Removing Data Blockage at the Edge
- By Winston Thomas
- January 14, 2019
The way businesses and consumers use data is evolving rapidly.
Forget the old hub-spoke design; today’s real-time applications and connected enterprises demand immediate processing and analytics near the data source.
The success of smart city applications, intelligent buildings, predictive maintenance, smart manufacturing and autonomous vehicles also depend on faster data processing at the data source.
“We found that companies are changing the way they are using data, and they want to move from a reactive to proactive data [management]. They want to move from analyzing what happened to what is going to happen,” said Asaf Somekh, chief executive officer of Iguazio.
Yet, many enterprises still use age-old data processing architectures that put a data center at the center of all data streams. It results in slower data processing, data congestion at the data center and slow response by AI.
Part of the problem is the complexity and the sheer breadth of various solutions involved in creating a new data IT architecture.
Analyzing the Continuous Promise
Edge IT, which is what the new data IT architecture is proposing, has been debated and talked about for some time. But moving from a centralized data infrastructure to one that brings some of the processing to the edge is not simple.
“Gartner released an amazing number in [2017] that 85 percent of such projects are failing. The main reasons for the failures are complexity and the huge number of technologies, and the way data has to be moved from one platform to another,” said Somekh.
Iguazio is proposing a continuous data design that caters for real-time data processing.
“So, we decided to focus on the problem and build a new technology platform that allows you to actually do real-time applications. So, you can analyze real-time and use AI to predict what is going to happen,” Somekh added.
Furthermore, Iguazio believes its Continuous Data Platform simplifies development and deployment of “high-volume and real-time data processing.”
The approach unearths two additional benefits for data scientists – the ability to easily add or remove new data streams to improve data analytics; and the advantage of choosing different cloud platforms based on workload requirements and adding redundancy in cloud design.
Partnerships Become Vital
Iguazio is not going at it alone. It is inking partnerships with other platform providers so that its customers can easily access compute resources.
For example, a recent partnership will see Iguazio work closely with Equinix to provide a “single unified data platform to power continuous analytics and event-driven applications at scale.”
Equinix Interconnection Oriented Architecture creates the digital edge, while Iguazio leverages the company’s Platform Equinix to run real-time processing and enable compute elasticity for multiple clouds.
Such partnerships offer an important solution for new cloud-native applications.
“As Asia-Pacific nations progress with smart city plans, so does the pressure for technology providers to keep pace with the rapidly changing demands of customers,” said Samuel Lee, President of Equinix Asia-Pacific.
Customers Hail New Design
The new hybrid environment provided by Equinix and Iguazio is already seeing huge interest, especially from ride-hailing apps.
PickMe, Sri Lanka’s leading on-demand transportation app, is using the hybrid design to “achieve better utilization of data and ultimately deliver a more seamless door-to-door transport service.”
Its new data architecture allows the company to experiment with the latest machine learning models in the cloud and deploy them when ready at the edge to run algorithms on “historical and fresh data and prevent fraud.”
For example, PickMe is able to create algorithms that block in real time specific drivers based on their behavior patterns, while providing real-time supply and demand heatmaps to optimize the drivers’ decisions.
“The ever-growing ride-hailing landscape in Southeast Asia deals with constant new vulnerabilities such as fraud and analytical accuracy. By deploying on Iguazio, we are able to deliver innovative programs, increase driver efficiency and maximize the profits of numerous aspects of our ride-hailing business,” said Jiffry Zulfer, chief executive officer of PickMe.
Winston Thomas
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends. He likes to piece together the weird and wondering tech puzzle for readers and identify groundbreaking business models led by tech while waiting for the singularity.