PentahoWorld 2015 concluded its conference with a fascinating keynote session highlighting Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence, a company that’s using Big Data successfully. The keynote also wrapped up by announcing 2015 Excellence Award Winners.

Using Big Data successfully with marine ships

“The Internet of Things is here to stay,” said James Stascavage, head of engineering at Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence. “Trillions of data points are going to be evaluated every year.” Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence is leveraging Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), using ETL heavily to make integration for its customers easy. “We make it flexible in the implementation,” he said.

Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence uses data to compare three things when it looks at equipment: It compares a piece of equipment to a standard (how a standard piece of that equipment should respond). Secondly, it compares the equipment to itself over a period of time. Thirdly, it compares to location by tracking how the same types of equipment hold up in different areas of the world, evaluating how environment can impact performance.

Case studies for Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence and Big Data

Stascavage described some interesting case studies where Big Data has been used on large pieces of equipment to help companies save money.  For example, tugboats were seeing failed fuel pumps every few weeks. They used software and sensors to monitor the tugboats, then evaluated the data to figure out how to replace the fuel pumps at exactly the right time, saving that particular tugboat company $35,000 per year. “This was absolutely easy to do,” said Stascavage. “This was an instant return on the customer’s investment.”

Using collected data from tugboats, Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence helped another tugboat company realize that it needed to reduce idle time for its tugboats, saving the company over $2 million dollars annually. Another example was helping a roll-on/roll-off shipping company realize that increasing hull cleanings of its vessels to six times every two years instead of once every two years, the company was going to save almost a million dollars. “We were able to transform data into information and information into dollars,” said Stascavage.

2015 Excellence Awards 

The keynote address culminated with Rod Squires, Executive VP of worldwide sales at Pentaho Corp., presenting the 2015 Excellence Awards to five key companies making waves in the Big Data world. There were five categories with five winners, and the contestants were judged on three criteria: Creativity, impact and business value.

Winning for the Big Data category was the company Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA), which has developed a surveillance program that analyzes data for potential fraud and other suspicious activity. Winning for Enterprise Deployment was CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The Best ROI category winner was Mo’mix Solutions; this company helps local governments and education organizations understand their data and trust it. BlackArrow, Inc. won the Embedded Analytics category; it is a company that is changing the game on Big Data analytics for video. Rounding out the last category was TIDAL for Platform Innovation. TIDAL is changing the paradigms of the music industry by allowing artists to push their music out for a fraction of the cost of a typical record label.

FINRA walked away with the Overall Winner award. “We at FINRA are really excited with what we’ve been able to accomplish so far,” said Matt Cardillo, software applications director of FINRA. “As we look to the future, we’re even more excited.”

Echoing that excitement, PentahoWorld 2015 successfully highlighted innovative businesses using Big Data in a diverse spectrum of industries.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE