A few things from what I've read and from what I know:
- the size of the company doesn't bother me
- the Oracle Gold Partner thing is "a bit of fluff". They still need to develop this for SAP as well per the announcement. Gold is the 2nd level out of 4. It means they have access to Oracle people and resources that others don't have access to.
- per the announcement each part is going to have terrabytes of data associated with it. Now depending on their retention period of that data and whether it's per part or per batch of 1000, etc it's going to mean a company will potentially need petabytes of storage just for Printrite depending on the specific size requirements. This could be somewhat significant.
- Big Data doesn't automatically mean Cloud. It could be on-site big data machines, servers that are hosted elsewhere (on demand/cloud) or existing servers and storage at the company. Some companies may refuse a Cloud/OnDemand solution due to security concerns whether that be data or network or a combination of both.
- the differentiation between big data and normal data is that big data is "large and unstructured or partially structured data". Normal data is structured (tables/columns/rows). Traditional database tools can't be used against Big Data. In this case the PR3D software knows what to do with it but I guess they need them to also develop a reporting layer. To be performant the hardware should be good (ie Exalytics) but that can be costly and take time to implement. If I were to do this, I'd really push for an on demand/cloud solution. More controls and standards. Legacy hardware, software, networks, etc can be problematic.
- i assume the need for this is only for analytics / historical analysis and it's not required for the IPQA part. However if the part is printed right the first time every time then the data is going to tell them everything's fine. I'm being sarcastic here. Analytics and historical analysis are still useful.
- I would hope that this software/plugin/integration isn't required for PR3D commercialization. Why wasn't this done earlier? How long will it take to develop? Implement? Incorporate? Large companies will typically take their time. If it is required for commercialization then it could delay things. It'll take longer to develop because they mentioned both Oracle and SAP solutions. If they go solely with an OnDemand/Cloud solution then why not just develop an Oracle solution?
Source: I have 19.5 years at Oracle and counting. Certainly in a different capacity but I'm quite familiar with Cloud and OnDemand. I'm not that familiar with big data but I know what big data is. I currentlly work with several OLTP databases and applications which provide data to a large OLAP/DW database. All of the data I deal with is structured.
Hope this insight helps and apologies for not being overly positive here and a lot of this may be moot if it's just an additional offering to come after commercialization. Still long.
