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Earlier we discussed about the launch of Amazon Quicksight, analytics for a) Messenger bots, b) application of machine learning in Google Translate and c) Intel’s Nervana strategy. In this post, PromptCloud will cover the latest news and events from the data analytics and cloud computing field.
1. McKinsey Releases Report on The State of Data Science
This month McKinsey Analytics and McKinsey Global Institute published a report–The Age of Analytics Competing in a Data Driven World. In this report, they have studied the adoption of data analytics and its business value delivery. This year they have noticed the application of data science across industries, especially in the field of machine learning and deep learning. Here are some of the salient points from the report.
- Location-based services and U.S. retail are the leading industries when it comes to capturing value from data and analytics. They predict that there is ample scope for businesses to gain new insights by capturing geospatial data to track assets, teams, and consumers spread across varied locations.
- Machine learning’s greatest application across industries lies in the improvement of forecasting and predictive modelling. After analyzing 120 most important use cases of machine learning, they weighted them as per respondents’ mention of each. Here is the resultant heat map.
- In the next three, there will be significant adoption of Machine learning to deliver real-time optimization across industries.
- In the present day, the two vital use cases of machine learning are empowerment of autonomous vehicles and personalization of advertisements.
- The top three barriers to accomplish data and analytics goals are
- Designing an appropriate organizational structure to support data and analytics activities (45%)
- Ensuring senior management involvement (42%)
- Designing effective data architecture and technology infrastructure (36%)
- In the last five years, U.S. retailer supply chain operations have witnessed up to 19% increment in operating margin by applying machine learning techniques.
- In the manufacturing industry, the primary areas where analytics can provide significant improvement are design-to-value, supply chain management and after-sales support.
2. Nokia to Buy IP Network Analytics Company Deepfield
On 15th December, Nokia announced that they would be acquiring U.S. based IP analytics vendor Deepfield. According to the Finnish company, the cloud service providers and large enterprises don’t have much idea about what’s going on with their network. Hence, this deal will enable Nokia to extend its leadership in real-time, analytics-driven network and service automation by delivering advanced solutions that can provide insights on network and application. This can also be applied to better protect networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Founded in 2011, Deepfield performs real-time analytics to provide insights on application demand and data flows. They monitor traffic from around 30,000 of the most popular cloud apps and services and detect changes with respect to the way it flows through networks. Nokia intends to use this to bolster the SDN (software-defined networks) platform, Nokia Network Services Platform (NSP) and the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP).
Most of the customers of Deepfield are primarily based out of the U.S. (Time Warner and Comcast are the prominent ones). Nokia expects to close this deal by March 2017 and has plans to sell the solutions to global customers.
Craig Labovitz, founder and CEO of Deepfield commented:
“We are very pleased to join Nokia, a like-minded global leader in IP networking with shared values in network innovation. I look forward to leveraging the strength of Nokia’s world-class customer, sales and support footprint to take our Deepfield technology worldwide.
This will also give us a solid foundation from which to accelerate the creation of new value — both in the Deepfield portfolio and in joint areas such as telemetry and automation.”
3. Amazon Launches AWS Managed Services
Public cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch AWS Managed Services, a solution specifically tailored for larger enterprises who would like to get benefits of a public cloud. Although many of the larger companies use AWS, this solution can be a good fit for many big companies who are still following the old-school approach and aren’t excited enough to use AWS. It conceals some of the existing tools used for AWS administration and monitoring and depends on the AWS workforce to manage the complex aspects of the job.
Although IBM offers a similar solution, Google and Microsoft are yet to get into managed cloud services. There are some other companies like 2nd Watch, Datapipe, and Cloudreach who offer cloud computing infrastructure management solutions. The interesting thing to note here is that partners like Rackspace also offer management of applications that run on top of AWS. Now clients will be able to either go with the partners or simply use the official managed solution. There is no doubt that this solution will put pressure on the AWS partners.
According to Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist, this solution is targeted at the Fortune 1000 and Global 200 companies. It has tools for data backup, patch management of software and operating systems, intrusion detection, and expenditure tracking. The price will depend on the number of AWS computing resources a company utilizes.
