Data lakes are designed to hold, process and facilitate limited analysis on data. So why, you might ask, does a company need both a data lake and analytics platform for sustainability and energy data?
Companies are expanding their data-management infrastructures massively and quickly, which has led some companies to create their own data lake. A data lake is a centralized repository that brings in business performance data from a variety of sources to an internally hosted database, in a structured and unstructured format.
A major challenge with data lakes on their own is that most are primarily databases. Data lakes may facilitate some data capture and data transformation capability, and some analysis and visualization capability. But they are generic tools without any energy and sustainability domain knowledge built-in. Therefore data lakes and analytics together is essential to get the most value from your sustainability and energy business data.
Organizations could of course build that specialist functionality into their Data Lake, but Envizi has invested hundreds of person-years to do that, and it would likely take many, many years for any organization to build up the same capability, and it probably still would not be as rich as the data insights you are able to extract from Envizi. Utilizing Envizi for this task provides organizations rich sustainability and energy functionality at a fraction of the cost it would take to develop in-house.
Data lakes and analytics platforms like Envizi do not compete, rather they complement each other – directly adding and retrieving data from the data lake and deriving insights from the data to inform monitoring, analysis and reporting outputs. The diagram below shows how Envizi can serve as an output platform for data monitoring, analysis and reporting as well as a direct input interface.

Data lakes and analytics combined can provide much more useful and specialized insights to your business energy and environmental performance.
Comments are closed.