In this week’s real-time analytics news: Confluent made a number of announcements at its Current 2023 conference.
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Confluent made a number of announcements at this week’s annual Current conference. To start, the company announced the open preview of Apache Flink on Confluent Cloud, a fully managed service for stream processing that makes it easier for companies to filter, join, and enrich data streams with Flink.
Other announcements included:
- Data Streaming for AI, an initiative to accelerate organizations’ development of real-time AI applications. Achieving real-time AI demands more than fast algorithms; it requires trustworthy, relevant data served in the moment for smarter, faster insights.
- Data Portal to help teams discover all the real-time data streams within their organizations, Enterprise Clusters to cut Apache Kafka costs for serverless private networking, and reduced storage costs for Confluent Cloud.
Read about more Confluent announcements: Confluent Launches Data Streaming for AI and Adds Apache Flink
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations so organizations of all sizes can build new generative AI applications. The announcements include:
- The general availability of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available through a single application programming interface (API).
- To give customers an even greater choice of FMs, AWS also announced that the Amazon Titan Embeddings model is generally available, and that Llama 2 will be available as a new model on Amazon Bedrock.
- AWS also announced a new capability (available soon in preview) for Amazon CodeWhisperer, AWS’s AI-powered coding companion, that securely customizes CodeWhisperer’s code suggestions based on an organization’s own internal codebase.
- To increase the productivity of business analysts, AWS is releasing a preview of Generative Business Intelligence (BI) authoring capabilities for Amazon QuickSight, a unified BI service built for the cloud, so customers can create compelling visuals, format charts, perform calculations, and more–all by simply describing what they want in natural language.
Dataiku unveiled the LLM Mesh, addressing the need for an effective, scalable, and secure platform for integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) in the enterprise. With the LLM Mesh sitting between LLM service providers and end-user applications, companies can choose the most cost-effective models for their needs, ensure the safety of their data and responses, and create reusable components for scalable application development. In addition, Dataiku is joined in this announcement by its LLM Mesh launch partners Snowflake, Pinecone, and AI21 Labs.
OpenAI has announced the rollout of new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. This advancement offers users a novel and more intuitive interface, enabling them to engage in voice conversations or visually share topics with ChatGPT. The features will be available in the upcoming two weeks to Plus and Enterprise users.
IBM announced several updates to its watsonx AI and data platform. First, IBM announced the general availability of itsGranite model series designed to help businesses build and scale generative AI. IBM also announced new commitments to advance the safe and responsible use of IBM-created generative AI and foundation models. Specifically, IBM released information about its training methodology for Granite models, and it now provides IP indemnity (contractual protection) for its foundation models, enabling our clients to be more confident AI creators by using their data.
Real-time analytics news in brief
Adverity announced the rollout of incorporated generative AI tools within the platform as part of its latest product strategy. The new upcoming and future AI-assisted features include a data transformation assistant, new connectors on demand, natural language data analytics, and proactive intelligence.
Aporia announced its AI Guardrails solution to secure and optimize the performance of generative AI-powered products. AI Guardrails provides seamless real-time monitoring and comprehensive control, ensuring a secure environment where AI operates responsibly, eliminating the potential risks of hallucinations or misuse.
Canonical announced that Charmed MLFlow, Canonical’s distribution of the popular machine learning platform, is now generally available. Charmed MLFlow is part of Canonical’s growing MLOps portfolio. It is integrated with other AI and big data tools such as Apache Spark and Kubeflow. It is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription and is priced per node, with a support tier available.
ClickHouse is making ClickPipes, a data streaming service that simplifies the porting of data for real-time analytics, generally available for all ClickHouse Cloud customers. This integration takes away an extra step and saves time for customers where real-time analytics are essential, such as ingesting data to generate responses for AI chatbots, instant fraud detection for financial services, healthcare monitoring, and more. Currently, ClickPipes can ingest data from Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud, though it will add more integrations in the future.
Decodable announced at Confluent Current the general availability of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), which allows users to run a private instance of the Decodable data plane—the part that handles connectivity and stream processing—in their own AWS account. In addition, Decodable has opened up a technical preview to support custom jobs written in Java using the standard Apache Flink DataStream and Table APIs.
Ericom Software announced the launch of Ericom Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Isolation. With a focus on allowing organizations to implement user controls to protect against data exposure, malware threats, and compliance challenges, Ericom Generative AI Isolation empowers businesses to leverage the benefits of generative AI websites while maintaining a secure environment that protects sensitive data and intellectual property.
Fujitsu announced the launch of two new AI trust technologies to improve the reliability of the responses from conversational AI models. The newly developed technologies include a technique to detect hallucinations in conversational AI models – a phenomenon in which generative AI creates incorrect or unrelated output – and a technique jointly developed at its research lab at Ben Gurion University to detect phishing site URLs implanted in the responses of the AI through poisoning attacks that inject false information.
Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., announced new Sustainability Solutions and Services to aid organizations in achieving critical environmental and decarbonization goals. Leveraging expertise in industrial domains, green transformation, energy, and mobility, Hitachi Vantara’s new offerings enable organizations to adopt sustainable business practices that pave the way to a greener future.
HiveMQ announced HiveMQ Data Hub, an integrated policy engine within the HiveMQ broker designed to enforce data integrity and quality. The new offering helps detect and manage distributed data and misbehaving MQTT clients with the ability to validate, standardize, and manipulate data in motion.
IBM unveiled a new suite of AI offerings for IBM Z that are designed to help clients improve business outcomes by speeding the implementation of enterprise AI on IBM Z across a wide variety of use cases and industries. Specifically, the new offerings are designed to help accelerate the adoption of popular AI frameworks and tooling. The company also announced enhanced Machine Learning for z/OS and advanced intelligence and operational improvements with the latest IBM z/OS operating system.
MongoDB announced MongoDB Atlas for the Edge, a set of capabilities that make it easier for organizations to deploy applications closer to where real-time data is generated, processed, and stored—across devices, on-premises data centers, and major cloud providers. Organizations can now use MongoDB Atlas for the Edge to build, deploy, and manage applications that are accessible virtually anywhere for use cases like connected vehicles, smart factories, and supply chain optimization.
PlayerZero announced its platform is generally available. PlayerZero is an end-to-end platform that correlates customer performance signals to releases, creating a self-improving feedback loop from customers back into the way the product is built. Specifically, the platform connects product and engineering data behind a natural language interface so teams can easily identify and root cause the most impactful quality issues and make sure they never happen again.
Revefi announced Revefi Data Operations Cloud, a new zero-touch platform to monitor and manage data quality, performance, and costs. The new platform is a copilot that empowers data teams to have the right data in their cloud data warehouses reliably, promptly, and affordably so that their organizations can use the data to make critical business decisions.
SAP SE announced Joule, a natural-language, generative AI copilot that helps transform the way business runs. Joule will be embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio. Specifically, Joule will be embedded into SAP applications from HR to finance, supply chain, procurement, and customer experience, as well as into the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Sisense unveiled the public preview of Compose SDK for Fusion. Compose SDK for Fusion is a flexible development toolkit that gives developers tools to embed context-aware analytics in a code-first, scalable, and modular way. That capability accelerates the development process, reduces maintenance overhead, and saves valuable time compared to coding analytics from scratch.
Solace announced a new version of its Solace Event Portal solution that gives organizations with Apache Kafka deployments better visibility into, and control over, their Kafka event streams, brokers and associated assets. New features and capabilities include a native discovery agent; an audit capability that enables users to easily identify discrepancies between runtime and design intent; the ability to implement best practices in the areas of designing, securing and governing event streams; complete lifecycle management and version control capabilities; and more.
Teradata announced new enhancements to its leading AI/ML model management software in ClearScape Analytics to meet the growing demand from organizations across the globe for advanced analytics and AI. These new features – including “no code” capabilities, as well as robust new governance and AI “explainability” controls – enable businesses to accelerate, scale, and optimize AI/ML deployments to quickly generate business value from their AI investments.
TripleBlind announced its AI Privacy Platform to ensure automatic end-to-end privacy protection across the breadth of the full AI lifecycle from analytics, training, prompting, and inferencing. The new platform is built on patented AI Blinding technologies, such as Blind Learning and Blind Inferencing, that provide accuracy for privacy enhancement for all AI workloads.
TrustCloud announced the launch of TrustCloud Business Intelligence, a suite of dashboards and reports that equip GRC and Security leaders to track and share the business, risk, and financial impact of their trust programs. TrustCloud Business Intelligence pulls in real-time data from TrustCloud’s compliance readiness, risk management, and security review applications and quantifies status and outcomes in easily digestible and shareable dashboards so GRC and Security professionals can monitor the health of their GRC program, see their impact on revenue, and quickly align leaders when making a case for new budget requests.
Vultr announced the launch of the Vultr GPU Stack and Container Registry to enable enterprises to build, test, and operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) models at scale — across any region on the globe. The GPU Stack supports instant provisioning of the full array of NVIDIA GPUs, while the new Vultr Container Registry makes AI pre-trained NVIDIA NGC models globally available for on-demand provisioning, development, training, tuning, and inference.
Partnerships, collaborations, and more
Amazon and Anthropic announced a strategic collaboration that will bring together their respective industry-leading technology and expertise in safer generative artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the development of Anthropic’s future foundation models and make them widely accessible to AWS customers.
Automat-IT and Anodot announced a long-term strategic partnership. The partnership is focused on helping customers maximize the value of their AWS deployments. This agreement combines the expertise of both companies to deliver comprehensive services atop AWS.
Cloudflare announced its global network will deploy NVIDIA GPUs at the edge combined with NVIDIA Ethernet switches, putting AI inference compute power close to users around the globe. It will also feature NVIDIA’s full stack inference software —including NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM and NVIDIA Triton Inference server — to further accelerate the performance of AI applications, including large language models.
Denodo and Data Sentinel partnered to create a solution that automates the time-consuming, labor-intensive tasks related to compliance with Canada’s new Quebec Law 25, which took effect this month. Like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Law 25 applies not only to its country of origin but to all companies that serve the protected customers. To that end, the solution helps organizations facilitate compliance with Law 25.
Domino Data Lab and Carahsoft Technology announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Domino’s Master Government Aggregator, making its platform available to the Public Sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions.
Infosys announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to jointly develop solutions that leverage Infosys Topaz, Azure OpenAI Service, and Azure Cognitive Services. Both organizations are bringing together their respective artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to enhance enterprise functions with AI-enabled solutions across multiple industries.
Lightbits announced the availability of the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. With this move, Lightbits customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform with streamlined deployment and management.
Penguin Solutions announced that it has been certified by NVIDIA to support enterprises deploying NVIDIA DGX AI computing platforms under the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Managed Services program. As a full-service integration and services provider, Penguin has the capabilities to design at scale, deploy at speed, and provide managed services for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD solutions.
Qumulo announced it has built its strategic relationship with Fujitsu to provide customers with more options to deploy their joint solution. To that end, Qumulo is now available on the new NVMe-based hybrid nodes on Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY platform that deliver the performance of flash storage at the price of disk. Also, Qumulo’s file system delivers real-time visibility, scale, and control of data across on-premises and cloud, allowing easy system configuration and performance management.
Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Airkit.ai. Airkit.ai enables Fortune 500 and fast-growing businesses to build flexible, omni-channel customer engagement applications and AI-based customer service agents. The addition of Airkit.ai to Salesforce will also help Service, Sales, Marketing, and Commerce teams move faster into the future of customer engagement in the era of AI.
VAST Data and CoreWeave announced a strategic partnership that will further CoreWeave’s mission to deliver highly scalable and performant cloud infrastructure for AI and accelerated compute workloads. CoreWeave selected the VAST Data Platform to build a global, NVIDIA-powered accelerated computing cloud for deploying, managing, and securing hundreds of petabytes of data for generative AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and visual effects (VFX) workloads.
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 September 23
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 16
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 9
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending September 2
- Real-time Analytics News for the Week Ending August 26
- Real-time Analytics News for Week Ending August 19
