis, Oracle

Oracle acquisition boosts position in data-as-a-service market

ContractOracle has announced its intention to acquire Israeli machine-learning company Crosswire, in a bid to strengthen its Data-as-a-Service offering.

The Crosswire technology enables marketers and publishers the opportunity to increase cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics, and builds on Oracle’s efforts to bolster its position in the smart data market segment.

“Uniting identity across desktop, browsers and mobile apps to create a meaningful and consistent relationship with customers and prospects has become one of the critical challenges for marketers,” said Omar Tawakol, General Manager at Oracle Data Cloud. “Identification methods are different on every device and across every channel, and solving this can enable marketers to have a significantly more effective dialogue with the consumer and save billions of advertising dollars.”

The team claim in combining the Crosswire capabilities with its Data Cloud portfolio, marketers will be able to build a graphical representation to identify how consumers interact with their digital devices. Oracle currently has such an offering within its portfolio, though the company claims the Crosswire capabilities increases the accuracy of the data, which in theory offers marketers the opportunity to better allocate advertising budgets.

“Oracle Data Cloud is the fastest growing global Data as a Service business, aggregating more than 3 billion profiles from over 15 million websites in its data marketplace and operating the most accurate ID Graph to enable understanding of consumer behaviour across all media channels,” said Tawakol. “The addition of Crosswise further broadens the Oracle ID Graph to construct a complete view of consumers’ digital interactions across multiple devices.”

The acquisition builds on moves by Oracle over recent years to bolster its cloud business. The company bought Ravello Systems for an estimated $500 million in February, as well as numerous acquisitions in 2015 including CloudMonkey, Maxymiser, and StackEngine.

Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, News & Analysis

Are decision makers thinking too short-term for cloud benefits?

Career ChoicesWhile cloud adoption maybe hitting the mainstream, the majority of projects are focused primarily around increasing productivity of employees through automation as opposed to the greater benefits of cloud computing.

Speaking at Cloud World Expo, Rashik Parmar, IBM’s Lead Cloud Advisor, highlighted that the benefits of cloud maybe currently underplayed by some organizations, as projects are initially too focused on productivity advantages. While automation could build an effective business case for cloud implementation, benefits such as performance and business predictability are often overlooked until projects are more mature.

“With performance we talk about speed. It’s the timing in which it takes to change, drive innovation in the market place and accelerate the way you deliver value to you customers,” said Parmar. “Predictability is one we often don’t think about. With the cloud you start to be able to understand the kind of outcomes you can achieve well before you put them out there. It’s that ability to be able to predict those outcomes and be confident that this particular journey is going to deliver value that gives people the inspiration and the ability to invest in cloud projects.”

Parmar highlighted that cloud is more than simply a tool for automation of software, but also the access to data, which has been healthily increased by the wider adoption of IoT technologies. Advances in cognitive computing are now enabling businesses to drive decision making through automation, taking time consuming tasks away from employees to ensure they can concentrate on core tasks.

“What we’re now starting to get into is a stage of machine learning, a stage of cognitive computing which allows us to see some of the broader patterns and automate further,” said Parmar. “Tasks which were being handed to humans are being replaced by automation. Radiography is a good example. A radiographer looks at an x-ray and decides whether there is a crack or a hairline fracture, and these are quite hard to automate without human skills. With the new cognitive capabilities and picture recognition analytics, we can use machine learning to pick out these anomalies and automate these tasks.”

While the initial benefits of cloud will always be automation and therefore and increase in productivity, as organizations mature through their cloud journey’s the long-term potential of cloud becomes more apparent.

IBM’s position would appear to be on the advanced side of cloud computing, seemingly wanted to accelerate customers through the adoption process and through to the performance and predictability benefits sooner rather than later. Though this does leave the question of how many organizations would be in a position digitally to capitalize on such concepts currently. Can organizations be fast-tracked to the advanced stages of cloud computing or does there have to be an internal learning curve? Could this be a case of IBM trying to encourage customers to walk before they can crawl?

Big Data, Bosch, connected car, HERE, News & Analysis

Bosch rumoured to be discussing stake in HERE

HEREGerman engineering giant Bosch is reportedly in talks to take a stake in high-definition digital maps company HERE, according to multiple sources.

HERE, which has been in operations for more than 25 years, has been the focus of healthy media attention in recent weeks as numerous tech companies have been linked to stakes within the company. Last year a consortium of German car manufacturers, including Daimler and BMW, acquired the business from Nokia for €2.5 billion with the aim of sourcing an alternative digital mapping offering from Google, for autonomous car initiatives.

Aside from engineering companies such as Bosch, the consortium has also been rumoured to be negotiating with various cloud providers, including Amazon and Microsoft. While rumours have focused on the consortium attempting to reduce financial exposure, a partner such as Amazon or Microsoft who could provide access to vast computing power, could be useful addition in efforts to establish the realities of the connected car.

HERE has claimed that its mapping systems can be identified in four out of five in-car navigation systems in North America and Europe, and recently extended its technology to the third-party developers in the Samsung connected car ecosystem.

While the move takes Bosch away from its traditional base of automotive components, it does build on moves made by the company in recent months to diversify its business offering. Last month the company announced the launch of Bosch IoT Cloud entering the company into the IoT race. The IoT cloud initiative comprises technical infrastructure as well as platform and software offerings, and claims to cover the full IoT proposition, from the device to the cloud.

“As of today, we offer all the ace cards for the connected world from a single source,” said Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner at the time of the launch. “The Bosch IoT Cloud is the final piece of the puzzle that completes our software expertise. We are now a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things.”

A stake in mapping company HERE could add further weight to Bosch’s ambitions to diversify its business offering and grow within the software market.

Big Data, IBM Watson, Machine learning, News & Analysis, Pfizer

Pfizer utilizes IBM Watson for Parkinson’s research

healthcare ITIBM and Pfizer have announced a research collaboration with the intention of improving how clinicians deliver care to Parkinson’s patients.

The collaboration will be built on a system of sensors, mobile devices, and IBM Watson’s machine learning capabilities, to provide real-time disease symptom information to clinicians and researchers. The team aim to gain a better understanding as to how the disease progresses as well as how patients react to certain medications, to design future clinical trials and also speed up the development of new therapies.

“We have an opportunity to potentially redefine how we think about patient outcomes and 24/7 monitoring, by combining Pfizer’s scientific, medical and regulatory expertise with IBM’s ability to integrate and interpret complex data in innovative ways,” said Mikael Dolsten, President of Pfizer Worldwide R&D.

According to the World Health Organization, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s affect almost one billion families around the world, Approximately 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease each year according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and an estimated seven to 10 million people suffer from the disease globally.

“The key to our success will be to deliver a reliable, scalable system of measurement and analysis that would help inform our clinical programs across important areas of unmet medical need, potentially accelerating the drug development and regulatory approval processes and helping us to get better therapies to patients, faster,” said Dolsten.

The collaboration seeks to create a holistic view of a patient’s well-being by seeking to accurately measure a variety of health indicators. Data generated through the system could also arm researchers with the insights and real-world evidence needed to help accelerate potential new and better therapies.

“With the proliferation of digital health information, one area that remains elusive is the collection of real-time physiological data to support disease management,” said Arvind Krishna, SVP at IBM Research. “We are testing ways to create a system that passively collects data with little to no burden on the patient, and to provide doctors and researchers with objective, real-time insights that we believe could fundamentally change the way patients are monitored and treated.”

Azure, Big Data, connected car, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Toyota

Toyota and Microsoft launch connected car initiative

ToyotaJapanese car brand Toyota has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Toyota Connected, a new joint venture to further the car manufacturer’s efforts towards autonomous vehicles.

Toyota Connected builds on a standing relationship with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud technology to make the connected driving experience smarter. Based in Plano, Texas, Toyota Connected will expand the company’s capabilities in the fields of data management and data services development initiatives.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology. It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity,” said Zack Hicks, CEO of Toyota Connected.  “From telematics services that learn from your habits and preferences, to use-based insurance pricing models that respond to actual driving patterns, to connected vehicle networks that can share road condition and traffic information, our goal is to deliver services that make lives easier.”

The connected cars market has been growing healthily in recent years, but is not new to Microsoft or Toyota as the two companies have been collaborating in the area of telematics since 2011, working on services such as infotainment and real-time traffic updates. A 2015 report stated that connected car services will account for nearly $40 Billion in annual revenue by 2020, while big data and analytics technology investments will reach $5 billion across the industry in the same period.

The new company itself has been given two mandates; firstly to support product development for customers, dealers, distributors, and partners, through advanced data analytics solutions, and secondly to build on Toyota’s existing partnership with Microsoft to accelerate R&D efforts and deliver new connected car solutions. The company have stated that its vision is to “humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background”.

The launch of Toyota Connected will able enable the organization to consolidate R&D programs into one business unit, which it claims will ensure that all initiatives remain customer centric. Initiatives will focus around a number of areas including in-car services and telematics, home/IoT connectivity, personalization and smart city integration.

As part of the launch, Toyota will also adopt Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, employing a hybrid solution globally, whilst also housing a number of Microsoft engineers in its offices in Plano.

“Toyota is taking a bold step creating a company dedicated to bringing cloud intelligence into the driving experience,” said Kurt Del Bene, EVP, Corporate Strategy and Planning at Microsoft. “We look forward to working with Toyota Connected to harness the power of data to make driving more personal, intuitive and safe.”

Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM partners with Aberdeen University to bring Watson to medical research

IBM2The University of Aberdeen has recently announced a partnership with IBM, which will allow students and staff to utilise Watson Engagement Advisor.

IBM scientists are collaborating with researchers at the university on the EU Marie Curie K-Drive project, an initiative which explores a number of different use cases for big data and knowledge graphs, including the treatment of cancer. The results of the project will also form the foundation of any proposals put forward by the university for the EU Horizon 2020 Programme.

“Cognitive represents an entirely new model of computing that includes a range of technology innovations in analytics, natural language processing and machine learning,” said Paul Fryer, Academic Initiative Leader at IBM. “The collaboration between IBM and the University of Aberdeen, which builds on a long-standing relationship, aims to help nurture the next generation of innovators; and is the first initiative of this type in Scotland.”

The university is now one of four in the UK to have access to the Watson Engagement Advisor, which will be used by students and staff to forward their cognitive computing research.

“The partnership with IBM is an exciting opportunity to advance our research in this area,” said Dr Jeff Z. Pan, coordinator of the K-Drive project at the university. “Cognitive computing is empowering human decision-making processes by understanding and exploiting data which is structured and unstructured, and our research is focused on how to make the best use of both types of data.”

Watson’s marketing messaging has primarily focused around the commercialization of artificial intelligence and big data. The partnership with the University of Aberdeen and the K-Drive project builds on IBM’s efforts to demonstrate the real-world viability. Over recent weeks, IBM has announced a number of collaborations to utilize the Watson proposition, including with Mastercard and the Honda Formula One team.

IBM and Honda announced that Watson technology would be incorporated into the McLaren Honda Formula One cars and pits to improve performance and racing decisions in real-time. The sensors will collect data from a number of different sources including driver timing, fuel flow rates and engine performance. The partnership is in reaction to new regulations that required all Formula One cars to use hybrid engines and limited fuel consumption during races.

“With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things, by 2025, every car will be connected in some way exuding vast amounts of streaming data ranging from traffic updates to health of the vehicle, operations and more,” said Harriet Green, GM for Watson IoT at IBM. “We are excited to team with Honda to provide sophisticated cognitive IoT capabilities and analytics to combine data directly from the F1 racing vehicles with other sources, allowing Honda to not only enhance its vehicles that are built for speed, but to also be more friendly to our environment.”

Big Data, Content & Applications, Database, Google, News & Analysis

Google launches Dataproc after successful beta trials

Google cloud platformGoogle has announced that its big data analysis tool Dataproc is now on general release. The utility, which was one of the factors that persuaded Spotify to choose Google’s Cloud Platform over Amazon Web Services is a managed tool based on the Hadoop and Spark open source big data software.

The service first became available in beta in September and was tested by global music streaming service Spotify, which was evaluating whether it should move its music files away from its own data centres and into the public cloud – and which cloud service could support it. Dataproc in its beta form supported the MapReduce engine, the Pig platform for writing programmes and the Hive data warehousing software. Google says it has added new features and sharpened the tool since then.

While in its beta testing phase, Cloud Dataproc added features such as property tuning, VM metadata and tagging and cluster versioning. “In general availability new versions of Cloud Dataproc will be frequently released with new features, functions and software components,” said Google product manager James Malone.

Cloud Dataproc aims to minimise cost and complexity, which are the two major distractions of data processing, according to Malone.

“Spark and Hadoop should not break the bank and you should pay for what you actually use,” he said. As a result, Cloud Dataproc is priced at 1 cent per virtual CPU per hour. Billing is by the minute with a 10-minute minimum.

Analysis should run faster, Malone said, because clusters in Cloud Dataproc can start and stop operations in less than 90 seconds, where they take minutes in other big data systems. This can make analyses run up to ten times faster. The new general release of Cloud Dataproc will have better management, since clusters don’t need specialist administration people or software.

Cloud Dataproc also tackles two other data processing bugbears, scale and productivity, promised Malone. This tool complements a separate service called Google Cloud Dataflow for batch and stream processing. The underlying technology for the service has been accepted as an Apache incubator project under the name Apache Beam.