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February 25: From BI to AI (Aporia, cnvrg.io, Decodable, Equalum, Grata, Hasura, Mage, nRoad, Redpanda, SeMI Technologies, thatDot)

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

Funding

Aporia Raises $25 Million to Grow its Machine Learning Observability Platform

On February 22, Aporia, a machine learning observability platform, announced that it had raised $25M in a Series A funding round. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures, and new investors Samsung NEXT and Tal Ventures. The funding will go towards hiring and global expansion.

Decodable Raises $20M Series A Funding Round For Its Realtime Data Platform

Decodable, a realtime data engineering platform, raised a $20M A round this week. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock led the funding round, with additional participation from individual investors including former US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, DataDog CEO Olivier Pomel, Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, and Redis CRO and President Jason Forget. Decodable also debuted the Decodable Real-Time Data Platform, which supports functions like event-driven micro services, data mesh deployment, realtime data integration and ML/AI pipelines, and data governance and regulatory compliance.

Grata Closes $25 Million A Round For Its Data Intelligence Engine

Grata, a data intelligence engine, announced February 22 that it had raised $25M in a Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures. Existing investors Accomplice, Bling, and Touchdown Ventures also participated, along with new investors Altai Ventures, Eigen Ventures, and Teamworthy Ventures. The funding will go towards further product development. Grata uses proprietary machine learning and natural language processing models to process unstructured data from websites into insights on private companies, made available in a search-based interface.

GraphQL Engine Provider Hasura Announces $100M in Series C Funding

Hasura, a GraphQL engine provider, has raised a $100M Series C funding round. Greenoaks led the round, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures. Hasura will use the funding for R+D and global expansion of their go-to-market strategy.

Streaming Data Platform Redpanda Raises $50M Series B

Redpanda, a data streaming platform, announced February 23 that they had raised a $50M Series B Funding Round led by GV. Haystack VC also participated, as did Lightspeed Venture Partners (busy week for Lightspeed, also participating in the Hasura C round!). The funding will go towards hiring for their engineering and go-to-market teams.

SeMI Technologies Raises $16M Series A Round For AI-Based Search Database

SeMI Technologies, providers of open source vector search engine Weaviate, announced a $16M Series A funding round February 22. Cortical Ventures and New Enterprise Associates co-led the round. The funding will go towards hiring, community development, and product improvement including increasing potential use cases and creating and improving the ML models Weaviate is based on.

Launches and Updates

cnvrg.io Announces AI Blueprints, Customizable ML Pipelines

On February 22, Cnvrg.io, an AI/ML platform provider, debuted cnvrg.io AI Blueprints. AI Blueprints is a curated open-source library of machine learning model APIs and customizable pipelines, allowing companies to quickly piece together models to analyze their data. Availability of cnvrg.io AI Blueprints is planned for the first half of 2022.

Equalum Releases v3.0 of their Continuous Data Integration Platform 3.0

Equalum released version 3.0 of their “continuous” data integration platform this week. New features include expanded support for cloud targets across AWS, Azure, and GCP; enhanced binary parsers for Oracle logs and SQL replication; improvements to replication groups to allow for extensive data migrations and cross-platform data warehousing; and no-code data integration capabilities for streaming ETL and ELT data, as well as batch ETL and change data capture.

Mage Debuts Low Code AI Ranking Model Tool for Product Developers

On February 24, Mage announced the general availability of its low code AI tool. Mage is targeted towards product developers needing to build AI ranking models to increase user engagement and retention.

nRoad Launches Unstructured Data Processing Platform Convus

nRoad, an NLP startup, introduced its Convus platform February 23. Convus provides machine learning models for financial services to extract insights from unstructured data. This allows FinTech businesses to avoid manual data extraction and entry while incorporating information in documents into business processes.

thatDot Releases Complex Event Processing Engine Quine Streaming Graph

thatDot, complex event processing software providers, debuted Quine Streaming Graph, an open source event processing engine based on streaming graph data. Developers can use Quine to quickly build complex event processing workflows to apply to streaming graph data using “recipes.” Recipes currently available include blockchain realtime tag propagation, CDN cache efficiency analysis, and Apache server log observability.

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Russia Invades Ukraine: 5 Considerations for the IT Community

As anyone who has checked the news today is aware, Russia invaded Ukraine early this morning as the United Nations was holding an emergency meeting seeking to persuade Russia not to invade. The initial results have included stunning pictures of Russian military vehicles and missiles entering Ukraine, the Moscow Stock Exchange falling over 30% in one day, and new international sanctions.

Although the subtleties of geopolitical complexity, NATO, the historical Russian Empire, Ukranian governmental changes, European oil and gas supplies, and nuclear arms are far far far beyond the scope of what we cover at Amalgam Insights, we absolutely hope for a quick and peaceful end to this attack.

In the meantime, we live in a global economy and there are specific aspects of this invasion that specifically affects the IT world.

First, plan for potential delays in software development. Ukraine had established itself as an important nearshore and offshore application development source with over 200,000 skilled developers. Many top software companies and enterprises employ developers from Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. With this invasion, developers are either moving west to Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lutsk or into Poland or being conscripted into defense forces. From a practical perspective, this is going to delay development of new versions and features. Check up with your key vendors to see whether there are expected delays based on this issue. Obviously, there is no feature more important than these lives; this is just about being able to manage expectations and to keep in touch with the people who are building the tools you use at work.

Second, check up on cybersecurity. With current sanctions and financial access locked down, Russia will be looking for liquid funds by any ways necessary. This includes ransomware, accessing computing for cryptomining, and using remote computing to mask trails to access other digital assets. This is a good time to update your patches and passwords and to be diligent on social engineering schemes designed to get employees to click through or give away passwords on the phone. Clicking unknown links is always bad, but this is an especially good time to be paranoid about updates even from trusted vendors and suppliers.

Third, keep your cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) safe. Crypto has been an enabler for black market activity because of its nature as a relatively liquid asset that is relatively easy to transfer. Make sure that any digital assets you or your organization have are backed up on a well-governed store such as ClubNFT. And make sure your crypto is safe on a wallet you own.

Fourth, budget for cloud costs to increase quickly over the rest of the year as the cost of computing increase. Russia and Ukraine are the primary producers and purifiers of the noble gas neon, which is used to etch semiconductors from 180 to 1X nm nodes, which make up roughly 75% of the total market. Ukraine provides 90% of the world’s supply of purified neon, with Iceblick alone estimated to provide over 60% of the world’s neon. As strategic Ukrainian targets are attacked, the supply of neon will decrease in the short term making chip prices go up. Even if Russia manages to create its own purification capacity, sanctions will make neon extremely expensive. As an example, when Ukraine was initially invaded in 2014, neon prices went up 6x.

Fifth, expect a flood of disinformation across all areas. Modern war is conducted not only as a military exercise, but as a financial, digital, informational, and political exercise. There are aspects of information that Putin and the Russian government are interested in controlling for their own specific reasons that can lead to non-factual announcements. This is going to be, in technical terms, “a pain in the ass” to manage as fact checking becomes more important. This may include disinformation around cybersecurity, healthcare, politics, or any other number of areas with the goal of providing distractions. As a key ally of Ukraine and a core member of NATO, the United States will likely be a target of the social rumor mill in a variety of ways. Ironically, I’ll use a Russian proverb for this recommendation: Доверяй, но проверяй (Doveryay, no proveryay – Trust, but verify).

And, obviously, make sure that your organization is not dependent on Russian computing and financial resources as the risk that those resources will be cut off from the rest of the world is unfortunately real as the escalation of cyber and financial conflict increases.

This invasion is a sad and worrisome time for the world. In our roles as technologists and IT shepherds, there is only so much we can do. But it is up to us to make sure that the assets and services that we manage are kept safe and in control in challenging times. Stay safe and keep your organization as safe as possible.

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February 18: From BI to AI (Arcion, Atakama, BigID, Dataiku, H20.ai, HPE, Kyligence, Informatica, Striim, Sway AI)

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

Funding and Financial

Arcion, Formerly Blitzz, Secures $13M Series A To Transform Data Infrastructure

Arcion, a data mobility platform, secured a series A funding round of $13M. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Databricks. Bessemer VP Sakib Dadi joined the board of directors as part of the process. The funding is likely to go towards building both the product and team. Arcion also brought on board CEO Gary Hagmueller from an EIR position at Redpoint Ventures. Prior to that, Hagmueller was the CEO at Dgraph Labs, the President and CEO at Clara Analytics, and spent most of a decade at Ayasdi as first CFO, then as COO.

Amalgam’s Insight: Cloud data pipelines continue to be both an important enabler for conducting analytics at scale and a capability that is still difficult to operationalize and automate. This funding round is part of a continuing wave of investment focused on improving access to large stores of data. In addition, Hagmueller’s experience in productizing previously unmanageable data challenges is a noted strength that will prove to be useful for Arcion.

Informatica Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2021 Financial Results

Enterprise cloud data management company Informatica reported its Q4 and 2021 financial results this week. While revenue was up, particularly subscription revenue – a known target as they move customers to the cloud and onto subscription plans – Informatica missed on earnings, and had a rough ride in the stock market this week.

Amalgam’s Insight: Tech vendors often go private as they are converting to the cloud exactly because public markets overreact to very tactical margin changes and struggle to value long-term business changes correctly. This happens time and time again where financial markets misread vendors, then suddenly wake up to see the results when a vendor beats expectations. There is no real fundamental difference between Informatica currently at $20 per share vs. when it was at $38 per share two months ago other than external geopolitical and economic forces as well as that Informatica is farther along in its progression towards migrating clients towards the cloud. At this point, Informatica is currently valued similarly to Fivetran which is an interesting comparison when one looks at the revenue of these two companies.

Product Launches and Enhancements

H2O.ai Democratizes Deep Learning with H2O Hydrogen Torch

H2O.ai, an AI cloud company, debuted H2O Hydrogen Torch, a no-code deep learning training engine. Hydrogen Torch is focused on making image, video, and natural language processing models with deep learning via a code-free interface, dealing with unstructured data that companies have not generally been able to analyze sufficiently to derive value from.

Amalgam’s Insight: Enterprises have the ability to analyze images and videos to support a wide variety of customer service, logistics, sales, and marketing use cases but still struggle to build models off these quirky and unstructured data sources that are often larger than the entirety of the structured data that is currently being managed. H2O Hydrogen Torch should prove to be a valuable solution for companies seeking to translate media libraries into business value.

Kyligence’s Intelligent Data Cloud Platform Now Available on Google Cloud

Kyligence, a data services and management platform provider, announced that its data cloud platform Kyligence Cloud was now available in beta on Google Cloud. Kyligence Cloud is a big data OLAP solution, providing high-performance analytic capability in a cloud-native environment while allowing analysts and business users to connect to it with familiar tools.

Amalgam’s Insight: Moving structured and performant data into the cloud continues to be important, but this announcement also demonstrates the continued progression of Google Cloud as a location for analytic data to reside. Google continues to gain access to high performance analytic data as both startups and enterprises see it as a cost-effective and user-interface friendly solution for data.

Sway AI Announces Its No-Code Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform

On February 15, Sway AI announced its no-code AI platform, targeted at both technical and business users. Sway AI’s focus is on allowing enterprises to build and deploy AI without needing to invest heavily in expensive hiring or complex toolkits upfront.

Amalgam’s Insight: This announcement hits many of the buzzwords businesses are hearing for model building: AI, no-code, business-friendly, rapid deployment. But beyond this hype, the critical challenge here is in helping the people who understand business data best to create relevant models.

Partnerships

Striim and Hewlett Packard Enterprise partner to offer high performance, mission-critical solutions with real-time analytics

Striim, a real-time data integration platform, announced a partnership with HPE in the form of Striim for HPE NonStop, a high-performance distributed data transaction solution that allows organizations to analyze streaming data for business insights.

Amalgam’s Insight: Streaming data is reaching mainstream visibility as the need for immediate analysis continues to grow. HPE has another tool to help sell its high-performance hardware while Striim gains another channel with a sales team with a strong solutions selling background.

BigID + Atakama: Data-Centric File Encryption | BigID

BigID, a data intelligence platform, announced a partnership with Atakama, an encryption company. From this partnership, Atakama is building a solution on the BigID platform that will read BigID’s data labeling and tagging, and automatically encrypt files based on the sensitivity of the data contained within.

Amalgam’s Insight: Data identity and trust are massive themes driving new markets associated with blockchain, NFT’s, and the general Web3 experience. But practical aspects of data trust and governance are still formidable challenges for the enterprise, including metadata management and data governance. This partnership helps bring more order to the chaos of existing Big Data environments.

Hiring

Dataiku Announces Edward Bush as Chief Operating Officer to Support Rapid Growth and Bolster Employee Experience

On February 16, Dataiku announced the elevation of Edward Bush as Chief Operating Officer. Bush joined Dataiku in 2017 as the VP of Finance. Prior to Dataiku, Bush was the VP of Finance and Business Operations at VTS.

Amalgam’s Insight: This promotion occurs soon after Dataiku upgraded its board with former Tableau CMO Elissa Fink and former Mimecast CFO Peter Campbell as well as a $400 million funding round. This serves as a strong vote of confidence in Bush to support the employee culture as Dataiku pushes for its next order-of-magnitude growth push.

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February 11: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Census, DvSum, Qwak, ScaleUp:AI, Scandit, Starburst, Superconductive, Trifacta, Wallaroo, ZL Tech)

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

Acquisitions

Alteryx Closes Acquisition of Trifacta | Alteryx

On February 7, Alteryx announced that it had closed its acquisition of Trifacta, as noted in the January 7 From BI to AI. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park provided recommendations and insights on Alteryx’ acquisition of Trifacta earlier this week.

Funding

Starburst Raises $250 Million to Lead the Market Shift to Faster Analytics on Decentralized Data | Starburst

Starburst, a data mesh analytics company, announced at its Datanova conference this week that it had raised a $250M Series D funding round. Alkeon Capital led the round, with participation from new investors Altimeter and B Capital Group as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

Amalgam’s Insight: One of the top challenges of this decade is in accelerating time-to-value on scattered and distributed data. The race to both develop this market and achieve market leadership is occurring quickly and Starburst’s focus on distributed query provides a flexible approach to consider.

Scandit, the Smart Data Capture Leader, Announces $150m Series D Investment Led by Warburg Pincus – Scandit

Scandit, a computer vision-based edge data capture company, announced on February 9 that it had completed a Series D funding round of $150M. Warburg Pincus led the round, with additional participation from existing investors Atomico, Forestay Capital, G2VP, GV, Kreos, NGP Capital, Schneider Electric, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV and Swisscom Ventures. The funding will go towards continuing Scandit’s global expansion, with a particular focus on APAC, specifically Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

Amalgam’s Insight: Visual data such as barcodes, QR codes, and text continue to provide valuable capabilities in supporting the On-Demand economy. The ability to translate visual data into workflows, documentation, and transactions based on a single scan is still maturing and Scandit’s new round of funding will allow it to support e-commerce, support, and logistics challenges in the APAC region.

$60m to make operational analytics a reality | Census

Census, a business-user targeted data layer, has raised $60M in a Series B round led by Tiger. Previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and new investor Insight Partners also participated in the round. The funding will go towards expanding the product, including adding more data connectors to their library, adding new CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) features, and building governance into their platform via a business-wide knowledge graph.

Amalgam’s Insight: Although $60 million is not a huge amount for the likes of Tiger Global, A16z, Sequoia, and Insight Partners, it is notable that four of the biggest venture capital firms with a data background saw the value of Census to enable business knowledge graphs. The holy grail of the business graph has been a goal for over a decade since the days that “Social Business” was still a buzzword. However, it has been difficult in practice to translate the vision of a fully interconnected data graph within the business into a reality. If this round goes as planned, don’t be surprised to see Census become a unicorn startup in the next couple of years.

Superconductive Raises $40M in Series B Funding to Revolutionize the Speed and Integrity of Data Collaboration

Superconductive, the provider of open source data quality tool Great Expectations, has raised a $40M Series B round. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from CRV, Index, and Root Ventures. The funds will be used for R+D towards releasing their first commercial product, as well as growing the organization through hiring.

Amalgam’s Insight: One of the new key phrases in today’s world of machine learning is that analytic and machine learning models are only as good as the data they are based on. Superconductive seeks to create a more collaborative experience to create better data pipelines so that all relevant data experts and developers can do their part to keep data clean.

Machine Learning Innovator Wallaroo Wins Backing from Microsoft’s M12 in $25M Series A Round | Business Wire

Wallaroo, a machine learning operationalization company, has closed a $25M Series A round of funding. M12, Microsoft’s venture arm, led the round, along with participation from existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Eniac Ventures, and Greycroft, as well as new investors NSS Advisors and Ridgeline Partners. Wallaroo will use the funds to both improve their existing product and release a free version, as well as grow sales and marketing.

Amalgam’s Insight: Wallaroo seeks to reduce the cost of operationalizing machine learning. This has obvious repercussions for Microsoft, which is in a race with Amazon and Google to put as many demanding workloads onto its cloud as soon as possible. Wallaroo’s claims of reducing time to production by over 90% should prove to be valuable in getting more models into production.

Qwak looks to automate MLOps processes | VentureBeat

MLOps company Qwak raised $15M in a Series A round, joining a number of companies eager to help companies operationalize their machine learning models. New investors include Leaders Fund and StageOne Ventures, while previous investor Amiti Ventures and individual investors also participated. The funds will go towards product development, as well as expanding sales and marketing.

Amalgam’s Insight: The pain point of animal-named companies getting models into production is a continuing theme those week. Qwak seeks to be a holistic machine learning engineering solution with its goal of being a destination for data scientists to build, test, and deploy models within a single platform and its claims of being able to get a model from script to production in less than five minutes.

Product Launches and Updates

Starburst Unveils New Data Product Functionality to Accelerate Data Mesh Journey | Starburst

Starburst also announced new capabilities for its Starburst Enterprise product at Datanova. New and improved features include access control to secure data products for consistent governance, the ability for data engineers and producers to define relevant metadata in said data products, and rating and sharing of said data products to make data accessible as quickly as possible.

Amalgam’s Insight: The battle for context continues to be a massive challenge and Starburst’s additions of data governance and metadata definitions align to the need for business users to trust the data that they are providing to their customers.

ZL Tech Introduces New Solution to Transform Out-of-Sight Corporate Knowledge to Business Insight – ZL Tech

On February 8, ZL Tech announced improvements to ZL People Analytics, its SaaS solution for unstructured information management. Instead of being confined to a “sandboxed” structured database, ZL People Analytics includes unstructured data such email, documents, and company chat in its purview while allowing that data to remain in-place to address governance and regulatory concerns, making the data search process more efficient.

Amalgam’s Insight: Text analytics can be both cumbersome to support and provide governance nightmares as GDPR, CCPA, and other personal information management laws have become standard practice. By supporting analytics on top of semi-structured and unstructured data, this offering helps companies to get more information while keeping data centralized and in-location.

DvSum Launches its Next Generation Data Catalog | Business Wire

On February 7, DvSum debuted its augmented data catalog solution. Key features include automatic cataloging, classification, and curation of data, as well as recommending new entities and business terms for an organization’s business glossary. There is a free tier available; premium plans based on the number of data sources and users start at $1k/month.

Amalgam’s Insight: The data catalog has become an important part of the data manager’s toolkit in defining the business view of the world. However, data curation is still a relatively expensive endeavor and DvSum is seeking to provide context while maintaining a cost-efficient offering.

Events

April 6-7, 2022: ScaleUp AI

On April 6 and 7, Insight Partners will host ScaleUp:AI, an AI industry conference, in New York and virtually. Confirmed speakers include Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi; Allie K. Miller, Global Head of Machine Learning Business Development, Startups, and Venture Capital at AWS; Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng; Humana Chief Digital Health and Analytics Officer Heather Carroll Cox; Fiddler AI CEO Krishna Gabe; and SentinelOne CEO and cofounder Tomer Weingarten. The in-person event is sold out, but virtual passes are still available; register for the event at ScaleUp:AI.

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Alteryx Acquires Trifacta: Considerations for DataOps, MLOps, & the Analytic Community

On February 7, 2022, Alteryx completed its acquisition of Trifacta, a data engineering company known for its promotion of “data wrangling” and in bringing to the forefront the challenge of cleansing data in making Big Data useful and supporting machine learning. Alteryx announced its intention to acquire on January 6th for $400 million with an additional $75 million dedicated to an employee retention pool.

Trifacta was founded in 2012 by Stanford Ph.D Sean Kandel, then-Stanford professor Jeffrey Heer, and Berkeley Professor Joe Hellerstein as a data preparation solution at a time when Big Data started to become a common enterprise technology. The company was formed based on Wrangler, a visualization of data transforms that tackled a fundamental problem of reducing the estimated 50-80% of worktime that data analysts and data scientists spent preparing data for analytical use.

Over the past decade, Trifacta raised $224 million with its last round being a $100 million round raised in September 2019. Trifacta quickly established itself as a top solution for data professionals seeking to cleanse data. In a report I wrote in 2015, one of my recommendations was “Consider Trifacta as a general data cleansing and transformation solution. Trifacta is best known for supporting both Hadoop and Big Data environments, including support for JSON, Avro, ORC, and Parquet.” (MarketShare Selects a Data Transformation Platform to Enhance Analyst Productivity, Blue Hill Research, February 2015)

Over the next seven years, Trifacta continued to advance as a data preparation and data engineering solution as it evolved to support major cloud platforms. During this time, three key trends emerged in the data preparation space starting in 2018.

First, data preparation companies focused on the major cloud platforms starting with Amazon Web Services, then Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. This focus reflected the gravity of net-new analytic and AI data shifting from on-premises resources into the cloud and was a significant portion of Trifacta’s product development efforts over the past few years.

Second, data preparation firms started to be acquired by larger analytic and machine learning providers, such as Altair’s 2018 acquisition of Datawatch and DataRobot’s 2019 acquisition of Paxata. Trifacta was the last remaining market leading data preparation company left on the market for acquisition after having developed the data preparation and wrangling market.

Third, the task of data preparation evolved into a new role of data engineering as enterprises grew to understand that the structure, quality, and relationships of data had to be well defined to get the insights and directional guidance that Big Data had been presumed to hold. As this role became more established, data preparation solutions had to shift towards workflows defined by DataOps and data engineering best practices. It was no longer enough for data cleansing and preparation to be done, but for them to be part of governed process workflows and automation within a larger analytic ecosystem.

All this is to provide guidance on what to expect as Trifacta now joins Alteryx. Although Trifacta and Alteryx are both often grouped as “data preparation” solutions, their roles in data engineering are significantly different enough that I rarely see situations where both solutions are equally suited for a specific use case. Trifacta excels as a visual tool to support data preparation and transformation on the top cloud platforms while Alteryx has long been known for its support of low-code and no-code analytic workflows that help automate complex analytic transformations of data. Alteryx has developed leading products across process automation, the analytic blending in Designer, location-based analytics in Location, as well as machine learning support and Alteryx Server to support analytics at scale.

Although Alteryx provides data cleansing capabilities, its interface does not provide the same level of immediate visual feedback at scale that Trifacta provides, which is why organizations often use both Trifacta and Alteryx. With this acquisition, Trifacta can be used by technical audiences to identify, prepare, and cleanse data and develop highly trusted data sources so that line-of-business data analysts can spend less time finding data and more time providing guidance to the business at large.

Recommendations and Insights for the Data Community

Alteryx clients that consider using Trifacta should be aware that this will likely result in an increased number of analytically accessible data sources. More always sounds better, but this also means that from a practical perspective, your organization may require a short-term reassessment of the data sources, connections, and metrics that are being used for business analysis based on this new data preparation and engineering capability. In addition, this merger can be used as an opportunity to bring data engineering and data analyst communities closer together as they coordinate responsibilities for data cleansing and data source curation. Trifacta provides some additional scalability in this regard that can be leveraged by organizations that optimize their data preparation capabilities.

This acquisition will also accelerate Alteryx’s move to the cloud, as Trifacta provides both an entry point for accessing a variety of cloud data sources and a team of developers, engineers, and product managers with deep knowledge of the major cloud data platforms. Given that Trifacta was purchased for roughly 10% of Alteryx’ market capitalization, the value of moving to the cloud more quickly could potentially justify this acquisition all on its own as an acquihire.

Look at DataOps, analytic workflows, and MLOps as part of a continuum of data usage rather than a set of silos. Trifacta has its 12,000 customers with a mean average of four seats per customer focused on data preparation and engineering. With this acquisition, the Trifacta and Alteryx teams can work together more closely in aligning those four data engineers to the ~30 analytic users that Alteryx averages for each of its 7,000+ customers. The net result is an opportunity to bring DataOps, RPA, analytic workflows, and MLOps together into an integrated environment rather than the current set of silos that often prevent companies from understanding how data changes can affect analytic results.

It has been a pleasure seeing Trifacta become one of the few startups that successfully defines an emerging market of data prep and to coin a term “data wrangling” that was successful enough that it gained market acceptance both with users and with competitors. Many firms try to do this with little success, but Trifacta’s efforts represent the notable exception where its efforts will outlive its time as a standalone company. Trifacta leaves a legacy of establishing the importance of data quality, preparation, and transformation in the enterprise data environment in a world where raw data is imperfect, but necessary to support business guidance. And as Trifacta joins Alteryx, this combined ability to support data from its raw starting point to machine learning models and outputs across a hybrid cloud will continue to be a strong starting point for organizations seeking to provide employees with more control and choice over their analytic inputs and outputs.

If you are currently evaluating Alteryx or Trifacta and need additional guidance, please feel free to contact us at research@amalgaminsights.com to discuss your current selection process and how you are estimating the potential business value of your purchase.

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Upcoming Amalgam Insights Report Alert: “Control Your Cloud”

The Big Takeaway: Cloud computing spending has reached new heights. Organizations need guidance to avoid wasting money. The “Control Your Cloud” SmartList will provide guidance for enterprises struggling to manage cloud costs.

Amalgam Insights forecasts that global spending on public cloud computing — including infrastructure and software — will total more than $350 billion in 2022. Driven by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent digital transformation projects, organizations will continue to invest in the cloud, to the tune of more than 20% this year. And the greater the investment made in cloud, the more room for waste. 

Savvy stakeholders, especially those who already pay attention to expenses in other technology categories (mobility, telecom, Software as a Service), know that uncontrolled cloud computing will significantly reduce any return on investment. Just as with wireless or networking or other strategic IT spend categories, department heads must come together to craft a strategic approach to overseeing cloud computing deployments and expenses. The stakes are too high.

Consider the wider perspective: Between 2020 and 2021, spending on public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) soared 37%. In numbers, that totals a $60 billion increase. 

Kelly Teal, Senior Research Analyst, Amalgam Insights

COVID-19, of course, served as the impetus for much of that growth. Anecdotally, cloud computing vendors have reported that the demand they expected to serve around 2030 hit a decade earlier because of the pandemic. As governments worldwide mandated lockdowns, organizations had to rush to support work-from-home setups for employees. Cloud computing delivered many of the capabilities businesses needed; IT teams scrambled, often cobbling together solutions that met staff needs but were not cost-effective. Leaders spent much of 2021 trying to rectify those issues, yet more cleanup remains to be done. Contractual obligations, employee preferences, and heavy lifting associated with a technology shift all can slow the process. 

At the same time, organizations face new challenges in 2022. Inflation rose by 7% by the end of 2021, just in the United States, according to the Consumer Price Index. Everyone is paying more for the same products and services, and wages are not keeping pace. Revenue may not make up for the gap, either. This leaves executives and line-of-business leaders more aware of spending than perhaps ever. Cloud computing represents a major area ripe for attention. 

Cloud computing also accelerates the ability to bring new ideas to market and execute on business opportunities. At a time when the attention and relationship economies require deeper and more data-driven understanding of customers, cloud computing allows access to the analytics, machine learning, and relevant connections that achieve that. Organizations need to translate new ideas into fully-fledged business units without investing millions of dollars in upfront cost on computing assets.

However, IT should not act alone when it comes to deciding how to manage cloud computing expenses just for the sake of getting the job done in a convenient way. Cloud computing, just like its wireless and telecom counterparts, impacts the entire organization. Therefore, the finance, IT, revenue, security, and governance departments all must be involved, on some level, in overseeing cloud computing investments. For example, executives in charge of budgeting need to understand cloud computing costs; IT must select and manage platforms and assign and monitor users and consumption; software development and IT architects need to tag and track resources as cloud services are spun up and down; and data experts have to ensure that the organization’s information within the various cloud resources stays in line with laws such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

Cloud computing is complicated. Executives across the organization need a deeper understanding of the intricacies so they can work together to spend wisely while ensuring no critical aspect goes overlooked. Amalgam Insights is stepping in to guide organizations through these considerations with our upcoming Vendor SmartList, “Control Your Cloud: Why Organizations Need Cloud Cost Management Capabilities in 2022.” 

Executives seeking to control cloud expenses need to read this report because it will provide expert analysis on the key cloud cost containment challenges of 2022 and the differentiated approaches to reduce and optimize cloud costs. The report also will features vendor profiles that cut through the hype and show why each vendor is different in a sector where marketing messages all seem to focus on the same starting points of reducing cost, providing financial visibility, and improving cross-departmental collaboration. This last issue emphasizes an important point: The profiles do not rank the providers that brief with Amalgam Insights. Rather, Amalgam Insights explores what makes each vendor different and offers guidance on why that vendor is currently chosen in a crowded marketplace. This level of detail gives organizations the knowledge to pinpoint which vendor(s) might best meet their needs for cloud computing cost management. 

The following stakeholders all will need to read and act on the report: Chief Technology Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, “Shadow IT” managers in sales and marketing, DevOps Directors and Managers, IT Architects, Vice President/Director/Manager of IT Operations, Product Managers, IT Sourcing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers, IT Service Providers and Resellers. Each of these roles is crucial to achieving cloud computing success throughout the organization.

Control Your Cloud: Why Organizations Need Cloud Cost Management Capabilities in 2022” will publish in the second quarter of 2022. 

Posted on

February 4: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Citrix, DataRobot, Informatica, Microsoft Azure, Onehouse, Pecan, Teradata, TIBCO, Yellowfin)

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

Funding

Our Opportunity to Build Something Even Bigger: Series C Funding Announcement – Pecan AI

On February 3, Pecan, a low-code predictive analytics platform, raised $66M in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the round, with new investor GV also participating, as well as existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, GGV Capital, Mindset Ventures, S-Capital, and Vintage Investment Partners. The funding will be used to accelerate R+D and increase headcount.

Amalgam’s Insight: Pecan epitomizes the idea of helping companies move from BI to AI with its capability to help SQL-savvy data analysts to conduct data science. As a bridge technology between BI and AI, Pecan’s approach to providing predictive models for general use is a capability enterprises will need to pursue (whether with Pecan or another vendor) to empower their data analysts for the emerging era of machine learning that has been in progress for the last half-decade.

Onehouse Supercharges Data Lakes for AI and Machine Learning With $8 Million in Seed Funding From Greylock and Addition

On February 2, Onehouse, a lakehouse service built atop Apache Hudi to make data lakes faster, cheaper, and easier to access, emerged from stealth with $8M in seed funding. Investment firms Greylock and Addition co-led the funding round; the money will be used for R+D. Onehouse is fully managed and cloud-native, accelerating the speed at which data lakes can be set up. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park is quoted in the press release announcing the launch of Onehouse.

Amalgam’s Insight: The lakehouse, an amalgamation of data lake and data warehouse, is an important construct for data architects seeking to unlock the value of the “Big Data” they have collected over the past decade. The overwhelming volume and variety of enterprise data makes a traditional data warehouse approach challenging to support for all relevant data. However, lakehouses are challenging to support and Onehouse’s approach of providing a managed service for lakehouses will be valuable for companies seeking to take this approach but lacking the personnel to access the analytic value of semi-structured data.

Acquisitions

Idera, Inc. Acquires Yellowfin International Pty Ltd

On January 28, Idera announced that they had acquired Yellowfin International, an embedded data analytics and BI platform. Yellowfin will join Idera’s Developer Tools business, expanding the capabilities of that suite in a new direction, enhancing the ability of Idera to cross-sell BI and analytics functionality to existing and new customers.

Amalgam’s Insight: Yellowfin has been a long-time favorite of Amalgam Insights with its market-leading visualization and user-focused data exploration capabilities combined with its extreme scalability. In joining Idera, Yellowfin now joins a suite of solutions that will enhance Yellowfin’s embedded business intelligence capabilities and provide developers with tools for more robust and user-friendly applications.

Teradata Announces Global Partnership with Microsoft

On February 2, Teradata announced a global partnership with Microsoft where it would more fully integrate the Teradata Vantage platform with Microsoft Azure. Though Teradata is already significantly integrated with over 60 existing Azure data services, this announcement signals a deepening of the existing relationship between the two companies.


Amalgam’s Insight: This partnership shows Microsoft Azure’s continued partnership with analytic and data companies that compete with other areas of Microsoft. For Teradata, this partnership helps current clients to migrate to an enterprise cloud that is developer-friendly while Microsoft gains more data as it competes against Amazon in the cloud infrastructure market.

Citrix to be Acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital for $16.5 Billion | TIBCO Software

On January 31, Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation announced that they would be acquiring Citrix, a digital workspace and application delivery platform, for $16.5B. As part of the transaction, Citrix will merge with TIBCO, which is currently owned by Vista, bringing together Citrix’s secure digital workspace and app delivery capabilities with TIBCO’s data and analytics under one roof, with the goal of accelerating Citrix’s SaaS transition while creating a company that serves 98% of the Fortune 500.

Amalgam’s Insight: We will be working on a deeper exploration of this acquisition, which at first glance mirrors Idera’s acquisition of Yellowfin in creating a larger enterprise application company with a variety of capabilities across data management, security, and IT management. Given that Vista Equity Partners acquired TIBCO in 2014 for $4.3 billion, this will provide to be a busy year for TIBCO in quickly integrating Citrix and presenting this combined company for an impending acquisition or IPO.

Updates and Launches

Alteryx introduces the newest version of the Alteryx Platform (2021.4)

Alteryx launched the latest version of the Alteryx Platform, 2021.4, on February 3. Key improvements include enhanced server APIs to allow for further administrative automation; the Named Entity Recognition text mining tool which automatically extracts data from images; new connectors for Anaplan, Google Drive, Outlook 365, and Automation Anywhere; and the Data Connection Manager, which will simplify sharing data sources across an organization.

Amalgam’s Insight: Alteryx’s market leadership as an analytic workflow platform is enhanced with this combination of connectors, data sharing, and automation capabilities. This version update comes at a time when Alteryx’s next stage of growth is dependent on supporting enterprise-wide use cases for analytic insight and providing the administrative governance necessary to quickly deploy these use cases.

Informatica Announces New PoD in UK to Support Growing Demand for Data Sovereignty | Informatica

On February 3, Informatica announced a new UK Point of Delivery for its Intelligent Data Management Cloud. Brexit has complicated the understanding and enforcement of data privacy and locality requirements, especially in regulated industries.

Amalgam’s Insight: Informatica’s debuting a geographically appropriate cloud to support organizations doing business in the UK helps said orgs respect relevant data-related laws and regulations. This delivery site will continue to be a trend in the data industry where global organizations will need to increase their investment in the UK or risk losing business to better-prepared competitors.

Hiring

Alteryx Announces Leadership Changes to Accelerate Next Phase of Cloud Growth | Alteryx

On February 1, Alteryx announced several personnel changes. Paula Hansen has been promoted to President and Chief Revenue Officer, while Keith Pearce has been named as the company’s new CMO. Previously, Pearce was the SVP of Corporate Marketing for Genesys. In addition, COO Scott Davidson will step down from his role as of mid-March.

Amalgam’s Insight: We covered the hiring of Paula Hansen in our May 2021 update. This promotion made sense as Alteryx has had a President/Chief Revenue Officer in the past. Keith Pearce has a strong record of solutions and vertical marketing across his career which fits Alteryx’ need to dig further into each vertical now that it has reached a critical mass of accounts. Alteryx’ challenge is no longer name recognition, but account development and education: two areas where Pearce has excelled in his past roles.

DataRobot Hires Google’s Debanjan Saha as Chief Operating Officer – DataRobot AI Cloud

On February 2, DataRobot welcomed Debanjan Saha as their new Chief Operating Officer. Saha was previously the VP and GM of Data Analytics at Google, overseeing analytics on Google Cloud and BigQuery; before that, Saha developed and launched the Amazon Aurora relational database at AWS.

Amalgam’s Insight: Saha has a long record of managing cutting-edge cloud solutions at IBM, Amazon, and Google across virtualization, database, and data management technologies. As DataRobot has quickly grown from a machine learning automation solution to a broader MLOps and engineering platform, Saha’s managerial background will be valuable in pushing DataRobot’s development and monetization of the end-to-end needs for enterprise machine learning.