"One of the first ones I'll talk about is one of our big infrastructure customers that do an awful lot with the logistics companies. They spent about the last 6 to 12 months doing an intelligent operations project. They're very asset-rich. One of the important things for them is decreasing the amount of downtime. Whenever one of their assets is out of action, money goes out the door and is lost with every minute of downtime they have.
How can they be more predictive?
How can they be proactive with things like maintenance schedules and so on?
We've spent an awful lot of time doing things like sensors and the Internet of Things, ensuring that we can report on the assets they've got. We're collecting a vast pool of data through that, what we would call a data lake. That data lake will be used to feed all sorts of incremental insights. It's a powerful end-to-end proposition for this customer, and it's all about collecting that data.
More importantly, nobody wants a bunch of data from which they can't get any intelligence. The next piece of the puzzle is how do we give dashboards? How do we alert people what the next best action would be when something occurs?"
- Dave Sayers, Travel, Transport and Hospitality Director, Microsoft