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
In this week’s installment of our regular Big Data roundup, we’ll start with some M&A news – insightsoftware.com Inc., provider of Hubble solutions, revealed its acquisition of Antivia, a business intelligence (BI) software company and developer of the fast dashboard and information application creation solution, DecisionPoint™. This acquisition will expand insightsoftware.com’s market reach beyond the Oracle and JD Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) ecosystem, which is currently served by the Hubble Corporate Performance Management (CPM) suite, and into the SAP ERP markets.
On the IPO front, we received more commentary about the recent Nutanix offering, which revealed a huge first day boost, with shares well above their expected range. The news has sparked the conversation around hyper converged infrastructure as the next standard computing approach – merging compute, storage and networking all in one box. A couple of commentaries come from Tom Lyon, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at DriveScale and Gene Banman, CEO also from DriveScale:
Nutanix is a prime example of the threat to traditional storage vendors brought by converged compute and storage systems,” said Tom Lyon, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, DriveScale. “Hyper converged systems are those that provide compute, storage and networking all in one box. So they are very easy to buy and deploy if the ‘one size fits all’ approach actually works for the user. But because Nutanix dictates the hardware platform, they could be eclipsed by solutions which allow their customers to choose their own hardware, reaping the benefits of that choice for themselves.”
Nutanix going public has made a significant impact in bringing awareness to the need that companies have to start thinking about adopting new ways of rebuilding their company’s data center infrastructure,” said Gene Banman, CEO, DriveScale. “This massive IPO pop definitely says something for getting entrenched early in a large number of customer infrastructures – potentially preventing others from coming in and replacing them. However, with Nutanix, it is not about the technology as much as it is about the marketing and sales efforts and the early penetration. Data center infrastructures and systems need to be flexible and scalable to support big data workloads and IT administrators need to be able to take advantage of the performance, scalability and economy that scale-out that brings while still taking advantage of scale-up infrastructure environments.”
A continuing number of new partnerships and alignments surfaced in the past week including Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) announcing a joint partnership with Convergence Consulting Group (CCG), a vendor-agnostic data and analytics consulting firm. Through this new partnership, CCG will empower its clients to achieve maximum ROI from their existing Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics investments by implementing Datawatch Monarch, Datawatch’s self-service data preparation (prep) solution. Monarch provides organizations with rapid data prep that speeds time-to-insight for enhanced decision making and improved operational processes … Nimbix, a leading HPC cloud platform provider, announced plans to expand its performance leadership in cloud supercomputing with the addition of IBM’s recently launched Power Systems S822LC for High Performance Computing (HPC) platform featuring NVIDIA® Pascal™ GPUs. Nimbix will now put the capabilities of IBM Power Systems for HPC, based on the POWER8 with NVIDIA NVLink™ interconnect technology processor, and Nimbix’s JARVICE platform in the hands of developers and data scientists to achieve unprecedented performance.
In M&A news, we learned that NGDATA®, the customer experience management solutions company, announced that it has acquired Rednun, a Netherlands-based company that specializes in creating personalized and data-driven video to optimize customer engagement. Rednun technology helps companies improve customer experiences by automating the personalization of videos. The acquisition bolsters NGDATA’s customer experience operating system, Lily Enterprise™, by offering companies a comprehensive solution for delivering relevant customer experiences. Rednun’s data-driven smart video technology will be a component of Lily Enterprise and will enable companies to more effectively use their data to drive continuous, real-time actionable insights for relevant customer interactions.
Financial results of companies in the big data space were proceeded at a healthy pace including Arkados Group, Inc. (OTCQB:AKDS), a global provider of scalable and interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) solutions focused on industrial automation and energy management, unveiled the Company’s consolidated financial and operational results for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2016. Revenues are up 286% year-over-year, reflecting rising demand for industrial Internet of Things Solutions:
- Revenues increased to $1.87 million, up $1.39 million or 286% from $484,262 reported in fiscal 2015, due to growth in both its technology and service customer segments;
- Software segment revenues came in at $730,249, up 81% over the last fiscal year due to growing volumes in our smart factory and smart building products;
- Energy Conservation Services segment contributed $1.14 million to revenues, up $1.06 million from $80,410 in fiscal 2015, demonstrating a strong ramp-up in this business segment since inception; and
- Shareholder equity increased by approximately $1.7 million this year over fiscal 2015 and by approximately $7.7 million since new management took over in 2013.
In the special designations category, we heard that Health Catalyst, a leader in healthcare data warehousing, analytics and outcomes improvement, has been named Digital Healthcare Innovator of the Year by Healthegy, an organization focused on improving and innovating healthcare and the host of the Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit in Boston … Gartner just released its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems, which identified MarkLogic as having the top “ability to execute,” among all challengers and noted its “focused and clear vision” for its product. According to Gary Bloom, CEO of MarkLogic:
The MarkLogic database solves one of the most critical data problems in the industry—the integration of data that is hopelessly locked up in silos—faster and more affordably than competitors. Couple this with our commitment to enterprise features and innovations like semantics, and we continue to distance ourselves amongst new generation databases. We are also gaining on incumbent relational technology as it was never designed to solve this data integration problem. The incumbents are further encumbered by the necessity to maintain the status quo to support their legacy business models. While new generation databases stumble on enterprise requirements and legacy vendors are stuck supporting an expensive database model that requires ETL to support modern applications, we will continue our march to help global organizations gain competitive advantage by leveraging all of their data.”
People news never stops in the big data ecosystem! We just heard that Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in cloud and big data software, announced the appointment of Concur founder and CEO, Steve Singh, to its board of directors. Singh brings significant experience successfully disrupting markets, scaling organizations, and building brands, and as a board member will assist Talend’s leadership team with its strategy and execution in the rapidly growing market for cloud and big data integration. Under Singh’s leadership, Concur grew to over $700 million in revenue before being sold to SAP in 2014 in an agreement worth approximately $8.3 billion … Cloudian, Inc., a leading 100 percent native S3 object storage provider, has appointed Jon Toor as chief marketing officer. Toor brings over 20 years of storage industry experience to Cloudian and will lead the company’s worldwide outbound marketing, demand generation, product management, and PR.
And finally, our Vendor of the Week is Intermedix, a leading provider of healthcare analytics and technology-enabled services, that has developed a solution to address no-show patients using Dataiku Data Science Studio (DSS), the all-in-one predictive analytics and data science platform. The problem of patients missing scheduled appointments costs the healthcare industry billions of dollars of lost revenue each year. The predictive analytics software solution developed by Intermedix was built, tested and deployed by a small team of data scientists in just one month using Dataiku DSS and is now being used in more than 50 private clinics across the US.
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