Elastacloud Channels

We have been working with CMSPI, an independent, global payments consultancy, on an ongoing basis to help them solve their data challenge and innovate their business. CMSPI specialise in advising merchants on how to improve their payments arrangements and reduce costs, utilising technology and implementing innovation. CMSPI therefore required an innovative, sustainable and flexible data analytics platform solution to manage the demand of their data-centric products, when they turned to Elastacloud for support. We lead the development of a robust, scalable infrastructure that could ingest huge quantities of complex data for processing and analysis. More recently, CMSPI’s demand to harness high volume/velocity data parsing/storage and analytics became more apparent. We implemented an analytical platform alongside CMSPI, that could create daily analytics and reporting for the business. The platform uses Azure, utilising Databricks, Azure SQL and Analysis Services to enable the user to quickly analyse data and see customers payments information. This allows their analysts to subsequently recommend improvements to their customers. The efficiency of CMSPI’s core products has been improved greatly and the business is equipped to develop innovative ideas, taking advantage of the value their data platform provides. To understand more about the benefits of the analytical data platform and implementation of automation, please read the full case study with CMSPI. Click here to find out more about us and our work with customers.

Earlier this month, in association with our partners PITA and the University of Almería, Elastacloud organised a large and unique event for nearly 50 local Almería school children. The Almería Hackathon Weekender gave the children a chance to learn how to create a fully functioning multiplayer game using programming tools, coding and game development applications. Since our Spanish office was established in 2018, we have firmly rooted ourselves in the city of Almería by forming strong partnerships with local organisations such as the University of Almería and the Parque Científico-Tecnológico de Almería (PITA). Our growing team in Almería is also very active in the local community through speaking at events, engaging in efforts to encourage women to consider careers in technology, and establishing the Cloud Almería community meetup group. Openness and community are two of our core values at Elastacloud spanning across our office locations. Sharing our knowledge and experience with others is behind all of our community engagements. The Almería Hackathon Weekender gave us the chance to share our love of compute, programming and cloud technology with a younger audience. The event hosted at the University of Almería, brought school children together to learn some basic, but real-world, applications of these technologies in creating a multiplayer game called Dodgeball Royale. Guided by the Elastacloud Spain team, the children learnt valuable skills in development, compute, teamwork and creativity. We used game development tool, Unity, to create the features of the Dodgeball Royale game. And game deployment service Azure Playfab, which served as a great way to teach the children about Microsoft Azure and the power of cloud technology. Teaching the children about deploying a multiplayer game with Azure Playfab Finally, together in groups the children were able to play the game they had created! The Hackathon Attendees playing Dodgeball Royale The Elastacloud team had a great time introducing the latest cloud technologies and concepts to the young community in Almería. The children were exceptional in the way they quickly picked up new concepts and deployed their new knowledge creatively and collaboratively. Let’s hear from the kids themselves on how the day went… Hackathon Interview English Translation: What did you most enjoying about the event today? We are enjoying coding the video game and Elastacloud's David Flores' explanations about video games. On a scale of 1 to 10 we are having a 20 of fun!! Did you make new friends? We have both become friends! What did you learn about computing? We are learning to use unity, to form a character from scratch. Do you want to make more fun computer games like this? We would definitely like to work on video games in the future. On behalf of everyone involved in organising the Hackathon Weekender, we thoroughly enjoyed running this event for these local school children in Almería. The entire Elastacloud team looks forward to organising and participating in more community events to continue to influence and share our experience with others. Want to get involved in local technology community events and activities? Click here to see what's available.

Using cutting edge cloud technology and innovative data solutions the Elastacloud team has delivered industry-leading business intelligence insights in a range of projects within the energy sector. Last year we worked with SSE, a large UK energy generation company to deliver industry-leading solutions to their data challenges. SSE SSE plc is primarily a developer, operator and owner of low-carbon energy assets with a strategic focus on regulated electricity networks and renewable energy. Their headquarters are in Scotland but have locations all over the UK, and they are listed on the London Stock Exchange whilst being a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. SSE also maintain and invest in transmission and distribution networks, generating and delivering electricity across the UK. For SSE, faults along their networks, which are often caused by lightning strikes, are very costly to business operations with great impact on their customers. When blackouts occur, SSE receives costly fines from OFGEM, and as climate change continues to influence extreme weather, blackouts and the subsequent fines are likely to increase. SSE´s goal was to protect their customers in the areas with the highest chance of lightning strikes, and to do so they had to identify the top 100 locations that have the highest risk of faults and the greatest impact on customers when those faults occur. Additionally, with these insights they can better and more cost-effectively install surge resisters to reduce risk of faults from lightning strikes. SSE consulted Elastacloud because they wanted to build a Machine Learning model that would target these high-risk areas using historical and current data. They wanted an interactive dashboard platform that would help them make better business and operational decisions. The Data SSE collect large amounts of geographical, meteorological, engineering and network data to understand the key features of their locations such as weather patterns and customer demographics. The potential of these large data sets a yet untapped and could be used to better predict and respond to faults. The Elastacloud data science team collected these data sets and explored correlations between them. The first step was to join the data sets to each other by connecting the geological, meteorological, customer and faults data. For instance, the lightning strikes were compared to the faults data to identify if lightning was a potential cause. The team were then able to combine geographical data and frequency data to show the areas of most probable lightning strikes, which included analysing engineering and land usage data to discover which areas were most susceptible to faults. Using this data the team were able to build machine learning models to find the lightning strike hotspots. A Machine Learning Answer The Elastacloud team used machine learning algorithms to build AI models that used the historic ´training data´ to make predictions or decisions for future faults involving lightning strikes on a given task. The models consider a variety of features of the lightning strikes such as distance, duration and frequency. Adjoining this to probability data, information about the cause of a fault and the likeness of it occurring can be seen with great accuracy. With complex data sets like this, the presentation needs to be clear. Our BI Team used SQL and Power BI capabilities to structure and categorise the features of the data into multiple segments. The platform created from these tools gave SSE the ability to view the dates, equipment identification numbers and regions in a single comprehensive report with an intuitive and interactive front end. The report gave SSE insight into the following features of the faults: · Time occurred · Cause · Location · Frequency · Consumer impact · Costs The models provide SSE with cutting edge insights around power blackouts and surges in SSE’s generation and identifies the top 100 hotspot areas along their networks. This allows SSE to make smarter, more targeted and cost-efficient decisions when implementing surge resistors using the machine learning models as a validation tool. Through this, SSE is better equipped to reduce the number and duration of electricity blackouts foregoing heavy fines from OFGEM and improving electricity supply efficiency for their customers. Find out more about Elastacloud in the Energy Sector here. Or if you want to read more stories of our projects and customer experiences click here.