Jessica Davis just published a piece at Information Week reviewing an architecture Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) put in place to help make drug development and fielding faster. Creating new drugs always takes years, and after they are created it takes years more to get them fielded.
Mark Ramsey is the chief data officer at GSK. He and his team have some incredible goals regarding speeding drug development times. They intend on helping GSK reduce what is normally an 8 to 20 year timeline to 2 years. The GSK approach has been to design in ways that break down data-flow barriers.
GSK has not achieved their goal yet, but are well on their way. The architecture they put in place to do it is based on great technologies, most of which CTOvision has reported on in the past. The foundation of the GSK platform is based on Cloudera. Others include Tamr, Zoomdata, Trifacta, Kinetica.
Ramsey’s data and analytics stack includes multiple technologies, with the foundation based on Cloudera’s Hadoop
“That’s our primary data and information platform — the source where we store our curated data and our analytics processes.” The stack also includes Kafka and Spark. Other technologies include StreamSets for data ingestion (which has been completely automated with bots), Tamr for machine learning data curation, Trifacta for data wrangling, and AtScale for virtualization across environments. AtScale lets users leverage familiar BI tools for insights from the Hadoop environment. GSK also uses Zoomdata for data visualization, Docker for some of its containerization, Kinetica for GPU-based analytics, and Waterline Data for storage and search. The total solution amounts to more than 5 petabytes of data, all on-premises.
The community should keep watching this one for lots of reasons. One is that GSK is in business to help humanity out. So if their architecture helps them help us it is something we should all have an interest in helping improve. And to the extent GSK will share lessons on their architecture it is something others can replicate.
It is also good seeing which technologies were put in place by GSK. This public recognition of great firms with enterprise grade technology is something that all these firms should be proud of and all enterprise technologies can consider an endorsement by the market.
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We track Cloudera in our list of Big Data disrupters.
