ThingWorx and the Connected Platform: Capitalizing on “Big Data”
Posted by | December 13, 2011
When a freak earthquake rocked the Northeast in August, citizens of New York City reported reading tweets about the quake before feeling its effects. In surrealistic fashion of Jules Verne prognostication, we can now know about something before it actually happens.
Now that we have essentially hit the limit on how fast information can travel, the next frontier is putting the speed of this information to good, actionable use. Back in February, when we initially deployed capital into ThingWorx, we introduced how the company leverages the concept of the Internet of Things. ThingWorx’s connected platform can capture this flurry of high speed information to open up new frontiers for collaboration between once-siloed tiers of data. Connected world platforms gather the information being sent across your business, all while integrating people, systems, and machines in the process—creating an industrial social network that can help streamline your business.
ThingWorx has applied the concepts of social networking and user empowerment to create a connected world that harnesses the explosion of smart, connected things, and the data flowing through them. For these smart devices to lead to a smarter world, some “intelligence” had to be created to understand the vast amount of data these devices are broadcasting. That’s the power behind ThingWorx’s connected platform.
Entrepreneurs and business leaders have some questions they need to ask themselves if they want to capitalize on the influx of big data, such as:
- What will we do with the intelligence of these devices?
- How will the data coming from these devices create value?
- And what sort of intelligence is needed to coordinate these devices?
These are the issues ThingWorx and its connected platform are currently addressing.
The Connected Platform
ThingWorx is founded on the premise that people and smart devices add important context and content to systems to form an industrial network. The platform provides a foundation for this network by allowing an organization to create constant connections to devices in the field—while combining the once siloed tiers of people, systems, and equipment data.
The platform not only aggregates this information, it searches and analyzes relationships between different pieces of data to find patterns. For example, the platform can identify patterns related to the purchasing tendencies of a customer base, or the status of equipment on a factory floor. By transforming this information into usable data, ThingWorx utilizes this technology to create unrealized value for the connected business.
A Connected Way of Working
In a corporate context, this idea can be largely generalized to the social networks, such as Facebook, that have permeated throughout our society. But this platform provides much more than friend requests; it turns your activity feed into a constant connection to what’s going on within your business, such as the status of deals, meetings that occurred, or a problem in a plant in China.
When you allow people and things to share and comment on those seemingly mundane activities and occurrences, you empower them to discover patterns, and infuse tribal knowledge into an ever-evolving system—creating a growing collective intelligence for your business.
