More Innovation:
Intelligence Made Easy with Gnowit
Published on October 29, 2019
Gnowit is an Ottawa-based company founded in 2011 and specializes in strategic web intelligence. Since their inception, the team of 7 employees have created a solution that has made its mark catering to the government relations and business intelligence sector. Gnowit leverages AI to help organizations find useful information from public sources (news, websites, blogs, online transcripts of government proceedings, etc.) that will better inform their decisions.
Data Overload
For an organization to function properly, they must be able to collect data and use it to inform their strategic planning. Businesses and organizations can leverage data trends to make informed choices and pivot company direction to pre-emptively identify threats or seize an opportunity. The internet has made data far more accessible, but with the limitless amount of information online, it is hard to know what trends will have the most impact on your company and what is just noise.
With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, data mining has become enhanced, allowing for the analysis of information at speeds unthinkable in the past. Gnowit’s solution uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technique, to automatically monitor the web for new articles, read through these articles and deliver the pertinent data.
Structuring a Solution
Gnowit’s AI solutions help businesses proactively identify relevant updates and deliver briefings containing strategic intelligence to improve decision making. Gnowit’s platform operates as an Internet scale solution, making three billion web calls a month, which results in the scrubbing of 30TB of data and delivery of 35 million fully analyzed documents. This scale of monitoring and curation goes beyond the capability of most organizations without an AI solution like Gnowit, and would require a staff of 70,000 to deliver through directed human effort (rather than automation).
Gnowit’s solution has three distinct functions that help companies build their strategic plans.
- Competitive Intelligence: Pulls data from public sources on competitor products and user reviews. This helps to identify situations where customers are expressing an interest in new features or complaining about a competitive product’s weakness.
- Public Relations: Monitors news coverage to uncover company and brand mentions. These can be analyzed to create an understanding of the company’s public image, allowing the user to strategize on when and how to message an announcement, release a statement, or interact with the public.
- Government Relations: Searches through public policy information to give companies information about legislation that may impact their strategic plans, allowing companies to anticipate and pre-emptively invest in educating and influencing key decision makers to ensure policy outcomes that are best for the company, the country and its citizenry.
Gnowit is planning on scaling up as it deploys new novel AI based capabilities and expands globally. In order to bring their solution to new markets, including the private sector, Gnowit has opted to carry out a CENGN project.
Preparing for Market Growth
Gnowit is modernizing their solution’s infrastructure deployment to work within a containerized environment. Currently, Gnowit provides its services through virtual machines (VMs). While this has allowed Gnowit the ability to grow its infrastructure to the equivalent of a distributed supercomputer on the cloud, it had led to a platform that is hard to maintain, not as easy to change and is more resource intensive. By shifting to a containerized environment, Gnowit will make their solution easily scalable to the demands of more customers.
Containerization will allow Gnowit to easily scale up, and even automate critical DevOp processes with on-board automation tools. Harnessing the use of micro-services, the key advantage of containerization, Gnowit can customize on demand resources needed by each client rather than building cookie cutter VMs. This will give Gnowit the flexibility needed to scale their solution to a large number of clients while keeping resource requirements low.
Additionally, Gnowit is looking to bolster their security measures by implementing a multi-cloud set-up, which will allow companies to use Gnowit’s services, but store all the relevant data that the solution mines on their own internal private cloud.
Gnowit’s CENGN project will allow the company to validate an increase in the flexibility and scalability of their solution, as well as test the multi-cloud configuration.
The CENGN Advantage
Gnowit’s network application project will be tapping into CENGN’s testbed and technical expertise. During each step of the project, the company will have CENGN’s team of solution engineers providing their expertise and guidance on container solutions. In order to validate their containerized solution, Gnowit will be provisioned with a CENGN project space deploying their solution with Kubernetes.
CENGN is giving Gnowit access to the CENGN cloud as well as a number of bare metal servers. Using these resources, Gnowit can test their solution with a multi-cloud configuration, using bare metal servers to simulate a customer’s private cloud environment.
All this testing and validating can be a costly and lengthy process. CENGN helps growing Canadian businesses overcome the testing process by providing a ready-made testing space, making this crucial step to commercialization quicker and easier. Gnowit has taken advantage of these services which will enable them to cost effectively penetrate new markets. Once their project is complete, they will be better equipped to market themselves to an increased amount of private enterprises with a containerized solution with new multi-cloud features. CENGN is very excited to provide Gnowit our infrastructure and expertise as they complete this project!
Gnowit is a growing Canadian business that is using the services at CENGN through the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP). The NGNP is a Government of Ontario program offered through a partnership between CENGN and the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) that is providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Ontario access to the CENGN Testbed. CENGN’s digital infrastructure is connecting SMEs like Gnowit to state-of-the-art equipment and network services, which will allow these companies to test and validate their solutions.
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About the Author
CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.
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