AI, Analytics, and Hybrid Cloud Dominate Strata Conference

This week a New York City gathering was the epicenter for thought leaders who will shape the future of business. While Manhattan’s east side hosted world leaders for the annual United Nation General Assembly, the real action was taking place on the west side at the Javits Center, which was home to Strata Data Conference.

The confab, organized by O’Reilly and Cloudera, explored developments in data for business. Common themes covered throughout the conference included big data and real-time analytics, plus artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The rapid embracement of these technologies and their increasingly important role in business was evident. One very interesting keynote discussion with Tim O’Reilly and Rob Thomas of IBM on AI benefits and what it will take to be successful in AI. Thomas laid out IBM’s pragmatic “Ladder to AI” for helping companies demystify the challenges of AI and increase their success rate. (See IBM’s Ladder to AI presentation here.)

One compelling use case that Thomas described was the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), where IBM automated 40% of the customer service inquiries, freeing up the bank’s reps to work on more challenging issues, which increased customer satisfaction 25%. (Listen to excerpts of their conversation here.)

News from the Conference

Many companies used the conference to introduce new products. For those who could not attend the conference, here is a quick summary of some of the key announcements in the real-time space.

Cloudera launched the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP). CDP is an integrated data platform that delivers powerful, self-service analytics across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand. The Cloudera Data Platform provides enterprise IT with the ability to deliver analytics-as-a-service to the business in any cloud environment while providing rich data security and lineage capabilities that minimize risk. 

See also: Cloudera Unfurls Raft of Big Data Cloud Services

Hazelcast announced a strategic partnership with Intel to provide a new Edge-to-Cloud IoT solution, with accelerated AI capabilities and real-time streaming analytics based on Hazelcast’s System of Now in-memory computing platform running on Intel platforms, including the 2^nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory.

Infoworks.io announced the availability of Infoworks DataFoundry on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). DataFoundry accelerates the implementation of cloud analytics projects running on GCP by automating and accelerating development and orchestration of data and analytics pipeline projects at scale.

MemSQL announced the launch of MemSQL Helios, an on-demand, elastic cloud service; and MemSQL 7.0 Beta, the most powerful version yet of the company’s distributed SQL database. Both solutions help enterprises easily ingest, process, analyze, and act on data to better compete and thrive in today’s insight-driven economy.

TigerGraph announced the general availability of TigerGraph Cloud, the first native graph database-as-a-service. TigerGraph Cloud gives business users (not just the data scientists) the ability to design their own solutions for graph-based data analysis easily. The company also announced $32 million in Series B funding to fuel global expansion.

Yellowbrick Data announced the Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse and the Yellowbrick Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR) service. The new offerings extend the benefits of the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse to the cloud, including the ability to replicate between the on-premises Yellowbrick Data Warehouse Appliance and the cloud, to support hybrid deployments (such as legacy ETL on-premises with users in the cloud), and to migrate easily to and from the cloud at will.