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.
Anaconda Supports Pandata, the Scalable Open-Source Analysis Stack for High-Powered Scientific Data Analysis
Anaconda Inc., provider of the popular data science & AI platform, announced its support of the Pandata stack, providing freely available open-source data analytics tools for processing data of any size and for any domain. The collection of tools includes high-performance, cloud-friendly, OS-independent Python libraries offering data analysis, visualization, and processing at scale, and across all areas of research, development, and operations.
Python has become the most popular programming language in the world, partially due to the wide range of open-source libraries available that cover almost any area of science, engineering, and data analysis. However, many available tools are highly specialized and restricted to addressing small problems in confined domains.
Pandata’s stack of general-purpose, interoperable, and compositional tools includes Dask, Xarray, Numba, hvPlot, Jupyter, and more, providing a versatile and sustainable shared platform for data analysis and scientific computation. Collectively, Pandata covers the landscape of data access, distributed computation, and interactive visualization across any domain or scale, letting researchers and practitioners in each field focus on the much smaller set of code that is required for their own specific domain.
“As the scale of scientific data analysis grows, traditional domain-specific software tools are hitting limits when managing increased data size and complexity,” said Dr. James Bednar, Director of Custom Services at Anaconda. “Within Python’s open-source ecosystem, general data-processing tools allow for flexibility and cross-domain collaboration with data of any kind. The Pandata stack takes advantage of this open-source model to bring a wide array of functionality to the traditional data stack that overcomes the limitations of legacy domain-specific stacks.”
Rasgo Introduces AI-Orchestrated Analytics
Rasgo introduced Rasgo AI, an AI-orchestrated self-service analytics platform bringing the power of GPT to the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) in a secure and trusted manner. Rasgo AI harnesses the power of GPT to revolutionize workflows for data teams and knowledge workers, removing friction and accelerating the path to continuous, accurate insights and recommended best actions.
“The largest impediment to self-serve analytics is that existing tools are incapable of providing knowledge workers with data insights without intervention from the data team,” said Patrick Dougherty, Co-founder & CTO, Rasgo. “To address this, we’ve employed GPT-4 to perform complex reasoning tasks with dynamic objectives. With GPT-4, Rasgo AI is the first platform to deliver context-rich insights, democratizing intelligence, not just the data, and transforming business users into intelligence providers. We’re using AI to change knowledge work forever.”
UiPath Showcases Latest AI Capabilities with “Project Wingman”
UiPath (NYSE: PATH), a leading enterprise automation software company, announced its latest artificial intelligence (AI) updates with “Project Wingman,” which enables customers to create powerful automations from simple natural language prompts. “Project Wingman” is now available in private preview for select customers.
The UiPath end-to-end platform uniquely combines Specialized AI solutions with the intelligence of Generative AI. “Project Wingman” is designed to fundamentally enhance automation creation for developers by providing a user-friendly experience and leveraging Generative AI to make our platform more accessible to those without programming experience. The private preview will allow customers with early access to experience how “Project Wingman” significantly improves business productivity, employee satisfaction, and customer experiences.
“‘Project Wingman’ brings together our AI Computer Vision’s deep understanding of computer screens with Generative AI. Using simple natural language prompts, users can uncover endless possibilities by creating automations that combine Specialized AI trained with proprietary data with the intelligence of Generative AI,” said Dr. Edward Challis, Head of AI Strategy at UiPath. “At UiPath, our mission is to allow every employee to unlock new potential and automate all knowledge work.”
Fast Simon Launches Vector Search With Advanced AI for eCommerce
Fast Simon, a leader in AI-powered shopping optimization, announced Vector Search with advanced AI for eCommerce. Vector Search is able to handle longer search queries and reduce the return of “no results” compared to keyword search alone. This makes it easier for eCommerce sites to match buyer intent, personalize the shopping experience, answer questions and make product recommendations.
Rather than matching keywords like most eCommerce search engines, Vector Search uses natural language processing and neural networks to analyze a query. Vector embedding maps the words from the search to a corresponding vector to detect synonyms, intent and ranking, and it clusters concepts to deliver more complete results. For example, the search “fall wedding guest dresses for black tie event” would return relevant results for long dresses, dark colors and options for sleeves, even if the items weren’t all tagged with the exact keywords.
“While many eCommerce search queries today are just one to two words, Gen Z tends to search differently. They often use full sentences and look for contextual results that match their intent. This shift requires a new approach to search that goes beyond keywords to understand the meaning,” said Zohar Gilad, CEO of Fast Simon. “As the next generation of shoppers, meeting the expectations of Gen Z is crucial for retailers who want to stay relevant.”
Aerospike Unveils New Curated Dashboards for Comprehensive Observability and Management
Aerospike, Inc. introduced a new curated set of Grafana dashboards built on over 400 documented metrics that make it even easier for companies to manage rapidly growing adoption of Aerospike’s real-time, multi-model database across the enterprise. The new dashboards provide comprehensive observability of the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform across multiple clouds, data centers, regions, clusters and nodes. With intuitive navigation, customers can quickly search for and see the metrics that matter most, drill down to granular details and set up custom alerting enriched with severity information and related alerts. The dashboards are organized by jobs to be done, providing administrators with the specific metrics relevant to tasks they are performing, such as upgrading or replicating data to another data center.
“As modern applications demand more real-time data at massive scale, Aerospike ’s enterprise footprint continues to expand,” said Subbu Iyer, CEO of Aerospike. “Now customers have intuitive and detailed dashboards and open access to all metrics required to manage the Aerospike Data Platform underpinning mission critical workloads across their entire deployment.”
Hailo Expands Hailo-8 AI Accelerator Portfolio, Delivering Unprecedented Performance to a Diverse Range of Edge AI Applications
Hailo, a pioneering chipmaker of edge artificial intelligence (AI) processors, announced it has expanded its groundbreaking Hailo-8™ AI accelerator offering following hundreds of successful deployments in customer programs and products. The new high-performance Hailo-8 Century PCIe card line offers up to 208 Tera Operations per Second (TOPS) for most demanding applications, and the Hailo-8L makes advanced AI processing available for entry-level applications. Both product lines are offered at a competitive price compared to the respective category leaders.
“The expansion of our Hailo-8 AI accelerator portfolio is unlocking new opportunities for our customers to harness real-time, power-efficient intelligence in a diverse range of applications and industries,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo. “With the rise of generative AI driven applications, our powerful and cost-efficient solutions bring unmatched AI performance and power efficiency, enabling state-of-the-art transformer-based models such as ViT, CLIP and SAM, at the edge.”
Cloverleaf Analytics, Exavalu, and Socotra Announce the Launch of the Ethical AI in Insurance Consortium
Cloverleaf Analytics (Cloverleaf), a leader in insurance intelligence solutions, Exavalu, a leading global digital advisory and consulting company, and Socotra, provider of the industry’s leading policy core and end-to-end insurance technology solutions, are excited to announce the launch of the Ethical AI in Insurance Consortium. The Consortium aims to foster responsible and transparent adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for decision management in the insurance sector, bringing together insurance carriers, technology and solutions companies, regulators, and other key influencers.
“Consumers are excited and carriers are optimistic as technology continues to show promise for improving products, services, and everyday life,” said Robert Clark, Founder and CEO of Cloverleaf Analytics. “The insurance industry has the opportunity to set a quality example of how to use AI responsibly, and this Consortium aims to be a beacon of light for insurers and technology companies that need help on this journey.”
Apromore Announces New Capabilities for AI-Driven Process Optimization
Apromore, a leading provider of AI-driven process mining and simulation solutions, announced new capabilities for enterprises to leverage predictive analytics to boost the effectiveness of customer-facing processes. Customer Experience (CX) and Operational Excellence (OPEX) teams can now easily spot friction points, errors and rework in customer interactions and make better decisions about steps to take to keep operational margins in check. The Apromore platform’s fully no-code interface allows analysts to build predictive dashboards without the need for technical resources, enabling teams to preempt performance degradation and to drill down into problematic customer touchpoints in near-real time, improving business resiliency and adaptability.
Marlon Dumas, Chief Product Officer at Apromore, said, “We continue to deliver on our vision of AI-driven process optimization, with an emphasis on capabilities that business teams can use in self-service mode, to drive day-to-day operational and customer excellence.” Dumas continued, “our AI-driven process optimization technology is already driving massive benefits in leading financial services organizations in Australia, the US and Europe. The latest evolutions in our product have been field-tested and helped our customers to enhance CX and OPEX metrics simultaneously.”
Monte Carlo Launches Data Product Dashboard, Enabling Companies to Track and Increase the Reliability of Critical Data Products
Monte Carlo, the data observability leader, announced Data Product Dashboard, a new capability that allows customers to easily define a data or AI product, track the health of corresponding data tables and training sets, and report on the product’s reliability to business stakeholders, directly in their data observability platform.
Data products refer to an application or asset – such as key dashboards, large-language models, or software – that delivers trusted information or services to downstream consumers. Examples of data products include an airline’s flight tracking system that combines real-time GPS data, flight manifest tables, and historical arrival and departure information; a customer relationship management platform syncing data across marketing tools; or an AI model that trains on financial data from thousands of sources to forecast future stock returns.
“As companies ingest larger volumes of data, the opportunity to build impactful and innovative data products exponentially grows. In order for data and AI products to realize their full potential, however, data teams must treat them with the same diligence as software applications, and that includes ensuring their accessibility, performance, and most importantly, reliability,” said Lior Gavish, co-founder and CTO of Monte Carlo. “Data Product Dashboard is the first solution of its kind to help organizations manage and improve the data quality of the tables and assets powering their most critical data applications, and in the process, foster greater trust and collaboration between data teams and their stakeholders.”
VAST Data Unveils the VAST Data Platform: A Transformative Data Platform Built for Deep Learning AI
VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI era, unveiled the full vision for the company by introducing a transformative data computing platform designed to be the foundation of AI-assisted discovery. The VAST Data Platform is VAST’s global data infrastructure offering, unifying storage, database and virtualized compute engine services in a scalable system that was built from the ground up for the future of AI.
“We’ve been working toward this moment since our first days, and we’re incredibly excited to unveil the world’s first data platform built from the ground up for the next generation of AI-driven discovery,” said Renen Hallak, CEO and Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Encapsulating the ability to create and catalog understanding from natural data on a global scale, we’re consolidating entire IT infrastructure categories to enable the next era of large-scale data computation. With the VAST Data Platform, we are democratizing AI abilities and enabling organizations to unlock the true value of their data.”
Kits.AI: Redefining Collaboration and Creation in the AI Era of Music
With the rise of AI Voice cloning technology, artists face new opportunities and challenges around how their voices are used. Some, like Holly Herndon and Grimes, have embraced the technology and built tools to share their voices with the world. Aiming to bring the same opportunity to all artists, Kits.AI has launched tools for artists to safely create, license, and share their own voice models, opening new opportunities for fan engagement and monetization.
“When we saw Grimes’ embracing AI to amplify her voice and engage her community, we were really excited by all the possibilities it could open for artists. But not all artists have the same resources as Grimes to support this kind of experiment,” explains Kits Co-Founder Evan Dhillon. “We believe that artists of all levels can open new revenue streams and build their communities if they have a way to do it themselves, so we set out to build it with Kits.AI.”
Egnyte Announces Generative AI Solutions for Secure Content Collaboration
Egnyte, the secure platform for content collaboration and governance, announced several new AI-powered solutions being natively integrated into the Egnyte platform. Egnyte customers will now be able to use the latest generative AI models to find and summarize information contained in their company’s documents and media files, without having to physically move any of their content, which could violate corporate policies and put their data at risk.
“While very much in vogue right now, Egnyte has been using large language models for close to a decade. The outputs of these models were historically focused on a relatively narrow set of IT security, privacy, and compliance applications,” said Vineet Jain, co-founder and chief executive officer at Egnyte. “With recent advances in AI and compute, we’re now able to unleash content intelligence for every user on our platform.”
ZEDEDA Launches Industry-First Application Services Suite, Revolutionizing Edge Computing
ZEDEDA, a leader in edge infrastructure orchestration, introduced ZEDEDA Edge Application Services, making it easier for customers to instantly gain granular control across all of their edge applications, including their modern AI-based applications.
The number of edge devices, along with the data they produce, is growing exponentially. Gartner® predicts that “by 2025, 75% of data will be generated outside these centralized [data centers or cloud regions] facilities.”1 Edge computing is required to manage and process that data, but the complexity of distributed environments can make it difficult for customers to get started quickly. Enabling access to core services can provide an on-ramp for organizations to benefit from an initial edge use case while also establishing a foundation for future growth, just as was seen previously with cloud adoption.
“Just as we saw occur with the cloud providers in the early days, it is time for the edge market to evolve beyond just infrastructure and begin to offer value-added services in addition,” said Said Ouissal, founder and CEO of ZEDEDA. “Now, with ZEDEDA Edge Application Services, we are able to offer our customers the ability to manage, configure and control their edge applications simply by leveraging the ZEDEDA ecosystem.”
OpenText powers organizations to achieve digital success in a multi-cloud world with Cloud Editions 23.3
OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX), (TSX: OTEX), announced the release of its latest OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 23.3, harnessing advanced technologies and innovations that seamlessly integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities across the portfolio. Building upon the success of Project Titanium, CE 23.3 marks the commencement of the Titanium X journey – the next phase in the company’s ambitious two-year roadmap to deliver AI-led, security-enabled and sustainability-focused innovations every 90 days.
“AI is the next technology era. It will reshape the future of and our world in unimaginable ways. If the internet changed everything, with AI, everything must change. OpenText has for a deep history of helping our customers connect and manage their operational and experience data, and now there is a whole new frontier of learning data from the exponential growth of AI that will lead to new possibilities,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO & CTO, OpenText. “The latest innovations in CE 23.3 combine the power of end-to-end integrations and AI automation to help customers seamlessly interconnect and exchange insights across clouds to learn, innovate and grow faster than ever before.”
RightData Announces the Next Generation of Data Catalog with DataMarket
RightData, the Data Products Company and leading provider of data product software solutions for modern data integration and trusted data quality, announced DataMarket, a user-friendly way to act on all data within an organization, including understanding definitions, viewing metadata, control access, and direct access to APIs, connectors, and natural language-based data analysis. Available starting today, DataMarket works with any data source, data store, or analytics package.
Vasu Sattenapalli, RightData’s CEO, said, “We’re creating a new era of data access. DataMarket is launching in a time of such great tension within organizations on how to both use and benefit from data. Data consumers are frustrated with having to ask around, ‘do we have this type of data? Who owns it? Can I get access?’ Data engineers, architects, and analysts are tired of creating data products that don’t get used or have to create the same data products time and time again. DataMarket course corrects all of this tension and gets refined data into the hands of decision-makers precisely when and where it’s needed most.”
Soracom Adds Generative AI Capability to IoT Connectivity
Soracom, Inc., a global provider of advanced Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity, announced three new services designed to help IoT deployments take advantage of the power and promise of generative AI (GenAI). These new services, named Soracom Query, Soracom Relay, and Soracom Harvest Data Intelligence, can work together or separately to analyze IoT device data on the fly or connect devices to the powerful AI/ML capabilities now available through leading hyperscale platforms.
“Applying GenAI to analyze IoT data has the potential to discover insights that are beyond our imagination,” said Kenta Yasukawa, CTO and Co-Founder of Soracom. “As a technology partner to the companies building tomorrow’s connected experiences, we’re committed to delivering leading-edge capabilities that accelerate their innovation and help them to succeed at scale and stay one step ahead in a changing world.”
WEKA Introduces Guarantees for Cloud Cost Savings and On-Prem Performance
WekaIO (WEKA), the data platform provider for performance-intensive workloads, unveiled two new guarantees for WEKA® Data Platform customers: the WEKA Half Price Guarantee for cloud deployments and the WEKA 2X Performance Guarantee for on-premises deployments.
Organizations are increasingly finding that legacy data infrastructure is ill-suited to the needs of next-generation applications like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other performance-intensive workloads in the cloud and on-premises. Although they recognize a new approach is needed, transitioning to a new data infrastructure can introduce uncertainty with respect to cost and performance.
“Organizations of every stripe are looking to leverage AI, ML, and HPC to gain competitive advantage in their respective markets. In our distributed, digital-first world, this is driving many to embrace hybrid cloud deployments to support innovation,” said Jonathan Martin, president at WEKA. “Still, many find themselves roadblocked by legacy data infrastructure that cannot support the performance demands of next-generation workloads like generative AI or are seeing their cloud storage costs spiral out of control. We’re so confident that the WEKA Data Platform can help them overcome these hurdles and deliver unparalleled affordable performance – on-prem and in the cloud – that we guarantee it.”
