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.
Akamai Launches Linode Managed Database
Akamai Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, launched a managed database service powered by Linode with support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB. Akamai’s Linode Managed Database simplifies database deployment, helping developers reduce risk, increase efficiency, and minimize the complexity that comes with manual management of production database clusters. Managed databases have been the most requested product by Linode customers. The launch of Linode Managed Database service marks Akamai’s first product launch in its compute line of business following its acquisition of Linode in March of this year, reinforcing its mission to develop the world’s most powerful and distributed compute platform from cloud to edge.
“Every web application needs a database,” said Will Charnock, Senior Director of Engineering, Akamai, Compute. “Being able to automate aspects of database management is critical for applications that need to be scalable, highly performant, and resilient. Linode Managed Database continues the important work, which began with Linode Kubernetes Engine – our managed Kubernetes service – of supporting developers, businesses, and partners by managing the day-to-day tasks of of mission critical components of their applications, allowing them to focus more on innovation and less on daily infrastructure management. With the click of a button, developers can have a fully managed database deployed and ready to be populated.”
Vic.ai Announces Spend Intelligence for Prescriptive Cost Optimization
Vic.ai, the artificial intelligence (AI) platform for autonomous accounting and real-time insights, announced it has broken ground on Vic.ai Spend Intelligence, a first-of-its-kind prescriptive AI technology for advanced enterprise-grade cost optimization. Vic.ai Spend Intelligence will provide predictive insights for Vic.ai customers with a stream of spend reduction initiatives, helping them save as much as 15% of their cost base in certain categories and on average 2-8% of customers’ total existing cost base.
“With Spend Intelligence, we continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do for finance,” said Alexander Hagerup, CEO of Vic.ai. “The spend management insights will help dramatically improve their control over spending across functions and business units. In addition to cost reductions, we’ll eventually track and monitor carbon footprint to help companies calculate and reduce CO2 emissions. We look forward to working more closely, and more prescriptively, with our customers to pinpoint changes that will translate into significant cost and environmental savings.”
Aerospike Unveils Database 6
Aerospike Inc. announced the general availability of Aerospike Database 6, a significant new release of the core engine that powers the popular Aerospike Real-time Data Platform. Aerospike Database 6 provides developers an environment that supports multiple programming models to build real-time applications with predictable performance at any scale for which Aerospike is renowned.
Aerospike Database 6.0 is the first real-time database with native support for JSON document models at an unlimited scale. The release adds enhanced support for Java programming models, including JSONpath query support to store, search, and better manage complex data sets and workloads. The release allows Aeropsike to support large-scale data models in instances across the enterprise and positions the company to add Time Series, Graph, and more data models in future releases.
“Market leaders—the disruptors in their industries—build with Aerospike to meet the insatiable demand for instant experiences in the Right-Now Economy™,” said Subbu Iyer, CEO of Aerospike. “Our Real-time Data Platform, powered by Aerospike Database 6, delivers predictable sub-millisecond performance, low latency, and unlimited scale, all at an affordable cost for many different data models across the enterprise. Companies that start with Aerospike future proof their real-time data stack for ongoing growth and success.”
ServiceTitan Launches Titan Intelligence, Bringing AI To The Trades
ServiceTitan, a leading cloud-based software platform built to power the trades, announced the launch of Titan Intelligence (TI), a suite of AI solutions for the trades. These new features provide home and commercial service providers with actionable insights and recommendations, enabling them to optimize, automate, predict, and innovate across every aspect of their business by harnessing the power of data. Natively built into ServiceTitan, Titan Intelligence will deliver trade-specific AI capabilities across its entire suite of new data products and feature enhancements. With aggregated intelligence and insights, and educational content products on data and analytic literacy, Titan Intelligence will evolve into powerful AI solutions that supercharge trades businesses and empower contractors to reach the level of success they deserve.
“Titan Intelligence is bringing the power of data and AI to the trades on a scale that has never been seen before,” said Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder and President of ServiceTitan. “This industry will no longer have to wait years, or even decades, to take advantage of modern technology innovations. The launch of Titan Intelligence represents a giant leap forward for the trades, and another example of ServiceTitan’s commitment to provide contractors with access to the best technology to fuel their business.”
Ocient Announces General Availability of the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse Version 19
Ocient, a leading hyperscale data analytics solutions company serving organizations that derive value from analyzing trillions of data records in interactive time, announced the general availability of version 19 of the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse. Earlier versions of Ocient have been successfully used for hyperscale solution deployments over the past year with a select group of enterprise customers.
Engineered to deliver unmatched price-performance for rapid complex and continuous analysis of massive structured and semi-structured datasets, the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse enables organizations to execute previously infeasible workloads in interactive time. With Ocient, organizations can tackle CPU-intensive workloads with ease, including large-scale joins and full-table scans with extreme I/O performance, returning results in seconds or minutes versus hours or days.
“The Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse started as a research project over six years ago and is now a full-fledged, enterprise-ready product designed from the ground up to maximize price performance at every layer. We also help customers realize the benefits of hyperscale data analytics as quickly as possible through a customer-centric go-to-market model that is rare in the industry. We’ve seen customers transform their businesses with the rapid, interactive, and virtually limitless insights possible with the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse and look forward to continually helping them scale with their data growth and use of modern analytics to achieve impactful business results,” said Chris Gladwin, co-founder and CEO, Ocient.
Iterative to Launch Open Source Tool, First to Train Machine Learning Models on Any Cloud using HashiCorp’s Terraform Solution
Iterative, the MLOps company dedicated to streamlining the workflow of data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers, announced a new open source compute orchestration tool using Terraform, a solution by HashiCorp, Inc., the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software.
Terraform Provider Iterative (TPI) is the first product on HashiCorp’s Terraform technology stack to simplify ML training on any cloud while helping infrastructure and ML teams to save significant time and money in maintaining and configuring their training resources. Built on Terraform by HashiCorp, an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services, TPI allows data scientists to deploy workloads without having to figure out the infrastructure.
“We chose Terraform as the de facto standard for defining the infrastructure-as-code approach,” said Dmitry Petrov, co-founder and CEO of Iterative. “TPI extends Terraform to fit with machine learning workloads and use cases. It can handle spot instance recovery and lets ML jobs continue running on another instance when one is terminated.”
Making The Power Of Vision AI More Attainable, Plainsight Launches On-Demand Platform with Free, Unlimited Data Labeling
Plainsight, a leader in proven vision AI, introduced its On-Demand SaaS platform for end-to-end, no-code computer vision workflows and fully integrated features. With free, unlimited labels and a $100 credit for pay-as-you-go features, Plainsight makes production-ready computer vision and real-time video analytics more attainable to more users than ever before. Plainsight is expanding its product portfolio with this On-Demand platform to reach beyond the large enterprise to put the power of vision AI into the hands of all users.
Data scientists, machine learning engineers, subject matter experts, and businesses of every size are demanding new ways to easily manage and analyze massive amounts of video footage, still images, and other visual data. Until now, the high cost, numerous tools, specialized expertise, and time commitment required to build and maintain a production-level system for building, training, and deploying computer vision models has made it difficult for experts and impossible for non-technical users. By streamlining the entire machine learning lifecycle with one intuitive interface, Plainsight™ On-Demand breaks down the barriers related to cost, complexity, and exclusivity.
“Making the power of computer vision easier to use is at the heart of Plainsight’s mission,” says Plainsight Co-Founder and CEO Carlos Anchia. “Organizations of all sizes, in every industry, are already capturing visual data, and many are well aware of its potential to transform their operations. What’s missing—for far too many—is the means to realize that value. The launch of Plainsight On-Demand significantly lowers the barrier to entry for users of all technical capabilities to put their visual data to work today.”
Precisely Extends Data Integrity Leadership with New Geo Addressing Innovations
Precisely, a leader in data integrity, announced new geo addressing capabilities to easily verify, cleanse, and geocode address data in enterprise business systems such as CRM, Billing, ERP, Workforce Management, and more. New geo addressing innovations launching from Precisely include enhanced address autocompletion, sophisticated matching algorithms, and new metadata options. The global reach of these market-leading capabilities is also being expanded through availability of Master Location Data in the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Finland – joining existing coverage in the US and Canada. Further expansion is planned throughout the year.
“We continue to innovate and extend our leadership in geo addressing, unlocking unparalleled levels of data context, which enables data integrity,” said Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer at Precisely. “We are broadening the reach of these best-in-class capabilities by bringing them to more places around the world and making them more accessible through flexible pricing and deployment options.”
StreamNative Cloud for Kafka: A Cloud-Native Managed Kafka Service Without the Limits of Kafka
StreamNative, the cloud-native messaging and streaming platform founded by the original developers of Apache Pulsar®, announced StreamNative Cloud for Kafka, a managed solution that supports Kafka protocol but operates Apache Pulsar under the hood.
“Kafka is a widely-adopted technology and organizations have been able to build a broad number of streaming use cases on top of it. But, it doesn’t come without challenges. For example, for use cases where data needs to be segmented into tens of thousands of granular topics, Kafka often struggles with poor performance. Or, for teams with a large number of microservices, the lack of native multi-tenancy often leads to a large number of Kafka clusters, typically with low utilization. StreamNative Cloud for Kafka helps to remove current Kafka limitations without having to change your application code,” Addison Higham, Head of Product, StreamNative.
Infinidat Unveils the InfiniBox SSA II Solid State Array: Faster Performance, Expanded AIOps, and Comprehensive Cyber Resilience
Infinidat, a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions, announced the InfiniBox™ SSA II, the next generation solid state array in the company’s broad portfolio of storage and cyber resilient solutions. With this announcement, Infinidat is extending its groundbreaking cyber resilient capabilities with InfiniSafe® to primary storage and rolling out significant enhancements to the performance, AIOps, and efficiency of the company’s first generation of the InfiniBox SSA. The new InfiniBox SSA II now stands as the industry’s fastest all-flash storage array with unprecedented low latency.
“Infinidat is accelerating its business with the InfiniBox solid state array platform, expanding our opportunities and capturing all-flash wins in the enterprise storage market where the highest levels of performance and availability, extensive cyber resilience, and cost-effectiveness are required for the most demanding applications and workloads,” said Phil Bullinger, CEO at Infinidat. “We have a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise storage and cyber resilient solutions powered by a common software architecture across our InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA II and InfiniGuard platforms, having expanded and enhanced the value and capabilities we are bringing to our customers extensively since early 2021.”
TIBCO WebFOCUS Humanizes the User Experience and Dynamically Scales for Efficiency and Business Continuity
TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in enterprise data, empowers its customers to connect, unify, and confidently predict business outcomes, solving the world’s most complex data-driven challenges. TIBCO announced the release of TIBCO WebFOCUS® 9.0.0, packed with powerful new capabilities like TIBCO WebFOCUS® Container Edition and a Hub for an entirely personalized user experience, along with significant enhancements for TIBCO WebFOCUS® Designer. These innovative features further strengthen the AI/ML experience for business users, analysts, and engineers, leveraging data and analytics from across the entire enterprise.
“Valuable data and AI/ML algorithms flow through absolutely every corner of an organization. The use of visual discovery and improved data management enables users and developers to turn that raw data into truly meaningful insights,” said Mark Palmer, senior vice president, engineering, TIBCO. “This game-changing release of TIBCO WebFOCUS supports a containerized, cloud-native deployment, which includes dynamic auto-scaling to drive overall infrastructure and cloud costs down, allowing customers to pay only for what they use.”
Speechmatics tackles one of machine learning’s biggest challenges, adding formatting of numbers, dates, addresses and more to its Autonomous Speech Recognition Solutions
Speechmatics, a leading speech recognition technology scaleup, launched a major step in delivering truly comprehensive speech recognition by adding Entity Formatting functionality to its Autonomous Speech Recognition (ASR) software. Tackling one of machine learning’s biggest challenges, using Inverse Text Normalization (ITN), the software’s ability to consistently and more accurately interpret how entities such as numbers, currencies, percentages, addresses, dates and times should appear in written form makes transcripts more readable and reduces post-processing work.
This update makes using speech recognition technology significantly more valuable to enterprise-level customers, where there is a higher dependency on the consistent and appropriate formatting of numbers in text, such as those in media, financial services and healthcare. Entity Formatting is notoriously challenging in speech recognition because the way that entities are spoken in conversation varies – even between countries that speak the same language – which adds layers of complexity. Telephone numbers are a great example where people might use ‘oh’ instead of ‘zero’ or use double/triple digits such as ‘triple three’.
“Creating a more professional transcript will speed up our customers’ workflows by making large numbers easier to read, requiring less human editing,” says Katy Wigdahl, CEO of Speechmatics. “Context is also critical – there are so many nuances and ambiguities that need to be accounted for in language, such as whether ‘pounds’ is a reference to weight or currency? And whether ‘venti’ is being used as the Italian word for 20 or winds?”
Satori Expands Database Integration Options, Now Offers Full Relational Database Support with Addition of MySQL, CockroachDB and MariaDB
Satori, creator of the first Universal Data Access Service for cloud-based data stores and infrastructure, today announced that it is adding support for three of the most popular relational databases – MySQL, CockroachDB and MariaDB. Users can now control access to data stored in these databases in a streamlined, secure and non-disruptive way.
“Our customers were asking for a scalable way to provide secure and frictionless access to MySQL, without slowing down innovation and hindering business growth,” said Yoav Cohen, CTO, Satori. “As new choices like CockroachDB and MariaDB see rapid adoption within the enterprise, we also saw the need to meet the growing demand for managing access to sensitive data in these databases while realizing the vision of universal data access. Now Satori customers can hook into these popular services, alongside other leading data platforms including Amazon Redshift and Snowflake, without having to build such capabilities themselves.”
Introducing Neo4j Graph Data Science as a Service
Neo4jⓇ, a leading graph data platform, announced Neo4j Graph Data Science, the company’s comprehensive graph analytics workspace built for data scientists, is now available with new and enhanced capabilities, and as a fully managed cloud service called AuraDS. AI and machine learning (ML) have propelled the use of predictive data architectures and their application across a broad range of use cases like recommendation engines, fraud detection, and customer 360 scenarios. The accuracy of these models is highly correlated to the completeness of context.
The Neo4j Graph Data Science is designed to make it easy for data scientists to achieve greater predictive accuracy with comprehensive graph analysis techniques. Users can improve models through a library of graph algorithms, ML pipelines, and data science methods. Neo4j Graph Data Science has been widely adopted and is trusted to perform at scale, easily handling hundreds of billions of nodes and relationships.
Datalogz Unveils Datalogz Cloud to Help Users Unlock their Full Data Potential
Datalogz, the pioneering data management solutions provider, has unveiled a renewed version of its platform, Datalogz Cloud, to empower a broader user base to unlock their full data potential. Datalogz Cloud is a free and ready-to-use data management and documentation platform that offers a comprehensive alternative for data users to make data more understandable and insightful. Datalogz Cloud replaces the need to document data in Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, or Notion boards. It creates one centralized cloud workspace that is engineered to speak with your data and provide a comprehensive and collaborative documentation environment.
“With Datalogz, data discovery is more like a Google search. Analysts simply type in the keywords of the data they’re looking for within their ecosystem and instantly receive high-quality, relevant data resources ready for immediate use in the analysis. They don’t have to wonder if the data is outdated or spend hours or days searching it out and guessing its meaning. They simply get straight to work uncovering the insights that keep driving their business forward,” said CEO Logan Havern.
Cloudreach, an Atos Company, Launches Sunstone™ to Enable Continuous Cloud Modernization
Cloudreach, an Atos company, the leading multi-cloud services provider, announced the launch of Sunstone, a breakthrough software platform designed to accelerate the modernization of in-cloud environments. Through the use of AI and machine learning technologies, Sunstone automates the continuous modernization of in-cloud applications to drive innovation, boost performance, increase security and reduce costs.
“As businesses see an increased need for cloud adoption and investment, they will need a solution that can quickly onboard their infrastructure and make it cloud-ready,” said Brooks Borcherding, CEO at Cloudreach “Sunstone will provide organizations the tools they need to move towards innovative cloud technology that modernizes workloads and operating models in a way that is aligned to business goals”
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