insideAI News Latest News – 5/24/2022

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.

VAST Data Answers the Customer Call For More Speed, Scale and Security With Newest Feature Releases

VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI-powered world, announced the latest versions of Universal Storage, bringing enhanced enterprise security features, performance and scale to its flagship software offering. With an install base of multiple exabytes and an annual growth rate of 300%, customers are continually challenging VAST with new feature requests to power their data-intensive use cases. This release, in total, represents more than 30 new features that have been directly requested by VAST customers. Testament to VAST’s distinguished R&D team, the average turnaround of “feature request to code” is four months.   

“Since our founding, we have always maintained a customer-first mindset, continuously adding new features and functionality at a rapid pace to solve their ever-growing and changing application needs,” said Jeff Denworth, co-founder of VAST Data. “Ultimately, we work to foster a close collaboration with our customers whose use cases are our product’s North Star. This level of agility is never seen from legacy providers of data infrastructure. Our responsive approach not only helps our customers manage their data easier, it also creates long-term business partnerships with customers and the broader market that is good for VAST.” 

Tamr Introduces Tamr Enrich to Simplify and Improve the Data Mastering Process

Tamr, a leading cloud-native data mastering solution, announced the introduction of Tamr Enrich, a set of enrichment services built natively into the data mastering process. Using Tamr’s patented human-guided machine learning, Tamr Enrich curates and actively manages external datasets and services, enabling customers to seamlessly embed trusted, high-quality external data insights to their data mastering pipelines for richer business.

“Companies go to great lengths, spending millions of dollars to attempt to derive business value from disparate data sources,” said Anthony Deighton, Tamr’s chief product officer. “We’re excited to offer a built-in solution that provides one-click simplicity and makes customers’ data cleaner and more complete.”

Franz’s AllegroGraph 7.3 Extends GraphQL to Knowledge Graph Developers and Enterprise Data Fabrics

Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Graph Database technology for Entity-Event Knowledge Graph Solutions, announced AllegroGraph 7.3, with enhanced GraphQL query capabilities for distributed Knowledge Graphs and Enterprise Data Fabrics. With AllegroGraph’s GraphQL APIs, developers can create performant and more complex data-driven applications. GraphQL’s unique capability to fetch the exact and specific data in a single request delivers flexibility to Knowledge Graph developers.

“GraphQL’s increasing industry adoption in combination with AllegroGraph’s FedShard and Entity-Event Modeling capabilities provide AI application developers and data architects with both the ease and flexibility to create very powerful data-driven applications across the enterprise,” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc. “Now when organizations need to integrate multiple systems from large legacy infrastructures and add new data to deliver a rich AI application – they can do so more quickly and easily using AllegroGraph and GraphQL APIs.”

GitLab 15 Provides Replacement for Do-It-Yourself DevOps with The One DevOps Platform

GitLab Inc. (NASDAQ: GTLB), provider of The One DevOps Platform, announced the launch of its next major iteration, GitLab 15, starting with its first release version, 15.0, bringing forward new cutting edge DevOps capabilities in one platform. GitLab 15 helps companies develop and collaborate around business-critical code to deliver software securely and achieve desired business results through its comprehensive DevOps capabilities. We believe upcoming releases will enhance the platform’s capabilities in solution areas including visibility and observability, continuous security and compliance, enterprise agile planning, and workflow automation and support for data science workloads. 

“In today’s highly competitive landscape, organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver software faster and more securely. They need a more mature, comprehensive platform to improve their time to market,” said David DeSanto, VP of Product at GitLab. “GitLab solves this problem with The One DevOps Platform. Organizations can do away with their do-it-yourself (DIY) DevOps toolchains and bring teams together from planning to product in a single application, enabling them to ship secure code faster, achieve business results, and improve their teams’ experience and collaboration.” 

Komprise Automates Unstructured Data Discovery with Smart Data Workflows

Komprise, a leader in analytics-driven unstructured data management and mobility, announced Komprise Smart Data Workflows, a systematic process to discover relevant file and object data across cloud, edge and on-premises data centers and feed data in native format to AI and machine learning (ML) tools and data lakes. Industry analysts predict that at least 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured by 2025. This data is critical for AI and ML-driven applications and insights, yet much of it is locked away in disparate data storage silos. This creates an unstructured data blind spot, resulting in billions of dollars in missed big data opportunities.

“Whether it’s massive volumes of genomics data, surveillance data, IoT, GDPR or user shares across the enterprise, Komprise Smart Data Workflows orchestrate the information lifecycle of this data in the cloud to efficiently find, enrich and move the data you need for analytics projects,” says Kumar Goswami, CEO of Komprise. “We are excited to move to this next phase of our product journey, making it much easier to manage and mobilize massive volumes of unstructured data for cost reduction, compliance and business value.”

Ahana Announces New Presto Query Analyzer to Bring Instant Insights into Presto Clusters

Ahana, the SaaS for Presto, announced a new tool for Presto users called the Presto Query Analyzer. With the Presto Query Analyzer, data platform teams can get instant insights into their Presto clusters including query performance, bandwidth bottlenecks, and much more. The Presto Query Analyzer was built for the Presto community and is free to use. Presto has become the SQL query engine of choice for the open data lakehouse. The open data lakehouse brings the reliability and performance of the data warehouse together with the flexibility and simplicity of the data lake, enabling data warehouse workloads to run alongside machine learning workloads. Presto on the open data lakehouse enables much better price performance as compared to expensive data warehousing solutions. As more companies are moving to an open data lakehouse approach with Presto as its engine, having more insights into query performance, workloads, resource consumption, and much more is critical.

“We built the Presto Query Analyzer to help data platform teams get deeper insights into their Presto clusters, and we are thrilled to be making this tool freely available to the broader Presto community,” said Steven Mih, Cofounder & CEO, Ahana. “As we see the growth and adoption of Presto continue to skyrocket, our mission is to help Presto users get started and be successful with the open source project. The Presto Query Analyzer will help teams get even more out of their Presto usage, and we look forward to doing even more for the community in the upcoming months.”

Apollo GraphQL Introduces the Supergraph, Enabling the Future of Composable Businesses

Apollo GraphQL introduced the supergraph, a network of a company’s data, microservices and digital capabilities, that empowers product and engineering teams to quickly create incredible experiences for their customers. A supergraph acts as a composition layer facilitating collaboration between backend data and services, and frontend apps and devices. Though composability exists in other layers of a modern tech stack, the way companies make new products and app experiences is still rigid and highly dependent on the tools, technologies and processes they have in place. Because of this, front-end teams bear the burden of sourcing and orchestrating data, fine-grained APIs, microservices and different client applications whenever they build new products and app experiences. The supergraph eliminates that complexity by enabling and automating organization-wide composability that delivers better performance and near infinite ways to rapidly orchestrate and recombine business domain models to meet future needs at any scale.

“The supergraph is a new way to think about GraphQL,” said Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo GraphQL. “It’s more than a way to connect front-end applications to the data and services they need to run – it’s a composition layer that can span an entire organization. We’ve already seen supergraphs become the standard GraphQL implementation powering some of the world’s most complex digital experiences. It’s a declarative and modular architecture that anyone can use and standardize around.”

Percona Announces General Availability of Percona Platform

Percona, a leader in open source database software and services, announced the general availability of Percona Platform, which brings the company’s expertise with databases including MySQL®, PostgreSQL® and MongoDB® together alongside services, management and automated insights into a single product. Using the company’s experience in managing and improving some of the largest database installations in the world, Percona Platform helps users monitor, manage, secure and optimize their database instances across any infrastructure. 

“Percona Platform brings the experience and expertise that we have built up over the years and puts it in the hands of developers and database administrators to use. It includes AI-powered recommendations that help users improve performance, management and security, as well as making it easier to scale up and manage their instances over time. With Percona Platform, we thought about how to improve the experience for developers and DBAs around running their data workloads, and how to help people achieve their goals faster around managing databases as part of their overall approach,” said Donnie Berkholz, Senior Vice President Product at Percona.

Lightbend Launches Kalix, A Revolutionary Approach to Simplifying Cloud-Based App Development for Global Teams 

Lightbend, the company providing cloud-native microservice frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, announced the launch of Kalix, a unique, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that delivers a new programming model and holistic Developer Experience (DX) designed specifically for the cloud and edge. By doing so, Kalix serves as the next stage in the evolution of serverless computing. Kalix works in concert with underlying cloud infrastructure in maintaining application properties and requirements on behalf of its users, enabling developers to use the skills they already have to build mission-critical, stateful applications in a serverless architecture. 

“Complexity in the cloud ecosystem is slowing down engineering and development teams,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “Kubernetes does an excellent job managing, orchestrating, and ensuring availability and scalability of containers, but that’s only half the story. ”There needs to be an equal investment in the application layer to make it easier for the developer to build complete applications that take full advantage of all the excellent underlying cloud infrastructure we have at our disposal. Kalix is the solution to this critical issue.”   

Real-Time Data Integration and Streaming Leader Introduces Striim Cloud on Google Cloud 

Striim, Inc., announced the availability of Striim Cloud on Google Cloud, the fastest way for customers to deliver real-time data and insights to power business intelligence and decision-making to meet the needs of the digital economy. Striim Cloud is a fully-managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for real-time streaming data integration and analytics. With a few clicks, customers can easily build real-time data pipelines to stream trillions of events every day, backed by enterprise-grade operational, security, and management features. Striim Cloud’s zero-maintenance, infinitely scalable platform enables customers to transform their businesses by adopting new cloud models, digitizing legacy systems, and modernizing their application infrastructure. Combined with Google Cloud’s unified data and AI models, enterprises will have the abilities and technologies needed to leverage their data to improve their business. 

“Real-time decision making is quickly becoming ‘table stakes’ for any business that expects to compete effectively across a multitude of industries,” said Philllip Cockrell, senior vice president of business development, Striim Inc. “Striim Cloud is a powerful, cloud-based, SaaS platform that gives enterprise customers an invaluable advantage in reaching this goal. We’re thrilled to make Striim Cloud’s capabilities available to Google Cloud customers worldwide.“

Hyper-collaborative data platform Count announces rebrand and hires influential Chief Data Evangelist

Count, a hyper-collaborative data platform, unveils a fresh look and a new approach to empower teams in decision-making processes. Who better to spearhead this revamp than the founder of the BI/Analytics Data Storytelling Framework, Mico Yuk, who joins the company as Chief Data Evangelist. The London-based startup has rebuilt how teams collaborate around data by creating a tool that automates the last mile of analytics. Large amounts of data are often processed and relayed, but ultimately left out of the decision-making process. The last mile of analytics bridges the gap between teams getting data, and reaching data-driven decisions.

Now, Count is unveiling its rebrand to be one of the most collaborative data platforms on the planet, as a result of a perhaps surprising development process. While Count already had a successful product on the market – its SQL notebook – it went back into private beta because it felt that there was more it could be doing to supercharge its data tool to be more collaborative and action-oriented. Mico Yuk’s onboarding comes at a pivotal moment for the company. A former data scientist and analyst, she is also a global keynote speaker and author who has trained thousands on how to use data visualization to power decision making. Mico has seen first-hand how the tech industry is shifting away from big repositories of data, to mechanisms that enable teams to work smarter with that data. Count’s mission resonated with Mico’s expertise in using data-based storytelling and visualization to drive decisions.

Global eCommerce Data Platform Launches its Latest Product, DataHawk Connections

DataHawk, an eCommerce Data and Insights software company used by brands and agencies to empower their eCommerce operations on Amazon and Walmart, announced the launch of its latest product, DataHawk Connections, which allows users to collect, aggregate, and sync their Amazon and Walmart business data to Google Sheets, Business Intelligence solutions such as Power BI and Tableau, or to a Cloud Warehouse, in a fully automated way.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you can’t be wasting dozens of hours a week on data collection while not even doing it exhaustively. DataHawk Connections allows brands to put their eCommerce data collection on auto-pilot, saving valuable time and unlocking advanced visualization and reporting capabilities which ultimately turn data into insights, helping increase revenues and margins.” said Othmane Sghir, CEO and co-founder of DataHawk.

Privacera Announces Most Complete Data Access Governance for Diverse Cloud Analytical Workloads

Privacera, the unified data access governance leader founded by the creators of Apache Ranger™, announced the release of  Privacera Platform 6.3 and PrivaceraCloud 4.3, which offer complete data governance automation and expanded support across the cloud partner ecosystem. The new releases dramatically expand the Privacera Access Governance Platform’s ability to secure a diverse and increasing number of data sources and analytical workloads offered by leading public and third-party cloud service providers, such as Google Cloud’s BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS, and Starburst.

“Privacera pioneered the industry’s first SaaS-based data governance and security solution that integrates privacy and compliance across multiple cloud services,” said Privacera CEO Balaji Ganesan. “Our latest releases not only help organizations use data effectively and responsibly, but also accelerate digital transformation by helping organizations safely migrate data to the cloud, while minimizing compliance risk. By expanding the scope of our platforms, we’re even better equipped to guide organizations along their data journeys.”

D2iQ™ Streamlines Smart Cloud-Native Application Deployments with Kaptain AI/ML 2.0    

D2iQ, a leading enterprise Kubernetes provider for smart cloud-native applications, announced version 2.0 of Kaptain AI/ML, the enterprise-ready distribution of open-source Kubeflow that enables organizations to develop, deploy, and run artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads in production environments. 

Powered by Kubeflow 1.5, the Kubernetes machine learning toolkit, Kaptain AI/ML now provides data science teams with features such as expanded control for mounting data volumes and increased visibility into idle notebooks, so they can spend more time developing and less time managing infrastructure. The enhanced user experience enables data scientists to more effectively manage the lifecycle of AI and ML models without the need for infrastructure knowledge and skill sets. By simplifying the deployment and full lifecycle management of AI and ML workloads at scale, Kaptain AI/ML 2.0 accelerates the impact of smart cloud-native applications. This enables organizations to drive better business results by more quickly delivering new smart products and services, becoming more agile when updating models, and driving smarter customer experiences. 

“The ability to rapidly scale workloads while remaining agile and reliable makes Kubernetes a natural fit for artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Deepak Goel, CTO of D2iQ. “Kaptain AI/ML 2.0 represents our continued innovation around improving the customer experience. By making it easier to deploy and manage AI and ML workloads across various Kubernetes platforms, Kaptain AI/ML 2.0 reduces complexity and removes operational barriers, enabling organizations to more quickly achieve success in production environments.” 

Lanner Electronics Launches Falcon H8 PCIe AI Accelerator Card, Powered by Hailo-8™AI Processors

Lanner Electronics, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of intelligent edge computing appliances, announced its first Hailo-8™AI-powered PCIe accelerator card, the Falcon H8. Lanner collaborated with leading AI (Artificial Intelligence) chipmaker Hailo to design the Falcon H8, enabling scalable and powerful intelligent video analytics applications for multiple industries operating at the edge, including intelligent transport systems (ITS), smart cities, smart retail, and Industry 4.0. The Falcon H8 is one of the most cost-efficient PCIe AI accelerator cards on the market, with a low power consumption and record high of up to 156 tera operations per second (TOPS) to allow high-end deep learning applications on edge servers. 

“Optimized for AI functionality, performance, and ease of deployment, Lanner is pleased to partner with Hailo to design a next-gen AI accelerator card that brings top-performing AI computing to the edge of industrial IoT,” said Jeans Tseng, CTO of Lanner Electronics. “Our expertise in creating high-density hardware platforms, combined with Hailo’s state-of-the-art neural chip and software framework, provides service providers and system integrators a best-in-class AI accelerator that enables running deep learning applications most efficiently with the lowest total cost of ownership.”

“The integration of Lanner’s Falcon H8 and the Hailo-8 provides unmatched AI performance at the edge. This joint solution is more powerful, scalable, and cost-effective than other solutions available on the market today,” said Orr Danon, CEO and Co-Founder of Hailo. “Our collaboration with Lanner will better power edge devices across industries, including transportation, smart cities, smart retail, industrial IoT, and more.”

PingCAP Announces the General Availability of TiDB Cloud to Empower Enterprise Modernization in the Cloud 

PingCAP, a leading distributed SQL Database provider, announced the general availability of TiDB Cloud, its fully managed Database-as-a-Service offering. After a year of extensively testing TiDB Cloud in public preview with partners and customers, enterprises can now run their mission critical transactional and real-time analytic workloads against a single, fully managed database while enjoying maximum performance and business continuity. As organizations advance their digital transformation initiatives in high data-driven environments, they need to address data extraction and data silos challenges that impact their business growth. TiDB Cloud delivers the answer to these pain points, providing a next-generation, cloud-native database that helps to quickly build modern, mission-critical applications in the cloud – both on AWS and Google Cloud.  

“Legacy databases are no match for today’s enterprises processing millions of transactions per second,” said Ed Huang, CTO and Co-founder at PingCAP. “At PingCAP we are dedicated to meeting the most demanding data needs, providing a modern, next-generation database that allows organizations worldwide to help them manage the increasing load of requests being made and activate real-time analytics capabilities at the same time.”

Era Software Introduces EraStreams for Scalable and Cost-Effective Observability Data Management

Era Software, the observability data management company, announced EraStreams private beta, a no-code data pipeline that lets users integrate, transform, and route observability data to EraSearch, the company’s petabyte-scale log management platform, and third-party monitoring tools.

“Our vision is to be the observability data management choice for organizations dealing with massive volumes of observability data,” said Todd Persen, co-founder and chief executive officer, Era Software. “The unveiling of EraStreams today advances this vision with a data pipeline to help you manage observability costs and improve troubleshooting effectiveness. It gives you real-time insights into application and system performance and adds another component to our scalable, cost-effective observability data management.”

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