A global network
Pacific Challenge is a specialist consulting firm, providing value to clients through its global network of affiliates who bring deep domain expertise in information technology, computer communications, semiconductors, computer hardware, and technology for financial services. The unique expertise of affiliates can be brought immediately to bear on a client’s needs. Located in key industry and research centres (including Sydney, Silicon Valley, and Adelaide), our colleagues bring their own networks and resources, helping ensure that our clients benefit from a truly unique global range of both expertise and access.
The Managing Partner of Pacific Challenge is Dr. J Craig Mudge AO, who brings his years of international experience both in technology companies and world-class research centres to his work
“Over a period of many years as the technology industry has "grown up," Craig has consistently exhibited an unusual ability to recognize and articulate important trends and opportunities before many others.”
Karen Tucker, CEO Churchill Club, Silicon Valley's premier business and technology forum
www.churchillclub.org
Partnering with clients on strategy, or as board members or advisers, affiliates of Pacific Challenge, or the Managing Partner, provide leadership in strategy development. For more established companies and organizations, the consulting firm’s cross-functional expertise in innovation drives the commercialization of research, product development and corporate venturing. For early stage technology firms, Pacific Challenge affiliates have the domain expertise and Silicon Valley track records to help guide a firm to success.
Current specializations
Strategy
Elements that are vital for a company to compete, win, and survive change over time. Notably it is context that changes those elements: the Internet, globalisation, recently the global financial crisis, and now mobility and social media. We work with our clients on deep dives to understand these elements and how a firm must respond for success.
Industries we have worked with include software, defence, cloud computing service providers, semiconductor, telecommunications, and computer hardware, as well as government agencies in the management of innovation. Click here for more information
Cloud computing
This disruptive technology, by deploying outsourced compute and storage at massive scale, via a pay-per-use model is bringing business value to business, government, and eScience. The current large amount of hype requires client firms to drive for business value. Click here for more information
Strategy work in the mining industry
Over the last nine years, the Managing Partner, Craig Mudge AO, has taken part in three projects applying emerging concepts of Big Data. These concepts took root in the first Big Data Conference in CSIRO, which he led. The first mining project involved the use of cloud computing to speed up the execution of an exploration program using magnetotellurics in a pre-fracturing and
post-fracturing study of a new geothermal site. Using parallelism enabled by the cloud, execution time went from weeks to days. The IEEE paper describing this
project is here
An exciting and satisfying project in mineral processing used machine learning to build a new model of performance of the major step in the Olympic Dam mining operation, namely, the mill. Our final report, including some sensitivity analysis, the performance improvement, and the rationale for using cloud computing for secure communication and computation, is here
A third mining project was a feasibility project on predictive maintenance, a method of managing maintenance that is common for aircaft, trains, and elevators, but only just emerging in mining. The concepts of using sensors, predicting remaining useful life, and some early experience are given in this report
Big Data
Big Data is concerned with data sets that are so large that existing methods of capture, storage, sharing, and analysis do not work. For example, keeping entries consistent in relational data bases holding tens of petabytes of data distributed across the globe is not possible. In some cases, it is the complexity of the data, not its size that is the problem. In others, the problem is the real-time nature of the data.
Sources of data are new instruments (astronomy and gene sequencing machines, for example), ecommerce financial transactions, sensor networks, new satellite feeds, and the web. The requirement for new techniques for capture, storage, sharing, and analysis represents both an opportunity for companies (more business value from technology) and a cost (a need to invest in new techniques, especially those that deal with scale and unstructured data).
A useful perspective, providing good historical context, by Steve Lohr is in this New York Times article.
Reports for government
The team at Pacific Challenge has done analysis of market and technology trends for state and federal governments, covering outsourcing, enterprise security, e-commerce, and commercialisation of technologies developed in national labs.
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