The Data Driver

Manthan won the Innovation Partner Award for the second consecutive year, at the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) India Partner Summit hosted in Mumbai, India. By combining AWS technologies with its expertise spanning descriptive and advanced analytics including forecasting, recommendations and causality, Manthan has created Maya, the world’s first AI-powered conversational platform for business analytics.
“We are delighted to receive this award two years in a row. It’s a testament to the body of work we have established in our AI initiatives. We believe AI is the future of decision making and have invested heavily in R&D focused AI labs that bring together the best technologies and some of the best minds in the industry,” said Atul Batra, CTO, Manthan.
Manthan has been at the forefront of technology innovations and is pioneering the move to zero touch UIs, voice-based AI-powered agents. With Maya, Manthan is transforming the way users interact with complex business systems. User…

Bringing some of the finest minds in the Indian big data and analytics industry together, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today concluded its 5th annual Big Data & Analytics Summit. Themed ‘AI and Deep Learning: Transforming Enterprise Decision Making’, the two-day event hosted leaders conferring about the paradigm shift that artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics are driving within India Inc.’s corporate strategy.
As a part of its reskilling initiative for the industry, NASSCOM also identified six areas of specialization in the Big Data Analytics domain which are expected to be key to sectors growth in times to come. These are business analysts, solution architects, data integrators, data architects, data analysts and data scientists. With the rising requirement for niche competencies in AI and analytics, the skill/expertise of the IT workforce will spearhead the analytical transformation on critical business processes acros…

Atos, through its technology brand Bull, has won a contract with GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) to deliver one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, planned for the end of 2017. A successor of the Curie system installed at the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul of the CEA in Bruyères-Le-Chatel), the Bull Sequana supercomputer has an overall power of 9 petaflops and can carry out 9 million billion operations per second. It will be used for research purposes in France and Europe. The announcement was formalised yesterday at  the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
A supercomputer to speed up academic and industrial research The new supercomputer will be made available to French and European researchers for use in academic and industrial fields that require extremely high computing and data processing power.
The applications for intensive computing are many and varied, such as climatology, where the supercomputer will help to model pas…

Hortonworks announced the general availability of Hortonworks Dataflow (HDF) 3.0, the next generation of its open source data-in-motion platform. HDF enables customers to collect, curate, analyze and act on all data in real-time, across the data center and cloud.
The growth of the Internet of Things brings new paradigm data from mobile devices, wearable technology and sensors which enterprises can use to uncover actionable intelligence in real-time. Gartner estimates that, “By 2020, 70% of organizations will adopt data streaming to enable real-time analytics”* and as such, adoption of HDF has accelerated significantly year-over-year. HDF is the industry’s first open source platform upon which enterprises can quickly build streaming applications for real-time analytics.
“To stay competitive in today’s interconnected world, businesses must harness the insights from data everywhere,” said Scott Gnau, chief technology officer at Hortonworks. “Increasingly, this means from point of creati…

Indian business intelligence (BI) software revenue is forecast to reach US$245 million (in constant currency) in 2017, a 24.4 percent increase over 2016 revenue of US$206 million, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes revenue for BI platforms (comprising of traditional and modern BI platforms), data science platforms, analytic applications and CPM Suites.
Gartner analysts are examining the key issues facing the data and analytics market during the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit, which is taking place here through Wednesday.
This year the summit theme has shifted from solely BI/analytics and incorporates the key elements of data management, such as data integration, data quality, data governance, master data management (MDM), and the upcoming tools, architectures, processes, skills and roles that together allow organizations to leverage data as an asset. Digital business dynamics are changing the complete field of data and analytics.
Indian chief information officers (C…

NEC Corporation and NEC Technologies India announced the launch of a “Center of Excellence for Analytics Platform & Solutions” (COE-APS), for promoting solutions and services of NEC’s Big Data & Analytics Platform, “Data Platform for Hadoop (DPH)”. The COE-APS will simplify digital transformation and act as a one stop shop for both customers and partners in the Telecom, Retail, Banking, Financial Services, Insurance and Manufacturing sectors, as well as Government organizations. NEC aims to achieve revenue of more than $100M USD within 3 years of the COE-APS’ establishment, which is being set-up with an overall investment of $10M USD over the same period.
The COE-APS will initially focus on markets that include Japan, India, Singapore, Philippines and Hong Kong, then gradually expand services throughout APAC and other regions. In order to support these growing operations, NEC plans to organize a team of 100 professionals within the first few years, as the Global Big Data &…

By: David Whitton, General Manager of Kodak Alaris - Eastern Cluster (Middle East, Africa, East Europe, Turkey & Russia)
Healthcare providers in the Middle East that leverage data driven from clinical and business analytics are discovering new opportunities to lower costs, provide better care for patients and establish health programmes. The on-going challenge, however, is in being able to effectively compile all forms of structured and unstructured health data into an analytics database.
Though clinical and business analytics can lead to dramatic improvements in patient care and business operations, it can be challenging to extract comprehensive information from healthcare data in unstructured formats such as email, faxes, text messages and paper, which can limit analytical outcome accuracy and usability. Forward-thinking organizations are using data classification, extraction and management software to free unstructured data that was formerly trapped, in order to realize a 360-d…

Ever wondered of a robot that will help in the construction work and other manual deed? Traditionally we've seen robots doing a lot of industrial works where they can lift and carry big objects, and where they can fly around dragonflies. However, we've not seen any robot until now which can stack stones perfectly. But this robot will make you think and force you to believe on the unbelieveable. This robot can stack stones very well and replace humans in this task as well. It means labourers and masons have a reason to worry now as robots are here to compete against them.
According to report published in TechCrunch, researchers at ETH Zurich have come out with a robot in their new project, “Autonomous Robotic Stone Stacking with Online next Best Object Target Pose Planning.” If the reports are to believed, the robot can autonomously lift stones and stack them perfectly. It can do things in a perfect manner even if the stones and rocks are of a different size and kind. This is …

Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced the world’s largest single-memory computer, the latest milestone in The Machine research project (The Machine). The Machine, which is the largest R&D program in the history of the company, is aimed at delivering a new paradigm called Memory-Driven Computing - an architecture custom-built for the Big Data era.
“The secrets to the next great scientific breakthrough, industry-changing innovation, or life-altering technology hide in plain sight behind the mountains of data we create every day,” said Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “To realize this promise, we can’t rely on the technologies of the past, we need a computer built for the Big Data era.”
The prototype unveiled today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over - or approximately 160 million books. It has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of t…

Qlik previewed  Qlik Sense June 2017, the newest release of its next-generation application for self-service business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics.  Built on a fully integrated, cloud-ready platform, and powered by the patented QIX Associative Indexing Engine, Qlik Sense combines enterprise readiness and governance with intuitive visualization and exploration, advanced analytics, and self-service data preparation capabilities.  This breadth and depth allows organizations to meet the broadest range of BI use cases from a single platform leading to consistent, data-driven decision making.  At its Qonnections 2017 customer and partner event, Qlik previewed functionality highlighting how the Company will advance its analytics portfolio to drive greater insight from all data, on premise and in the cloud, while augmenting the intelligence of users across the enterprise.
“Qlik pioneered the category for user-driven, governed self-service BI.  With Qlik Sense, we continue to expand…

Pluralsight announced a new set of product features for its enterprise customers. The new features allow CIOs, CTOs, and engineering leaders to understand the technical aptitude of their teams, align learning to business objectives and reach breakthrough moments faster.
“Businesses have a choice - embrace the latest technologies or fail,” said Aaron Skonnard, CEO and co-founder of Pluralsight. “CIOs, CTOs and their teams are under increasing pressure to deliver the next big innovation, and the growing technology skills gap is their biggest obstacle to success. Our new enterprise features will help them combat the skills gap, learn and adopt the most critical technologies faster and gain a competitive edge.”
New features include: • Skill Analytics - enables CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders to quantify and deeply understand the strengths and weaknesses of their team’s digital skill sets, and gives visibility into popular subjects they may want to consider as part of their digital stra…

The Smart Cube, an award-winning global analytics and research company, has launched Smart Fleet, a new product for fleet managers that will transform how they manage their fleets and engage with suppliers.
Businesses today typically use multiple fleet suppliers, all providing different reporting data, in diverse formats, with varying levels of accuracy. As a result, many fleet managers still use manual spreadsheets for their day-jobs, which can be unreliable and time-consuming to maintain and offer inflexible and limited reporting. Increasing expectations from senior executives for data to be presented in a visually appealing format puts further pressure on fleet managers.
For the first time, Smart Fleet enables a centralized view of a company’s vehicle fleet, irrespective of the number of suppliers and supports better decision making with comprehensive visualization, analysis and reporting tools. Hosted in the cloud, the platform draws together multiple data sources to provide a si…

EY, the leading global professional services organization, today announced its plans to enhance its suite of automation and artificial intelligence offerings with the opening of its first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center in India.

The students at MIT Pune have been using IBM Watson APIs powered by IBM Bluemix, IBM's Cloud platform and have hit the ground running with speed within weeks. When asked about leveraging a new technology like IBM Watson, Krishnamohan Manmohan, a student at MIT Pune, said, "What I like most about Watson is that it is an incredible platform that provides a variety of services that can solve real world problems. These services can be used as and when required and are always accessible. It's definitely something that all students should have access to, in order to develop the market relevant skills sets.''