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 summer months in the Big Data industry are anything but quiet! This week I was bombarded with all sorts of industry rumors and news items starting with big customer wins like – Qlik® (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in visual analytics, revealing that Baidu, the world’s largest Chinese search engine is using Qlik Sense® to improve its cloud services platform and provide an enhanced data analytics experience to its customers. Qlik Sense will be integrated into Baidu Palo to enable self-serving visualization analytics on the Palo OLAP engine, giving Chinese enterprises the ability to achieve greater agility in aggregating data from various sources to make data driven business intelligence decisions. By incorporating Qlik into the Palo OLAP engine, start-ups in China, especially those enterprises on Baidu Cloud now have greater support in driving data analytics among cloud or filed sources. This enables all individuals within the organization to obtain insights in near real-time from intuitive, easy-to-use personal visual analytics dashboards and applications. In addition, Qlik Sense allows users to quickly visualize and explore data in depth, reveal associations, and derive insights to drive better business decisions … KAYAK, the world’s leading travel search engine, has selected Talena, the always-on big data pioneer, to provide scalable backup and granular recovery capabilities across its HPE Vertica environment. Talena’s unique smart storage optimizer and automated backup processes will help KAYAK save time and money and free up valuable engineering resources. Talena, an HPE Big Data Platform Technology Alliance Program partner, is fully certified for the HPE Vertica Analytics Platform and available for HPE Vertica customers in the HPE Big Data Marketplace.
We also heard that Avata Intelligence, a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, announced that the company has officially changed its name from Armorway. The name change reflects the intelligence behind its award-winning AI platform and growing use in analyzing and recommending actions for optimal outcomes. Applications of the platform have expanded to include such diverse areas as public safety & infrastructure, defense, healthcare, global awareness and social good.
Big Data also saw more compelling industry alignments such as Narrative Science, a leader in advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise, announcing Narratives for Tableau. The collaboration enables Tableau Server and Tableau Public customers to receive natural language summaries that explain the insights within their data visualizations. Users can simply download the free Google Chrome extension and immediately start using it to receive intelligent narratives that can be easily embedded and shared. The extension serves as a first step towards more deeply integrating Advanced Natural Language Generation into Tableau and supports Tableau’s mission to help people see and understand their data …
Kaminario, a leading all-flash storage company, announced it has been named a MongoDB Enterprise Certified Solutions Partner. This collaboration will allow customers to leverage an integrated, powerful data management and all-flash storage infrastructure to power today’s on-demand world, and scale enterprise applications easily and cost efficiently as their business grows.
In the special recognitions department, we heard that Collibra, a leader in data governance software solutions for business users, announced it has been named a Leader in the August 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions. The Magic Quadrant evaluated solutions from nine vendors that may suit the needs of data and analytics leaders. According to the Gartner report, “The growing need for organizations to treat information as an asset is making metadata management strategic, driving significant growth for metadata management solutions” … Geotab announced that GO TALK has received a 2016 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award from IoT Evolution magazine and IoT Evolution World, a leading magazine and website covering IoT technologies. “Geotab is dedicated to bringing real business benefits using IoT,” said Geotab CEO Neil Cawse. “GO TALK was designed to enhance driver and fleet safety, while improving compliance, productivity and operational efficiency. It’s an honour to have that innovation recognized.”
In people movement news, we learned that Tableau Software, Inc. (NYSE: DATA), a leader in visual analytics, revealed that it has appointed Adam Selipsky as president and chief executive officer effective September 16. Christian Chabot, Tableau’s co-founder and current CEO, will continue to serve as chairman of Tableau’s board of directors. Adam Selipsky has spent over a decade building Amazon Web Services, one of the most successful technology platforms in the world … Infogain, a leading provider of technology solutions and services announced of Rikki Jolly as the new Vice President-Global Delivery for its Retail Services. Reporting to Ray Allen, SVP & General Manager, Retail Business Practice, he is responsible for driving the entire delivery function to increase operational efficiencies and ensure the smooth delivery of processes to exceed client expectations. Rikki has more than 20 years of experience across Delivery and Account Management. Prior to Infogain, he was Global Client Partner for Capgemini Financial Services (FS), managing the delivery and operations for a large multinational bank … V.i. Laboratories, Inc. (“V.i. Labs”), a leading provider of cloud-based software analytics solutions to generate actionable intelligence on the use and misuse of applications, announced the appointment of John Forbes as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services. With the company’s rapid expansion into new markets, and its continued commitment to increasing value and opportunities for customers, John is responsible for building and motivating a team of seasoned sales professionals to drive new customer acquisition, customer success, and compliance revenue services … Primary Data unveiled their new storage platform, DataSphere, debuting just in time for VMworld 2016. With this product, data virtualization and orchestration will finally unite different types of storage – the last hurdle to a truly software-defined datacenter. Primary Data has over $60M in venture funding to date, and is led by the former Fusion-io executive team who first brought flash memory to servers, which has since become a standard storage industry technology. The company also announced last Fall that Steve Wozniak has joined the company as their Chief Scientist. Its investors include Mercato Partners, Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pelion Venture Partners … Bedrock Data™, a leader in automated cloud integrations, announced that Thor Johnson has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The announcement comes on the heels of marked growth and success across all facets of the company over the past 12 months, including a more than doubling across three key metrics: month-over-month bookings, number of SaaS platform connectors and connector depth.
More M&A news surfaced this week including Syncsort, a global leader in Big Data and mainframe software, announcing that it has completed the acquisition of Cogito Ltd., maker of specialized software that can access IBM z Systems mainframe data, significantly improve the performance of IBM DB2® and CA IDMS™ database management systems on IBM z/OS, and lower mainframe costs for the world’s largest enterprises. This is Syncsort’s third acquisition of a UK-based mainframe software company, all of which deepened its capability to bridge the gap between Big Iron and Big Data.
New financial results were also announced this week, including Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in cloud and big data integration software, today released financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2016:
We achieved record revenue for the second quarter of 2016 of $25.4 million, accelerating to 38% year-over-year growth from 34% in the first quarter of 2016,” said Mike Tuchen, Talend CEO. “Our strong results were driven by our cloud and big data solutions, with combined revenues continuing to grow over 100% year-over-year. Following our successfully completed IPO in July, we are pleased to have recently been named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. With our flexible product architecture, we believe Talend is well positioned to capitalize on the growing trend of Hadoop, Spark, and cloud adoption as organizations look to leverage their data to optimize every aspect of their business.”
In funding news, we heard that BlueTalon, Inc., announced it has closed $16 million in Series A financing led by Maverick Ventures, with participation from new investor Arsenal Venture Partners and existing investors Signia Venture Partners, Data Collective, Divergent Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Stanford-StartX Fund. The new funding will be used for continued expansion of BlueTalon’s development and sales teams to address the increasing demand for BlueTalon’s data-centric security solutions which provide unparalleled control and visibility at the data layer. With this round of financing, Matthew Kinsella, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures, has joined the BlueTalon board of directors. To date, BlueTalon has raised over $25M in funding.
There also were plenty of new product and service announcements beginning with ManageEngine (Zoho Corp.), the real-time IT management company, announcing that the latest version of its self-service IT analytics software, Analytics Plus, integrates with its IT operations and monitoring and customer support solutions. Now, Analytics Plus goes beyond ITSM analytics to help enterprises derive meaningful insights from the data generated by ManageEngine’s network monitoring, applications monitoring and customer support software. The new version of Analytics Plus is generally available now.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is – Skytree, a leader in enterprise-grade machine learning, that has launched a free version of its machine learning platform – Skytree Express. Download your free version here. In addition to a FREE version of the Command Line Interface (CLI), Skytree also offers a FREE version of its most requested interfaces, Skytree’s own project based Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Python SDK. Skytree Express includes:
- Skytree’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Python SDK or Skytree’s Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Up to 100 million data elements (elements = rows x columns)
- Skytree’s patented AutoModel and Skytree machine-learning algorithms, built for speed, scalability and accuracy
- Single user desktop license
- User community support
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