Year: 2018

Companies struggle with all types of compliance issues. Failure to comply with government regulations, such as Dodd-Frank, EPA or HIPAA, is a significant business risk for many companies. Internally mandated compliance also represents problems as well. Security and cost control policies are just as vital as other forms of regulation since they protect the company from reputational, financial, the operational risks.
Continue reading Infrastructure as Code Provides Advantages for Proactive Compliance

Development organization continue to feel increasing pressure to produce better code more quickly. To help accomplish that faster-better philosophy, a number of methodologies have emerged that that help organizations quickly merge individual code, test it, and deploy to production. While DevOps is actually a management methodology, it is predicated on an integrated pipeline that drives code from development to production deployment smoothly. In order to achieve these goals, companies have adopted continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tool sets. These tools, from companies such as Atlassian and GitLab, help developers to merge individual code into the deployable code bases that make up an application and then push them out to test and production environments.

Cloud vendors have lately been releasing their own CI/CD tools to their customers. In some cases, these are extensions of existing tools, such as Microsoft Visual Team Studio on Azure. Google’s recently announced Cloud Build as well as AWS CodeDeploy and CodePipeline are CI/CD tools developed specifically for their cloud environments. Cloud CI/CD tools are rarely all-encompassing and often rely on other open source or commercial products, such as Jenkins or Git, to achieve a full CI/CD pipeline.

These products represent more than just new entries into an increasingly crowded CI/CD market. They are clearly part of a longer-term strategy by cloud service providers to become so integrated into the DevOps pipeline that moving to a new vendor or adopting a multi-cloud strategy would be much more difficult. Many developers start with a single cloud service provider in order to explore cloud computing and deploy their initial applications. Adopting the cloud vendor’s CI/CD tools embeds the cloud vendor deeply in the development process. The cloud service provider is no longer sitting at the end of the development pipeline; They are integrated and vital to the development process itself. Even in the case where the cloud service provider CI/CD tools support hybrid cloud deployments, they are always designed for the cloud vendors own offerings. Google Cloud Build and Microsoft Visual Studio certainly follow this model.

There is danger for commercial vendors of CI/CD products outside these cloud vendors. They are now competing with native products, integrated into the sales and technical environment of the cloud vendor. Purchasing products from a cloud vendor is as easy as buying anything else from the cloud portal and they are immediately aware of the services the cloud vendor offers. No fuss, no muss.

This isn’t a problem for companies committed to a particular cloud service provider. Using native tools designed for the primary environment offers better integration, less work, and ease of use that is hard to achieve with external tools. The cost of these tools is often utility-based and, hence, elastic based on the amount of work product flowing through the pipeline. The trend toward native cloud CI/CD tools also helps explain Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub. GitHub, while cloud agnostic, will be much for powerful when completely integrated into Azure – for Microsoft customers anyway.

Building tools that strongly embed a particular cloud vendor into the DevOps pipeline is clearly strategic even if it promotes monoculture. There will be advantages for customers as well as cloud vendors. It remains to be seen if the advantages to customers overcome the inevitable vendor lock-in that the CI/CD tools are meant to create.

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, Anaconda, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot,  Datawatch, Domino, H2O.ai, IBM, Immuta, Informatica, KNIME, MathWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, Paxata, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS, Tableau, Talend, Teradata, TIBCO, Trifacta.

Continue reading Data Science Platforms News Roundup, July 2018

The announcement: On July 10, Domino Data Lab announced a partnership with SAS Analytics that will let Domino users run SAS Analytics for Containers in the public cloud on AWS while using Domino’s data science platform as the orchestration layer for the infrastructure provisioning and management. This partnership will allow SAS customers to use Domino as an orchestration layer to access multiple SAS environments for model building, deploy multiple SAS applications on AWS, track each SAS experiment in detail, while having reproducibility of prior work.

What does this mean?

Domino customers with SAS Analytics workloads currently running on-prem will now be able to deploy those workloads to the public cloud on AWS by using SAS Analytics for Containers via the Domino platform. Domino plans to follow up with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to further enable enterprises to offload containerized SAS workloads in the cloud. By running SAS Analytics for Containers via Domino, Domino users will be able to track, provide feedback on, and reproduce their containerized SAS experiments the same way they do so with other experiments they’ve constructed using Python, R, or other tools within Domino.

Continue reading Domino Deploys SAS Analytics Into a Model-Driven Cloud

Last week at Google Next ‘18, Google announced a new beta capability in their BigQuery cloud data warehouse: BigQuery ML, which lets data analysts apply simple machine learning models to data residing in BigQuery data warehouses.

Data analysts know databases and SQL, but generally don’t have a lot of experience in building machine learning models using Python or R. An additional issue is the expense, time-consumption, and possible regulatory violations of moving data out of storage in order to send it through machine learning models. BigQuery ML aims to address these problems by letting data analysts push data through linear regression models (to predict a numeric value) or binary logistic regression models (to classify a value into one of two categories, such as “high” or “low”), using simple extensions of SQL on Google databases, run in place. Continue reading Google BigQuery ML Extends the Power of (Some) Modeling to Data Analysts

Optimized sales training requires three critical aspects; combining effective sales enablement, people skills, and situational awareness

July 31, 2018 08:30 ET | Source: Amalgam Insights

BOSTON, July 31, 2018 — It turns out that the traits common to the best salespeople aren’t necessarily innate; research indicates they can be scientifically coached to be top producers. A new report, issued today from Amalgam Insights, evaluates the technology vendors who are leading the industry in optimizing this kind of training.

Todd Maddox, the most-cited researcher in corporate learning and Learning Science Research Fellow at Amalgam Insights, authored this report. This research uniquely identifies learning science approaches of optimizing sales training, which Maddox says requires a combination of effective sales enablement, people skills, and situational awareness.

The companies recognized in this research are (in alphabetical order): Allego, Brainshark, CrossKnowledge, Gameffective, Highspot, JOYai, Lessonly, Mindtickle, Qstream, myTrailhead, Seismic, and Showpad.

“Companies are continually looking for a competitive edge; leveraging technology to develop a top-tier sales force is a key area for improvement,” Maddox says. “If you want sales enablement and training tools that are highly effective, they must be grounded in learning science – the marriage of psychology and brain science. Many sales teams and sales-focused vendors have access to these tools. What is needed is an effective way to leverage these tools to maximum advantage,” he added.

Maddox’s report notes that successful companies work to map sales processes to three distinct learning systems in the brain:

• The cognitive skills learning system is about knowing facts (the “what”) and is directly linked to sales enablement;
• The behavioral skills learning system is about behavior (the “how”) and is directly linked to people skills training; and
• The emotional learning system, which is about “reading” people and situations (the “feel”) and is directly linked to situational awareness.

“When these three traits are combined, salespeople become far more effective in understanding both the tangible and intangible needs of their customers and can craft and deliver solutions that continually produce solid results for their companies,” Maddox said.

Maddox’s report, “2018’s Best Sales Enablement Solutions for Building Better Sales Brains,” is available for Sales VPs, Directors, and Managers at www.amalgaminsights.com.

About Amalgam Insights:
Amalgam Insights (www.amalgaminsights.com) is a consulting and strategy firm focused on the transformative value of Technology Consumption Management. AI believes that all businesses must fundamentally reimagine their approach to data, design, cognitive augmentation, pricing, and technology usage to remain competitive. AI provides marketing and strategic support to enterprises, vendors, and institutional investors for conducting due diligence in Technology Consumption Management.

For more information:
Hyoun Park
Amalgam Insights
hyoun@amalgaminsights.com
415.754.9686

Steve Friedberg
MMI Communications
steve@mmicomm.com
484.550.2900

Last week, Microsoft Inspire took place, which meant that Microsoft made a lot of new product announcements regarding the Azure cloud. In general, Microsoft is both looking up and trying to catch up to Amazon from a market share perspective while trying to keep its current #2 place in the Infrastructure as a Service world ahead of rapidly growing Google Cloud Platform as well as IBM and Oracle.  Microsoft Azure is generally regarded as a market-leading cloud platform, along with Amazon, that provides storage, computing, and security and is moving towards analytics, networking, replication, hybrid synchronization, and blockchain support.

Key functionalities that Microsoft has announced include:
Continue reading Azure Advancements Announced at Microsoft Inspire 2018

An Interactive Webinar with Qstream CEO, Rich Lanchantin

On Wednesday, July 17, 2018, Amalgam’s Learning Scientist and Research Fellow, Todd Maddox, Ph.D. and Qstream’s CEO, Rich Lanchantin conducted a live, interactive webinar focused on the critically important topic of situational awareness and patient safety. Achieving the highest quality in patient care requires a careful balance between efficiency and situational awareness in order to prevent medical errors. Healthcare professionals must be able to observe the current environment while also keeping the various potential outcomes top of mind in order to avoid unnecessary complications.

In the webinar, we discussed the learning science—the marriage of psychology and brain science—of situational awareness and patient safety and showed how to most effectively help clinicians learn and retain information, which results in long-term behavior change. We focused specifically on the challenges faced in optimally training the “what”, “feel” and “how” learning systems in the brain that mediate situational awareness, and how the Qstream platform effectively recruits each of these learning systems.

A replay of the webinar is available for all interested parties at the following link. Simply click the “Webcasts & Slideshare” button and the webcast is there. You will also see a second webcast that I recorded with Rich Lanchantin focused on “The Psychology of Hard vs. Soft Skills Training”. Enjoy!

If you would be interested in retaining Todd Maddox, the most-cited researcher in corporate learning, for a webinar, speaking engagement, or workshop, please contact us at sales@amalgaminsights.com

On Thursday July 19, 2018, Brandon Hall Group released a podcast discussion between Amalgam Insights’ Learning Scientist and Research Fellow, Todd Maddox, Ph.D. and Brandon Hall’s COO, Rachel Cooke. The podcast focused on the “adoption gap” in Learning & Development that results when users are presented with a large number of tools and technologies, but little if any guidance on what tool to use when.

Todd and Rachel discuss the importance of leveraging learning science—the marriage of psychology and brain science—to provide best practices for mapping tools onto learning problems in the most effective manner. Todd and Rachel discuss the challenges faced in optimally training hard and people (aka soft) skills.

A replay of the podcast is available for all interested parties at the following link.

If you would be interested in retaining Todd Maddox, the most-cited researcher in corporate learning, for a podcast, webinar, speaking engagement, or workshop, please contact us at sales@amalgaminsights.com

[This Research Note was co-written by Hyoun Park and Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli]

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Data Management Managers, Data Integration Managers, Application Development Managers

Why It Matters: his partnership demonstrates how Informatica’s integration Platform as a Service brings Google Cloud Platform’s Apigee products and Informatica’s machine-learning-driven connectivity into a single solution.

Key Takeaway: This joint Informatica-Google API management solution provides customers with a single solution that provides data, process, and application integration as well as API management. As data challenges evolve into workflow and service management challenges, this solution bridges key gaps for data and application managers and demonstrates how Informatica can partner with other vendors as a neutral third-party to open up enterprise data and support next-generation data challenges.
Continue reading Market Milestone: Informatica and Google Cloud Partner to Open Up Data, Metadata, Processes, and Applications as Managed APIs