The Smart Revolution – People, Devices, and Actionable Intelligence

[This article originally written by Bruce Reading.]

The first Internet revolution connected content and people; the second is also connecting “things.” Projections for the Internet of Things (IoT) suggest that 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020, a market opportunity that Gartner estimates at $300 billion. As the digital and the physical worlds collide, data is being generated at increasing speed and volume, “Big Data” gets bigger faster, and an enormous opportunity is being created based on what’s knowable and what is actionable. In Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution, accepted facts and theories give way under the pressure of new ideas and possibilities. Today’s revolution is being fueled by the availability of unprecedented amounts and types of data and technology’s ability to transform that data into actionable intelligence. It’s creating a new dimension in terms of what’s possible – it’s creating the Smart Revolution.

Making things ‘smart’ means adding intelligence to data and dumb devices, creating rich and unique user experiences, having the ability to make decisions per event not only on aggregations. In the smart revolution, value shifts from approximations and post processing of data to analytics and decisions in real-time, i.e., as fast as data arrives. The Smart Revolution is not just about smart phones and watches, it’s about smart everything: products, wearables, cities, farms, grids, buildings, our homes, and sensors of all kinds. It’s changing entire industries as diverse as energy, gaming, finance, transportation, healthcare, and government. It’s transforming them in ways that weren’t possible just a few short years ago.

Applications driving the Smart Revolution have demanding requirements and need next generation underlying architecture to support their volume and speed. These smart applications are in the midst of streams of data produced by 10’s of thousands to millions of users and devices. With data volumes and complex interactions that traditional solutions can’t handle, Smart applications analyze, decide, and respond in REAL real-time, and do it on a per-event basis.  And they require elastic scalable performance to meet rapid changes in demand.

Examples include:

• Smart grid management — based upon micro-second decisioning capabilities, utility companies can manage electrical grids, stabilizing operations during peak demand and emergencies to prevent outages, all while managing their power requirements and profitability with precise visibility for buying and selling energy on secondary markets
• Smart mobile advertising — advertisers need to perform complex interactions on massive volumes of consumer data the moment that data arrives, tracking location and behavioral data in real-time, making the necessary adjustments in milliseconds to ensure optimized customer satisfaction and revenue potential
• Risk/fraud detection — smart security applications need to detect and manage fraud in real-time, managing data events from hundreds of thousands to millions of customers before loss is incurred or any harm has been done
• Gamer experience — online gaming companies create better user experiences and maximize revenue opportunities with intelligence gleaned through analyzing data from millions of users and making complex decisions in the blink of an eye
• Smart healthcare — smart analytics to capture and analyze real-time data from medical monitors are being applied to improve patient care

No Compromises for the Smart Revolution

VoltDB is the only database architected to lead the Smart Revolution. It takes advantage of the latest advances in hardware, virtualization, and cloud computing, delivering super-fast in-memory performance (real real-time, as measured in milliseconds) and unlimited throughput with transactional consistency (ACID-compliant)—all while providing the benefit of SQL and Java with a deploy-anywhere modern scalable architecture. While other database offerings force you to compromise one or more of these capabilities, VoltDB delivers it all – powering the most demanding applications of the Smart Revolution.

We are in the midst of a mind-blowing revolution, a “Smart Revolution,” delivering innovative solutions that optimize business impact in this accelerating, massive and fast moving data-driven world in which we live. VoltDB has partnered with some of the foremost, cutting-edge application and solution providers on the planet, enabling them to create applications that derive maximum value from Big Data. If you are looking to leapfrog your competition, optimize your revenue and profitability, and build killer applications that deliver a rich customer experience, then join the “Smart Revolution” and give us a call. VoltDB can help.