Amalgam Insights is relaunching its weekly summary of important announcements in the data and analytics space. If you would like your announcement to be included in these roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.
Product Launches and Updates
DataRobot Delivers New Platform Enhancements
At their AI Experience Worldwide event this week, DataRobot announced a number of enhancements to its enterprise AI platform, with the goal of making it easier for every user to have AI be useful for them.
* Composable ML will allow advanced AutoML users with the requisite coding background to tweak existing DataRobot “blueprints” for their specific use cases.
* Continuous AI extends DataRobot’s MLOps product by letting users schedule relevant retraining sessions for models in production. These events can be scheduled on a regular basis, or when specific events occur such as data drift. In addition, new challenger models can be automatically created with AutoML to ensure the model that best fits the data is the one in production.
* The No Code AI App Builder will allow any user to turn a model into an application without needing to code, letting business users and decision makers leverage their model’s predictions in a more timely manner.
* Bias and Fairness Production Monitoring enables bias testing and monitoring of production models, warning when bias is detected and what factors are responsible.
* Model Grader will score existing models on four vectors: data quality, model robustness, model accuracy, and model fairness. At a glance, customers will be able to understand how their models perform with these criteria in mind.
In addition, DataRobot also partnered with Hivecell to deploy AI in edge computing environments, launched an AI for Health Incubator, and joined a World Economic Forum initiative to address ethics in artificial intelligence.
IBM Announces New Hybrid Cloud and AI Capabilities
During this week’s Think event, IBM announced new capabilities to bring data and AI together.
* IBM debuted AutoSQL, a new capability within IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Customers will be able to automate access to their data, even across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, without having to move or copy said data. This will speed up the use of said data while mitigating the risks of creating further data silos that occur when data is moved.
* IBM launched Watson Orchestrate, an interactive AI that will assist users in performing “tasks” from procuring approvals to preparing proposals more quickly in order to focus on more strategic tasks. Watson Orchestrate is currently available in preview as part of the IBM Automation Cloud Paks.
Altair One Cloud Platform Debuts New Features and Functionality
On Monday, May 10, Altair launched Altair One, a portal for the Altair product suite, including access to Altair’s data analytics and management tools and its high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. By integrating its AI and analytics tools with its base of computer-aided engineering and design tools into a single suite, Altair One can provide value for organizations whose use cases have combined needs for HPC and AI together.
Acquisitions
DataRobot Acquires Zepl to Enhance Enterprise AI Platform Capabilities for Advanced Data Scientists
In addition to the updates to its platform noted above, on Tuesday, May 11, DataRobot announced that it had also acquired Zepl, a cloud data science and analytics platform. Zepl will be incorporated into the DataRobot platform in its notebook form, allowing more advanced data scientists to code their own tasks and models manually within DataRobot, and collaborate with business analysts in one place to extend their initial model-building efforts.
New Hires
Alteryx Appoints Paula Hansen as Chief Revenue Officer
Monday, May 14, Alteryx appointed Paula Hansen as their Chief Revenue Officer. Hansen has held the CRO position before at SAP Customer Experience, and before that served as Vice President of Cisco’s Global Enterprise organization. Hansen brings broad enterprise solutions sales capabilities to this position that are in line with Alteryx’ plans for future growth as a foundational platform for supporting analytics and AI.
General
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Approves Technology Research Bill
On Wednesday, May 12, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation approved the Endless Frontier Act (S.1260), a $110 billion bill to promote technology research over the next five years. Among the key technology areas included were artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and energy. Amalgam Insights believes that this bill will fundamentally affect the product development maps of AI, cybersecurity, and quantum computing vendors and provide standards that will be incorporated into RfPs and other software sourcing exercises.
[…] with Snowpark, growing the existing DataRobot-Snowflake partnership. Data prep tasks from Zepl (a recent DataRobot acquisition) can be pushed into Snowflake for feature engineering, while providing a preconfigured environment […]
[…] from his role as of mid-March.Amalgam’s Insight: We covered the hiring of Paula Hansen in our May 2021 update. This promotion made sense as Alteryx has had a President/Chief Revenue Officer in the past. Keith […]