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August 26: From BI to AI (Alteryx, BigID, Domino, Micro Focus, OpenText, Salesforce, SAS, SingleStore, Sisu, Snowflake, Zilliz)

Funding and Financials

Salesforce Announces Q2 2023 Fiscal Results 

Salesforce released its Q2 2023 financial report on August 24. Revenues were up 22% year over year, at $7.72B for the quarter. Despite the improvement in revenues, CRM stock dropped over 6% after the report was released.

Snowflake Reports Q2 2023 Financial Results

Snowflake released their Q2 2023 fiscal results the same day as Salesforce. Snowflake revenues were up 83% year over year, with $497.2M in total revenue for the quarter. These numbers were strong enough SNOW jumped nearly 20% at the opening bell, though Snowflake stock is currently trading at just below $200/share, about half of its previous peak value.

Vector Database Company Zilliz Raises Additional $60 Million in Series B Extension

 Zilliz, a vector database company, raised an additional $60M in funding in an extension to its earlier $43B Series B round. Prosperity7 Ventures led the extension, with participation from 5Y Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Temasek’s Pavillion Capital, and Yunqi Capital. Zilliz will use the additional funding to continue expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams, once they’ve opened their new Silicon Valley HQ.

Launches and Updates

Alteryx Releases Alteryx Server-FIPS for Public Sector Analytics 

Following up on their May release of Alteryx Designer-FIPS, Alteryx announced this week the launch of Alteryx Server-FIPS. Alteryx’s FIPS releases are compatible with the Federal Information Processing Standards  for data and computer security, which apply to public sector computing environments that require high-quality data encryption. Alteryx Server-FIPS will allow analyst teams within public sector organizations to collaborate on analytic workflows, macros, and apps.

BigID Debuts Auto-Classification for Data Governance

Data intelligence platform BigID announced auto-classification capabilities for data governance and management. Organizations will be able to automatically classify and tag data for governance purposes, even in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. 

Domino Data Lab Obtains ISO 27001:2013 Certification

On August 24, Domino Data Lab announced that they had achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification. ISO 27001:2013 standards require following strict rules around data security, risk management, continuous monitoring and improvement, and personnel training to assure end-to-end security around accessing and using sensitive data in machine learning models.

Incorta Adds Component SDK, Marketplace, Additional Data Apps 

Incorta announced new data applications for a number of platforms, opening up Incorta capabilities to new types of data. The new data apps include Workday (Workforce and Compensation), SAP ECC (Financials and Supply Chain), and Oracle EBS and Cloud ERP (Financials and Supply Chain, and Human Capital Management). Incorta also debuted the Incorta Marketplace, allowing Incorta users to share analytic content in the form of additional data apps, as well as custom visualizations and dashboard controls. Finally, Incorta also released a component SDK that developers can use to create new data connectors beyond the library of already-existing ones.

Sisu Expands Capabilities with Automated Analytics 

Sisu Data has added new features to its Sisu Decision Intelligence Engine. With these new features, Sisu customers will be able to automatically detect trends and anomalies in data, and augment analytics workflows with “automated analytics” to track and understand how and why metrics change and predict the future impact of such changes.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

OpenText to Acquire Micro Focus International PLC

On August 25, OpenText announced its intent to acquire British software and IT firm Micro Focus at £5.32 per share, implying an estimated total value for Micro Focus around $6B. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2023. From our BI to AI perspective, this acquisition helps augment OpenText’s existing analytics capabilities through Micro Focus’ Vertica analytics platform, in addition to a broad set of capabilities available in the rest of Micro Focus’ broad portfolio.

SAS Integrates Viya with SingleStore

Analytics firm SAS and cloud database SingleStore have announced an integration between SAS Viya and SingleStore as part of their ongoing partnership. SAS Viya with SingleStore will allow SAS analytics and AI services to be used on data stored in SingleStore.

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August 19: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Collibra, Cloudera, data.world, Explo, integrate.ai, InterSystems, Omni)

Funding and Financials

Customer-Facing Analytics Solution Explo Raises $12M Series A 

Customer-facing analytics solution Explo has raised $12M in a Series A funding round. Craft Ventures led the round, with participation from Amplo VC and Felicis Ventures. Explo will use the funding to further their product roadmap.

Unified BI Platform Omni Emerges from Stealth, Raises $26.9M in Funding

BI platform Omni launched publicly this week with $26.9M in funding. Redpoint led the $17.5M Series A, with participation from First Round and GV. A seed round was raised back in April, led by First Round, with participation from BoxGroup, GV, Quiet Capital, Redpoint, and Scribble Ventures. Omni was founded by Looker alums Colin Zima (Chief Analytics Officer) and Jamie Davidson (former VP of Product), and former Stitch CTO Christopher Merrick. 

Updates and Launches

Cloudera Launches First All-in-One Data Lakehouse Cloud Service 

Cloudera launched Cloudera Data Platform One, an integrated SaaS data lakehous solution. CDP One includes cloud compute, cloud storage, streaming analytics, machine learning, and security under one roof, on private single-tenant cloud infrastructure, with the aim of permitting secure self-service analytics and exploratory data science in the cloud. CDP One is currently available on a limited basis, with wider availability planned for later in 2022.

data.world Announces Eureka Explorer Lineage

Enterprise data catalog data.world debuted Eureka Explorer Lineage this week, a data lineage product built atop data.world’s knowledge graph. Eureka Explorer Lineage shows the flow of data from source to analysis, revealing where data is sourced, where it’s aggregated, and whether or not it has been transformed at any point. Explorer Lineage also uses the knowledge graph to map data to business concepts, making it easier for nontechnical team members to understand what their data is saying.

integrate.ai Releases Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning and Analytics Platform

SaaS company integrate.ai debuted its machine learning and analytics platform, focused on preserving the security and privacy of sensitive data while still allowing machine learning and analytics capabilities to be performed. Machine learning traditionally requires centralizing and aggregating data sources, which may not be possible with certain types of data. integrate.ai works via federated machine learning, which allows data to remain distributed while being analyzed, and the aggregated end results maintain the privacy of the original data.

InterSystems Announces Numerous Updates to IRIS

InterSystems announced new releases for its data platform IRIS. The additions of Embedded Python and IntegratedML to IRIS will accelerate and simplify creating smart data fabrics. InterSystems also announced better collaboration facilities for data analysts and data scientists to make their work usable by each other without having to move the underlying data at any point in the process. Improvements to Adaptive Analytics were also released, allowing business users to more easily explore data ad hoc.  Finally, InterSystems announced a partnership with data intelligence platform Collibra, allowing customers to take advantage of Collibra’s data governance, privacy, and quality capabilities.

Hiring

Alteryx Names Steve Brodrick as Chief Transformation Officer | Alteryx

Steve Brodrick joined Alteryx this week as their Chief Transformation Officer. Brodrick comes to Alteryx from Stanley Black and Decker, where he focused on financial and transformation efforts over the last 20 years. Brodrick will report directly to Alteryx President and CRO Paula Hansen

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Sync Computing Raises $15.5M A Round to Provide Business Governance to Data Infrastructure

On August 16, 2022, Sync Computing, an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost Management, announced a $15.5 million round of equity and debt financing led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from prior investors The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures, and National Grid Partners. Sync Computing has already differentiated itself in the cloud infrastructure optimization market for its capabilities to automate the provisioning and orchestration of cloud both from a cost and runtime perspective based on a proprietary mathematical approach (an oscillator-based Ising machine for those seeking the primary technical inspiration used in Sync applied to optimizing data pipelines) covered in our Cloud Cost Management SmartList. From a business perspective, this means two things: cost management and improved performance.

Amalgam Insights believes that this funding round will help Sync Computing to further enhance its differentiation in the current cloud cost and infrastructure optimization markets as data and machine learning companies seek a starting point to help them to identify cost and performance opportunities, provide options to improve either the cost-basis or revenue-enhancing aspects of infrastructure, and implement these capabilities. This announcement included the general availability announcement of an Apache Spark Autotuner, which will allow data engineers to broadly optimize data environments. We also believe that this funding will help Sync Computing to accelerate the roadmap items described in our SmartList, including enhanced support for both their Autotuner and Orchestrator products to support Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure as well as Kubernetes cluster management support and support for PyTorch and TensorFlow.

As a side note, Amalgam Insights believes this construction of financing is a smart move as it reduces the amount of equity that Sync Computing’s founders need to give up in order to obtain the cash they are receiving to run the company. If the company grows as expected, the interest rate associated with debt will be less than the cost of equity given up in the long run. Given the nature of Sync Computing’s offering at a time when enterprises are seeking to rationalize and optimize their big data and machine learning environments, this bet seems wise.

The  involvement of Costanoa Ventures is significant as it has emerged as a top-tier venture capital firm for supporting data and machine learning infrastructure management  with portfolio investments including Alation, Bigeye, and Pepperdata as well as a variety of AI-enabled applications ranging from 6sense to Intacct to Lex Machina, all of which have been acquired.

With this round of funding, Amalgam Insights believes Sync Computing is well-positioned to continue on its currently unique path of supporting the combination of recommenations, automated configuration, cost management, and performance optimization without requiring additional investment in headcount or skills.

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August 12: From BI to AI (Anaconda, Dropbase, Mighty Canary, Oracle, Verta)

Funding

Dropbase Reveals $1.75M Funding Round
Data management company Dropbase announced that they had raised a $1.75M venture funding round this week. Gradient Ventures led the round, with additional participation from Bragiel Brothers, Liquid 2 Ventures, Unpopular Ventures, Y Combinator, and additional angel investors. The funds will be used to XYZ. Dropbase allows users to drag and drop a simple CSV file into a Postgres database while addressing typical dirty data issues on the fly.

Launches and Updates

Mighty Canary Introduces “Trustmark” for Realtime Data
Data trust company Mighty Canary introduced the concept of a “trustmark” this week. Trustmarks report on the state of existing data pipelines, noting the freshness of realtime data on a dashboard. This allows business users to better understand – and trust – that the data on their dashboards is accurate and timely, and note when there are relevant issues. Mighty Canary is currently in beta.

Verta Adds Enterprise-Focused Capabilities to its MLOps Platform
MLOps platform Verta added several new integrations to its MLOps platform. Key new capabilities include support for Active Directory and OAuth, enabling single sign-on (SSO) and automating user provisioning and management; Python Package Index (PyPi =) integration, allowing teams to securely share Python packages and dependencies within their organization; Datadog integration, which will send operational and endpoint metrics from Verta to Datadog so that teams have better visibility into their machine learning models; Apache Kafka integration for simple scalable deployment; and finally, vulnerability scanning throughout the machine learning lifecycle to improve model security.

Partnerships

Anaconda Announces Strategic Cloud Partnership with Oracle
On August 9, Anaconda announced a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Anaconda will embed its repository of open source Python and R packages within OCI’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Services., giving customers access to Anaconda without requiring a separate license.

Anaconda Announces Strategic Cloud Partnership with Oracle
On August 9, Anaconda announced a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Anaconda will embed its repository of open source Python and R packages within OCI’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Services., giving customers access to Anaconda without requiring a separate license.

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August 5: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Databricks, dbt labs, Hazelcast, MicroStrategy, Snowflake, Zilliz)

Financials

Alteryx Announces Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results
Alteryx announced its Q2 2022 financial results on August 2. Revenues of $180.6M were up 50% year over year; specifically, subscription revenue doubled to nearly $81M. AYX saw a significant boost in the market based on the revenue growth spurt, though they ended the quarter with a net loss of $106.7M.

MicroStrategy Announces Q2 2022 Financial Results, Separates Chairman and CEO Roles

BI and analytics company MicroStrategy announced their Q2 2022 financial results this week as well. The $122.1M in revenues for this quarter were slightly lower than the same quarter last year, though subscription services revenues were up 5% year over year at $34.1M. As of the end of the quarter, June 30, MicroStrategy had $918M in operational loss due to their Bitcoin holdings tumbling in value, though some of that value has since been recovered.

MicroStrategy also revealed that they would be dividing their Chairman and CEO roles. On August 8, current CEO and Chairman of the Board Michael Saylor will step into the new role of Executive Chairman, while retaining his Chairman of the Board role. Saylor will focus on innovation and long-term corporate strategy, while heading the Board’s Investments Committee and supervising MicroStrategy’s bitcoin acquisition strategy. Current President Phong Le will become the new CEO, in charge of MicroStrategy’s corporate strategy execution, and serve on the Board of Directors as well.

Snowflake to Announce Q2 2023 Financial Results
Snowflake announced that it will release its financial results for Q2 2023 on Wednesday, August 24, following the close of the US markets that day. Snowflake will hold a conference call at that time to discuss the results.

Launches and Updates

Databricks Makes Photon Engine Generally Available

This week, Databricks announced that its lakehouse query engine, Photon, was now generally available across all of the major cloud platforms. New features with the GA release include speed upgrades across numerous functions: vectorized sort (3-20x performance gain over Apache Spark), accelerated window functions performing calculations across table rows that are 2-3x faster than before; and stateless Structured Streaming workloads at 20% of the cost of running similar workloads on traditional Spark. Though Photon’s initial focus on SQL was to enable data warehouse workloads on data lakes, language coverage has been expanded to include modern DataFrame and SparkSQL workloads.

dbt Labs Debuts Technology Partner Program

dbt Labs formally launched its dbt Labs Technology Partner Program this week. Over 50 partners are participating, from categories such as data quality and business intelligence, including Airbyte, Monte Carlo, and ThoughtSpot. Partners integrate their software to extend dbt’s capabilities, while gaining an increased connection to dbt’s userbase.

Hazelcast Launches Viridian Serverless

Realtime data platform Hazelcast released the beta version of Hazelcast Viridian Serverless, a process that grows and shrinks a cluster based on the current workload. Not having to plan for specific sizing up front can speed up app development, and it simplifies the provisioning process. Viridian Serverless is currently available on AWS, with GCP access in the works.

Zilliz Announces Key Contributions to Milvus 2.1

Vector database company Zilliz, creators of the Milvus open source vector database, announced significant contributions to the recent Milvus 2.1 release. These contributions include performance boosts throughout, improvements to scalar data processing to support hybrid search, and tutorials to help users build apps on top of Milvus.

Hiring

Alteryx Appoints Doniel Sutton as Chief People Officer | Alteryx
On August 4, Alteryx announced that it had appointed Doniel Sutton as their Chief People Officer. Sutton brings over 20 years of human resources and strategic experience to Alteryx. She was previously the Chief People Officer at Fastly, and has held senior HR leadership roles at Paypal, Prudential, Bank of America, and Honeywell.

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Calero-MDSL Acquires Network Control to Support Mid-Market TEM Demand

On August 2, 2022, Calero-MDSL announced the acquisition of Network Control, a telecom expense and managed mobility services vendor based in Waverly, Iowa. This acquisition continues the acquisitive streak of Calero-MDSL and increases its status as the largest telecom expense management solution in terms of spend under management.

Network Control provides telecom expense management and managed mobility services. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Waverly, Iowa, Network Control was privately held with no outside investment. Network Control is owned by Mark Hearn, a long-time TEM executive who purchased the company in 2011. Amalgam Insights estimates that Network Control has roughly doubled in headcount to approximately 100 employees between the 2011 acquisition and the 2022 purchase by Calero-MDSL.

With this acquisition, Calero-MDSL is making greater strides into the mid-market in acquiring a client base that collectively includes over 200,000 devices and $300 million in spend under management over 75 customers. From a pure spend perspective, Network Control does not represent a substantive addition to Calero-MDSL’s estimated $22 billion under management as the largest TEM in terms of spend under management. However, Network Control brings several important skills to Calero-MDSL that will be vital for the continued growth of the combined company.

First, Network Control has shown the ability to consistently win new business in the mid-market enterprise and is known for its retention. In Amalgam Insights’ CIO Guide for Wireless Expense Management, Network Control was listed as one of Amalgam Insights’ Distinguished Vendors based on its 98%+ retention rate for customers, with the majority of account losses over time coming from merger and acquisition activity or from the cessation of business activities. Mid-market enterprises between $1 million and $20 million in annual telecom spend is an increasingly competitive space for the large TEM vendors that are reaching the practical limits of saturation among the Global 2000 where they have traditionally focused. As TEM has become an established business practice over the past 15-20 years, TEM vendors have been able to polish both their software platforms and managed services capabilities and now are better positioned to provide these capabilities downmarket to support the next $200 billion in global mid-market telecom and technology spend that has traditionally been almost a greenfield market.

In addition, Network Control brings strong managed services capabilities for managed mobility, with approximately 100 employees trained in supporting a managed mobility services organization across operations, logistics, sales, and other business functions which will be valuable to Calero-MDSL in bolstering existing managed mobility capabilities. Network Control is known for its flexibility and client-centric focus in bringing new services to clients as well as for the quality of customer service provided.

Network Control also has a sustained record of winning deals against the likes of Tangoe and Sakon, which happen to be two of Calero-MDSL’s largest rivals in the TEM space. In our CIO Guide, we saw that Network Control ran into competitive deals in approximately 80% of their sales, which was indicative both of the relatively educated nature of potential customers and Network Control’s ability to win against larger vendors.

What to Expect?

First, for mid-market businesses between $100 million and $5 billion in annual revenue, expect increased attention from TEM companies seeking your business to manage your telecom spend. They are seeking environments that have been manually managed or managed with spreadsheets and fall under the IT Rule of 30, which states that any unmanaged IT spend category averages 30% in duplication and waste. This will also be a shift for TEM and MMS vendors that have traditionally sold into the mid-market and found that their biggest competition was against the status quo. As this market starts to shift towards what is being called the “mid-market” or the “mid-enterprise,” expect to see more competitive deals. Calero-MDSL has acquired a company that has a history of winning mid-market business against Calero-MDSL’s biggest rivals based on understanding mid-market pain points and service needs. By adding marketing and sales muscle to Network Control’s operational capabilities, Calero-MDSL has an opportunity to support the mid-market in an unprecedented way.

Second, this acquisition looks like it could kick off a second wave of TEM consolidation. In the early 2010s, there was a massive wave of consolidation in the TEM market driven by venture capital-backed vendors seeking exits or running out of funding. In the 2020s, the situation is slightly different as the firms that have remained to this day tend to be privately owned and profitable companies that have established both best practices and processes to support loyal customer bases. We have started to see the acquisition of these private firms with the acquisitions of Vision Wireless and Wireless Analytics by Motus and with this acquisition, but there are at least a half dozen additional firms with strong mid-market experience that would be strong candidates for a similar acquisition or rollup. However, the big caveat here is that any acquisition of these companies needs to be coupled with a strong customer service culture as the mid-market TEMs Amalgam Insights covers frequently average 98% retention or higher with over 100% wallet share; this is a demanding market where technology, services, and client management must be aligned.

Third, this acquisition shows that the cost of acquiring talent is still significant in the TEM world. Calero-MDSL would have needed an extra year to find the volume of high-level talent that they are getting at one time with the acquisition of Network Control. The ability to find personnel with experience in managing the spend and procurement of millions of dollars in annual technology spend is still relatively rare. This skill will become increasingly necessary in the recessionary times that we are currently facing. Companies cannot simply eliminate technology, so they will need to financially reconcile their environments both with in-house and third-party resources. Network Control has proven its ability to maintain a high level of service by maintaining a high staff-to-client ratio, a practice that Amalgam Insights recommends keeping as the relative cost of labor is smaller than the cost of finding a new customer.

Fourth, it is safe to assume that Network Control was purchased for its talent, capabilities, and client base rather than its software platform. Although Network Control’s TEMNet is a functional platform, the amount of investment that Calero-MDSL has put into its platform ensures that customers will eventually be migrated to this platform. As long as this migration is handled carefully, this should not be a challenge. Calero-MDSL has prior experience in migrating clients from previous acquisitions A&B Groep and Comview, among others.

Overall, Amalgam Insights believes that this acquisition will be accretive to Calero-MDSL both in providing greater capacity to support managed mobility services and to learn the demands of mid-market clients from an experienced team. This acquisition also will eventually provide Network Control clients with access to the Calero-MDSL platform, which has been built to support global environments and now also includes Unified Communications as a Service and Software as a Services support. Amalgam Insights believes this acquisition demonstrates Calero-MDSL’s continued commitment to expanding its market share and providing telecom and technology expense savings to a wider clientele of organizations.

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July 29: From BI to AI (Datafold, Domino Data Lab, Expert.ai, FeatureByte, Fiddler, Hightouch, Informatica, Microsoft)

Funding and Finance

FeatureByte Emerges from Stealth with $5.7M Seed Round

Feature engineering and management platform FeatureByte launched this week, announcing a $5.7M seed round led by Glasswing Ventures and Tola Capital. The funding will go towards scaling up R+D and go-to-market operations. The FeatureByte founders came from DataRobot, where CEO Razi Raziuddin was the SVP of AI Services and Chief Product Officer Xavier Conort was the Chief Data Scientist. FeatureByte looks to simplify the creation and management of AI model features.

Informatica Reports Q2 2022 Financial Results

On July 27, Informatica announced its Q2 2022 financial results. Revenues of $372M beat expectations by $7.8M; earnings were above expectations at $0.16 per share. INFA is up since the earnings announcement.

Microsoft Announces Q4 2022 Financial Results
On July 26, Microsoft announced its Q4 2022 financial results. Revenues ($51.87B) and earnings ($2.23/share) were both slightly lower than expected. MSFT dipped a bit in the market, but ended the week up.

Updates and Launches

Expert.ai Adds New Features to its Natural Language Platform

Natural language platform Expert.ai made improvements to its natural language platform. Key new features include improved data labeling with active learning capabilities, automatic generation of extraction rules enabling users to generate rule-based models, and pre-trained knowledge models in specific domains.

Fiddler Updates Machine Learning Model Management

Fiddler, a model performance management platform, revealed new capabilities this week. Fiddler customers will now be able to use vector monitoring to better observe models in production involving unstructured data, such as ones based on natural language processing and computer vision. Fiddler will also surface more low-frequency events that can contribute to subtle model drift while concealing issues such as fraudulent transactions. Finally, Fiddler has also unveiled a “single pane of glass” user interface, allowing data science and MLOps teams to view and manage models from a centralized dashboard.

Partnerships

Datafold and Hightouch Debut Integration
Data reliability company Datafold and data activation platform Hightouch announced an integration to alert data engineers whenever a dbt data model change will impact data involved in a Hightouch sync. Hightouch automates data integration from data warehouses to business systems such as CRMs, ERPs, and custom applications; data model changes upstream or downstream can break data syncs. Datafold’s Data Diff combines with Hightouch to alert data engineers to potential issues before they become issues in production.

Domino Data Lab and Alexander Thamm Partner to Scale Data Science in Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Domino Data Lab announced a partnership with consultancy Alexander Thamm to help customers in the German-speaking DACH region accelerate their data science implementation timelines. The Data Science Journey Accelerator will pair Domino’s Enterprise MLOps platform with Alexander Thamm’s consulting services for data science and data engineering. Offerings will include assessments in data strategy, the data science lifecycle, and business value, as well as creating proofs of concept.

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July 22: From BI to AI (Askdata, Cloudera, DataRobot, Datatron, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Pecan AI, SAP, Talend)

Hiring

Debanjan Saha Steps Into DataRobot Interim CEO Role

DataRobot President and COO Debanjan Saha has been appointed interim CEO in the wake of Dan Wright stepping down from the CEO position. Saha joined DataRobot in February 2022. Prior to DataRobot, Saja was the VP and GM of Data Analytics at Google, as well asthe VP and GM for Amazon Aurora and RDS. Saha also spent a decade at IBM, primarily in storage and analytics.

Wright will continue with DataRobot in an advisory role during the executive search for a permanent CEO.

Launches and Updates

Datatron Releases Version 3.0

MLOps platform Datatron released version 3.0 this week. Key new features include integration with JupyterHub, allowing data scientists to operationalize models directly from their notebook-interface coding environment; simpler deployment and management facilities ffor all three major cloud platforms without needing to learn or manage Kubernetes; and an updated logging and operations dashboard, along with single sign-on support.

Oracle and Microsoft Present Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure

On July 20, Oracle and Microsoft announced Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. Azure customers will be able to provision, access, and monitor Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, connecting OD services running on OCI with apps in Azure that use data from those services. Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure is generally available now.

Pecan AI Debuts One-Click Data Science Model Deployment

Low-code automated predictive analytics company Pecan AI added one-click machine learning model deployment to its platform this week. Pecan also added model monitoring targeted towards low-code users, alerting them when models show signs of degradation. These two additions join existing features on the Pecan platform to automate all aspects of model creation and deployment.

Partnerships

Talend Enhances Cloudera Data Platform Support

Data integration platform Talend added new certifications for Cloudera Data Platform on the Public Cloud, and CDP data services including Data Engineering and Data Hub. Talend also revealed new native integrations with CDP Engineering, allowing data teams to autoscale Spark jobs without needing to manually configure and scale clusters.

Acquisitions

SAP Acquires Search Analytics Startup Askdata

SAP has acquired Italian search-driven analytics startup Askdata for an undisclosed sum. Askdata uses machine learning and natural language processing models to make it easier for less-technical users to interrogate data in place. Askdata will become part of a future analytics solution for SAP Analytics Cloud.

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July 15: From BI to AI (Alteryx, AssemblyAI, AWS, Deci, Microsoft, SAP, SingleStore, Tecton, TIBCO)

Funding and Financials

In addition to the funding rounds mentioned below, Alteryx, Microsoft, and SAP all announced the release dates for their next quarterly earnings reports. Alteryx will report their Q2 financial results on Tuesday, August 2; Microsoft will report their Q4 financials on Tuesday, July 26; and SAP will report their Q2 financials on Thursday, July 21.

AssemblyAI: $30M Series B Round

Automatic speech recognition platform AssemblyAI picked up $30M in Series B funding. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Accel and Y Combinator. AssemblyAI will use the funding to grow their AI research team and accelerate product development.

Deci Raises $25M Series B

Deep learning AI building company Deci raised a $25M Series B round. Insight Partners led this round as well (busy week), with participation from existing investors Emerge, Fort Ross Ventures, Jibe Ventures, and Square Peg, and new investor ICON. Deci will use the funding to grow go-to-market efforts and R+D.

SingleStore Announces $116M F Round, New CFO and GC

Cloud-native analytics database provider SingleStore announced a $116M Series F round of financing this week. Goldman Sachs Asset Management led this round, with participation from current investors Dell Technologies Capital, GV, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM Ventures, and Insight Partners, as well as new investor Sanabil Investments.

SingleStore also welcomed two new [executive level] hires in recent weeks. Chief Financial Officer Brad Kinnish joins SingleStore from Aryaka Networks, where he also served as CFO. Prior to Aryaka, Kinnish was also the CFO at Marin Software, and the managing director of Software Investment Banking at Deutsche Bank. New General Counsel Meaghan Nelson was previously the associate general counsel at Veeva Systems as part of over a decade of legal experience.

Tecton Raises $100M Series C Round

Machine learning feature platform Tecton raised a $100M Series C funding round. New investor Kleiner Perkins led the round, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with new investors Bain Capital Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Tiger Global. The funding will go towards additional hiring in engineering and go-to-market teams.

Updates and Launches

AWS Makes Three New Serverless Analytics Offerings Generally Available

AWS announced the general availability of three new serverless analytics offerings; with these, customers will be able to analyze massive amounts of data without needing to manage the supporting infrastructure. Amazon EMR Serverless will allow customers to run analytics apps using Apache Spark and Hive. Amazon MSK Serverless will simplify realtime data ingestion and streaming. Finally, Amazon Redshift Serverless will allow customers to manage high-performance data warehousing and analytics workloads without having to micromanage clusters.

TIBCO Unlocks the Power of Master Data Management Software-as-a-Service with the New TIBCO Cloud EBX | TIBCO Software
TIBCO ModelOps Significantly Improves Efficiency and Flexibility Across the Enterprise with Impactful AI | TIBCO Software

TIBCO revealed two major releases this week. TIBCO Cloud EBX is a SaaS-based Master Data Management solution, will let users manage their corporate data from anywhere. EBX is part of TIBCO Cloud Passport, a new consumption-based pricing plan enabling SaaS for various TIBCO capabilities. Key features of TIBCO Cloud EBX include a model-driven process for data management; the ability to manage every data domain with hierarchy management, match-and-merge functionality, and search and query capabilities; and easy ways to import and export data in bulk and access it via APIs.

TIBCO ModelOpswill provide self-service data science access to teams including business users, with the aim of deploying more machine learning models faster. All common model formats are supported in ModelOps, and governed models can currently be added to TIBCO Spotfire, TIBCO Data Virtualization, and TIBCO Streaming, with more options to follow.

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July 8: From BI to AI (Databand.ai, IBM, Meta, Ontotext)

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

Acquisitions

IBM Expands Observability Capabilities with Databand.ai Acquisition

IBM announced Wednesday that they had acquired Databand.ai, a data observability software provider. Databand.ai looks for issues such as data anomalies, missing or incomplete data, and other problems that come up during the data transformation process. IBM suggests that pairing Databand.ai with IBM Observability by Instana APM and Watson Studio will combine application performance monitoring and data observability into a more complete observability platform spanning a broader spectrum of IT ops. Databand.ai employees will join IBM’s Data and AI group.

Launches and Updates

Meta Debuts Improved Language Translation Model and Dataset

Meta announced Wednesday that their AI researchers had built an AI model, NLLB-200 (No Language Left Behind) that significantly improves the accuracy of machine translation between 200 different languages. Meta also compiled the FLORES-200 dataset to measure NLLB-200’s language performance to ensure high-quality translations. Developers will be able to access both NLLB-200 and FLORES-200, and Meta will award $200,000 in grants for “impactful uses” of NLLB-200; specifically, researchers working in linguistics, machine translation, and language technology, as well as nonprofits translating two or more African languages, are invited to apply.

Ontotext Releases GraphDB 10.0

Ontotext announced GraphDB 10.0, the latest major release of their database engine. Key new features include a new high-availability cluster architecture with higher uptime, zero data loss, better fault tolerance, and better recovery from failures; an improved graph path search algorithm that can run in parallel mode in multicore environments, enabling faster processing on complex searches and the ability to handle more concurrent requests; improved full text search; and a simplified upgrade path requiring no development effort to upgrade from free to standard to enterprise editions of GraphDB.