Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category 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 you a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help you keep 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
Welcome back to another edition of “Above the Trend Line!” This week saw a lot of activity out on the conference circuit which led us to beautiful San Francisco for the EARL Conference. We learned a lot about how the R language is being used in enterprise settings. Let’s get on with some news starting with some financial results … MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the Converged Data Platform that fully integrates analytics with operational processes in real time, announced 81% revenue growth for its first quarter of fiscal 2018, which ended on April 30, 2017, compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2017. MapR achieved this revenue growth through new and expanded purchases by customers worldwide. The number of MapR customers and partners continued to grow as deployments of the MapR platform helped organizations derive greater business value from their data … Cloudera announced its first quarterly earnings since the company’s IPO, dropping by about 15%, which means with two of the big three Hadoop / “big data” vendors now public, we have more visibility into the real financials and investments companies are making in Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and other big data technologies, platforms, and services. According to Arcadia Data’s Steve Wooledge, it’s still too early to call big data a winner or loser:
Cloudera released earnings which showed Q1 subscription revenue up 59% year-over-year, and a net expansion rate of 142%,” said Wooledge. “MapR announced revenue growth up 81% year-over-year for fiscal Q1. This points to rapid growth of the data management and ‘data science platform’ market, which one could argue is just one part of the total market and only represents the initial growth of the big data market which is the data platform/storage foundation and perhaps the FIRST use case on the big data platform. What excites me about the big data market is I think we are entering the ‘big data analytics/applications’ growth phase where we will see the explosion of different uses/applications for the data we have not been traditionally able to cost-effectively capture and process.”
We also heard about some special recognitions … Sinequa announced that it was named a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions, Q2 20171.” In this report, Forrester Research stated, “Sinequa’s comprehensive NLP [natural language processing] is the path to cognitive understanding. Most search engine vendors start with indexing and then progress to content analytics. Not Sinequa. The company started with NLP because understanding both the search query and the content is the key to search relevancy and knowledge discovery.” The Forrester report also noted, “Sinequa focuses on high-value search applications that are embedded into critical business processes in industries such as pharma research, aircraft maintenance, and financial services.” According to Forrester, “Cognitive Search is delivering the AI version of Enterprise Search … The new generation of enterprise search solutions that employ AI technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to ingest, understand, organize, and query digital content from multiple data sources” … CareSkore, a leader in end-to-end personalized population health management, announced that it was selected as the best predictive analytics solution in healthcare IT from over 30 competitors by the judges for the MedTech Breakthrough Awards. CareSkore’s machine learning platform generates patented predictive and prescriptive analytics that allow providers to dramatically improve population health outcomes.
In M&A news, we learned that Alteryx, Inc., (NYSE: AYX) a leader in self-service data analytics, announced it has acquired Yhat, Inc., a data science software company headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Yhat specializes in providing data scientists and analysts with self-service data science tools for developing, managing and deploying machine learning models to web and mobile applications faster and with fewer resources. The acquisition will further enhance the Alteryx data analytics platform and build on its strategy to help organizations empower citizen data scientists and trained data scientists to rapidly deploy and manage advanced analytic models.
The funding spigots are still wide open for the big data ecosystem … Tractable, a deep learning company specializing in computer vision, announced an $8 million USD Series A investment. The investment is led by Ignition Partners, an enterprise tech-focused venture firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle. Other investors include Zetta Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on artificial intelligence, as well as insurance industry leaders such as Andy Homer (former CEO Towergate, former CEO AXA UK), Scott Roza (Chief Business Officer Guidewire Software), Tony Emms (former Chief Claims Officer Zurich Insurance UK), Greg Gladwell (former CEO Crawford & Company UK and Ireland), and Stuart Bartlett (founder & CEO Vision, founder and CEO BlueGrassComms). Tractable develops proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can learn and perform visual tasks, just like humans. Tractable helps companies overcome one of the main issues in computer vision – labeling the data. Using Tractable, clients increase the productivity of their human experts, allowing them to focus on more meaningful, high-value work.
In the new partnerships, alignments and collaborations department, we heard that Datorama, a global marketing intelligence company, is announcing a strategic partnership with leading Human Data Intelligence company, DataSift. This all-new relationship will make it easier for Datorama customers to access and visualize LinkedIn’s member data via DataSift’s Media Strategies API, in a privacy-first manner. Now, agency-based marketers will have the ability to quickly surface answers related to critical questions surrounding awareness, demand and interest in a client’s product or service. This means less time spent preparing data for analysis and more time spent delivering more effective campaigns on LinkedIn’s platform … Ayla Networks, a global Internet of Things (IoT) platform for manufacturers, announced that it will support AWS Greengrass, which seamlessly extends AWS to devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and other application services. For many industrial manufacturing operations, the need to achieve mission-critical responsiveness or transmit sensitive data means doing IoT computing and communications at the edge rather than in the cloud. The AWS Greengrass software is designed to give enterprises the flexibility to deploy end-to-end IoT solutions however they wish, from the edge to the cloud. As one of the first AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners to support AWS Greengrass, Ayla is integrating its IoT device agent software into the AWS Greengrass software, providing IoT edge device management capabilities that include device discovery, routing, provisioning and firmware updates … Cloudian, Inc., a global leader in enterprise object storage systems, and Komprise, the industry-leader in intelligent data management, has announced a joint solution that enables customers to move dormant or infrequently used data to an on-premises active archive and reclaim more than half of their Tier 1 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) capacity. The Cloudian/Komprise solution uses the Komprise data management software to identify inactive NAS data and then transparently move it to an on-premises Cloudian scale-out storage device. Customer-defined policies, such as data age, frequency of use, and file type determine which data should be tiered. All data remains within the data center.
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