It was nostalgic going back to the organisation that we built the foundation of our careers in – back then in the 90’s setting up sales and operations for one of India’s largest petrochemical unit that was just “Going Live “. Size, scale and achieving what would be considered impossible targets by most have always been hallmarks of the Reliance way of life.
So, when I got a chance to attend a meetup “Big Data Journey at Reliance Jio and Curb your insecurity with Hadoop” hosted on the 18th of January 2018, I was naturally excited. As an entrepreneur and a founding partner of a UK consultancy delivering enterprise solutions, analytics, data strategy and making forays into machine learning and artificial intelligence, I was looking forward to taking away some of the experiences of Jio who are shaping up to be a market leader in technology and innovation.
Very soon during the presentation, it became abundantly clear that the Reliance way of working lives on and if anything has acquired even bigger proportions. Reliance Jio, through its mobile data plans, has been responsible for multiplying India’s data consumption. Having added 100 Million customers in 170 days after launch, Jio mobile consumers alone consume 1 billion GB of data per month.
As per the presented statistics, India today is set to become the biggest consumer of mobile data in the world in absolute volumes. At the same time, Jio has embraced the use of technology and innovation in a big way. Data-driven decision making, ado analysis of real-time information and NLP/Deep learning are now integral to their operations.
They have the largest data lake in India – multi-petabyte scale, handling 10’s of millions of queries every day. Operating at cloud scale with about 200 data generating systems generating structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, approx. 300+ Billion records are being processed daily, and this is also growing rapidly. With a clear thrust towards open source platforms, Jio is also leading the open source charter in India to leverage the power of the developer community.
My key takeaways from the session:
- Data strategy should form a key initiative in any organisation that is looking to gear up and indeed exploit the opportunities in the inevitable changes to industry that are imminent with the advent of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence
- Open source systems today offer a great opportunity to leverage large communities and build rapidly to scale. The fact that India’s largest corporation is leading this will set a great example of how it can be done.
I came away looking forward to tracking what seems to be building up as a vast ecosystem of technology and innovation with very ambitious growth plans.
