On a monthly basis, I will be rounding up key news associated with the Data Science Platforms space for Amalgam Insights. Companies covered will include: Alteryx, Amazon, Anaconda, Cambridge Semantics, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot, Datawatch, Domino, Elastic, Google, H2O.ai, IBM, Immuta, Informatica, KNIME, MathWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, Paxata, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS, Tableau, Talend, Teradata, TIBCO, Trifacta, TROVE.
Domino announced key updates to its data science platform at Rev 2, its annual data science leader summit. For data science managers, the new Control Center provides information on what an organization’s data science team members are doing, helping managers address any blocking issues and prioritize projects appropriately. The Experiment Manager’s new Activity Feed supplies data scientists with better organizational and tracking capabilities on their experiments. The Compute Grid and Compute Engine, built on Kubernetes, will make it easier for IT teams to install and administer Domino, even in complex hybrid cloud environments. Finally, the beta Domino Community Forum will allow Domino users to share best practices with each other, as well as submit feature requests and feedback to Domino directly. With governance becoming a top priority across data science practices, Domino’s platform improvements around monitoring and making experiments repeatable will make this important ability easier for its users.
At Informatica World, Informatica publicized a number of key partnerships, both new and enhanced. Most of these partnerships involve additional support for cloud services. This includes storage, both data warehouses (Amazon Redshift) and data lakes (Azure, Databricks). Informatica also announced a new Tableau Dashboard Extension that enables Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog from within the Tableau platform. Finally, Informatica and Google Cloud are broadening their existing partnership by making Intelligent Cloud Services available on Google Cloud Platform, and providing increased support for Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataproc within Informatica. Amalgam Insights attended Informatica World and provides a deeper assessment of Informatica’s partnerships, as well as CLAIRE-ity on Informatica’s AI initiatives.
Microsoft announced a number of new Azure Machine Learning and Azure AI capabilities. Azure Machine Learning has been integrated with Azure DevOps to provide “MLOps” capabilities that enable reproducibility, auditability, and automation of the full machine learning lifecycle. This marks a notable increase in making the machine learning model process more governable and compliant with regulatory needs. Azure Machine Learning also has a new visual drag-and-drop interface to facilitate codeless machine learning model creation, making the process of building machine learning models more user-friendly. On the Azure AI side, Azure Cognitive Services launched Personalizer, which provides users with specific recommendations to inform their decision-making process. Personalizer is part of the new “Decisions” category within Azure Cognitive Services; other Decisions services include Content Moderator, an API to assist in moderation and reviewing of text, images, and videos; and Anomaly Detector, an API that ingests time-series data and chooses an appropriate anomaly detection model for that data. Finally, Microsoft added a “cognitive search” capability to Azure Search, which allows customers to apply Cognitive Services algorithms to search results of their structured and unstructured content.
Microsoft also announced a partnership with General Assembly to address the dearth of qualified data workers, with the goal of training 15,000 workers by 2022 for various artificial intelligence and machine learning roles. The two companies will found an AI Standards Board to create standards and credentials for artificial intelligence skills. In addition, Microsoft and General Assembly will develop scalable training solutions for Microsoft customers, and establish an AI Talent network to connect qualified candidates to AI jobs. This continues the trend of major enterprises building internal training programs to bridge the data skills gap.
Key Stakeholders: 
