This Week in Data Preparation (September 21, 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.
20 links in this week’s post: 5 articles (on articifial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, DataOps, ModelOps, and healthcare data, by Wovenware, O’Reilly, Tel-Aviv University, Blumberg Capital, SAS, and NexSoftSys), 2 interviews (on scalable analytics and data-driven approach to COVID-19, by Dell Technologies, and Aetion), 9 company updates (by Cloudera, conDati, atScale, PI.EXCHANGE, Onna, Dataguise, Bloomberg, Actifio, IBM, and C3.ai), and 4 capital raise announcements (by data.world, Snowflake, JupiterOne, and Varada).
Articles
The Nurturing And Feeding Of Data: The Unsung Hero In AI Development. “While artificial intelligence (AI) gets the glory for its role in helping to solve business problems — such as improving the environment, predicting customer churn and identifying promising medical treatments — not enough attention is paid to the data that runs the algorithms. And that’s a big problem.” writes Carlos M. Meléndez, COO and Co-Founder of Wovenware, an artificial intelligence and software development company.
The Future Growth of AI and ML. “We’ve all come to terms with the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how businesses operate and how much it can help a business in the long term. Over the past few years, this understanding has driven a spike in companies experimenting and evaluating AI technologies and who are now using it specifically in production deployments.” writes Rachel Roumeliotis, VP of Data and AI at O’Reilly.
The AI landscape is shifting from ‘data’ to ‘knowledge.’ Here’s why that matters. “The most common AI business strategies we see are built around data. We believe that proprietary data is currently the most strategic moat for AI companies, but in the coming years, it will become less of a unique asset, making proprietary data differentiation less sustainable. Therefore, we expect a shift in focus, from data-based AI strategies, to knowledge-based AI strategies.” write coauthors Eviatar Matania, professor at the School of Political Sciences, Government and International Affairs at Tel-Aviv University, and Tomer Y. Avni, associate at Blumberg Capital, based in Tel Aviv.
Operationalizing Analytics with DataOps and ModelOps. “In this article, we want to highlight how an organization can avoid missteps in their analytics journey and ensure their analytics initiatives deliver business value. How can they leverage analytics at scale to drive outcomes and avoid becoming part of the 72 percent whose AI initiatives are in the lab and not in production?” write coauthors Prashanth Southekal, Managing Principal of DBP-Institute, a Data Analytics consulting firm, and Harsh Vardhan, Sr. Solution Architect at SAS Institute.
Real time data and AI are transforming the healthcare industry. Here’s how. “The healthcare industry has come a long way since its inception a few years back. Long gone are those days when each process in healthcare was running manually. Today, the situation is different. All thanks to the advancement in technology and the wave of digitization, healthcare is experiencing a paradigm shift in its processes like never before.” writes NexSoftSys’ James Warner.
Interviews
Dell Technologies Is Betting Big On Scalable Analytics Infrastructure, Says Sheenam Ohrie. Sheenam Ohrie, Vice President, Dell Digital, APJ CIO Leader, Dell Technologies India, has over 25 years of experience in various aspects of global delivery project management testing and leadership roles at Dell , and her vision is to transform the IT delivery sector through digital IT as a Service business model through a combination of platforms, products and services. She also plays the role of the chairperson for the Women in Action group for Dell Technologies.
Aetion CEO: Data-driven approach to COVID-19 requires rigor, transparency. Aetion Inc. CEO Carolyn Magill spoke with S&P Global Market Intelligence about the company’s ongoing partnership with the FDA, which has taken a turn to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic; the need for safety and effectiveness monitoring when patients receive a vaccine; and the importance of clear, unbiased data to make healthcare decisions in a crisis.
Company updates
Cloudera Introduces Analytic Experiences for Cloudera Data Platform. “Our customers understand the importance of the data lifecycle to infuse data-driven decision making throughout their business, traditionally integrating data clusters for NiFi, Kafka, Spark, Impala, Hive, HBase and more,” said Arun Murthy, chief product officer, Cloudera. “The role of data engineering in preparation for data science is instrumental for operationalization,” said Stewart Bond, Research Director of IDC’s Data Integration and Intelligence Software service.
conDati Launches Shopify 360° Analytics Starter Bundle; Unification & Best Practice Dashboards for Pre-Through Post-Purchase Data. “conDati is a true AI analytics platform-as-a-service running in the cloud. With built-in performance, there’s no infrastructure to manage or knobs to turn. conDati automatically handles data engineering, AI and dashboard creation, infrastructure, optimization, security, data protection and more, so you can focus on using your data, from the first day” explains Ken Gardner, CEO and Founder of conDati.
AtScale Adds New Datasets and BI Dashboards to AtScale Data Insights Marketplace to Uncover New Insights. “SafeGraph is committed to helping companies and communities understand the physical world through open access to geospatial data,” said Auren Hoffman, Founder and CEO, SafeGraph. “We are pleased to offer Tableau dashboards for use with the AtScale Data Insights Marketplace,” said Jonathan Libby, Global Technology Alliances, Tableau. “Our overall goal with providing AtScale Data Insights Marketplace at no cost to BI professionals is to help them make better business decisions in today’s challenging environment,” said Christopher Lynch, Executive Chairman and CEO, AtScale.
How PI.EXCHANGE helps freelancers and small businesses have easier access to AI solutions. “Our IP is on how we are driving the computational costs for data preparation. If you think about it, it‘s kind of like an AI agent which helps to compute and pick the right kind of data for each client. We maintain a very strong focus on IP and focus on perfecting our technology,” says Quan Pham, Founder at PI.EXCHANGE.
Onna Takes Aim at Compliance Market With a Tool to Automate Data Privacy. Kelly Griswold, Chief Strategy Officer at Onna told Datanami, “The [applications] that we’re seeing most demand for right now are typically falling in the legal, compliance, and security spaces, as well as general information governance and knowledge management, which ties into the more horizontal applications and search.”. “Having an intelligent Knowledge Integration Platform empowers these organizations with the ability to search, classify, understand, and control sensitive data, providing them with the critical tools needed to maintain the highest possible standards of compliance,” Eric Liou, VP of Product at Onna told Toolbox.
Dataguise Announces Integration With Microsoft Information Protection, Joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association. “There are a lot of different ways organizations can protect sensitive data, but accurate, thorough discovery is always the first step — and it can be tough to get it right,” said JT Sison, Vice President Marketing and Business Development at Dataguise. “The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association has grown into a vibrant ecosystem comprised of the most reliable and trusted security software vendors across the globe. Our members, like Dataguise, share Microsoft’s commitment to collaboration within the cybersecurity community to improve our customers’ ability to predict, detect, and respond to security threats faster,” said Rani Lofstrom, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Security.
Bloomberg Expands Alt Data Offering. “Over the past few years, we have seen demand for alternative data skyrocket as firms have integrated sophisticated insights into their investment strategies. This has only increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, as information once considered a value-add has now become essential to navigate a dislocated economy,” said Caroline Ward, Alternative and Historical Data Product Manager at Bloomberg. “Working with Bloomberg has provided a seamless and effective way for us to deliver this data directly to investors, without unnecessary hassle or barriers to us or end users,” said Thomas Owen, Managing Director with MariTrace. “We’re working with Bloomberg because its market leading data offering will provide a fuller picture to best serve investors, and Bloomberg’s impressive reach will help us bring our data to leading, sophisticated investors,” said Clinton Libbey, Managing Director at Kumi Analytics. “We have made significant upgrades to Enterprise Access Point as demand for data has evolved in this environment of market volatility and remote work,” said Gerard Francis, Global Head of Enterprise Data at Bloomberg.
Actifio and IBM virtualize the data pipeline to reduce security risks, cut storage costs, and speed up strategic insights. “Data science is great, artificial intelligence is great, but you still have to have good data underneath and you have to do it at speed,” said Scott Buckles, North America business unit executive for database, data science and DataOps at IBM.
C3.ai to launch data-driven initiative to combat COVID-19. Thomas M. Siebel, CEO of C3.ai has high hopes for the competition and says; “The C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge represents an opportunity to inform decision-makers at the local, state, and federal levels and transform the way the world confronts this pandemic, as with the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake and the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, this initiative will tap our community’s collective IQ to make important strides toward necessary, innovative solutions that will help solve a global crisis.”
Capital raise announcements
data.world Secures $26 Million in Venture Capital Funding. “Building thriving data cultures that empower everyone in an enterprise to make smarter, data-driven decisions is no longer a story of transformation. It’s an absolute imperative,” said Brett Hurt, co-founder and CEO of data.world. “We rely on data.world to help our analysts and business leaders make data-driven decisions about real estate investments and global supply chain opportunities,” said Luke Slotwinski, vice president of Data & Analytics at Prologis. “As one of the original investors in both Alibaba and Compass, I’ve seen how critical data is in driving company performance. data.world is changing the way enterprises think about and use data,” said Scott Booth, chairman of Tech Pioneers Fund. “data.world is addressing the multi-billion dollar enterprise data catalog and governance problem space. Every enterprise around the world has this same pain point — how to make the data in all of the data lakes and warehouses findable, understandable, addressable, and reusable across their organization,” said Sally Jenkins, CMO at Elastic. “I am thrilled to be investing in data.world,” said Jim Breyer, founder of Breyer Capital.
Snowflake (SNOW) Soars 130% in $3.36 Billion Record Software IPO Debut. “So far, so good,” Snowflake Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman said in an interview. “IPOs for us are milestones along the way. They’re not endpoints. We needed to do this for a number of reasons, especially to raise the stature of the company in the marketplace.”
JupiterOne Lands $19 Million Funding Round to Fuel Data-Driven Approach to Cyber Asset Management. “Security is a basic right for every organization, but cost and complexity are major barriers,” said Erkang Zheng, founder and CEO of JupiterOne. “We built JupiterOne because we saw a gap in how organizations manage the security and compliance of their cyber assets day to day. Compliance should be a natural outcome of doing security correctly, and that starts with understanding what resources you have, how they are configured, who owns them, and how they are connected to each other.”
Virtualization Startup Varada Streamlines Data Ops. Varada, a data virtualization startup targeting big data query acceleration, announced a $12 million funding round this week as it ramps up its “zero data-ops” platform designed to prioritize analytics workloads via proprietary indexing technology. “This round of Series A funding will accelerate the progress of our solution and allow us to quickly scale our plans to deliver the new standard for data virtualization,” said Varada CEO Eran Vanounou.
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