Alpine F1 Team has signed a global enterprise deal for KX Insights, a “cloud-first, real-time streaming analytics platform” that will run on Microsoft Azure. The deal, which builds on an existing relationship between the two organizations, will enable Alpine F1 Team to rapidly scale-up its real-time decision-making capabilities and implement an operating model of continuous actionable business intelligence for enhanced performance both on and off the track.
In a sport where winning is measured in fractions of a second, the ability to make split-second decisions based on the analysis of real-time and historic data gives the team a real competitive advantage. Over the last 18 months, KX has become Alpine F1 Team’s “holistic data science platform of choice, helping it spot and react to problems before they happen and identify opportunities to increase performance, all in milliseconds” according to the press release.
KX Insights provides a single point of access to data across the entire organization, regardless of system, format or location. It uses hybrid cloud architecture to deliver “fast, scalable real-time” data insights without the added burden of infrastructure, complicated upgrades or the need to optimize for different cloud environments.
Nathan Sykes; IT, Business Systems and Data Science Director, Alpine F1 Team said: “KX Insights now puts us in the position where we can fully utilize the capabilities of our cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. We can easily scale up and down as required while adding new data streams with ease. Add this to the powerful pipelines we already have access to in KX tools for ingesting data and visualizing the results in fractions of a second. This will give us access to even more data allowing for even greater insights via analytics as well as taking our models to a greater complexity and accuracy.”
Mike Downey, tech lead for Sports, Microsoft said: “With billions of data points being captured at the track and at the factory, it is critical to have a cloud infrastructure that is agile and can enable tools such as KX Insights to deliver information in real-time. Alpine F1 Team’s use of Microsoft Azure is an example of enabling data driven decision making in a sport where every second matters.”
With Kubernetes support and access to some of the lowest cost storage tiers including Azure Blob Storage, KX Insights “offers lower infrastructure and maintenance costs than standard deployments”. Built on kdb+, a time-series database, it is available on Azure through the Azure Marketplace.
