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Embracing digital transformation in rail How does a multinational tracing its roots as far back as 1893 adapt to the digital age? Rail Express spoke with Thales digitisation expert Michael Livingstone about how the company is driving change through big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
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S THE AUSTRALIAN DIRECTOR OF Thales’s Guavus business unit, Michael Livingstone helps businesses discover how digital can bring them tangible benefits. Through workshops and business process modelling, Guavus evolves concepts into actionable steps, driving a digital transformation not only for Thales’s clients, but within Thales Group as a whole. For what is a highly technical and at times mystifying subject, the gist of Thales’s digital push is quite simple: take more than 100 years of experience in industries like defence, transportation, aerospace and security, and enhance them with modern-day, data-driven analysis. “Thales is both the provider, and potentially the customer, for each of our optimisation programs,” Livingstone tells Rail Express. Once a Silicon Valley startup, Guavus over the last decade became a pioneer in real-time big data processing and analytics, and was acquired by Thales Group for more than US$200 million in 2017. At the time Thales CEO Patrice Caine said, “The application to Thales’s core businesses of Guavus’s technologies and expertise in big data analytics will strengthen our ability to support the
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ISSUE 2 2019 | RAIL EXPRESS
digital transformation of our customers, whether in aeronautics, space, rail signaling, defense or security.” That mentality is consistent with what Livingstone and his team are doing today in the Australian market. “We’re looking at how we take our long institutional memory and apply that to this new digital footprint,” Livingstone says. “And for our clients, that means looking at new and emerging opportunities in their industries, too.” Guavus was one of a series of key acquisitions made after Thales set out on its digital journey more than four years ago. Other recent additions include encryption specialist Vormetric, driver advisory system provider Cubris, and digital security firm Gemalto. Livingstone says opportunities for digital change both within and outside of Thales may lie in core processes, customers, suppliers, employees, or assets, but he says all are built from a strong understanding of current business practices. “Historically there’s simply been an overwhelming amount of data for people to consider,” Livingstone explains. “In fact, in the past there’s been so much data there was very little
ABOVE: Digitisation can benefit passenger rail operations in many ways, from timetable optimisation, to predictive maintenance.
RIGHT: Thales aims to leverage its digital progress across all of its sectors, including ground transportation.
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