In the news this week: Deloitte launches an AI institute and IBM, HPE, Salesforce, and Siemens introduce offerings to help businesses safely return to work.
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:
Deloitte announced the launch of the Deloitte AI Institute, a center that focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) research, eminence and applied innovation across industries. The Institute will bring together the brightest minds in the field of AI to apply cutting-edge research to help address a wide spectrum of relevant AI use cases. The Institute’s network will consist of top industry thought leaders and academic luminaries; start-ups; research and development groups; entrepreneurs; investors; and innovators. This network of specialists and research, combined with Deloitte’s depth of applied AI knowledge and understanding of pain points across industries and sectors — whether it is identifying use cases, understanding industry specific ecosystems, scaling from AI proof-of-concepts or securing AI systems — can help organizations transform quickly with AI.
IBM’s Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) is releasing COVID notebooks, a toolkit that helps developers and data scientists answer important questions about the pandemic. The solution takes care of tasks, including obtaining authoritative data on the current status of the outbreak, cleaning up the most serious data-quality problems, collating the data into a format amenable to easy analysis with tools like Pandas and Scikit-Learn, and building an initial set of example reports and graphs. Taking care of these tasks frees developers and data scientists to focus on advanced analysis and modeling tasks instead of worrying about things like data formats and data cleaning. The repository uses developer-friendly Jupyter notebooks to cover each of these initial data analysis steps. To simplify the process of updating your results with the latest data, IBM as created data processing pipelines using the Elyra Notebook Pipelines Visual Editor and KubeFlow Pipelines.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced five new return-to-work solutions that will help organizations accelerate business recovery and reopening plans in the wake of COVID-19. The new solutions, which will assist in controlling the spread of the virus and enabling business continuity, will be implemented and managed through HPE Pointnext Technology Services. These new solutions include social distance tracing and tracking, touchless entry, fever detection, augmented reality and visual remote guidance, and workplace alerts and information sharing. These solutions will scale for businesses of all sizes using secure, high-performing HPE servers for the edge, Aruba AI-powered network infrastructure, and technologies from HPE’s rich ecosystem of partners.
Salesforce and Siemens announced a strategic partnership to develop a new workplace technology suite that will support businesses globally to safely reopen and deliver the future experience for physical workplaces. The partnership will combine Salesforce’s Work.com, powered by Customer 360, and Siemens’ Smart Infrastructure solutions, including Comfy and Enlighted, to orchestrate the processes, people and things that are essential to creating safe, connected workplaces for the future. Key solutions include a ‘touchless office’ with mobile employee boarding passes for building and elevator entry, and a safe occupancy management system, which allows employees to reserve conference rooms and desks through Comfy’s app that sends real-time alerts as thresholds are reached.
Databricksannounced the availability of Delta Engine and the acquisition of Redash. These new capabilities make it faster and easier for data teams to use its Unified Data Analytics platform for data science, machine learning, and a broad range of data analytics use cases. Delta Engine is a high-performance query engine on cloud data lakes and Redash is an open source dashboarding and visualization service for data scientists and analysts to do data exploration. Organizations can now build curated data lakes that include structured and semi-structured data and run all their analytics on high quality, fresh data in the cloud. Databricks acquired Redash to provide easy-to-use dashboarding and visualization capabilities on these curated data lakes. With Redash, data scientists and SQL analysts can eliminate the complexity of moving data into other systems for analysis.
Red Hat, Inc. announced key enhancements to the Ansible Automation portfolio, including the latest version of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and new Red Hat Certified Ansible Content Collections available on Automation Hub. The latest release of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations expand automation to new domains while increasing productivity and cross-team collaboration. As a component of the latest platform release, new Ansible Content Collections developed, tested, and supported by Red Hat enable organizations to get the most up-to-date automation content.
IBM announced the release of IBM Blockchain Platform version 2.5, which improves on IBM Blockchain Platform version 2 in a number of ways. These include supporting the latest open source innovation with The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 and delivers new integrations with Red Hat technologies. It boosts security, usability, flexibility, and development speed with support for Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 and Ansible Content Collections.
Aiven, a technology company combining open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced the release of Kafka MirrorMaker 2 as a stand-alone service, enabling enterprises to access the Apache Kafka ecosystem more easily. MirrorMaker 2.0 itself comes with a number of improvements, including the ability to maintain offset mappings between clusters, critical for disaster recovery — one of the top use cases for MirrorMaker. With Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, and now MirrorMaker 2 as a service, Aiven customers can specialize their workloads, reducing dependency while increasing resilience. MirrorMaker 2 helps enterprises ensure data continuity by allowing them to easily replicate data among Kafka clusters. Aiven’s multi-cloud platform further enhances this by allowing the replication of data across cloud providers.
VMware, Inc. introduced a new integrated feature in VMware vSphere 7 that will enable enterprises to deliver elastic infrastructure on-demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. This new feature—VMware vSphere Bitfusion—is developed out of VMware’s 2019 acquisition of Bitfusion, a pioneer in the virtualization of hardware accelerator resources including graphics processing unit (GPU) technology. The combination of Bitfusion and VMware vSphere will help organizations achieve cost savings, enable resource sharing out of the box, and deliver the right hardware accelerator resource, like a GPU, to the right workload at the right time.
Grid Dynamics Holdings, Inc., provider of data science and digital transformation services, announced a partnership with Dataiku. The partnership brings together one of powerful toolkits for data preparation and ML models deployment, deep skills in business and technology strategy, and many years of experience in implementing data science and machine learning programs for Fortune 1000 clients. Dataiku’s platform capabilities complemented by Grid Dynamics’ expertise in state-of-the-art machine learning technology and large-scale digital transformation programs enable businesses to quickly deliver even the most challenging AI/ML programs and seamlessly integrate AI/ML features into marketing, revenue management, and supply chain operations.
The Unified Communication Framework (UCF), a collaboration of industry, laboratories, and academia to create production-grade communication frameworks and open standards for data-centric and high-performance applications, announced the formation of the Open Smart Network Application Programming Interface (OpenSNAPI) project. Through collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia within the UCF consortium, the goal of OpenSNAPI is to define and create a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing the compute engines on the network – specifically on a smart network adapter.
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Infinite Computer Solutions, provider of products and platforms for digital transformation, announced a strategic collaboration to promote the widespread adoption of smart cities solutions and deliver Internet of Things as a Service (IoTaaS) for plug and play deployment. The collaboration creates an end-to-end, fully managed solution that facilitates digital transformation for smart connected spaces across government, healthcare, construction, entertainment, transportation, manufacturing, retail, and logistics. The IoTaaS offering connects companies in the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program using Infinite’s intelligent engagement platform – ZyterSmartSpaces – to enable a streamlined, full suite of offerings that address the complexities around developing secure, smart, connected spaces across vertical industries, worldwide.
IBM and SAP SE announced their partnership’s next evolution, with plans to develop several new offerings designed to create a more predictable journey for businesses to become data-driven intelligent enterprises. The next evolution of the IBM and SAP partnership aims to help drive faster business transformation time to value, accelerate industry innovation through industry-specific data value offerings, turbocharge customer and employee experiences and provide ultimate flexibility and choice to run their workloads in hybrid cloud environments.
inContext.ai, a developer of healthcare-centric information extraction software and AI-powered clinical applications, announced an award of $225K in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. The inContext.ai platform improves physicians’ interactions with complex and counter-intuitive software by augmenting and assisting the physician’s workflow, decreasing the possibility of medical errors and compromised care while reducing the frustrations that lead to physician burnout.
DIAWAY, the big-data storage and networking integrator, announced a strategic partnership with Excelero and the launch of a new product, DIAWAY KEILA powered by Excelero NVMesh. It is a full-fledged, 100% software-defined storage solution built for high-performance computing workloads including both AI/ML/deep learning and data warehouses and containers.
Lynx Analytics announced the open source release of its Complete Graph Data Science Platform, LynxKite 4.0. The platform helps businesses democratize the adoption of Graph AI. Up until today, building Graph AI solutions has been a highly technical process that involved numerous skills, tools and coding efforts. This has created a high barrier to entry and slow adoption of Graph Analytics. LynxKite removes these obstacles and makes Graph AI more accessible to enterprises and citizen data scientists.
DataRobot unveiled an expanded partnership with Snowflake, the cloud data platform, which includes an integration with Snowflake Partner Connect. Building on DataRobot’s existing integration with Snowflake, the new inclusion in Partner Connect will accelerate time-to-value for joint customers. DataRobot also announced it achieved Elite status as part of the new Snowflake Partner Network. DataRobot’s addition to Snowflake Partner Connect enhances the integration of the offerings by making it easy for Snowflake users to trial DataRobot in conjunction with their Snowflake data. With a seamless connection to Snowflake, customers can leverage all the benefits of the cloud data platform. Snowflake eliminates the manual work of traditional data solutions and empowers users with a powerful single, integrated platform for near real-time data insights that advance their businesses forward.
RapidMiner, a data science platform enabling people of all skill levels to rapidly create and operate artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, announced the latest release of its platform, RapidMiner 9.7. This update prioritizes the team element for successful data science initiatives, continuing to put people at the center of the enterprise AI journey by empowering users of varying backgrounds and abilities. As part of this release, RapidMiner Server has dramatically evolved to keep pace with both changing times and changing technology. Now known as the RapidMiner AI Hub, it is built to connect AI to people, processes, systems and value in order to tear down silos and make enterprise AI successful, wide-spread and sustainable. The RapidMiner AI Hub allows people with different tooling preferences and skillsets to collaborate on AI projects within any organization. Creating a shared infrastructure such as this improves costs, agility, data access, transparency, security, and compliance.
Intel and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced award recipients of joint funding for research into the development of future wireless systems. The Machine Learning for Wireless Networking Systems (MLWiNS) program is the latest in a series of joint efforts between the two partners to support research that accelerates innovation with the focus of enabling ultra-dense wireless systems and architectures that meet the throughput, latency and reliability requirements of future applications. In parallel, the program will target research on distributed machine learning computations over wireless edge networks, to enable a broad range of new applications.
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In case you missed it, here are our most recent previous weekly real-time analytics news roundups:
