Ford and Hewlett Packard (HP) have completed a real-world driving experiment that explored ways of improving personalized services, bolstering recommendations for individual drivers and optimizing fleet management.
Image Credit: Ford
The Ford Fleet Insights experiment included HP vehicles equipped with wireless sensors – with Hewlett Packard’s Vertica analytics engine (part of the HP Haven platform) subsequently tapped to explore patterns and multiple dimensions of fleet driver activity.
Interestingly, most drivers participating in the experiment visited the same national coffee house and refueled with the same brand of gasoline – regardless of location. The experiment also found that 70 percent of trips took place during weekdays, with typical trip distances clocking in at 13 miles or less. Meanwhile, traveling employees often left vehicles unused at the airport for days.
As Ford VP and CIO Marcy Klevorn notes, data analysis about commutes and driving routines could ultimately lead to greater economies of scale for company fleets and new solutions for optimizing underutilized vehicles.
“The Fleet Insights experiment is one of the first steps to better understand and learn about how driving behavior is changing,” said Klevorn. “Fleets could see operating costs lowered through national buying contracts and improved utilization and maintenance, while individual drivers could receive coupons or create cooperative pools to share unused vehicles.”
According to Datanami’s George Leopold, HP introduced its Haven predictive analytics package in February to help accelerate machine learning and statistical analysis of evolving data volumes.
“HP upgraded its analytics engine last November with its Vertica for SQL on Hadoop platform designed to provide a pathway to data residing on Apache data lakes as well as other Hadoop distributions,” Leopold added.
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, the use of Big Data analytics spans multiple verticals, including healthcare, smart grids, banking and agriculture. Indeed, Wikibon analysts see the Big Data market topping $84B in 2026, attaining a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the forecast period 2011 to 2026.
Meanwhile, IDC estimates the global Big Data and Analytics market will hit $125B in hardware, software and services revenue this year (2015).
Interested in learning more about Big Data? You can check out our article archive on the subject here.
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