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
I really enjoy being a journalist in the Big Data space! There’s never a dull moment and this week is a good example, starting with more people movement news … AppDynamics, an application intelligence leader helping power enterprise digital transformation, announcing that Susan Lovegren has joined the company as its first Chief People Officer and will hold a position on its executive leadership team. Lovegren joins AppDynamics from Juniper Networks where she served as the senior vice president of human resources and chaired the Juniper Foundation. At Juniper, Lovegren was responsible for setting the strategic program direction for its nearly 10,000 employees and overall culture to foster innovation. With more than 25 years in leadership roles at technology companies, Lovegren has a proven track record for creating working environments in which employees thrive. In addition, Lovegren has campaigned for women in technology through partnerships with the Anita Borg Institute, Grace Hopper Women in Computing and Watermark. She has spoken publicly on these issues and currently co-leads Watermark’s C-Suite CHRO Network of women human resources leaders and is on the advisory board of Catalyst, a leading nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate progress for women through workplace inclusion … MapD, the data exploration platform, announced that experienced executives, Bill Maimone and Alan Wong had joined the company as Vice Presidents of Engineering and Finance respectively. These talented leaders will help the guide the company through a period of extraordinary growth, building a framework for the company to continue to scale from both a technology and administrative perspective. Founded in 2013, MapD has pioneered an analytics platform that can query and visualize massive data sets up to 100x faster than other systems. By leveraging the massive parallelism of commodity GPUs, it can execute and render SQL queries over multibillion row datasets with millisecond response times.
There were plenty of high-profile customer wins by Big Data vendors including MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the Converged Data Platform, announcing that CellOS Software Ltd., the fast-growing provider of software solutions for the communications industry has deployed the MapR Converged Data Platform. CellOS will leverage the innovative features in the MapR Platform with Apache Drill and Apache Spark to offer its customers real-time data streaming applications to optimize the monetization of mobile broadband. As the data flowing in broadband networks continues to grow at breakneck pace, communication service providers (CSPs) are growing increasingly aware of the value of this data. CellOS will utilize the MapR Converged Data Platform to enable CSPs to extract meaningful data in real-time, gain significant insights from the data, and identify revenue-generating opportunities.
The week also saw a number of special designations starting with MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the Converged Data Platform, announcing it was named a Leader by Forrester Research, Inc., in the report, “The Forrester Wave™: Big Data NoSQL, Q3 2016.” Forrester evaluated 26 criteria categorized by current offering, strategy and market presence. MapR achieved the highest score for current offering among all reviewed vendors … Couchbase announced it was named a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Big Data NoSQL, Q3 2016.” As Forrester stated, “NoSQL is not an option — it has become a necessity to support next-generation applications.” As organizations continue to move into the Digital Economy, Couchbase’s leading NoSQL solution provides customers with the ability to:
- Support large numbers of concurrent users (tens of thousands, perhaps millions)
- Deliver highly responsive experiences to a globally distributed base of users
- Be always available – with no downtime
- Handle semi- and unstructured data seamlessly
- Rapidly adapt to changing demands, thanks to its schemaless JSON data model
In new products and services news, we start with Google Cloud Platform unveiling that all their database storage solutions (Cloud SQL Second Generation, Cloud Datastore and Cloud Bigtable) are now generally available. The company also released several updates to Google Compute Engine that will bring new improvements for our database customers. This includes: support for Microsoft SQL licensing, new data encryption features, improved price-performance, and lowered latency … Lotame, a leading independent data management platform focused on helping companies maximize the value of their data, announced the launch of Lotame Data Stream, an always-on source of rich consumer data, powered by billions of data points from Lotame’s global data exchange. Lotame Data Stream allows global enterprises to combine this high-quality data with their existing first-party data for a more complete profile of their consumers.
Industry financial results included Versium, a leading provider of automated predictive data technology solutions for marketing agencies and enterprises, unveiling a number of significant corporate milestones and new leadership hires. In the first half of 2016, Versium achieved triple-digit year-over-year revenue growth, gained major customer traction across a number of key industry verticals, and expects to double its headcount by the end of the year. Versium has acquired more than 30 new customers, with a focus on insurance, financial and retail sectors. The company has completed a number of integrations with leading CRM and marketing technology platforms, allowing users to leverage automated predictive modeling to produce highly targeted prospect lists from within their existing marketing platforms. Versium raised $2 million in additional funding in May to bolster development, sales and marketing efforts, and support its growing list of channel partners and direct customers.
We also learned that Basho Technologies, the creator and developer of Riak® KV and Riak® TS, the resilient NoSQL databases, announced its Scaling Time Series Apps Roadshow, an educational tour that will provide program attendees demonstrations of tools designed specifically to meet the challenges IoT data presents. Beginning in September, Basho will hold informative sessions across the U.S. and Europe to help developers better understand how to derive value from IoT data and how to fully utilize powerful tools like Basho’s Riak TS and Apache’s Spark™ to build applications that can scale to meet the incredible demands of IoT applications. Basho will also be partnering with other industry leaders and attending key industry conferences over coming months to bring IoT expertise to developers and engineers nationwide.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is – Dataiku, the maker of the all-in-one predictive analytics software platform Dataiku Data Science Studio (DSS). The company announced the release of Dataiku DSS 3.1, which now enables transformations in Apache Spark’s Scala, adds additional external integrations, an improved UX interface, and includes 5 machine learning engines in its visual analysis section. Dataiku DSS 3.1 introduces new visual machine learning engines that allow users to create powerful predictive applications within a code-free interface. Users of all skill levels can now leverage HPE Vertica machine learning, H2O Sparkling Water, MLlib, Scikit-Learn, and XGBoost directly from within the visual analysis section of Dataiku DSS 3.1 to apply powerful machine learning algorithms to their data science projects without having to write a single line of code. Kudos to the company for pushing the envelope with machine learning!
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