IBM and Science & Technology Facilities Council form Big Data Innovation Hub to help organisations extract insight and value from data

LONDON, U.K. - 05 Nov 2014: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the Science & Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Hartree Centre has created a Big Data innovation hub using IBM Big Data and Analytics technology to help organisations solve complex business problems and achieve competitive advantage.

By working with the Hartree Centre, companies can very quickly identify the value in their data and design a technology system to meet their business needs. Hartree Centre provides advanced computational and data analytics facilities as well as access to highly skilled data scientists to customers looking to tackle their Big Data and Analytics challenges. Once a company has completed a successful proof of concept', the STFC team can then help them establish their operational Big Data Analytics systems, taking them on the journey from business objective to a fully operational system.

STFC's Hartree Centre is based at its Daresbury Laboratory in North West England, located at the Sci-Tech Daresbury national science and innovation campus. STFC is one of the UK's seven publicly funded Research Councils responsible for supporting, coordinating and promoting research, innovation and skills development. Following the success of its High Performance Computing (HPC) initiative in addressing science challenges, the STFC is looking to further stimulate the UK economy by helping organisations exploit technology and techniques in Big Data Analytics.

STFC has already worked across several industries to help them discover the value in a Big Data technology solution and a skills service before moving to a full implementation, including:

Democrata, a UK construction company is using the powerful analytics at Hartree Centre to automate environmental impact assessments and better predict risk. Surveys are required to analyse a multitude of data sets to understand the impact of a high speed rail link or a new road. In the past this has been a slow and cumbersome task. But now, using big data analytics automated searches and queries on disparate data sets means faster and cheaper decision making for large engineering and construction firms.

KnowNow Information, an IBM Business partner is helping local government Emergency Service providers improve their decision making and resources planning. Using the Hartree Centre big data analytics technology and data scientists, the emergency services provider can now see patterns of incidents across their territory and the system can begin to predict where and when to allocate resources. This has the potential to save time and money for all emergency response teams.

Global healthcare company GSK is working with the Hartree Centre to develop clustering techniques similar to that used on social networking sites to enhance the understanding of these relationships. Disease mapping' looks at a wide array of source data from various journals and other records to identify correlations between genes, biological processes and known diseases.

Healthcare Hartree Centre has helped healthcare providers perform analytics on hospital performance records to improve healthcare more widely by understanding correlations between performance based on cost of service delivery and throughput.

We have a great track record of delivering high performance computing services to industry developing algorithms and complex models that are used to create new products faster and cheaper. This collaboration in data analytics provides an obvious and exciting extension opening up our skills to a wider audience of businesses. This toolset will allow any company to accelerate their understanding of data and its value within their business, said Lee Hannis, Business Development Manager, Hartree Centre, STFC.

As we see the Internet of Things' evolving with many more connected devices, we believe Big Data Analytics technology can be applied to developing new products and services for other areas. The work we have done with STFC is a great example of this, said Dixit Shah, Big Data and Analytics Leader, IBM UK and Ireland.

At the heart of STFC's IBM Big Data and Analytics environment is IBM's Infosphere BigInsights offering enterprise grade Hadoop for data processing, warehousing and analytics, enabling organizations to turn large, complex data volumes into meaningful insights. Complementing BigInsights within the Hartree Centre environment are Infosphere Streams for real-time analytics with micro-second latency, IBM Watson Explorer for Big Data exploration and search, IBM Business Analytics for predictive analytics and Big Data reporting and visualisation.

For more information about IBM Infosphere BigInsights, visit: https://ibm.biz/BdFq56

For more information about IBM Big Data Analytics, visit: https://ibm.biz/BdFq55

For more information about STFC, visit: http://www.stfc.ac.uk/home.aspx

LINK:	http://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/45331.wss...
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