In this week’s real-time analytics news: An impressive array of philanthropic and government funding for bringing AI to society, plus numerous product intros.
Keeping pace with news and developments in the real-time analytics market can be a daunting task. We want to help by providing a summary of some of the items our staff came across each week. Here is a short list of some news from this week:
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation announced that it will double its investments in data science and AI grantmaking in 2021 with a new commitment of $40 million and introduce new initiatives to accelerate opportunity and innovation in the development of inclusive, ethical data, and AI. The 2021 commitments aim to disrupt the status quo by empowering civil society to fully participate in shaping the future so that the benefits of AI and data are shared by all.
Colby College announced it received a $30-million gift to establish the first cross-disciplinary institute for artificial intelligence (AI) at a liberal arts college. The Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence will help students and faculty research, create, and apply AI and machine learning (ML) across disciplines while setting a precedent for how liberal arts colleges can shape the future of AI.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $500,000 grant that will help lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary institute that encourages the use of artificial intelligence-enabled materials discovery, design, and synthesis. Funds from the grant will be used to bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers with complementary expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and material science for an AI-Enabled Materials Discovery, Design, and Synthesis (AIMS) Institute.
IBM added new capabilities to its IBM TRIRIGA integrated workplace management system that is designed to use artificial intelligence and near real-time insights to help organizations create a safe, productive, and efficient workplace. The new capabilities include dynamic space planning, indoor wayfinding, and a virtual assistant and are designed to help support organizations’ return to work and support employee well-being and productivity. Building upon its collaboration with Cisco DNA Spaces, IBM offers TRIRIGA integrations, such as density heat mapping, that are designed to help enable near real-time occupancy monitoring that alerts facility managers to the number of people in a given space based on WiFi and occupancy-sensing devices. Facility managers can use this information to manage capacity in high-traffic areas and the API endpoints to configure their own automated workflows, such as an alert that an area needs cleaning once occupancy exceeds a certain threshold.
Wind River debuted Wind River Studio, a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems where security, safety, and reliability are required. This first release of Studio enables the flexible and efficient deployment, management, and operations of intelligent 5G distributed edge clouds through one single pane of glass. Key features and capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the deployment and management of distributed edge networks at scale; network analytics technology; and core-to-edge orchestration supporting the management of containers, network elements, and edge devices.
Neo4j announced the general availability of Neo4j Aura Enterprise, Neo4j’s fully managed cloud database for organizations building high-performance graph applications. Aura Enterprise radically speeds time to value, enabling businesses to get to production faster than the equivalent on-premises option. Organizations can now focus entirely on building performant, graph-powered applications quickly, without worrying about infrastructure or maintenance.
Red Hat launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6, which offers data resilience capabilities for cloud-native workloads. Integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6 offers enhanced data resilience features, including snapshot functionality orchestrated by the Container Storage Interface (CSI) and OpenShift APIs for Data Protection to restore data and applications that run in container pods. The solution also offers broad support from an ecosystem of leading backup vendor solutions, such as IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, which provides data resilience for containerized applications running in Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes; TrilioVault for Kubernetes; and Kasten K10 by Veeam.
SUSE released Longhorn 1.1, which lets Rancher container management platform users can now leverage a Kubernetes-native storage solution in low-powered hardware at the edge. The new release lets DevOps teams easily manage persistent data volumes in any Kubernetes environment while bringing an enterprise-grade but vendor-neutral approach to cloud-native storage. Rancher users can build additional resilience into their edge environments with ARM64 support, new self-healing capabilities, and increased performance visibility provided by Longhorn 1.1.
Cirrascale Cloud Services, a provider of deep learning infrastructure solutions for autonomous vehicles, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and computer vision workflows, announced the availability of its Graphcloud platform. The massively scalable AI cloud platform is a collaboration between Cirrascale and Graphcore and offers users access to Graphcore’s tightly integrated hardware and software IPU-POD scale-out platform using second-generation GC200 Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and Poplar software stack.
JFrog Ltd., the DevOps company, announced an agreement with Docker. In the first milestone of the partnership, the companies are providing developers unlimited (for SaaS users), high-performance premium access to quality, and trusted application components on Docker Hub to streamline developer experience and scale the use of containers in the enterprise. Specifically, the agreement ensures that cloud users of the JFrog Platform, including those who use the free subscription offered on AWS, GCP, and Azure, won’t face Docker Hub image-pull limits. The agreement also provides dedicated support mechanisms for mutual customers.
C3 AI, a provider of enterprise AI software, announced the general availability of C3 AI Ex Machina, a next-generation predictive analytics application that empowers anyone to develop, scale, and produce AI-based insights without writing code. C3 AI Ex Machina lets anyone apply predictive analytics to their business. The application allows users to solve complex use cases, including customer churn prevention, supplier delay mitigation, asset reliability prediction, and fraud detection.
NVIDIA announced the newest release of NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) technology. Available now, the latest version of its vGPU software brings GPU virtualization to a broad range of workloads — such as virtual desktop infrastructure, high-performance graphics, data analytics, and AI — thanks to its support for the new NVIDIA A40 and NVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs. The new release also supports the NVIDIA GPU Operator, a software framework that simplifies GPU deployment and management.
Dell Technologies, SK Telecom, and VMware announced a collaboration to develop OneBox MEC, a single box approach that provides enterprises with an integrated, private 5G, and edge computing platform. As a fully integrated solution, OneBox MEC will simplify deployment and operations and deliver reliable and predictable performance via secure connectivity. Solutions providers, network functions providers (RAN and Core), and system integrators will be able to use the OneBox MEC to improve latency, reliability, and security of IT systems and networks.
Real-time analytics news in brief:
Reveal, a provider of a leading AI-powered eDiscovery platform, and Brainspace, a provider of visual analytics for eDiscovery and investigations, announced that they have merged. The combination brings together two leading artificial intelligence and analytics engines designed for the legal industry.
Quantum Corp. announced the launch of the H2000 Series of hybrid storage arrays for data-intensive workflows. Marking a significant increase in performance on previous generation systems, the H2000 Series is designed to leverage both SSDs and HDDs to match performance, capacity, and cost with the demands of business applications.
H2O.ai announced H2O AI Hybrid Cloud, an end-to-end AI platform to rapidly build, share, and use AI models and applications. The platform simplifies and automates the entire data science lifecycle, including connecting to and preparing data, building and explaining models, deploying and operating models, and building and sharing AI applications.
Ctrl IQ announced its official launch unveiling a full technology stack that merges the capabilities of enterprises, hyper-scale, cloud, and high-performance computing. Founded to meet the growing demand for orchestrating computational-intensive workflows, Ctrl IQ’s orchestration solution is designed for AI, machine learning, analytics, and scientific workflows.
Veritas Technologies announced Veritas NetBackup 9. With NetBackup 9, Veritas adds Flex Scale, offering users a scale-out deployment option based on Veritas’ validated reference design. This new architecture provides a hyperconverged approach to data protection that delivers cloud-like simplicity and scalability in an on-premises data center.
Aetina Corporation announced its new SuperEdge product series, an AI inference computing platform for edge AIoT environments. Aetina SuperEdge is an NVIDIA NGC-Ready system validated to run deep learning and inference applications.
Khoros announced that it has acquired Flow.ai, a provider of a conversational AI platform for designing and managing chatbots. Adding Flow.ai’s technology advances Khoros’ conversational AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, data science expertise, and will extend AI/ML capabilities available to businesses for greater self-service and operational agility.
Sardina Systems announced free cloud migration to FishOS OpenStack and Kubernetes for enterprise vScaler users to deploy private clouds to FishOS. FishOS offers automation, auto-failover, disaster recovery, zero downtime upgrade, monitoring, integration, and coexistence with existing infrastructure.
ZEDEDA announced its cloud-native solution that delivers visibility, control, and security for edge computing deployments. ZEDEDA’s distributed edge orchestration solution lets companies deploy and manage compute nodes anywhere with no IT expertise.
Qumulo expanded its Cloud Q configurations offering, making it available through the AWS Marketplace. The enhanced cloud file offering lowers the cost of file data management for customers and enables much more efficient AWS infrastructure utilization for a wider variety of unstructured file data workloads.
DataStax announced the acquisition of Kesque to accelerate delivering open-source, scale-out, cloud-native enterprise event streaming for modern data apps. DataStax also announced the general availability of DataStax Luna Streaming, a production-ready, open-source distribution and support subscription for Apache Pulsar.
HAProxy Technologies announced the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller 1.5, which enables applications running in a Kubernetes cluster to find and communicate with each other and the outside world through the Service abstraction. The solution also offers basic authentication and service mutual TLS authentication. It also offers config snippets support.
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In case you missed it, here are our most recent previous weekly real-time analytics news roundups:
