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
Whew! We’ve seen a huge heat wave here in California – Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and beyond … and it roughly parallels the heat we’re seeing in the big data industry. So much happening so let’s get started with some funding news … ArangoDB GmbH, the company behind one of the fastest growing next generation databases, closed the final tranche of a 4.2 million Euro investment led by Munich-based venture capital firm Target Partners. The company is developing the open-source NoSQL database ArangoDB, which combines three major data models (graph, key/value, JSON-documents) in one database and with one query language. ArangoDB allows startups and enterprises to speed up innovation cycles, simplify technology stacks and increase on-time and on-budget delivery of software projects … Kinetica, provider of the GPU-accelerated relational database, announced it has closed a $50-million Series A financing. The round was co-led by Canvas Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners, with participation from new investor Citi Ventures and existing investor Ray Lane of GreatPoint Ventures. Kinetica customers include GlaxoSmithKline, PG&E, US Postal Service, IronNet Cybersecurity, and one of the world’s largest retailers. Kinetica estimates their total addressable market to be approximately $30 billion using Gartner’s 2017 Q1 forecast for enterprise software … Sumo Logic, a leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform delivering continuous intelligence, announced a $75 million funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors including Accel Partners, DFJ Growth, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and others. Sumo Logic has raised a total of $235 million in funding over seven years. The funding will fuel growth across Sumo Logic’s business – spanning engineering, sales and global operations – with an emphasis on extending the platform capabilities of its service to address growing use cases including operational and security analytics, advanced machine learning and IoT. These use cases address the most significant challenges facing organizations embracing digital transformation – getting their arms around the growth of machine data to uncover the intelligence and insights needed to build, run and secure modern applications. According to Barclay’s Big Data Handbook, machine data will account for 40 percent of all data created by 2020, reaching approximately 16 zettabytes.
Also, in M&A news we learned that TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, announced it has acquired nanoscale.io, a provider of innovative microservices technology and tooling. The acquisition extends and enhances TIBCO’s leadership in the development of microservices and APIs that connect and integrate with a more expansive on-premises or hybrid cloud environment, and bolster its Connected Intelligence platform … Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) announced it has acquired Kinvey, a privately-held company based in Boston and leader in Backend as a Service (BaaS) technology. This acquisition is a key part of the Progress strategy to provide the best platform to build and deliver modern cognitive-first applications. Today’s news comes on the heels of the company’s acquisition in March of machine learning and predictive analytics vendor, DataRPM. Kinvey is used by organizations across industries to build and deploy modern applications including, Schneider Electric, VMware, Bell and Howell, and Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. From mission-critical consumer and business experiences for global insurance, manufacturing and media companies, to HIPAA-compliant and life-critical apps for healthcare, health implant manufacturers and pharma, Kinvey powers more than 31,000 apps, used by more than 100 million end-users. Kinvey’s BaaS serves more than 10 billion API calls a month and was named a leader and top ranked in the current offering category in “The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Development Platforms, Q4 2016 …” Centerbridge Partners, L.P., a leading private investment firm, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise software providers Syncsort Incorporated and Vision Solutions, Inc. from Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. Upon completion of the $1.26 billion transaction, Syncsort and Vision will be combined, creating a leading “Big Iron to Big Data” platform investment controlled by Centerbridge. Clearlake, which acquired Syncsort in 2015 and Vision in 2016, is retaining a minority ownership stake. The combined company, led by Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers and operating under the Syncsort name, will be headquartered in Pearl River, NY. Each business is expected to benefit from the dramatic increase in global presence, as well as significantly expanded product offerings, afforded by the combination. Vision CEO Nicolaas Vlok is anticipated to transition to become an advisor to the combined entity.
In the partnerships, alignments and collaborations department, we heard that Zebra Medical Vision and Telerad Tech, the technology arm of India’s first and largest teleradiology company – Teleradiology Solutions (TRS) corporation, announced that they have signed a partnership to bring Zebra’s cloud based deep learning analytics engine to over 20 countries and 150 hospitals and healthcare organizations. Zebra Medical Vision has been a pioneer in the development and commercialization of deep learning imaging analytics solutions, and since 2015 has released clinical applications that automatically identify liver, lung, bone and cardiovascular disease, as well as breast cancer and intra-cranial bleeding. The company’s solutions have been implemented in hospitals across Europe and the US, and the collaboration with Telerad Tech will allow expansion of the company’s footprint to India, broader Asia and Africa … Attivio, a leading cognitive search and insight platform company, announced that it has expanded its strategic relationship with TIBCO Software to offer an OEM of Attivio’s data catalog technology. TIBCO offers the product as TIBCO Spotfire® Data Catalog. TIBCO Spotfire Data Catalog enables Spotfire® users to quickly and easily search across data lake and relational sources, automatically discovering the relationships needed to combine them. They can then build data views without time-consuming requests to the data owner. The system automatically ensures security and governance.
We also found details about some new products, services and solutions starting with … The developers of a Shanghai based tech startup have announced the launch of a revolutionary artificial intelligence based app for iOS users. The Android users worldwide will also get this remarkable driving assistant app very soon as it is currently being developed for Android. Driva has several amazing features with benefits and it will eventually play a decisive role in saving many lives of drivers around the world. Driva is a remarkable breakthrough in technology and it will pave the way for the future research in AI and its effects on driving. Driva is a patented result of rigorous research and development. As a result of this testing, it has been revealed that the app detects front car and traffic light with the accuracy rate of more than 98%. Moreover, it also cleverly designs a special driving recorder function, so that those who do not want to buy and install the driver’s recorder can use their own smart phone to achieve the same goal. However, users do not need to record video continuously, but they can record only when needed. This feature is a vehicular equivalent of having a black box in a road car as in case of an accident or emergency, a driver can quickly press the recording button and the application will automatically record past 30 seconds of the video.
In the customer wins area, we heard that Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), provider of a leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, announced Rackspace®, a managed cloud leader, is leveraging Splunk® Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security (Splunk ES) as the foundation for the company’s decision analytics engine. Rackspace uses Splunk solutions across security, compliance, DevOps, business intelligence, application management and IT operations. Rackspace ingests nearly three terabytes of data per day into Splunk software to create meaningful visualizations, to diagnose anomalous activity, and to remediate issues across all business processes. As a result, Rackspace’s security and compliance teams are projected to improve the speed of security event detection by at least 70 percent, accelerate investigation of high-priority security incidents by at least 70 percent and decrease the overall financial impact of security outages by at least 50 percent. Through automation of these processes, Rackspace security analysts will get valuable time back to focus on establishing proactive security strategies … Redis Labs, the home of Redis and provider of Redis Enterprise, announced that eHarmony, the Relationship Services Provider has selected its Redis Enterprise platform to power their real-time applications. eHarmony uses Redis Enterprise in several applications to deliver the highest level of responsiveness and interactive customer experience. Redis Enterprise fulfills many roles – from real time analytics, to supporting low latency match searches, to powering news feeds and profile data – delivering superior experience to the desktop as well as mobile users of eHarmony service. eHarmony selected Redis Labs as part of its ongoing initiatives to minimize operational overhead. The Redis data structures simplify processes for storing data, thus reducing the resources needed and accelerating time to market. Redis Enterprise, with its automated, seamless scaling and cost-effective low-touch manageability, provides a robust technology platform for their team, backed by the 24×7 support from the Redis Labs experts.
And finally, no doubt you saw the news from Tintri, which postponed its IPO. Although the details are still hazy, it may be a warning to other technology companies and the storage industry at large. Avinash Lakshman, CEO of Hedvig and co-creator of Apache Cassandra, thinks that the news is not a moratorium on storage. Hedvig has seen strong demand for software-defined storage solutions that provide centralized management layers that can span multiple clouds. The key, Avinash points out, is to make sure that one of the main data center goals is to eliminate complexity:
We see strong demand for storage as companies continue to undergo digital transformation and grapple with ever-growing data volumes. But many customers want multi-cloud solutions that span environments like VMware, containers, and even public clouds. All of these will be in play as next-gen IT architectures unfold. Our customers have made it loud and clear that they want to eliminate complexity and move away from siloed, monolithic storage arrays that add more complexity to their infrastructure. While traditional storage may be in flux, we believe that software-defined storage solutions which that can manage data across multiple clouds, workloads and storage tiers are the future of the data center.”
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