Rarely a week goes by without us reporting on a new enterprise Hadoop use case, partnernship or integration. But this one’s particularly intriguing; Vivint have spoken about how their smart home services are being fuelled by Cloudera.
The Internet of Things has certainly garnered alot of hype as term; Brandon Bunker, senior director, customer analytics and insights at Vivint explains why. ““We’ve taken that one step further with Cloudera and can now look across many data streams simultaneously for behaviors, geo-location, and actionable events in order to better understand and enrich our customers’ lives,” he told Gigaom. “This platform has differentiated our business and given us a tremendous competitive advantage.”
Vivint’s customers have on average 20-30 sensors installed in their homes, which each constantly garner data about their environment. How do you glean any insights from this vast trough of seemingly innocuous data? Well, that’s where Cloudera comes in.
“When we consider all the net new data generated by devices embedded with sensors and geo-location services that hasn’t been touched before, we open ourselves to new possibilities,” states Cloudera’s VP of Marketing Alan Saldich, “to realize not just new revenue streams for business but to solve much bigger problems because we can dive into those points of convergence in our world.”
Of course, as well as supposedly solving bigger problems, the Internet of Things creates them too. It could have obvious positive impacts- switching off appliances when they’re not being used and saving energy, or using sensor data to design optimal homes. Of course, their are benign self-interested uses for companies too- if you can figure out how people are using their homes, you can figure out which products to pitch to them to make their lives easier. But of course, there’s the issue of how much we’re willing to share, and where exactly video footage and sensor data from our most intimate surroundings is actually going.
Certainly, smart homes are an intriguing prospect, and a concept which could open up many opportunities- but the impact they’ll have upon privacy remains to be seen.
