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
Spring is a wonderful season for the big data industry, with new possibilities opening up at every turn. We heard from many of our friends in the ecosystem this past week and we’ll start off with some people movement news … Couchbase Inc., a NoSQL database leader, announced the appointment of former Veritas President Matt Cain as Chief Executive Officer and Board Member, effective immediately. Cain succeeds Bob Wiederhold, who has served as Chief Executive Officer of Couchbase since 2010 and will remain as Executive Chairman. Cain joins the company following record enterprise growth in which Couchbase has emerged as the database platform of choice for modern web, mobile and IoT applications that delivers unsurpassed customer experiences. As a seasoned technology leader, Cain brings to Couchbase a diverse background across strategy, product development, and sales and is uniquely qualified to scale operations and propel growth globally. Most recently he served at Veritas Technologies LLC as President of Worldwide Field Operations, leading a 4,200 person team responsible for all aspects of sales, customer retention, channels, services, and support. Before that, he was Chief Product Officer with full P&L responsibility for their $2.5B business revitalizing the company strategy, increasing engineering efficiency, and delivering growth across the portfolio. He was instrumental in the separation of Veritas from Symantec and sale to the Carlyle Group … GPU analytics company MapD Technologies has appointed Ché Wijesinghe to lead global sales, sales engineering and customer success. Wijesinghe was most recently President and Chief Operating Officer at Neokami, an artificial intelligence software company, and previously Head of Global Sales for Cisco’s data and analytics business group. The MapD analytics and visualization platform leverages the massively parallel processing capabilities of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to query multi-billion record datasets in milliseconds and visualize complex data in real-time. Its lightning-fast SQL queries are ideally suited to exploring big data in sectors such as advertising, financial services, and telecom, where traditional CPU-based analytics solutions struggle.
In the new designations category we have learned that Yewno, a new technology powering knowledge discovery, announced that it has ingested its 100 millionth content asset. Yewno enhances human learning and understanding by extracting and connecting concepts from vast volumes of content and data. The content within Yewno’s education product Discover covers a broad range of academically relevant subject fields and formats including scholarly and trade journal and book content, Open Access and Open Educational Resources, quality web sources and data sets, and institutional repositories. New content partners providing publications to Yewno include Gale, a Cengage Company, SPIE – the international society for optics and photonics, the American Medical Association, Stanford University Press, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development … Adaptive Insights, the pure-play cloud vendor to be named a leader in strategic corporate performance management (CPM), is working with five Major League Baseball (MLB) teams to help up-level their finance teams’ games. While this last week saw Opening Day for most teams, for an MLB team’s finance leader it is just one day in the life of their deep, ongoing analysis of how to optimize ticket pricing, secondary markets, concessions, parking, operating expenses, TV ads, and more, in addition to player contracts and multi-million-dollar player compensation budgets. A challenge inherent in this process, for which any finance leader at the helm of an organization with multiple business units, locations, and divisions can relate, is the constantly changing business landscape. Baseball is one of the most statistics-driven sports in the world, and the expectation for real-time data on demand is high. MLB finance organizations are following suit, with teams throughout the league embracing cloud technology to plan faster, smarter, and more profitably … Sinequa, a leader in cognitive search and analytics, announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned Sinequa as a Leader in its March 2017 Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines. Sinequa develops cognitive technology that empowers people in large organizations to gain insight from enterprise data within their digital workplace. By combining human-driven interactions with machine-assisted analysis, the company’s insight engine serves as a comprehensive auxiliary brain to enterprise workers by delivering right-time, relevant and contextual insights so they can make better decisions, drive innovation and achieve greater operational efficiencies.
Also, we had some M&A action this week with WalkMe, a leading user adoption platform, announcing that it has acquired Jaco, making this the company’s second acquisition this year. Jaco’s advanced technology records and analyzes users’ activity as they navigate through any product in real time. No matter how complex the app is, or which framework it is running, Jaco enables you to replay every user session as a video. Jaco’s technology will be integrated into WalkMe’s digital adoption platform that simplifies the user experience and drives user action using insights, engagement, and guidance capabilities. Using WalkMe powered by Jaco, companies can now record, analyze and play back entire user sessions to understand common technology pitfalls to user adoption. By providing visual insights down to the individual user level, businesses can reduce IT helpdesk support inquiries, streamline workflows, and improve the user experience.
We heard of some encouraging customer wins this week starting with MapR Technologies, Inc., the provider of the Converged Data Platform that converges the essential data management and application processing technologies on a single, horizontally scalable platform, announcing that SAP selected the MapR File System to support SAP’s cloud infrastructure storage capabilities. The high scale, performance and reliability of this system can enable SAP to continuously deliver innovation faster to its global software customers in the cloud by providing built-in resiliency, life cycle management, and high availability of data and associated storage services for SAP HANA, SAP IQ, and other data intensive workloads … Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM:DWCH) announced that Massachusetts-based MountainOne Bank is utilizing the company’s Monarch self-service data preparation (prep) software to easily access and blend data from disparate systems and reports. The $850 million community bank joins the expanding roster of hundreds of financial institutions around the globe using Datawatch to radically simplify and expedite transactional and operational reporting and analysis. Banks and credit unions are increasingly tapping the power of Datawatch Monarch to access, manipulate and combine their data — and eradicate extremely time-intensive manual processes, such as rekeying data and performing line-by-line reconciliation. With no dependency on IT or complex scripting required, institutions’ business users are finally liberated to unlock and blend the data housed in general ledger and core processing systems with other various “siloed” systems and static reports to make timely, data-driven decisions. Executives and managers in the front- and back-office benefit from unprecedented visibility into and better management of everything from ATM settlements, accrued interest reports and loan offerings, to daily teller reports and customer/member card services. MountainOne, which recently went through a conversion to the D+H core processing platform, turned to Datawatch Monarch to speed the process of obtaining and reconciling text report data from its Oracle®General Ledger system. SVP of Operations Stacy Litke initially tried the traditional, manual route of dumping general ledger text reports into Excel and matching up rows of data with account numbers, but knew there had to be better way.
It seems that the funding spigots are still flowing for the tech industry as we learned that Crunchbase, a business information platform, announced that it has secured $18 million in Series B funding and launched Crunchbase Enterprise, a new premium offering for teams to access Crunchbase data. The Series B was led by Mayfield, and the company will use the investment to grow its team and drive product development that will expand Crunchbase’s solutions as well as the breadth and depth of its data … Qumulo, a leader in modern scale-out storage, announced that it has closed $30 million in funding, bringing the total to date over $130 million. The oversubscribed C Prime funding round was led by new investors Northern Light Venture Capital and other strategic investors, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Madrona Venture Group, Top Tier Capital Partners, and Tyche Partners. Qumulo will use the funding to fuel market and global expansion … Insilico Medicine, Inc, a big data analytics company applying deep learning techniques to drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research announced that it has closed an investment from the billionaire biotechnology investor Jim Mellon. Proceeds will be used to perform pre-clinical validation of multiple lead molecules developed using Insilico Medicine’s drug discovery pipelines and to advance research in deep learned biomarkers of aging and disease. Often referred to as the “British Warren Buffett”, Jim Mellon is famous for spotting trends early. In the 1980s he started investing in emerging markets. In the 1990s he travelled to Russia to participate in the privatization of state assets. In 2005 together with his business partner he co-founded a company called Uramin with one hundred thousand dollars and sold it for over 1.8 billion euro in 2007 and Jim is now a substantial landlord in Germany.
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