Relevance of Innovation

Relevance of Innovation

As one of the hot topics around the world, data science significantly generates and stimulates innovation in almost all industries. Data-driven concepts are penetrating into decision making processes and produce innovative ideas in both large organizations and start-ups.

I started my business called Datavix(www.datavix.org) in data science a year ago with my friends. We initially did some machine learning projects for our clients to generate revenue and maintain our operation. We decided to develop our own product 3 months ago and I found that some innovative ideas helped us to optimize our product features and to satisfy our target customers.

Our product is an open data platform and supports online machine learning for data scientists. There are two concerns for me to develop this product. One is hardware architecture, other is the computation capabilities which support our online machine learning function. Traditionally, we would purchase at least 20 high performance servers which probably cost $3000, huge cost for bandwidth leasing from telecom operators and an IT person to maintain our servers. According to our estimation, the minimum cost for our platform would be $80K annually. This is a significant cost for us especially we are still in start-up phase.

We did a lot of research on alternatives for our platform but none of those is better than building it ourselves until we came up with the idea to adopt cloud computing for our product. This idea changes the traditional bottom IT architecture for one firm and its elastic computing capabilities supports the demand of high performance computing. Technically speaking, cloud computing can support our platform efficiently and we can adjust our computing capabilities dynamically to maintain our service level to tour new users. There are two options for us to use cloud computing: construct private cloud or use public cloud service. We have to compare these two solutions to make a decision for our platform. Developing private cloud will still have a high R&D cost and we have to still maintain the physical network ourselves. However, a private cloud will free us from the security concern since we have control over our own network. Using public cloud such as AWS or Google Cloud can help us to reduce the R&D cost and both Amazon and Google can support real-time computing upgrade for increasing volume, moreover, they provide secure environment for our cloud service.