It is not the best of times for the global economy and especially for developed countries. Recent reports suggest that advanced economies are expected to grow by 1.9 percent in 2018, hardly enough to meet their socio-economic requirements. The effect of this slow expansion-rate is most visible in sectors like infrastructure and maintenance. Several developed countries are making bold plans to upgrade their public infrastructure like roads and railways, but are struggling to follow through with them due to rising costs.
Some believe the answer to this bleak situation is data. Alex Sparrow, CTO of the U.K.-based
Quartic Technologies, the right use of data can ease the costs. Speaking to asmag.com about the company’s solution, he elaborated on the importance of data.
“[A] thought worth considering is the economic backdrop to some of the verticals we’re working in - particularly infrastructure maintenance,” Sparrow said. “Western economies are currently struggling with the rising costs of building new roads and railways but also the increasing burden of maintaining existing infrastructure. Reducing these costs through better use of data is becoming more and more important.”
Quartic is building a software platform to power the next-generation data analytics for industrial applications. According to Sparrow, the foundation of this is data integration. From databases and spreadsheets through to real-time telemetry data from IoT devices, the company allows its customers to quickly and simply clean their data and assemble it in one place.
Quartic is building a software platform to power data
analytics for industrial applications.
“The industries we are working in (infrastructure maintenance and manufacturing) are sitting on growing data mountains that need to be synthesized into operational decisions,” Sparrow said. “Which road is in most need of resurfacing work? Which batch of steel on the production line is likely to fail testing and would better be rejected early? Which piece of machinery is likely to experience failure? Our platform enables organizations to solve these problems.”
The important role of integration in data analytics
Having already been identified as an important business field, there are several companies that are already vying for market share in data analytics. Naturally, in a startup scene where the fittest alone can survive, companies have to come up with features that make them unique and stand out from the competition.
Sparrow said that Quartic’s key distinguishing feature is data integration – rapid assimilation and cleaning of data from any source. It is often said that data preparation accounts for 70 to 80 percent of data science and predictive analytics work.
“We are automating this tedious work with artificial intelligence (AI),” he said. "AI systems can automatically analyze, catalog and clean an organization’s data sources to prepare them for analysis or use in operational systems. We are one of the few players in this space to offer first-class support for real-time datasets. This is vital for industrial and IoT use cases. Making use of streaming data requires a fundamentally different approach to analytics - one that we’ve baked into our platform from the start.”
The final piece of the platform is predictive analytics. To Quartic, this means predicting when and how things will fail and what an organization should do to prevent or mitigate these failures. Of course, the key to the superiority of an algorithm lies in the quality and breadth of the data flowing into them.
Industry 4.0 to fuel demand for data analytics
As mentioned earlier, economic constraints that hinder the development initiatives are clearly a factor that can drive demand for analytics. This will be all-the-more evident if we consider that several industries are currently not taking advantage of the data that is generated and are at times not even aware of the possibilities.
Alex Sparrow, CTO, Quartic
Fortunately, the concept of Industry 4.0 and ‘smart’ industries are creating the necessary awareness among companies, encouraging them to move toward the idea of data analytics.
“Demand for data analytics products is high and only set to increase,” Sparrow said. “We have seen that the industries we’re working in are currently severely underserved in this regard, and have seen real appetite from customers to do more with the data they have. The recent buzz around Industry 4.0 and the efficiency improvements it might bring is opening a lot of organizations up to the idea that they can and should do better.”
The future of data analytics
Quartic’s expertise and offering are squarely on the software side of things, but the company does integrate with a number of standard IoT devices as well as mobile devices for data acquisition. AI plays a critical role in its development as it is the core component of several pieces of its product. AI can drastically lower the cost of data integration and cleaning, which is currently a laborious and time-consuming task.
“Our predictive maintenance/failure models are also using AI to power better decision making,” Sparrow said. “We only expect this to become more important over time.”