insideAI News Latest News – 3/3/2022

In this regular column, we’ll bring you all the latest industry news centered around our main topics of focus: big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. Our industry is constantly accelerating with new products and services being announced everyday. Fortunately, we’re in close touch with vendors from this vast ecosystem, so we’re in a unique position to inform you about all that’s new and exciting. Our massive industry database is growing all the time so stay tuned for the latest news items describing technology that may make you and your organization more competitive.

Unravel Data Unveils Most Advanced AI-Powered DataOps Observability Platform with Launch of its 2022 Winter Release

Unravel Data, the only data operations platform providing full-stack visibility and AI-powered recommendations to drive more reliable performance in modern data applications, today announced the general availability of its 2022 Winter Release of the Unravel Platform. With this new release, users of Unravel will be able to leverage AI-driven enhancements that reduce the complexity of their data pipelines, control cloud utilization costs for data applications, and realize faster time-to-value for data cloud migrations. More than 20 Fortune 100 brands, including two of the top five global pharmaceutical companies and three of the top 10 financial companies in the world, rely on Unravel to simplify the complexities of their modern data operations.

“Every company is a data company. However, the complexity of the modern data stack requires a completely new and intentional approach – one that can move at the speed and scale that today’s real-time enterprise demands,” said Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Unravel Data. “With this latest release, Unravel enables organizations to accelerate their cloud data migration initiatives with unmatched performance and reliability. The insights delivered by the Unravel platform also enable our customers to gain a more complete understanding of their cloud costs, delivering on our promise to radically simplify data operations.”

Uniphore Introduces Q for Sales: Real-Time EQ to Transform Remote B2B Buying Experiences

Uniphore, a leader in Conversational Automation, announced Q for Sales, the enterprise-level solution equipping sales organizations with a powerful emotional intelligence (EQ) based solution to drive positive, engaging and trusted customer interactions and outcomes. Built on Uniphore’s unique conversational AI and automation platform, Q for Sales leverages Computer Vision, Tonal Analysis, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to capture and make recommendations on the full emotional spectrum of sales conversations to boost close rates and performance of sales teams.

“Conversations and data associated with them have never been more important to organizations than today,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and Co-founder of Uniphore. “We know that every $1 invested in EQ results in $6 in sales. In developing Q for Sales, we took our experience developing the industry’s most powerful conversational AI and automation platform to create a solution that now measures real-time EQ, complete with analytics to supercharge sales teams. With Q for Sales, sales organizations will no longer be in the dark on what drives success and closes deals.”

Precisely Launches Property Graph to Streamline Data Enrichment and Build a Comprehensive View of Properties Faster and Easier

Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, today announced the launch of Property Graph, the newest addition to its Precisely Addresses product family, that makes it more efficient to see the relationships between data related to buildings, parcels, property attributes, addresses, and points of interest. The product equips customers with the most comprehensive view of properties possible, providing maximum context for location-driven decision making.

“We developed Property Graph in response to our customers’ need for a comprehensive view of properties – ensuring that it integrates seamlessly into business processes alongside our existing data enrichment products,” said Dan Adams, Senior Vice President of Data Strategy & Operations at Precisely. “Our deep spatial and data domain expertise enables us to understand the nuances between many data sources and create a product that is unparalleled in the market. Providing this level of context is essential for data integrity – it provides our customers with a solid foundation of trusted data for more confident decision-making.”

Directus Announces General Availability of Directus Cloud

Directus, a software company focused on democratizing data across the enterprise, announced general availability of Directus Cloud, the cloud version of its revolutionary Open Data Platform, Directus. A tiered offering built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Directus Cloud features a proven backend infrastructure, lightning-fast performance, a new more intuitive dashboard, and a growing number of cloud-exclusive extensions to enhance the platform’s features and capabilities. This announcement follows the recent introduction of Directus 9, completing the platform’s transition from beta to production-ready.

“Directus Cloud eliminates the heavy lift of designing, building, and maintaining infrastructure to support the Directus platform, so users can get up and running in seconds and focus on innovation,” said Ben Haynes, founder and CEO of Directus. “We’ve spent years obsessing over our cloud architecture so we can provide our customers with the most secure, performant, and scalable data infrastructure possible. Directus Cloud is incredibly fast, regardless of the size or location of your organization – whether you’re a small startup or a Fortune 100 company.”

Zoho Takes on Current Low-Code Market Gaps with New Creator Platform to Empower Businesses to Easily Build, Deploy, Manage, and Analyze Custom Solutions

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced the latest version of its low-code offering, Zoho Creator Platform, an all-in-one solution that bridges the gap between business users and IT teams by providing a low-code solution-building experience regardless of technical know-how. Organizations currently face soaring demand for new business software, but existing low-code platforms for business users only facilitate basic app building, lacking the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools. Existing solutions in the market designed specifically for business users facilitate only basic app building, lacking the complexity needed to develop end-to-end tools, which allow organizations to scale and ensure centralized governance.

“Outside of Zoho’s Creator Platform, few if any low-code solutions on the market allow business users or IT to engineer tools while simultaneously enabling IT teams to manage ongoing challenges of security, compliance, integration, and governance,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho. “The marriage of these two disciplines and user profiles is where we see the unique value of the Creator Platform.”

AI-powered solution disrupts predictive maintenance by automating it with sound

With the world relying more and more on manufacturing, downtime is becoming an increasing problem. Industrial manufacturers lose around $50 billion each year due to unplanned downtime in their plants – this causes delays which lead back to lost productivity and unhappy customers. Fortunately, the Czech company Neuron soundware has developed a new product that aims to address one of the industry’s biggest challenges- Predictive Maintenance. 

Sound analysis of the machines enables Neuron soundware to detect imminent failures that would mean costly repairs and production outages. The technology is based on an amalgamation of artificial intelligence built with neural networks, Machine Learning, and IoT device nBox, which receives and processes the data from sensors. This newest innovation in the world of predictive maintenance powered by Neuron soundware uses the sounds from machines to predict when they’ll break down. This new cutting-edge technology has been tested by leaders from different industries, including Prague Public Transport Company, Airbus, Siemens, and BMW – and it’s proven to be successful every time.

New Hazelcast Release Aims to Eliminate Waiting, Improve Accuracy of Insights on Real-Time Data

Hazelcast Inc. is raising the bar for creating real-time advantages with the latest release of its run anywhere, real-time data platform. The Hazelcast Platform enables enterprises to build business applications that take automated, immediate action on data, without the wait times associated with database writes and human intervention. The new release boosts the analytical capabilities of a real-time system by enabling greater situational context to event and streaming data as it is created, yielding more meaningful insights. The new release also adds extended query capabilities and higher availability via less maintenance downtime.

“When Hazelcast announced its platform last year, the ability to merge real-time data with historical context opened new possibilities to deliver the right offer or insights to the end-user at the right time,” said Manish Devgan, chief product officer at Hazelcast. “By being able to work with datasets at scale within the same data platform, businesses can now enable even better outcomes in a much shorter window of time-to-market.”

Cape Privacy Launches Self-Service Enterprise Solution to Enable Secure Predictions

Cape Privacy, the platform that enables businesses to run predictive machine learning models on encrypted data, announced the availability of its self-service enterprise solution optimized for the Snowflake data cloud. Businesses can now use Cape Privacy to employ encryption-in-use, securely operationalize their most highly classified data, and run predictive machine learning models on encrypted data stored in private clouds or in a third-party data cloud.

“When dealing with the most sensitive information in the world, such as financial data, it is critical that security is prioritized. That said, the potential benefit to the customer when using that data for insights cannot be ignored,” said Ché Wijesinghe, CEO at Cape Privacy. “There is an enormous amount of highly sensitive personal, financial and health-related data and intellectual property generated and collected each day that is not adequately protected. This is a growing risk that we see being exploited all the time. Giving organizations the ability to maintain encryption at all times, they can close that risk gap by achieving encryption-in-use and finally put their most sensitive data to work safely. That is what Cape Privacy is doing.”

Voltron Data Unveils Enterprise Subscription for Apache Arrow to Accelerate Data Access and Processing Across Business-Critical Applications

Voltron Data, the company accelerating standards in data analytics and the largest corporate contributor to Apache Arrow, announced its first commercial offering – the Voltron Enterprise Subscription for Arrow – for companies building with Arrow. Launching with several paying customers, it supports both new and existing Arrow users by providing exclusive access to features that will enhance the way companies build enterprise applications.

“After years of growth, Arrow is not only an open source standard but an enterprise standard as well. We are excited to launch this product focused on enabling enterprises—and the data platform companies that serve them—to take full advantage of the benefits of Arrow,” said Josh Patterson, co-founder and CEO of Voltron Data.

Anomalo Releases Pulse — A Unified Dashboard to Capture the Data Quality Health of the Entire Enterprise

Anomalo, the complete data quality platform company, introduced the Pulse dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of data quality in an organization and aggregates all the data quality vitals in one place. For the first time, executives have unprecedented visibility of the health of their data quality across the entire enterprise.

“As customers deploy Anomalo, they want to understand if data quality is improving over time and if they’re doing a better job with the health of their data. Pulse answers that question,“ said Elliot Shmukler, co-founder and CEO of Anomalo.

Stardog Streamlines Enterprise Data Analytics at Scale with New Stardog Designer

Stardog, a leading Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) platform provider, unveiled Stardog Designer, a no-code, visual environment for creating knowledge graphs, which help data and analytics teams to easily apply knowledge graph technology in their work, improving productivity and enabling better, data-informed decisions.

“Stardog has long been a favorite to help data and analytics teams to connect and relate data to unleash analytics that fuel data-informed decisions,” said Kendall Clark, cofounder and CEO at Stardog. “Our newest release is making it easier for data engineers and data scientists to leverage the value of knowledge graph now and ignite their organization’s data fabric journey.”

OpenText Powers Information-led Transformations and Resilient Supply Chains

OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX), (TSX: OTEX) announced Cloud Editions 22.1 (CE 22.1) featuring new and enhanced innovations that enable organizations to leverage information for digital business transformations. As part of OpenText’s ongoing commitment to better customer, partner, and employee experiences, CE 22.1 enables resiliency through information management in the cloud at scale.

“Every organization is thinking about new customer and employee experiences to meet the dynamic needs of modern work,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, OpenText CEO & CTO. “Cloud Editions 22.1 delivers powerful new tools and capabilities to help businesses digitize their most essential business networks and ensure growth is inclusive and sustainable.”

Imply Announces Polaris, a Cloud Database Service for Modern Analytics Applications

Imply, the company founded by the original creators of Apache Druid®, unveiled the first milestone in Project Shapeshift, the 12-month initiative designed to solve the most pressing issues developers face when building analytics applications. The announcement includes a cloud database service built from Apache Druid and the private preview of a multi-stage query engine for Druid. Together, these innovations show how Imply delivers the most developer-friendly and capable database for analytics applications.

“Today, we are at an inflection point with the adoption of Apache Druid as every organization now needs to build modern analytics applications,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO and co-founder, Imply. “This is why it’s now time to take Druid to the next level. Project Shapeshift is all about making things easier for developers, so they can drive the analytics evolution inside their companies.” 

New Open Source Software Quine Streaming Graph Released to Simplify Event Processing on Data in Motion

thatDot, Inc., a pioneer in complex event stream processing software, released Quine. Quine’s unique approach combines graph data and streaming technologies into a modern, developer-friendly open source software package. Developers and data pipeline engineers use Quine to rapidly build high volume, real-time, complex event processing workflows at scale. A handful of Quine queries can replace months of development time and millions in costs, eliminating batch processing, multi-level joins, time windows, and other time-consuming and outdated processes that drag down and stall analysis on streaming data. 

“Enterprise data engineering teams are confined to the limitations and tradeoffs of the previous generation of event processing frameworks like Flink. They spend enormous time and effort building complicated event-driven architectures that only work on small time-windows of in-memory data and miss out on the bigger picture,” said Ryan Wright, the creator of Quine and Founder/CEO of thatDot. “Quine can transform months of tedious data engineering into an afternoon’s work enabling data pipeline engineers to easily interpret high-volume event data streams, innovate and ship products  faster, and to use the emerging Graph AI tools driving the next wave in machine learning.”

Couchbase Launches Couchbase Mobile 3, Making it Easier for Developers to Build Modern Applications Across Mobile, Desktop and Embedded IoT Devices

Couchbase, Inc. (NASDAQ: BASE), provider of a leading modern database for enterprise applications, announced Couchbase Mobile 3, an edge-ready data platform that empowers mobile developers and edge architects to build fully native, modern applications in the cloud, at the edge and on mobile and IoT devices using the language, frameworks and platform of their choice. Couchbase Mobile 3 introduces an industry-first embedded document database for mobile, desktop and custom embedded hardware with built in synchronization capabilities. With Couchbase Mobile 3’s strengthened edge capabilities, development teams can focus on the core competency of their applications without worrying about speed and connectivity issues.

“Customers increasingly require mobile and edge capabilities to meet modern application demands and data must always be available so the app always performs at unmatched speed,” said Wayne Carter, vice president of Engineering, Couchbase. “With Couchbase Mobile 3, we have simplified development and management of complex data synchronization tasks. Our first of its kind, modern embedded database allows customers to easily build dynamic applications from the cloud to the edge, while leveraging their existing skills and code.” 

New StormForge Optimize Live Uses Machine Learning to Intelligently and Automatically Improve Application Performance and Cost Efficiency in Cloud Native Production Environments 

StormForge, a leader in cloud-native application performance testing and resource optimization, announced StormForge Optimize Live, a new solution for automatically and intelligently improving the efficiency of production environments. Optimize Live analyzes existing observability data using machine learning to recommend real-time configuration changes that reduce resource usage and cost while ensuring application performance. The new solution is part of the StormForge platform, which now closes the loop between pre-production and production optimization to proactively and continuously ensure peak efficiency for organizations using Kubernetes.

“StormForge Optimize Live builds out the StormForge platform to deliver the first intelligent optimization for cloud native pre-production and production cloud native environments,” said Matt Provo, CEO and founder, StormForge. “StormForge informs, optimizes and operates throughout the entire cloud-native development cycle for both developers and operations managers who require an intelligent and comprehensive platform that maximizes their returns on Kubernetes investments. This is how we all realize the promise of Kubernetes and cloud native.”

Databricks Launches Lakehouse for Financial Services to Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation Across the Industry 

Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse architecture, announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services, an open, modern data platform tailored to customer use cases across the Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets sectors. As the financial sector moves to embrace open source and cloud technology to drive innovation, Databricks customers and industry partners like Avanade, Deloitte, FINOS, Gemini, Nasdaq and TD Bank  are accelerating the time-to-value of their data assets with the Lakehouse for Financial Services. 

“For Financial Service Institutions around the world looking to modernize and innovate, the two most important assets are no longer its capital or sheer scale, but its data and its people,” said Junta Nakai, RVP, Financial Services Global Industry Leader at Databricks. “The Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services brings these two critical resources together on a secure, collaborative and open source-based data platform that allows FSIs to leverage data across clouds and drive innovation with AI.”

Deci’s New Family of Models Delivers Breakthrough Deep Learning Performance on CPU 

Deci, the deep learning company harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to build AI, announced a new set of industry-leading image classification models, dubbed DeciNets, for Intel Cascade Lake CPUs. Deci’s proprietary Automated Neural Architecture Construction (AutoNAC) technology automatically generated the new image classification models that significantly improve all published models and deliver more than 2x improvement in runtime, coupled with improved accuracy, as compared to the most powerful models publicly available such as EfficientNets, developed by Google.

While GPUs have traditionally been the hardware of choice for running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), CPUs, already more commonly utilized for various computing tasks, would serve as a much cheaper alternative. Although it is possible to run deep learning inference on CPUs, generally they are significantly less powerful than GPUs. Consequently, deep learning models typically perform 3-10X slower on a CPU than on a GPU. 

DeciNets closes the gap significantly between GPU and CPU performance for CNNs. With DeciNets, tasks that previously could not be carried out on a CPU because they were too resource intensive are now possible. Additionally, these tasks will see a marked performance improvement: by leveraging DeciNets, the gap between a model’s inference performance on a GPU versus a CPU is cut in half, without sacrificing the model’s accuracy.

“As deep learning practitioners, our goal is not only to find the most accurate models, but  to uncover the most resource-efficient models which work seamlessly in production – this combination of effectiveness and accuracy constitutes the ‘holy grail’ of deep learning,” said Yonatan Geifman, co-founder and CEO of Deci. “AutoNAC creates the best computer vision models to date, and now, the new class of DeciNets can be applied and effectively run AI applications on CPUs.”

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