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November 6, 2014

Platfora Introduces Analytics Offering for IoT

DUBLIN, Ireland, Nov. 6 — Platfora, the #1 native big data analytics platform for Hadoop, today introduced an analytics solution for the Internet of Things (IoT) that enables business users to work with machine and sensor data at scale without significant support from the IT department. With Platfora, organizations can create a data-driven analytics culture that accelerates development of new products and services, and enables them to correlate multi-structured data across the enterprise to prevent risk and create a better customer experience.

“Imagine IoT data as an iceberg. The challenge that organizations face is that the great majority of IoT data is below the waterline, which cannot be accessed by traditional analytics tools without long cycles of data preparation,” said Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora. “If you can’t easily work with data below the waterline, you cannot participate in the IoT era because it’s impossible to answer complex behavioral questions that arise when analyzing these new types of machine, transactional and customer interaction data.”

There are few better examples of business success in the IoT era than Vivint, a leading U.S.-based provider of smart home technology including solar, security and control solutions. The company deployed Platfora to provide new insights and conduct visual analytics on machine and sensor data gathered in its ecosystem of enterprise data systems and millions of home automation devices. During one product quality monitoring exercise, analysts discovered anomalies in a small group of customer home systems. They could not pinpoint the problem using traditional analytics tools, so analysts worked iteratively in Platfora with various sensor and machine data sets until they found a consistent pattern, which turned out to be a minor manufacturer’s defect. This discovery enabled Vivint to roll service trucks to customer homes and solve the problem before most of them became aware of the situation.

The Industry’s First Analytics Platform Built for IoT

Platfora Big Data Analytics is a full-stack, native-Hadoop platform that enables analysts, business professionals and data scientists to iteratively work with data in the rawest forms, so they don’t have to structure data and form queries beforehand. Users work collaboratively in an intuitive, visual analytics environment, and can achieve insights on IoT-native data varieties (i.e. JSON, XML) with billions of unique values. With Platfora’s analytics solution for IoT, users can perform advanced data functions including:

  • Segmentation. Partition groups of connected devices and machines based on patterns of behavior and attributes, and via advanced analysis. Segmentation takes the anonymity of big data sets and makes them manageable and actionable for analysts.
  • Deep behavioral analysis. The ability to correlate the behavior of devices and data across the extended enterprise to conduct path analyses that reveal system success or failure, and device dependencies. This capability supports new product development, existing product performance analysis and security risk profiling, among other IoT use cases.

“Providing non-technical employees with self-service access to data in Hadoop is creating lots of new business opportunities for our company and is helping us deliver a better customer experience,” said Brandon Bunker, senior director of customer analytics and intelligence at Vivint. “Platfora Big Data Analytics is purpose-built for these kinds of tasks. The platform is lightning fast, presents our data in a visually stunning way, and it’s surprisingly easy to use.”

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