Category: From BI to AI

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

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Alteryx Announces Acquisition of Trifacta

Yesterday, January 6, Alteryx announced that it has acquired Trifacta for $400M in a cash offer. Trifacta and Alteryx have historically been viewed as competitors, but Trifacta’s greater depth of capability re data engineering and cleansing complements Alteryx’ strengths in analytic workflows.

Product Launches and Updates

AI that understands speech by looking as well as hearing

Today, January 7, Meta debuted Audio-Visual Hidden Unit BERT (AV-HuBERT), a self-supervised framework for understanding speech that combines video input from lip movements and audio input from speech, both as raw unlabeled data. The goal is to improve accuracy even in environments where audio input may be compromised, such as from loud background noise.

Financial Transactions

Qlik Announces Confidential Submission of Draft Registration Statement Related to Proposed Public Offering

On Thursday, January 6, Qlik announced that it had confidentially submitted its draft regulation statement related to a proposed IPO. The expected IPO comes over five years after private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo purchased Qlik and took them private.

Fractal announces US$ 360 million investment from TPG

On Wednesday, January 5, Fractal, an AI and advanced analytics provider, announced that TPG, a global asset firm, will be investing $360M in Fractal. Puneet Bhatia and Vivek Mohan of TPG will join Fractal’s board of directors as part of the deal.

WEKA Increases Funding to $140 Million to Accelerate AI Data Platform Adoption in the Enterprise

WEKA, a data storage platform, announced on Tuesday, January 4, that they have raised $73M in a Series C funding round, raising total funding to $140M. The oversubscribed round was led by Hitachi Ventures. Other participants include Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Ibex Investors, Key 1 Capital, Micron, MoreTech Ventures, and NVIDIA. The funding will go towards accelerating go-to-market activities, operations, and engineering.

Hiring

Databricks Appoints Naveen Zutshi as Chief Information Officer

Finally, Wednesday, January 5, Databricks announced that it had appointed Naveen Zutshi as their new Chief Information Officer. Zutshi joins Databricks from Palo Alto Networks, where he was the CIO for six years, expanding Palo Alto Networks into new security categories and scaling up at speed. Prior to that, Zutshi was the SVP of Technology at Gap Inc, overseeing global infrastructure, ops, and security for the retailer.

Product Launches and Enhancements

IBM to Add New Natural Language Processing Enhancements to Watson Discovery

On November 10, IBM revealed new natural language processing enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery. Business users will be able to train Watson Discovery to surface insights more quickly on a corpus of industry-specific documents without needing traditional data science skills. Specific capability enhancements include pre-trained document structure understanding, automatic text pattern detection, and a custom entity extractor feature that will help identify industry-specific words and phrases with specific contexts. The announced enhancements are forthcoming, though IBM did not announce a target release date.

Informatica Announces Cloud Data Marketplace

On November 11, Informatica debuted their Cloud Data Marketplace. The Cloud Data Marketplace will allow Informatica business users to “shop” for both datasets and AI and analytics models, surfacing existing assets to encourage reuse of more-vetted resources rather than duplicating efforts by re-gathering data or building a model from scratch. Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace is available today with consumption-based pricing on Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud.

Tableau Outlines Product Vision and the Future of Analytics at Tableau Conference 2021

On November 9, at Tableau Conference 2021, Tableau announced a host of innovations for the Tableau platform and ecosystem, focused on bringing analytic capabilities to the workflows and environments workers already use. Highlights include Model Builder, a new feature in Tableau Business Science that allows Tableau users to build predictive models using Einstein Discovery; and Scenario Planning, another new Tableau Business Science feature to compare scenarios and “what-ifs,” supported by Einstein AI.

Partnerships

Domino Data Lab Expands Collaboration with NVIDIA and TCS with New Enterprise MLOps Solutions for Modern IT Stacks

On November 9, Domino Data Lab announced a fully-managed offering with solutions partner Tata Consultancy Services that allows Domino customers to run high-performance computing and data science workloads on NVIDIA DGX systems, hosted in the TCS Enterprise Cloud. This marks the next step in a deepening relationship between Domino and NVIDIA, with the Domino integration into the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite on the horizon.

Funding

H2O.ai Closes $100 Million in Funding Led by Customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia

On November 8, H2O.ai closed $100M in Series E funding. The round was led by customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with participation by existing investors Crane Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and new investor Pivot Investment Partners. The funding will be used to scale up partnerships, sales, marketing, and customer success at a global level.

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

Product Launches and Updates

Cloudera Introduces Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud

On August 16, Cloudera launched Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud to better manage customer data flows. When too many data flows are deployed into a single cluster, performance often falters, yet choosing larger infrastructure footprints “just in case” is expensive. Cloudera DataFlow was created to automate and manage complex cloud-native data flow operations, automatically scale up and down said streaming data flows more efficiently, and cut customers’ cloud costs. Cloudera DataFlow is generally available on AWS now.

Latest Release of the SnapLogic Platform: Self-service Integration and Automation

On August 17, SnapLogic announced its August 2021 product release, introducing no-code SnapLogic Flows for business users, ELT support to Databricks’ Delta Lake, and zero downtime upgrades, along with updating its API lifecycle and development portal. SnapLogic Flows will enable business users to construct data flows and apps to integrate into popular business software such as Salesforce without needing to know how to code, while allowing IT to provide guiderails and requirements to oversee said apps. New features in SnapLogic API lifecycle management include the abilities to maintain, improve, unpublish, deprecate, and retire APIs, ensuring that older versions aren’t used in error.

Funding

Apollo GraphQL Announces $130 Million Series D Investment to Power the Future of Graph and Application Development

On August 17, Apollo GraphQL announced a $130M Series D funding round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing funders Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures, and new investor Next47. The funding will be used on continuing R+D of open source graph technology to make app development faster and more accessible.

Monte Carlo Raises Series C, Brings Funding to $101M to Help Companies Trust Their Data

On August 17, Monte Carlo, a data reliability company, announced a $60M Series C funding round, led by ICONIQ Growth. Salesforce Ventures, along with existing investors Accel, GGV Capital, and Redpoint Ventures, all participated. Monte Carlo will use the funds to expand its product offerings, support more use cases, and open up to new markets.

Acquisitions

Adapdix acquires Edge Intelligence to bring data and AI closer together

Adapdix, an edge AI/ML platform, announced the acquisition of Edge Intelligence, a data management platform, on August 16. Edge Intelligence will improve Adapdix’ existing EdgeOps Data Mesh with better data management capabilities, and allow Adapdix to expand its existing offerings in edge automation.

Hiring

Fermín Serna Joins Databricks as Chief Security Officer

On August 19, Databricks announced that they had appointed Fermín Serna as the company’s new Chief Security Officer. Serna is coming over from Citrix, where he was the Chief Information Security Officer; before this, Serna was the Head of Product Security at Google. At Databricks, Serna will lead the network, platform and user security programs, as well as governance and compliance efforts.

TigerGraph Adds Industry Leader and Trailblazer to its Executive Team; Announces Fall Graph + AI Summits

On August 19, TigerGraph, a graph analytics platform, announced that they had hired Dr. Jay Yu as Vice President of Product Innovation, and as GM at the San Diego Innovation Center for TigerGraph. Dr. Yu comes to TigerGraph from 18 years at Intuit, where he led the Financial Knowledge Graph project and encouraged graph technology adoption in large commercial cases. TigerGraph also announced the Graph + AI Summit for this fall on two dates, October 5 in San Francisco and October 19th in New York. Both hybrid events will be livestreamed to virtual attendees, as well as including in-person attendance.

Funding

Snorkel AI Raises $85 Million at $1 Billion Valuation for Data-Centric AI

On August 9, Snorkel AI, a programmatic data labeling platform, snagged an $85M Series C round at a $1B valuation. Addition and various BlackRock funds and accounts led the round, with participation from previous investors Greylock, GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe Capital, and Walden. The funding will go towards scaling Snorkel AI’s engineering team and growing its go-to-market team for global sales.

Product Launches and Updates

Mindtech Chameleon 21.1

On August 11, Mindtech announced updates to Chameleon, their synthetic image creation and curation platform for training visual AI systems. Data scientists and machine learning engineers will be able to create the exact annotated images they need to train their visual AI models. Key new features and enhancements include Simulator, which uses real-world behavior modeling to create synthetic data sets, and Curation Manager, which performs visual analysis of synthetic and real datasets to identify diversity and bias. Chameleon 21.1 is available for immediate licensing.

Oracle Announces MySQL Autopilot for MySQL HeatWave Service

On August 10, Oracle announced MySQL Autopilot, a new component of Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave service. Autopilot automates HeatWave, a MySQL query acceleration engine in the Oracle cloud, by building machine learning models to help it learn how to perform optimally. Oracle also debuted MySQL Scale-out Data Management at the same time to improve the performance of reloading data into HeatWave by 100x.

Talend Announces Latest Innovations to Support Journey to Healthier Data

On August 11, Talend announced updates to Talend Data Fabric, its data integration and governance platform. Key innovations include native integration with Databricks 7.3 and AWS EMR 6.2 on Apache Spark 3 to enable faster advanced analytics at scale, private connectivity between Talend and AWS or Azure to support HIPAA and PCI compliance, and adding read/write capabilities to a campaign directly from a data pipeline.

Acquisitions

Qlik Acquires NodeGraph To Enhance End-to-End Analytics Data Pipelines With Interactive Data Lineage and Drive ‘Explainable BI’

On August 12, Qlik acquired NodeGraph, a metadata management platform. NodeGraph’s interactive data lineage function will contribute to Qlik’s “explainable BI” capabilities, while the governance aspects will enhance the Qlik data fabric, and NodeGraph’s impact analysis capabilities will expand Qlik’s SaaS offerings.

Hiring

Customer-Focused C-Suite Appointments Bolster DataRobot’s Executive Leadership Team

On August 12, DataRobot welcomed three new appointments to their C-Suite. Jay Schuren moves up as DataRobot’s first Chief Data Science Officer, having come over in 2017 with the Nutonian acquisition. Sirisha Kadamalakalva joined DataRobot as their first Chief Strategy Officer from Bank of America, where she was the Managing Director and Global Head of AI/ML, Analytics, and CRM Software Investment Banking. Steve Jenner came over from Zscaler, where he was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Engineering.

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

Funding

Dataiku Raises $400M at a $4.6B Valuation to Enable Everyday AI in the Enterprise

On August 5, Dataiku announced that they had raised $400M in a Series E round of funding. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, CapitalG, Dawn Capital, FirstMark Capital, ICONIQ Growth, and Snowflake Ventures, as well as new investors Eurazeo, Insight Partners, and Lightrock.

Presto Company Ahana Raises $20M Series A Led By Third Point Ventures To Redefine Open Data Lake Analytics

On August 3, Ahana announced a $20M series A funding round. Third Point Ventures led the round, with participation from GV, Leslie Ventures, and Lux Capital. In addition, Robert Schwartz, a Managing Partner at Third Point Ventures, will join Ahana’s Board of Directors. With the funding, Ahana will accelerate engineering and contributions to the open source data lake analytics Presto project, and expand its go-to-market team.

Product Launches and Updates

Spell Operationalizes Advanced AI with Comprehensive MLOps Platform for Deep Learning

On August 4, Spell launched the eponymous Spell, an MLOps platform for deep learning. The goal is to reduce the cost of operationalizing complex deep learning models that use natural language processing, machine vision, voice recognition, and other similarly complex models dependent on deep learning.

Exadel’s Open Source Face Recognition Application CompreFace Adds New Features

On August 3, Exadel announced improvements to CompreFace, their open source facial recognition application. The updates include additional services and plugins such as face detection and verification, age and gender detection, support for the facial recognition library InsightFace, an improved user experience, added scalability and GPU support, and JavaScript and Python SDKs to make integration easier.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Alteryx becomes Elite partner in the Snowflake Partner Network to Further Accelerate Analytics and Data Science Automation for Global Organizations

Alteryx made an additional partnership announcement at the end of last week around their efforts to address analytics automation; given the context of the automation acquisitions announced this week, it’s worth mentioning as part of a larger trend. In addition to the BluePrism and PwC announcements, Alteryx has become an Elite Technology Partner in the Snowflake ecosystem, building on the deeper relationship announced in June and reflecting a growing number of Alteryx-Snowflake users working on automated analytics projects.

MuleSoft enters agreement to acquire Servicetrace

On August 2, Salesforce announced their intent to acquire Servicetrace, an RPA provider, and to integrate it into their MuleSoft data integration platform. In particular, Servicetrace’s capabilities will enhance Salesforce’s Einstein Automate, empowering additional workflow automation for Salesforce customers.

ServiceNow to acquire Swarm64 to support the world’s largest workflows

On August 5, ServiceNow announced their intent to acquire Swarm64, a database performance company. Once Swarm64 has been integrated into ServiceNow’s solutions, customers will be able to query their data sources more quickly as part of the workflows they build with ServiceNow’s Now Platform, in addition to working with larger datasets.

If you would like your announcement to be included in these data platform-focused roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding

DataRobot Unveils Major Milestones, Including $300M Series G Funding Investment

On July 27, DataRobot announced a $300M Series G funding round. Repeat investors Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global led the round, along with participation from new investors Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Franklin Templeton, ServiceNow Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for further development of DataRobot’s Augmented Intelligence platform, as well as expanding its go-to-market team.

Kili Technology raises $25M Series A

Also on July 27, Kili Technology revealed that it had raised a $25M Series A funding round. Balderton Capital led the round. The company is looking to accelerate hiring with the funding.

SAS charts path to IPO-readiness

On July 29, SAS announced that it intended to be ready for an IPO by 2024. Key steps SAS will take over the next couple of years include refining its financial reporting structure, optimizing certain operational processes, and further developing its AI and analytics capabilities.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Alteryx and PwC Expand Strategic Relationship Globally to Address Analytics Automation Demand

Blue Prism Partners with Alteryx to Drive Faster, More Reliable Data Analytics

Alteryx revealed news about two partnerships this week. On July 28, Alteryx announced a new partnership with Blue Prism, an intelligent automation company, along with a bi-directional integration between the two platforms. Blue Prism developers will be able to include Alteryx analytic processes within RPA-driven processes, while Alteryx analysts will be able to trigger Blue Prism digital workers from within their Alteryx workflows.

On July 29, Alteryx announced that it was expanding its relationship with PwC. The original partnership, announced in February 2020, focused on upskilling and digital transformation efforts in US companies; these efforts are now being expanded globally.

Atos acquires Visual BI to enhance its ability to address customers’ increasing need for analytics in the cloud

On July 29, Atos, a digital transformation company, announced that it was acquiring Visual BI, a cloud data analytics company. By acquiring Visual BI, Atos hopes to address its customers’ increasing need for cloud-based BI and analytics.

DataRobot is Acquiring Algorithmia, Enhancing Leading MLOps Architecture for the Enterprise

The same day it announced $300M in Series G Funding (see above), DataRobot also revealed that it was acquiring MLOps platform Algorithmia.

Domino Data Lab Announces New Partner Network

On July 29, Domino Data Lab debuted the Domino Partner Network, connecting technology and services partners across four categories: Tools & Data, Infrastructure, Solutions, and Implementation & Consulting. Inaugural members include Accenture, AWS, DataArt, Dell Technologies, MathWorks, NetApp, NVIDIA, and Snowflake, among others.

Google Cloud and SAP Partner to Accelerate Business Transformations in the Cloud

IBM and SAP to Help Financial Institutions Accelerate Cloud Adoption to Modernize Operations in a Secured Environment

SAP had two partner announcements this week as well. On July 28, SAP announced that it intends to expand the availability of SAP finance and data management solutions on IBM Cloud for Financial Services, which have built-in security and compliance controls to address financial regulations around risk and data. The goal is to accelerate adoption of IBM Cloud within the financial services industry.

On July 29, SAP and Google Cloud announced that they would be expanding their strategic partnership. Google Cloud will now be a strategic partner for RISE with SAP, SAP’s digital transformation offering. Similar to SAP’s IBM partnership, the goal is to accelerate cloud adoption and business process migration even further.

Product Enhancements

AtScale AI-Link Connects Business Intelligence and Enterprise AI with Semantic Layer to Scale Augmented Analytics and Data Science

On July 29, AtScale introduced AI-Link. AtScale allows BI teams to consume live cloud data with preferred apps; data scientists can now access the same data with Python via AI-Link to put into augmented analytics and machine learning models. AI-Link is available today as an add-on to AtScale.

EZOPS Supports Streamlined Data Control and Optimized Efficiency in Snowflake

On July 27, EZOPS announced that they are incorporating Snowflake support. Snowflake customers will be able to use EZOPS’ AI models to analyze data stream patterns for anomalies, and then escalate said anomalies within EZOPS Workflow for further triage and analysis.

Trifacta Delivers Head Start on Cloud Data Engineering With New Template Gallery

On July 27, Trifacta debuted pre-built cloud data engineering templates to further enable what they’re calling “self-service data management.” The templates will allow Trifacta users to tweak pre-configured data engineering workflows to suit their needs, then quickly deploy them. Some examples of the available templates include transforming data to a target schema using a mapping table, identifying sentiment keywords and calculating NPS, and importing data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery.

Hiring

Kyndryl Names David Wyshner As Chief Financial Officer

Kyndryl, the new separate company of IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services, has appointed David Wyshner as the company’s CFO. Wyshner was most recently the CFO of XPO Logistics; prior to that, Wyshner led the separation of Wyndham Worldwide into three separate companies during his time as CFO there.

Informatica Appoints Elizabeth Rafael to Board of Directors

On July 26, Informatica announced that Betsy Rafael has joined the Informatica board of directors, as well as the chair of the audit committee. Most recently, Rafael was the Chief Transformation Officer at GoDaddy. Preceding her stint at GoDaddy, Rafael served as Vice President and Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Executive at Apple, and Vice President, Corporate Finance at Cisco.

If you would like your announcement to be included in these data platform-focused roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Launches and Updates

Dremio Launches SQL Lakehouse Service to Accelerate BI and Analytics

On July 21, at Subservice Live, Dremio debuted Dremio Cloud, a cloud-native SQL-based data “lakehouse” service. The service marries various aspects of data lakes and data warehouses into a SQL lakehouse, enabling high-performance SQL workloads in the cloud and expediting the process of getting started. Dremio Cloud is now available in the AWS Marketplace.

Google Cloud Announces Healthcare Data Engine to Enable Interoperability in Healthcare

On July 22, Google Cloud announced Healthcare Data Engine, now in private preview. Healthcare Data Engine integrates healthcare and life sciences data from multiple sources such as medical records, claims, clinical trials, and research data, enabling a more longitudinal view of patient health along with advanced analytics and AI in a secure environment. With the introduction of Amazon HealthLake last week, it’s clear that expanding healthcare and life sciences analytics capabilities continue to be a top priority among data services providers.

Palantir Introduces Foundry for Builders

Dipping a toenail into the waters outside their usual large established organization customer base, Palantir announced the launch of Foundry for Builders, providing access to the Palantir Foundry platform for startups under a fully-managed subscription model. Foundry for Builders is starting off with limited availability; the initial group of startups provided access are all connected to Palantir alumni, with the hope of expanding to other early-stage “hypergrowth” companies down the road.

Redpoint Global Announces In Situ

On July 20, Redpoint announced In Situ, a service that provides data quality and identity resolution. In Situ uses Redpoint’s data management technology to supply identity resolution and data integration services in real time within an organization’s virtual private cloud, without needing to transfer said private data across the internet.

Sisense Announces Sisense Extense Framework

On July 21, Sisense debuted the Sisense Extense Framework, a way to deliver interactive analytics experiences within popular business applications. Initially supported apps include Slack, Salesforce, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Chrome, now available on the Sisense Marketplace. The Sisense Extense Framework will be released more broadly later this year to partners looking to build similar “infusion” apps.

Vertica Announces Vertica 11

On June 20, at Vertica Unify 2021, Vertica announced the Vertica 11 Analytics Platform. Key improvements include broader deployment support, strengthened security, increased analytical performance, and enhanced machine learning capabilities.

Funding

Cube Dev Raises $15.5 Million to Help Companies Build Applications with Cloud Data Warehouses

On July 19, Cube Dev announced that they had raised $15.5M in Series A funding. Decibel led this round, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Betaworks and Eniac Ventures. The funding will be used to scale go-to-market activities and accelerate R+D on its first commercial product. Cube Dev also brought aboard Jonathan E. Cowperthwait of npm as Head of Marketing and Jordan Philips of Dashbase as Head of Revenue Operations to support their commercial expansion.

Julia Computing Raises $24M in Series A, Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia Joins Board

Julia Computing announced the completion of a $24M Series A funding round on July 19. Dorilton Ventures led the round, with participation from Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, and HighSage Ventures. Julia Computing will use the funding to further develop JuliaHub, its secure, high-performance cloud platform for scientific and technical modeling, and to grow the Julia ecosystem overall. Bob Muglia, the former CEO of Snowflake, joined the Julia Computing board on the same day.

Lucata Raises $11.9 Million in Series B Funding to Introduce Next-Generation Computing Platform

Lucata, a platform to scale and accelerate graph analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities, announced July 19 that it had raised $11.9M in Series B funding. Notre Dame, Middleburg Capital Development, Blu Ventures Inc., Hunt Holdings, Maulick Capital, and Varian Capital all participated in the round. The funding will fuel an “aggressive” go-to-market strategy.

Acquisitions

Zoom to Acquire Five9

On July 18, Zoom announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Five9, a cloud contact center service provider, for $14.7B in stock. In welcoming Five9 to the Zoom platform, Zoom expects to build a better “customer engagement platform,” complementary with its Zoom Phone offering. Later in the week, Zoom also announced the launch of Zoom Apps and Zoom Events, further enhancing the collaboration capabilities of the primary Zoom video communications suite.

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

Product Launches and Enhancements

Informatica Announces Unified Data Governance and Catalog As-a-Service in the Cloud

On July 13, Informatica announced the launch of its Cloud Data Governance and Catalog solution as a key part of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud. As part of Informatica’s continuing expansion to the cloud, Informatica customers will now be able to do data cataloging, quality, data and machine learning model governance through the same “pane of glass.” Amalgam Insights has a forthcoming post on Informatica’s integration of data governance and machine learning model governance.

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon HealthLake

On July 15, Amazon debuted Amazon HealthLake, a data lake for healthcare and life sciences data that falls under HIPAA requirements. HealthLake uses machine learning to extract and appropriately transform unstructured health data to prepare it for use in analytics and AI models. The service is generally available now.

CognitiveScale Announces Launch Of Cortex Fabric Version 6

On July 15, CognitiveScale announced the release of Cortex Fabric Version 6, a low-code AI app development platform. Cortex 6 lets “citizen developers” build AI-based apps with their “Campaigns” visual framework, focusing on business optimization and process automation use cases.

GoodData and Vertica Partner to Accelerate Cloud-Native Self-Service Analytics Adoption in the Enterprise

GoodData and Vertica announced a strategic partnership on July 15. GoodData.CN, GoodData’s cloud native analytics services, will connect to Vertica’s data warehouse to allow non-technical users to perform self-service analytics.

Hazelcast Unveils Real-Time Intelligent Applications Platform

On July 14, Hazelcast announced the Hazelcast platform, which will allow users to merge streaming data with data at rest. Because Hazelcast can handle realtime event streams as well as access to data lakes and data warehouses, it can act as a single point of access for all types of data. Hazelcast is currently in beta; general availability is expected in August 2021. In addition, certain features of Hazelcast will also be available through the Hazelcast Platform for IBM Cloud Paks.

StrongBox Data Solutions Announces StrongLink 3.2

StrongBox Data Solutions announced the availability of StrongLink 3.2, a data management platform. StrongLink automates policy enforcement across a wide variety of data sources and storage types, aiming to eliminate data silos while providing replication to protect said data’s existence. StrongLink 3.2 is available immediately.

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

Funding

AnyVision Raises $235M from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Eldridge

AnyVision, a facial recognition AI company, has closed a $235M series C funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Eldridge. Amit Lubovsky, director of SoftBank Investment Advisors, will join the board as part of the transaction. Funding will be directed towards further development of AnyVision’s Access Point AI software, as well as further innovation of its SDKs for edge computing functionality. AnyVision’s funding announcement comes at an interesting time for facial recognition startups; concerns around data privacy are subjecting companies creating and using facial recognition to growing scrutiny.

Obviously AI Increases Seed Round Funding to $4.7M

Obviously AI, a no-code AutoML startup, has raised an additional $1.1M from the University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, as well as Trail Mix Ventures and B-Capital. The funding will go towards extending Obviously AI to serve more use cases, as well as expanding Obviously AI’s presence in Asian markets. The concept of no-code AI model building is the unicorn everyone dipping into data science is seeking, but Obviously AI is currently limited to supervised learning use cases, and broadening their scope to cover unsupervised learning is the next … obvious step.

Opaque Raises $9.5 Million Seed to Unlock Encrypted Data with Machine Learning

Opaque, a secure data analytics platform, announced July 7 that it had raised a seed round of $9.5M led by Intel Capital. Race Capital, The House Fund, and FactoryHQ also participated in this round. Opaque lets companies analyze encrypted cloud-based data without exposing the data to the cloud provider. Funding will go towards Opaque’s open source contributions to the data security community.

Product Launches and Updates

Immuta Becomes First Data Access Control Solution for Snowflake Partner Connect

On July 7, Immuta, a cloud data control access provider, announced its availability in the Snowflake Partner Connect portal. Snowflake users will now be able to use Immuta to configure automated data access control around their data. The Immuta Snowflake integration launches as an Immuta instance preconfigured with a Snowflake user’s connection credentials, minimizing setup complexity and time needed.

Hiring and Departing

Google announces Adaire Fox-Martin as its new EMEA Cloud president

Google Cloud has appointed Adaire Fox-Martin as its new EMEA Cloud president. Fox-Martin moves over from a 14-year tenure at SAP, most recently as an Executive Board Member leading Global Customer Success. Prior to that, Fox-Martin spent nearly two decades at Oracle.

IBM’s Jim Whitehurst Says He’s Leaving to Find a New Chance to Run Something

Over the holiday weekend, IBM announced that Jim Whitehurst would be stepping down as president, though he would remain in an advisory role for the time being. In an interview this week with Barrons, Whitehurst acknowledged that his reasoning is that he wants to be a CEO again, and with the appointment of Arvind Krishna to that spot at IBM, his own chances of holding that position were unlikely. Whitehurst had come over to IBM with the Red Hat acquisition, having held the CEO position there since 2007.

In anticipation of the long holiday weekend for Americans and Canadians, news was fairly light in the data world this week; most announcements were around updates and enhancements to existing products.

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

Product Launches and Updates

Tableau Extends Augmented Analytics in Tableau 2021.2

On June 29, Tableau announced the release of Tableau 2021.2, with new and enhanced augmented analytics capabilities. “Ask Data,” a capability that allows users to ask business questions of their data using natural language, and “Explain Data,” a function that provides explanations of data points, both have new interfaces that enhance users’ understanding of their data. Other new features in Tableau 2021.2 include the ability to save clean data from Tableau Prep into Google BigQuery, and to implement machine learning models from Amazon SageMaker within Tableau dashboards.

TIBCO Spotfire 11.4 LTS Release

TIBCO announced the release of Spotfire 11.4 LTS on June 30. Key features in this release include the ability for nontechnical users to embed advanced analytics functions into Spotfire apps, and over a dozen new custom visualizations and apps available as “Spotfire Mods” on the TIBCO Exchange.

Anaconda Collaborates with Intel to Improve Speed and Scale for Machine Learning Workflows

Anaconda announced enhancements to its ongoing partnership with Intel, including better access to libraries and packages optimized for Intel hardware to enhance the performance of machine learning models. Of note, the Intel Extension for Scikit-learn is now available in Anaconda’s package repository; Anaconda says models built using the extension run 27-36x faster than models based on the baseline Scikit-learn.

JetBrains: Announcing Datalore Enterprise

On June 29, JetBrains announced the availability of Datalore Enterprise, an on-premises collaborative version of their single-user cloud-based data science platform. Datalore Enterprise will provide JetBrains collaboration tools atop Jupyter Notebooks, along with existing features of Datalore such as PyCharm coding assistance tools.

Facebook AI Announces Habitat 2.0, plus Introducing the Habitat-Matterport 3D research data set

Finally, Facebook AI announced the latest version of their Habitat platform (Habitat 2.0), a simulation platform that lets AI researchers teach machines to navigate and interact with both virtual and physical 3D environments. Improvements include ReplicaCAD, an extension of Facebook’s Replica data set, built to support movement and object manipulation as a digital twin, In collaboration with Matterport, Facebook AI also published HM3D, an open-source licensed data set consisting of over 1,000 indoor 3D scans. (This last year, prospective property buyers couldn’t go to open houses, but they could at least investigate a given property’s digital twin, and Matterport supplied a number of these virtual house tours for property listings.) Future AI-enhanced assistants and robots will need to interact with complex 3D environments; advancing “embodied” AI will be a top priority in order to build such assistants. Suggested scenarios include asking one’s AI-enhanced glasses where your housekeys were last observed, or asking a robot to check your desk for your laptop and if it’s there, to bring it to you.