Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The Internet of Racing Machines

    The Internet of Racing Machines

    For the Formula One racing circuit, the financial crisis of six years ago was an opportunity to reinvent the sport; today the teams use a combination of technologies to gain an advantage over their competitors.

    “A few years ago you wouldn’t have been here today,” Francois Puentes, Head Of Account Management at Team Lotus told a group of journalists ahead of this week’s Melbourne Grand Prix. “F1 was a completely different sport.”

    The 2009 financial crisis was the catalyst for the changes Puentes says; “we all sat down as teams at the same table to make the sport more sustainable, this obliged us to run the sport as a business.”

    “Before we didn’t know what the unit cost was for a part. We would very often produce two of the same parts without even knowing what was going on.”

    To tighten their management systems, Lotus bought in a range of cloud based business software such as Microsoft Dynamics and also accelerated its adoption of computerised manufacturing techniques.

    Speeding up development

    Lotus employs over 500 people to keep its two cars on the road and most of the vehicles parts are designed and manufactured at its headquarters in Oxford, England. During the season the team’s workshop may produce up to five hundred replacement or redesigned components each week.

    This brings together a number of technologies including Computer Aided Design, 3D Printing and cloud computing.

    The internet of racing machines

    Massive rule changes have also accelerated Formula One’s adoption of in car technology with information being gathered from sensors throughout the vehicles.

    During races data is transferred from the vehicles’ sensors by radio for the teams’ crews to analyse performance. This includes information like gear box temperature, tyre condition, and aerodynamic performance data.

    Following the race larger volumes of data are downloaded from the vehicle for engineers to tune the car for the next event.

    While Lotus has teamed with technology companies like Microsoft and EMC, rival team Caterham partnered with GE whose Global Research team worked to integrate the technologies demanded by the new F1 rules.

    Global technology

    Caterham’s cars use intercoolers developed in Germany, carbon fibre composites and fibre optic sensors from the United States, and big data analysis techniques developed in India.

    Key to gathering that data are sensors throughout the vehicle that capture a constant stream of data about forces acting on the car during the race, transmitting this information in a far more efficient way than traditional methods which relied on load sensors attached to the suspension.

    The result is massive volumes of raw data. On the track, Caterham cars generate 1,000 points of data a second from more than 2,000 data channels. Up to 500 different sensors constantly capture and relay data back to the team’s command centre for urgent analysis.

    Learning from Big Data

    By applying what the company has learned from its Industrial Internet projects, GE was able to help Caterham cut its data processing time in half, leaving the team in a stronger strategic and tactical position.

    Thanks to these analysis techniques, the Caterham team can look at slices of its data across an entire season, pinpoint setups that were particularly effective, and identify reliability issues earlier.

    Inside the vehicle, GE has also found a way to replace metal pipes with carbon fibre, reducing the overall weight of the vehicle.

    These technology developments will continue to find applications beyond the 2014 Grand Prix season.

    Carbon composites are being used extensively in the aviation industry and big data analysis is playing an important role in the renewable energy sector.

    Lewis Butler, Caterham’s chief designer, says working with GE is helping the team deepen its skills base.

    “GE are working with Caterham to help with the manufacturing process and knowledge transfer, and giving Caterham F1 Team the capability to manufacture its own parts,” he says.

    All the Formula One teams are using Internet of Things technologies to gather information on their vehicles, Big Data tools to manage that information along 3D printing to accelerate their research and manufacturing processes.

    The Formula One world is a glimpse into the future of business as various technologies come together to change the way industries operate.

    Paul travelled to the Melbourne Grand Prix as a guest of Microsoft and Team Lotus.

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  • Using data laws to create an economic advantage

    Using data laws to create an economic advantage

    Yesterday I posted piece on Business Spectator about Australia’s new privacy regulations, little did I know that the European Union Parliament was about to release its own.

    The EU regulations look interesting and certainly seem on  first look to be far more comprehensive than Australia’s effort that I describe as a toothless, box ticking exercise.

    A notable aspect of the EU’s announcement of the new rules is its claim that the updated regulations are expected to generate €2.3 billion in economic benefits each year.

    Whether the EU’s rules prove to be an economic cost – as Australia’s effort will almost certainly turn out to be – or a competitive advantage remains to be seen, however the European Parliament is certainly making a case for data security and privacy protection as being an important selling point in a highly competitive digital world.

    The competitive advantages between countries and continents in the 21st Century will be vary different to those that determined the economic winners of the previous two centuries.

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  • Technology One and cloud computing’s gold rush

    Technology One and cloud computing’s gold rush

    “Consulting companies are a blight on our industry” declares Adrian DiMarco, CEO of Technology One.

    A quick way to rile DiMarco is by asking him about IT outsourcing as I learned during an interview at Technology One’s annual Evolve conference on the Gold Coast last month.

    The 1600 enterprise clients attending this year’s Evolve conference illustrate Technology One’s growth since it was founded in 1987 out of DiMarco’s frustration with the multinational outsourcing companies.

    “I used to work for multinational technology companies and as a young person I really used to want to work for them, I found it very attractive and I expected they’d be very attractive and cutting edge.”

    The reality DiMarco found was very different; “I worked for them for years and found the opposite, just how bad and inefficient they were.”

    “I really didn’t like what I was working with, the software we were using and stuff and I thought we can do it much better here in Australia. The idea was to build enterprise software.”

    Moving to the cloud

    Having built that enterprise software company DiMarco now sees his Technology One’s future lying in cloud services and empahises the importance of learning from the industry’s leaders.

    “We looked at companies like Google, Salesforce, Facebook and Dropbox. These companies are the undisputed leaders in the cloud.

    “One thing that we noticed was that you can’t get Google, Salesforce, Facebook from a hosted provider; you can’t get it from IBM or Accenture.

    “The leaders in the cloud build it themselves so they are deeply committed to it, they run the software for their customers and they invest millions of dollars each year in making the experience better.”

    “It is clearly what the cloud has always meant to be.”

    DiMarco though sees problems ahead as vendors look to rebrand their products and warns businesses need to be careful about cloud services.

    “It is the next big goldrush in the IT industry. IT companies, particularly service companies have over the last few years seen revenues decline so in order to find new sources of growth they are all targeting the cloud.”

    Accountability and the cloud

    The lesson DiMarco learned in the early days of cloud computing was that accountability is necessary when you’re trusting services to other providers.

    “We had early customers that went to the cloud; we said ‘look, it’s a great idea and we think it’s the future’. They wanted to go with hosting providers and we thought it was a sensible decision and we saw a train smash, it was a train smash of epic proportions”

    “They were running data centres overseas in Europe that had latency issues, performance issues and the customers were paying money after money after money.”

    “The customer was getting a terrible performance and there was no accountability.”

    “We couldn’t fix it because we had lost control over the customers.”

    This lack of accountability is one of the reason why so many IT projects fail DiMarco believes, citing the notorious Queensland Health payroll project.

    “Queensland Health again used this fragmented model; the party that built the software, which is SAP, used a third party which was IBM to implement it which meant no accountablity.

    :That would never have happened If SAP had signed the contract, if SAP had implemented the software, which they won’t do, they would have known the risks that were being taken and they would have stopped that project and fixed it up.??“That’s the difference between our model and the competitors model.”

    “They take no responsibility, they implement these systems, they charge a fee-for-service and they have open ended contracts – that’s how they get to be a billion dollars – and do you know who suffers? It’s the customers.”

    Shifting away from consultants

    DiMarco sees governments moving away from the consultant driven model that’s proved so disappointing for agencies like Queensland Health which creates opportunities for Technology One and other Australian companies.

    “For the last fifteen years we’ve not been able to sell software to the state government. It’s just changing, we’re getting in there now, but it was a terrible problem for us.”

    The shift from big consultants is a view endorsed by Sugar CRM co-founder Clint Oram who described how the software business is changing when he spoke to Decoding the New Economy last week.

    Oram sees the software market challenging established giants like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft; “in the past it was ‘here’s my software, goodbye and good luck. Maybe we’ll see you next year.”

    “If you look at those names, the competitors we see on a day-to-day basis, several of them are very much challenged in making the shift from perpetual software licensing.” Oram says, “it’s been a challenge that I don’t think all of them will work their way through, their business models are too entrenched.”

    “Software companies really have to stay focused on continuous innovation to their customers.”

    DiMarco agrees with this view, citing the constant investment cloud computing companies make in their products as being one of the advantages in the business model.

    Building the Australian software industry

    For Australia to succeed in the software industry, DiMarco believes the nation has to encourage and celebrate the industry’s successes.

    “It’s about getting people to believe in Australian software. I think the Aussie tech industry needs a lot more successes we can point to,” DiMarco observes. “I think that will create enthusiasm, excitement and a hub for the rest of the community to get around.”

    “We gotta get some big scale companies with some high visibility and get them successful.”

    For the future of Technology One, DiMarco sees international expansion as offering the best prospects with the company having recently announced a UK management team as part of its push into the British local government market.

    Hopefully DiMarco’s UK management team won’t have to deal with the local management and IT consultants as they try to sell into British councils.

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  • David Cameron and the Internet of Things

    David Cameron and the Internet of Things

    Last year I interviewed the CEO of London and Partners, Gordon Innes, on how Britain’s capital is making a bid to become Europe’s Silicon Valley.

    At the opening of CeBIT last night, UK Prime Minister David Cameron increased the country’s bid with a plan on building Britain’s capability in the digital industries.

    Cameron portrayed the moves as being a partnership with Germany. This may be partly because he was being gracious towards his host and also because the Brits might not see Germany as being a competitor in these fields.

    The fields that Cameron highlighted are deploying 5G networks, more efficient use of spectrum and increasing research into the Internet of Things.

    A research boost is a notable as it may give the Brits a foothold in an area that’s evolving rapidly as the Internet of Things raises a whole range of security, privacy and governance issues.

    While there’s still a sniff of Harold Wilson’s 1963 White Heat of Technology speech in the Cameron government’s policies, at least the British government is articulating policies for the 21st Century.

    It may well be that Cameron’s digital revolution will be no more successful than Wilson’s technological revolution fifty years ago, but at least it will be a brave attempt.

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  • Accountability and security

    Accountability and security

    Security writer Brian Krebs has followed up last year’s story that US credit reporting agency Experian had been selling personal data to Singaporean based identity thieves with the guilty plea from the scheme’s architect.

    Krebs points out that the leader of the identity thieves, Vietnamese national Hieu Minh Ngo, could access up to 200 million consumers’ records.

    It’s almost impossible to say how much theft, fraud and misery was inflicted on innocent Americans who had their personal details misused by Ngo’s customers.

    The amazing thing is it appears that Experian’s executives or shareholders will not suffer any sort of penalty – civil or criminal.

    In an age where companies are collecting masses of data on everyone, it’s inconceivable that those trusted to store and protect that information – particularly credit reporting agencies – seem beyond any accountability for failing in their core responsibilities.

    There’s also the aspect of undermining the US credit system; if merchants and consumers find they can’t trust credit reporting agencies, then offering or getting credit becomes far more difficult and risky.

    Until the management of companies like Experian are held accountable for their incompetence, any talk of safeguarding privacy is empty. It’s why we should treat claims that our data is held safely by government agencies or businesses with a great deal of caution.

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