Alexis
Hi everyone. Welcome to Talk Tech with Data Dave. I am Alexis, your host of this podcast, and I’m here today with Data Dave to answer your questions about all things technology, all things data, all things cloud, all things IT, all things AI, and all things D3Clarity.
How are you, Dave?
Data Dave
I’m very well, Alexis. I’m feeling good today, so thank you, thank you for that introduction. How are you?
Alexis
I am good. It is a little bit colder here than I want it to be for us heading into the summer, but it’s okay. It’s okay. But I’m pumped because today we have another listener question.
Data Dave
Excellent.
Alexis
Our question today comes from a listener named Brendan McHugh. And Brendan sent in this question specifically to you, Dave, via LinkedIn. He said, “As a CTO, what are some current cloud integration projects that you’re excited about?” Before we answer the question, I’m going to do my normal pitch.
If you have a question for Data Dave, please send us your questions just like Brendan did. You can send us a question via LinkedIn, you can send us an email at talktech@d3clarity.com, or you can send us a question right on the D3Clarity website. Any of those are great ways to send questions to Data Dave.
So, Dave, I’m going to say that question one more time. Thanks, Brendan, for sending that in. “As a CTO, what are some current cloud integration projects that you’re excited about?”
Data Dave
That’s an interesting question, and I know that’s a bit of a cop out. My basic answer to that one is, “What is a project that is exciting that isn’t a cloud integration project? Right?
Alexis
At this point.
Data Dave
Yeah, that becomes my fundamental answer.
As D3Clarity, I think I’m working on four or five projects right now, all of which are cloud integration projects. I don’t think I have one that’s not a cloud integration project.
Alexis
I mean, that was how D3Clarity started, right? You guys were data guys who thought, “The future of data is in the cloud. And so we have to combine the two.”
Data Dave
Yes, that was it. We were largely data guys. We were operating a lot on-premise in that time, and it was more convenient to take some of it to the cloud. And the cloud is just completely blossomed and exploded. And now it’s rare that we do a data integration project that isn’t a cloud project from a cloud infrastructure project. But also is the data hosted on the cloud?
Alexis
Right.
Data Dave
Most of the organizations that are our clients run their entire business off the cloud and don’t have a data center anymore. So, everything is sitting in Amazon or Azure or whatever. I did an analytics project, an interesting dashboard. Just doing some BI predictive analytics the other day. And of course, they wanted it mapped out by location. Well, the obvious thing with the location is to put it on a map, right? So, you put it on a map. You’re integrating cloud data using Google Maps or Amazon’s version or something. As soon as you do that, you’re doing a cloud integration project because you’re taking your data that’s by city and saying, “Where is the city in a geospatial land. How do I do this?”
That’s a really fun construct.
We’re doing some pretty exciting ones in some of the oil and gas industry, and we have done a number of those from things like risk and ecological impact, which again is geospatial and mapping related to digital twins and structured analysis of offshore devices and offshore installations and things like that.
Alexis
Okay, hold on, I’m going to stop. You said “digital twins”. I just saw an article on digital twins the other day and I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting word.” Now you’ve said it. And now I think I should probably know what that means. Can you explain that to me and maybe our listeners?
What is a digital twin?
Data Dave
So, a digital twin is basically taking a real-world environment and building a digital representation of that real-world environment.
Okay, so you could build a digital twin of a factory, and you would build a 3D model of that factory and then overlay from an engineering drawing or from a building that 3D factory, you could overlay various pieces of data that make the installation real.
Alexis
Oh.
Data Dave
So, I’ll give you a fun little example that I did.
I built a digital twin of my kitchen the other week. And what I did was I took, I think, something like a hundred photographs of my kitchen, the inside of my kitchen, and built a photogrammic model of that to be a photorealistic 3D model of my kitchen.
Alexis
Okay.
Data Dave
And then what I could do is I put a database behind that and put inventory levels for the cupboards on it. So, now you could walk into this digital twin, and you could see how many plates were in the cupboards. But you could also go in and then put a pot on the stove and said, okay, I’ve modeled the pot and put it on the stove, and then heated that pot up, and the 3D model pot changed color with the temperature of the pot on the stove.
Alexis
So that’s really fun. But, like, in a business standpoint, that could be like super fun. If you were in a factory.
Data Dave
Oh, yeah.
Alexis
Although that could be super-duper fun. Not just fun. That would be super useful.
Data Dave
Super useful and super interesting.
So you think of a warehouse where you could walk into the warehouse and see on your iPad, as you hold the iPad out and pop it into augmented reality, and you’re suddenly seeing the inventory levels across your warehouse, or the pressure and temperature levels on a pipeline in a factory, or an oil refinery or an offshore rig or whatever. Digital twin, because you’re tying the real-time digital data and sensor feeds to now the twin of what it looks like in real time, in real space.
Alexis
So, my probably best example of that would be Pokémon Go. I play Pokémon Go because I’m a big old dweeb, and there’s augmented reality in Pokémon Go. And, like, it maps out my streets for me, and I can see things in the road with me or in the street with me where I’m walking and things on top of my dog. That’s the digital twin of my circumstances with the Pokémon? Right?
Data Dave
Essentially, yes. A digital twin is normally a little more detailed than Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go is classic augmented reality. So, you’re just projecting a fictional image over the top of the physical image. So, that’s a little more augmented reality.
A digital twin is when you’re really plotting out the structure so you can deconstruct it.
Alexis
Okay, that makes sense. I follow you there.
Data Dave
A digital twin of your car, for example, would allow you to peel off the hood of the engine and look at the temperature of every piece and the nature of the car. And walk through, make yourself tiny, and walk through the engine.
Alexis
That would be fun.
Data Dave
And look at all the parts and pieces and that sort of thing. And that’s where you really get into a digital twin. It is a digital representation of, or twin of, the real world, so to speak.
Alexis
Those are all cool examples of cloud integration projects that D3Clarity is working on right now. And then obviously you made a digital twin of your kitchen because you apparently are also a giant dweeb, which is why we have this podcast.
Data Dave
Yeah. And because it was really me experimenting with. “Okay, if somebody asked me to do it with something huge, then how do I collect all the data and analyze the data for doing it with something huge?” Because we were doing the sort of live streams and the “what equipment really exists in this factory” and various other things to describe that. And I was sort of, “Okay, what’s the end state? I’ve got to be able to picture the end state so I can do this project. Right?” So, I built myself a little one.
Alexis
That’s awesome. But in the real world. Not in the real world, but I mean in the current world, in the big picture, there’s a lot of cloud integration projects going on. Like Pokémon Go, for example, is a cloud integration life project in and of itself.
Data Dave
Absolutely, it is. If you think about all the…. If you project forward for a minute… and start thinking about it, we’re talking about robotics in domestic situations and so on.
And my opinion is we’re a long way at the moment from AI even coming close to being as sophisticated as the human brain and that sort of thing, especially with the amount of information and power that we carry around.
Therefore, any appliance that is AI is by definition a cloud integration project because it’s getting the data from the cloud. It’s looking at the reference databases on the cloud, and it’s running AI models in the cloud. So, every time you use your phone and look up your Apple AI guy or get asked Apple a question, that is a cloud integration project.
Every one of those is based on a cloud integration project. So, I think there’s some absolutely fascinating cloud integration projects and exciting ones going on. From self-driving cars to the expansion of using Waze, Google Maps, and other things while you’re driving, to knowing the weather forecast and getting recommendations on whether you should buy an umbrella or not because it’s going to rain in the next four hours and you’re a thousand miles from home. I don’t know, there’s a lot in that around different things, and these are kind of trivial examples. But then you look just under the covers of what we’re seeing at all of these are cloud integration projects, and they’re all- if they’re not happening it’s not far from just turn your head and look over there and there’s something equivalent to what I just said. Whether it’s the umbrella example or some other similar example. What kind of shoes are you going to run in, et cetera? All these things are out there, and they’re all happening.
Am I excited about cloud integration? Yeah, I think the opportunity is tremendous. There’s risk there. We’ve talked about that in a number of podcasts. But the opportunity and the exciting projects are massive and all over the place. And like I say, we’re doing a number and the ones that excite me are the ones I’m deeply involved in.
So, you know, things like the digital twinning, things like analysis, and AI for predictive analytics. I can’t share most of them because they were under NDA clearly, but there’s a lot of that going on. But rarely do we see a project these days that isn’t at some level a cloud integration project.
Alexis
Yeah, I think that’s the long and short of this idea, this picture. I can’t think of anything that we do at D3Carity that’s not, to some extent, a cloud integration project. Because we are a remote organization that runs on the cloud. Like we as an organization run on the cloud. We work with our clients on cloud. Like even our clients who run on-prem, we are literally working with them to get them into the cloud.
There’s this story that we tell amongst ourselves about Preston. The listeners know Preston, he’s been on the pod before. Preston going to one of our clients and walking into their server room and like looking at their like hard server and being the one person that knew what to do with their hard server. Because we’ve been working with them so long and migrating them that they don’t really have people there anymore who care about an on-prem server. But Preston was like, “I know, okay, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got one of these running in my closet when I need to. Let me figure this out.” And he was able to, but we’ve been working with them to get them off of an on-premise situation that they don’t really need it anymore.
Data Dave
That’s right. That’s more and more the case. And a lot of the organizations that we work with.
When we’re working with accountants and so on, they don’t necessarily know where their data is anymore.
So, I was working with one of our clients, and we’re inherently dealing with two or three clouds at any one point in time because one of their applications is in Amazon, another one’s in Azure, another one’s on a proprietary cloud, and a couple of others. And it’s rare that we aren’t dealing with cloud data and cloud integration and some of the interesting technologies that that brings with it and some of the interesting data sets that that brings with it because it opens up a Pandora’s Box of, “I can look at maps. Now, I didn’t used to be able to look at topographical maps in that kind of analysis. I can look at commodities and auctions and sales and histories of things that. And I want to do the analysis and see, okay, I’m thinking about buying one of these. Can I see its entire sales history throughout its life?”
Well, if it’s a collectible, then yes, you can. Yeah, right. If it’s a car, yeah, you absolutely can.
So now, extract that into business, and it’s a large piece of equipment or a piece of land or whatever it might be. I can suddenly start to say, “Okay, not only do I want to see the geographic location of this piece of land, I want to see the boundaries, the legal boundaries of this land plotted on a graph, and I want to see the history of ownership for the last hundred years.”
Alexis
Right.
Data Dave
It’s a little bit of a nontrivial project for a lot of structures, but it’s not impossible.
Alexis
That’s what my husband does for a living, literally. He looks at maps, and he figures out who has owned them for the last hundred years.
Data Dave
Right? Yeah. And that’s his job, but there’s nothing to stop you from doing that and looking at that as a cloud integration project now as well. More and more of this data is becoming available on the cloud and available in public domain.
Alexis
Yeah. Well, Brendan, we really want to thank you for submitting that question. I hope we answered it for you in a way that makes you feel good. Dave, thanks for being here today and answering that question on the podcast. Listeners out there. I said it once, I’ll say it again. Please submit your questions to us at talktech@d3clarity.com. You can also reach out to either one of us on LinkedIn or submit your questions right on the D3Clarity website. Dave, it has been a pleasure.
Data Dave
Thank you, Alexis.
