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June 11: From BI to AI: Special Snowflake Edition (Alteryx, Amazon, Dataiku, DataRobot, Domino Data Lab, Informatica, Talend, and of course, Snowflake)

This week’s “From BI to AI” update is a little different from the usual. Snowflake Summit occurred June 8-10, bringing a slew of announcements related to Snowflake’s new features, and many Snowflake partners timed their own related announcements in sync with the Summit.

Snowpark and Java UDFs

On Tuesday, June 8, Snowflake launched Snowpark, their “developer experience.” Data scientists, data engineers, and developers can build in Java or Scala within Snowpark, and then execute their workloads directly within Snowflake.

Also on the coding side, Snowflake announced support for Java UDFs (user-defined functions) within Snowflake, allowing customers to import their custom code and business logic to Snowflake. Both Snowpark and Java UDFs within Snowflake are currently in private preview, with public preview coming soon.

Snowflake also announced the Snowpark Accelerated Program, where partner vendors can access Snowflake technical experts and be provided with additional exposure to existing Snowflake customers.

Snowflake Partner Announcements

Numerous Snowflake partner vendors followed up with their own announcements on Wednesday, June 9.

Snowflake can now be used as a data source within Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. This integration allows data prep for machine learning in SageMaker to occur in Snowflake.

Alteryx announced a deeper integration of Alteryx with Snowflake. Alteryx Designer is now directly available on Snowflake; data prep, data blending, and automated analytics processing are pushed down into Snowflake for better performance and scalability. Joint Alteryx-Snowflake customers can also augment existing data sources with those available on the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Current Snowflake customers have access to a free trial of Alteryx within their Snowflake account.

Dataiku debuted their Snowflake integration with Snowpark and Java UDFs. Dataiku-Snowflake users will be able to push computation down to Snowflake, so that data prep and scoring can happen within Snowflake.

DataRobot’s new Snowflake integration also joins DataRobot with Snowpark, growing the existing DataRobot-Snowflake partnership. Data prep tasks from Zepl (a recent DataRobot acquisition) can be pushed into Snowflake for feature engineering, while providing a preconfigured environment for model development within Snowpark. DataRobot’s Java Scoring Code also pairs with Snowflake Java UDFs to enable DataRobot models to do scoring within Snowflake.

Domino Data Lab inaugurated its Snowflake partnership this week with Snowpark integration as well. Joint Domino-Snowflake customers will be able to build data pipelines within Snowpark, and execute MLOps workflows from Domino within Snowflake.

Building on its 2020 Partner of the Year status, Informatica announced tighter integrations between its Intelligent Data Management Cloud and Snowflake, offering support for Java UDFs for joint Informatica-Snowflake customers and advancing its mass-ingestion ELT capabilities. Users will be able to transform, cleanse, and govern data from a wide variety of enterprise applications automatically, en masse, on its way to ingestion in Snowflake.

Finally, Talend revealed Talend Trust Score for Snowflake. This new capability will allow joint Talend-Snowflake users to verify data quality within Snowflake, using Snowpark and Java UDFs.

(Sidenote: the acquisition of Talend by Thoma Bravo is proceeding apace; Thoma Bravo has begun the tender offer to acquire all outstanding ordinary shares and American Depository Shares of Talend.)

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

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Alation Raises $110 Million D Round to Help Businesses Better Understand Their Data

On June 3rd, Alation announced a $110 million D round led by Riverwood Capital with participation from new investors Sanabil Investments and Snowflake Ventures. Current investors Costanoa Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Icon Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Union Grove Partners also contributed to the round. With this round, Alation has raised a total of $217 million and is valued at $1.2 billion.

One of the first things that stands out with this investor list is how Alation serves as an example of “investipartnering” where business partners also become limited equity partners. With Snowflake, Salesforce, and Dell all on the cap table, Alation stands out as being a strategic partner for some of the biggest cloud players on the planet. 

Here’s why this investment makes sense in today’s data environment.
One of the biggest challenges for data in 2021 is effectively governing & defining data across a wide variety of sources. Alation has been both a pioneer and now a consistent market-leading data catalog both from a revenue and functionality perspective. 

Yet, there is still a massive greenfield opportunity to rationalize taxonomies, naming conventions, integrations, and data-centric decisioning processes within the larger enterprise data ecosystem. These data challenges were already challenging enough for analytics, where businesses have had data warehouse, master data, and data integration tech for decades. But now this data also has to be prepped for machine learning & AI, where these structures are less useful. One of the reasons that a variety of industry estimates state that data scientists spend as much as 80% of their time cleansing data is because data scientists have either eschewed traditional enterprise data structures or are simply unaware of the analytic data ecosystem that has been built in enterprises over the past several decades as they seek to tackle problems.

 In an agile, “Post-Big Data” data world, the true hub of data intelligence is either at the catalog or datalake level, depending on how data is used and organized. In today’s data world, the data warehouse is an important piece of core infrastructure for enterprise data, but is not typically agile enough to support the rapid data selection, augmentation, transformation, and analysis associated with both self-service analytics. and machine learning efforts. In this modern data context, Alation is a vital player in advancing the cause of referencing, contextualizing, and linking datasets together rapidly.

And the investment by Snowflake Ventures reflects that Snowflake knows they need more control over less structured data. Snowflake is under pressure to justify its massive valuation as a cloud data leader and now has to meet the growth expectations of being worth well over $50 billion and having had a peak valuation of over $125 billion in its brief tenure as a public company. Alation will be a vital part of Snowflake’s story in providing a more agile environment for the entirety of enterprise data as Snowflake moves closer to a variety of datalake capabilities that allow for more flexible data transfer.

I’ve covered Alation since its Series A in 2015 led by Costanoa Ventures, which has now established itself as a premier early stage investor in data-driven startups, back when I was the Chief Research Officer at Blue Hill Research. Their focus on data navigation at a time when Hadoop was seen as The Big Data Answer ended up being prescient and Alation’s value is now established with over 250 enterprise clients. 

But there is a larger opportunity. As Alation has expanded from a data catalog solution to a broader data discovery, context, governance, and collaboration solution and as the challenges of data and metadata management move downmarket, Alation’s capabilities are increasingly aligned with fundamental market needs to categorize and share data effectively.

To become a global solution, Alation needs to get into thousands of organizations, a goal that I think is now realistic with this latest round of funding that both boosts sales in the short term and sets a path to ongoing scalable growth.

Recommendation for the Data Management Community

The key takeaway for the data community is that legacy data management tools typically lack the speed and functionality necessary to identify, classify, and organize new data for new analytics, machine learning, and AI use cases. This includes everything from unstructured documents to relevant binary files to time-series, graph, and geographic data. This problem has driven both the commercial and investor interest in Alation and this problem is moving downmarket as more organizations seek to start building scalable and repeatable machine learning, data science, and analytic application development environments. Organizations that are not actively planning to improve their metadata and data collaboration efforts will find themselves fundamentally hampered in trying to make the leap from BI to AI and in keeping up with the new business world of augmented, automated, process mapped, natural language-based, and iterative feedback-driven transformation. Behind all the buzzwords, companies must first understand their existing data and contextualize their new data.

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June 4, 2021: From BI to AI featuring Alation, Cazena, Cloudera, Datacoral, Dataiku, Interative, and Stemma

This week’s roundup From BI to AI features Alation, Cazena, Cloudera, Datacoral, Dataiku, Interative, and Stemma. If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Acquisitions

Cloudera Acquires Datacoral and Cazena, is Acquired by Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice and KKR for $5.3 Billion

On June 1, Cloudera announced that it had agreed to be acquired by investment companies Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice, and KKR for a $5.3B sum, transitioning to a private company. Financial results for Q12021 were released at the same time, with subscription revenue up 7% year over year.

Cloudera also acquired two SaaS companies in separate transactions. Datacoral enables data transformations and data integration, while Cazena implements quick cloud data lakes. Both companies provide fully managed services that facilitate data preparation for self-service analytics.

Funding

Alation Announces $110 Million Series D to Accelerate Growth

On Thursday, June 3, Alation, an enterprise data intelligence platform announced that it had raised a $110M Series D funding round. Riverwood Capital led this round of funding. Other participants also included existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Icon Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Union Grove Partners, along with new investments from Sanabil Investments and Snowflake Ventures. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park wrote about this example of “investipartnering,” and provides recommendations for the data management community.

Stemma Launches, Reports Seed Funding of $4.8 Million

On Thursday, June 3, Stemma announced that it had raised $4.8M in seed funding, led by Sequoia, and subsequently officially launched their data catalog product. Built atop the open-source data catalog Amundsen, Stemma provides enterprise-scale management capabilities and an intelligence layer based on relevant context.

MLOps Company Iterative Raises $20 Million Series A Funding Led by 468 Capital

Iterative.ai, an MLOps platform, announced Wednesday, June 2 that it had raised a $20M Series A round. 468 Capital and Florian Leibert led the round, which also included prior investors True Ventures and Afore Capital. Iterative.ai also debuted its first commercial product, DVC Studio, a visual front-end on its open source projects DVC (Data Version Control) and CML (Continuous Machine Learning) intended to enhance collaboration above and beyond data scientists’ usual Git methods.

Product Launches and Updates

Dataiku Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

On June 1, Dataiku announced availability through the Azure Marketplace. Azure customers can now purchase Dataiku with their existing Azure cloud budget and relationship, taking advantage of integrated access to Azure’s cloud storage and compute resources for their data science workflows.

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Market Alert – Zylo Delivers on a Platform for SaaS-Centric Business Management

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Finance and Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Human Resources Officers, Procurement Directors, Software Asset 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: SaaS management requires an integrated set of applications to coordinate the business activites driven by SaaS costs, inventory, and usage. With this RESTful API combined with Zylo’s existing application, SaaS optimization capabilities, and integrations, Zylo delivers not only a strong toolkit for companies to support SaaS management, but a platform for businesses to gain a SaaS-centric view of business activities, projects, and goals.

Top Takeaway: With the Zylo API in place, organizations now have a starting point to gain a SaaS-centric view of the business that maps SaaS to the people, processes, projects, technology, and financial drivers of the business.

About the Zylo API

On May 26, 2021, Zylo, a SaaS (Software as a Service) management company, announced the launch of its independent API to provide access to application license and usage data. This API provides companies with the ability to export SaaS subscription data to analytics and asset management tools, use subscription data to push service order workflows to disconnect and optimize subscription usage, and bring new applications into the Zylo platform to support SaaS portfolio optimization.  

In going through the API documentation for the Zylo platform, Amalgam Insights notes that the Zylo API includes access to application-specific subscriptions, data imports, and data exports. Data access includes SaaS categories and subcategories, business units and goals, supplier name, cost center, expense report information, and user license information. Once these fields are mapped to their equivalent categories across applications, Zylo customers will be able to fully synchronize data on an ongoing basis through a RESTful API. 

This API is comparable in some ways to the API provided by Zylo competitor Productiv, but Amalgam Insights notes that the Productiv API both rate-limits and time-limits data batches that are not currently limited in the Zylo API. SaaS Management Bettercloud also has an API for its platform, but Bettercloud’s focus on SaaS operations and its GraphQL and graph analysis makes Bettercloud’s API and platform more aligned to the tactical challenges of workflow and app network analysis rather than finance and accounting.

Business Context for Why This API Matters

Amalgam Insights takes the view that technology expense management should be a core capability for the financially responsible CIO and that SaaS, cloud, and network expense management solutions can be used as the hubs of activity to determine the financial and business activities associated with technology and business transformation. However, one of the biggest challenges to this vision has been the inability for these expense-based platforms to provide their granular data and optimization recommendations to all of the systems that require increasingly detailed technology usage to support business model transformation and agile finance and accounting-based forecasting exercises.

In addition, SaaS is one of the fastest-growing spend categories in the business world. As a market, SaaS is expected to grow over 20% annually over the next five years leading to a $275 billion market in 2025. SaaS currently makes up half of all new software spend and roughly 10% of all new technology spend that will occur in 2021. From a practical perspective, Amalgam Insights estimates that SaaS will save approximately 25 billion employee-hours or 12.5 million employee years of manual work this year. And Amalgam Insights also notes that businesses start supporting 250 SaaS apps on their network as soon as they get to 500 employees, on average. After that point, the SaaS count grows incrementally as employee count increases. These are all different ways of pointing out the importance of SaaS, whether it be in context of software spend, IT spend, or employee productivity.

So, SaaS matters as a business spend category and it can potentially be used to support a variety of business management and analysis tasks. But the technological access to this data has often been limited in the past to flat files that required an intermediate level of data translation or summary data that lacked the granularity to help support individual employees, assets, plans, projects, and products dependent on the optimal usage of SaaS.

This is why the Zylo API fundamentally matters from Amalgam Insights’ perspective. In today’s technology world, every application wants to call itself a “platform” upon inception, which makes the word almost meaningless. But from a practical perspective, a technology platform is one that can help manage multiple applications and to bring together the data, workflows, and outputs of multiple applications in an integrated fashion to improve business outcomes. This is the promise of Zylo’s API in providing a SaaS-centric way of looking at the business usage of SaaS for a variety of applications. 

From Amalgam Insights’ perspective, this was the missing link in seeking an app-based vision for tracking, planning, budgeting, and forecasting business activity from a SaaS-based perspective. If apps and the cloud are as important as everyone in the technology and business worlds claims and if digital transformation is truly important to justify the billions being spent on it, businesses need to find a way to track work not only by department and employee, but by application as well. This next level of visualizing work, employee enablement, project resource dependencies, and digital workflow supply chains is what Amalgam Insights ultimately finds most interesting about the emergence of this API.

Recommendations for the Technology Expense Community

Our key recommendation is this: Work to gain a SaaS-centric view of the business that maps SaaS to the people, processes, projects, technology, and financial drivers of the business. 

To contexualize this recommendation, consider that the technology expense community largely comes from three areas at the moment: telecom expense management, software asset management, and cloud cost management (also known as FinOps). These three categories of workers typically bring together some understanding of technology, sourcing, and accounting to help the business based on the IT Rule of 30, which states that every unmanaged IT subscription spend category averages 30% in waste.  By optimizing these spend categories, the technology expense community has proven its worth as we have saved large enterprises millions of dollars while providing visibility to opaque and complex spend categories.

But we are facing a moment of reckoning when technology has become increasingly important to the foundational operations of a company. The COVID pandemic proved the need to both manage and support employees quickly and regardless of their physical location. As connectivity, data access, and application access became the biggest bottlenecks to accessing expertise and completing work that required multiple employees, the need to understand the cost basis of SaaS, the SaaS licenses and access that each employee required to be fully productive, and the infrastructure and security requirements associated with SaaS all became mandatory to track and visualize on a regular basis. 

In this light, the key recommendation Amalgam Insights provides to the technology expense community based on this announcement is clear: it is no longer enough to only cut costs and businesses require a SaaS-centric business view to go along with finance-centric and people-centric views. You may not be in the position to fully act on the repercussions of what you find, but you are in a perfect position to empower your CIO, CFO, and CEO on this vital view of apps that run the business. 

Amalgam Insights believes that the Zylo API combined with the existing Zylo application, data schema, and integrations provides a strong foundation for visualizing the SaaS-enabled enterprise. Whether companies choose to work with Zylo, work with another SaaS management provider, or build their own solution, Amalgam Insights believes that the future of IT management is dependent not only on cost visibility and savings, but on providing a business lens to link technologies to core business functions.

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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.