Ferranti Computer Systems Dives into Big Data

Big data is all the rage these days and rightly so. The industry is steadily coming to appreciate the incredible value that can come from the geometric data multiplications occurring each day. The challenge, of course, is organizing the data so that it can be manipulated in a way that it can be analyzed for derivative insights.

Ferranti, a partner with whom we announced a new collaboration agreement last September, has made a big leap into big data organization and analysis within its flagship MECOMS 2012 solution, a business support system that is based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, our powerful enterprise planning solution.

Ferranti’s strategy announcement this week fulfills the promise of the benefits of integration we’ve been talking about for a while now. Ferranti announced that their big data strategy brings large volumes of information to existing functionality of MECOMS, allowing real smart metering and smart billing on one single architecture and technology platform.

Ferranti’s innovations in big data include In Memory Analytics that ensure real time data processing and Smart Volume Streaming, which enables optimized large volume handling. All MECOMS components will be able to make full use of large amounts of data using these innovations. As part of Ferranti’s big data strategy, MECOMS’ smart metering components will enable input, processing and throughput for large volumes of records, fully integrated with traditional components such as asset management, service management, CRM, billing etc.

Ferranti has confidence in the ability of its systems to handle these data quantities because it is combining the new Microsoft SQL Server 2012 features for data-distribution, secondary storage and / or cloud-based Microsoft Azure storage. Industry press like Information Week last year wrote in detail about the integral role of SQL Server 2012 to the Microsoft big data strategy.  The underlying SQL Server story is worth a few minutes of your time as well.

Ferranti posted their press release about their big data strategy here and you might note that it mentions the new architecture complies with the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture. – Jon C. Arnold