H2O.ai confirms its status of leader

During one of the best meeting of the recent IT Press Tour with H2O.ai, its CEO and founder Sri Satish Ambati, gave us a good intro and state of the art of AI.

Founded in 2011, the company has raised so far $73.6M in 5 rounds to democratize Artificial Intelligence (AI) via its open source Machine Learning (ML) platform. The idea is to offer a foundation to build or improve applications illustrating the various use cases identified by H2O, critical for the market take off.

Driveless AI is a big iteration in AI adoption for enterprise, it automates data science and machine learning workflows with a high level of accuracy. The impact is impressive with an unique UI for immediate visualizations.

The solution runs on commodity hardware specifically configured with GPU for parallel processing.

ML automation solves also the challenge of data scientist limitations helping companies to boost workflow, visualization and modeling. Driverless AI accepts data from different sources such tabular data from plain test files (csv, txt, data, orc, svmlight, avro, parquet, tgz, gz, bgz, zip, xz, xls, xlsx, bin and arff), Hadoop, Google cloud storage, Google BigQuery or even S3 buckets. Following the data import, the dataset is ready for an experiment and can be monitored in live mode with a very unique UI.

In details, a data is a row representing one entity and must have an associated label, all data present in one dataset. It also means that data submitted to the ML engine is prepared for that with cleaning and normalization already done.

Driverless AI reduces drastically the data processing time with automation and optimized data modeling implementation. It delivers a better prediction model, more easy to deploy and reuse with standards such Python and Java-based technologies.

Technically for on-premises deployment, Driverless AI, installed as a Docker image, requires a minimum of 10GB of free disk space to run and is greedy of memory with a minimum of 64GB dedicated to its job and at least 10x of your dataset size of disk space. For cloud installation, I should say for Amazon, H2O provides a AWS AMI. On bare-metal, a RPM package is available for Red Hat, Centos 7, SLES 12 Linux OS, a DEB is also available for Ubuntu 16.04 and for Windows with Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

H2O is a real breakthrough for current enterprise use cases with a proven tool more and more adopted by the market. If you have a chance to attend an H2O conference, soon in London and in a few months in San Francisco, join and listen carefully, something is happening...

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Aera Technology ready to disrupt the market

The recent IT Press Tour offered to the press crew the opportunity to meet and visit Aera Technology, led by Frederic Laluyaux for a few quarters now.

Under his leadership, the company, named in the past FusionOps made a real shuffle, renamed Aera Technology, new directions and new funding of $50M. We all remember what Frederic did at Anaplan taking the rein of the company in 2012 with a few dozens employees and leaving almost 4 years later in a very different position with more than 500 hundreds people, coming from a confidential player to a market leader with 4 VC rounds for a total of $220M under his tenure. Wow a real success that fueled Anaplan to be introduced a few days ago to the NYSE. Efforts and strategy put in place by Frederic have paid off.

Aera Technology plays in a different segment but have some similarities with Anaplan: the company exists before Frederic arrived, it's pretty small, confidential with strong technology.

The main idea of the company is top optimize and boost enterprise's business processes by considering cognitive automation. This approach addresses these business challenges with a different angle with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data modeling expertise and business optimization knowledge.

The effect or value proposition is a self-driving enterprise service able to suggest business directions and tactics, becoming a trusted advisor for the executive team. In term of steps, the Aera cycle is based of 4 key permanent functions critical for the accuracy of recommendation:

1. Understand phase with crawlers navigating the environment and swallowing tons of data,
2. Recommend phase with suggestions for financial improvement and operational gains,
3. Predict phase is crucial, it is a real-time data service leveraging AI and ML to deliver key precise informations to sustain and improve the business.
4. Act phase is related to the execution of the decisions.

Beyond the traditional interaction, the human-machine interface is also a key piece of the solution with a similar experience like Siri, Goole or Alexa voice control. Let's start with "Aera? ..."

A good example of Aera is given by Merck KGaA healthcare division. The company runs the solution to improve significantly the supply chain process with better predictions, real time visibility and reduction of supply shortages. The team will expand the perimeter of Aera from 100 to 5000 products following the pilot phase. Merck understands the competitive advantage provided by Aera, it reminds the early days of SAP and ERPs when early adopters increased their gap with followers.

The core element is the Aera Cognitive Operating System aka Aera COS which groups the 3 bottom layers on the architecture diagram above: Crawlers, Data Processing Engine (DPE) and Cognitive Data Layer (CDL). The solution built by Aera uses Apache Hadoop and Spark, Redis, we heard also Exasol, all running on AWS. The next key component is the Aera Cognitive WorkBench (CWB) which provides new methods to make decisions on/with data and delivers real-time recommendations to improve the business line. It clearly accelerates decisions and visibility is highly improved. Again it's difficult to control what it's not well measured so imagine for predictions...

Fueled by AI, the CWB allows the decision maker to add a new dimension of thinking aligned with the speed of changes by competition, customers and market demands.

Aera belongs to a small group of players that leverage enterprises and market data to boost business thanks to its unique cognitive approach fueled by AI, ML and specific advanced algorithms. Something is happening with Area.

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Platform.sh announces white-label offering to boost adoption

Platform.sh, the emerging leader in modern applications cloud hosting, just unveiled a new business iteration of its platform named White-label SaaS Factory. This initiative targets companies with desire to move their applications to the cloud rapidly and securely in a very cost effective way.

The idea behind this offering is to maximize development team time and invite them to concentrate their effort on their core applications and services instead of suffering by infrastructure tasks. Platform.sh offers a way to provide all services and layers to dev. teams fully localized and branded for the customers. The company leverages two key differentiators, its instant-cloning technology and "batteries included" continuous deployment workflow.

With Platform.sh running on AWS, Azure and Orange Cloud, the flexibility is already there with recognized API capabilities and proven billing functions. This approach delivers the promise of the cloud - elasticity, simplicity, flexibility, ubiquity and speed - inviting developers to migrate their apps without risks and scale their company business. Congrats to Frederic Plais and his team.

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Kaycee Lai is back

Promethium, the new company of Kaycee Lai, just exits the stealth mode and announced a seed round of $2.5M led Zetta Venture Partners. Kaycee has successful tenure at Avamar then EMC, Delphix, Virsto then VMware, Primary Data and more recently Waterline Data.

The company develops a data context automation platform to address needs in data governance and business intelligence and analytics with a self-service approach. With GDPR pressure and a few other regulations, data governance has become a must have. We'll learn more about the company in the coming weeks for sure. Congrats to Kaycee and his team.

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Yellowfin, a trusted BI player

Yellowfin, an Australian BI company, came from a long way to meet The IT Press Tour team. Founded in 2003, the company, a profitable ISV, with no VC money ever, splits the market in 3 areas to explain market trends and evolutions: 1985-2005 with BI, 2005-2015 with Data Discovery and we recognize here some famous data services layers such the data preparation, data discovery itself and data visualization, and finally 2015 and future with Smart Analytics fueled by Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning of course lots of automation. The market is growing at a rapid pace to reach $18.8B in 2017 to $22.8B in 2022 according Gartner and propelled by of course the Hadoop/Spark ecosystem and by also new companies addressing new data challenges with new technology components base don AI & ML.

Gartner defines 3 waves from semantic layer-based platform to visual-based data discovery platforms to finally augmented analytics. and Yellowfin belongs to this last category. Bizarre the last part is not named platform despite we know the power of this term in our industry today.

In 15 years, Yellowfin secured 27k+ clients in 75 countries with 300+ global partners meaning that the technology is well known, proven and adopted with customers like Coca-Cola, BMC, Honda, Vodafone, Taco Bell, KFC and Xerox... many big ones.

The product is a BI and Analytics platform that integrates data preparation, data analysis and dashboards with security and governance and runs on-premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid mode. Clearly Yellowfin is a recognized player with several awards that needs to maintain its leadership in the category being shaked by new comers with new ideas and other platform philosophies. We heard that the company will introduce something big soon that make others followers, we'll cover that for sure...

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New dimension for Platform.sh

We met Platform.sh 18 months ago with the IT Press Tour and the company, emerging leader in modern PaaS, continues to grow at a rapid pace.

Frederic Plais, CEO, has injected a unique human behavior and today the company counts more than 100 employees with 5,000+ customers and got a few months ago a new VC round - series C of $34M - for a total of $47M, globally all lights are green. Wow impressive for an engineering driven company who suffered a bit of its lack of visibility. This is what I name Platform.sh a hidden gem. But they're working on it with Chris Yates as its new VP of Marketing coming from Acquia. The Company has just been awarded in France by Syntec and EY for the 1st position in international Top 250 category.

Data is the new oil and every company is a software company harvesting and harnessing data to drive success. Finally they all create and manufacture data, you take data and from it you build new data defining key business differentiators.

But complexity is the enemy with tons of applications, tools, databases environments, languages... showing a tough challenge. Number of combinations is high meaning it's a risk and costs climb. Platform.sh solves these challenges with a very easy to use and comprehensive devops platform. The key argument is around the development productivity to release faster new version and invite to focus on the application itself and not the infrastructure around it.

In term of services delivered, Platform.sh offers a scalable composable PaaS, CICD, Service Management, Code Management Tools, Container Management, Billing , Performance and Monitoring... Among key features, Instant Cloning boosts time-to-speed for applications and auto-scale "follows" transparently applications workloads.

Platform.sh recently entered in a new dimension ready for a rapid growth in 2019.

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Snowflake leads the pack by far...

Snowflake, the emerging leader in cloud data warehouse, just announced a new monumental VC round of $450M that pushes the bar to a total of $928.9M at a pre-money valuation of $3.5B coming from $1.7B post-money last January. It means that the company boosted almost $2B its valuation in 9 months. And the current post-money is obviously almost $4B that doubles that 2018 valuation increment! Led by Sequoia Capital, joined by Meritech Capital as new all existing investors joined this round realizing that the opportunity is fantastic and the hope of high return important. Referring to my last post about Snowflake, I said that nothing will happen below 10x the total investment so I'm pretty confortable to say below $10B, go home.

From left to right: Thierry Cruanes Founder Architect, Bob Muglia CEO,
Benoît Dageville Co-founder & CTO and Marcin Zukoswki Co-founder (Credit Snowflake)

We had the privilege to meet and visit Snowflake at their San Mateo HQ during the last IT Press Tour in June and all the press team were impressed by the team, the product, the vision and globally by the maturity of the strategy.

Snowflake plays in a new category, the Cloud Data Warehouse, having built a new highly scalable database for analytics, like Amazon Redshift, acquired from ParAccel before Actian bought the company in 2013 or GCP BigQuery. It is the only ISV in the leader quadrant, the 2 others are cloud service providers. Some competition come from more classic approaches as well and we wonder what will the Cloudera/Hortonworks merge bring on the table. Microsoft tries to offer something named Azure SQL Datawarehouse but with very limited success.

Fueled by this last round, the coming strategy includes multi-cloud and we expect sooner and later a release on GCP, in other words this population can't be ignored, sales geo expansion, this is pretty classic, and engineering growth, in USA and Berlin, this is interesting to notice in order to continue to lead and drive that market segment.

The Snowflake story is fantastic and it's always good to shake the palm and disrupt the market to offer new approaches for users. Congrats. We hope to meet Snowflake again for a future edition as things are going super fast.

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Dell Tech. invests in CNEX Labs

Strong in storage with EMC, Dell Technologies continues to invest in storage technologies especially ones related to network storage devices and controllers.

This time, Dell Tech. Capital is just consistent with its past investment as the company already participated to the A round and even let it. Today CNEX Labs receives $23M in series D for a total of $85.7M according to Crunchbase. CNEX develops SSD controllers to leverage multiple NAND and especially boost performance, energy and QoS of high-volume SSD. It helps to optimize SSD farms to different workloads with just software parameters.

As Dell plays a key role in hyperscaler model, this investment makes perfect sense. M12, Microsoft Venture - who led Series C - Sierra Ventures, Walden Venture Investments, Brightstone Venture Capital and a few others. It will be interesting to see where it will go...

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CTERA Networks received additional $30M

CTERA Networks, leader in secured file services for enterprise, just announced a Series D of funding with $30M received from Red Dot Capital Partners, who led the round, Singtel Innov8 and al existing ones like Benchmark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco, Venrock, Vintage Investment Partners and Viola Group. The total investment received by CTERA climbs to $100M. The success of CTERA is the effect of the adoption of the cloud and distributed enterprise storage based on Software-Defined Storage philosophy. Congrats.

We have met 2 times CTERA with The IT Press Tour, last visit was in Tel-Aviv in November 2016 and previously in March 2012 and we realized the progress. It's time to meet them again.

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