Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel
The big data ecosystem is alive and well! This past week, I’ve seen a lot of forward movement including some funding news coming from Paxata, provider of the leading enterprise-grade, self-service, Adaptive Information Platform that serves the needs of both the business consumer and IT, announcing it has raised $33.5 million in its fourth round of investment. The latest round was led by Intel Capital, along with new co-investors Microsoft Ventures, Cisco Investments, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and AirTree Ventures, as well as existing investors, including Singapore-based EDBI, In-Q-Tel and Accel. The latest round of funding will be used to further accelerate the core semantic and machine learning underpinnings of Paxata’s next generation Adaptive Information Platform and continue expanding the company’s global presence into Europe and high-growth markets. Additionally, Paxata will extend its industry thought leadership and education around intelligent information management to help business analysts, Chief Data Officers, and IT management … Dataiku, the maker of the all-in-one predictive analytics software platform Dataiku Data Science Studio (DSS), announced they have raised a $14 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital out of New York. Dataiku’s core product, Dataiku DSS, is a unique advanced analytics software platform that allows companies to build and deliver their own data products more efficiently. It is an all-in-one solution that enables data teams of all skill levels to develop powerful data analytics products using the latest techniques and technologies in data science and machine learning. With this latest fundraising round, Dataiku will substantially accelerate its commercial efforts in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
We learned of some new industry partnerships and alignments starting with NGD Systems, a storage pioneer creating intelligent solid state drives (SSDs) for the cloud data center, announcing it has joined the OpenFog Consortium, the global organization that is driving advancements in fog computing in order to solve the latency, bandwidth and communications challenges associated with IoT, 5G communications, and artificial intelligence. Fog computing is an emerging horizontal architecture for computing, storage, control, and networking that distributes these key services closer to end users along the cloud-to-things continuum. The OpenFog Consortium is a public-private ecosystem, formed to create an open framework architecture for efficient and reliable networks and intelligent endpoints combined with identifiable, secure, and privacy-friendly information flows between clouds, endpoints, and services, all based on open standard technologies … Hazelcast, a leading open source in-memory data grid (IMDG) with hundreds of thousands of installed clusters and over 16 million server starts per month, and Solace, the leading provider of open data movement technology, announced a new joint solution which enables multi-cloud and hybrid cloud replication of Hazelcast clusters for worldwide operation. It enables enterprise grade reliability, WAN scale-out and low latency cluster replication … Panoply.io, the data management for analytics company that enables customers to seamlessly implement a self-optimizing analytics cloud infrastructure, announced a partnership with global technology powerhouse ironSource. The partnership will allow customers using ironSource’s data infrastructure solution – Atom Data Flow Management – to connect their data integrations to a self-optimizing, AWS Redshift-based data warehouse, all with the click of one button from within their ironSource implementation. ironSource now integrates data sources into Panoply.io, so Atom customers who currently use, or plan to use, AWS Redshift can more easily and affordably enable and optimize their data analytics infrastructure … Prevedere, a leader in business performance forecasting, announced its strategic partnerships with Nielsen, Microsoft and Prosper Insights to further enhance the value of its predictive analytics solution. These alliances will heighten Prevedere’s forecasting capabilities across many industries and more easily integrate predictive insights within existing enterprise planning processes.
We also found out about some new products, services and solutions starting with Rosslyn Data Technologies, formerly known as Rosslyn Analytics, announcing the immediate availability of RAPid One-Click Data Analytics, a new suite of self-service automated analytic (SaaS) solutions that reduce time to visibility and insight from weeks to mere hours. In a technological breakthrough, Rosslyn fast tracks decision-making by automating the many steps required to extract, transform, load (ETL) and improve data quality for complete, accurate and timely analysis … Ayasdi, a leading developer of machine intelligence applications, announced its inclusion as an initial member of Deloitte Catalyst. Professional services giant Deloitte recently announced the formation of the network of visionary companies working to translate the potential of disruptive technologies into practical business solutions for the firm’s clients. As part of Deloitte Catalyst, Ayasdi expects to accelerate the use of its proven artificial intelligence capabilities to solve the most pressing problems of leading financial services and healthcare organizations. Already, the world’s largest banks use Ayasdi for stress testing, risk management, trading optimization and the prevention of financial crime and money laundering. In healthcare, many of the nation’s largest and most prestigious health systems use Ayasdi to make fundamental medical breakthroughs, to manage their revenue cycle, to improve population health and to reduce clinical variation, leading to better quality care at lower cost … ASG Technologies, a leading provider of information access, management and control solutions for today’s enterprise, unveiled the launch of ASG Enterprise Data Intelligence release 8.8. Building on the strength of ASG’s industry-leading data intelligence solution, the update adds proactive notification features to offer ongoing visibility into the origin and transformation of critical corporate data elements, something many organizations currently lack. As a result, users gain confidence in the accuracy and timeliness of the underlying information that influences everything from forward-looking business strategy, to compliance, to real-time customer interactions … Datadog, a monitoring service for modern cloud environments, announced the release of a new machine-learning based feature called Anomaly Detection. This will allow engineering teams to quickly identify abnormal behavior within rapidly changing cloud environments, based on historical patterns that are impossible to track manually. Anomaly Detection works by constantly analyzing historical application performance data, in order to evaluate whether the current state is to be expected by comparison. This is different from traditional monitoring solutions that pre-define what should be considered normal behavior of the application, without taking into consideration seasonality and trends. Application throughput, web requests, user logins and other top-level metrics all have pronounced peaks and valleys, and those fluctuations make it difficult to manually set sensible thresholds for alerting or investigation.
Globalization hits the big data industry with Hortonworks, Inc.® (NASDAQ:HDP), a leading innovator of open and connected data platforms, announcing the opening of a new, larger premises in Albert Quay, Cork, at an opening ceremony hosted by the Lord Mayor of Cork City and IDA Ireland. The inauguration comes just nine months after the company confirmed its plans to extend its global team, and create 50 jobs in Ireland. As business growth and availability of skilled resource in the region remains strong, One Albert Quay will provide Hortonworks with a much larger working space, offering employees the right environment to welcome a growing roster of partners and customers. One such partner is Cork-based big data specialist Bluemetrix, which delivers web analytics and data consultancy, who recently became the company’s first Silver Certified Partner in Ireland.
In the industry awards and designations category, we heard that Qlik®, a leader in visual analytics, announced that Qlik Sense®, its modern platform-based approach to business intelligence and analytics, has received the Ventana Research 2016 Technology Innovation Award in the Business Intelligence category. These Awards, presented annually, distinguish pioneers that have developed clear visionary and transformative technology that drive better efficiency and productivity as well as the outcomes and performance of an organization. Built on a fully integrated, simple, and intuitive visual analytics platform and powered by the patented QIX Associative Indexing Engine, Qlik Sense combines enterprise readiness and governance with best-in-class visualization and data preparation capabilities. This breadth and depth allows organizations to meet the broadest range of BI use cases from a single platform. This latest recognition comes on the heels of Qlik Sense being ranked first by users in 13 categories in its debut in BARC BI Survey 16, the industry’s largest independent global survey of BI users.
There’s a never ending stream of people movement in the big data industry, starting with Splice Machine, provider of the open-source SQL RDBMS powered by Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, announcing that the Dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (CMU SCS), Andrew Moore, is joining the Company’s Board of Directors. Before CMU, Moore was Vice President of Engineering at Google Inc., where he headed the retail segment, Google Shopping … NGDATA®, the customer experience management solutions company, announced the appointment of Joe Pilkerton as President of North American Operations. Pilkerton will oversee NGDATA’s sales and delivery operations and will be responsible for expanding the company’s presence in the North American market. With more than 20 years of experience, Pilkerton has a unique background that combines entrepreneurial and executive management expertise building global technology companies. Most recently, Pilkerton was co-founder and chief operating officer for FirstBest Systems, a provider of underwriting technology to property/casualty insurers. Prior to FirstBest, he was managing director at Next Stage LLC, a closely held private investment firm specializing in early stage software companies.
We learned of several compelling customer wins starting with Clearsense, whose learning data ecosystem removes the barriers created by data silos and closed platforms in order to help healthcare providers improve outcomes, announcing its subscription-based solutions will serve as the the data ecosystem and data science foundation for Meharry Medical College. The Clearsense activation encompasses the entirety of Clearsense’s subscription-based solutions. As students develop groundbreaking analytics applications on the Clearsense platform, the agreement gives Clearsense and Meharry Medical College the opportunity to transition the best of them to the commercial market. In addition, Clearsense and Meharry Medical College have agreed to evaluate the potential of executing a separate agreement to use the Clearsense data ecosystem and the company’s data science expertise to address non-healthcare-related academic challenges. This initiative will employ the same concept of making big data small and relevant at the point of action. IBM has selected Qubole as a key ecosystem partner for the Watson Data Platform, allowing users to process the entirety of their data with Spark on any public cloud of their choice. This saves companies valuable resources and in-data movement costs by eliminating the need to migrate data back and forth from their selected service to the BlueMix Cloud, while providing the benefits of auto-scaling and automated big data management services within the public cloud infrastructure. Hortonworks, Inc. ® (NASDAQ: HDP), a leading innovator of open and connected data platforms, announced that Lenovo Group Ltd. (Lenovo), a multinational technology company, is using Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) to manage its robust big data analytics platform, as well as Hortonworks Professional Services to provide expert global support. Lenovo is in the midst of a transformation from a product to a customer-centric company. Understanding the customer journey and providing a real-time connected experience is at the core of this transformation. The company collects vast amounts of data from various journey touch points and leverages machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized experiences in real-time. It needed a partner like Hortonworks that could help it scale and achieve this business objective.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is Striim, provider of an end-to-end, real-time data integration + streaming analytics platform, has been awarded the 2016 Big Data Award for “Most Advanced Data Solution” by Innovation Enterprise (IE). The award was presented at the recent Big Data Innovation Summit in Boston, and was based on nominations and votes from attendees and speakers over the course of IE’s Big Data event series …
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