Telecom New Zealand's innovation division, Telecom Digital Ventures, is targeting the big data market with a new business called Qrious, which will help organisations to take on "big challenges" and wrest value from data and analytics.
General manager for Qrious Cyrus Facciano said there are significant obstacles to using big data, which Qrious aims to address through a locally-hosted cloud platform that will enable the secure blending of proprietary and public data.
“We believe there is a massive opportunity ... to generate significant economic and social benefit from smarter use of data. Global insights suggest this could generate value in the billions of dollars for New Zealand," he said.
“We have established a platform where businesses, the public sector and other organisations can privately and securely host their own data and combine this with other publicly available information to gain even greater insights.”
According to the Qrious website the offerings include platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) elements.
The website says Qrious has invested in a "privacy charter of guiding principles, leading security architecture, regular penetration testing and the appropriate compliance measures to ensure that people's privacy is protected."
Qrious wants to help organisations, many of which don’t have the expertise or technical resources to analyse information and gain insights, to target areas such as public transport, housing and health, Facciano said.
"By connecting available data sets across the sector and correlating this with population demographics, we can help direct investment to the most in-demand types of care.
“Greater value and benefits can be derived from the combination of information, the insights that can be gleaned from that information, and the application of those insights into valuable action."
Qrious is also establishing a Data Science Academy where students will be trained on analytical techniques.
Telecom, Qrious's parent, is in the process of renaming itself Spark.