Metadata is the New Data

You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to recall the phrase made famous by Spock – and Leonard Nimoy, the actor who originally portrayed him – “Live long and prosper.” During early filming of the franchise, Nimoy’s character needed to have a special greeting that Vulcans share. Nimoy suggested something from his childhood, which involved the “V” gesture and the phrase, both of which touched a magic chord. While Nimoy is gone, his magic lives on.

I believe we will someday credit IoT metadata with providing us what lives on, what connects us. Whether it prospers or just proliferates is up to you.

The IoT digital economy continues to evolve, fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. With trillions of dollars in value at stake across the IoT landscape, Telcos have enormous opportunities of scale if approached in the right way. 

As Telcos build out and begin to monetize their IoT solutions, the key is to architect the data ecosystem’s fluidity to transform assets and processes. IoT solutions start with data sources being ingested into IoT platforms. We already know that traditional data silos hinder responsiveness to market trends and business growth. Imagine what a proliferation of siloed IoT platforms would impede, especially with the startling velocity of data accumulation.

The time to reimagine data strategy is right away. Sustainability of a Telco’s IoT reign requires exodus from legacy thinking, vintage ecosystems and bolt-on partners and transition to hyper-interoperability, multi-tenant IoT platforms and data-driven knowledge exchange. My previous blogs have touched on the value of digital ecosystem management (DEM), open-source and micro-service architecture. Highly automated, orchestrated and composable methodologies, such as these, help federate apps and data to support increasingly complex multi-service platforms and business models, which must somehow remain easy to manage.

The strategic worth of a modern, agile digital ecosystem is the ability to foster innovative bundles of products, services and channels where all parties benefit economically. The data strategy should be multi-dimensional, to embody complementing connectivity technologies and cross-silo interoperability. Telcos can build, consume and monetize the right IoT offerings for customers. With the help of metadata.

Metadata is the new data. Vital. Ubiquitous. Valuable.

As seen in the chart above, Metadata provides insights that enable Telcos to democratize content to drive decisions and successes based on data. Metadata helps you capitalize on the astronomical scale of IoT data squirreled away somewhere. Everything about the data in your ecosphere, from customer behaviors and purchasing patterns to historical, transactional and crossover records, can be tagged and catalogued. Metadata is what allows data to be mapped, correlated, meaningful, actionized for contributable valuable. It is the language that mission-critical systems can use to talk with one another, within and across each IoT vertical or service. While capturing useful metadata is easiest at the point of data creation, after-the-fact metadata generation is doable with proper cataloging capabilities. We see metadata at the precipice of something significant.

As you consider how your Telco and IOT solutions will live long and prosper, allow me to highlight our best working solutions for building flexible, composable digital platform architectures. Hitachi Vantara is not a newcomer to IoT nor the integral power of metadata. In fact, we have incumbency in the journey of digital ubiquity. We deeply understand and have the tools to help you define, ingest, classify, organize, analyze, protect and leverage your IoT data.

Our Lumada 2.0 (origin: illuminate data) is a purpose-built, distributed micro-services IoT architecture with a platform-as-a-service substrate upon which other services and analytics can be engineered. Imagine an end-to-end stack where aggregated, meta tier analytics meet developer-friendly, scalable software for on-premises or cloud. Lumada is natively composable, i.e., modular and engineerable, for extensive use-case adaptability. At the Hitachi NEXT user conference last September, we demonstrated a Lumada deployment in 16 minutes.

Our Pentaho services stoke “adaptive execution” for IoT, which matches workloads to processing engines without developers having to rewrite data integration logic. Our streamlined data refinery solutions stream, blend and curate data sets for high-speed, machine-learning analytic queries. And, of course, Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Content Intelligence bring new relevancy and portability to object store metadata and the repositories that underpin all things data collaboration.

Most Telcos are focused on immediate issues, but the world is approaching the Internet of Everything at warp speed.  Will you go where no Telco has gone before?

k.r.

Navaid Khan