on the horizon

Introducing jStart® Beacon

How can line of business users rapidly build data analytics applications to consume, parse, and analyze the massive amounts of data being generated by social media, their own applications, internal databases, and/or external sources? jStart set out to tackle that very problem, after seeing these very issues surface with a number of its clients. The result: jStart® Beacon, a visual web-based development environment to create data analytics applications.

Key Design Requirements for Beacon

• Create common components to encourage re-use and to help LOB users to rapidly create applications
• Easily connect to disparate data sources, allowing users to pull data from numerous sources including social media, internal databases, even flat files
• Allow the user to switch out components and rapidly re-run the application to encourage an iterative exploration process to aid in analysis
• Build an application that has a web interface--allowing users to easily build, modify, or run applications from any platform
• Leverage cloud resources effectively and efficiently, without needing to know how to deploy applications into the environment, or have any cloud specific technical skills
• Aim for a "build and run within five minutes" goal: the system should be intuitive and easy enough to use that users with minimal instruction can build apps within a very short amount of time

How might companies use Beacon?

Based on our work with clients, we can foresee some potential uses cases for Beacon, including:

• A retail company desires to see who key influencers exist within social media that are relevant to their specific offerings
• A patent lawyer wants to scan millions of patent applications, looking for keywords associated with a patent they're working on to identify potential prior art/competitive technologies, etc.
• A politician wants to measure public sentiment about policies and initiatives, using social media to adjust the policies to best address the needs of the public
• A healthcare provider wishes to analyze the data in their patient data, looking for patterns which are associated with successful patient care

The Cloud Operating Environment

Beacon represents jStart's first technology offering in conjunction with the team's Cloud Operating Environment initiative. As part of that initiative, the technology runs in a cloud environment, and illustrates how clients can take advantage of IBM's cloud technologies.

How you can get started

As an On the Horizon technology, jStart is commited to exploring how Beacon might be leveraged in a number of industries to solve critical, unique challenges. If you are interested in seeing how Beacon might be leveraged by your organization, jStart has put together a list of options: