RoZetta Technology Launch Speech

I’m very pleased to be here for the launch of RoZetta Technology – an appropriate title for a company in this industry as we enter the Zettabyte era.

When I was thinking about the role played by big data today I was reminded of that seminal text, the 1983 track ‘Making Love Out Of Nothing At All’ by Air Supply.

I want to argue that big data – and what RoZetta Technology does – is an example of a modern phenomenon of making value out of nothing at all.

When I began studying economics at university – in the same year as it happens that Air Supply came out with this single – I was struck by the assumption in the textbooks that producers and consumers have ‘perfect information’.

The theory goes that as a consumer, you know exactly who will sell you a product and at what price; as a producer you know exactly who wants to buy your product.

But certainly in 1983 the reality was very different. As a consumer it was hard to find out who was selling and at what price; as a producer you faced a similar difficulty in understanding your market.  To get this information you incurred substantial search costs.

The contrast with today’s world – of Uber and AirBnB and many other applications – is striking.

It turns out lots of people are willing to rent out their home or provide transportation to you in their car, once there’s a costless way to see who wants to pay for it.

Similarly, if you look at the potential of Big Data in operating business more efficiently or allocating public resources more efficiently, it turns first on being able to collect information in large quantities at very low cost.

One example I notice everyone cites from the Sense-T project that RoZetta is involved in is monitoring the heartbeats of oysters.  This gets combined with lots of other information like water quality, temperature, and so on.

That information has always been there – but it has never previously been possible to collect it cost-effectively.

Now that it is possible to collect that data, it can be used to work out the best time to harvest oysters, making the business more efficient and more competitive.

Another example comes from a paper released last year by Nicholas Gruen of Lateral Economics.   By using sensors in a road network, the Western Australia government could optimise traffic flows over the existing network, saving hundreds of millions of dollars by getting more capacity out of the network and deferring the build of new roads.

Information of this kind might seem inconsequential – it might seem like nothing at all.  But with modern data collection and manipulation, you can create substantial value out of nothing at all.

Certainly RoZetta’s corporate history very much demonstrates this principle of making value out of nothing at all.

By building a database of financial transactions over a long period of time, RoZetta has used clever technologies to turn this data into a high-value product.

The company holds a repository of transaction histories from global financial markets dating back 18 years – today measuring around 2 petabytes of data, which translates to over 3 megabits of data per second, every second, since the project began.

The company had its beginnings in Sirca and was backed by a consortium of universities.

Now, gathering data is one thing – securing meaningful, actionable information from it is another. That’s where the cleverness of RoZetta’s approach comes in.

That’s because a key challenge is getting senior managers, in both business and government, to see the possibilities from gathering and analysing data.

Or in the words of Air Supply, obviously written about data manipulation:

“I know just where to touch you,

and I know just what to prove;

I know when to pull you closer,

and I know when to let you loose”

It’s a terrific set of skills to have – and RoZetta has them.

Their white paper, ‘Beyond Big Data’, gives a great explanation of the potential of their technology.

They’re doing ground breaking work in financial services, in agriculture, and they have the technology to replicate that work in many other fields.  They take huge volumes of data, and extract valuable and business-relevant information from it.

In fact I want to quote two more lines from the seminal Air Supply classic which summarises what RoZetta can do:

“You can take the darkness from the pit of the night

and turn into a beacon burning endlessly bright.”

In other words, out of the confusing and incomprehensible mass of data, they can extract clear and relevant information which businesses can use to chart their course.

To me Rozetta exemplifies modern Australia – really smart people turning out knowledge-based high-value products. In Dr Ian Opperman they have a very capable leader:  a PhD in electrical engineering, an MBA, senior management experience at CSIRO, at Nokia, and a serious research track record.

So I am very pleased to launch the white paper, to be here for the official start of the rebranded RoZetta, and to congratulate all involved for the track record to date  – and most importantly, on what lies ahead.