Helping Enterprises Say Goodbye to Static Analytics and Hello to the Power of Active Analytics

This blog was originally published on the Oracle for Startups blog .

Guest Author: Amy Sorrells, Global Communications, Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem

You might not know the name Kinetica today. But their executives believe in the near future the name Kinetica will be synonymous with a data-driven economy.

Kinetica is an active analytics platform to help companies, governments, and societies manage the make-or-break shift from using data as a passive asset into using data as an active asset.This enables organizations to build streaming, real-time analytical applications that react instantly to changing conditions.

“Data thrives when it’s continuously shared so real-time, active dynamic decisions can be made and enable the data-driven economy,” said Kinetica’s CEO Paul Appleby. Active analytics, he says, will be the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And Kinetica plans to be a leading partner in that revolution.

Part of the power of the Kinetica platform is the ability to use GPUs to process and visualize complex streaming, historical, and location data at scale, continuously in real-time. “Oracle has world-class GPU instances that deliver power, performance and scalability at a lower cost,” says Appleby. “Organizations building data-driven applications with the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform gain tremendous value running on Oracle Cloud.”

Kinetica has ambitious goals in a competitive space where buzzwords like “real-time data” and “data-driven economy” have largely failed to deliver.  But to understand the company’s confidence and bold vision, you have to understand their unique beginning: tracking terrorists’ threats for the U.S. government.

Built from the ground up to handle the complexities of today
“Back in 2009, we started on this government project to track terrorist threats in real-time across numerous locations, devices and data sources—as you can imagine, it was massively complex and dynamic.  And we quickly realized the technology did not exist to do it right,” said Amit Vij, president and cofounder of Kinetica.

So, Amit and his cofounder and CTO Nima Negahban started to build a high-performance, real-time analytics database that could perform with massive, complex and dynamic data sets.

Big brands seeing strong results
Customers across the globe are “plugging us into the middle of existing data infrastructure to turbo charge their analytics”. Executives say one way to think of Kinetica is as the “speed and intelligence layer” for your data, added Vij. Kinetica offers APIs and connectors to allow developers to build smart, active analytical applications and supports all standard front-end BI tools. This accessibility and compatibility is helping win customers.

One of their automotive customers is using Kinetica to put analytics inside the car, processing huge amounts of raw streaming data from the vehicle in real-time to enable things like a dynamic driver experience. 

Kinetica has an impressive roster of customers including USPS and GSK. Another customer, OVO Pay, has developed a connected vending machine that delivers real-time offers to customers based on past purchase history and other behavioral information. Other performance results include:

• One large telco company realized, with its current system, it would take six years to render all their maps and location data in order to optimize their network for 5G rollout. The Kinetica platform did it in 50 minutes.
• An oil exploration company dramatically increased their analytics and data science capabilities. They went from visualizing nine million data points in 2D to visualizing and analyzing 90 billion data points to create a 3D model of the earth’s crust to more accurately identify oil deposits to accelerate resource discovery.
• A major global bank is modernizing their risk management system so they can move risk calculations from a batch process typically done once or twice a day to intraday, continuous analysis. This provides a better understanding of risk exposure so portfolios are prepared for unexpected market and asset volatility.
• One of the world’s largest retailers uses Kinetica to make sure their stores are never out of stock. By analyzing continuous streaming inventory data from thousands of locations, the retailer can better understand changes in stock and dynamically adjust their supply chain to keep up with demand.

Why partner with Oracle for Startups?
Already integrated with the Oracle Analytics Cloud, Kinetica also sees value in Oracle’s business applications, where integrations have mutual benefits for Kinetica, Oracle and customers.  Kinetica is also featured on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, making it easy for Oracle customers to start leveraging their technology. 

Kinetica is currently rolling out POCs with their customers in EMEA and JAPAC so they “can test drive our platform in the Oracle Cloud.”

Start exploring how you can leverage Oracle Cloud for your startup today.