MapD Partners on Network Analytics Platform

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High-flying analytics software vendor MapD Technologies is partnering with Canadian mobile data vendor Tutela Technologies on an analytics platform that provides real-time metrics on mobile network performance and device usage.

The GPU-powered platform dubbed Tutela Explorer will combine visualizations with large data sets to help gauge the performance of mobile networks and the devices they support, the partners announced on Thursday (Aug. 3). The analytics platform is touted as providing insights into mobile network performance by region down to street level.

Queries extract insights in the form of visual analytics sourced from hundreds of million of mobile devices, positioning the platform as a tool that would allow mobile carriers to spot network problems based on real-time data.

“Tutela’s device network records over a billion measurements every day which the telecom industry needs to visualize in real-time,” said MapD CEO Todd Mostak.

The partners also noted that the service can zero in at the level of cellular towers to identify problems, discern usage trends or fine-tune mobile infrastructure.

The partnership also seeks to analyze claims by mobile phone competitors AT&T (NYSE: T), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), T-Mobile and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) that each has the fastest mobile network. The issue of mobile network quality also is vital to wireless providers in a fiercely competitive market. “Ensuring you are outpacing your rivals with superior network metrics is a key ingredient to both marketing and market share success,” MapD’s Mike Gardner noted in a blog post announcing the partnership with Tutela, which is based in Victoria, B.C.

MapD’s GPU-based approach has been combined with Tutela’s mobile information platform considered among the largest in the industry. The crowd-sourced data includes mobile devices, networks and applications. MapD said it put together more than 100 million rows of data in building the mobile analytics platform.

Tutela’s Explorer platform combines the company’s huge set of mobile data with MapD’s analytics software to gauge metrics ranging from coverage areas, 3G and 4G coverage areas signal strength, network latency as well as all-important uploads and downloads speeds.

Those data points are then merged into visualizations generated by MapD’s GPU-powered, in-memory, columnar SQL database. The partners claim the combination of mobile data and analytics capabilities results in interactive analysis of billions of rows of data along with the ability to probe an individual row of mobile data.

San Francisco-based MapD uses Nvidia’s GPUs to run enterprise applications that include machine learning and numerical computations. The GPU-based SQL query engine combines with data visualization that are designed to allow analysts and data scientists to crunch multi-billion-row data sets.

GPU powerhouse Nvidia is an investor in MapD. Founded in 2013, MapD Technologies originated from research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Other seed investors include In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

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