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 M&A activity, people movements, funding news, industry partnerships, customer wins, 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@insidebigdata.com. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.
Another week with plenty of industry scuttlebutt starting with some new M&A news … Sumo Logic, a leader in continuous intelligence, announced the acquisition of JASK Labs, Inc. (JASK), a provider of cloud-native autonomous security operations center (ASOC) software. The acquisition brings together Sumo Logic’s industry leading Continuous Intelligence Platform, including its pioneering cloud SIEM and security compliance solutions, with JASK’s ASOC offering to deliver a leading cloud-native security intelligence solution built for today’s digital businesses that leverage modern applications, architectures and multi-cloud infrastructures … OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX) (TSX: OTEX), “The Information Company,” announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Carbonite, Inc. (NASDAQ: CARB) (“Carbonite”), provider of cloud-based subscription data protection, backup, disaster recovery and end-point security to small and medium-sized businesses and consumers.
In new funding news we heard … Quartic.ai, a full-stack industrial AI and IIoT software provider, has completed a $5 million Series A round of financing led by WRVI Capital, with additional funding through private investors. The investment will allow Quartic.ai to accelerate deployment of its Industry 4.0 technology and serve a larger customer base … RedMarlin, a deep learning-powered fraud prevention company protecting the world’s leading brands from counterfeit activity, has secured $10M in Series A funding led by Thomvest Ventures and Crosslink Capital. The funding will be used to grow engineering and sales teams while also furthering the development of a go-to-market strategy that reaches new customers and industries critically in need of fraud protection.
In the new partnerships, collaborations, and alignments category we learned … Global identity and access management specialist OpenAthens and Yewno, a Silicon Valley-based AI provider with a mission to transform information into knowledge, announced their strategic partnership to provide mutual users with unparalleled access to knowledge discovery. Committed to empowering library users spanning a wide range of industries, OpenAthens ensures institutions can provide quick, easy and secure access to online resources. Through the partnership, universities and other institutions using OpenAthens’ single sign-on solutions will now be able to offer Yewno Discover online without the need for separate login credentials, improving end-users’ experience … Rockset, the serverless search and analytics company that enables real-time SQL on NoSQL data, announced the capability to build interactive, live Tableau dashboards on NoSQL data, without requiring users to write a single line of code. Making it possible to capture NoSQL data from sources such as Apache Kafka and Amazon DynamoDB, Rockset provides seamless access to new data types and formats, allowing Tableau users to realize the full potential of operational monitoring and analytics on their business data … DataVisor, a leading fraud detection company with solutions powered by transformational AI technology, announced it has teamed up with Experian to integrate its unsupervised machine learning powered transactional risk assessment capabilities into Experian’s CrossCore™ platform. The addition of these capabilities and output signal into Experian’s fraud and identity platform will help businesses more easily detect correlated patterns and hidden connections between accounts that could be indicative of fraudulent behavior … defi SOLUTIONS, an innovative lending technology and BPO services provider, announced a partnership with Zest AI, a leader in AI software. Zest AI will provide defi clients direct access to Zest Automated Machine Learning (ZAML) software for loan decisioning. The partnership between defi SOLUTIONS and Zest AI makes machine learning credit scoring and advanced risk management capabilities more accessible to banks, credit unions, finance companies, and other lenders. Lenders using ZAML software to predict creditworthiness typically achieve a 15% approval rate increase with no added risk, or a 30% decrease in charge-offs with constant approval rates, according to Zest AI.
In people movement news we heard … Dremio, the data lake engine company, announced the appointment of Jason Nadeau as Vice President of Marketing. In this new role, Jason will be responsible for leading Dremio’s global marketing team as it continues to scale in an effort to help enterprises realize the dramatic benefits made possible by the tectonic shift to analytics on cloud data lake storage. Most recently, Jason served as VP of Product Marketing for Pure Storage … Snow Software, a leader in technology intelligence solutions, announced Chief Marketing Officer Sanjay Castelino has been appointed Chief Product Officer. In this new role, Castelino will oversee Snow’s complete product lifecycle from strategy and development through launch and continued innovation.
We also received a commentary around why the recent Azure Synapse Analytics announcement is a big deal and how it will help companies leverage powerful insights, at scale in a secure and speedy environment:
“Azure Synapse Analytics is advancing analytics workloads for enterprises looking to accelerate the data lifecycle,” commented Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud, Big Data, and Data Integration, Informatica. “This launch brings together two core modern analytics use cases – cloud data warehousing and big data analytics – into one, unified platform. This launch holds substantial impact on those enterprises who require blazing fast analytics on very large amounts of data for the daily operations of their business. Think airline companies who must process data around ticketing and seat availability, passenger check-in, and scheduling in real-time, to ensure maximum efficiencies and profitability for the company. As part of our longstanding strategic partnership with Azure, Informatica has been a part of the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Analytics and data warehouse initiatives depend on data, and Informatica is highly focused on providing industry-leading enterprise cloud data management solutions. The booming cloud modernization trend demands innovations like Azure Synapse Analytics as organizations look to expand the discovery of insights and make the most of their analytics processes.At Informatica, we are focused on accelerating data’s time to value from the data management side, now, with Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft is focusing on the same demands, but from the data consumption side, making the overall data lifecycle faster and more impactful.”
2020 Trends/2019 Year-in-Review
“As data volumes continue to explode, one of the key challenges is how to get the full strategic value of this data,” said Jon Toor, CMO of Cloudian. “In 2020, we will see a growing number of organizations capitalizing on object storage to create structured/tagged data from unstructured data, allowing metadata to be used to make sense of the tsunami of data generated by AI and ML workloads. While traditional file storage defines data with limited metadata tags (file name, date created, date last modified, etc.) and organizes it into different folders, object storage defines data with unconstrained types of metadata and locates it all from a single API, searchable and easy to analyze. For example, a traditional X-ray file would only have metadata describing basics like creation date, owner, location and size. An X-ray object, on the other hand, could use metadata that identifies patient name, age, injury details and which area of the body was X-rayed, making it much easier to locate via search. In 2020, object storage will be instrumental in helping to process AI and ML workloads in 2020 as this newer storage architecture leverages metadata in ways traditional file storage doesn’t.”
“We’re going to start seeing some dramatic breakthroughs and some real transformative changes in 2020,” commented Peter Guagenti, CMO of MemSQL. “To an extent not seen to date, AI and ML will, so to speak, emerge from the lab and infiltrate your life. A recession, if there is one in 2020, will accelerate this coming AI/ML impact. That’s because a lot of the efforts that AI and ML are focused on relate to automation and building efficiencies in the way humans work.”
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