ICG, a data and real-time streaming analytics company located in Chantilly, Va., is debuting LUX 2.0, a second generation of its analytics platform, on November 15. Founder David Waldrop made
news when, while testing the beta version of the platform, he discovered that ships from West Africa, the center of the current Ebola health scare, were headed to the United States.
"LUX 2.0 allows me to make inquiries [of data collections]," Waldrop says of the method he used to detect the ships' presence. "I drew an area of interest—a box along West Africa—to track the boats—when they ported, when they were going out to sea." He says two of the boats he tracked have reached the U.S.—one is in Jacksonville and the other is in New Orleans.
Waldrop says tracking the progress of ships is just one of many different ways LUX 2.0 can be used to assist businesses and government clients to make quick decisions informed by data that changes over time. "Streaming analytics is coming of age," he says. "In emerging situations, minutes and seconds matter."
The first generation of data analysis tools relied on stored (i.e. old) data. "What's out there now operates on real-time, moving data, but they are designed for coders." He mentions
Apache Storm,
Amazon Kinesis, IBM's
InfoSphere Stream and
Google DataFlow as examples.
That's where LUX 2.0 is different. It's a streaming analytics platform for non-coders. LUX's users—who come from industries like finance, maritime, and cybersecurity—can interact with "hundreds of different data sources fused together" with "an hour's training." A user could count occurrences of a certain word in a certain country across social media streams, for example, or use the software to define "normal" and then receive alerts when out-of-the-ordinary events occur.
Another important difference? LUX 2.0 isn't cloud-based, meaning it passes muster with the Department of Defense and other government agencies. The DoD, at least one other undisclosed U.S. government agency, and a "commercial cyber company" are all LUX 1.0 clients; Waldrop anticipates converting them to the next version when it is released.
The platform runs $10,000 per processing unit per year, and ICG requires customers to purchase at least 8 units, so LUX 2.0 isn't for data dabblers. But for agencies and contractors that need to crunch data from a billion streaming events on the fly, Waldrop's got their backs.
This article has been updated to correct the name of one of ICG's competitors. IBM is the maker of InfoSphere Stream, not Microsoft. Elevation DC regrets the error.