Q&A with Joanna Catalano, Chief Growth Officer at Piano

Joanna Catalano, Chief Growth Officer at Piano, is an accomplished leader in growing and scaling new businesses, building customer relationships, and leading sales and marketing teams. She has extensive cross-cultural experience in America, EMEA, and APAC in commercial and digital transformation, new business development, building bespoke digital products, and creating advertising trading and data consultancy solutions. She has more than 20 years in end-to-planning as a management consultant and has built high-performing teams and new functions from the ground up.

Being agile to change is the most important thing we can do.



MEDIA 7: Could you please take us through your professional journey?
JOANNA CATALANO:
Over the last 20 years, I’ve had wonderful opportunities to lead businesses, launch new products and brands, and drive significant, scaled revenue growth, working across geographies and cultures as a ‘global citizen.’ My career started in Eastern Europe at the height of economic transition. Witnessing transformation at such a large scale piqued a curiosity in human and systemic behavior and change that has since guided my professional journey. I��ve been able to gather a holistic view of B2C and B2B business, having spent time working brand-side for technology platforms and software business, as well as leading services businesses. While working for established consumer brands (American Express and Starwood Hotels), I acquired deep subject matter expertise in all facets of sales, marketing, and customer service and witnessed the potential of digital disruption and the power of data.

During my time with Google, I developed global network client and accelerator programs with blue-chip brands like Hilton, Expedia, Coca-Cola, Citibank, Intel, and P&G. My strategy enabled Google to grow product share of revenue, and ink new annual deals and partnership agreements. Prior to joining Piano, I served as the CEO of iProspect Asia Pacific, where I drove a digital marketing agency business of $400M+ in billings across 14 countries and delivered revenue and profit growth. I also led an M&A strategy in order to extend coverage and deliver specialization in the company���s core product areas. Since I joined Piano in October 2020, my focus has been on driving a growth strategy rooted in product, vertical, and partnership expansion. Piano's proven track record and relationships with world-class publishers and brands made joining the company an easy choice, and the opportunity for the next phase of Piano expansion is an exciting challenge for our leadership team.

M7: Piano was named the ‘Best MarTech Startup’ in 2021, in the MarTech Breakthrough Awards Program. What was the strategy behind achieving such prestigious recognition?
JC:
While the COVID-19 pandemic hit some businesses hard, Piano provided a necessary and complementary solution for a market that experienced high growth and engagement as consumers flocked to support national and local media outlets. These news websites needed different monetization strategies as advertising dollars dwindled and as social media platforms facilitated disinformation and misinformation about the pandemic, racial injustice, and the presidential election. In response, our Strategic Services team conducted 1:1 assessments and lunch-and-learns for certain customers and target customers. This team also continually updated and shared out proprietary benchmark data, including churn rates, page views, conversion rates, and more, from across hundreds of publishers, to help guide clients' subscription businesses.

We’re proud to have been recognized for our growth and innovation during this time by MarTech Breakthrough and other organizations, including Red Herring, World Economic Forum, Deloitte, and the Business Intelligence Group. Over the last few years, our approach to acquisitions — Newzmate, Cxense, and most recently, French-based analytics company AT Internet — has allowed us to enhance our product offering and revenue. Rather than purchasing multiple point solutions, relying on an internal development team or a vendor's roadmap to accommodate their request, our customers can accomplish their revenue goals within a single platform that uses a drag-and-drop interface to put the ability to quickly deploy satisfying and sophisticated user journeys into the hands of their marketing teams. We’re an amalgamation of specialized technology, effectively integrating best-of-breed software across the categories we serve.


Our training program is a cross-functional effort from leaders across the company.



M7: What are some of Piano’s strategic services offered to the clients that help them grow revenue and drive results?
JC:
Piano’s strategic services team, led by Michael Silberman, delivers value to clients by helping them understand their audiences, improve their offering and optimize their marketing tactics throughout the customer journey. Our approach across all our strategic services offerings is grounded in three key capabilities.

First, we have exclusive user behavior data that helps us understand engagement and subscription conversion on media websites. That data allows us to develop benchmarks showing the range of performance across important KPIs. We can do deep-dive research into questions like retention and customer lifetime value, and we can develop powerful machine learning models based on that data.

Second, we have a proven process that we know delivers results for our clients. We start with the concept of design thinking, which puts the user at the center so we can understand how to drive value. We use the customer journey to define the experiences we create and the actions we want users to take, and we employ constant testing and learning to drive results.

Third, Piano’s strategic services team has a wide variety of experience across audience research and insights, marketing optimization, business analysis, data insights, and machine learning. Our team has more experience than any other, achieving growth in user engagement and subscription conversion across a variety of clients and websites around the world.


M7: How do you ensure that your sales team understands and presents the products in an engaging manner?
JC:
Over the last two years, we’ve expanded our software platform organically and through acquisitions. Although our sales team is excellent, these new products and capabilities have underscored the need for comprehensive training on our products, services, and the challenges our clients face that we help solve. To that end, every new employee at Piano participates in product training that equips staff with a foundational knowledge of Piano's product offerings. We also facilitate ongoing training sessions related to product updates, capabilities, and partnerships to ensure everyone representing Piano and our capabilities is fully up to speed and informed on the latest developments. Our training program is a cross-functional effort from leaders across the company. And as we continue to scale, we’re also hiring a director of training and enablement to ensure our teams are trained and supported to understand and sell the benefits of our platform.


We’re an amalgamation of specialized technology, effectively integrating best-of-breed software across the categories we serve.



M7: What do you think is essential to stay competitive in a market that is going through constant digitalization?
JC:
At Piano, we’re laser-focused on the interactions that organizations are having with their customers online. Our unique combination of artificial intelligence, human ingenuity, and a global network is designed specifically to help companies make the most out of the digital customer journey. As this market continues to advance, staying ahead of the curve and helping clients prepare their businesses for future sustained growth and success has been critical. Our team is constantly evaluating our aggregate data to identify the trends that will impact our clients and take advantage of strategic opportunities to grow and expand our offering. We’re also listening to clients, leveraging their relationships, looking at new technologies, and tapping into our industry partnerships to cultivate this momentum.

It has also been essential for us to closely follow external factors, like data privacy laws or changes to legacy systems like third-party cookies, so we can build our products and advise our clients accordingly. Piano is so trusted that we are the only major analytics provider to receive an exemption from the French administrative body CNIL, allowing us to collect analytics without first requiring user consent. All this is to say, constant digitization is one of the things I find most exciting about this market. The technological advances we’ve been able to make over the course of my career are astounding and are really what have created the opportunity for Piano to thrive. Being agile to change is the most important thing we can do.


M7: What do you read, listen to, or watch, to stay on top of your game?
JC:
To stay on top of my game I read the New York Times and Financial Times for general news. I also enjoy the topics covered by First Round Review and have been subscribed for several years now. Recently, I’ve become interested in Cal Newport's work, for both professional and personal application. For meditation, I use several sources; apps-wise I like 10 Percent Happier because of the meditation teachers who work with Dan Harris. For inspiration, I listen to Krista Tippett, On Being and read Brain Pickings weekly.

ABOUT PIANO

Piano helps organizations understand and influence customer behavior by putting the power of insights and logic into the hands of their employees. The Piano Analytics and Activation Platform measures thousands of customer data points and acquires first-party data to more deeply engage users and then serve relevant content and experiences based on their unique behaviors and profiles. Using this powerful end-to-end platform, Piano’s clients have achieved more scale, engagement, and revenue by expanding the lifecycle and value of every digital interaction. Piano’s global customer base includes IBM, CNBC, Nielsen, The Wall Street Journal, NBC Sports, Gannett, The Telegraph, the BBC, Kirin Holdings, and more. Piano has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing, most innovative technology companies in the world by Red Herring, World Economic Forum and Deloitte, won Data Management Solution of the Year from Data Breakthrough, nabbed Best MarTech Startup by MarTech Breakthrough and garnered Organization of the Year in the Business Intelligence Group’s “The Sammys.” For more information, visit piano.io.

More C-Suite on deck

‘Data teams are critical in defining and driving business growth metrics’ says Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Mode.

Media 7 | March 4, 2022

Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Mode elaborates on his role as a CEO of Mode Analytics, the most comprehensive platform for collaborative Business Intelligence and Interactive Data Science. Read on to know more about his thoughts on digitization and Mode's brand-new visualization tool, Visual Explorer.

Read More

'Raising the voices of those who may not always be heard is critical,' says Claire Thomas

Media 7 | April 28, 2023

Claire Thomas is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across Hitachi Vantara through programs that reflect the diverse backgrounds, interests, and passions of their current and future workforce. Continue reading to learn her views on the significance of inclusion and diversity in an organization.

Read More

Listen to your customers, advises Christopher Penn, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai

Media 7 | November 16, 2021

Christopher Penn, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai shared his insights with us on how marketers can make better use of data, attribution models and natural language processing to promote conversions and increase customer engagement. Read on to find out about his three-part strategy for successful marketing campaigns.

Read More

‘Data teams are critical in defining and driving business growth metrics’ says Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Mode.

Media 7 | March 4, 2022

Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Mode elaborates on his role as a CEO of Mode Analytics, the most comprehensive platform for collaborative Business Intelligence and Interactive Data Science. Read on to know more about his thoughts on digitization and Mode's brand-new visualization tool, Visual Explorer.

Read More

'Raising the voices of those who may not always be heard is critical,' says Claire Thomas

Media 7 | April 28, 2023

Claire Thomas is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across Hitachi Vantara through programs that reflect the diverse backgrounds, interests, and passions of their current and future workforce. Continue reading to learn her views on the significance of inclusion and diversity in an organization.

Read More

Listen to your customers, advises Christopher Penn, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai

Media 7 | November 16, 2021

Christopher Penn, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai shared his insights with us on how marketers can make better use of data, attribution models and natural language processing to promote conversions and increase customer engagement. Read on to find out about his three-part strategy for successful marketing campaigns.

Read More

Related News

Data Architecture

SingleStore Announces Real-time Data Platform to Further Accelerate AI, Analytics and Application Development

SingleStore | January 25, 2024

SingleStore, the database that allows you to transact, analyze and contextualize data, today announced powerful new capabilities — making it the industry’s only real-time data platform. With its latest release, dubbed SingleStore Pro Max, the company announced ground-breaking features like indexed vector search, an on-demand compute service for GPUs/ CPUs and a new free shared tier, among several other innovative new products. Together, these capabilities shrink development cycles while providing the performance and scale that customers need for building applications. In an explosive generative AI landscape, companies are looking for a modern data platform that’s ready for enterprise AI use cases — one with best-available tooling to accelerate development, simultaneously allowing them to marry structured or semi-structured data residing in enterprise systems with unstructured data lying in data lakes. “We believe that a data platform should both create new revenue streams while also decreasing technological costs and complexity for customers. And this can only happen with simplicity at the core,” said Raj Verma, CEO, SingleStore. “This isn’t just a product update, it’s a quantum leap… SingleStore is offering truly transformative capabilities in a single platform for customers to build all kinds of real-time applications, AI or otherwise.” “At Adobe, we aim to change the world through digital experiences,” said Matt Newman, Principal Data Architect, Adobe. “SingleStore’s latest release is exciting as it pushes what is possible when it comes to database technology, real-time analytics and building modern applications that support AI workloads. We’re looking forward to these new features as more and more of our customers are seeking ways to take full advantage of generative Al capabilities.” Key new features launched include: Indexed vector search. SingleStore has announced support for vector search using Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) vector indexing algorithms, leading to 800-1,000x faster vector search performance than precise methods (KNN). With both full-text and indexed vector search capabilities, SingleStore offers developers true hybrid search that takes advantage of the full power of SQL for queries, joins, filters and aggregations. These capabilities firmly place SingleStore above vector-only databases that require niche query languages and are not designed to meet enterprise security and resiliency needs. Free shared tier. SingleStore has announced a new cloud-based Free Shared Tier that’s designed for startups and developers to quickly bring their ideas to life — without the need to commit to a paid plan. On-demand compute service for GPUs and CPUs. SingleStore announces a compute service that works alongside SingleStore’s native Notebooks to let developers spin up GPUs and CPUs to run database-adjacent workloads including data preparation, ETL, third-party native application frameworks, etc. This capability brings compute to algorithms, rather than the other way around, enabling developers to build highly performant AI applications safely and securely using SingleStore — without unnecessary data movement. New CDC capabilities for data ingest and egress. To ease the burden and costs of moving data in and out of SingleStore, SingleStore is adding native capabilities for real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) in for MongoDB®, MySQL and ingestion from Apache Iceberg without requiring other third party CDC tools. SingleStore will also support CDC out capabilities that ease migrations and enable the use of SingleStore as a source for other applications and databases like data warehouses and lakehouses. SingleStore Kai™. Now generally available, and ready for both analytical and transactional processing for apps originally built on MongoDB. Announced in public preview in early 2023, SingleStore Kai is an API to deliver over 100x faster analytics on MongoDB® with no query changes or data transformations required. Today, SingleStore Kai supports BSON data format natively, has improved transactional performance, increased performance for arrays and offers industry-leading compatibility with MongoDB query language. Projections: To further advance as the world’s fastest HTAP database, SingleStore has added Projections. Projections allow developers to greatly speed up range filters and group by operations by introducing secondary sort and shard keys. Query performance improvements range from 2-3x or more, depending on the size of the table. With this latest release, SingleStore becomes the industry’s first and only real-time data platform designed for all applications, analytics and AI. SingleStore supports high-throughput ingest performance, ACID transactions and low-latency analytics; and structured, semi-structured (JSON, BSON, text) and unstructured data (vector embeddings of audio, video, images, PDFs, etc.). Finally, SingleStore’s data platform is designed not just with developers in mind, but also ML engineers, data engineers and data scientists. “Our new features and capabilities advance SingleStore’s mission of offering a real-time data platform for the next wave of gen AI and data applications,” said Nadeem Asghar, SVP, Product Management + Strategy at SingleStore. “New features, including vector search, Projections, Apache Iceberg, Scheduled Notebooks, autoscaling, GPU compute services, SingleStore Kai™, and the Free Shared Tier allow startups — as well as global enterprises — to quickly build and scale enterprise-grade real-time AI applications. We make data integration with third-party databases easy with both CDC in and CDC out support.” "Although generative AI, LLM, and vector search capabilities are early stage, they promise to deliver a richer data experience with translytical architecture," states the 2023 report, “Translytical Architecture 2.0 Evolves To Support Distributed, Multimodel, And AI Capabilities,” authored by Noel Yuhanna, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. "Generative AI and LLM can help democratize data through natural language query (NLQ), offering a ChatGPT-like interface. Also, vector storage and index can be leveraged to perform similarity searches to support data intelligence." SingleStore has been on a fast track leading innovation around generative AI. The company’s product evolution has been accompanied by high-momentum growth in customers and surpassing $100M in ARR late last year. SingleStore also recently ranked #2 in the emerging category of vector databases, and was recognized by TrustRadius as a top vector database in 2023. Finally, SingleStore was a winner of InfoWorld’s Technology of the year in the database category. To learn more about SingleStore visit here. About SingleStore SingleStore empowers the world’s leading organizations to build and scale modern applications using the only database that allows you to transact, analyze and contextualize data in real time. With streaming data ingestion, support for both transactions and analytics, horizontal scalability and hybrid vector search capabilities, SingleStore helps deliver 10-100x better performance at 1/3 the costs compared to legacy architectures. Hundreds of customers worldwide — including Fortune 500 companies and global data leaders — use SingleStore to power real-time applications and analytics. Learn more at singlestore.com. Follow us @SingleStoreDB on Twitter or visit www.singlestore.com.

Read More

Machine Learning

InterSystems Introduces Two New Cloud-Native Smart Data Services to Accelerate Database and Machine Learning Application Development

InterSystems | January 12, 2024

InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve their most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems, today announced general availability of the InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML® services. These fully managed cloud-native smart data services empower developers to build cloud-native database and machine learning (ML) applications in SQL environments with ease. With Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML, developers can access a next generation relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that is fast and easy to provision and use. Embedded AutoML capabilities allow developers to easily develop and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands in a fully-managed, elastic cloud-native environment. Shaping a complete data management portfolio for mission-critical applications As part of the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services, Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML provide application developers with access to InterSystems proven enterprise-class capabilities as self-service, fully managed offerings on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while providing a fast and seamless on-ramp to the full suite of capabilities in InterSystems IRIS® data platform. InterSystems IRIS is a next-generation data platform designed for organizations implementing smart data fabrics that provide powerful database management, integration, and application development capabilities. By consolidating these capabilities into a single product, InterSystems IRIS accelerates the time it takes to realize value from data, simplifies overall system architectures, and reduces both maintenance effort and costs. “We are excited for the capabilities of InterSystems IRIS to be exposed through these new, easy to deploy and easy to use services,” said Scott Gnau, Global Head of Data Platforms at InterSystems. “With native support for AutoML, we give developers the power to build comprehensive, predictive, and prescriptive applications.” Fully managed, enterprise-class reliability with InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL Cloud SQL makes it easy for application developers to leverage advanced relational database capabilities as a fully managed, secure, scalable, high performance, highly available cloud-native database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Cloud SQL delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Extremely high performance, especially for ingesting and processing incoming data and performing SQL queries on the data with low latency at scale Fast and easy to provision and use Ability to easily connect client applications via JDBC, ODBC, DB-API, and ADO.NET drivers Automated security, data encryption, and backups Automation of machine learning tasks with InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML Available as an additional cloud managed service for InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL customers, Cloud IntegratedML extends the capabilities of Cloud SQL to enable SQL developers to quickly build, tune, and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands, without moving or copying data to a different environment. A significant advantage of Cloud IntegratedML is the elimination of the need to transfer or replicate data to an external platform to build ML models, or to move ML models to a different environment for execution. Cloud IntegratedML delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Automation of machine learning processes and resource-intensive tasks such as feature engineering, model development, and fine-tuning Seamless integration of models developed and trained with Cloud IntegratedML within Cloud SQL, facilitating real-time predictive insights and prescriptive actions in response to events and transactions This comprehensive suite of smart data services establishes the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services as an optimal choice for SQL developers seeking a robust, high-performance database solution tailored to their needs. The new Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML services are available through InterSystems Developer Hub. About InterSystems Established in 1978, InterSystems is the leading provider of next-generation solutions for enterprise digital transformations in the healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain sectors. Its cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed, and scalability problems for large organizations around the globe. InterSystems is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24×7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 38 offices in 28 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit InterSystems.com.

Read More

Big Data Management

Dremio Partners With Carahsoft to Bring Modern Data Infrastructure to the Public Sector

Dremio | January 05, 2024

Dremio, the easy and open data lakehouse, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, today announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Dremio’s Master Government Aggregator®, making the company’s complete cloud and software portfolio for Government, Defense, Intelligence and Education available through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2), National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint, National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA) and OMNIA Partners contracts. This collaboration paves the way for Public Sector organizations to harness cutting-edge data analytics capabilities which empower them to make smarter decisions and significantly enhance operational efficiency through lightning-fast data access. Dremio propels agencies into the future by embracing a state-of-the-art data lakehouse architecture in Public Sector organizations. By transitioning to Dremio's solutions, organizations can enjoy sub-second query performance and a remarkable 10-fold improvement in price performance. The new environment eliminates costly and complex legacy data lake solutions and implements a flexible, highly modern architecture. Dremio provides cost-effective self-service analytics and data management, simplifying data pipelines and ETL complexity while accelerating insights across diverse storage locations. With a proven track record of modernizing legacy Hadoop environments and implementing the modern data lakehouse solution, Dremio and Carahsoft aim to transform Public Sector data management by breaking down data silos. Embracing a data mesh concept enables efficient handling of various data sources, fostering cross- collaboration and decentralized data control. Dremio’s expertise supports Public Sector agencies in implementing these principles, eradicating data silos for a more collaborative and efficient approach to data analytics. "Public sector organizations face a range of data infrastructure challenges, many of which are common to both Government and non-government entities. These issues often hinder effective data management, analysis, and decision-making,” said Roger Frey, Vice President of Alliances at Dremio. “Dremio's mission is to make data easily accessible and analyzable for all users, regardless of where it resides. We are excited to partner with Carahsoft to bring our state-of-the-art data analytics solutions to the Public Sector." “Within the Public Sector’s intricate data landscape, complexities often impede efficient data management and decision making,” said Laura Howton, Sales Director who leads the Analytics and Data Management Team at Carahsoft. “By adding Dremio to our AI and Machine Learning portfolio, our reseller partners can now provide modern, cost-effective and easily accessible data analytics tools to Government customers, bolstering their modernization efforts.” Dremio’s solutions are available through Carahsoft’s SEWP V contracts NNG15SC03B and NNG15SC27B, ITES-SW2 Contract W52P1J-20-D-0042, NASPO ValuePoint Master Agreement #AR2472, NCPA Contract NCPA01-86 and OMNIA Partners Contract #R191902. For more information, contact the Carahsoft team at 571-591-6430 or Dremio@carahsoft.com; or register for a complimentary webcast, “The Key Steps in Decreasing Costs and Improving Performance Through Data Lake Modernization,” Thursday, January 25, at 2p.m. About Dremio Dremio is the easy and open data lakehouse, providing self-service analytics with data warehouse functionality and data lake flexibility across all of your data. Use Dremio's lightning-fast SQL query service and any other processing engine on the same data. Dremio increases agility with a revolutionary data-as-code approach that enables Git-like data experimentation, version control, and governance. In addition, Dremio eliminates data silos by enabling queries across data lakes, databases, and data warehouses, and by simplifying ingestion into the lakehouse. Dremio's fully managed service helps organizations get started with analytics in minutes, and automatically optimizes data for every workload. As the original creator of Apache Arrow and committed to Arrow and Iceberg’s community-driven standards, Dremio is on a mission to reinvent SQL for data lakes and meet customers where they are on their lakehouse journey.

Read More

Data Architecture

SingleStore Announces Real-time Data Platform to Further Accelerate AI, Analytics and Application Development

SingleStore | January 25, 2024

SingleStore, the database that allows you to transact, analyze and contextualize data, today announced powerful new capabilities — making it the industry’s only real-time data platform. With its latest release, dubbed SingleStore Pro Max, the company announced ground-breaking features like indexed vector search, an on-demand compute service for GPUs/ CPUs and a new free shared tier, among several other innovative new products. Together, these capabilities shrink development cycles while providing the performance and scale that customers need for building applications. In an explosive generative AI landscape, companies are looking for a modern data platform that’s ready for enterprise AI use cases — one with best-available tooling to accelerate development, simultaneously allowing them to marry structured or semi-structured data residing in enterprise systems with unstructured data lying in data lakes. “We believe that a data platform should both create new revenue streams while also decreasing technological costs and complexity for customers. And this can only happen with simplicity at the core,” said Raj Verma, CEO, SingleStore. “This isn’t just a product update, it’s a quantum leap… SingleStore is offering truly transformative capabilities in a single platform for customers to build all kinds of real-time applications, AI or otherwise.” “At Adobe, we aim to change the world through digital experiences,” said Matt Newman, Principal Data Architect, Adobe. “SingleStore’s latest release is exciting as it pushes what is possible when it comes to database technology, real-time analytics and building modern applications that support AI workloads. We’re looking forward to these new features as more and more of our customers are seeking ways to take full advantage of generative Al capabilities.” Key new features launched include: Indexed vector search. SingleStore has announced support for vector search using Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) vector indexing algorithms, leading to 800-1,000x faster vector search performance than precise methods (KNN). With both full-text and indexed vector search capabilities, SingleStore offers developers true hybrid search that takes advantage of the full power of SQL for queries, joins, filters and aggregations. These capabilities firmly place SingleStore above vector-only databases that require niche query languages and are not designed to meet enterprise security and resiliency needs. Free shared tier. SingleStore has announced a new cloud-based Free Shared Tier that’s designed for startups and developers to quickly bring their ideas to life — without the need to commit to a paid plan. On-demand compute service for GPUs and CPUs. SingleStore announces a compute service that works alongside SingleStore’s native Notebooks to let developers spin up GPUs and CPUs to run database-adjacent workloads including data preparation, ETL, third-party native application frameworks, etc. This capability brings compute to algorithms, rather than the other way around, enabling developers to build highly performant AI applications safely and securely using SingleStore — without unnecessary data movement. New CDC capabilities for data ingest and egress. To ease the burden and costs of moving data in and out of SingleStore, SingleStore is adding native capabilities for real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) in for MongoDB®, MySQL and ingestion from Apache Iceberg without requiring other third party CDC tools. SingleStore will also support CDC out capabilities that ease migrations and enable the use of SingleStore as a source for other applications and databases like data warehouses and lakehouses. SingleStore Kai™. Now generally available, and ready for both analytical and transactional processing for apps originally built on MongoDB. Announced in public preview in early 2023, SingleStore Kai is an API to deliver over 100x faster analytics on MongoDB® with no query changes or data transformations required. Today, SingleStore Kai supports BSON data format natively, has improved transactional performance, increased performance for arrays and offers industry-leading compatibility with MongoDB query language. Projections: To further advance as the world’s fastest HTAP database, SingleStore has added Projections. Projections allow developers to greatly speed up range filters and group by operations by introducing secondary sort and shard keys. Query performance improvements range from 2-3x or more, depending on the size of the table. With this latest release, SingleStore becomes the industry’s first and only real-time data platform designed for all applications, analytics and AI. SingleStore supports high-throughput ingest performance, ACID transactions and low-latency analytics; and structured, semi-structured (JSON, BSON, text) and unstructured data (vector embeddings of audio, video, images, PDFs, etc.). Finally, SingleStore’s data platform is designed not just with developers in mind, but also ML engineers, data engineers and data scientists. “Our new features and capabilities advance SingleStore’s mission of offering a real-time data platform for the next wave of gen AI and data applications,” said Nadeem Asghar, SVP, Product Management + Strategy at SingleStore. “New features, including vector search, Projections, Apache Iceberg, Scheduled Notebooks, autoscaling, GPU compute services, SingleStore Kai™, and the Free Shared Tier allow startups — as well as global enterprises — to quickly build and scale enterprise-grade real-time AI applications. We make data integration with third-party databases easy with both CDC in and CDC out support.” "Although generative AI, LLM, and vector search capabilities are early stage, they promise to deliver a richer data experience with translytical architecture," states the 2023 report, “Translytical Architecture 2.0 Evolves To Support Distributed, Multimodel, And AI Capabilities,” authored by Noel Yuhanna, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. "Generative AI and LLM can help democratize data through natural language query (NLQ), offering a ChatGPT-like interface. Also, vector storage and index can be leveraged to perform similarity searches to support data intelligence." SingleStore has been on a fast track leading innovation around generative AI. The company’s product evolution has been accompanied by high-momentum growth in customers and surpassing $100M in ARR late last year. SingleStore also recently ranked #2 in the emerging category of vector databases, and was recognized by TrustRadius as a top vector database in 2023. Finally, SingleStore was a winner of InfoWorld’s Technology of the year in the database category. To learn more about SingleStore visit here. About SingleStore SingleStore empowers the world’s leading organizations to build and scale modern applications using the only database that allows you to transact, analyze and contextualize data in real time. With streaming data ingestion, support for both transactions and analytics, horizontal scalability and hybrid vector search capabilities, SingleStore helps deliver 10-100x better performance at 1/3 the costs compared to legacy architectures. Hundreds of customers worldwide — including Fortune 500 companies and global data leaders — use SingleStore to power real-time applications and analytics. Learn more at singlestore.com. Follow us @SingleStoreDB on Twitter or visit www.singlestore.com.

Read More

Machine Learning

InterSystems Introduces Two New Cloud-Native Smart Data Services to Accelerate Database and Machine Learning Application Development

InterSystems | January 12, 2024

InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve their most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems, today announced general availability of the InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML® services. These fully managed cloud-native smart data services empower developers to build cloud-native database and machine learning (ML) applications in SQL environments with ease. With Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML, developers can access a next generation relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that is fast and easy to provision and use. Embedded AutoML capabilities allow developers to easily develop and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands in a fully-managed, elastic cloud-native environment. Shaping a complete data management portfolio for mission-critical applications As part of the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services, Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML provide application developers with access to InterSystems proven enterprise-class capabilities as self-service, fully managed offerings on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while providing a fast and seamless on-ramp to the full suite of capabilities in InterSystems IRIS® data platform. InterSystems IRIS is a next-generation data platform designed for organizations implementing smart data fabrics that provide powerful database management, integration, and application development capabilities. By consolidating these capabilities into a single product, InterSystems IRIS accelerates the time it takes to realize value from data, simplifies overall system architectures, and reduces both maintenance effort and costs. “We are excited for the capabilities of InterSystems IRIS to be exposed through these new, easy to deploy and easy to use services,” said Scott Gnau, Global Head of Data Platforms at InterSystems. “With native support for AutoML, we give developers the power to build comprehensive, predictive, and prescriptive applications.” Fully managed, enterprise-class reliability with InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL Cloud SQL makes it easy for application developers to leverage advanced relational database capabilities as a fully managed, secure, scalable, high performance, highly available cloud-native database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Cloud SQL delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Extremely high performance, especially for ingesting and processing incoming data and performing SQL queries on the data with low latency at scale Fast and easy to provision and use Ability to easily connect client applications via JDBC, ODBC, DB-API, and ADO.NET drivers Automated security, data encryption, and backups Automation of machine learning tasks with InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML Available as an additional cloud managed service for InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL customers, Cloud IntegratedML extends the capabilities of Cloud SQL to enable SQL developers to quickly build, tune, and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands, without moving or copying data to a different environment. A significant advantage of Cloud IntegratedML is the elimination of the need to transfer or replicate data to an external platform to build ML models, or to move ML models to a different environment for execution. Cloud IntegratedML delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Automation of machine learning processes and resource-intensive tasks such as feature engineering, model development, and fine-tuning Seamless integration of models developed and trained with Cloud IntegratedML within Cloud SQL, facilitating real-time predictive insights and prescriptive actions in response to events and transactions This comprehensive suite of smart data services establishes the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services as an optimal choice for SQL developers seeking a robust, high-performance database solution tailored to their needs. The new Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML services are available through InterSystems Developer Hub. About InterSystems Established in 1978, InterSystems is the leading provider of next-generation solutions for enterprise digital transformations in the healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain sectors. Its cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed, and scalability problems for large organizations around the globe. InterSystems is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24×7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 38 offices in 28 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit InterSystems.com.

Read More

Big Data Management

Dremio Partners With Carahsoft to Bring Modern Data Infrastructure to the Public Sector

Dremio | January 05, 2024

Dremio, the easy and open data lakehouse, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, today announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Dremio’s Master Government Aggregator®, making the company’s complete cloud and software portfolio for Government, Defense, Intelligence and Education available through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2), National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint, National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA) and OMNIA Partners contracts. This collaboration paves the way for Public Sector organizations to harness cutting-edge data analytics capabilities which empower them to make smarter decisions and significantly enhance operational efficiency through lightning-fast data access. Dremio propels agencies into the future by embracing a state-of-the-art data lakehouse architecture in Public Sector organizations. By transitioning to Dremio's solutions, organizations can enjoy sub-second query performance and a remarkable 10-fold improvement in price performance. The new environment eliminates costly and complex legacy data lake solutions and implements a flexible, highly modern architecture. Dremio provides cost-effective self-service analytics and data management, simplifying data pipelines and ETL complexity while accelerating insights across diverse storage locations. With a proven track record of modernizing legacy Hadoop environments and implementing the modern data lakehouse solution, Dremio and Carahsoft aim to transform Public Sector data management by breaking down data silos. Embracing a data mesh concept enables efficient handling of various data sources, fostering cross- collaboration and decentralized data control. Dremio’s expertise supports Public Sector agencies in implementing these principles, eradicating data silos for a more collaborative and efficient approach to data analytics. "Public sector organizations face a range of data infrastructure challenges, many of which are common to both Government and non-government entities. These issues often hinder effective data management, analysis, and decision-making,” said Roger Frey, Vice President of Alliances at Dremio. “Dremio's mission is to make data easily accessible and analyzable for all users, regardless of where it resides. We are excited to partner with Carahsoft to bring our state-of-the-art data analytics solutions to the Public Sector." “Within the Public Sector’s intricate data landscape, complexities often impede efficient data management and decision making,” said Laura Howton, Sales Director who leads the Analytics and Data Management Team at Carahsoft. “By adding Dremio to our AI and Machine Learning portfolio, our reseller partners can now provide modern, cost-effective and easily accessible data analytics tools to Government customers, bolstering their modernization efforts.” Dremio’s solutions are available through Carahsoft’s SEWP V contracts NNG15SC03B and NNG15SC27B, ITES-SW2 Contract W52P1J-20-D-0042, NASPO ValuePoint Master Agreement #AR2472, NCPA Contract NCPA01-86 and OMNIA Partners Contract #R191902. For more information, contact the Carahsoft team at 571-591-6430 or Dremio@carahsoft.com; or register for a complimentary webcast, “The Key Steps in Decreasing Costs and Improving Performance Through Data Lake Modernization,” Thursday, January 25, at 2p.m. About Dremio Dremio is the easy and open data lakehouse, providing self-service analytics with data warehouse functionality and data lake flexibility across all of your data. Use Dremio's lightning-fast SQL query service and any other processing engine on the same data. Dremio increases agility with a revolutionary data-as-code approach that enables Git-like data experimentation, version control, and governance. In addition, Dremio eliminates data silos by enabling queries across data lakes, databases, and data warehouses, and by simplifying ingestion into the lakehouse. Dremio's fully managed service helps organizations get started with analytics in minutes, and automatically optimizes data for every workload. As the original creator of Apache Arrow and committed to Arrow and Iceberg’s community-driven standards, Dremio is on a mission to reinvent SQL for data lakes and meet customers where they are on their lakehouse journey.

Read More

Spotlight

Piano

Piano

Piano helps organizations understand and influence customer behavior by putting the power of insights and logic into the hands of their employees. The Piano Analytics and Activation Platform measures thousands of customer data points and acquires first-party data to more deeply engage users and then...

Events

Resources

Events