SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The CEO of Alpha Technologies, Doug Tate, said that his company is all ready to move further into big data. That is after they are done with the installation of the fiber-optic cable in Charleston and South Charleston.
Doug Tate said that the internet of things and big data already exist in West Virginia, but there is still a dilemma.The state needs to be the more prominent player in the industry.
Alpha Technologies is a company that has been in the business for quite some time, and Tate said that they are ready to expand their growth. He said that big data is considered the electronic version in today’s time of what everyone has been doing over the years, except having much more data points.
Hurricane, West Virginia, is the base for Alpha Technologies, but it has a data center located in South Charleston, specifically in the West Virginia Regional Technology Park. There, it has built rooms that house high-technology servers that collect and store countless data for government agencies and other businesses.
The future growth plan of the company into big data can be the hope in providing private customers, the federal, and, most especially, the state the solutions to big data problems.
Big data is a common term in the information technology industry. It is the immensely large data sets that are so complex. Its complexity is also the reason most traditional data processing application software is completely inadequate to work with it.
Big data can be simply understood as trillions of data points from various things. It includes the weather, the traffic flow, or any information that someone deems useful. It is considered to be a growing field in health, manufacturing, homeland security, and commerce for apparent reasons.
The internet of things, on the other hand,is the central storage for what the computers, sensors, cameras, and other machines have gathered where it is being analyzed.
Tate said that the combination of the internet of things and big data could be useful for retailers in determining sales for the particular scale of customers at any given day and time.
Alpha Technologies is still in the works of installing the 35-mile fiber-optic ring around Charleston and South Charleston area, something that is set to be finished early next year. Alpha Technologies’ CEO said that after this, the infrastructure would help move the company further to the big data chain as well as the local economy.
Tate said that part of Alpha Technologies’ fiber-optic project is to provide a better and faster connectivity between companies and the data center, increasing efficiency and providing ease of use that is not available right now. He added that they have been storing big data for more than four years in the big data type of solutions for customers.
Alpha Technologies’ CEO also said that data are already automated. Software technology has already made data mining a little easier. The only next thing to do is having the information to mine.
