"If you are inundated with data from many sources, you have to be able to understand what the data means and then react quickly."
CEO, Dr William L Bain
The ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service is capable of fundamentally changing the way industries such as healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, and financial services process live data streams. Through the application of real-time digital twins, its technology can simultaneously analyse telemetry from thousands of streaming data sources, allowing its users to gain real-time insights to make critical decisions. ScaleOut’s new technology also minimizes development time by enabling applications to be easily constructed with concise, real-time digital twin models, utilizing numerous popular streaming cloud data sources, including Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Core, Apache Kafka and REST.
ScaleOut Software - founded in 2003 by its CEO Dr. William L. Bain – specialize in developing software that delivers scalable, highly available, in-memory computing and streaming analytics technologies for a wide range of industries. With 450 customers worldwide, its range of solutions already facilitate mission critical applications, such as airline reservation systems, online banking, customer support and eCommerce needs, where data is critical to the success of the business and must be available immediately.
“We use the term maximizing situational awareness to describe the benefit that our technology provides. It allows us to ingest data from many sources, analyse it independently for each source, analyse it in aggregate, and then to address those needs in a matter of seconds.” says their CEO, Dr. William L. Bain
The company’s powerful new streaming analytics platform offers important benefits in numerous industries. However, one immediate area where ScaleOut’s Software could prove invaluable is in the fight against COVID-19 to help hospitals track inventories and equipment such as masks and ventilators, so they can move them to where the biggest needs are.
“To track the needs of hospitals, you need to be able to ingest data from thousands of sources that would traditionally be held in a database and then analyzed offline, which takes a long time. Being able to quickly assess where an urgent need is emerging requires technology such as ours, so you can track independent needs and initiate a response immediately.” explains Dr Bain
Another potential COVID-19 application for ScaleOut Software’s digital twin approach would be with voluntary contact tracing.
“This is the ideal technology for hosting data about contacts between people, so that if someone tests positive for COVID-19 you can very quickly find all of their contacts. It allows you to track many data sources independently and react immediately to changes,” continues Dr Bain.
It is also clear that there are numerous applications in the wider healthcare sector. For example, by being able to track data from devices such as pacemakers and smartwatches in combination with data on the wearer such as their medical history, current medication and activity, you can obtain much better information in real time. Another potential application is in the tracking of medical refrigerators, where it would allow users to monitor the data from thousands of refrigerators in aggregate. Should there be a failure in a hospital, users could immediately react before vaccines or human organs become useless and find which nearby refrigerators have capacity, where they could be moved.
Another area where ScaleOut Software’s technology could make a huge impact is in disaster recovery.
“If you are inundated with data from many sources, you have to be able to understand what the data means and then react quickly” explains Dr Bain.
“In a disaster recovery scenario, you need to be able to identify the real problem and how it is moving and then have the ability to stage your resources to deal with it. You have to know where all the disaster supplies are kept, how long they’ve been there, what temperatures they’ve been kept at and exactly where they’re needed most.”
With so many potentially life changing applications of this technology, it seems surprising that streaming analytics are not already more widely adopted. We asked Dr Bain why he thought this was the case.
“Streaming analytics up until now has only largely been used for finding patterns and trends in aggregated data streams such as in stock feeds. It has not been utilised to provide the granularity of analysis that the Digital Twin approach can. This approach gives us a real advantage in identifying patterns as they emerge from individual data sources and then aggregating the result, instead of the other way around.”
ScaleOut Software have remained leaders in in-memory computing technology for the last 17 years and it is clear from speaking with them why this is.
“It’s important to make sure you listen to your customers and develop a product that meets a genuine problem, although sometimes you have to lead the customer when you offer something that is cutting edge. You also need to maintain focus so you can produce a high quality solution, while meeting your customers’ needs and gaining market traction,” said Dr Bain.
“It is also about picking the right people to team up with,” adds COO David Brinker. “The combined experience of people with different skills, perspectives and knowledge allows you to minimise the risk of mistakes. It’s a real joy to be able to work with other dedicated people to drive forward a company’s strategic direction.”
The ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service will help organizations all over the world dramatically improve the situational awareness in their live systems, spanning thousands or even millions of data sources. Whether tracking critical medical supplies or a population of smart watch users, real-time digital twins are a game changer in the world of streaming analytics.
