Oracle has outlined a strategy to exploit the market for 'fast data', with an explanation on how it relates to the 'device to data centre' concept.
Pete Utzschneider, Vice President Product Management at Oracle, sets out the company's position in an audio interview on the company's blogsite, linking the strategy to the growing interest in the "internet of things".
The latter refers to the proliferation of 'edge' devices such as sensors, mobile point of sales units and shop tills that can provide real time data to businesses. Their numbers are rapidly increasing, and they are throwing growing volumes of information at data centres at high speed.
Utzschneider says that companies will want to analyse this data as quickly as they receive it in order to develop new services and get a competitive edge.
"Organisations will have to take 'fast data' and do analysis on the fly," he says. "If you can do that you can provide a responsiveness to enable customer service."
He claims that Java programming language, for which Oracle has held the rights since it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, is likely to play an important part as the platform for developers top create applications to manage fast data. There is a very large community of them, and the company can point to its Oracle Event Processing (OEP) as a software foundation for applications that can handle data in real time.
Utzschneider suggests this makes it possible to create an "event decision architecture" that can be used in making changes in operations and customer service. It is possible to collect the data from a massive number of devices as it becomes available, run it through the OEP engine on a server and make decisions about large and small issues that affect profitability.
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"We believe the 'device to data centre' concept provide a way for organisations to cope with and transform this data to an opportunity," he says.