Just when everyone is shifting their focus to cloud monitoring, Amazon appears to be marching toward on-premises IT management. Sort of.
The evidence: Amazon earlier this year acquired 2lemetry. According to company jargon, "2lemetry is an Internet of Things platform and technology company that powers the connected enterprise, tying people, processes, data and devices together—transforming raw data into real-time actionable intelligence."
Huh? Translated into English, 2lemetry has two Internet of Things platforms. They are:
1. 2lemetry Integrate -- which allows enterprises to connect device data to applications or databases, the company says. A potential use case involves device data feeding information to Salesforce.com, Heroku and ThingWorx, the company adds.
2. 2lemetry Incoming -- which supports location and proximity sensing, facial recognition, and geo-fencing for people, places and things, 2lemetry asserts. A potential use case involves asset tracking or something far more advanced like facial recognition with analytics. The company claims, "2lemetry’s facial recognition solution effectively measures and records age and gender– data that can then be used for digital signage or for analytics to drive future decisions."
MODERN MONITORING: IOT MEETS BIG DATA
Clearly, Amazon is not going down the traditional IT monitoring path. Instead, 2lemetry attempts to transform machine data, user data and applications into business intelligence.
The big question: Just how far will Amazon reach into corporate networks as the company attempts to touch IoT endpoints?
Dig through all the jargon and it looks like Amazon wants to...
- Collect data from any type of device -- whether connected to an enterprise network or a cloud network.
- From there, Amazon hopes to link the data with some sort of intelligent analysis, automatically triggering events (the right ad for the right person in the right location).
- From there, Amazon hopes the automated event (right ad, right person, right location) triggers... more purchases on Amazon.com.
So while Amazon is getting deeper into monitoring, it really isn't about network or device performance monitoring. Instead, it's about gathering user data and transforming it into an Amazon.com sale -- or collecting some customer tariffs during that data collection and transformation process.
