In this regular column, we’ll bring you all the latest industry news centered around our main topics of focus: big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. Our industry is constantly accelerating with new products and services being announced everyday. Fortunately, we’re in close touch with vendors from this vast ecosystem, so we’re in a unique position to inform you about all that’s new and exciting. Our massive industry database is growing all the time so stay tuned for the latest news items describing technology that may make you and your organization more competitive.
Pixie Labs Launches to Give Developers Instant Kubernetes-Native Application Observability
Pixie Labs emerged from stealth with its first product, Pixie. Pixie dramatically reduces the complexity and cost for developers to observe and troubleshoot their application’s performance. With Pixie, developers don’t need to change code, manually set up ad hoc dashboards or compromise on how much performance data they can observe. Early access customers range from early-stage startups to internet-scale streaming content teams who are all already running Pixie in their production Kubernetes environments.
“We thought a better data system can be built, and we envisioned a magical developer experience where they can get the data they need without having to change code or move data outside their environments,” said Zain Asgar, co-founder and CEO of Pixie Labs.
Alation 2020.3 Delivers New User Experience and Enhanced Analytics
Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, today announced Alation 2020.3, a new release of its flagship data intelligence platform that helps organizations drive data culture and reflects the company’s commitment to provide customers with flexibility across the full range of cloud deployment options. Alation 2020.3 debuts with an updated naming convention and a new quarterly software release cadence that delivers new and enhanced features to customers on a more frequent basis.
“We’ve always believed that the trick to getting people to use data more regularly was reducing the barriers to getting to the data. The new user experience in Alation 2020 coupled with the insights provided by Alation Analytics makes enterprise data accessible and approachable to a significantly greater number of users, especially business users,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder, Alation. “We are excited about Alation’s transition to a cloud-native architecture while still providing the flexibility for our customers to deploy in the cloud or on-premises.”
VSORA Introduces Small Footprint, Low-Power PetaFLOPS Platform Enabling L4/L5 Autonomous Driving
VSORA, a provider of high-performance silicon intellectual property (IP) solutions for artificial intelligence, digital communications and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) applications, today unveiled the first PetaFLOPS computational platform to accelerate Level 4 (L4) and Level 5 (L5) autonomous vehicles designs. The programmable solution, delivered as an IP block called AD1028, combines digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning (ML) acceleration for the autonomous driving industry. Its powerful multi-core DSP and AI architecture eliminates the need for DSP co-processors and hardware accelerators to provide a level of flexibility never achieved previously.
“We are proud to be the first to offer computational power, portability and economy in one device for designing L4 and L5 autonomous vehicles,” remarks Khaled Maalej, CEO and founder of VSORA. “AD1028 is the first in a series of platforms from VSORA to provide global vehicle manufacturers early commercial availability of L4 and L5 functionality.”
Teradata Announces Data Warehouse and Analytics Solutions with Hybrid Multi-cloud Offerings Across Top Three Public Cloud Vendors
Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the cloud data analytics platform company, today announced general availability of Teradata Vantage on Google Cloud. This as-a-service offering provides access to Vantage – the powerful data and analytics platform that unifies analytics, data lakes and data warehouses – using increasingly popular Google Cloud resources. Teradata provisions and maintains secure, scalable environments on Google Cloud so that customers can focus on using data as one of their greatest assets.
This expansion of cloud data analytics options gives Teradata customers deployment flexibility. Teradata is the only data warehouse and analytics company to provide consistent features and software across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments on all three of the top public clouds. This flexibility includes both license and application portability that makes migrations to Google Cloud faster, with lower risk.
“Teradata is committed to providing the best enterprise data analytics in the cloud. For us, this means offering our customers modern data analytics, but also flexibility with deployment options that don’t limit choice or lock them in. Customers seem to appreciate this strategy, as our annual recurring revenue from cloud offerings doubled in 2019 and is on track to double again this year,” said Hillary Ashton, Chief Product Officer at Teradata. “Every company’s cloud strategy is different: for customers interested in cloud data analytics offerings using Google Cloud, Teradata is the only partner to meet their needs today, as well as tomorrow as their needs evolve.”
Lytics Predictive Audiences Gives Marketers the Tools to Build Accurate, Powerful Lookalike Models in Minutes
Lytics, the insights-first customer data platform (CDP) built for marketing teams, has released Lytics Predictive Audiences, a powerful tool that builds lookalike models that allows marketers to reach out to their customers with timely, personalized experiences delivered at key stages of the customer lifecycle. For the first time ever, marketers without data science expertise can take control of building lookalike models inside their CDP, so they can deliver personalized experiences across all their digital marketing channels. Lytics Predictive Audiences combines the right data with Lytics’ powerful artificial intelligence/machine learning engine, enabling marketers to build audiences using an intuitive dashboard that lets them control key variables, see results, and troubleshoot issues.
“With Lytics Predictive Audiences, it’s like we’ve given each marketer their own data scientist to help identify key customer attributes and quickly build accurate lookalike groups,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, President of Lytics, explains. “In the past, lookalike models required time and hands-on effort from a data science team or were essentially a black box inside of Facebook or another media buying platform. Marketers didn’t have the tools to understand, explain, or validate how the model worked. With Lytics Predictive Audiences, marketers can understand what’s working and why–and more importantly, demonstrate results with increased conversions, subscriptions, and engagement.”
Anyscale Announces Ray 1.0
Anyscale, the company behind the open source project Ray, announced Ray 1.0, the latest version of the Ray open source project. Ray 1.0, which provides a universal serverless compute API and an expanded ecosystem of libraries, was shared with attendees at the first annualRay Summit, along with the announcement of the private beta of Anyscale’s managed Ray platform. With Ray 1.0, developers can build scalable libraries and applications without worrying about infrastructure. Without Ray, these applications must be developed in tandem with infrastructure for running the applications, which comes with high development costs and a lack of interoperability. By providing a general purpose API, Ray broadens the set of applications that can be built and run in a scalable serverless fashion beyond what can be done with today’s more specialized systems.
“Ray 1.0 signals a substantial investment in the project’s stability, maturity, and production-readiness, and because Ray is used to develop so many other libraries, this release impacts the entire application ecosystem,” said Robert Nishihara, co-creator of Ray and CEO of Anyscale.
Dental AI Council Launches to Help Define the Future of AI in Dentistry
Leaders from across the dental industry announced the formation of the Dental AI Council (DAIC), an organization devoted to helping define the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in dentistry through research and education. DAIC members represent all major industry constituencies, including practitioners, dental service organizations, equipment manufacturers, practice management software providers, insurance carriers, laboratories and universities. As AI begins to yield increased efficiency, accuracy, consistency and insight in a variety of dental applications, the DAIC will seek to stimulate greater industry-wide understanding of the technology. The DAIC’s primary function is to lead independent research to ascertain where and how AI will prove most valuable to dentistry, empirically validate its functional capabilities and performance, and answer fundamental questions related to AI’s role in the oral healthcare ecosystem of tomorrow. In addition to research, the DAIC will facilitate AI-related educational programming, thought leadership content and public advocacy initiatives.
“Diagnosis, treatment, prosthetics, practice management, claims review, FWA oversight––the list of areas where AI can improve performance in our industry is long,” said Dr. Linda Vidone, Chief Clinical Officer at Delta Dental of Massachusetts. “To see that performance boost soon, we’ll need to buck a trend where innovation in dental lags behind other medical fields. The DAIC will be a reputable information source and guide to encourage AI’s early adoption and mindful deployment in dentistry.”
New Denodo Platform 8.0 Accelerates Hybrid/Multicloud Integration, Automates Data Management with AI/ML, and Boosts Performance
Denodo, a leader in data virtualization, announced that its new Denodo Platform version 8.0 accelerates hybrid/multicloud integration, automates data management with artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), and boosts performance with smart query acceleration. By further augmenting the Denodo Platform’s already advanced data integration, management, and delivery capabilities with intelligent recommendations, hyper performance, and PaaS support, Denodo Platform 8.0 advances data virtualization into a logical data fabric.
“Denodo 8.0 is the result of years of continuous innovation to support our customers’ enterprise data management journeys,” said Alberto Pan, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Denodo. “Our customers have been pioneers in their respective industries, leveraging the Denodo Platform as the enterprise logical data fabric for advanced analytics, cloud modernization, data science, and data services. We responded to our customers’ requests by providing the most advanced data platform in the industry with PaaS-style infrastructure management, machine learning data catalog, GraphQL support, smart query acceleration, and an easy-to-use unified user interface.”
Pepperdata Announces Query Spotlight Now Supports Apache Impala
Pepperdata, a leader in Big Data Performance, has expanded the capabilities of Query Spotlight, a recent product in its big data performance suite, to support Apache Impala—one of the leading players in interactive SQL query engines. Query Spotlight makes it easier for operators and developers to understand the detailed performance characteristics of their query workloads together with related infrastructure-wide issues. The product allows query workloads to be tuned, debugged and optimized for better performance and reduced costs in the cloud and on premises. Query Spotlight for Impala displays detailed stats, query plan, breakup of the query duration by every step and also provides visibility into databases and tables. The recommendation engine includes system level recommendations as well as query level recommendations—joins included.
“Queries are a significant portion of our customer’s big data workloads, so we know the performance of these workloads is critical. IT and applications teams can now get visibility into their Hive and Impala queries in one place, compare the runs of their queries and take advantage of the recommendations Query Spotlight provides,” says Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. “We’re confident Query Spotlight can increase the performance of their Impala queries while helping them decrease overall costs.”
D-Wave Announces General Availability of First Quantum Computer Built for Business
D-Wave Systems Inc., a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, announced the general availability of its next-generation quantum computing platform incorporating new hardware, software, and tools to enable and accelerate the delivery of in-production quantum computing applications. Available today in the Leap™ quantum cloud service, the platform includes the Advantage™ quantum system, with more than 5000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, in addition to an expanded hybrid solver service that can run problems with up to one million variables. The combination of the computing power of Advantage and the scale to address real-world problems with the hybrid solver service in Leap enables businesses to run performant, real-time, hybrid quantum applications for the first time.
“Today’s general availability of Advantage, the first quantum system built specifically for business; the expansion into real-world sized problems and new problem types with our hybrid solver services; and our new jump start program to get customers started continues what we’ve known at D-Wave for a long time – it’s not about hype, it’s about scaling and delivering systems that provide real business value on real business applications.,” said Alan Baratz, CEO, D-Wave. “We also continue to invest in the science of building quantum systems. Advantage was completely re-engineered from the ground up. We’ll take what we’ve learned around connectivity and scale and continue to push the limits of innovation for the next generations of our quantum computers. I’m incredibly proud of the team that has brought us here and the customers and partners who have collaborated with us to build hundreds of early applications and who now are putting applications into production.”
AI Chipmaker Hailo Launches Top-Performing M.2 and Mini PCIe AI Acceleration Modules to Enhance Performance of Edge Devices
Leading AI chipmaker Hailo announced the launch of its M.2 and Mini PCIe high-performance AI acceleration modules for empowering edge devices. Integrating the Hailo-8TM processor, the modules can be plugged into a variety of edge devices, transforming multiple sectors with superior AI capabilities including smart cities, smart retail, industry 4.0, smart homes, and beyond. The modules enable customers to integrate high performance AI capabilities into edge devices, providing a more flexible and optimized solution for accelerating a large range of Deep Learning-based applications with high efficiency – optimizing time to market with a standard form factor. Hailo’s AI acceleration modules seamlessly integrate into standard frameworks, such as TensorFlow and ONNX, which are both supported by Hailo’s comprehensive Dataflow Compiler. Customers can quickly port their Neural Networks (NNs) into the Hailo-8 processor, ensuring high-performance, enabling smarter AI products, and accelerating time-to-market.
“Manufacturers across industries understand how crucial it is to integrate AI capabilities into their edge devices. Simply put, solutions without AI can no longer compete,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo. “Our new Hailo-8 M.2 and Mini PCIe modules will empower companies worldwide to create new powerful, cost-efficient, innovative AI-based products with a short time-to-market – while staying within the systems’ thermal constraints. The high efficiency and top performance of Hailo’s modules are a true gamechanger for the edge market.”
ThoughtSpot Launches SaaS Offering to Unleash the Value of Cloud Data Warehouses with Search & AI-Driven Analytics
ThoughtSpot, a leader in search & AI-driven analytics, announced the release of ThoughtSpot Cloud, one of the first fully-managed SaaS offerings providing business users with the flexibility to glean instant insights from data in the cloud. With ThoughtSpot Cloud, businesses can empower employees to access granular insights across the entirety of their cloud data in a matter of minutes, helping these organizations maximize ROI from their investments in cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Snowflake.
“Empowering every employee with data has become the lifeblood of modern businesses. This has become especially clear for organizations this year as they face the challenges COVID-19 has brought,” said Sudheesh Nair, CEO of ThoughtSpot. “ThoughtSpot Cloud is purpose-built to address our customers’ needs to unleash into the full power of their cloud data and drive true digital transformation more quickly than ever before. Existing legacy solutions, which are riddled with lag-times and infrastructure restrictions, are simply not up to the task. Our customers rely on us to help them to build a more fact-driven world through the use of data, and with ThoughtSpot Cloud, we’ve taken a major step forward in advancing this important mission.”
TIBCO Simplifies Data Unification with TIBCO Any Data Hub
TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in enterprise data, empowers its customers to connect, unify, and confidently predict business outcomes, solving the world’s most complex data-driven challenges. TIBCO announced the launch of the TIBCO® Any Data Hub, an all-encompassing data management blueprint that embraces distributed data environments. The framework offers necessary capabilities to support the demand for accurate and consistent data across the organization with trust and control, aligning IT and the business.
“In a perfect world with perfect systems and never-changing architectures, there would be no need for tools and technologies like master data management and data virtualization. Instead, in the world we live in, organizations look to solutions that will help manage an overwhelming influx of data,” said Mark Palmer, senior vice president, engineering, TIBCO. “We’ve seen a massive expansion in data and an evolution of the systems and architectures that generate and control this data. The TIBCO Any Data Hub blueprint simplifies the entire process for customers by unifying the tools and approaches needed to create a complete and cohesive data picture, making a meaningful business impact.”
P360 Adds Advanced Artificial Intelligence Capabilities to its Sales Enablement Platform BirdzAI
P360, a leading developer of technology for life sciences companies, announced major updates to its sales enablement platform BirdzAI. The BirdzAI platform now includes advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities that enable real-time decision-making for sales organizations by providing deep insights derived from a wide variety of proprietary and tertiary datasets. Key features include sales forecasting, churn prediction, brand propensity analysis, next best action insights and more.
“By adding advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to our BirdzAI platform, we are helping life sciences companies eliminate the guesswork often associated with sales operations,” stated P360 CEO and Founder Anupam Nandwana. “For example, BirdzAI’s churn forecasting capabilities puts predictive forecasting for physician prescriptions directly in the hands of company representatives. Sales teams are able to see in real-time which brands a specific physician is prescribing, and which ones they might be stepping away from.”
Panalgo Brings the Power of Machine-Learning to the Healthcare Industry Via Its Instant Health Data (IHD) Software
Panalgo, a leading healthcare analytics company, announced the launch of its new Data Science module for Instant Health Data (IHD), which allows data scientists and researchers to leverage machine-learning to uncover novel insights from the growing volume of healthcare data. Panalgo’s flagship IHD Analytics software streamlines the analytics process by removing complex programming from the equation and allows users to focus on what matters most–turning data into insights. IHD Analytics supports the rapid analysis of a wide range of healthcare data sources, including administrative claims, electronic health records, registry data and more. The software, which is purpose-built for healthcare, includes the most extensive library of customizable algorithms and automates documentation and reporting for transparent, easy collaboration. Panalgo’s new IHD Data Science module is fully integrated with IHD Analytics, and allows for analysis of large, complex healthcare datasets using a wide variety of machine-learning techniques. The IHD Data Science module provides an environment to easily train, validate and test models against multiple datasets.
“Healthcare organizations are increasingly using machine-learning techniques as part of their everyday workflow. Developing datasets and applying machine-learning methods can be quite time-consuming,” said Jordan Menzin, Chief Technology Officer of Panalgo. “We created the Data Science module as a way for users to leverage IHD for all of the work necessary to apply the latest machine-learning methods, and to do so using a single system.”
MemVerge Makes the Impossible Possible by Delivering Big Memory that is DRAM-Fast and Highly Available
MemVerge™, the pioneers of Big Memory software, announced general availability of Memory Machine™ software. Used with Intel® Optane™ persistent memory, Memory Machine fundamentally changes in-memory computing infrastructure. IT organizations depend on high-performance DRAM while coveting lower-cost and persistent memory. MemVerge asked, “Why not both?” The Memory Machine engineering team answered with the industry’s first software-defined pools of DRAM and persistent memory that are easy to deploy because they appear to applications as familiar DRAM. MemVerge is the first to extend the performance limits of persistent memory to offer DRAM-like speed; and provide enterprise-class memory data services that transform the decades-old and fragile DRAM memory tier into a new highly available memory tier. As a result, organizations around the world have started deploying Memory Machine to harness the power of Big Memory.
“Servers deployed with Intel Optane persistent memory hardware and Memory Machine software incorporate a Big Memory architecture without compromise,” said Charles Fan, MemVerge Co-Founder and CEO. “Memory Machine harnesses the best of DRAM and persistent memory to create a new software-defined Big Memory tier that is simultaneously lower cost, high-performance and highly available.”
Ahana Unveils First Cloud-native Managed Service for Presto on AWS
Ahana, the self-service analytics company for Presto, announced its new Presto-as-a-Service offering designed to simplify the deployment, management and integration of Presto, an open source distributed SQL query engine, with data catalogs, databases and data lakes on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ahana Cloud for Presto is the only easy-to-use, cloud-native managed service for Presto, and is deployed within the user’s AWS account, giving customers complete control and visibility of clusters and their data.
”While Presto is one of the fastest-growing open source projects in data analytics, it is still a complicated distributed data system with extensive tuning and integration required. This tends to make Presto deployments expensive and achievable mostly by large Internet companies like Facebook, Uber and Twitter,” said Dipti Borkar, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Ahana. ”Organizations increasingly need self-service SQL analytics, and Ahana Cloud for Presto can now simplify and unify data analytics so users can query data directly in place across a range of data sources on AWS including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and others – without the need to move or copy the data.”
Diffbot Unveils New Product: Industry-First Knowledge as a Service Natural Language Processing System
Diffbot, a leading Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) company powering intelligent web applications, announced the launch of its Natural Language Processing (NLP) API, a new deep learning system that autonomously assesses information in free text via external knowledge on the web. The new NLP system is integrated into the company’s— the world’s largest—multilingual Knowledge Graph, which analyzes, extracts, and enhances content across the unstructured web, to learn and deconstruct natural language text.
In addition, the company achieved its second industry breakthrough in a decade using free web text to generate the most accurate character genealogy in two of the most popular biblical and cultural texts in human history. Diffbot’s NLP API was able to completely analyze the Bible and accurately generated a full genealogy of all the historical figures mentioned in the ancient text. The system also successfully evaluated George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire (the basis for the hit HBO series Game of Thrones) and identified 500 more characters than currently found on the web.
“With this new breakthrough, Diffbot continues to push the boundaries in achieving its vision in building an ImageNet for human language and realizing a Semantic Web that will transform the business world,” said Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot. “We have been testing its capabilities in beta and the results have been extremely promising in illustrating the true impact it will have on the professional world, especially in the fields of science, history, education, and religion.”
VAST Data Debuts LightSpeed Storage Platform To Power The Next Decade of Machine Intelligence
VAST Data, the storage company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, announced the availability of its next generation storage architecture designed to eliminate the compromises of storage scale, performance and efficiency to help organizations harness the power of AI as they evolve their data agenda in the age of machine intelligence. Dubbed LightSpeed, this new concept combines the light-touch of VAST’s simple NAS appliance experience with leadership-class performance for GPU-based and AI Processor-based computing, taking the guesswork and configuration out of scaling up AI infrastructure.
“Today, VAST is throwing down the gauntlet to declare that customers no longer need to choose between simplicity, speed and cost when shaping their AI infrastructure strategy,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-founder and VP Product at VAST Data. “Let data scientists dance with their data by always feeding their AI systems with training and inference data in real-time. The LightSpeed concept is simple: no HPC storage muss, no budgetary fuss, and performance that is only limited by your ambition.”
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