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
The team over here at insideBIGDATA.com would like to wish all our loyal readers a very happy and safe holiday season. We’ve enjoyed bringing you a strong pulse of the big data industry this past year, and with our upcoming major pivot in 2018, we’re looking forward to getting you an even more focused channel to all that’s happening with big data, data science, machine learning, AI and deep learning. The next year should be a fun ride!
But for now, let’s dig into to some compelling industry scuttlebutt starting with some new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … GE Healthcare (NYSE:GE) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) announced they will deepen their 10-year partnership to bring the most sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to GE Healthcare’s 500,000 imaging devices globally and accelerate the speed at which healthcare data can be processed … CognitiveScale announced it is collaborating with Microsoft to combine the power of Microsoft Azure with industry-specific machine intelligence software from CognitiveScale. The relationship is designed to accelerate AI adoption in the financial services industry to transform front and back office operations for enterprise clients. CognitiveScale’s augmented intelligence solutions extend human and process intelligence, fueling innovation by making sense of expanding volumes of structured and unstructured data. This approach to AI emulates cognitive functions like perception, abstraction, reasoning, and learning to build machine-accumulated knowledge for organizations … Datical, a leading provider of database release automation solutions, announced its collaboration with Pivotal Software, Inc. on a container image for Concourse, enabling enterprises to speed their full stack cloud-native application delivery process by automating database changes alongside application changes. Concourse is a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) open source project sponsored by Pivotal geared for teams that practice agile development. Concourse is a popular choice among Pivotal Cloud Foundry® (PCF) users for continuous delivery because of its container-based builds, flexible integrations, and visual dashboard. The integration between Datical and Concourse allows developers to treat database code just like application code — and increase developer productivity from a few weeks to a few hours. With this new Concourse resource, Datical and Pivotal are empowering enterprise customers to scale and deploy cloud-native applications as fast as they are developed in order to quickly deliver innovation that meets market and customer needs. Datical’s new image can be run with Concourse as part of a testing pipeline to enable application development teams to push application and database changes through the release cycle at the same time … MariaDB® Corporation, the company behind the fastest growing open source database, today announced Tableau Software, the global leader in visual analytics, has certified MariaDB integration with Tableau’s business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics platform. Bringing together the highly popular data management products and the renowned visualization technologies means businesses globally can confidently use these preferred solutions for reliable, fast, data-driven business decisions.
In M&A news we heard … Syncsort, a leader in Big Iron to Big Data solutions, announced that it has completed the acquisition of Cilasoft, a global provider of IT solutions, specializing in compliance and security audit software for the IBM i platform (AS/400, iSeries, System i). The acquisition is part of Syncsort’s strategy to build on its leadership in data availability by offering a more comprehensive portfolio of security solutions for the IBM i platform.
In new funding news, we heard … Instana, the monitoring solution that applies both automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to fully automate all aspects of application performance management (APM), announced it has raised a $20 million Series B investment led by Accel. Accel specializes in investments with exceptional founders with unique insights, from inception through all phases of growth. Through innovations in real-time analysis and the application of AI, Instana has delivered a solution that represents the new era of APM monitoring designed from the ground up to work in modern application environments. By facilitating high speed agile development and operations, Instana is leading the way into the next-generation of management tools, enabling IT to deliver services more quickly and efficiently, and better manage business-critical applications in containerized environments … Alchemy IoT, a provider of IoT Asset Intelligence for industrial applications, today launched with $4 million seed funding from Aweida Venture Partners and several angel investors. The startup’s cloud-based application, Clarity, helps customers pursue a greater return of their industrial assets and competitive advantage. The product introduces a novel “no-code” approach to IoT Asset Intelligence that simplifies how fleet management, plant maintenance and manufacturing performance can be improved using artificial intelligence and unsupervised machine learning. Alchemy will focus on helping small- to mid-sized industrial customers overcome the technical and data-science resource mandates that are needed – and often unattainable – to deploy today’s expensive and highly complex IoT solutions.
We also learned of a compelling customer win … Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Tencent Cloud has adopted Mellanox interconnect solutions for its high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) public cloud offering. Tencent Cloud is a secure, reliable and high-performance public cloud service that integrates Tencent’s infrastructure capabilities with the advantages of a massive-user platform and ecosystem. The Tencent Cloud infrastructure leverages Mellanox Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters, switches and cables to deliver advanced public cloud services. By taking advantage of Mellanox RDMA, in-network computing and other interconnect acceleration engines, Tencent Cloud can now offer high-performance computing services, as required by its users, to develop advanced applications and offer new services …
In the people movement category we learned … Kinetica, provider of the fast next-generation analytics database, announced the appointment of Paul Appleby as chief executive officer as the company accelerates momentum in enabling real-time applications for greater business value. Appleby has spent his career successfully building and leading global teams for industry brands and startups alike, most recently at BMC Software as president, worldwide sales and marketing. Prior to BMC Software, he also held executive leadership roles at Salesforce, C3 IoT, and Siebel Systems … BackOffice Associates, a leader in information governance and data stewardship solutions, today announced the appointment of technology visionary William (Bill) D. Green as its new Chairman of the Board. Green previously served as CEO and Chairman of Accenture and holds noteworthy board roles at major companies such as Dell EMC and S&P Global. David Booth, BackOffice Associates’ former Chairman of the Board, will remain on the board of directors and continue serving as CEO … GoodData has strengthened its executive leadership team with the appointment of two industry veterans to drive and execute the leading embedded analytics company’s go-to-market strategy. The company is focusing on global growth and continuously improving its Platform-as-a-Service analytics offerings. James Smith has joined the company as chief marketing officer, bringing more than 25 years of global marketing expertise to GoodData. Prior to joining, Smith led marketing teams at OneLogin and Sitecore and was responsible for lead generation, branding, product marketing, and all aspects of online marketing. Garry Olah has also joined GoodData, as the company’s senior vice president of business development, with more than 30 years of expertise in sales, marketing, and business development. Prior to joining GoodData, he worked as the vice president of business development at Coho Data, Apprenda, and Citrix.
And finally, we learned The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) announced the formation of a new Working Group (TPC-AI), tasked with developing industry standard benchmarks for both hardware and software platforms associated with running Artificial Intelligence (AI) based workloads. Current AI ecosystems contain a mix of technologies and products for everything from traditional servers and tools to specialized systems and libraries for building and deploying models into applications. As industry investment in AI continues to accelerate, and the number of AI platforms and tools continue to proliferate, vendors and customers increasingly require an impartial means of comparing performance and total cost of ownership across a widening array of hardware and software systems.
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