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
This week, the Big Data steam roller continues to terrorize the countryside! SO MANY new products, services and solutions starting with Euclid Analytics, a leader in retail analytics and omni-channel engagement, introducing Euclid Traffic, to deliver best-in-class person counting technology coupled with a simple-to-use dashboard. Euclid Traffic enables retailers, malls and restaurants to compare traffic across locations, staff locations more effectively based on visitor flow, and evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns on traffic. When paired with Euclid’s Wi-Fi analytics and engagement platforms, Euclid Traffic delivers the most comprehensive customer behavior and insights solution in the industry. With this launch, Euclid is teaming up with Xovis, a leading systems developer for people counting solutions. Currently in deployment across 100-plus locations, this collaboration expands Euclid’s hardware-agnostic software platform to support Xovis 3D person tracking and counting sensors to improve conversion rates and marketing effectiveness … Heard on the street, Galactic Exchange, Inc. revealed the closing of its seed financing round and also confirmed that the pre-release (beta) version of its flagship ClusterGX™ product line would be available for general download at the end of September, to coincide with the O’Reilly Strata+Hadoop World event in New York. California based Galactic Exchange has been developing technology to hugely simplify the deployment of Hadoop/Spark based infrastructures and associated analytics applications, both on-premise and in the cloud. ClusterGX™ Community Edition will be free to download from the Galactic Exchange web site and will enable an organization to spin up Container virtualized Hadoop/Spark clusters in a matter of minutes with zero experience required … Hazelcast, a leading open source in-memory data grid with hundreds of thousands of installed clusters and over 16 million server starts per month, announced that the open source version of Hazelcast 3.6.3 is now available as an image in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace – an online applications and services marketplace that enables start-ups and independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer their solutions to Microsoft Azure customers around the world. Microsoft Azure customers can now quickly run and provision Hazelcast and leverage the resilience, integrity, and scale of Hazelcast’s easy-to-deploy, in-memory computing … Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, revealed an expansion of its Wave Analytics portfolio with new apps built by Salesforce and independent software vendors (ISVs) in its ecosystem. New Salesforce Wave apps for B2B Marketing and Financial Services Cloud, as well as 20 apps from leading ISV partners including Everis, ThinkLP and Vlocity, allow even more employees to be smarter about their customers with actionable insights within the context of their businesses. In addition, the new Wave Dashboard Designer and Wave Dataset Designer enable companies to personalize Wave apps for each role and function within a department, and combine data from multiple data sources to provide employees with the specific insights they need to drive their businesses forward. Salesforce launched Wave Analytics Cloud to empower employees with pre-configured, easy-to-use analytics apps that deliver data-driven insights they have come to expect from consumer apps like Fitbit, Mint and Waze. Traditional business analytics tools are often disconnected from business processes and present data in static, outdated reports that require an army of experts to create. Wave apps seamlessly integrate with Salesforce and provide users with an intuitive, self-service way to drill into the most up-to-date data, uncover insights, collaborate and take instant action, from any device. And today, the Analytics Cloud is extending its apps portfolio beyond sales, service and IT with apps for marketing, financial services as well as apps from ISV partners.
Rumors abound in the new customer wins category starting with Qumulo, a leader in data-aware scale-out NAS, announcing that the University of Utah Marriott Library has selected Qumulo Core for an enterprise-class storage system that would significantly enhance functionality. The University of Utah Marriott Library is at the forefront of digitizing and archiving media, from newspapers, thesis, research data, and books to analog or uncompressed film, photography and video. It houses the Utah Digital Newspapers Project, which is the second largest open access newspaper collection, next to the Library of Congress. The Marriott Library had significant storage capacity and performance requirements, and needed a storage system that could scale gracefully to meet those requirements over time.
Big Data vendors customer wins continue to march on with The Ventura County (CA) Sheriff’s Office awarding a contract to Wynyard Group to implement its Advanced Crime Analytics and Informant Management software. The Sheriff’s Office will build upon its intelligence-led policing and data-driven decision making initiatives with this technology acquisition.
Among the new partnerships announced, we have Paxata, provider of the enterprise-grade self-service data preparation platform, announcing it has formed a strategic partnership with K.K. Ashisuto where they will serve as the master distributor of Paxata in the Japanese market. This partnership will play a critical role in the success of transforming data into information ready for analysis, visualization, and consumption within the manufacturing, retail, financial services and healthcare industries in Japan … Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company and Stibo Systems, a global leader in multi-domain Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, announced a partnership, that will see the two companies collaborate to offer Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. This partnership is aimed at building trust-worthy data foundations to help joint customers derive accurate insights as they embrace digital transformation. Wipro’s deep expertise in end-to-end Analytics, Master Data Management (MDM) and Information Management (IM) solutions, across industries when combined with Stibo Systems’ award-winning Master Data Management solution, STEP Trailblazer, will widen the scope and value of solutions that can be offered to customers, worldwide. Stibo Systems’ STEP Trailblazer solution provides users with a powerful, editable grid-based view of product data, which facilitates the transfer of multiple items such as product families and variants while simultaneously performing crucial validation checks … Siemens Digital Grid U.S. has entered into an agreement with Space-Time Insight, Inc. to offer its real-time visual analytics applications in North America. The partnership strengthens Siemens smart grid platforms, applications and services and provides utilities better insight into asset health and grid reliability, resulting in an unpreceded ability to predict and identify possible failures on their system. As part of the agreement, the companies will integrate Space-Time Insight’s Asset Intelligence and other visual analytics applications for utilities, with Siemens Spectrum Power™ platform. The data collected by the Siemens Spectrum Power™ SCADA platform will be analyzed and visualized in Space-Time Insight’s applications, improving utility operations and planning by giving engineers detailed insight into possible asset failures, including susceptibility to weather conditions … Logicalis UK, the international IT solutions and managed services provider, unveiled a first-in-market partnership with Paxata, a market leader in data preparation. Paxata’s solutions speed up the business users ability to source, explore, understand, clean, and publish data. Paxata is an enterprise-grade solution built for machine learning, interactive, self-service data preparation at scale. Driven by the industry’s desire to utilize big data, the partnership will allow Logicalis’ customers in the UK, Europe and other key international markets to create actionable ingests to drive business transformation and strengthen its solutions and service offerings in the business analytics market. As part of the partnership agreement, Logicalis will serve as a reseller for Paxata and provide training and other professional services to joint clients.
We also learned of a number of industry designations, starting with Adaptive Inc., the Metadata Management platform company, announcing that Gartner, in their inaugural Magic Quadrant report on Metadata Management Solutions, has named Adaptive as a Leader. Adaptive’s flagship product, Adaptive Metadata Manager™ helps organizations solve complex information management challenges by providing a resilient platform that can assure Data Governance, Business Intelligence Reporting as well as Regulatory Compliance programs across large enterprises. Adaptive’s metadata repository technology is trusted in blue-chip organizations in many industry sectors, notably in global financial services, as well as providing third-party consulting partners with a set of capabilities they can leverage in their own solutions … Cambridge Semantics, a leading provider of graph-based Smart Data discovery and exploratory analytic solutions, also was recognized in the August 2016 Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions report by Gartner, Inc. Cambridge Semantics was one of nine vendors to meet the criteria for inclusion in the report, including Adaptive, Collibra, Data Advantage Group, Global IDs, IBM, Informatica, Oracle and SAP. Gartner analysts recognized Cambridge Semantics for its Anzo Smart Data Platform, Anzo Smart Data Integration and Anzo Smart Data Manager solutions.
Funding for Big Data vendors continues at a rapid pace, including TPG Growth, the $7 billion middle market and growth equity investment platform of TPG, announcing it has invested in C3 IoT, reinforcing its position as the fast-emerging leader in the Internet of Things (IoT) market. The investment adds to TPG’s strong franchise and extensive track record in the technology space. Founded by Silicon Valley icon Thomas Siebel, C3 IoT applies the sciences of big data, advanced analytics, and machine learning to enable a new generation of smart business processes and predictive analytic applications that enable businesses to create competitive advantage.
Industry people news in the past week includes Splice Machine, developers of the open-source RDBMS powered by Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, announcing that Mark de Visser has joined the organization in the role of VP of Marketing. The appointment comes at a key inflection point for Splice, following the announcement of the open-source 2.0 edition of its scale-out ANSI-SQL database. de Visser brings over 25 years of experience in enterprise technology marketing to the Splice Machine team. Among the products he has helped launch in his career are Borland C++, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zend Framework, Sonatype Nexus, Sauce Labs Test Cloud and iText 7. He was also part of the team at Red Hat that developed the first ever commercially viable open source business model and has been involved in open source projects ever since.
In Big Data M&A news, we learned that cloud infrastructure provider Nutanix announced that it has acquired PernixData, a software platform for scale-out storage acceleration. Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage, had this to say about the news:
The industry is consolidating quickly with the long-term winners likely to be the companies that have critical mass – revenue scale, growth rate and a thriving customer base – and a broad technology foundation that can transform customers’ IT environments.” – Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage.
We also heard that Calabrio, a leading provider of customer engagement and analytics software, and KKR, a leading global investment firm, announced that they have entered into a definitive purchase agreement whereby KKR will acquire Calabrio. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is – Kaggle, the data science challenge company recently launching after much anticipation the Melbourne-University AES-MathWorks-NIH Seizure Prediction Challenge. Participants can vie for a chance to win part of the US$20,000 prize pool and test their data science skills against the one-of-a-kind long-term human intracranial EEG database from the world-first human clinical trial of the NeuroVista Seizure Advisory System that was coordinated by the University of Melbourne. This device was implanted in the heads of epilepsy patients to record brain activity over a period of 6 months to 3 years. Typical recordings of intracranial EEG in humans only last up to two weeks and do not provide enough data to allow accurate evaluation of seizure prediction algorithms because often only a handful of seizures can be collected over two weeks. The durations of data in the NeuroVista dataset overcome this problem. Analysis of the human NeuroVista data set has indicated that seizure prediction in humans is in fact possible, however, improvements can still be achieved depending on the patient. This contest seeks to find improved methods by contributing data from 3 patients whose seizures are difficult to predict.
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