Analytics: The New Frontier for Business Competitiveness

Not that long ago, data analysis focused mainly at looking backward to understand things that happened in the past. Today, thanks to Moore’s Law and the resultant advances in computing and memory technologies, analytics can now tell us what is happening in real time and help us predict what will happen in the days to come.

This landmark shift in our ability to extract value out of data is a key enabler for the new digital service economy. In this new era, an organization’s competitive edge increasingly hinges on its ability to turn an avalanche of data into actionable insights that improve operations and guide the creation of essential new products and services.

This isn’t an opportunity that is limited to Web 2.0 businesses or high-tech powerhouses. The opportunity for pervasive analytics and insights spans virtually all industries—from healthcare to transportation, from banking to manufacturing.

With powerful analytics solutions, physicians can diagnosis illnesses faster and create personalized treatment plans. Retailers can better understand buying behaviors to stock up on the products people are most likely to need. Car manufacturers can use predictive failure analysis to make repairs proactively—before customers find themselves stuck on the side of the road.

While these examples are diverse, they all share a common central focus: the combination of big data and high-powered computing solutions with sophisticated technologies like in-memory analytics that accelerate time to insight. And this is where the latest generation of Intel® Xeon® processors enters the picture.

The new Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 family is designed to accelerate real-time analytics on enormous datasets with sizes of multi-terabyte and even petabyte-scale. With up to 20 percent more cores, threads, cache, and system bandwidth than previous-generation processors, the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family makes fast work of complex, high-volume transactions and queries.

In addition, we’ve added an expanded memory footprint to support in-memory analytics—one of the keys to gaining immediate insights from big data. We’ve also added sophisticated technologies like Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions to boost simulation performance, Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX) to accelerate OLTP performance, and Intel® Run Sure Technology to support mission-critical uptime and advanced data integrity.

Let’s consider a couple of real-life examples of the potential to put powerful analytics and simulation tools to work in conjunction with Intel Xeon processors to help organizations extract value from big data in real time:

• FarmLogs uses analytics tools and high-powered computing solutions to help farmers make their land more productive. It achieves this goal by putting sensors on farm machines, connecting the machines to Internet, and analyzing data streams in real time. With an instant view of how different areas of their fields are performing, farmers can adjust seed, fertilizer and other variables to best match the field conditions. This helps them avoid waste and improve the productivity of the field.

• Pacific Northwest Seismic Network uses big data analytics to provide the public and others with early warnings about earthquakes and ground motions. The organization is now working to develop the ability to warn people about earthquakes before the shaking has reached them—to give them precious seconds, or maybe even a minute, to protect themselves and those around them.

There is a broader theme to consider here: Data-driven insights can improve the human condition—whether it’s increasing food production, saving lives when earthquakes strike, or meeting some other goal that can be achieved only with real-time insights gleaned from massive amounts of data.

At a business level, data analytics are increasingly tied to competitiveness. In fact, we believe that within three to five years data analytics will become the No. 1 data center application in terms of importance to the business. In virtually every industry, organizations will change their processes to take advantage of analytics to improve operations, products, and personalization.

To enable this transformation, Intel is working to democratize actionable insights by making analytics and simulation tools easy to deploy, easy to use, and efficient to run. And, as always, we are working with a broad ecosystem to provide open solutions and flexible tools to meet diverse customer needs.

For a deeper dive into the capabilities of the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 family, visit intel.com/ITcenter.