Published on the 18/02/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
RoZetta Technology, officially launched this week, is an attempt by 40 Australian and New Zealand universities to commercialise their big data expertise…
A team of 85 has been spun out of Sirca, the not-for-profit big data organisation owned by 40 A/NZ universities and renamed RoZetta Technology under the stewardship of Dr Ian Oppermann, former head of CSIRO’s ICT flagship.
The arrangement sees RoZetta take over all of Sirca’s commercial client business, leaving Sirca free to meet the big data needs of its university owners. Oppermann said that he intended to take RoZetta to the next stage by rolling out a series of products, rather than bespoke services.
He has also not ruled out a float or trade sale of the business in the future; but he’s not blind to the challenges that the company faces in developing a higher profile and growing revenues: “Software companies grow really fast or die slowly.”
Among the major clients that RoZetta inherits from its parents are ThomsonReuters and Dow Jones, which take its big data feeds and analytics and package those up to customers around the world. RoZetta’s strength comes from being able to process, analyse and graph every trade from every share market in the world in 2.5 hours.
While RoZetta has developed special services for many existing clients it is now focused on products – the first being a big data platform called Hercules (built using Hadoop, Elastic Search and RoZetta’s own technology) and an analytic system called Athena that can be used to report, monitor, visualise and detect trends.
It is also finalising a tool codenamed Alpha Shapes which will map the financial characteristics of a business into a shape, to allow investors to visualise how a business is performing, and then if they like that, search for similarly “shaped” businesses to add to their portfolio. Oppermann said that the company also planned to work with a partner on a mortgage related product that would price risk.
In a separate announcement which demonstrates how big-data savvy universities have become, Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne and SAS have announced they will collaborate on a research programme focused on advanced analytics for business and establish a Master of Business Analytics degree programme.
