Though IoT systems promise a wealth of data teeming with opportunity, the scalability and speed required by these projects is a significant roadblock. Being able to collect, process, and analyze the vast quantities of data streaming in from sensors and devices is challenging, where concerns around data quality, security, and privacy complicate these obstacles further.
In DBTA’s latest webinar, Harnessing AI for IoT: Strategies and Technologies for Data Empowerment, experts explored key strategies and technologies that can empower enterprises to take control of their IoT systems with AI.
Stefan Asanin, senior technical product marketing manager, CrateDB, began by explaining that, “IoT is everywhere, but that does not mean it’s immediately available for your AI solution. It needs to be flawlessly integrated so that data can be fed into AI—the right data, at the right time.”
With that being said, while AI has the capacity to enrich IoT data, it needs a platform that supports unified data storage, search, and analytics, according to Asanin. CrateDB—acting as a unified data layer—is a powerful solution for AI and IoT that manages, processes, and analyzes massive IoT datasets in real time. CrateDB offers a scalable, resilient, and easy-to-use platform that connects seamlessly to systems powered by the simplicity and flexibility of SQL.
“CrateDB forms a backbone, a single solution for data intelligence combining real-time data, AI integration, [and] advanced analytics [which] will help you empower your business to make smarter decisions and more efficient operations,” said Asanin.
IoT is not just an integration challenge, but a latency and product challenge, noted Bharath Raghavendran, senior product manager, Informatica. This is because while insights derived from sensor and device data is exponentially more valuable than traditional analytics, the value expires and evaporates once the moment is gone. From a product perspective, customers desire fast, event-driven experiences that are both responsive and personalized to their journeys—which real-time data and low latency drives.
Yet, IoT is ripe with data challenges, both in the technological and business sense. According to Informatica data, 60% of enterprises say difficulties integrating multiple data sources is the top hurdle in accessing more real-time data. Furthermore, 3 in 4 organizations say they would lose customers without access to the insights they glean from real-time data streams.
Raghavendran emphasized that through Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), Informatica offers a comprehensive, scalable solution for IoT. IDMC is a single platform for streaming and IoT data ingestion and integration, offering continuous processing for real-time use cases and serverless processing for scaled data integration use cases.
According to Mark Gamble, director product and solutions marketing, Couchbase, Couchbase Mobile is “an ideal solution for offline-first, AI-powered mobile and IoT applications at the edge.”
Being implemented by companies such as Pepsico, Emirates, and Arthrex, Couchbase Mobile is made up of three components:
- Couchbase Capella: A fully managed cloud NoSQL database-as-a-service
- Capella App Services: Fully managed services for data sync, authentication, and access control
- Couchbase Lite: An embedded NoSQL database for mobile and IoT apps
Gamble explained that since AI-driven applications are the future of modern business and beyond, adopting an edge architecture is crucial in ensuring those AI apps are hyper-personalized, contextually proactive, responsive, and available everywhere.
Couchbase offers cloud-to-edge AI support, designed to support the new era of AI and IoT and its various needs. With advanced architectures and topologies; advanced data sync and user management; an offline-first design with peer-to-peer sync; and full-text and vector search, Couchbase powers mobile and IoT AI at the edge, even offline, explained Gamble.
This is only a snippet of the Harnessing AI for IoT: Strategies and Technologies for Data Empowerment webinar. To view the full webinar, featuring detailed explanations, real-world use cases, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.