Philip Carnelley
Research Director, European Software Group
Finding a parking spot in the UK’s Milton Keynes should get significantly easier than it used to be, thanks to Big Data.
A couple of years ago, Milton Keynes council believed that pressure on their existing 25,000 parking spaces meant that another 12,000 needed to be created. However, analysis showed that, at any one time, around 7,000 spaces were available – but drivers often couldn’t find them.
BT devised a system with a mobile app running against data streamed from new parking bay sensors into a Cloudera Big Data platform, to allow drivers to locate those empty spaces – more cost-effective than creating new parking spaces. Wider benefits include the reduction in fuel used in searching for empty spaces and the reduction in emissions. The project is currently being trialed.
This, and much more evidence of the onward march of open source and Big Data, was provided at the Cloudera ‘Sessions’ user conference in London last month, where a number of customers spoke to their experiences of using big data, or were cited by Cloudera executives themselves.
Several of the use cases included links to Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In IDC’s view, IoT will be a tidal wave driving massive need for Big Data applications deployment – and Cognitive/AI applications too – in the coming years. Alongside the smart parking example, we heard about predictive maintenance of trucks and helicopters, healthcare and smart insurance applications – all showing the symbiosis between the IoT and big data analytics.
But perhaps the most striking takeaway was the assertion from Tom Reilly, Cloudera CEO, that within two years, half of all customer workloads would be in the cloud – up from 20% today, with strong demand for solutions across multiple cloud platforms. IoT-type applications will be a large part of that.
Indeed IDC believes that in the next 3 years, company spending on cloud analytics workloads will grow five times faster than on-premises solutions.
Organisations not wishing to be left behind in the agility and cost-effectiveness stakes by their peers need to be devising a cloud intercept strategy now if they haven’t already done so.
If you want to learn more about IoT, Cloud and Cognitive/AI applications, please contact Philip Carnelley.