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Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

Note: if you missed Part III of this blog series, catch up and read Part III: Enterprise Considerations

This is part of a four-blog series exploring Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI.
Part I: Context for the Acquisition
Part II: Why?
Part III: Enterprise Considerations
Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

Industries: Enterprise Mobility Management, Technology Expense Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, Mobility Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor. By purchasing MOBI, Tangoe gains Managed Mobility expertise, a customer base with high customer satisfaction, and expertise in Robotic Process Automation to support enterprise mobility.

Top Takeaway: Tangoe continues to aggressively acquire market leaders both to increase market share and add Best-in-Breed capabilities, personnel, and technology to its technology management portfolio.

Tangoe Acquires MOBI

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon.

Market Considerations Continue reading Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

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Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part III: Enterprise Considerations

Note: if you missed Part II of this blog series, catch up and read Part II: Why?

This is part of a four-blog series exploring Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI.
Part I: Context for the Acquisition
Part II: Why?
Part III: Enterprise Considerations
Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

 

Industries: Enterprise Mobility Management, Technology Expense Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, Mobility Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor. By purchasing MOBI, Tangoe gains Managed Mobility expertise, a customer base with high customer satisfaction, and expertise in Robotic Process Automation to support enterprise mobility.

Top Takeaway: Tangoe continues to aggressively acquire market leaders both to increase market share and add Best-in-Breed capabilities, personnel, and technology to its technology management portfolio.

Tangoe Acquires MOBI

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon.

Key Questions for customers to keep in mind that have not been answered as of publication: Continue reading Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part III: Enterprise Considerations

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Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part II: Why?

Note: if you missed Part I of this blog series, catch up and read Part I: Context for the Acquisition

This is part of a four-blog series exploring Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI.
Part I: Context for the Acquisition
Part II: Why?
Part III: Enterprise Considerations
Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

Industries: Enterprise Mobility Management, Technology Expense Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, Mobility Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor. By purchasing MOBI, Tangoe gains Managed Mobility expertise, a customer base with high customer satisfaction, and expertise in Robotic Process Automation to support enterprise mobility.

Top Takeaway: Tangoe continues to aggressively acquire market leaders both to increase market share and add Best-in-Breed capabilities, personnel, and technology to its technology management portfolio.

Tangoe Acquires MOBI

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon.

So, Why Did Tangoe Purchase MOBI?

MOBI’s ability to scale as a managed mobility services company and to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and retention made it an attractive acquisition target.

To understand why, consider that in the startup world, Amalgam Insights notes that companies tend to have new management challenges each time that they expand by 3x. So, for instance, a company that has 30 employees will need to change its management policies to support a 100 employee company, and then again to become a 300 employee company. The experience in managing a company at larger scale is indicative of the ability that the company’s policies will be scalable. So, for instance, customer service policies that have proven to be stable for a 250-300 person company would tend to be easier to maintain than those that exist for a 10-15 person company that may have significant hands-on management that can make up for a lack of policy.

Amalgam Insights believes that this success at scale was an important aspect of Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI. Tangoe, as a roughly 2,000 employee company, needed to acquire a company of scale to increase its managed mobility capabilities and to bring in a team of strong customer service and managed mobility professionals who already understood the demands of enterprise IT. With MOBI, Tangoe was able to bring in a top vendor to drive Tangoe’s expansion of managed mobility services and know that the policies in place would work for both a large number of employees and clients.

Tangoe also acquired MOBI’s significant investments both in their platform as well as in robotic process automation. At MOBI Untethered 2017, MOBI introduced their Mobots, a series of robotic process automation tools used to support service desk, service orders, carrier logistics, and billing data use cases. Amalgam Insights believes that these “Mobots” will end up being a significant advantage in scaling service reach, automating carrier interactions, and accelerating answers for support requests.

With this acquisition, Indianapolis now becomes the center of Tangoe’s Managed Mobility Services efforts. Although Tangoe has a significant facility in Austin, Amalgam Insights expects that increased growth in Tangoe Managed Mobility Services will lead to investment in Indianapolis. This is important both because Indianapolis is a growing tech hub in the United States and because MOBI had already negotiated tax incentives in return for job growth. As Tangoe’s Managed Mobility Services increase in size over the next few years, this benefit could be a true win-win for both Tangoe and Indianapolis.

MOBI’s experience in device logistics will be valuable to Tangoe both in providing additional capacity to manage mobile devices as well as to support Tangoe’s existing managed mobility team which is largely located in Austin, Texas. In December of 2016, Tangoe had announced a significant expansion of its Austin facilities to support device refreshes, repairs, and customization. With this additional investment in device logistics, Tangoe increases its throughput for handling large enterprise mobility projects.

One aspect of this acquisition that may help MOBI going forward is that Amalgam Insights notes that MOBI has lost deals in the past due to their inability to support landline and network environments. However, as a part of Tangoe, MOBI no longer has this problem as Tangoe’s Managed Mobility Services arm. Tangoe’s long-term DNA is based on telecom and network expense management and the breadth of Tangoe’s enterprise deployments will provide expertise and support for all enterprise technologies that are peripheral or related to enterprise mobility.

Amalgam Insights also notes that MOBI was also taking on the challenge of going down-market in conjunction with its automation efforts. With the Tangoe acquisition, Amalgam Insights expects that the ongoing service development efforts of the Tangoe Managed Mobility Services team led by the MOBI team will focus more on the complexity of enterprise mobility efforts, a challenge well-suited to MOBI’s automation and service capabilities.

In Part III of this blog series, we will explore enterprise considerations for Tangoe and MOBI’s current and potential customers. Or, to read the entire report and acquire inquiry time with the analyst to better understand this acquisition from your organization’s perspective, purchase the report at the following link: https://www.amalgaminsights.com/product/amalgam-insights-market-milestone-tangoe-acquires-mobi-to-enhance-mobility-management-capabilities/

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Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part I: Context for the Acquisition

Industries: Enterprise Mobility Management, Technology Expense Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, Mobility Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor. By purchasing MOBI, Tangoe gains Managed Mobility expertise, a customer base with high customer satisfaction, and expertise in Robotic Process Automation to support enterprise mobility.

Top Takeaway: Tangoe continues to aggressively acquire market leaders both to increase market share and add Best-in-Breed capabilities, personnel, and technology to its technology management portfolio.

Note: This is part of a four-blog series exploring Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI.
Part I: Context for the Acquisition
Part II: Why?
Part III: Enterprise Considerations
Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon. Continue reading Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part I: Context for the Acquisition

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The View from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon – Containers and Kubernetes Become Enterprise Ready

In case there was any doubt about the direction containers and Kubernetes are going, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle should have dispelled them. The path is clear – technology is maturing and keeps adding more features that make it conducive to mission-critical, enterprise applications. From the very first day, the talk was about service meshes and network functions, logging and traceability, and storage and serverless compute. These are couplets that define the next generation of management, visibility, and core capabilities of a modern distributed application. On top of that is emerging security projects such as SPIFFE & SPIRE, TUF, Falco, and Notary. Management, visibility, growth in core functionality, and security. All of these are critical to making container platforms enterprise ready.

“The future of containers and Kubernetes as the base of the new stack was on display at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon and it’s a bright one.

Tom Petrocelli, Research Fellow, Amalgam Insights”

If the scope of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is any indication, the ecosystem is also growing. This year there were 8000 people at the conference – a sellout. The CNCF has grown to 300+ vendor members there are 46,000 contributors to its projects. That’s a lot of growth compared to just a few years ago. This many people don’t flock to sinking projects. Continue reading The View from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon – Containers and Kubernetes Become Enterprise Ready

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Amazon Expands Toolkit of Machine Learning Services at AWS re:Invent

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services expanded its toolkit of machine learning application services with the announcements of Amazon Comprehend Medical, Amazon Forecast, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon Textract. These new services augment the capabilities Amazon provides to end users when it comes to text analysis, personalized recommendations, and time series forecasts. The continued growth of these individual services removes obstacles for companies looking to get started with common machine learning tasks on a smaller scale; rather than building a wholesale data science pipeline in-house, these services allow companies to quickly get one task done, and this permits an incremental introduction to machine learning for a given organization. Forecast, Personalize, and Textract are in preview, while Comprehend Medical is available now.

Amazon Comprehend Medical, Forecast, Personalize, and Textract join a collection of machine learning services that include speech recognition (Transcribe) and translation (Translate), speech-to-text and text-to-speech (Lex and Polly) to power machine conversation such as chatbots and Alexa, general text analytics (Comprehend), and image and video analysis (Rekognition).

New Capabilities

Amazon Personalize lets developers add personalized recommendations into their apps, based on a given activity stream from that app and a corpus of what’s available to be recommended, whether that’s products, articles, or other things. In addition to recommendations, Personalize can also be used to customize search results and notifications. By combining a given search string or location with contextual behavior data, Amazon looks to provide customers with the ability to build trust.

Amazon Forecast builds private, custom time-series forecast models that predict future trends based on that data. Customers provide both histoical data and related causal data, and Forecast analyzes the data to determine the relevant factors in building its models and providing forecasts.

Amazon Textract extracts text and data from scanned documents, without requiring manual data entry or custom code. In particular, using machine learning to recognize when data is in a table or form field and treat it appropriately will save a significant amount of time over the current OCR standard.

Finally, Amazon Comprehend Medical, an extension of last year’s Amazon Comprehend, uses natural language processing to analyze unstructured medical text such as doctor’s notes or clinical trial records, and extract relevant information from this text.

Recommendations

Organizations doing resource planning, financial planning, or other similar forecasting that currently lack the capability to do time series forecasting in-house should consider using Amazon Forecast to predict product demand, staffing levels, inventory levels, material availability, and to perform financial forecasting. Outsourcing the need to build complex forecasting models in-house lets departments focus on the predictions.

Consumer-oriented organizations looking to build higher levels of engagement with their customers who provide generic, uncontextualized recommendations right now (based on popularity or other simple measures) should consider using Amazon Personalize to provide personalized recommendations, search results, and notifications via their apps and website. Providing high-quality relevant recommendations a la minute builds customer trust in the quality of a given organization’s engagement efforts, particularly compared to the average spray-and-pray marketing communication.

Organizations that still depend on physical documents, or who have an archive of physical documents to scan and analyze, should consider using Amazon Textract. OCR’s limits are well-known, especially when it comes to accurately interpreting and formatting semi-structured blocks of text data such as form fields and tables, resulting in significant time devoted to post-processing manual correction. Textract handles complex documents without the need for custom code or maintaining templates; being able to automate text interpretation and analysis further accelerates document processing workflows, and better permits organizations to maintain compliance.

Medical organizations using software that depends on manually-implemented rules to process their medical text should consider using Amazon Comprehend Medical. By removing the need to maintain a list of rules in-house, Comprehend Medical accelerates the ability to extract and analyze medical information from unstructured text fields like doctor’s notes and health records, improving processes such as medical coding, cohort analysis to recruit patients for clinical trials, and health monitoring of patients.

All organizations looking to use machine learning services from external providers need to consider whether outsourcing will work for their circumstances. Data privacy is a key concern, and even more so in regulated verticals with industry-specific rules such as HIPAA. Does the service you want to use respect those rules? From a compliance perspective, why a model gives the results it does needs to be explained as well; merely accepting results from the black box at face value is insufficient. Machine learning products that automatically provide such an explanation in plain English do exist, but this feature is still uncommon and in its infancy.

Conclusion

With its latest announcements, Amazon continues to broaden the scope of customer issues it addresses with machine learning services. Medical companies need better text analytics yesterday, but struggle to comply with HIPAA while assessing the data they have. Customer-facing organizations face stiff competition when their competitor is only a click away. And any company trying to plan for the future based on past data grapples with understanding what factors affect future results. Amazon’s machine learning application services address common tactical business issues by simplifying the process for customers of implementing task-specific machine learning models to pure inputs and outputs. These services present outsourcing opportunities for overworked departments struggling to keep up.

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Tangoe Acquires MOBI to Strategically Expand Enterprise Mobility Capabilities

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon.

Key questions to consider for this acquisition include:

  • Why did Tangoe decide to buy MOBI at this time? For its customer base? Corporate culture? Technology?
  • How does this acquisition affect enterprises seeking toolsets to assist with the orchestration and accounting of digital transformation initiatives?
  • How will work be split and coordinated between Tangoe’s Austin logistics warehouse and MOBI’s Indianapolis-based facilities?
  • What will Tangoe do with MOBI’s Robotic Process Automation initiative of Mobots?
  • Will Tangoe keep MOBI’s staff or will there be a bunch of high-quality mobility and support staff available?
  • What happens to MOBI partners who may compete with Tangoe?
  • Will MOBI customers be moved to the Tangoe Matrix platform immediately?
  • Will Tangoe contribute to the burgeoning Indianapolis tech scene that is currently one of the hottest startup spots in the country?

To learn more about which of these questions can be answered and which of these questions require greater due diligence, please read my full analysis, which is available at: https://www.amalgaminsights.com/product/amalgam-insights-market-milestone-tangoe-acquires-mobi-to-enhance-mobility-management-capabilities

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Market Milestone – Looker Raises $103 Million E Round to Expand the Looker Data Platform

On December 6, 2018, Looker announced that it closed a $103 million E round led by Premji Invest, a private equity firm owned by Wipro chairman Azim Premji. This round also includes new funds from Cross Creek Advisors, a venture capital firm focused on late-stage investments with current investments including tech darlings such as Anaplan, Datastax, Docker, DocuSign, Pluralsight, and Sumo Logic. This round also included participation from current investors from prior rounds (such as Looker’s Series D covered by Amalgam Insights).

This round is expected to be a final round before a potential Initial Public Offering. Of course, in recent times, plans for IPO from hot companies have been interrupted at the last moment, such as with Workday’s $1.55 billion acquisition of Adaptive Insights (see Amalgam Insights’ coverage for more information) and SAP’s $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics. A Looker IPO may not be guaranteed, but Amalgam Insights would expect that the valuation of Looker is likely not going to be affected whether the company ends up going public or being acquired for strategic reasons.

Why is Looker worth $1.6 billion?

With this funding, Looker crosses into “unicorn” territory with a valuation of approximately $1.6 billion. This valuation is based on Looker’s run-rate of over $100 million in annual revenue supported by an employee base that is approaching 600, year-over-year growth exceeding 70%, and expansion into Tokyo to support the Asia-Pacific region.

Amalgam Insights believes that this valuation reflects several key trends and intelligent strategic decisions made by Looker in supporting enterprise-grade business intelligence and data supply chain needs.

First, Looker was developed to support a variety of data preparation, cataloging, governance, querying, and presentation capabilities at scale across a wide variety of data sources and formats. This approach reflects Looker’s purpose of being a data platform built for a new generation of data analysts based on the volume and variety of challenges that drive current analytic challenges.

Taking a step back, I remember when I first ran into Looker on the trade show circuit. I was looking at a variety of BI solutions in 2013, including the likes of Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy, when I ran into a small booth manned by a guy named Keenan Rice, who currently serves as Looker’s VP of Strategic Alliances. As a jaded analyst, I asked how his solution was different from the 30+ other solutions that were being shown on that show floor. At the time, everyone was bragging about their pixel-perfect visualizations, report building capabilities, and basic data presentation that were interesting to see, but rarely provided significant value, competitive differentiation, or Return on Investment.

However, Keenan’s pitch differed substantially. Although Looker also provided visualizations for large data tables, Keenan started by talking about data analyst challenges in preparing data for self-service analytics, using Looker’s SQL-based LookML as a modelling layer to access a variety of data, bringing new data into existing data and analytic workflows, and delivering it all as Software-as-a-Service. As a former data analyst, this was all music to my ears, but I wondered if Looker would be able to stand out as a solution against all of the dashboarding solutions, report builders, and the massive marketing budgets of incumbent BI vendors. Looker was just starting as a company and had just announced its Series A, so it faced significant odds in standing out based on the $10 million to $40 million range of Series A or Series B funding that a company like Looker would typically get at this point.

But it has been a pleasure both to seek Looker grow over the years and to lead a new generation of solutions focused on simplifying data supply chains and pipelines. It ends up that Looker was just early enough to avoid having comparable competition while solving a market need that businesses understood, especially those companies seeking a new generation of BI-based capabilities and wanting to develop a more data-driven organization. So, that’s a long way of saying that Looker took a big and laborious bet against the grain six years ago and has been rewarded for having a combination of good product and good timing.

But this isn’t the only reason that Looker has been successful.

As Looker has achieved market fit and success, the solution has evolved from a data workflow solution into an emerging application development solution that allows analysts and developers to work collaboratively in building secure and embeddable data models. By truly building Looker as a platform rather than simply calling it a platform as an aspirational goal based on a set of APIs, Amalgam Insights expects that Looker will become increasingly valuable for data analysts and the “citizen” developers who seek to increase appropriate access to enterprise data and analytic outputs.

And Looker has now taken an important step forward in providing department-specific apps in the most recent Looker 6 launch. Starting with digital marketing and web analytics, Looker is now taking advantage of its analytics capabilities to provide out-of-the-box support to help enterprises with key challenges rather than forcing clients to build foundational analytics that have been built over and over. Both these apps and Looker’s development focus build on top of Looker’s prior focus on Looker Blocks first launched in 2015, which were a collection of SQL, visualizations, and pre-built analytic models designed to accelerate analytic projects.

So, what is next for Looker? IPO? Global domination? 

All kidding aside, with expansion into AsiaPac to accompany Looker’s existing European offices in London and Dublin and Looker’s current 70% growth rate, it is possible that Looker could increase net-new revenues in 2019 faster than BI stalwarts such as Information Builders and Qlik. From a financial perspective, Amalgam Insights notes that Looker’s growth mirrors that of Alteryx, which has roughly quadrupled its stock price since its March 2017 IPO which was based on Alteryx’ 2016 revenue of roughly $86 million with 59% year-over-year growth.

Looker has stated that it believes that this Series E round should be its last funding round before IPO and, given recent market valuations for successful software companies, there should be no reason to expect otherwise from Looker. Looker’s progress both as a software development platform as well as a platform of pre-built applications and services bodes well for Looker as it continues to evolve as an enterprise platform focused on expanding access to data insights.

Finally, Amalgam Insights believes that Looker’s success will lead to continued success with other data and analytics companies focusing on rapid data modelling, data mapping, and analysis of multiple data sources. Looker’s agile BI approach that avoids the challenges of traditional BI and ETL solutions in supporting multiple data sources has become a new standard for accelerating the value of data. This both means that traditional BI companies will need to accelerate their own data pipeline efforts or to partner with other vendors and that Looker will start to be targeted in the same way that the likes of Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy have in the past. The price of success is increased competition and innovation, which is good news for the BI, data, and analytics markets and should provide Looker with enough challenges to avoid resting on its laurels.

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Tom Petrocelli Publishes Groundbreaking Report Defining Serverless Computing

On December 10th, 2018, Tom Petrocelli published the Market Guide for Serverless Computing entitled “Serverless Computing Provides New Solutions to Modern Problems” in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018.

This report was written in response to massive market confusion regarding the current definition of serverless computing and the categories of options that software, platform, and infrastructure architects can use to initiate serverless computing projects.

“Serverless can best be thought of as any computer system that abstracts the infrastructure for the developer, employs an event-driven model, and only consumes resources when needed.”

Tom Petrocelli, Research Fellow, Amalgam Insights

In this report, Petrocelli provides a definition of serverless computing, provides five key use cases for serverless computing, explores the economics of serverless computing, and provides 14 representative enterprise-grade solutions across open source projects, cloud services, and on-premises commercial products.

Amalgam Insights’ Market Guides provide an unbiased, third-party perspective for explaining new technology and service capabilities based on our decades of expert experience, briefings with leading technology vendors, and discussions with Early Adopter organizations.

To download the report, which will be available at no cost throughout the duration of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, please download at the following link: https://www.amalgaminsights.com/product/market-guide-serverless-computing-provides-new-solutions-to-modern-problems

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Data Science and Machine Learning News, November 2018

On a monthly basis, I will be rounding up key news associated with the Data Science Platforms space for Amalgam Insights. Companies covered will include: Alteryx, Amazon, Anaconda, Cambridge Semantics, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot, Datawatch, DominoElastic, H2O.ai, IBM, Immuta, Informatica, KNIME, MathWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, Paxata, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS, SnapLogic, Tableau, Talend, Teradata, TIBCO, Trifacta, TROVE.

Continue reading Data Science and Machine Learning News, November 2018