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May 28, 2021: From BI to AI: A Weekly Recap of Data and Analytics

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding

Atlan | Series A Fundraise

Atlan, a SaaS data collaboration platform company, announced a Series A funding round of $16M on May 25. Insight Partners led the round, supported by existing investors Sequoia Surge and Waterbridge Ventures, and other individual investors. Atlan plans to use the funding for hiring across marketing, sales, and customer success departments.

OpenAI Startup Fund

On May 26, OpenAI announced that it would be investing $100M to partner with early-stage AI startups. Applications are currently open; likely partners will be companies in fields such as health care, climate change, and education, as well as companies addressing productivity improvement use cases. Microsoft and other OpenAI partners contributed to the fund.

Product Launches and Updates

Databricks held its 2021 Data + AI Summit May 24-28. Among the announcements:

Databricks Unites Data and Machine Learning Teams with Launch of Databricks Machine Learning

Databricks launched Databricks Machine Learning, unifying Databricks’ existing machine learning capabilities with two new features, Databricks AutoML and Databricks Feature Store. Databricks AutoML automates many of the more tedious aspects of the experimentation and training phases of building machine learning models, while Databricks Feature Store can find all features that have already been defined associated with the raw data being used, helping data scientists avoid unnecessary duplicate work. Databricks Machine Learning is currently in public preview for existing Databricks customers.

Databricks Unveils Delta Sharing, Open Protocol for Real-Time, Secure Data Sharing and Collaboration Between Organizations

Databricks also announced a new open source project, Delta Sharing. Delta Sharing is an open protocol for securely sharing data across organizations in real time. This is Databricks’ fifth major open source project, referred to in last week’s From BI to AI. Delta Sharing is included within Delta Lake, and supported by a number of data providers and software vendors such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Tableau.

Databricks Enhances Data Management Capabilities with Launch of Delta Live Tables and Unity Catalog

Databricks announced two new services to enhance data reliability, governance, and scale. Delta Live Tables will simplify the management and creation of data pipelines on Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog will let users discover and govern their organization’s data assets. Unity Catalog is supported by the new Delta Sharing, referenced above. Delta Live Tables is now in preview for Databricks customers, and Unity Catalog has a waitlist for access.

Google Cloud Launches Three New Services with Unified Data Cloud Strategy

At Google Cloud’s inaugural Data Cloud Summit, Google announced three new products: Dataplex, Datastream, and Analytics Hub. Dataplex is a smart data fabric to simplify data management. Datastream enables the replication of data streams in real time from Oracle and MySQL databases to Google Cloud services. Analytics Hub will allow Google Cloud customers to securely share data and insights within and outside of their organization, building on BigQuery’s existing sharing capabilities. Dataplex and Datastream are both available in preview, while Analytics Hub’s preview is “coming soon.”

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Redshift ML

On May 27, AWS announced the general availbility of Amazon Redshift ML. Redshift ML lets users create, train, and deploy machine learning models using SQL commands, leveraging Amazon SageMaker.

Tellius Enhances AI-Driven Decision Intelligence Platform with Proactive and Personalized Insights

Following on its earlier announcement of Series A funding, Tellius announced significant improvements to its AI-driven decision intelligence platform. Among these key enhancements, Tellius’ new Quick Start capability helps organizations with limited data science resources get started by guiding users through a wizard, going from identifying metrics of interest to relevant tailored analytics content. Tellius Feed alerts users to significant changes in measured metrics, along with root cause analysis.

Microsoft Announces Two New Machine Learning Capabilities

At Microsoft Build this week, Microsoft announced two new machine learning capabilities to help users accelerate AI model deployment. Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints help developers and data scientists rapidly deploy and operationalize machine learning models by automating key underlying steps, and the introduction of PyTorch Enterprise on Azure. Microsoft customers using Microsoft Premier and Unified Support have access to PyTorch Enterprise, and can request prioritized hotfixes to PyTorch.

Hiring

DataRobot Taps Tableau’s Damon Fletcher as Chief Financial Officer

Tableau’s Damon Fletcher has moved over to DataRobot as the company’s new CFO. Fletcher previously held the CFO role at Tableau, helping it shift to a subscription-based model; prior to that, he was a CPA with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. DataRobot is currently a private company, but Fletcher’s experience as the CFO of public Tableau may prove relevant for a potential DataRobot IPO.

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Salto Raises $42 Million to Reduce Technical Debt of Enterprise Infrastructure

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Vice President/Director/Manager of Platform Engineering, Vice President/Director/Manager of Operations, System Architects, Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, IT Finance, Software Asset Managers, Sales Operations, Marketing Operations

Why It Matters: As Software as a Service continues to balloon into a $275 billion global market by 2025 and the typical Global 5000 enterprise supports over 1,000 apps over its network, the challenge of SaaS configuration increasingly is linked to employee onboarding and productivity. Just as the battle for enterprise mobility security was a core concern for the 2010s, the battle for SaaS app governance will be a core IT concern for the 2020s.

Key Takeaway: IT departments must coordinate enterprise architects, security and governance teams, and software asset management personnel to ensure that all major SaaS applications considered mission-critical have well-governed configuration testing and management capabilities.

About the Funding Round

On May 19, 2021, application configuration platform Salto announced a $42 million B round led by Accel with participation by Salesforce Ventures and prior investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. This round comes only seven months after a $27 million A round announced in October 2020.

With this round of funding, Salto is expected to continue developing its solution and rapidly hiring. Salto currently supports Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot, Workato, and Zuora. These core SaaS applications are all market leaders, but considering the breadth of additional enterprise applications currently in market, the potential value associated with Salto supporting additional solutions is obvious and massive.

What Does Salto Do and Why Is It Worth So Much?

Salto is a solution for configuring business applications in a repeatable, scalable, and governed fashion at a time when the administration of Software as a Service is becoming increasingly complicated and challenging. Salto uses DevOps-based and software development-based tools and methodologies to help enterprise support SaaS at scale.

This mindset comes from Salto’s founders, Rami Tamir, Benny Shnaider, and Gil Hoffer, who collectively founded Salto in 2019 after previously working at Pentacom, Quumranet, and Ravello. Each company ended up exiting for over $100 million, showing the type of track record that venture capital firms love to see.

Salto’s core technology is maintained as an Open Source project (https://github.com/salto-io/salto) and a SaaS toolkit that includes

  • Not Another Configuration Language (NaCl… get it?), a structured language to help support and define software configurations
  • A command-line interface with operations commands including
    Fetch, which connects to each enterprise application and downloads current configurations for users
  • Deploy, which compare your preferred configurations to existing configurations and then creates an execution plan to fix configurations
  • A Salto vs-code extension to the vs-code IDE used to interact with NaCl-based files.

The SaaS offering of Salto also supports

  • Environments that allow for testing a service instance of an application and can be managed through the Fetch and Deploy applications
  • A Git client, which helps users to effectively push or pull changes as needed to support software configuration.

So, why does this matter so much for IT?

Let’s take a step back. We have established that software is one of the greatest force multipliers for human effort in the history of the world. It is nearly impossible to get work done in large enterprises without using at least one or more complex enterprise software solutions, such as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

To add to this complexity, the dominant deployment mode for software is now Software as a Service, which is growing over 25% per year and drives the majority of new software purchases. Amalgam Insights estimates that the average company with 1000 employees is running 500 applications on their network and about 10% of those apps are centrally managed through IT as key enterprise data assets and workflow managers. These SaaS applications are being updated constantly, to the point that many vendors have given up on providing formal versions and instead simply provide agile updates. Even vendors with formal versions are releasing new functionalities and fixes on a constant basis.

In this era of immense application environments and constant change, companies can easily end up with inconsistent environments across departments and locations as they customize their software deployments with user interface preferences and specific code to match their business needs. Companies need to support their software suites based on business dependencies and make sure that core software solutions are always working for the sake of employee productivity.

Amalgam Insights believes that Salto’s SaaS configuration solution is an important management solution for end-user computing that has not been fully developed as of yet. At a time when everything from paper to on-premises software to hardware is all being replaced by SaaS, companies have either been offered SaaS operations management solutions to govern and secure licenses, Software asset management to manage the inventory of applications, or SaaS expense management to reduce and optimize spend. However, these three families of SaaS management do not effectively govern and audit the configuration and administration of applications

Salto uses NaCl to extract the metadata associated with a software configuration to provide users with a consistent taxonomy, text search, and references to make sure that companies understand what happens when they change their software configurations. Seemingly minor access or usability changes may end up unwittingly breaking business processes and interdepartmental collaboration.

The Value Chain of Salto for Enterprise Environments

The practical result is that Salto has seen customers claim to accelerate update times by 75%. The resulting productivity can be framed in several ways.

First, the terms of the (value of the new solution) * (the number of employees affected). This value should be based on a value based on the average revenue per employee, as employee output is based on revenue, not compensation.

Second, the avoidance of technical debt and avoiding the conflicts of multiple versions or broken versions in production can be estimated.

Third, the value of having visibility to the full configuration and interrelationships that each software system has can lead to better business process management and accelerated business changes. This value may be more difficult to quantify, but is often noticed at the executive level when businesses are trying to make changes.

Fourth, this level of visibility and auditability can lead to more rapid governance and compliance reporting as well as improved protection to potential security vulnerabilities related both to application configuration and the human aspects associated with working on misconfigured applications.


Altogether, the value of Salto quickly adds up to 1% of an employee’s annual productivity, which Amalgam Insights estimates to be between $3,200 per year.

Hyoun Park, Chief Analyst Amalgam Insights

It is not unreasonable to think that an employee could quickly lose an hour or two each month from NetSuite or Salesforce configuration issues, either from direct work issues or from the lineage, reporting, and security issues that follow. At the enterprise level, this quickly escalates to over $3 million for every 1,000 employees, making the business case for Salto more obvious.

This is ultimately the case that Salto is making in a SaaS-empowered world and that Accel, Bessemer, Lightspeed, and Salesforce Ventures have signed off nearly $70 million to pursue.

Recommendation for Enterprise IT Departments

Amalgam Insights’ key recommendation in light of this announcement is simple: Work with enterprise architects to ensure that all major SaaS applications considered mission-critical have well-governed configuration testing and management capabilities. 

Enterprise SaaS is currently a $110 billion market that will grow to $275 billion in 2025. In light of this growth and the increasing corporate dependence on SaaS to support business processes, companies must have a solution to support effective SaaS configuration management and changes. In this world of ever-changing technical needs, IT must keep up and ensure that SaaS deployments and updates are governed just as more traditional software, hardware, network, data center, and other IT resources are.

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May 21, 2021: From BI to AI: A Weekly Recap of Data and Analytics

If you would like your data- or analytics-related announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Launches and Updates

Alteryx Debuts Alteryx Machine Learning, Enhances Alteryx Intelligence Suite
On Wednesday, May 19, at its Inspire conference, Alteryx debuted Alteryx Machine Learning, an automated machine learning platform. Alteryx Machine Learning supplies guided automated machine learning with an “Education Mode” and ready-to-use machine learning models that both analysts and data scientists can use in their workflows. It’s currently available to Alteryx customers in early access.

In addition, Alteryx revealed updates to Alteryx Innovation Suite that extend its own AutoML capabilities to address unstructured and complex data, such as natural language processing, text mining, computer vision, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.

Alteryx also announced the formation of Alteryx Ventures, a $50M fund that will invest in companies that enhance the analytics and data science processes already available on the Alteryx platform.

Google Cloud Launches Vertex AI
On Tuesday, May 18, at Google I/O, Google Cloud announced the general availability of Vertex AI, a managed machine learning platform. Vertex AI unifies Google Cloud’s machine learning services in one environment, simplifying the process of building, training, and deploying models. Google claims Vertex AI can train machine learning models with almost 80% fewer lines of code than its competitors.

SAS Expands Support for Additional Cloud Providers
On Tuesday, May 18, at the SAS Global Forum 2021, SAS announced the availability of SAS Viya on AWS and GCP, with Red Hat OpenShift coming later in 2021. Viya had been available exclusively on Microsoft Azure since November 2020.

Coiled Cloud Launches at Dask Distributed Summit After Securing $21M in Series A Funding
At Dask Distributed Summit on Tuesday, May 18, Coiled, a data, AI, and ops platform, announced the general availability of Coiled Cloud. Coiled Cloud provisions distributed environments on-prem and in the three major clouds while simplifying operational management of machine learning models.

Coiled also announced $21M in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, putting Coiled at $26M in total funding. The new round is planned to accelerate market adoption and product innovation, as well as fund further open source development of Dask, a Python-based library for parallel computing.

Funding Rounds

Immuta Announces $90 Million in Series D Funding
On May 20, Immuta announced that it had secured $90M in Series D funding. Existing investors Citi Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, DFJ Growth, Intel Capital, Okta Ventures, and Ten Eleven Ventures participated in the round, joined by new investors Greenspring Associates, March Capital, NGP Capital, and Wipro Ventures. Immuta will use the funding to accelerate R+D, expand sales and marketing to reflect growing demand in the US, EMEA, and APAC, and enhance its strategic partnerships among other cloud data service providers. In its most recent release, Immuta announced integrations with Amazon Redshift and Azure Synapse.

Explorium Closes $75M Series C Amid Soaring Demand for External Data
Explorium, an automated external data platform, closed a $75M Series C funding round on May 18. Insight Partners led the round, supported by Fort Ross Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Zeev Ventures, Emerge, F2 Venture Capital, 01 Advisors and Dynamic Loop Capital. Explorium’s total funding is now at $127M.

Upcoming Events

May 24-28, 2021: Databricks to Unveil Fifth Major Open Source Project at 2021 Data + AI Summit
Databricks will host the Data + AI Summit May 24-28. The theme of the event is “The Future is Open,” referencing Databricks’ commitment to the open source community; to go along with the theme, Databricks is expected to unveil a fifth major open source project at the event. To register for this event, please visit Data + AI Summit.

June 15-17, 2021: Altair Future.AI Global Event
Altair will hold its Future.AI event June 15-17. The event is expected to highlight advances in analytics and AI. To register for this event, please visit Future.AI.

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ThoughtSpot Acquires Diyotta to Accelerate Access to Cloud Data

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, Digital Transformation Heads, Director of Engineering, Enterprise Architecture Directors and Managers, Application Architecture Directors and Managers, Financial Systems Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: This document serves as introductory guidance for Amalgam Insights’ subscribers considering ThoughtSpot and Diyotta for their data environments. Cloud data warehouses and data lakes provide challenges in data integration and transformation for enterprises seeking to analyze the massive volumes of data in these stores. Diyotta has a strong track record of supporting analytic data at massive cloud scale over the past decade and will provide ThoughtSpot with both the technology and talent necessary to continue innovating in making data more accessible for business analysis and distribution.

Top Takeaway: This acquisition makes ThoughtSpot more prepared and able to support enterprise data ecosystems and it should be accretive to current and future ThoughtSpot customers seeking to access data more quickly.

About the Announcement

On May 4th, 2021, ThoughtSpot purchased Diyotta, a data integration platform as a service (IPaaS) vendor known for its ability to support “Big Data” sources, including the market leaders in cloud data warehouses. Diyotta also has a data pipeline SaaS product supporting over 120 data sources to simplify integration. With this purchase, ThoughtSpot both acquires a strong data integration platform and closes gaps for customers seeking to rapidly deploy ThoughtSpot across cloud data sources and machine learning services. With this acquisition, over 60 Diyotta employees will be joining ThoughtSpot, which Amalgam Insights believes is over half of the company.

About Diyotta

Diyotta was founded in 2011 by Sanja Vyas, Ravindra Punuru, and Sripathi Tumati to build a cloud-based data integration at a time when cloud computing was just starting to get traction. At the time, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was a $5 billion global market (compared to the $70 billion+ market that IaaS is in 2021) and data was only beginning to move into the cloud.

Over time, Diyotta built out a code-free data integration platform that allowed companies to connect a wide variety of scalable data sources and built out partnerships with leading data and analytics vendors. 

A notable partnership created was the October 2019 announcement of Diyotta and ThoughtSpot creating a strategic partnership to support search-driven analytic insights. This partnership accelerated enterprise access to data both by allowing companies to build data pipelines more quickly and to support data ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) from a variety of sources to ThoughtSpot. 

What to Expect

ThoughtSpot has quickly evolved in 2021 both through inorganic acquisitions including Diyotta and SeekWell as well as through the organic creation of the ThoughtSpot Modern Analytics Cloud to provide a SaaS platform for search-driven analytics and the launch of ThoughtSpot Everywhere to provide a low-code application development platform. As ThoughtSpot seeks to continue enabling its growth as a company, one of its bottlenecks was in providing access to the increasingly diverse, distributed, and messy data ecosystems that every enterprise now has. ThoughtSpot had created ThoughtSpot Embrace to query a variety of data sources already, including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure Synapse, SAP HANA, Snowflake, and Teradata. With the acquisition of Diyotta, ThoughtSpot Embrace development should accelerate and the two solutions should come closer together more quickly.

With Diyotta, ThoughtSpot now owns an in-house solution for companies seeking to bridge the data access gap for enterprises that lack mature ETL capabilities for cloud data. ThoughtSpot had already been licensing Diyotta technology within its solution, but the Diyotta acquisition allows ThoughtSpot to further access Diyotta’s combination of ease of use, scale, and support for a variety of cloud-based data sources This acquisition should allow the two technologies to support more synergistic development going forward. 

In particular, both Diyotta and ThoughtSpot are strong partners with Snowflake. ThoughtSpot has even taken a $20 million investment from Snowflake Ventures. ThoughtSpot is now better positioned to optimize its data integration and analytics solutions for Snowflake.

ThoughtSpot and Diyotta already partnered to support an easy way to both access and analyze data through their respective technologies. With this acquisition, Amalgam Insights expects to see Diyotta integrated into ThoughtSpot over time as analytics and business intelligence companies are driven to become business data companies capable of handling not only analytic needs, but the curation and orchestration of data sources and the programmatic delivery of analytics back to both applications and data sources.

As for the Diyotta standalone products, Amalgam Insights believes that the revenue from these products is relatively small considering that ThoughtSpot has raised approximately $564 million with the most recent round coming from Snowflake and the prior round of $248 million happening in August 2019. Given that, it is likely a distraction for Diyotta to continue both supporting the standalone iPaaS solution while also supporting ThoughtSpot’s broader product and sales goals. 

Amalgam Insights’ Recommendations

For ThoughtSpot customers, this acquisition should be a welcome addition as it will accelerate ThoughtSpot’s ability to support data sources. Diyotta’s technical team has deep experience in supporting rapid data connectors and the deeper ETL processes needed to support data analytics across a wide variety of data lakes and data warehouses. The biggest task for ThoughtSpot customers is to find out how quickly Diyotta will be available as a broader ThoughtSpot Embrace solution and whether Diyotta will be made available to current customers as a standalone product or as an embedded product going forward.

For Diyotta customers, start tracking support announcements to see what commitments ThoughtSpot is making to support the product. Diyotta was purchased to support ThoughtSpot’s massive research, development, and product roadmap and to effectively allow ThoughtSpot to be Diyotta’s biggest customer.

For the analytics community in general, this acquisition demonstrates that the data integration and analytics companies are coming together based on market demand for solutions to make data easier to access and analyze. Both Diyotta and ThoughtSpot were developed to handle massive analytic data. This is a trend that will continue. Expect to continue seeing Best-in-Class integration and BI solutions coming together to provide you with integrated options. 

This acquisition also speaks to the increased demand for usability. Diyotta consistently ranked high in every measure of usability and ease-of-use as an integration platform, which was an important aspect of this acquisition. ThoughtSpot continues to work on creating an Apple-like environment for data where end-user and analyst access to data remains simple by putting substantial work and investment into analytic performance, backend search, natural language processing, and data management.

Overall, Amalgam Insights believes that this acquisition makes ThoughtSpot more prepared and able to support enterprise data ecosystems and that it should be accretive to current and future ThoughtSpot customers seeking to access data more quickly.

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May 14, 2021: From BI to AI: A Weekly Recap of Data and Analytics

Amalgam Insights is relaunching its weekly summary of important announcements in the data and analytics space. If you would like your announcement to be included in these roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Launches and Updates

DataRobot Delivers New Platform Enhancements

At their AI Experience Worldwide event this week, DataRobot announced a number of enhancements to its enterprise AI platform, with the goal of making it easier for every user to have AI be useful for them.

* Composable ML will allow advanced AutoML users with the requisite coding background to tweak existing DataRobot “blueprints” for their specific use cases.
* Continuous AI extends DataRobot’s MLOps product by letting users schedule relevant retraining sessions for models in production. These events can be scheduled on a regular basis, or when specific events occur such as data drift. In addition, new challenger models can be automatically created with AutoML to ensure the model that best fits the data is the one in production.
* The No Code AI App Builder will allow any user to turn a model into an application without needing to code, letting business users and decision makers leverage their model’s predictions in a more timely manner.
* Bias and Fairness Production Monitoring enables bias testing and monitoring of production models, warning when bias is detected and what factors are responsible.
* Model Grader will score existing models on four vectors: data quality, model robustness, model accuracy, and model fairness. At a glance, customers will be able to understand how their models perform with these criteria in mind.

In addition, DataRobot also partnered with Hivecell to deploy AI in edge computing environments, launched an AI for Health Incubator, and joined a World Economic Forum initiative to address ethics in artificial intelligence.

IBM Announces New Hybrid Cloud and AI Capabilities

During this week’s Think event, IBM announced new capabilities to bring data and AI together.

* IBM debuted AutoSQL, a new capability within IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Customers will be able to automate access to their data, even across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, without having to move or copy said data. This will speed up the use of said data while mitigating the risks of creating further data silos that occur when data is moved.
* IBM launched Watson Orchestrate, an interactive AI that will assist users in performing “tasks” from procuring approvals to preparing proposals more quickly in order to focus on more strategic tasks. Watson Orchestrate is currently available in preview as part of the IBM Automation Cloud Paks.

Altair One Cloud Platform Debuts New Features and Functionality

On Monday, May 10, Altair launched Altair One, a portal for the Altair product suite, including access to Altair’s data analytics and management tools and its high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. By integrating its AI and analytics tools with its base of computer-aided engineering and design tools into a single suite, Altair One can provide value for organizations whose use cases have combined needs for HPC and AI together.

Acquisitions

DataRobot Acquires Zepl to Enhance Enterprise AI Platform Capabilities for Advanced Data Scientists

In addition to the updates to its platform noted above, on Tuesday, May 11, DataRobot announced that it had also acquired Zepl, a cloud data science and analytics platform. Zepl will be incorporated into the DataRobot platform in its notebook form, allowing more advanced data scientists to code their own tasks and models manually within DataRobot, and collaborate with business analysts in one place to extend their initial model-building efforts.

New Hires

Alteryx Appoints Paula Hansen as Chief Revenue Officer

Monday, May 14, Alteryx appointed Paula Hansen as their Chief Revenue Officer. Hansen has held the CRO position before at SAP Customer Experience, and before that served as Vice President of Cisco’s Global Enterprise organization. Hansen brings broad enterprise solutions sales capabilities to this position that are in line with Alteryx’ plans for future growth as a foundational platform for supporting analytics and AI.

General

U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Approves Technology Research Bill

On Wednesday, May 12, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation approved the Endless Frontier Act (S.1260), a $110 billion bill to promote technology research over the next five years. Among the key technology areas included were artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and energy. Amalgam Insights believes that this bill will fundamentally affect the product development maps of AI, cybersecurity, and quantum computing vendors and provide standards that will be incorporated into RfPs and other software sourcing exercises.

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vCom Solutions releases Version 13.1 of vManager IT Lifecycle & Spend Management Platform

On May 10, 2021, vCom Solutions announced general availability for their IT Lifecycle Management Solution vManager 13.1. This is the first version of vCom that includes cloud FinOps support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

This version also includes vManager Marketplace, which allows vCom customers to do comparative purchases of IT services based on real-time pricing across hundreds of network, mobility, and collaboration vendors, “Pay Now” functionality that allows vCom customers’ accounting teams to digitize and pay invoices more easily through the checking account, and mobile analytics to support mobile rate and inventory optimization.

These capabilities reflect several core challenges that Amalgam Insights notes in managing IT. First, cloud Infrastructure as a Service continues to grow extremely rapidly, with all major vendors outpacing industry estimates for revenue growth. Amalgam Insights expects IaaS to continue growing roughly 20% year-over-year, leading to a $275 billion dollar market in 2025. This IaaS trend is part of a bigger trend of public cloud (Software, Platform, and Infrastructure as a Service) where half of all new IT spend in 2021 will come from the public cloud and that the public cloud market will grow to be over $600 billion in 2025.

Second, this spend will come in to face the IT Rule of 30, which states that every unmanaged IT spend category will provide a potential 30% savings opportunity.

The IT Rule of 30 has gone undefeated across network, telecom, mobility, and software and it continues to reign in cloud. As the next $100 billion+ of IaaS spend comes in over the next five years, there will be many billions of dollars in cost savings opportunities.

Third, as IT is increasingly consumerized, companies have more flexibility than ever to choose their providers. However, vendor choice is only useful if companies can effectively manage the sourcing and procurement process. Otherwise, IT departments can fall prey to the analysis paralysis that occurs when the size and detail of data overwhelm the human ability to process data. Vendor choices need to be centralized and provided on an apples-to-apples basis to support effective IT purchases.

Amalgam Insights’ Recommendation

Amalgam Insights believes the combination of platform improvements along with vCom’s current reputation for customer service and managed services should be seen as a valuable combination of capabilities for mid-market organizations seeking both to manage IT costs across all subscription charges and hardware.

With this release, vCom has taken several big steps to quickly make enterprise-grade functionality available to its clients. vCom’s version 13.1 provides several meaningful upgrades for existing customers across cloud, mobility, and payments. Most importantly, this update allows vCom to support cloud costs at a time when mid-market organizations are increasingly either supporting or planning to support million-dollar cloud bills. Amalgam Insights recommends that companies considering a net-new solution for managing IaaS to consider vCom as a solution that will allow holistic visibility across the hybrid cloud (hardware and IaaS) as well as network, telecom, SaaS, collaboration, and mobility.

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From BI to AI: A Weekly Recap of Data and Analytics

Amalgam Insights is relaunching its weekly summary of important announcements in the data and analytics space. If you would like your announcement to be included in these roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Launches and Updates

Alkymi Launches Patterns to Allow Business Users to Identify and Extract Data in Real-Time to Automate Daily Workflows

Wednesday, May 5, Alkymi launched Alkymi Patterns, a tool to automate process workflows based on data from tables and text in emails and documents. Users can quickly train Patterns to extract necessary information from unstructured data in their inbox, and automate the demonstrated workflow for the arrival of future emails and documents. Alkymi Patterns is now available for all Alkymi Data Inbox customers.

TIBCO Adds Additional Automation Capabilities to TIBCO Cloud Integration

On Tuesday, May 4, TIBCO announced updates to TIBCO Cloud Integration, its iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), including process automation updates and new accelerators. The new features will help customers with logistics and transportation challenges by mitigating the need to develop custom integrations from scratch.

Databricks on Google Cloud Now Generally Available

Databricks announced general availability of Databricks on the Google Cloud Platform on Tuesday, May 4. The latest version includes new features such as a Tableau connector to Databricks on GCP, as well as a terraform provider to provision and manage Databricks in GCP along with the associated cloud infrastructure. This announcment is indicative of the increased popularity of multicloud and multi vendor solutions to solve analytic challenges.

Oracle Analytics Cloud Announced New Analytics Cloud Capabilities

Oracle added capabilities to its Analytics Cloud on Monday, May 3, expanding its “self-serve analytics” capacity. Among the new features are “explainable machine learning” (which factors were most important in a given machine learning model predicting a certain outcome), automated data prep, text analytics, “affinity analysis” (identifying sets of items that often go together), graph analytics, custom map analytics, the ability to query using natural language, and a new mobile app.

New SAS Viya offerings help better manage and navigate big data for AI and analytics

On Monday, May 3, SAS announced the addition of two new data management solutions to its Viya platform, both available now. The first, SAS Studio Analyst, provides a more visually oriented IDE to enable end users to more quickly add data quality and data prep steps to their data workflow. The second, SAS Information Governance, integrates metadata search capabilities and a data catalog into Viya, allowing data professionals to find and manage their data resources more easily.

Anaconda and HP Announce Collaboration on Products for Data Scientists

On April 28, Anaconda and HP announced a “deepened collaboration” to support the data science community. Anaconda is now fully integrated into the Z by HP for Data Science product line as part of the pre-loaded software stack. By automatically including Anaconda’s curated repositories, Z by HP for Data Science users will be able to spend less time on Anaconda package management and environment configuration.

Red Hat Launches OpenShift Data Science

On April 27, Red Hat added new managed cloud services to its portfolio. Among these new services is Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, based on Open Data Hub. This service provides for faster development, training, and testing of machine learning models without the typical infrastructure demands. OpenShift Data Science is currently available in beta, as an add-on to OpenShift Dedicated and to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS; general availability is expected later this year. Red Hat’s offering is important because of its position as a leading Open Source development platform. By combining its existing software development platform capabilities with a data science platform, Red Hat provides a one-stop shop for developing machine learning-based applications.

Funding

Predictive analytics startup Pecan.ai raises $35M to boost AI adoption

Pecan.ai, a predictive analytics startup, announced a $35M Series B round Thursday, led by GGV Capital. Pecan.ai is a no-code platform that pits neural networks against each other to determine the most evolved and accurate neural network for any given prediction.

StarTree Secures $24 Million Funding to Commercialize “Blazing Fast” Analytics Platform Used by LinkedIn and Uber

StarTree, a real-time cloud analytics platform, announced a $24M Series A round of funding. Bain Capital Ventures and GGV Capital (spreading the wealth) led the round, with participation from existing investor CRV. StarTree, based on Apache Pinot OLAP, is designed to let users access their data more quickly and easily. With this funding, StarTree is expected to seek business from companies needing to provide analytics to large customer bases in real time.

Timescale Raises $40M Series B to Support its Time Series Database

Timescale raised a $40M Series B funding round Thursday, May 6. Redpoint Ventures led this round of funding, and all existing investors participated. The funds will be used to enhance its product suite, including new features to manage large-scale product deployments and enhancing visibility for developers of its time-series relational database.

Tellius Raises $8 Million to Provide AI-Supported Decision Intelligence

Tellius raised an $8M Series A funding round on April 27. Sands Capital Ventures led the funding round, with participation from Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to further enhance its decision intelligence solution, with the goal of helping customers make more data-driven decisions more easily.

n8n raises $12m Series A for its ‘fair-code’ workflow automation tool

n8n announced a $12M Series A funding round on April 26. Sequoia Capital, firstminute Capital, and Harpoon Ventures participated in the round led by Felicis Ventures. n8n seeks to provide a “fair code” environment for developing applications in a no-code environment, and to grow a community of citizen developers. n8n intends to use the funds to expand hiring in engineering, developer relations, sales, and marketing, as well as investing in its workflow automation tool.

Acquisitions

Francisco Partners and TPG to Acquire Boomi from Dell Technologies

Francisco Partners and TPG will acquire Boomi from Dell Technologies for $4B. Boomi provides cloud-based integration platform as a service (IPaaS) services. Francisco Partners has a history of investing in data companies, such as Lucidworks and Redis Labs, while prior TPG data and AI company investments include C3.ai and Domo.

Upcoming Events

DataRobot’s 2021 AI Experience Worldwide, May 11-12, 2021

On May 11-12, DataRobot will hold their 2021 AI Experience Worldwide event online. Broad themes include the new era of democratized AI, and why trust in AI is a requirement. To register for this event, please visit AI Experience Worldwide.

TIBCO Analytics Forum 2021

On May 25-26, TIBCO will hold the TIBCO Analytics Forum. The event will focus on recent innovations in data management, data science, and visual and streaming analytics. To register for this event, please visit the TIBCO Analytics Forum.

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Calero-MDSL Acquires MetaPort to Map the Enterprise Network

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Finance and Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Human Resources Officers, Procurement Directors, Telecom Directors and Managers, Mobility Directors and Managers, IT Architects, Vice President/Director/Manager of IT Operations, DevOps Managers, System Architects, Product Managers, IT Sourcing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Technology is a vital component of the business, but technology inventories and analytics are often updated too infrequently, inaccurately, and incompletely for the information to be relevant to real-time business decisions. MetaPort’s capability to map network elements and provide automated updates provides enterprises with greater visibility to the network, which will have downstream effects on the importance of network data for making business decisions.

Top Takeaway: With the acquisition of MetaPort, Calero-MDSL can provide its global customers with advantages in pursuing network transformation and consolidation, aligning network elements to business decisions, and accelerating IT’s ability to be a better partner to businesses.

On April 20, 2021, Technology Expense Management market leader Calero-MDSL, owned by Riverside Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners, announced the acquisition of MetaPort, a telecom network mapping company. Andres Aguirre, founder and CEO of MetaPort will be joining Calero-MDSL through this acquisition. With this acquisition, Calero-MDSL customers will be better positioned to map their network environments, remove redundant or obsolete circuits, and prepare for network transformation projects.

Calero-MDSL is the current market leader in Technology Expense Management based on technology spend under management, with responsibility for over $14 billion in enterprise technology spend across telecom, network, mobility, software, cloud services, and other technology categories. Calero-MDSL also has a market data management product to support financial data subscriptions where Calero-MDSL is considered the market leader as well.

MetaPort was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. MetaPort was founded with the assumption that IT departments could provide greater guidance to businesses if IT infrastructure data could be more transparent and accessible. With this focus, MetaPort has developed a tool that allows enterprises to quickly visualize a full inventory of their current network environment, view and track changes for network details as they are changed through automated updates, search this network information to find all relevant details, explore this data through drill-down and category-specific divisions of networks, and align all network data with its costs. This capability was already valuable to IT departments when MetaPort originally launched, but became even more valuable in the time of the COVID pandemic when the vast majority of technology workers were banished to their homes. As companies deal with the combination of new network investments made over the past year combined with employees’ incipient return to offices, the synchronization and coordination of network elements becomes even more critical to the delivery of technology and maintaining the backbone of connectivity necessary to support businesses in the digital era.

Network visibility is also a vital capability for the technology expense management world. One of the greatest tenets of technology expense management is that any effort to manage and cut costs is only as good as the data and metadata categorization and terminology used to define each piece of technology being managed. The network has long been both vitally important to understand and notoriously difficult to manage on an ongoing basis because of the relative ease of ordering network circuits to support branch offices, pet projects, or quickly emerging business needs associated with new products or services.

In this context, Calero-MDSL’s interest in MetaPort is clear. The ability to quickly gain a full enterprise inventory of network circuits is quite valuable for setting up cost-effective and performance-enhanced software-defined network environments, providing an enterprise environment that allows every employee and project to be sufficiently trunked with data, and to support an analytical view of the business based on the existing data backbone that defines organizational access to collaboration and information.

From an analytics perspective, the MetaPort acquisition is also important because the basis of good business intelligence, analytics, and machine learning is high-quality data that is well documented and updated in real-time. This level of data quality has often been missing in the technology expense management world, where inventories are often only updated when a change is provided on the invoice or when an audit of invoices and service orders is conducted.

Amalgam Insights hopes that this acquisition is part of a new trend in technology expense management that increasingly combines cost management with IT performance and business metrics. The long-term vision of technology expense management is one where technology as a fundamental core driver of business can be tracked from a financial perspective, not only to determine which costs can be reduced but also to understand which technology investments may need to be increased in order to improve business outputs and outcomes. Technology is not just a cost center in the digital era, but often a force multiplier and profit center when used correctly. As companies start to realize that a real-time, comprehensive, and business-mapped technology inventory is a strategic advantage, they will start to use this capability to forecast revenue, operational outputs, and future demand for increased or altered technology augmentation of business efforts.

Recommendations for the Technology Expense Management Community

Based on this acquisition, Amalgam Insights provides the following suggestions.

First, from a strategic perspective, Amalgam Insights urges all Technology Expense Management professionals to figure out how often their inventories are being updated and how complete these updates are in terms of updating cost centers, geographies, use cases, and other business-relevant information. It is not good enough to simply update this information once a year or upon request. Think of your inventories the same way that accountants look at their financial books as something to be monitored and verified on a monthly basis, if not more often. To do this means getting some help from technology built to discover and verify networks, device fleets, and access to cloud and software services. Find out how to accelerate inventory updates for the areas where you are responsible for expense management.

Second, Calero-MDSL customers should work with their Calero-MDSL account teams to get access to MetaPort as soon as possible. Getting automated updates to network hardware and services inventories is a key component to supporting a more connected business. This visibility is especially important for companies that are invested in the Internet of Things, edge computing, or distributed workers that use and share significant amounts of data. This is an area where customers should push Calero-MDSL both to make the capability available and to integrate with Calero-MDSL’s analytics, cost management, and inventory capabilities. Over time, this capability can also be mapped with network performance solutions and business performance maps to determine areas that may need more or less technology support over time.

Third, consider how to use technology inventories, tracked changes, and utilization to provide guidance to business environments. For instance, how does bandwidth support differ for sales-oriented locations compared to research-oriented locations? Are contact center locations ready to support a video-centric, data-centric, or augmented reality approach for high-touch service environments? Have specific areas required more frequent changes or updates because their performance is more variable or because they are having trouble forecasting their demand? Technology is part of the business and needs to be treated as such. Taking this approach is both an opportunity to make technology expense data more respected in the business and to be more involved in the strategic efforts of the business.

Overall, Amalgam Insights is bullish on this acquisition as it represents an opportunity for a major Technology Expense Management vendor to push the market forward in improving the quality, frequency, and variety of data being collected for network inventories. This change can potentially feed a variety of efforts to bring technology discussions and business imperatives closer together. As Calero-MDSL continues to integrate MetaPort into the core technology expense platform and starts to create products around MetaPort’s capabilities, Amalgam Insights expects that new opportunities will come up for technology expense that are more relevant to the CIO, CTO, and enterprise architect roles that are responsible for the strategic acquisition and deployment of technology.