Last month, I reached out to a few industry experts about how the move towards the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet–the two names that describe a greater number of “things” being tracked and networked in both consumer and enterprise spaces respectively–and the conversations we had on the topic have brought to mind a lot of interesting revelations about development and technology.
One of the people I reached out to was Jeff Healey, Director of Product Marketing, HP Vertica, and his insights have shown that the Industrial Internet is a story about the data–as well as the people and the infrastructure behind collecting and building on that data.
There are numerous implications and impact from the very paradigm of the Industrial Internet that have stories and examples that hit close to home. No more so than when Healy spoke about campuses seeking better energy efficiency for buildings and their use of HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) to keep the people comfortable, and machinery running properly. As everyone knows that it’s not just data centers that have massive energy consumption concerns–every space that humans hole up need some sort of environmental compensation and understanding how architecture, climate, and energy-use jigsaw together is indeed a question of data. That data not only must be collected, collated, and tagged properly; but it also needs to be stored, moved, and analyzed. Knowing a lot about energy use, heating, cooling, and vents isn’t enough–there has to be a well designed infrastructure in place to receive that information and process it into actionable terms.
As a result, I’m not surprised that Healey brings up Vertica’s products that possess the powers to do exactly that and deeply embedded in this discussion about how the Industrial Internet affects developers is a story about Big Data, visualization, and especially the management and analysis of the entire data stack.
Below is the transcript of the e-mail interview.
How do we see the Internet-of-Things adapting to the developer-space? Since there will need to be software to detect (format), send-receive, store, and eventually analyze that data this means there’s an entire application-space for developers to move into.
Developers are increasingly building applications that display sensor data, served up by analytics. These applications could be data visualization dashboards based on Tableau, Qlikview, Microstrategy, and others, or custom-built rich Internet applications for usage-based insurance, fleet management, proactive monitoring, and more.
With more data coming from a multitude of sources, this affects the robustness of networks and infrastructure, so how do you see that affecting operations when it comes to uptime and bottlenecks?
Today, the problem and the solution lies within the data. Not only is a massive amount of data being transmitted across IT infrastructures, there is also a massive amount of IT operational data being generated by these IT systems illustrating the health of the holistic environment. To effectively troubleshoot, diagnose and triage IT operations problems before they affect business services, IT must collect, store and analyze massive amounts of machine data, including events, metrics, topology and logs.
At HP Discover, HP unveiled HP Operations Analytics, the first IT analytics platform to provide advanced analytics through contextual analysis of structured and unstructured operational data. This new solution integrates into existing IT operations tools to provide actionable insight to pinpoint performance or end-user experience problems. A robust, scalable solution built on the HP Vertica Analytics Platform, HP Operations Analytics is capable of analyzing machine data in real time to provide IT operations teams with the actionable insights needed to remediate performance issues and ensure the continuous delivery of high-quality business services.
In addition, HP also announced a new “Management Cockpit for Big Data,” powered by HP Operations Manager i software, that provides monitoring and visibility across the entire big data stack linking health of big data platforms such as HP Vertica and Hadoop with the health of the underlying IT infrastructure. The new capability provides operations teams with the ability to understand the dependencies between these various components of the stack and to quickly correlate and remediate issues.
What level of interest are you seeing in your customer base in Internet of Things? Do you anticipate interest level to grow over the next two years, or are customers too overwhelmed by more immediate issues like supporting mobile computing at this time to have much bandwidth to deal with this next new thing?
The Internet of Things is gaining increased attention of media and the market. While our customers are at various stages of deployment, all want to understand how they can benefit from the growth of information, which is only set to increase with the unfathomable amount of sensor data becoming available.
At HP Vertica, we are seeing a lot of interest in sensor data analytics from clients looking to improve customer satisfaction, create new services and reduce maintenance costs. Our customers are looking to gather sensor data in order to analyze it and extract value to achieve business results.
What patterns are you seeing among your customers? For instance, is interest growing mainly in specific industry segments?
Sensor data is being created all around us and it affects almost every industry. Our customers are taking a variety of different approaches but all are ultimately looking to accelerate innovation and time to value.
For example, a manufacturer that makes HVAC systems for large buildings and campuses is leveraging sensor data to create innovative, high-performance buildings. The company is using sensors to capture data from its HVAC components in hundreds of building which the services team then analyzes to improve the efficiency and reliability of the company systems. The company’s optimization engineers review the data to see if there are different settings that will improve performance and extend the life of the HVAC equipment or reduce its energy consumption. The engineers use these optimization settings to make recommendations to customers and to fine-tune alarms and notifications.
Is your company responding? For instance, do you have new products and services focused on accommodating the huge increase in data volume this will generate or on analyzing that data?
Enterprises are increasingly recognizing the value to be extracted from big data, including semistructured data generated by machines and sensors. As these enterprises see high volumes of incoming sensor data, they need help managing it in a scalable manner while simultaneously reducing maintenance costs, improving customer satisfaction and creating value-added services.
HP Vertica Analytics Platform 6.1, the latest version of HP Vertica’s next-generation analytics platform, is purpose built to simplify big data. The platform is designed from the ground up to handle today’s big data analytics workloads in a massively scalable, high-performance, open and extensible manner. Its scalability and flexibility are unmatched in the industry, delivering 50-1000x faster performance at 30 percent the cost of traditional solutions. More than 700 customers are using the HP Vertica Analytics Platform to power some of the most innovative business models today as well as traditional businesses (financial services, telecommunications, healthcare/life sciences, energy/utilities).