After writing my last blog on the government use of cloud solutions, I attended two events and found solutions that can address the need of leveraging data analytics toimproving business outcomes. The internet of things has been a hot term for a long time and the associated challenge has always been on how to leverage this data. Challenges facing governments in collecting a wide realm of data from multiple sources has been a perpetual challenge but cloud computing and big data analytics makes it a “solvable” problem.

There are some major characteristics that such solutions need to have:

• Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tools or similar process capabilities
• Data Warehouse
• Data Mining
• Real Time Stream Processing
• Dashboard Capability

If you want to learn more on how to start on this path, do plan to attend Cloud Computing Bootcamp held as a track with 10th Cloud Expo in NYC from June 11-14, 2012.

Here were the two events I referred to above:

1. At IBM Pulse, I found an IBM offering called Intelligent Operations Center providing a dashboard to view various government services.  However, any dashboard has to be powered by data.  Behind the scenes in this offering is the infrastructure and framework required to collect real time data from multiple sources.  As any new software offering, it boasts being available through the cloud or by any city’s own data center.  As a middleware provider, IBM has taken this platform and built smarter city offerings around transportation and water use cases.

2. The GigaOM Structure Data conference in New York City was primarily focused on BigData with a number of emerging companies demonstrating solutions monetizing the process of turning data into intelligence.  After visiting the SQLStream exhibit, I met Damian Black, the CEO of SQLStream who explained the business value of their product and how it helped New South Wales, Australia with their transportation problems. SQLStream seems to specialize on the real time stream processing as their niche capability that makes it simple to implement for specific use cases that needs that capability.

The examples of SQLStream and IBM shows that there is movement to process this data into actionable insights.

The challenge for both solutions is delivery of solutions to the vast customer set of customers in multiple geographies and under different regulations.  The key would be to leverage ISV’s and partners to enable execution for very real problems faced today.

As big data and cloud computing progresses, there will be more vendors pouncing on the opportunity to provide a platform for the internet of things to feed data into a warehouse and then being able to provide users with insight never possible before.  There is plenty of room of opportunity for multiple solutions.

Organizations need to build a strategy in helping them evaluate their current business processes.  If you want to learn more on how to start on this path, do plan to attend Cloud Computing Bootcamp held as a track with Cloud Computing Expo in NYC from June 11-14.