Quench the Thirst for Sensor Data Monetization: Drink from the Firehose

Sensors Expo is the leading industry event for the types of intelligent sensor-integrated systems that are driving the next generation Internet of Everything, Industrial Internet, telematics and Machine-to-Machine services. As a key sponsor in the Big Data and Wireless Systems pavilion, and speaking in the Big Data track, we found the event a great litmus test for the current state of the sensor-related systems’ industries.

This year, the focus was very much on the monetization of intelligent sensors networks. This included how businesses and consumers can benefit from the Internet of Things, but also a focus on infrastructure costs, in particular, architectures for managing the high cost of wireless backhaul for large scale sensor data transmission.

The clues were there at last year’s event, where the focus was not so much real-time operational intelligence and monetization, rather the more fundamental issue of real-time streaming sensor data integration. The main question twelve months’ ago was how can such huge volumes of data from many different sources and locations be integrated into the operational platforms, and at an affordable cost.

Drinking from the Sensor Firehose

The Internet of Everything is the new frontier for real-time Big Data management, where data velocity now trumps data volume as the primary driver, where the geographical distribution of streaming data adds new levels of complexity, and yet the useful lifetime of data, the window within which to make a decision, has decreased dramatically. As data management architectures evolve, each new technology looks to increase real-time visibility and reduce the latency to actions and decision-making.

Which is exactly problem that SQLstream’s VP of Americas, Glen Hout, presented in his session on Real-Time and Big Data: The Perfect Union for Large-Scale Sensor Network Management. SQLstream is a streaming Big Data management platform, sensor data is processed in real-time as they are created, and answers generated with sub-second latency. SQLstream also collects unstructured sensor data of any type and from any number of sources simultaneously, and can deliver multiple aggregated and real-time intelligence to external systems such as operational management platforms, existing data warehouses and Big Data storage platforms.

The Intelligent Edge

However, the issue with the cost of transmission backhaul is also addressed by SQLstream. SQLstream’s agent framework enables intelligent data collection agents to be deployed as close to the data source as possible. Intelligence Agents offer filtering, aggregation and analytics capability at the edge of the network. Depending on the information content in the data, the volume and therefore cost of real-time transmission will be reduced significantly.

So the future is bright, the future is real-time operational intelligence. And to achieve that, requires the next generation of streaming data management and true real-time operational intelligence platforms.