Monthly Archives: October 2015

Data in the Cloud ….and Weather as a Service (WaaS)?

30 Friday Oct 2015

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Are we seeing Weather as a Service (WaaS)? Perhaps it is viable more now than ever, as many businesses rely on weather data to maximize profits. Drug companies and pharmacies rely on weather forecasts to predict when to increase supplies of allergy medications. Agriculture companies use weather data to maximize crop yields. Better forecasting for adverse weather conditions could enable airport controllers, for example, to plan for disruption and enable flight path optimization to reduce fuel consumption.

So two announcements this week highlight the change towards a focus on smarter weather predictions and enhanced data analytics for making money from data on the weather.

IBM announced Wednesday that it has purchased the Weather Company. [It is essentially buying everything except the actual TV network.] IBM is taking the Weather Company’s digital assets, including the Weather Channel mobile app, weather.com, and critically for IBM all the company’s forecasting data and technology. The Weather Company owns the largest commercial meteorological database in the world, along with massive facilities that collect radar, satellite, and other weather information.

And in the UK, having lost the lucrative BBC contract in August, the Met (UK Meteorological Office) announced this week its plans to raise £2bn by offering commercial supercomputing services over the web using a powerful Cray supercomputer.

According to the article announcing the purchase in ComputerWeekly, the Met forecasts that it estimates it will generate its extra revenue for the UK Treasury between 2016 and 2020. “Almost half of the revenue (£933m) will come from companies working to predict the scale and timing of climate change. Another quarter (£526m) will be raised through providing services to the renewable energy sector, which includes wind, solar and hydroelectric power, as well as nuclear power generation. The Met Office estimates that potential customers in the aviation industry, including foreign air forces, could buy up to £295m of services.”

Are IBM and the Met on to something here? So much of climate change is about adaption and response to conditions that are somewhat unpredictable. In terms of big data and smarter analytics, can weather prediction become even more useful as a pattern predictor that can teach us how to apply analytics in other industries?

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Enterprise IT and the ever shifting focal point

13 Tuesday Oct 2015

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Dell’s planned acquisition of EMC, combined with the upcoming split of HP, highlights a problem that has faced enterprise IT since the beginning of the computing era.

The problem is the shifting focal point of the enterprise portfolio.  In the beginning, we had the centralized resources (mainframe, supercomputer, VAX, CDC, etc).  And the workflow, purchasing, manpower, etc were all centered around it.   Then we hit decentralized computing (minicomputers), distributed computing (UNIX), open source computing, mobile computing, and so forth. We have gone from proprietary OS to more standard OS to open source OS to mobile platforms and so forth.

Here is my point: we no longer have a central focal point, and the enterprise portfolio is now more diverse, more disseminated and from that point, harder to predict or protect. With cloud models and subscription pricing, we even go further down the decentralized path.

IT purchasing has been about decision making at a central point in the organization. And as computing has disseminated into the organization, the ability to sell and create profit as in the previous times has stumped the more centrally oriented IT salesforce. IT vendors need to reorganize themselves to look more like the portfolio of the enterprises they serve.

Just my humble opinion. #backseatdriver

 

Servicing the IoT – an industry onto itself?

11 Sunday Oct 2015

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I was reading the press release from last week’s Gartner Symposium in Florida.  Although I do not agree with the timing of the events they predict, two of them are of distinct interest to me given my own areas of research in marketing automation and IoT infrastructure.

First point:  All of the enabled objects (IoT) will require service and maintenance.  Well, they do now already require service and maintenance, but with the “phone home” ability of connectivity and some level of intelligence, the down time of objects can be significantly reduced.  This will be helpful given our reliance on said objects will increase as a function of their intelligence.

It is likely that an unique service industry will develop in and around IoT objects, and those who provide service to infrastructures will need to add knowledge about internet enabled devices to their portfolio.  Real time automation again rears its head, so those with skills in simulation and utility management will benefit.

Second point: A certain percent of business content will be authored by machines.  [To be frank, given the poor writing skills of many of the millennials I teach, this can only be a good thing. 😉 ]   Seriously, there are many items that can be automated in terms of corporate communication.  I would agree that business reports can become automated and their contents more automatically disseminated. And preferably NOT in terms of increasing the volume of email!

I have to say I like their point 5, and agree with the statement: “Smart building components cannot be considered independently, but must be viewed as part of the larger organizational security process. Products must be built to offer acceptable levels of protection and hooks for integration into security monitoring and management systems.” It is clear that holistically a smarter workplace must be greater than the sum of its parts.   Integration and baking security into the workplace is a necessity for protection of corporate capital.