Data is at the core of guiding strategic business decisions that drive organizations goals, objectives and initiatives. The power of data-driven decision making however cannot be fully realized until the necessary data is collected, blended, organized and presented in the right context. In today’s world, the volume of data generated from different sources such as IoT devices and applications are increasing exponentially. To cope with this data growth and to consume meaningful data, organizations that rely on fact-based (data) business decisions should start investing in platforms that can efficiently handle huge datasets in any format ensuring fast ingestion, retrieval, and meaningful transformation of data.
Another aspect that needs consideration is how fast the decisions can be made. For this, it is very important to hook up the analytics to near real-time data warehouses or data stores. In this data-driven path involving a huge volume of data and real-time processing, it is critical to have a highly scalable and flexible system. A cloud-based data platform with cutting edge software solutions can help achieve this through its flexibility of on-demand computing/infrastructure scalability.
“Any time scientists disagree, it’s because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I’m right, or you’re right, or we’re both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
This white paper examines how companies can add value to their business by using AOT (Alpha Ori Technologies) VIO as the source of their data needs.
AOT VIO is a SaaS cloud-based, highly scalable, near real-time data exchange and analysis platform for the maritime business industry.It is built to support multi-tenants in a highly secured environment by storing data in customer-centric isolated storage space. It is a system that can answer “YES” to customers’ questions like – “Do I have the right meaningful data at the right time?”.
AOT VIO combines the power of data warehousing for AOT SMARTShip™ applications along with data exchange integrations from/to external vendors and major maritime data sharing platforms through APIs. It also supports structured and semi-structured data in any file format. It is an integrated solution that allows the ingestion and curation of data from various sources such as SMARTShip™, Ship ERP, Class Registry, 3rd party systems, etc.
With VIO, customers can take advantage of various data points that originate from different sources using a single data platform. With our consolidated and governed data, which includes time series and reports data originating from various sources (vessels, applications), valuable insights can be gained without any additional effort. With the planned integration of external service providers like weather, customers will be able to produce actionable insights by blending such data points from different sources. Ultimately, VIO can deliver the best insights for planning fleet operations by assessing each vessel’s performance, including total fuel oil consumption (TFOC), better clarity on port arrival times, total voyage duration and much more.
With so much information out there about the various cloud and in-house data platform options, how will you know in which direction to proceed when it’s time to take a decision and modernize your data management strategies?
Our evaluation criterias shown below can help you to better understand the power and easiness of VIO, our cloud-based data exchange platform as a service. The comparison also shows how VIO can accelerate your data analytics initiatives through its well formed infrastructure in cloud with established third party integrations.
Evaluation basis | Using VIO | Building an in-house data platform |
---|---|---|
Improved business insight | VIO can provide a huge data set collected from vessels operated globally through SMARTShip applications and other third-party applications including ShipERP. The data provided by VIO can also be blended with other data sources to get better business insights. | Building a new industry standard data exchange platform requires a lot of time and resources. Customers will also need to establish integration agreements with third-party vendors to consume data from them. |
External integrations | By making use of VIO’s established integrations with external vendors, businesses can activate new datasets and solve complex business problems quickly: a. NAPA integration through Ship Data Center (ShipDC) b. ERP Integration (ShipPalm) | Will not be able to take advantage of VIO’s established third-party integrations. |
Leverage the analytics built by AOT-SMARTShip | With our existing bi-directional integration of AOT VIO and AOT SMARTShip applications, companies can make use of advanced analytics using predictive algorithms available within the SMARTShip applications. | Will not be able to utilize advanced analytics from the AOT SMARTShip applications. |
Agility in terms of new integrations and scalability | With our agile development methodology, we can integrate new data sources quickly. With the highly scalable infrastructure and serverless data pipelines, we are also able to quickly adapt to changing business data needs effortlessly. Any number of consumers or producers can be integrated into VIO with minimum development time. Customers can take advantage of these combined datasets, just by establishing data usage agreements with AOT. With our infrastructure in the cloud environment, we can scale out quickly based on the demand. | It may be challenging for small and medium size businesses to integrate new data sources or data from scattered business units quickly and effectively to get a combined view of data as it requires a lot of investment in the infrastructure that should be able to scale out quickly based on the changing business demands. The data architecture will also need to be examined and updated as the technology evolves. |
Multi-tenancy and Overall cost | Our infrastructure can handle multiple customers seamlessly, with additional data security ensured by keeping customer data in independent isolated customer-centric databases. Since the cost of infrastructure, upgrade, maintenance and managing data security is shared across multiple tenants, the customers will be able to use the data at an affordable price. | Will not be able to take advantage of easier integrations with third parties through open APIs. The cost associated with maintenance and upgrade of the environment will be much higher for individual platforms compared to using a multi-tenant environment. |
Availability | Our system operates in an infrastructure with load balancing and auto scaling features, along with continuous system monitoring, ensuring high availability. | Need to manage resource monitoring and health checks independently to ensure high availability. |
Performance | High performance in data extraction is assured with parallel processing. | |
Security | Data is our business, so we have given top priority for security in all aspects of data handling. Data security is ensured with multi-level authentication and resource level authorization. In addition, the data resides in logically separated virtual private cloud networks, offering industry-standard data protection measures. | Need to implement security measures. |
In short, it is critical to make use of an industry standard highly scalable and flexible data platform for better turnaround on business decisions. Customers who do not have access to the right data exchange platform may struggle to make quick business decisions that can be achieved easily based on insights from millions of data points generated from vessel operations and related processes.
Ingesting data from isolated, different systems are vital in the maritime industry for providing a consolidated and meaningful data set. VIO’s scalable, flexible and modularized design will help you to achieve your data goals with changing business needs. With its pre-built data ingress and egress path, any external system or application can be integrated with VIO easily. The blueprint of our end-to-end solution from ‘ingesting data’ to ‘data egress’ for different applications or platforms, along with operationalizing maritime analytics is depicted in figure 3.
Like any other systems all the basic security measures such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing the data, providing data to the right users at the right time and keeping audit log for data access are equally applicable to data warehouses as well. In addition to these basic security requirements, it is important to enforce additional security measures for any data exchange platform.
By definition, a data platform is a central location where consolidated data from multiple sources resides; so it can be a lucrative target for any malicious individual trying to get the information. It is also important for a highly secured system to ensure data integrity by protecting the data from accidental or malicious changes such as wrong data insertion, updating or deletion. VIO provides industry standard data security by enforcing the following security measures in our system.
Data silos is one of the biggest issues in the maritime industry, where data is scattered across disparate systems. It is really important to bring data together for uncovering opportunities and identifying potential bottlenecks before they occur. With maritime industry data silo can occur in several ways, such as
Figure 5 depicts scattered pieces of an organization’s information subsystems, losing out the chance to bring effective and efficient data driven decisions.
Figure 6 depicts how VIO can fit together these scattered systems into one well-coordinated, cohesive architecture creating a 360-degree view of your data.
In addition to breaking down data silos, by adding data from third parties, VIO provides deeper insight into its customers’ data.
AOT VIO defeats all these data access and consolidation challenges securely through its integration first strategy. With VIO’s flexible design, any data systems can be integrated quickly. Its existing integrations with third party applications like ShipERP we are able to enrich and add value to existing data. In addition, with VIO’s established integration with NAPA through ShipDC, companies can make use of NAPA maritime intelligence solutions. Along with all these integrations, with AOT SMARTShip™ application we can bring data from different IoT systems on the vessels to VIO.
In short, its flexible design foreseeing potential integration paths, makes VIO unique in the maritime data platform world.
Figure 8 depicts one of our data pipelines where data flows to third parties through VIO . In this AOT SMARTShip™ application acts as the data provider.
When it comes to data science, data models and algorithms can be trained better with huge data sets; as the volume of data increases the probability of getting false positives or negatives diminishes. With VIO’s huge dataset, companies can walk in the data science direction -the harnessing of big data, by feeding and training the models easily.
VIO enables big data platforms quickly through its power to bring 5Vs together.
AOT VIO is capable of supporting:
AOT VIO data pipelines are designed and built in such a way that we can integrate any new vendors with a minimum development cycle.
All our AOT SMARTShip™ customers will have their vessel data in VIO.
Non-SMARTShip™ customers can ingest data either by:
All our AOT SMARTShip™ customers can make use of SMARTShip™ application data downloader; a well-defined portal for retrieving data from VIO, based on the contract agreement.
Non-SMARTShip™ customers can retrieve data by:
Technical information on how to access our APIs for data retrieval is available in the link provided below
https://data.alphaorimarine.com/v1.0/dwh/api-docs/common/api
Jain Jacob is a Senior Data Engineer, who specializes in cloud-based data engineering and analytics projects at Alpha Ori Technologies.
Praveen Viswanath is one of the co-founders at Alpha Ori Technologies, and as a Principal Solution Architect he provides thought leadership for cloud-based data architecture implementations.