Machine Generated Data

What is it, and why am I talking about it? I have had the pleasure of spending a good deal of time with many of our customers over the last few months. The feedback, and especially the stories are great! I have enjoyed each and every conversation. Moreover, I have seen a strong recurring theme. Infobright is particularly well suited to providing organizations the ability to analyze Machine Generated Data.

When this is the task at hand, we deliver a unique advantage because of our “Knowledge Grid”. Machine Generated Data is not industry specific, although it is more prevalent in some than others, and it is not machine type specific, and that list of types keeps growing. Machine Generated Data means data that is automatically generated without direct human intervention. It can mean Call Data Records generated by a telecom switch like many of our customers are utilizing to perform analytics needed for quality assurance monitoring. It can mean network device readings that many customers are analyzing to ensure network quality and optimization. It can also be readings from instrumentation of laboratory equipment, used by many of our customers to assess test outcomes where the quantity of the lab readings is so large that without Infobright the analysis would be less thorough, perhaps even resorting to data sampling instead of holistic analysis. And it can mean much more, from RFID signals to weblogs to stock market data.

The market for analyzing Machine Generated Data is a large and growing one. The characteristics are very straightforward: there tends to be a large number of records added in a short period of time which are seldom modified and are typically populating a finite set of targets. In some ways it is a very straightforward environment. That said, typical relational databases do not lend themselves to analyzing this data once it begins to grow, which in most cases happens very quickly. And the alternative is often viewed as a general purpose data warehouse, which is typically a high cost, painful effort. Our customers have shown me that time and time again they are able to break through the performance and scalability wall posed by traditional databases without having to incur the time, money, and ongoing headaches associated with implementing a general purpose data warehouse. Don’t get me wrong, I have huge respect for those general purpose solutions. In most cases, they do much more than we do here at Infobright. That’s OK. Our goal is not to be an “all things to all people” offering. Our goal, which we seem to be doing better and better now, is to provide the easiest, absolutely most cost effective option if you need to analyze Machine Generated Data. And we mean that both in terms of how easy and cost effective it is to get up and running, as well as how easy and cost effective it is to maintain the environment over time.

Machine Generated Data is everywhere. When I am on the computer or my phone, the device is generating it. When I drive my car, it is being generated. When I am at the doctor’s office, the medical equipment is generating it. When I am on an airplane, it is generating it. Have a Toll Pass? Credit Card? Security System? All machine generated data. I have probably learned more in the last six months than any period in my life. It turns out, Machine Generated Data is really cool. And it’s really Infobright.