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 conference season is longer than ever in the big data space this year, and insideBIGDATA is finding news for our readers around every corners. Let’s start with new partnerships and alignments — we heard that BlueData, provider of a leading Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform, announced that it is now a member of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Partner Ready Technology Partner Program. This program provides an integrated set of technical, marketing, sales, and collaboration services for market-leading solutions running on key HPE technologies and platforms. The two companies will work together to accelerate Big Data projects and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise deployments of Hadoop, Spark, and other related Big Data workloads … Active BI Ltd, one of the fastest growing companies within the Business Intelligence Domain announced that the company has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Berkshire Solutions Ltd (BSL), a leading Business Intelligence Consultancy provider with its European headquarters in the UK and offices in India joined hands with Active BI Ltd. BSL have been providing value added services for over 6 years to hundreds of companies across the world including J P Morgan, Barclays, NHS England, PWC, Toyota, Ministry of defence, Accenture, NSSF Kenya and many more … Datorama, a global marketing analytics innovator, announced it has established a formal partner relationship with LiveRamp™, an Acxiom® company and leading provider of omnichannel identity resolution. LiveRamp’s IdentityLink platform unifies siloed data across offline and digital channels to power an omnichannel view of the consumer for people-based marketing initiatives. This collaboration unlocks tremendous value for Datorama users, who can now benefit from precise campaign targeting and performance measurement at the individual level — all within a privacy-compliant environment … The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC), the global, member supported organization that promotes the accelerated growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), announced it will collaborate with the IoT Acceleration Consortium© (ITAC) to further the development of Internet of Things (IoT) in numerous industries. The goals of the cooperation are to promote the digital economy by preventing fragmentation and to harmonize various aspects of IoT.
In the customer wins category we’ll start with supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY) announcing that Baylor University has selected a Cray® CS400™ cluster supercomputer, further demonstrating its commitment to transformative research. The Cray system will serve as the primary high performance computing (HPC) platform for Baylor researchers and will be supported by the Academic and Research Computing Services group (ARCS) of the Baylor University Libraries. The Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer will replace Baylor’s current HPC system, enhancing and expanding its capacity for computational research projects. Among other research initiatives, Baylor serves as a Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Tier 3 site for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Baylor scientists analyze data gathered by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, in partnership with others around the globe as part of ongoing research into subatomic particles … Continuum Analytics, the creator and driving force behind Anaconda, a leading Open Data Science platform powered by Python, announced that Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC, a drug discovery company focused on rare genetic diseases, has adopted Bokeh––a Continuum Analytics open source visualization framework that operates on the Anaconda platform. Bokeh on Anaconda makes it easy for biologists to identify genetic disease markers and assess drug efficacy when visualizing cell data, allowing for faster time-to-value for pharmaceutical companies … AbbVie Stemcentrx, one of many research companies turning to HPC to overcome obstacles with its large data workloads, has selected SGI® UV™ 300 to elevate its investigation of cancer. As a leader in genomics research with a strong mission to pioneer new therapies for curing diseases, AbbVie Stemcentrx leverages their SGI UV 300 to assist with bioinformatics initiatives that require significant levels of compute power, such as analyzing large and complex datasets for cancer therapy and genetics sequencing research.
For the special designation category, we learned that in DMA’s 2016 Analytic Challenge data scientists from today’s leading data and analytics firms went head-to-head to determine who can best calculate a customer’s lifetime value and teams from AdTheorent and DataLab USA emerged as co-winners. Sponsored by DMA’s Analytics Community and EY (Ernst & Young LLP), the 2016 Analytic Challenge recognizes the top solutions to driving personalized customer interactions. Influent50 was awarded the runner-up prize. All three winning companies were highlighted earlier this month at DMA’s &THEN event in Los Angeles, where attendees gained a full briefing on the competitors and their solutions.
We also learned of new products, services and solutions starting with Alation, Inc., the collaborative data company, announced the planned Q4 release of a new product, Alation Tableau Edition and selection as strategic Technology Partner for data governance. The new Alation product, with deep integration with Tableau Server, supports a new approach to no-risk, self-service analytics. Together, Alation and Tableau embrace the freedom and speed of self-service analytics with the trust in data that comes from consistent enforcement of data governance best practices … Just two months after its launch out of stealth, Unravel Data announced that its full-stack performance intelligence platform for optimizing Big Data operations (DataOps) has been certified on Cloudera Enterprise 5 through the Cloudera Certified Technology Program. Cloudera has the world’s fastest, easiest and most secure data analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop for helping organizations solve their most challenging business problems with data. The Cloudera Certified Technology Program’s goal is to simplify the process for Apache Hadoop technology buyers to purchase the right components and software applications to extract the greatest value from their data … Interana, a leader in behavioral analytics for the digital economy, announced the launch of Interania, a new online community that gives Interana users a platform to exchange best practices for behavioral analytics. Interania offers discussion boards, blogs and how-to content to help community members make sense of digital behaviors and hone their analytic skill set. It is the first forum for digital economy workers to share tips and spark meaningful dialogue about how to best use behavioral analytics to drive business results across an organization … Lexalytics®, a leader in cloud and on-prem text analytics solutions, announced that it has released Semantria for Excel 5.0, a text analytics add-in for Microsoft Excel to help companies gain better insights from surveys and ultimately improve business outcomes. Semantria for Excel enables market researchers, business analysts, customer experience management (CEM), voice of the customer (VOC) and voice of the employee (VOE) professionals to quickly and easily analyze both structured and unstructured survey data in one place. Whether generated from popular third-party online survey companies or formats like SPSS® or triple-S XML, Semantria for Excel can generate insights and create reports and data visualizations with the click of a button.
In new funding news we learned that Litmus Automation, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced that the company has secured a seed round of US$1.5MM through a number of reputable private angels from the US and Canada. While the IoT platform market has been hot with acquisitions and new entrants, this stealth company has garnered traction with Fortune 500 companies and has positioned itself as a leader in the connected car and industrial spaces. The company graduated last year from one the top accelerators in the US, the Alchemist Accelerator, and took part in two Canadian accelerators, Ryerson Futures/DMZ and MaRS.
In people movement news, we heard that Actian announced the appointment of a new leadership team, headed by new CEO Rohit de Souza. Rohit is bringing nearly 25 years of blue chip, strategic technology and change management experience to Actian, including his previous experience as CEO of BeyondCore. In addition, David Murphy is stepping in as Executive Chairman and Gregg Hampton as CFO. This is an interesting point in time for Actian, a data management and integration company who competes with the likes of Informatica, Dell Boomi and others. With the growth of cloud, IoT and analytics, Actian technology has never been more vital to a business as it is now. Having developed a portfolio of products over the past 25+ years – including the well-known Ingres relational database – Actian is one of the best prepared companies to help tackle the data revolution.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is KPMG, commissioning Forrester Consulting to survey 2,165 respondents from 10 countries to identify in which areas businesses are using data & analytics (D&A), and to what extent they lack trust in their D&A models and processes to drive decision making and desired outcomes. The report, Building Trust in Analytics shares insights and recommendations on suggested processes, practices and governance for building trust in D&A using KPMG’s four anchors of trust, a framework for assessing quality, effectiveness, integrity and resilience. Most business leaders today believe in the value of using D&A throughout their organizations, but say they lack confidence in their ability to measure the effectiveness and impact of D&A, and mistrust the analytics used to help drive decision making.
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