Vibe Data Stream [Vibe] and Virtual Data Machine [VDM] combine at the center of Informatica’s Internet of Things strategy. Primarily for Machine-to-Machine [M2M] data, and by connecting through Power Center, ultimately leading to Machine-to-Human [M2H] Data. The goal is to have VDMs residing in mobile devices, sensor packages, or as part of sensor networks. At this point, VDMs require more processing power than available in most components. Thus, Vibe and VDM are primarily suited today to data, network operations, and communication centers.
However, Informatica is seeing a broad range of use cases involving both large machines and sensor networks, from many different sectors including
- telcos,
- oil and gas,
- financial services,
- government,
- data center operations, and
- building services.
The Proof is Out There
One Proof of Concept [PoC] currently underway is with a Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning [HVAC] company. In the PoC, the HVAC company is looking at streaming data from all of their installations. Using Informatica products, they are bringing this data into their data center for both streaming and batch analytics. There are actually three use cases being examined in this PoC:
- Improving customer service
- Internal analytics on generic patterns of use for improved design, reliability and maintainability
- Predictive maintenance from the provider rather than from the building management team
Other field trials look at Vibe and VDM capabilities in regard to Pub/Sub models working with Informatica Ultra Messaging, as well as persisting data in all forms of data stores from traditional Enterprise Data Warehouses [EDW] to Hadoop [HDFS] and NoSQL databases such as Cassandra. These field trials involve solving the ongoing problems of the different areas mentioned above.
- In a financial services case, both application log data and financial information exchange [FIX] log data are being used to pull in log data real time for market, order flow and trade data.
- For online retail, Vibe is used to track web-site visitor paths through the site using log data.
- Data center operational efficiency optimization for green IT, sustainability or improving the bottom line through log data from switches, servers, applications and call centers.
- For one governmental agency, Informatica Vibe and VDM are maintaining the Service Level Agreement [SLA] in real time, for 800 separate field organizations over more than a million devices, using industry-standard Security Content Automation Protocols [SCAP] data formats.
Perhaps the most involved trials begin done to date with Informatica Vibe and VDM, are within the Telecommunications space. As one might expect, the explosion of data and customer expectations, as cellular goes from 2G to 3G to 4G/LTE requires real-time management of ever increasing amounts of data. But also the wireline/fiber and cable use cases are exploding as the traditional market places of voice, entertainment and connectivity intertwine.
Out to the Edge
Informatica is aggressively working with partners, such as chip, sensor and package manufacturers, to understand how to optimally implement Vibe, whether that is through streaming collection capability of Vibe on the device itself or as part of the larger infrastructure at some point in the collection tier to implement the needed streaming collection. Currently, collecting sensor data can hit performance limits using the sensor or communication base protocols. Thus, for example in the oil and gas industry, Informatica is working with both vertical-specific sensor manufactures and large organizations in the industry, to determine how Vibe can supplement or even replace the collection tier.
SAE Fit
What Informatica brings to evolving sensor analytics ecosystems [SAE] is not only their specific technologies of Vibe and VDM, but combining these with a complete package for supporting streaming analytics, operational intelligence, complex event processing [CEP], batch analytics, predictives, reporting, data marts and EDW, through their existing technology families such as Ultra Messaging, Power Center, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and more, both through traditional and Cloud deployments. This results in bringing mature market features to the SAE in the form of
- Guaranteed delivery
- Automated zero latency fail-over
- Centralized GUI administration
- No intermediary staging of data at source, broker, or target
- Fail-over does not require shared file systems
References
This blog post is based upon both the Informatica Press release referenced below, briefings at last year's Informatica Analyst Days and a private briefing from the Informatica team. This allowed us to gather more information and get answers to our questions. Also referenced are other of our blog posts on IoT and Big Data, for context.
- Informatica Press Release from Strata + Hadoop World
- What does IoT All Mean
- The IoT and Change
- Big Data: It’s Not the Size, It’s How You Use It
- New Hope from Big Data
licensed under a Creative Commons License.