“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 1/16/2017

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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@insidebigdata.com.  Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

The year in big data is starting off with a bang! We here at insideBIGDATA are hot on the track of all the latest industry buzz. Let’s start with new financial results … Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) announced selected preliminary 2016 financial results. The 2016 anticipated results presented in this release are based on preliminary financial data and are subject to change until the year-end financial reporting process is complete. Based on preliminary results, total revenue for 2016 is expected to be about $630 million, in the range of the previously provided guidance, and the company expects to be profitable on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis for 2016. As of December 31, 2016, cash and investments are expected to total about $225 million. For 2017, while a wide range of results remains possible, the company currently believes it will be difficult to grow over 2016.

In the people movement category we’ll start with Interana, a leader in behavioral analytics for the digital economy, announcing Aditya Vempaty has joined as Vice President of Marketing. With more than a decade of engineering, marketing and sales experience in enterprise tech, big data and analytics, Vempaty will play a major role in expanding awareness of Interana and the value behavioral analytics brings to digital businesses. Building on eight consecutive quarters of revenue growth, he will lead the expansion of marketing and communications initiatives for the company … Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) announced the appointment of Stathis Papaefstathiou to the position of senior vice president of research and development. Papaefstathiou will be responsible for leading the software and hardware engineering efforts for all of Cray’s research and development projects. With more than 30 years of high tech experience, Papaefstathiou has held senior-level positions at Aerohive Networks, F5 Networks, and Microsoft. In his most recent position at Aerohive, Papaefstathiou was the senior vice president of engineering and led product development across the company’s entire product portfolio, including network hardware, embedded operating systems, cloud-enabled network management solutions, big data analytics, and DevOps. Prior to Aerohive, Papaefstathiou served as vice president of product development at F5 Networks and was responsible for defining the strategies for dynamic data centers, cloud, and virtualization. Previously, Papaefstathiou held several technical and senior management positions at Microsoft in high performance computing, distributed operating systems, data center automation, as well as in Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom … Kespry, a leading aerial intelligence platform provider, announced that industry leader, George Mathew has been appointed as the company’s new chief executive officer (CEO) and chairman. He was most recently president and chief operating officer of self-service analytics software provider Alteryx. With 20 years of experience at growth-oriented technology startups as well as category leading software providers such as salesforce.com and SAP, Mathew has held a wide range of senior leadership positions, from driving company strategy to leading product management, development, sales and marketing teams.

We’re seeing the effort to forge strategic partnerships, collaborations and alignments taking strong steps forward beginning with Automated Insights, creator of Wordsmith, the public natural language generation (NLG) template engine, announcing a partnership with TIBCO Software that has produced a compelling combination of Wordsmith and the TIBCO Spotfire® data visualization and analytics software. Spotfire® is a leader in the business intelligence market that helps analytics professionals uncover insights and make better decisions faster. The partnership with Automated Insights enables Spotfire users to read instant, written explanations side-by-side with their dashboards. It’s like having an expert sit down with each dashboard consumer, explaining trends in simple, understandable language … Treasure Data, a leading cloud platform to make all data connected, current, and easily accessible, together with Chartio, a cloud-based data exploration solution, announced its partnership to bring customers a new Live Business Intelligence Integration. By leveraging Treasure Data and Chartio’s new integration, organizations can quickly have a full stack, modern, enterprise analytics solution. Treasure Data and Chartio’s Live Business Intelligence Integration is clearly focused on empowering business analysts, and allows organizations to rapidly collect and unify data from numerous sources at scale to inform business decision and drive success. For Marketing, Operations, and Product teams alike, it is critical to make data-driven decisions at the speed of business. By adding Chartio capabilities to Treasure Data’s existing solution, business users are able to explore their data without requiring any engineering support through an intuitive drag and drop interface, while power users can analyze their raw data directly via SQL, all in real time … Hortonworks, Inc. ® (NASDAQ: HDP) announced an open source technology collaboration with Neustar, Inc., a trusted, neutral provider of real-time information services, to create powerful, business-friendly security and identity management tools for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Hortonworks’ connected data platforms enable Neustar to extend its OneID® identity management to the open source community, utilizing Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Hortonworks Data Flow (HDF), to enable the development of new industry-leading identity management and security solutions for IoT devices …  Clustrix, a leader in scale-out SQL, and Zettaset, a leader in Big Data security, revealed a business and technology partnership that will transform data protection and privacy for companies that rely on large-scale OLTP databases. The benefits of the relationship are now available to customers who can seamlessly and securely deploy ClustrixDB 8.0 with the Zettaset Big Data Encryption Suite, to achieve the highest level of security, performance optimized for large-scale distributed computing and storage environments. A drop-in replacement for MySQL, ClustrixDB powers some of the world’s most dynamic web applications with its scale-out, in-memory performance capabilities to ensure peak performance through heavy concurrent traffic. As the number of cyberattacks on online companies continues to rise, these sites also need to secure their customers’ data. The Clustrix/Zettaset partnership enables them to meet the most stringent security requirements without compromising either throughput or scalability … Dataguise, a leader in sensitive data governance, announced that WHISHWORKS, a provider of IT services and systems integration focused on building and supporting the data-driven enterprise, has partnered with Dataguise to strengthen the security and compliance of data infrastructure throughout Europe. WHISHWORKS will offer DgSecure to customers within its areas of operation, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The partnership between Dataguise and WHISHWORKS will help organisations to overcome difficulties in unlocking Big Data’s potential because of the compliance requirements that will be imposed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May, 2018. As many organizations struggle to combine their various data sources into a secure structure that can yield the rich insights necessary to drive meaningful and sustainable business growth, WHISHWORKS recognizes that some view this information as out of reach, expensive, or sensitive in nature. WHISHWORKS deployments that integrate Dataguise security and compliance software will enable solution efficiency, security and greater profits by allowing higher levels of access through a secure and searchable data security framework in order to maximize the value of becoming a data-driven organization … Huawei announced a partnership with AlgoSec, a market leader for business-driven security policy management. Through this partnership, Huawei security integrates its full range of firewall-related solutions with AlgoSec’s security policy management solution to enable joint customers to streamline and automate security management operations, enhance visibility and improve security, compliance and business agility. Huawei’s next generation firewall solution for the enterprise and data center is customized for large, medium and small enterprises. It resolves issues about border security, data transmission security and user access security and discovers abnormal traffic, behaviors and identifies advanced threats before there is any business damage. AlgoSec delivers an automated solution for managing complex policies across firewalls and related security infrastructure, to streamline security operations and change management, ensure continuous compliance, and deliver a tighter security policy that offers better protection against cyber-attacks. Through this integration, AlgoSec displays Huawei firewalls, including subnets and zones on its interactive network topology map, providing end-to-end visibility across the hybrid enterprise. With the integrated solution, users can manage the entire security policy, including change management, network-visualization and traffic simulations, policy and risk analysis, auditing and compliance reporting. Additionally, AlgoSec provides real-time monitoring and alerting on changes to registered Huawei firewall rules to quickly uncover problems such as unauthorized or risky changes, and inefficient or unnecessary policies. AlgoSec can scale to support any large-scale heterogeneous distributed enterprise environment. In conjunction with Huawei’s next generation firewall, AlgoSec is a critical component to ensure a customer’s network is compliant for auditing purposes … Tableau (NYSE: DATA), a global leader in rapid-fire business analytics software, announced a partnership with the United States Department of Commerce and operational data management and intelligence provider Enigma to help the general public see and understand government data. Using the free Tableau Public data analysis tool for public data, combined with the Enigma platform, this partnership will make it easier for anyone to analyze and visualize economic data … 1010data, Inc., offering the integrated cloud platform that combines self-service data management and analytics at scale with ready-to-use data, announced that it has joined the Nielsen community, as a member of the Nielsen Connected Partner Program. As a Connected Partner, Nielsen clients can now leverage 1010data’s Insights Platform to seamlessly integrate and analyze all of their data including internal company data, Nielsen data, and any other external data sets – all on a single platform. The Nielsen Connected Partner Program is an industry first for companies servicing the retail and CPG industry. By opening up data pipelines, partner companies and Nielsen clients can find each other and collaborate in an open data ecosystem; removing the most common and burdensome barriers to connecting applications and data sets at scale. With Nielsen’s data as the DNA of this program, Nielsen clients and partners will harness more efficient and accurate analytics that drive better industry results from all angles.

We also heard that Amazon Web Services ElasticSearch is being targeted by the same hackers who have gone after MongoDB. Travis Smith, Senior Security Research Engineer at Tripwire says:

The installation of many applications opt for ease of use instead of a locked down state, mainly to make the introduction to using their product as seamless as possible. ElasticSearch falls into this category, when you install the database there are no credentials by default. Similar to other applications, you need to add additional configuration to lock down the installation. The best advice is to block access to the ElasticSearch service from the Internet. As a database, it is generally only needed by the front end website or at the very least a few predictable IP addresses from the internet. The next step would to add authentication to the database itself, regardless of it being directly accessible via the Internet. Elastic Co also provides products such as Shield which will provide authentication to the database. To be more proactive against such attacks, it’s best to understand what your attack surface is before your adversary does. The CIS Critical Security Controls outlines steps for discovering unknown software which can help you determine what you might need to protect. While many commercial products are custom tailored to find such exposed services, a simple NMAP scan is a great first step for anyone looking to gain their first insight.”

And finally, our Vendor of the Week is DrivenBI, provider of SRK – the cloud-native self-service BI platform that empowers business professionals without IT’s constant support, being recognized by PM360 as one of the most innovative products of 2016. The innovative products included software, apps, programs, and other solutions designed to improve how those working in marketing of the medical industry do their jobs.

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