Big Data Is Big Business For WANdisco After £500k British Gas Deal

British Gas has turned up the heat on big data by signing a £500,000 deal with distributed computing specialist WANdisco.

With offices in both Sheffield and Silicon Valley, the contract is the largest that WANdisco has secured to date.

The deal was inked after British Gas trialled a deployment of the firm’s Non-Stop Hadoop product, which allowed the utilities provider to capture real-time data from more than a million household Smart Meters.

Big savings

As a result, British Gas was able to demonstrate cost savings in data storage and processing, as well as minimise data loss and downtime in compliance with regulations.

The next step in the new contract will see Non-Stop Hadoop crank things up a level in live production. The amount of data under management will be scaled up to more than twice its original level, with particular benefits for the “Connected Homes” Programme.

Here, real-time analytics will allow the dynamic matching of energy supply with demand patterns. Given that Samsung has predicted that 2015 will see the amount of homes adopting connected technology soar, the move taps into this growing market.

“Customers see our Hadoop technology as critical for enterprise big data deployments,” said WANdisco’s chief executive, David Richards.

“Enlarging our footprint with existing customers like British Gas, in addition to gathering new customers, is a very important part of our strategy.  This deal clearly demonstrates our ability to expand a small initial big data deployment into a much larger deal.”

British Gas has likewise proven that it thinks big data means big spending, since the deal follows another £300,000 contract with consumer data business dunnhumby just before Christmas.