An Ovum Case Study Addresses the full potential of Octo Telematics
Telematics has moved well beyond the niche market that first saw it garner attention by the global industry. The adoption of GPS-connected telematics devices and usage-based insurance models has become the new reference standard for insurers and policy holders. Even final points of sales, that now offer cost-effective insurance policies bundled with an impressive range of services and products, ensure greater safety, comfort and entertainment. Indeed, the insurance industry at large is involved in a major paradigm shift as it integrates new technology and prepares for an imminent future defined by smart cities, increased sustainability and self-driving cars.
Internet of Things
Internet of Things platforms and connected technology have allowed the industry to extend the benefits of telematics and to develop new insurance propositions for homes, offices and shops, as well as personal insurance and far more, too.
Moreover, the integration of telematics and IoT allows insurers to be connected – directly and in real-time – with all the assets they are protecting, whether they are vehicles, property, or individuals. And this means not only that insurers can monitor the status of insured items, but also that they can take direct and even automatic action in response to any type of emergency: a fire, a vehicle collision or even an abnormal heartbeat.
As a pioneering telematics service provider, Octo Telematics has established a leading position on the global market. Octo’s experience, together with the adoption of a co-innovation model through partnering with key technology players such as Cloudera, Software AG, Salesforce, SAS, and SAP, was fundamental for the development of a new highly functional, flexible, and scalable IoT-based platform for the greater insurance industry.
Octo’s Next Generation Platform
The Next Generation Platform (NGP) will allow the company to expand its business scope by taking advantage of the increasingly rapid evolution of technology and to be ready to expand wherever the insurance market heads in the future.
Octo’s previous platform was custom-tailored around the needs of vehicle telematics, but it was not conceived to integrate the vast number of sensors that are now ubiquitous. In fact, sensors in wearables, smart watches, smart locks, smoke detectors, and surveillance devices are becoming increasingly important components in IoT insurance propositions. And while the platform managed data from over 5 million vehicles, it was reaching the limits of its scalability.
Monitoring data sourced from millions of connected devices required a new architecture. New security measures were studied in order to encrypt data and protect it from hackers and other threats. Also, a larger number of monitored items, called for a significant advance in the computing and storage capability . On top of this, the collected data produced by millions of sensors needed to be paired with incident response and claims processes so insurers could provide policyholders with a fully integrated IoT insurance proposition.
The Next Generation Platform, is fully scalable and now provides for all these needs with the computing resources necessary to support up to 20 million concurrent sensor devices, approximately four times the number in use today.
Data Management
Octo Telematics selected the Cloudera Enterprise Data Management and Analytics Platform for this critical element of the NGP. The Cloudera Enterprise includes a suite of tools to provide state-of-the-art security, governance, and workload managementfunctionality operating within an integrated data and platform model. The platform provides the underlying infrastructure to collect, process, and analyse huge volumes of structured and unstructured data, while being able to perform analytics on both streaming and static data sources.
Moreover, the Cloudera Enterprise Platform distributed computing model that allows the NGP to operate both on-premises and across private or public cloud services. And, as technology provides new opportunities, it is fundamental for the NGP to be able to quickly and flexibly analyse and model vast amounts of incoming data to drive the development of new insurance products.
The Road Ahead
Octo Telematics currently collects, processes and analyses data generated by over 5.3 million drivers for a total of over 175 billion driven miles, big data that increases at a rate of over 11 billion additional data points daily.
And while the NGP has only been operational for a short period, there already is evidence of the positive impact it is producing for Octo Telematics and its clients. It is driving the introduction of new products, such as property and life insurances, it is reducing the time-to-market for new product launches by over 50%, and it is increasing process efficiency and customer retention.
Finally, while the insurance sector remains Octo’s primary focus, the greater flexibility and functionality of the NGP means that the company can begin to extend its domain-specific functionality to other sectors with a strong IoT-based potential. In fact, initial evaluation to add vertical-specific functionality to the NGP in support of a wider spectrum of industries, such as the telecoms, energy and utilities sectors, is already underway.
In short, Octo Telematics’ Next Generation Platform is set to redefine the insurance industry, just as the first usage-based insurance policies introduced by Octo revolutionised the vehicle insurance market at the beginning of the millennium.