In the last couple of weeks the feud between The NY Times Editor, John Broder – and Tesla Motors’ CEO, Elon Musk has played out in the media.
It all started when Broder took a highway trip between Washington D.C. and Boston, cruising in Tesla’s Model S luxury sedan. The purpose of the trip was to range test the car between two new supercharging stations. This 200 miles trip was well under the Model S’s 265-mile estimated range. But nonetheless the trip was filled with anxiety for Broder. Fearful of not reaching his charging destination, he had to turn off the battery-draining amenities such as radio and heater (in a 30 degree weather) to finally reach his destination – feet and knuckles “frozen”.
In rebutting Broder’s claims, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has charged that the story was faked, that Mr. Broder intentionally caused his car to fail. On his Tesla blog, he released graphs and charts, based on driving logs that contest many of the details of Mr. Broder’s article.
With the logs now published, one thing is clear — Tesla’s use of predictive analytics helped them warn Broder on what is ahead. By calculating the range based on the energy consumption, Tesla signaled Broder to charge the vehicle in time. Had Tesla not been able to call its log files as witness, this futuristic motor tech company could have experienced serious brand damage.
What’s interesting is that Tesla’s story is not unique. Today, virtually anything that we use, an appliance, a mobile phone, an application, generates some sort of data – machine-generated data. And the truth exists behind that data. Such data, when analyzed and mined properly, provides indicators that solve problems, ahead of time.
Having real-time access to machine-generated data to foresee problems and improve performance is exactly why NetApp is using Pentaho. Using Hadoop and Pentaho Business Analytics to process and drive insights from 2-5 TBs of incoming data per week, NetApp has built a solution that sends alerts and notifications ahead of the actual hardware failure. The solution has helped NetApp predict its appliance interruptions for the E-Series storage units, offering new ways to exceed customer SLAs and protect the brand’s image.
Tesla, NetApp or other, if you run a data-driven business, the more your company can act on that data to improve your application, service or product performance, the better off your customers and the better your brand will be.
Pentaho Business Analytics gives companies fast and easy ways for collecting, analyzing and predicting data patterns. Pentaho’s customers see the value of analytics in many different facets and use cases. NetApp’s use case will be featured in Strata’s upcoming conference on Thursday, February 28, 2012.
Join us to find out more.
– Farnaz Erfan, Product and Solution Marketing, Pentaho
Data Runs The World 