Tideworks finalises big data tool for terminals

In the beta phase of testing with Manzanillo International Terminal, Panama, the new analytics product, Tideworks Insight, has been created entirely in-house.

It has been developed in response to customers’ requests for combined historical data, real time trending analytics and real time data analysis of port operations.

Scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2016, the tool is the result of more than two years of work by the Tideworks software engineering team.

Speaking to Port Strategy, Thomas Van Buskirk, vice president of product engineering, said: “We’ve made a huge investment in understanding our customers’ needs with regard to their KPIs and metrics, and understanding what it means to be flexible with the data model.

“We’re focusing on a single place that you can go for the single version of the truth. It’s one place you can go to analyse what’s happening at your facility across all the variety of products you might be using.”

He added that while developers have been looking to harness real time data warehousing in some form or another for years, the technology to make it possible has only been available for the past two to three years.

Tideworks took the decision not to focus on the business intelligence layer – the “pretty dashboard” – choosing instead to focus on data warehousing, data extraction, translation, loading and change data capture. Instead, Tideworks has chosen Seattle-based Tableau as its preferred business intelligence layer provider, although users will not be restricted to Tableau and will be free to use their existing BI tool or any other.

“It’s not that we’re not valuing the BI layer,” said Mr Van Buskirk. “We’re actually valuing it more than any vendor that focus on the BI layer because the BI market is extremely dynamic. We want to give our customers the flexibility to make choices that can be as dynamic as that BI market is.

“Also, because Tideworks is not reinventing the wheel with its business intelligence layer, customers will be able to tap into external databases, aggregating metrics for the entire business enterprise in one dashboard.

“We will have a base platform that we can extensively build on top of, allowing the user to be able to add additional data sets from third parties,” said Mr Van Buskirk.

In an increasingly competitive business analytics environment, Tideworks lists its unique selling points as giving its customers the flexibility to work with any system if necessary; data integrity with checks and balances against the data that goes in; and real-time data exchange.

“We have a team that are extremely capable in data modelling that are going to be available to our customers to help them expand based upon their individual needs, their data sets and their KPIs, allowing them to get into things like equipment maintenance cost against productivity – the types of metrics that, for a lot of people, are the holy grail of business intelligence,” said Mr Van Buskirk.