Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category such as M&A activity, people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, customer wins, 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 you a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help you keep 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
Year End Special! The next several “Above the Trend Line” columns will include a number of 2019 prediction commentaries from our friends in the big data ecosystem. Don’t miss these insights by industry luminaries from well known companies.
Let’s start off with some new M&A activity … Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), announced a definitive agreement to purchase BlueData, a leading provider of software that transforms how enterprises deploy artificial intelligence and big data analytics, expanding HPE’s offerings in these rapidly growing markets. The acquisition is expected to close within HPE’s first fiscal quarter, ending January 31, 2019. As the volume of data continues to grow exponentially, companies are increasingly investing in the hardware, software, and services needed to gain actionable insights from it. By 2022, the total addressable market for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and big data is expected to grow to approximately $160 billion. However, not all organizations will have the AI and data literacy skills needed to extract business value and actionable insights from their data, and demand is increasing for faster and more cost-effective solutions that can easily deploy AI/ML and big data analytics … Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, announced that it has acquired NooBaa, an early stage company developing software for managing data storage services across hybrid and multicloud environments. The addition of NooBaa’s data management technology augments Red Hat’s existing portfolio of hybrid cloud offerings and helps advance Red Hat’s position as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies … Syncsort, a leader in Big Iron to Big Data software, announced it has acquired EView Technology, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based provider of software for integrating mainframe and IBM i data into leading enterprise IT management platforms, including ServiceNow. The acquired products and expertise build on Syncsort’s leadership in the growing Big Iron to Big Data market, expanding the number of next-generation platforms Ironstream™ delivers critical mainframe and IBM i data to for advanced analytics. In addition to Splunk and the Elastic Stack, Ironstream™ will now be able to seamlessly integrate this data with ServiceNow® Discovery, Microsoft System Center and Micro Focus Operations Manager.
In the new partnerships, alignments and collaborations department we learned … SiteZeus® announced a new data partnership with Spatial.ai that uses the power of machine learning to unlock a treasure trove of Geosocial data to better understand consumers. This new data partnership represents the first psychographic partner and first social media data partner for SiteZeus. Spatial is a location data company that creates social based consumer segmentation profiles by using billions of geotagged conversations occurring on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Meetup and other social platforms. Specifically for SiteZeus, Spatial has generated 94 different segments “clustering behavioral data using machine learning” to create the most organic segments. Some examples are: Wellness, Athletic Fashionista/o, Craft Brew Lovers, Motivated, Millennial Nostalgia, Empty Nesters, Pop Culture, Outdoor Challenges, Nerd Alert, Hippie, Male Recreation, etc. What that means for SiteZeus users is that results from sales forecasting models are more powerfully predictive, providing greater insight to clients across a diverse set of industries, including restaurants, retail, healthcare, banking, C-stores and virtually any business that targets a certain type of customer … Priority Software Ltd., a leading global provider of business management solutions, announced its collaboration with Anvizent Analytics, the Atlanta based purpose-built manufacturing and ERP analytics solution. The partnership allows Priority customers to enable advanced dashboards and analytics on their Priority ERP system. Anvizent is a fully integrated, fully automated end-to-end analytics solution that simplifies the entire analytics process. With its patent-pending automated data warehousing technology, customers can rapidly access and analyze data with zero coding. The Anvizent solution for Priority ERP comes with pre-built integration for all Priority ERP modules along with 100+ pre-built dashboards across sales, customer service, manufacturing, logistics, finance, and other key business functions … DataDirect Networks (DDN®), a leader of at-scale storage solutions, announced a new collaboration with Council of Scientific Industrial Research – Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-CEERI), focused on an objective to design, test and execute computation and storage solutions that will enable artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) workloads. The collaboration will provide a complete infrastructure solution that can deliver Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) for CSIR-CEERI customers.
In people movement news we heard … Lumin, a technology company focused on data-driven insights and control through its smart energy platform, announced Brian Sullivan will join the firm as head of data engineering. Sullivan spent six years at Netflix, the world’s leading video streaming service, where he was director of the Internet giant’s Streaming Data Engineering and Analytics team.
In the customer wins category, we learned … MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of enterprise analytics and mobility software, announced that Corporación Hijos de Rivera S.L., producer of Estrella Galicia beer and other leading beverage brands, is piloting a new voice-powered business analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) application with Amazon’s customizable virtual assistant, Alexa, to simplify decision-making for its employees. With the production of more than 268 million liters of beer per year, Hijos de Rivera and its beverage brands are consumed and enjoyed in the Spanish market and across more than 50 countries. In manufacturing, business users regularly find themselves in situations where they’re unable to access a report or interpret a data visualization in order to gauge business performance. To address this, Hijos de Rivera’s Estrella Galicia business created a voice-activated AI application for its users to glean data from its MicroStrategy analytics platform. By implementing Alexa across the business, Estrella Galicia can drive adoption to more decision makers, who can turn to Alexa for a direct pathway to the data they need. With questions such as, “Alexa, ask MicroStrategy how much Estrella Galicia Sin Gluten we sold in the third quarter?” or “Alexa, ask MicroStrategy what my total revenue for this quarter is?,” users can more easily discern opportunities to be explored and make data-driven decisions to accelerate productivity and drive out operational inefficiencies … Cloudian, a leading provider of enterprise object storage systems, announced that the Utah Department of Technology Services has deployed Cloudian HyperStore storage appliances, resulting in cost savings of up to 75 percent when compared with traditional SAN and NAS storage. Installed in conjunction with a Rubrik data protection system across three data centers, the Cloudian appliances employ geo-distribution to achieve a 33 percent improvement in storage efficiency. Managed by the Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure Team for the State of Utah, the Cloudian system provides a backup data repository for the team’s Rubrik data management platform. This repository includes 2.8 PB of storage on 24 appliances that are interconnected in a single storage fabric to provide a consolidated view of data. Compared to the team’s previous storage tiering solution, the Cloudian system has significantly increased throughput with the ability to employ parallel data transfers across multiple Cloudian nodes simultaneously. Cloudian’s erasure coding feature allows data to be striped across multiple sites for fault tolerance, rather than replicated, resulting in the increased storage efficiency.
2019 Predictions
In 2019, AI should be less about hype and more about practical applications as customer expectations challenge organizations to deliver a better experience,” said Bill Waid, General Manager, FICO Decision Management. “Enterprises venturing into new markets, by geographies or new categories, will find self-learning AI technologies particularly valuable as there is often a lack of historical data and the dynamic of the environments is volatile. Those who succeed in applying machine intelligence to business processes and balance it with human expertise will be poised to excel.”
AI: from hype to business impact in 2019. The honeymoon is officially over for Artificial Intelligence,” Josh Poduska, Chief Data Scientist at Domino Data Lab. “2019 will be the year that AI will become an organizational reality, rather than experimentation, tinkering, and doubt.”
New customer growth for Hadoop will dwindle and Hadoop clusters will slow in growth,” said Monte Zweben, CEO of Splice Machine. “Massive growth on cloud-based SQL data platforms. Machine Learning will enter an operational phase, getting out of backroom experiments to move into the fabric of real-time, mission-critical, enterprise applications. Oracle defections to scale-out SQL platforms will reach a point where the Company will disclose a risk factor in a quarterly disclosure.”
AIOps and the “Right Type” of Monitoring – AI is making huge strides in monitoring things like signals that are natural to humans (images/video/speech),” said Gadi Oren, VP of Products at LogicMonitor. “However, in comparison the killer applications within IT have not emerged yet because no company knows yet how to prepare the “right type” of signals and the related feedback to allow for machine learning, and produce a strong meaningful application supporting IT management. Prediction: Within the next 3 years, companies will figure out the right mix of signals and feedback for machine learning and will create a breakthrough in monitoring strategies. The first to leverage this new strategy after gathering the right data will have the key advantage in the market. Ultimately, these tools will increase team efficiencies by enabling teams, which used to require experts, to operate through generalists providing considerable customer value.”
The software development industry continues its shift towards modularization of responsibilities on the software development practice,” said Alvaro Oliveira, Director of Operations at Toptal. “Serverless continues to grow along with data storage solutions in forms of many different databases. This takes developers from writing infrastructure code to just writing functions that are handed off to be managed by service providers. What’s more, the way software interacts with users will continue to see new and innovative ways in forms of voice-activated devices, chatbots, traditional web, mobile phone and AI assistants.”
AI and Object Storage Play Tag: As businesses increase their use of AI to extract greater value from their digital assets, metadata tagging will become an even more critical element of enterprise storage,” said Jon Toor, CMO at Cloudian. “This will bring more attention to object storage, which is centered on metadata, and the key will be integrating well with AI tools.”
Machine learning will be integrated into products and services – Companies will increasingly use machine learning algorithms to enable products and services to learn from data and improve performance,” said Seth DeLand, Product Marketing Manager of Data Analytics at MathWorks. “Machine learning is already present in some areas: image processing and computer vision for facial recognition, price and load forecasting for energy production, predicting failures in industrial equipment, and more. In the coming year, it can be expected that machine learning will be increasingly present as more companies are inspired to integrate machine learning algorithms into their products and services by using scalable software tools, including MATLAB.”
Our homes are now connected: smart devices learn our habits, lights turn off and on based on our work and home schedules, our refrigerators can keep our grocery lists, our smart speakers can remind us of our appointments,” said Jeff Ton, SVP, Product Development and Strategic Alliances at InterVision. “Now, the same will become true in business. In 2019, we will begin to see artificial intelligence and machine learning operating our datacenters. For years, we have had devices that monitor themselves and send alerts to their original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in advance of malfunctions. The difference in 2019 is that the disparate devices will talk to each other providing more information about the health and efficiency of the datacenter itself. This increase in information and automation will enable self-healing infrastructure to become a reality.”
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