February 2014

Sponsored by Treasure Data Inc.

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Although much of the popular market attention has focused on the devices on the Internet of Things, the real monetary value emerges from the business’ ability to effectively use the data they generate and on IT’s skill at capturing, storing and managing it. This paper explores the uses and challenges of the Internet of Things, drawing on examples of business use cases, and positions the data processing needs in the context of traditional data warehousing, big data and cloud computing. It also describes a new managed service cloud offering, Treasure Data, which is structured rather like a traditional three-stage data warehouse. 

Abstract

The interest over the last few years in big data is rapidly moving to a subset of such data–that generated by the Internet of Things. The aim is to place ever smaller and cheaper sensors in almost every object conceivable and connect them all through the Internet in order to monitor and predict physical reality. This apparently simple idea will revolutionize business and IT support needed in the next few years. While the current hype is undoubtedly huge, the potential disruption if even 20% of the hype happens is enormous.

Although much of the popular market attention has focused on the devices, the real monetary value emerges from the business’ ability to effectively use the data they generate and on IT’s skill at capturing, storing and managing it. The first section of this paper broadly explores the uses and challenges of the Internet of Things, drawing on examples of the business uses that are emerging, while the second section positions the data processing needs in the context of traditional data warehousing, big data and cloud computing.

The third section of the paper positions a new managed service cloud offering, Treasure Data, which is structured rather like a traditional three-stage data warehouse, but is optimized for many of the aspects of data from the Internet of Things. Finally, the paper provides some initial considerations and next steps for the journey to gaining real benefit from this emerging phenomenon.