“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 5/2/2016

Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel @insidebigdata.com.  Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

In C-suite news we learned that Alteryx, Inc., a leader in self-service data analytics, announced it has appointed Chuck Cory, former Chairman, Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, and Tim Maudlin, an Independent Financial Services Professional, to its Board of Directors … Another industry alignment! FICO, the predictive analytics and decision management software company, and Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, unveiled they have formed an alliance to meet the increasing market need for analytic solutions in financial services. The alliance will provide FICO’s risk and fraud management products through Capgemini’s consulting and integration services in North America … More people movement! UK-based IS Solutions Plc, a leading AIM-listed data solutions provider, has appointed digital data expert Matthew Tod to head up a new Data Insight practice. Tod was previously of digital analytics consultancy Logan Tod and Co. which was acquired by PwC in 2012; he became Partner and later led the Customer Consulting Group, successfully building up PwC’s digital transformation strategy capabilities. He takes the new role of Director of Data Insight at IS Solutions Plc and will work with clients to overcome the “data everywhere” problem, enabling them to gain competitive advantage from their information assets … And in some M&A news: HGGC, a leading middle market private equity firm, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of FPX, a SaaS company and leading provider of platform-agnostic enterprise Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) applications. As part of the transaction, senior FPX management has reinvested their proceeds from the sale and retained a significant minority stake in the business. Terms of the private transaction were not disclosed … Heard on the street: Narrative Science, a leader in advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise, announced the availability of Narratives for Power BI, a first-of-its-kind extension for the Microsoft Power BI community. The extension, now available for download, allows users to access important insights from their data in the most intuitive, consumable way possible – dynamic, natural language narratives. Now all users, regardless of skill-set, can quickly understand the insights from any data set or visualization, simply by reading them … ODPi, a nonprofit organization accelerating the open ecosystem of big data solutions, revealed that 4C Decision, ArenaData, and AsiaInfo, have joined the initiative to advance efforts to create a common reference specification called ODPi Core. Many vendors have focused on productizing Apache Hadoop® as a distribution, which has led to inconsistency that increases the cost and complexity for application vendors and end-users to fully embrace Apache Hadoop. Founded last year, ODPi is an industry effort to accelerate the adoption of Apache Hadoop and related big data technologies. ODPi’s members aim to streamline the development of analytics applications by providing a common specification with reference implementations and test suites … Veriflow, the network breach and outage prevention company, announced the appointment of Scott Shenker to its Board of Directors and of Sajid Awan as vice president of products. Veriflow launched out of stealth on April 5, with $2.9 million in initial investor funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. The company’s software, which is designed for CISOs, network architects, engineers and operators, uses mathematical network verification, which is based on the principles of formal verification, to bulletproof today’s most complex networks. Veriflow’s patented technology, including a best-practice library of network security and correctness policies, provides solutions across the multi-billion-dollar networking market to minimize the security breaches and costly disasters that can result from network vulnerabilities … SnappyData, developers of the in-memory hybrid transactional analytics database built on Apache Spark, indicated that it has secured $3.65 million in Series A funding, led by Pivotal, GE Digital and GTD Capital. The funding will allow the company to further invest in engineering and sales. The SnappyData leadership team includes, Richard Lamb, Jags Ramnarayanan and Sudhir Menon, who worked together during their time at Pivotal to build Pivotal GemFire® into one of most widely adopted in-memory data grid products in the market … Three researchers located at Drexel University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been named 2016 -2017 Data Fellows by the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) the consortium announced. The NCDS, a public-private partnership to advance data science and address the challenges and opportunities of big data, will provide each Data Fellow with $50,000 to support work that addresses data science research issues in novel and innovative ways. Their work will be expected to advance the mission and vision of the NCDS, which formed in early 2013. Fellowships begin July 1 and last one year … Lavastorm, a leading agile analytics company, announced that it has partnered with Qlik® (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in visual analytics, to put a powerful, fully-integrated modern analytics platform into the hands of data analysts and business users directly through Qlik Sense®. The dynamic, integrated solution provides an intuitive, comprehensive platform that eliminates the complexity of advanced analytics while empowering business users of all skill levels to uncover unique, transformative business insights … Another industry alignment: Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, and MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms, today announced an alliance to bring the flexibility and scalability of the cloud to modern data analytics. This collaboration will build on Snowflake’s certified connectivity with MicroStrategy 10™ through further product integration and go-to-market collaboration, enabling businesses to take advantage of the cloud to get fast answers to their toughest data questions … New product news! Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) launched Datawatch Monarch 13.3, the latest edition of the company’s first-to-market self-service data prep solution. Datawatch Monarch enables business users to acquire, manipulate and blend data from virtually any source. The new product release delivers better and faster data access and data prep through advanced functionality, unrivaled simplicity and enhanced information governance … Trifacta, a leader in data wrangling, announced that Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, has partnered with Trifacta to provide a data wrangling solution for the Infosys Information Platform (IIP) and Infosys’ other platforms and offerings. Infosys clients can now leverage Trifacta’s intuitive self-service solution for exploring and transforming data — a critical step in any analytics process. Business analysts and data scientists can integrate large, complex data sets, transform and filter the results and share valuable insights, all from data stored and processed within the IIP platform.