In this week’s real-time analytics news: Accenture and Avanade announced a copilot business transformation practice supported by Microsoft.
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Accenture, Avanade, and Microsoft announced they are launching a copilot business transformation practice, supported by Microsoft, and co-investing in new capabilities, solutions, and training to help organizations securely and responsibly reinvent their business functions with generative and agentic AI and Copilot technologies.
The Copilot business transformation practice will provide the technology and industry experience clients need to help accelerate and expand their use of Copilot and agents across the enterprise. The companies will collaborate on AI and Copilot agent templates, extensions, plugins, and connectors to help organizations leverage their data and gen AI to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and drive growth.
The practice consists of 5,000 professionals from Accenture and Avanade, supported by Microsoft product specialists who will work closely with the Accenture Center for Advanced AI. The team will tap into more than 50,000 Microsoft Copilot-trained professionals across Accenture and Avanade to help deliver industry and functional transformation.
The Eclipse Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on promoting the interest of the open source community in the implementation of regulatory initiatives on Open Source Artificial Intelligence (OSAI). The MoU outlines several areas of cooperation, including:
- Information Exchange: OSI and the Eclipse Foundation will share relevant insights and information related to public policy-making and regulatory activities on artificial intelligence.
- Representation to Policymakers: OSI and the Eclipse Foundation will cooperate in representing the principles and values of open-source licenses to policymakers and civil society organizations.
- Promotion of Open Source Principles: Joint efforts will be made to raise awareness of the role of open source in AI, emphasizing how it can foster innovation while mitigating risks.
Other real-time analytics news in brief
Snowflake announced new advancements that accelerate the path for organizations to deliver easy, efficient, and trusted AI into production with their enterprise data. With Snowflake’s latest innovations, developers can build conversational apps for structured and unstructured data with high accuracy, efficiently run batch large language model (LLM) inference for natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, and train custom models with GPU-powered containers — all with built-in governance, access controls, observability, and safety guardrails.
In other Snowflake news, the company announced a modern approach to bring transactional and analytical data together in a single, unified platform with Unistore. Unistore is powered by Hybrid Tables (now generally available on AWS), a table type that enables fast, high-concurrency point operations to support transactional workloads.
Buf announced the Jepsen report for Bufstream, making it the first verifiably correct, Kafka-compatible message queue built on a modern cloud-native architecture. Bufstream scales elastically to meet the demands of any workload and supports active-active, multi-region Kafka deployments, so enterprises no longer need to worry about clusters or regions. Bufstream enforces data quality and stream governance policies at the broker level. With Bufstream’s Advanced Semantic Intelligence, organizations can go beyond schema validation to enable deeper semantic validation of business logic directly within the broker. Bufstream stores its data directly as Apache Iceberg tables, allowing lakehouse analytics teams to leverage this data faster.
Alteryx announced its Fall 2024 release for the Alteryx platform. The latest update supports hybrid architectures and meets customers where they are—whether in the cloud or on-premises. The Fall 2024 release improves the user experience of developing and managing analytics workflows to increase productivity. The new capabilities include new data connectors, support for analytic apps in Alteryx Cloud Execution for Desktop, enterprise utility enhancements, and server API improvements.
Cloudera announced that it entered into a definitive agreement with Octopai to acquire Octopai’s data lineage and catalog platform that enables organizations to understand and govern their data. Octopai’s automated solutions for data lineage, data discovery, data catalog, mapping, and impact analysis across complex data environments complement Cloudera’s modern data architecture strategy. As such, Cloudera customers can get visibility across a myriad of data solutions so they can fuel their AI, predictive analytics, and other decision-making tools with trusted data.
DataRobot announced an enterprise AI suite to develop and deliver generative AI applications and agents that can be customized to meet business needs. The new DataRobot enterprise AI suite enables teams to deliver advanced generative AI solutions, rapidly prototype and perfect the user experience for generative AI applications, and streamline application publishing
Elastic announced its AI ecosystem to help enterprise developers accelerate building and deploying their Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. The ecosystem provides developers with a curated, comprehensive set of AI technologies and tools integrated with the Elasticsearch vector database. The Elastic AI Ecosystem includes integrations with Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic’s Claude, Cohere, Confluent, Dataiku, DataRobot, Galileo, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Microsoft, Mistral AI, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Protect AI, RedHat, Vectorize, and Unstructured.
Hitachi Vantara announced a strategic partnership with Hammerspace. The collaboration is designed to address specific AI workload and data quality challenges by integrating Hammerspace technology with Hitachi Vantara’s AI-enabled infrastructure capabilities to ensure high performance, scalability, and automated data orchestration to ensure distributed data is easily and transparently accessible for GenAI workloads.
Infinidat has announced its Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow deployment architecture to enable enterprises to fully leverage generative AI (GenAI). With Infinidat’s RAG architecture, enterprises utilize Infinidat’s existing InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA enterprise storage systems as the basis to optimize the output of AI models without the need to purchase any specialized equipment.
KX unveiled upgrades to PyKX, its Python-first interface for kdb+. PyKX 3.0’s hybrid architecture combines the speed and scale of kdb+ with seamless integration to Python’s machine learning (ML) and deep learning libraries. PyKX 3.0 empowers users to run high throughput, high-performance, real-time streaming, and historical data applications entirely orchestrated from Python.
Nutanix announced that it extended the company’s AI infrastructure platform with a new cloud native offering, Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), that can be deployed on any Kubernetes platform, at the edge, in core data centers, and on public cloud services like AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. Leveraging NVIDIA NIM for optimized performance of foundation models, Nutanix Enterprise AI helps organizations securely deploy, run, and scale inference endpoints for large language models (LLMs) to support the deployment of generative AI (GenAI) applications in minutes, not days or weeks.
Pulumi announced enhancements to the Kubernetes ecosystem. Key improvements include major updates to the EKS provider supporting Amazon Linux 2023 and Security Groups for pods, the release of Pulumi Kubernetes Operator 2.0 with dedicated workspace pods, Pulumi ESC integration with External Secrets Operator, and a new Kubernetes-native deployment agent for enhanced security and scalability. These updates, alongside improvements to Helm Chart resources, enhanced await logic, and better CustomResource support through crd2pulumi, strengthens Pulumi’s commitment to providing developers with robust, enterprise-grade tools for managing Kubernetes infrastructure.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5, the latest version of its enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 delivers enhanced capabilities to bring even more consistency to the operating system underpinning rapid IT innovations, from artificial intelligence (AI) to edge computing, and make these booming advancements an accessible reality for more organizations.
In other Red Hat news, the company announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic. Neural Magic’s expertise in inference performance engineering and commitment to open source aligns with Red Hat’s vision of high-performing AI workloads that directly map to customer-specific use cases and data anywhere and everywhere across the hybrid cloud.
RelationalAI announced the general availability of its Snowflake Native App on the Snowflake Marketplace, with production support to its customers. Built on the Snowflake Native App Framework Integration with Snowpark Container Services (now generally available on AWS and public preview on Azure), RelationalAI enables customers to build and modernize intelligent applications with less code and complexity, using a data-centric architecture based on relational knowledge graphs.
SAS announced the acquisition of the principal software assets of Hazy, a synthetic data technology company. The acquisition aims to enhance SAS’s data and AI portfolio, equipping its customers with critical and timely synthetic data generation capabilities as their use of AI rapidly expands. To that point, by integrating Hazy’s synthetic data capabilities, SAS will empower customers to innovate and conduct deep research, overcoming challenges related to data availability, access, or quality.
ThoughtSpot unveiled an expansion to the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities with the launch of Spotter. Spotter is an agentic AI analyst that allows businesses to proactively derive actionable and meaningful outcomes from their data. Specifically, Spotter brings the analytical and reasoning skills of a data analyst to the fingertips of every user, wherever they are.
VDURA announced a new release of its VDURA Data Platform software. The latest VDURA Data Platform is a significant modernization of the previous releases with a move to a fully parallel, microservices-based architecture, a new flash-optimized metadata engine, and an enhanced object storage layer. Together, these features ensure unmatched efficiency, scalability, and durability across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
If your company has real-time analytics news, send your announcements to [email protected].
In case you missed it, here are our most recent previous weekly real-time analytics news roundups:
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending November 9
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending November 2
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending October 26
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending October 19
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending October 12
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending October 5
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 28
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 21
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 14
