How University of Bari got smarter.
The beautiful Puglia region of Southern Italy is bordered on three sides by the sea, which is home to one of the area’s major economic activities—fishing. This time-honored business, however, had an age-old problem: fishermen couldn’t know exactly which fish would sell when they got back to port. At University of Bari, Professor Giuseppe Visaggio realized the fishermen needed to reconsider how they brought their fish to market. “Coming back to port with fish that are no longer in demand lowers the margin that fishermen receive for their catch,” said Visaggio. “And the fact that these fish can’t be stored means they’re often discarded—which is a loss for fishermen and for society.”
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Fishing for solutions.
Visaggio is president of a regional development consortium of universities and technology businesses known as DAISYNet, whose members design new ways for Puglia’s businesses to solve old problems. When Visaggio and the consortium selected commercial fishing for a cloud computing pilot, a university team went to sea with the fishermen and saw the challenges of a market splintered by the unknown demands of buyers and the delay in getting the catches to port.
“Net” new ways
“Visaggio and team built a virtual fish market using cloud wireless technology and computing resources that bring together buyers and sellers in real time.”
Previously, fishermen couldn’t begin deal making until they were back on land, but with the new “marketplace in the cloud,” they can now use mobile devices to report the size and type of fish they’re carrying, as well as the location and expected time of their arrival. This “floating marketplace” creates an unprecedented level of transparency and market efficiency for buyers and sellers alike.
Not business as usual.
For Puglia’s fishermen, the university’s solution opens new opportunities. Now, often miles away from port, they can reach a new wave of individual restaurants, shops and markets that bid directly on the fish through an online auction capability. And beyond the nearly 700 percent increase in market addressability, the fishermen are much better able to liquidate catches at the best possible price. Visaggio commented, “It's personally and professionally satisfying to apply new ideas like cloud computing to breathe new competitive life into such established industries. It inspires us to keep on looking for new ways of doing things.”
University of Bari’s smart fish market solution uses …
Servers
IBM System z®
Software
IBM WebSphere® Integration Developer, IBM WebSphere Process Server, IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, IBM DB2® for z/OS, IBM Tivoli® Service Automation Manager
Services
IBM Global Technology Services - Integrated Technology Services: SOA Infrastructure, Middleware: SOA Integration Services, Server Product Services for System z, Storage & Data Product Services, Data Center Services
Business Partner
Mauden S.P.A
Solutions
System z Solution Edition for Cloud Computing, Linux - Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; Linux - Red Hat
Industry Solutions
Education: Innovation in Research
Smarter Outcomes
A Smarter Planet is measured by its results. Here are the outcomes of University of Bari’s smart sales optimization solution:
The size of the addressable market for fishermen has increased 700%.
Fishermen working on the cloud income is 25% higher.
Fishermen still at sea find a 70% faster time to market through smarter processing of their catch.
On the cloud, supply is matched with demand, margins are stronger and fewer fish go to waste.
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Continuing the Conversation
Smarter cloud-based commerce helps the University of Bari team create transformational solutions for their region.
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