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.
With Spot Wave, NetApp Helps Organizations Drive Down Infrastructure Cost and Complexity for Big Data Applications on Kubernetes
Global cloud-led, data-centric software company, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), announced the launch of Spot Wave by NetApp, and Spot Ocean’s support of Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service. Together, these products provide customers with leading solutions for simple, scalable and efficient infrastructure for cloud-native applications.
Wave automates the provisioning, deployment, autoscaling and optimization for running Apache Spark big data applications on Kubernetes in the cloud and helps to reduce cloud waste and costs by up to 90%. Using Wave as a turnkey product, organizations can deploy Spark environments faster and more easily, and focus on putting their data to work knowing that Wave is ensuring their infrastructure is continuously optimized for availability, performance and cost.
“Organizations are rapidly adopting Kubernetes to deliver cloud-native applications with greater speed and agility, not only for stateless services but also for big data applications,” said Amiram Shachar, vice president and general manager of Spot by NetApp. “The necessity for organizations to balance cloud infrastructure cost, performance and availability for optimal efficiency is complex and time-consuming. Spot Wave and Ocean are solving that problem by providing a serverless experience for Spark and ensuring their infrastructure is continuously optimized.”
Analytic Partners Drives Speed to Insight with New Release of GPS Enterprise
Global leader in measurement and optimization solutions, Analytic Partners, announced a new release to GPS Enterprise, its proprietary platform for data-driven decisioning. These innovations include Dynamic Decisioning to drive near real-time decision making and the new generation of its data management solution (ADAPTA) to increase speed to insights.
GPS Enterprise offers comprehensive data ingestion, quick processing of complex modeling, and deep insights for data-driven decisions. It is an end-to-end solution that includes ADAPTA (Data) to ingest, assess, score, and cleanse data for analytics and decisioning; AMP (Analytics) to uncover key business drivers and growth levers for marketing and beyond; and PROPHET (Decisioning) to forecast, plan, and optimize to maximize value. GPS Enterprise helps teams across organizations to support data-driven decision making, including marketing, analytics/insights, senior leadership, and finance.
“In today’s environment of data deprecation, there remains a wealth of privacy-safe data to leverage for insights and growth,” said Nancy Smith, President and CEO of Analytic Partners. “Our focus is to turn data into expertise and deliver speed to insights so that our clients can better navigate disruptions and achieve 5x more growth using GPS Enterprise.”
CCM and CXM Leader O’Neil Digital Solutions Transforms Communications with the Launch of ONEscore, a Breakthrough Data Analytics and Intelligence Engine
In an unprecedented development in the Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) space, O’Neil Digital Solutions announced the launch of ONEscore, a data analytics and intelligence platform that enables clients to accurately study recipient behavior in real time and properly segment their customers using 360° live personas. Through its proprietary predictive modeling and AI engine, ONEscore allows enterprises to truly get to know their customers with a comprehensive snapshot, allowing for highly personalized, relevant, and timely communications. As a result, they enhance the customer experience, translating to better customer outcomes and improved industry ratings.
As the communications landscape rapidly changes, businesses need to communicate more effectively to ensure customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. ONEscore data analytics capabilities helps clients get to know and understand their audience, enabling more personalized and meaningful communications. This creates a better overall experience for the customer. In healthcare, this directly impacts a health plan’s Star Rating, which directly impacts profitability. And, in the insurance and financial services sectors, it impacts their net promoter score (NPS), an industry standard for measuring customer experience.
“In a Covid-19 world where digital communication is vital, the launch of ONEscore enables companies to really get to know their audiences,” says Mark Rosson, Executive VP Sales & Marketing, O’Neil Digital Solutions. “By applying critical data insights, we empower healthcare providers to send personalized communications that result in behavioral change, ultimately improving their Star Ratings and Net Promoter Scores,” concluded Rosson.
OmniIndex launches Google BigQuery APIs
OmniIndex, a leading file analysis provider bringing analytics to unstructured data, has launched a number of new APIs designed specifically to enable simple data visualizations via Google BigQuery and Google Data Studio. The new APIs enable a simple call to export the OmniIndex DataSets into Google BigQuery where it can then be used by Data Studio to create powerful visualizations of the OmniIndex analysis.
BigQuery is an enterprise data warehouse that solves the problem for many businesses looking to store and query massive datasets by enabling super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure.
OmniIndex itself is a new simple-to-implement private SaaS solution and is the first that addresses all areas of unstructured data analytics: AI Contextual Awareness, AI Sentiment Analysis, Automatic Content Analysis and PII Alerting. The APIs – GoLang and NodeJS (Alpha) – provide connections into Google BigQuery, speeding up the standard querying of OmniIndex data and its export into Google BigQuery itself.
“When we launched OmniIndex our goal was to bring to life the value of unstructured data and not just the 20% that sits inside a database,” said Simon Bain, CEO, OmniIndex. “For agile organizations this means access to valuable data previously unavailable. For many businesses, being able to export this data into Google BigQuery and have visualizations within Google Data Studio is an important integration to help them deliver analytics that will in turn provide insights to decision-makers on how an enterprise is performing.
Version 6.0 of Teleport Introduces Secure Database Access for Users Who Need To Access Databases in Multi-Cloud Environments
Teleport, an Access Plane company, announced that Teleport 6.0 is now available to the public, introducing Teleport Database Access. The newest features included in Teleport 6.0 were designed to provide PostgreSQL and MySQL users with convenient access to databases running on private networks, while preventing data exfiltration, compliance enforcement and visibility into access and behavior.
“Engineers who’re already using Teleport for SSH access will be pleased to discover that their command-line tools to access MySQL and PostgreSQL gain superpowers when they upgrade to 6.0,” said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport.
New Relic Delivers Next-Gen AIOps to Democratize AI-Assisted Incident Response for Every Engineer; Introduces Free Forever Access to Instant Anomaly Detection
New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR), the observability company, launched new capabilities in New Relic Applied Intelligence to help engineers detect, understand, and resolve incidents faster than ever. This latest update to New Relic One allows engineers to uncover anomalies automatically, now enabled by default and available for free to all users. Engineers can now also see the probable root cause of every incident from any data source automatically, with guidance on suggested responders on their team who may be best equipped to revolve each issue. Also available in public beta today, engineers can quickly spot patterns and outliers in all of their log data using machine learning (ML) to dramatically reduce troubleshooting time.
“AIOps has promised engineers the ability to harness AI and machine learning to predict possible issues, determine root causes, and intelligently drive automation to resolve them,” said Bill Staples, president & chief product officer at New Relic. “Despite the hype, many DevOps and SRE teams have struggled to achieve the value of AIOps, as steep learning curves, long implementation and training times, prohibitive pricing, and lack of confidence in AI and machine learning have stood in the way. With our next-gen AIOps capabilities launched today, New Relic is solving these challenges, putting the power of observability in the hands of every engineer to finally deliver the promised value of AIOps to everyone.”
Feedzai Fairband: World’s most advanced framework for AI fairness
Feedzai, a leading cloud-based risk management platform, has announced Feedzai Fairband, the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework. The new AutoML algorithm automatically discovers less biased machine learning models with zero additional model training cost while increasing model fairness by up to 93%, on average. With this new technology, Feedzai allows financial institutions across the world to make better and fairer decisions.
Feedzai Research developed the new framework under the premise that protecting financial institutions from financial crime can and should be done in a fair, accountable, and transparent way and that AI should not harm consumers. Feedzai Fairband can be used with any fairness metrics, model metrics, and sensitive attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, location, and more. In addition, the technology works with any algorithm and model settings and has shown vast applicability besides risk and financial crime management.
“Feedzai Fairband is one of the biggest milestones in the financial services industry as it presents a low-cost, no-friction framework to address one the biggest problems of our era – AI bias,” says Dr. Pedro Bizarro, Chief Science Officer at Feedzai. “By creating the most advanced framework for AI fairness, Feedzai is allowing financial institutions to incorporate a critical piece of technology that addresses a problem under close public scrutiny with proven damaging effects across the globe. Building accurate and fairer models will be less challenging from now on.”
Global Cloud Communications Provider Enhances Customer Self-Service with AI-powered Conversational Service
Aisera, a Palo Alto-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions company, announced its AI Customer Service solution with proven on-demand 24/7 customer support and higher customer satisfaction ratings. Aisera’s AI Customer Service automates user requests for customer service, sales, marketing and commerce organizations. Aisera works with existing service cloud products such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Zendesk and ServiceNow to deliver a revolutionary end-to-end service experience for users. Aisera’s AI Customer Service improves Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) while drastically reducing support and operations costs.
“Customers today expect businesses to deliver immediate, personalized support and services on whatever device and channel they prefer at any time, 24/7,” said Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera, said. “Powered by Unsupervised NLP and NLU, AI-driven Automation and Cloud technologies, Aisera offers consumer-like self-service that dramatically improves the user experience. An advantage where companies like 8×8 leverage disruptive AI solutions to compete and grow by enabling customer experience for millions of business and contact center users.”
DataRobot 7.0 Release Includes Enhancements to Every Product in its Enterprise AI Platform
DataRobot unveiled significant upgrades to every product in its enterprise AI platform. These enhancements, created based on critical input from customers, are designed to optimize the value seen through AI deployments and enable organizations to drive better business outcomes with AI.
“We are committed to helping enterprises experience the greatest value from their AI models,” said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, SVP of Product at DataRobot. “Through ongoing engagement with our customers, we’ve developed an intimate understanding of the challenges they face, as well as the opportunities they have, with AI. Our latest platform release has been specifically designed to help them seize the transformative power of AI and advance on their journeys to becoming AI-driven enterprises.”
Datadobi Announces Support for File Data Protection on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
Datadobi, a global leader in unstructured data management software, announced it has added support for Azure Blob storage in DobiProtect 5.11, enabling customers to protect their data from any NAS or cloud filesystem to Microsoft’s cloud-based object storage solution. As unstructured data continues to rapidly grow, Datadobi allows enterprises to protect against cyberthreats, ransomware, accidental deletions, and software vulnerabilities with a simple, quick, and cost-effective solution.
Azure Blob storage is a massively scalable and secure object storage service for data lakes, archives, cloud-native workloads, analytics, and machine learning. Using Datadobi, organizations can now maintain protection copies of their file data in Azure Blob Storage.
“We’re seeing a massive shift of customers moving to and protecting data in the cloud and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is clearly a leading and trusted cloud solution,” said Carl D’Halluin, CTO, of Datadobi. “With the addition of Datadobi solutions, Azure customers can host and protect their unstructured data in the cloud, optimizing storage investment and with one hundred percent data accuracy and integrity.”
Informatica Speeds Cloud-Native Enterprise Data Management With NVIDIA Accelerated Computing
Informatica®, an enterprise cloud data management leader, announced the availability of its serverless, Spark-based Cloud Data Integration engine that offers accelerated performance using the NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark with NVIDIA accelerated computing. For the first time users have access to end-to-end machine learning operations (MLOps) capabilities by operationalizing machine learning models, and to the power of data management with the scalability and speed delivered by RAPIDS data science software and NVIDIA infrastructure. This is a big milestone on the road toward data democratization and a critical step to scale up digital transformation efforts.
“Data science is the backbone of AI, as it is key to transforming oceans of enterprise data into business opportunities,” said Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA. “Informatica’s integration of RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark with NVIDIA accelerated computing brings the world’s most advanced infrastructure to the many industries that rely on Informatica’s enterprise cloud data management solutions, enabling customers to speed their data science and AI pipelines across their cloud and on-prem data centers.”
TYAN Now Offering AMD EPYC™ 7003 Processor Powered Systems
TYAN®, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, introduced AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series Processor-based server platforms featuring efficiency and performance enhancements in hardware, security, and memory density for the modern data center.
“Big data has become capital today. Large amounts of data and faster answers drive better decisions. TYAN’s industry-leading server platforms powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors enable businesses to make more accurate decisions with higher precision,” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation’s Server Infrastructure BU. “Moving the bar once more for workload performance, EPYC™ 7003 Series processors provide the performance needed in the heart of the enterprise to help IT professionals drive faster time to results,” said Ram Peddibhotla, corporate vice president, EPYC product management, AMD. “Time is the new metric for efficiency and EPYC 7003 Series processors are the perfect choice for the most diverse workloads, helping provide more and better data to drive better business outcomes.”
Using Blockchain to Unlock the Power of Machine Learning: GNY Launched Decentralized Platform for Secure and Collaborative Machine Learning
Using blockchain to democratize machine learning, GNY today launched the world’s first blockchain providing access to powerful machine learning functionalities on a secure and collaborative decentralized platform. Empowering businesses and organizations to solve large and complex problems, GNY’s Mainnet will enable users to utilize its blockchain architecture to run machine learning analysis of any type of data – from financial records to public health information – without risking sensitive data theft. The Mainnet launches with 5 machine learning use cases, which will expand to dozens by the end of 2021 and eventually hundreds. The launch comes after 18 months of development and rigorous testing. To demonstrate its potential impact, one GNY test revealed how researchers could use Mainnet to set up a private blockchain to run comparative analysis of daily COVID-19 mortalities from individual cities. Another test showed how the platform could be used to fight climate change by analyzing multiple sets of public and private data to predict when peak fossil fuel consumption will occur.
According to Cosmas Wong, the Founder and CEO of GNY, the platform represents a major step forward in efforts to make the power of machine learning accessible to organizations and groups of any size:
“Machine learning can be a force for good for solving the world’s most pressing problems, innovating industries, or simply growing a business, but it needs to be accessible, cost-effective, and secure,” says Wong. “Our goal is to democratize machine learning so that anyone can leverage all the opportunities made possible with this powerful technology.”
Vertica in Eon Mode Now Available for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage to Deliver High-Performance Analytics in On-Premises Environments
Vertica and Dell EMC announced the general availability of Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), delivering data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics. This combined predictive analytics offering gives data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics wherever their data resides, supporting hybrid deployments and on-premises data center use cases. By “right sizing” the compute resources for analytical queries and storage resources for data, data engineering teams can more cost-effectively and confidently manage variable workloads.
Most companies are embracing a multi-cloud and hybrid approach to infrastructure, and many workloads will remain on-premises. Modern analytics architectures must ensure that operational efficiency and workload flexibility is not limited to only data that resides in the public clouds. Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS delivers the advantages of separating compute from storage to enterprise data centers as a highly scalable, highly performant solution for the most demanding analytic workloads.
“Our customers trust us to provide the greatest freedom in how they consume the highest performance analytics – flexibility for the broadest deployment options, whether it’s deploying Vertica on any major public cloud or on-premises with more leading object storage options,” said Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager of Vertica. “With Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS, organizations can choose our cloud-optimized architecture to manage variable workloads in hybrid or on-premises environments with Dell EMC’s market-leading software-defined cloud object storage platform.”
Signals Analytics Launches AI-Driven Consumer Intelligence Platform for Apparel Brands Seeking a Pandemic Rebound
Signals Analytics, an AI-powered consumer and market insights platform, added Apparel to its rapidly growing list of industry-specific intelligence offerings. Connecting data from more than 13,000 external sources – including Instagram, Target, Macy’s, Walmart, Amazon, Zappos and Nordstrom – the software offers contextualized insights across the consumer, competitive and commerce landscape fueling faster and more successful go-to-market strategies in an industry where the need for speed is greater than ever. Fashion was hit hard in 2020 as the world adapted to shelter-in-place orders and social events were cancelled. Struggling to sell existing inventory, new innovation and product launches from apparel brands drastically declined. Signals Analytics’ data shows that the number of new products launched on ecommerce channels declined by 56% year on year, and even as countries begin to reopen, Boston Consulting Groupclaims industry revenue could still drop by more than one-third in 2021.
“As apparel companies continue to map out future plans, it is critical for them to incorporate a strong data strategy across all areas of the business – from concept to commerce,” says Guy Cohen, Chief Product Officer of Signals Analytics. “Fashion has always been regarded as a creative rather than data-driven field, lagging behind in insight-driven decision-making. By layering in advanced analytics and predictive capabilities such as those in Signals Analytics, brands can balance the art with science, using data-driven insights to create product lines that speak to what will actually push consumers to add items to their online carts.”
Kinetica Launches Developer Edition of Its Streaming Data Warehouse
Kinetica, the streaming data warehouse that combines historical and streaming data analysis with powerful location intelligence, announced that the Kinetica Developer Edition is available for download today. This free, easy-to-launch edition of Kinetica’s premium product gives developers, data engineers, and data architects the ability to develop ideas and small-scale proof-of-concepts without worrying about license expiration.
“Our streaming data warehouse was purpose-built for complex advanced analytics, whether that’s real-time financial portfolio risk analysis, route optimization and network planning, or monitoring global networks of sensor data to protect the country,” said Tom Addis, CEO, Kinetica. “It has been a priority for us to provide developers with a complimentary offering to our enterprise product with no expiration date, which allows them to see the value before committing to a larger-scale PoC.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Drives Hybrid Cloud Disruption with New HPE GreenLake Cloud Services and Partnerships
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) announced a series of innovation updates to its market-leading HPE GreenLake cloud services portfolio, and new capabilities and partnerships designed to dramatically simplify the experience and expand the reach of the HPE GreenLake Cloud Services business.
“As the market leader in hybrid and on-premises cloud services, HPE continues to innovate to bring HPE GreenLake and the cloud experience to a broader set of customers for their digital transformation and modernization efforts – at the edge, colocation facility, or datacenter,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “The HPE partner ecosystem plays a central role in our success, and partners of all types are embedding HPE GreenLake into their business models and offerings to deliver an agile as-a-service experience to their clients. Together, we are disrupting the market by “bringing the cloud to you” for our clients, combining the simplicity and agility of the cloud with the flexibility and control of a hybrid environment.”
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