Jan
26
Manufacturing/Motoring/Media
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Here we sit, in a poor benighted island, slowly sinking into economic anonymity, in a great world where economic growth seems to be a property of lands we once called “under-developed”. A worthy come-uppance, and a suitable subject for Davos this week. Yet, as a persistent optimist, I somehow glimpse a glowing future for my children’s children. Information services and solutions lie close to the heart of developmental growth, and I have written here repeatedly (too often for some readers!) about the necessary connection between injecting data/content into workflow and the regeneration of a post-industrial economy. For some reason the information industry has its eyes fixed on pure information usage (sometimes called “research”). In some areas, though – credit rating, risk management, automated financial trading systems, scientific research – we have come out of the bunker and begun to look at the way applied intelligence, often now derived from Big Data and analytics, can change the way that we view the operational logic of whole sectors of commercial and industrial life.
Now, lets pull back a step further and see how information services change networked industry and society at large. I only have space for two examples. The first was driven home to me on Monday at a dinner given by the Real Time Club. The speaker, Dr Siavash Mahdavi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siavash_Haroun_Mahdavi), spoke on 3D printing, and by the time he had finished, and we had examined printed hip joints and shoe inserts amongst other examples the penny was beginning to drop for me. We are moving in the network from manufacturing by extrusion processes through moulds, the industrial revolution pre-digital world, to additive manufacturing, creating products in software and instructing printing devices to build them in extremely thin 2D layers one on top of the other until the desired shapes and structures are created. Medical implants have had the publicity here, but gold jewellery was mentioned as an application. This is a design – intensive, network efficient manufacturing world in which design and the actual printer can be in totally different places. Printing can take place using any materials which can be chemically – adapted to the process. Customization (the running shoe insert designed for the imprint and weight distribution of your own foot) and personalisation are at the centre of this. Every product can be made for you. However, it remains a requirement that everything we know about the performance, qualities and expectations of an artificial hip are brought to bear in the network upon the design process, as the information services world creates the bullets for manufacturing workflow to fire. And all this is going strong now: the lead engineering player in 3D printing in the UK is Renishaw (http://www.renishaw.com/en/additive-manufacturing-news–15505) (and with eery coincidence it announced today a strong trading year, with sales up 11%).
If this is not bizarre enough, I stumbled upon a Google story this week about automated motoring. Apparently Google’s own patented technology had racked up 200,000 autonomous driverless miles by the end of last year. This may just be another Google enthusiasm which runs out of steam, but it does have a history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car), and a great deal of real research, and my bet is that it will happen in this over-crowded isle a lot quicker than the UK estimate of 2056. Extending the network to our over-populated motorways may be the only way to squeeze more capacity from infrastructure we do not have the space to rebuild, and to control scarce parking resource. Driving my car to the motorway and then surrendering control to a system that governs inter-car distance and speed until I leave is a likely first stage. And as the car becomes part of the network, then its ability to intelligently appraise where it is, where it is going and how it is feeling becomes a natural extension of a world of autos which are already computers on wheels. Information service solutions will be vital to feed this activity: important players like ITOWorld (www.itoworld.com) already assemble critical geospatial data, matched at the vital micro level by services like Elgin (http://www.elgin.gov.uk/) who can tell you about every road repair in Britain. At the moment this is part of the world of local government and planning: tomorrow it will have to be part of the knowledge base of your motor car.
When I think about examples like these I become more and more convinced that the new world of information service knowledge and intelligence will be more important than the old one, patrolled by intermediaries like librarians, and governed by quite irrelevant business models like advertising. And here is a world where the use shapes the content, and where suppliers are involved in developing solutions for sectors or even individual companies. Here the information services and solutions players have forgotten whether they are “content” or “software” players, because it has no bearing on the end result, and they had to have both elements to play in any case.
So who will do this stuff well? Undoubtedly the Indians and the Chinese and the Brazilians amongst others. But in many ways this future vision levels out a lot of the inequalities of the old and new worlds. You do not need a great deal of cheap labour to compete here. Capital too will have a different importance if you can custom manufacture close to the point of use, and avoid shipping and warehousing. I quite fancy the chances of this old island: good with design, strong start-up culture, great software development skills, good financial services investment culture, strong presence in information and education markets globally. Or at least I would, if our politicians did not think that modernity was returning to the railway investment mode of Britain in the 1840s, or aping the French and the Japanese high speed trains of the 1960s and 1970s. The infrastructure requirement here would be to create the most intensive high bandwidth broadband coverage in Europe. Fat chance of that while politicians think there are more votes to be got by shaving 34 minutes off the journey time from London to Birmingham!
Some of my friends call this type of article “futuristic madness” (and that was the polite one!). But, to me, the real madness lies in taking the formats of the Gutenberg age (books, newspapers etc), carefully wrapping them in software and delivering them in facsimile form across the network – and then calling these eFormats Innovation!
Jan
12
Take the Program to the Data
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Its Big Data week, yet again. In the last two months we have seen all of the dramas and confusions attendant upon emerging markets, yet none of the emerging clarity which one might expect when a total sea change is taking place in the way in which we extract value from data content. Then this week, with all the aplomb of an elephant determined not to be left behind in a world which has apparently decided that the hula hoop is the only route to sanity, Oracle announced its enterprize Big Data solution. Again. Only now it is called the Big Data Appliance. It started shipping on Tuesday. And the world will never be the same again.
At the heart of the Oracle launch is a Hadoop license. This baby elephant lies at the heart of almost everything. The two Hadoop – based commercializations, have both raised finance in the lead-up to 2012: Cloudera ($40m) and Hortonworks ($20m), while other sector players like MapR who also exploit Hadoop found 2011 a really good time to raise money. And this had a radiating effect on the whole data handling sector. Neo 4j, a database technology (NeoTechnology, based in Malmo and Menlo Park) for graph storage and resolution raised $10m in a round led by Fidelity. Meanwhile, Microsoft signed a deal with Horton works, IBM said it would launch Hadoop in the Cloud, EMC (Greenplum) went for MapR, Dell announced a Hadoop-based initiative, and the world waits and wonders what Hewlett Packard will do, now that it has Autonomy for analytics.
So now we have plenty of initiatives, and, as usual, not much idea of who the next generation of users will be. The first generation speak for themselves. We can see the benefits that Facebook derive from being able to used Hadoop-based tools to find connections and meanings in their content that would have been impossible to cost-effectively reveal in a prior age. And the same would be true of such unlikely bedfellows as the Department of Homeland Security, or Walmart, or Sony (think Playstation Network), or the Israeli Defence Force, or the US insurance industry (via Lexis Risk), or Lexis Nexis (who announced a Big Data integration with MarkLogic), let alone the two players who effectively started all this: Yahoo! (Hadoop) and Google (MapReduce). So asking where it goes next is a legitimate question, but one which can only be answered if we accept that the next group of users are never going to recreate the Google server farms in order to break into these advantageous processing environments. The next group of intensive users will have their XML content on MarkLogic, or their graphical data on Neo 4j. They will want to use the US census data remotely (so will contract with Amazon for process time on the Amazon web presence), and will use a large variety of third party content held in similar ways. Some of their own content will still be held locally on MySQL databases – like Facebook – while others will be working in part or fully in the Cloud, and combining that with their own NoSQL applications. But the essential point here is that no one will be building huge data warehousing operations governed by rigid and mechanistic filing structures. Literally, we are increasingly leaving the data where it is, and bringing the analytical software to it, in order to produce results that are independent of any single data source.
And this too produces another sort of revolution. The front door to working in this way is now the organizational software itself. When Lexis Risk announced at the end of last year that they were going to take HPCC open source, a number of critics saw that as turning their back to an exploitation opportunity. Yet it makes very real sense in the context of Oracle, Microsoft and IBM seeking to build their own “solutions”. Some businesses will want to run their own solutions, and will make a choice between open source Hadoop and open source HPCC. Others in systems integration will seek out open source environments to create unique propositions. But since it was always unlikely that Lexis Risk was going to challenge the enterprize software players in their own bailiwick, then open source is a way of getting a following, harvesting vital feedback, and earn not insignificant returns in servicing and upgrading users.
I am also delighted to see that other winners seem likely to be MarkLogic, since I have been proud of working with them and speaking at their meetings for a number of years. For publishers and information providers, it is now clear that XML remains the route forward. But MarkLogic 5 is clearly being positioned as the information service providers socket for plugging into the Big Data environment. Anyone who believes that scientists will NOT want to analyse all data in a segment, or engineers source all relevant briefs with their ancilliary information, or lawyers cross examine all documentation regardless of location, or pharma companies examine research files in the context of contra-indications should stop reading now and take up fishing. My observation is that Big Data is like Due Diligence: once someone does it, even if the first results are not impressive, all competitors have to do it. The risk of not trying to find the indicative answer by the most advanced methods is too great to take.
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