Today was the main day of the Melbourne Cisco Live Conference; the company’s annual Australian event.
Much of the talk was around the Internet of Everything — which will be the basis of subsequent posts — with a constant theme around the explosion of data.
A favourite statistic was that of Cisco’s Executive Vice President who pointed out that US Department store Walmart collects 2.5 Petabytes of customers data every hour.
The reason for this was pointed out by GE’s Australia and New Zealand CIO, Mark Sheppard, who pointed out that twenty years ago jet engines had few sensors while today they have hundreds, a point also made by Team Lotus’ Engineering Director Nick Chester to Networked Globe.
Chester observes that when he started in Formula One racing two decades ago, there were four or five sensors on a racing car; today Lotus’ vehicles have over two hundred.
All of these sensors are creating massive amounts of data and the big challenge for businesses is to manage all of this information, something we’ll be exploring over the next few weeks.