This Week in Data Preparation (December 14, 2020)
This weekly post with news items from the data preparation market is brought to you by The Data Value Factory, the company offering Data Preparer.
16 links in this week’s post: 3 articles (on implementing AI successfully, on self-service data platforms in pharma and biotech companies, and on data centres), 3 surveys (by SnapLogic and Vanson Bourne, Tableau and YouGov, and Immuta), 7 company updates (by Amazon, Entytle, Immuta, Cloudera, Element, Ahana, and ThoughtSpot), and 3 capital raise announcements (by Hibob, Firebolt, and SingleStore).
Articles
How to implement AI successfully. With comments by Leila Seith Hassan, head of data at the UK arm of global marketing agency Digitas, Dr Alan Bourne, chartered occupational psychologist and founder of Sova Assessment, Alix Melchy, vice president of AI at Jumio, Paul Crerand, field chief technology officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa at MuleSoft, Adrian Tam, director of data science at New York-based Synechron, Dr Neil Yager, co-founder and chief scientist of Phrasee, Dr Greg Benson, chief scientist at SnapLogic and professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco, Adam Mayer, senior manager at Qlik, and Jamie Hutton, chief technology officer of Quantexa. Article by Jonathan Weinberg, freelance journalist, writer and media consultant/trainer.
How A Self-Service Data Platform for Life Sciences Analytics Can Fast-Track Drug Readiness. Owning a self-service data platform allows emerging pharma and biotech companies to accelerate past data engineering intricacies and focus on ad-hoc analytics to discern how their data can help them meet objectives for clinical operations, medical affairs, and commercial teams. Article by Janardan Prasad, CBO and Head of Life Sciences at Lore IO.
The shift is on: From data centres to ‘centres of data’. Michael Dickman, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, offers his best practice advice about how to prepare for a shift to the Edge and tells us why this new architectural approach — one that is Edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven — is much-needed.
Surveys
77% of IT leaders don’t fully trust the data in their organisation for decision-making. “It’s well known that effective use of data analytics can provide significant business advantages. But to know that so many organisations are making business decisions using data they do not trust is alarming,” said Craig Stewart, CTO at SnapLogic.
83 percent of data-driven businesses gained critical advantages during the pandemic, says YouGov Survey. “Going into 2021, businesses need to view data culture as a must-have as they navigate through the pandemic and seek out growth,” said Anand Ekambaram, Country Manager, Tableau India. “Our data and visualization driven strategy enabled us to create a single version of truth in critical areas like cash flow, inventory, delivery lead times besides operations, that drove our ability to stay close to customers, run our operations and simultaneously drive improvement across multiple fronts,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation and Digital Solutions Office, Tata Steel.
Tackling Data Governance in a Multi-Cloud DW World. Immuta’s inaugural Data Engineering Survey found that 75% of data engineering teams plan to adopt at least one cloud data warehouse over the next one to two years. That’s a big deal, says Steve Touw, Immuta’s CTO and co-founder, but it’s not exactly news.
Company Updates
Amazon HealthLake helps healthcare providers analyze unstructured medical data. In a keynote presentation, AWS Vice President for AI Matt Wood explained that healthcare providers struggle to apply intelligence to their data because it’s usually spread across numerous repositories in various formats such as clinical notes, reports and image scans. It can take months to prepare, stage and transform that data for analysis, he said.
Entytle, Inc., announces the launch of Customer Central 360 to empower Industrial OEMs to do more with less in 2021. “We believe that without the perfect quality of input, any Customer 360 is exactly that — a 360 that brings you back to where you started. For our customers, we fix that data quality problem before building a 360 view of their customers”, said Vivek Joshi, CEO, Entytle Inc.
Immuta Automates Data Access Governance for Cloud Data Ecosystems. “Based on our recent research, we’re seeing a ‘perfect storm’ for modern data access governance, fueled by the rapid shift to the cloud and the need to analyze sensitive data,” said Steve Touw, Immuta’s Chief Technology Officer. “Our platform brings together massive amounts of sensitive data to help analysts track the spread of COVID-19 and help shape public policy and health response,” said Ryan Naughton, Co-ED of The Center for New Data.
Cloudera CEO: Enterprise Data Cloud Vision Nearly Complete. With the delivery of an on-prem version of its Cloudera Data Platform last quarter and support for Google Cloud expected in early 2021, the company is close to fulfilling its vision for an enterprise data cloud, CEO Rob Bearden said.
Element Launches Element Unify. “We built Element Unify specifically for the industrial sector, to solve the unique IT/OT data management problem that these enterprises have grappled with for decades,” said Andy Bane, CEO of Element.
Ahana Announces General Availability of Managed Service for Presto on AWS; Delivers Combined Solution with Intel to Drive Adoption of Open Data Lakes Analytics. “With Ahana Cloud being generally available, the power of Presto is now accessible to any data team of any size and skill level. By abstracting away the complexities of deployment, configuration and management, platform teams can now deploy ‘self-service’ Presto for open data lake analytics as well as analytics on a range of other data sources,” said Dipti Borkar, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Ahana. “As Ahana Cloud users, we saw from day one the value the platform brings to our engineering team,” said Kian Sheik, Data Engineer, ReferralExchange. “We look forward to working with Ahana and helping bring this compelling open data lake analytic solution to market,” said Arijit Bandyopadhyay, CTO of enterprise analytics & AI within Intel’s data platform group.
ThoughtSpot Reimagines Search & AI-Driven Analytics for Cloud Data. While cloud computing enables processing at massive speed and scale, business people need to access and collaborate on insights from across their organization, or their businesses will fall behind,” said Sudheesh Nair, CEO, ThoughtSpot. “We launched our original search-driven experience so anyone could ask a question in simple language, and get the right answer in seconds, and infused AI to help them answer questions they didn’t even know to ask,” said Ajeet Singh, Co-founder & Executive Chairman, ThoughtSpot.
Capital Raise Announcements
Hibob raises $70 million to expand its data-driven HR platform to more markets. The Series B round of funding was led by Seek and Israel Growth Partners.“Companies are now seeking ways to help their people remain engaged, productive, and connected while remote, and that provides major opportunities for continued growth in the HR tech sector,” Hibob CEO and cofounder Ronni Zehavi told VentureBeat.
Firebolt launches with $37 million in funding to redesign the cloud data warehouse experience. The funding included participation from Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures. “While companies can store massive amounts of data, most organizations are only able to analyze a fraction of that big data, and often find themselves looking at stale data that does not reflect the current state of their business,” said Firebolt Co-Founder & CEO Eldad Farkash. “Firebolt created a SaaS product that changes the analytics experience over big data sets,” Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures said.
SingleStore, formerly MemSQL, raises $80M to integrate and leverage companies’ disparate data silos. The round is being led by Insight Partners, with new backers Dell Technologies Capital, Hercules Capital; and previous backers Accel, Anchorage, Glynn Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Rev IV also participating. Alongside the investment, SingleStore is formally announcing a new partnership with analytics powerhouse SAS. I say “formally” because they two have been working together already and it’s resulted in “tremendous uptake,” CEO Raj Verma said in an interview over email.
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