“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 2/15/2016

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a new recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short news items such as people movements, funding news, 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@insidehbigdata.com.  Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

Vast, the data-as-a-service platform for autos and real estate, today announced a $14 million investment from Capital One Growth Ventures. Vast connects buyers and sellers of cars and homes through data-driven discovery experiences. CarStory.com, Vast’s consumer marketplace, utilizes the Vast data platform to understand consumer intent and match each shopper with the right vehicle. The investment by Capital One Growth Ventures will enable Vast to grow its CarStory product footprint while bringing its big data platform to other industries such as real estate … Rumor has it that a new collaboration between top-rated data analytics leaders will provide deeper insight into patient health risks – which promises to improve patient experiences while reducing costs. Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the big data analytics and marketing applications company, and Knowledgent, a big data strategy and information consultancy that improves lives and business through data, will partner to leverage predictive analytics in making health risk analysis more effective … And for politically minded, here is a big data analysis of US election coverage — Election Tracker ’16, OpenText’s newly launched tool that looks at text from thousands of online news articles and global media outlets, to create meaningful, visual, and highly interactive dashboards that summarize and compare coverage across news outlets, presidential candidates, hot topics, and tone as they unfold in the news media … We caught up with Jason Zintak, CEO of Platfora for some interesting thoughts about the Hadoop industry — “Whatever Hortonworks’ earnings report reveals, Hadoop is here to stay and its potential cannot be overstated. While companies must be able to quickly analyze their data to remain competitive, most of it still remains in the dark. Forrester reports that 60-73 percent of enterprise data is still unused for analytics, but Hadoop is fundamentally changing this dynamic by disrupting the economics of big data analytics. With the explosion of the Internet of Things and other net new data sources, organizations face increasing pressure to generate real-time data insights to better understand the customer journey. Platfora is seeing a big uptick in Hadoop adoption across Fortune 500 companies as powerful new tools running on Hadoop are democratizing data access and business insights …” Just heard on the street, Basho Technologies, the creator and developer of NoSQL databases Riak® KV and Riak® TS, named John Musser as vice president of technology. Musser is the founder of ProgrammableWeb and  an acclaimed industry expert on APIs, software platforms and developer ecosystems. He brings deep insight into both the technical and business applications of APIs, including their increased importance, emergence of business models and technology trends. Musser will help drive product strategy and direction for the Basho family of products … Opposing points of view are good for the industry — Datawatch execs think Gartner is shortsighted on data prep. Gartner has predicted that by 2018, self-service data preparation tools are going to either evolve into end-to-end analytics platforms or be integrated into others’ analytics platforms as features – but Datawatch believes that’s a very narrow view of the market because it completely discounts the broad range of operational use cases for prepared data … Rumor has it that Trifacta, a leader in data wrangling software, raised $35M in growth-stage financing from existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners and new investor Cathay Innovation. The new funding brings the company’s total amount raised to approximately $76 million. The additional financing will be used to fuel the growth of Trifacta’s global field organization and the continuing innovation of its award-winning products … Just learned that Dell Statistica is now identified in the “Leaders Quadrant” of the new Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms. Statistica delivers a full range of data blending, data discovery, and advanced and predictive analytics tools such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Positioning Dell Statistica in the Leader quadrant for the first time displays the tool’s strong track record in the market and emergence as a prominent analytics platform … Also, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms is out! The report is based on many factors including detailed questionnaires from actual BI users, and contains reviews of all vendors’ strengths and cautions. According to ThoughtSpot CEO Ajeet Singh:

Gartner released the 2016 MQ for BI & Analytics last week. It sent a powerful shockwave across the industry. The message was clear: the BI world has hit a dead end. Gartner moved a half a dozen so-called ‘market leaders’ out of their leader’s quadrant, signaling that business-as-usual won’t cut it anymore. Business leaders want to buy analytics technology that’s both easy-to-use and meets IT-driven scale and security requirements. While the legacy vendors do the latter, they miss the former by a mile. Gartner is demanding a new breed of modern BI platform – one that puts the business user in the driver’s seat. You shouldn’t have to go to three-day training class to answer a simple data question or wait four days for an expert to build you a report. Those days are over. Gartner is shining a light on the dark secret legacy vendors have been hiding for years. They wisely foreshadow that the winners of tomorrow will be vendors who extend the reach of analytics to more users through ‘search-based data discovery enabled by natural language query interfaces’.”

 

Gartner_BI_quadrant_2016

Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.

Speak Your Mind

*