Fujitsu Launches Data Curation Service/Data Consulting to Help Customers Analyze and Use Big Data

Tokyo, April 27, 2012

Fujitsu today announced the launch of Data Curation Services/Data Consulting, a service that helps customers analyze big data, assess its value and pick up topics, while proposing new ways to utilize data. The service is run by Fujitsu's team of curators⁽¹⁾, who are specialists in analytics and modeling. The curators can extract latent value in data to discover patterns that would otherwise go undetected, even without prior knowledge of the customer's business.

Through the new service, customers can use their own data to gain an understanding of the beneficial results that big data usage can bring. The service assists customers in improving their business operations and building new businesses through measures such as feasibility studies (practicality or cost effectiveness testing) when considering the specifications of a new product or service, improving operational efficiency by leveraging data in unrelated business units and marketing that incorporates human behavior analysis.

Fujitsu's Data Curation Services/Data Consulting is positioned as a gateway to the company's framework of Data Curation Services in which Fujitsu's curators help businesses employ big data effectively.

Going forward, Fujitsu plans to continue expanding its Data Curation Service offerings and to roll out new data usage-related services in combination with Fujitsu's Data Utilization Platform Services⁽²⁾, a set of cloud services for using big data.

Amid booming interest in using big data, there are an increasing number of companies exploring what they can actually do with big data and where to get started. Fujitsu is now offering its Data Curation Service/Data Consulting as a way for companies to take the first step in using big data, thereby enabling them to understand the value of their data and the benefits of employing it. As a result, the service allows companies to sow the seeds for optimizing their overall business operations and building new businesses.

Business Intelligence (BI)—a currently widely used technique for utilizing data—employs a hypothesis-verification approach in which an expert who is a specialist in a company's operations develops hypotheses and tests them. By contrast, Fujitsu's new service can extract latent value in data that this hypothesis-verification approach overlooks, thereby enabling data to also be applied in business areas that do not easily lend themselves to hypothesizing, such as resolving cross-operational challenges and building new businesses. By analyzing a wide variety of data from multiple perspectives, it is possible to "make the data speak" without relying on prior knowledge of the business.

The results obtained from Data Curation Services/Data Consulting are the first step in a "data-oriented value creation cycle" through which customers can solve issues, improve operations, build new business areas and use the data accumulated through these processes to extract new areas of improvement.

About the Data Curation Services/Data Consulting

As part of the new service, Fujitsu's curators are entrusted with the customer's data and briefed to determine the objectives for using the data. At that time, a course of action for analyzing the data is determined, and analyses and evaluations are performed for roughly two months (standard). Curators will then present the customer with an analysis report describing the usefulness of the data, as determined through the analysis and evaluation process, in addition to suggesting ideas regarding data collection and utilization. The findings will also be presented during a briefing session. As a result, customers will be able to move forward with improving their existing operations or building new businesses.

A wide variety of data application models can be tested with the new service. For example, data accumulated from a company's support operations could be used to improve operations in a different department, such as planning or design. When deciding the specifications of a new product or service, data already on hand can be used in a feasibility study to determine whether the goals for the new product or service are attainable. Moreover, machinery operating log data could be used in a maintenance service for predicting breakdowns, or imagery from surveillance cameras could be used to discover patterns in human behavior that can then be leveraged for marketing purposes.

Service Features

1. Analysis that "makes data speak"

The service extracts and analyzes only what can be brought out from the data, avoiding the problem of preconceived ideas based on existing knowledge of the business. This data-oriented analysis brings to light the true potential inherent in the data.

2. Quick analysis by a team of curators

Through focused data analysis and assessment by curators with advanced skills in data modeling and analytics, high-level results can be produced in a surprisingly short time.

3. Presents new perspectives by bringing together diverse data

This analysis brings together diverse business data, which can illuminate issues and suggest improvements and new business areas that conventional BI, which focuses on a specific business area, would tend to overlook.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing and Availability

Service	Price (excl. tax)	Availability
Data Curation Service/Data Consulting	By quotation	Immediately

Future Plans

Fujitsu plans to gradually extend the menu of offerings under its Data Curation Services to deliver a variety of services for utilizing data. This includes services to assist in creating new models for data utilization, and Data Utilization Platform Services to create effective utilization processes for building a data-oriented value creation cycle.