Data Science
J.D. Power | September 18, 2023
J.D. Power, a prominent global leader in data analytics, has recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Autovista Group, a renowned pan-European and Australian automotive data, analytics, and industry insights provider. This strategic acquisition complements J.D. Power's existing strengths in vehicle valuation and intricate vehicle specification data and analytics while significantly expanding its presence within the European and Australian automotive markets.
This acquisition represents a crucial moment, as it delivers substantial value to the customers of both companies. It brings together Autovista Group's extensive European and Australian market intelligence with J.D. Power's market-leading predictive analytics, valuation data, and customer experience datasets. These complementary offerings will empower original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), insurers, dealers, and financing companies with a truly global perspective on critical industry trends. They will also provide the tools to accurately predict risk, capitalize on emerging trends, and align sales strategies with real-time market dynamics.
Pete Cimmet, Chief Strategy Officer at J.D. Power, stated:
The addition of Autovista Group broadens our global presence allowing us to serve our customers across key global markets including North America, Europe and Asia/Australia. We look forward to partnering with the Autovista team to launch innovative new products and pursue strategic add-on acquisitions in Europe and Australia.
[Source: Business Wire]
Autovista Group, through its five prominent brands—Autovista, Glass's, Eurotax, Schwacke, and Rødboka—standardizes and categorizes a multitude of technical attributes for nearly every vehicle manufactured in European and Australian markets. This comprehensive approach offers clients a 360-degree view of detailed vehicle data, which is invaluable for valuations, forecasts, and repair estimates. Furthermore, Autovista Group's robust analytical solutions and its team of seasoned experts are trusted by stakeholders across the automobile industry for their in-depth insights and benchmarks related to vehicle values, ownership, replacements, and repair costs.
Under this agreement, Autovista Group's senior leadership, along with its 700 employees, will remain part of the organization, serving as J.D. Power's automotive data and analytics platform for Australia and Europe. Lindsey Roberts will continue to lead the team in her role as President of J.D. Power Europe, reporting to CEO Dave Habiger.
Currently, Autovista Group is owned by Hayfin Capital Management, a prominent European alternative asset management firm.
The anticipated closure of the Autovista Group acquisition is set for conclusion by the end of 2023, pending customary closing conditions and regulatory review and approval.
For this transaction, RBC Capital Markets acted as the exclusive financial advisor, and Kirkland & Ellis provided legal counsel to J.D. Power. TD Cowen served as the exclusive financial advisor, with Macfarlanes, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Mishcon de Reya acting as legal advisors to Autovista Group and Hayfin.
About J.D. Power
J.D. Power, a renowned consumer insights, advisory services, and data and analytics firm, has consistently spearheaded the use of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic modeling to illuminate the intricacies of consumer behavior for more than half a century. With a storied legacy of providing in-depth industry intelligence on customer interactions with brands and products, J.D. Power serves as the trusted leader for the world's preeminent enterprises, spanning diverse major sectors, profoundly influencing and refining their customer-centric strategies.
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Big Data Management
iMerit | September 07, 2023
iMerit, a prominent player in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) data solutions, has unveiled its latest offering, the Radiology Annotation Product Suite. This innovative suite is designed to cater to the needs of medical AI developers by providing advanced automation, annotation, and analytics capabilities.
This new product suite is firmly rooted in iMerit's Ango Hub platform, an end-to-end enterprise-grade technology platform that is specifically tailored to deliver top-notch data annotation tools for AI development teams. Within this suite, a comprehensive range of solutions awaits, including data sourcing, workflow design, cutting-edge data annotation tools, and the invaluable input of human experts, all seamlessly integrated into a single platform. This unique fusion of iMerit's technological prowess and radiology expertise ensures a smooth journey from training data all the way to regulatory benchmarking.
A significant hurdle in radiology AI applications is the demand for specialized tools and insights from domain experts to ensure the necessary accuracy and precision in training data. For developers, the Radiology Annotation Product Suite offers a one-stop solution, combining automation, annotation tools, and analytics within a single platform, facilitating the creation of precise data pipelines essential for quick scaling radiology AI solutions into production.
Sina Bari MD, Senior Director of Medical AI at iMerit, explained that their suite aims to combine human expertise, data management, and automation in a single solution.
Notable features include
Customized workflows designed for Radiologists with consensus and multistep capabilities.
Diagnostic-level annotation accuracy with multiplanar functionality and 3D volume rendering.
Efficient annotation facilitated by smart automation tools and model integration.
Stringent data security and regulatory compliance, including CFR 21 Part 11, HIPAA, and SOC2.
This solution seamlessly integrates U.S. and offshore experts, including board-certified radiologists, all within a highly secure end-to-end platform, ensuring cost-effective scaling of annotation efforts.
Radha Basu, Founder and CEO of iMerit, emphasized the importance of their work, stating that they understand the challenges of developing AI applications and that their suite was built to scale data annotation efforts with high quality, accuracy, and speed.
About iMerit
iMerit is a prominent AI data solutions company specializing in data services such as dataset creation, image tagging, sentiment analysis, data verification, and content aggregation. It serves Fortune 500 enterprises in various industries and have a global presence, with headquarters in the United States and teams in India, the US, Bhutan, and Europe. iMerit's investors include Omidyar Network, Dell.org, Khosla Ventures, and British International Investment.
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Big Data Management
GlobeNewswire | October 25, 2023
EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leader in accelerating Postgres in the enterprise, today announced its acquisition of Splitgraph, an early-stage disruptor that provides a Postgres compatible serverless SQL API for building data driven applications from hundreds of datasources. This move is seen as a meaningful step in EDB's evolution, underscoring its commitment to delivering Postgres solutions to the ever evolving challenges customers face across a diverse data landscape.
Acquiring Splitgraph advances our capabilities within the realm of analytics and AI, said Kevin Dallas, CEO, EDB. With Splitgraph's technology and deep expertise, we're taking a leap in making data lake and data warehousing operations more efficient, streamlined, and collaborative. Unifying our shared commitment to customer-driven product development, we can accelerate our progress and better address the intricate data challenges that our customers encounter.
Miles Richardson, Co-Founder of Splitgraph, echoed Dallas’s sentiments, "We are pleased to share EDB’s vision to transform the way organizations engage with data using Postgres, especially for analytics workloads and AI-driven use cases. Becoming a part of EDB unlocks exciting new possibilities for our technology, further advancing the ways in which companies look to Postgres to solve their data ecosystem challenges.”
With the acquisition of Splitgraph, EDB underscores its dedication to innovating within the Postgres ecosystem, directly addressing the needs of users who want to seamlessly run analytical queries across diverse data sets. Splitgraph enhances this core capability by enriching data integration, cataloging, and governance, streamlining the management of both in-house data and information sourced from open publishers through a single Postgres interface. This strategic move firmly establishes EDB's commitment to continually elevate the value it delivers to its customers throughout the data landscape.
About EDB
EDB provides enterprise-grade software and services that enable organizations to harness the full power of Postgres, the world’s leading open source database. EDB provides unmatched Postgres database expertise, and enables the same Postgres everywhere, including solutions for hybrid, self-managed private clouds, and EDB BigAnimal, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service. EDB serves more than 1,500 customers globally, including leading government agencies, financial services, media and information technology companies. As the leading contributor to the vibrant and fast-growing Postgres community, EDB is committed to driving technology innovation. Through its solutions for high availability, reliability, security, 24x7 global support and advanced professional services, EDB empowers enterprises to control risk, manage costs and scale efficiently. For more information, visit www.enterprisedb.com.
EnterpriseDB and EDB are registered trademarks and BigAnimal is a trademark of EnterpriseDB Corporation; Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Postgres and PostgreSQL are registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada and used with their permission. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.
About Splitgraph
Splitgraph is a serverless data platform where you can query, upload, connect and share tables of data. It's built on Postgres and optimized for analytical queries over versioned snapshots and external data tables. Splitgraph develops Seafowl, an open source serverless OLAP database optimized for building data-driven Web apps, and also recently released a ChatGPT plugin for querying its catalog of open data with natural language.
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Data Architecture
Cision | October 27, 2023
Neo4j, the world's leading graph database and analytics company, announced major new capabilities enabling cloud or self managed customers to increase analytical queries by up to 100x faster, run both transactional and analytical processing within one database, and automatically track data changes in real time for faster mission-critical decision making.
Neo4j's integration of operational and analytical workloads within a single database is now enhanced by the power of parallel runtime and change data capture, empowering our customers with real-time insights, cost-efficient data management, and simplified architecture, said Sudhir Hasbe, Chief Product Officer, Neo4j. The results foster quicker decision-making, superior customer experiences, and a competitive edge in the market at a magnitude of speed, performance and agility that is far greater than ever before.
New capabilities and benefits include:
Up to 100X faster performance of analytical queries via Parallel Runtime capability, which adds concurrent threads across multiple CPU cores to run analytical graph queries. Neo4j also leverages a technique called morsel-based parallelism to optimize this capability, for greater scalability, better resource utilization, and seamless multitasking.
Faster mission-critical decisions now enabled by native Change Data Capture (CDC), which automates the real-time tracking and notification of data changes in the database. CDC is also integrated with Neo4j Connector for Kafka and Confluent, which streams these changes for easier consumption across other data platforms and applications.
Easier Knowledge Graph creation via new embedding models that predict and find missing relationships and infer new connections within an organization's knowledge graph for greater semantic understanding.
New pathfinding algorithms that make complex workflows more efficient by identifying the best sequence and critical paths between nodes on a graph.
"Neo4j's Change Data Capture capability enables us to synchronize the latest changes happening in our customers' various data sources simultaneously – and helps us guarantee that when they use Dropbox Dash, they can search and find their content accurately," said Anil Masakal, Engineering Leader, Dropbox.
"Neo4j's new capabilities enable modern law enforcement agencies to react with greater agility to mission-critical events, empowering them to fight more crimes and solve them faster," said Christophe Willemsen, CTO, GraphAware. "For example, we can trigger alerts and send them to front-line officers when the phone number of a Person of Interest pings from a cellular tower near a high-risk event where a VIP is present, bodycam footage shows the image of a child at risk, and other events."
These advancements follow a series of milestones for Neo4j. The company recently integrated native vector search into its core database capabilities, enabling more accurate, explainable, and transparent outcomes for LLMs and other generative AI applications. It earlier won Google Cloud's 2023 Technology Partner of the Year award in the data management category, and placement in CRN's 2023 Big Data 100. Neo4j was recognized for the first time in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, the first time that any native graph vendor was included in the report.
About Neo4j
Neo4j, the Graph Database & Analytics leader, helps organizations find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of data connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Customers leverage the structure of their connected data to reveal new ways of solving their most pressing business problems, from fraud detection, customer 360, knowledge graphs, supply chain, personalization, IoT, network management, and more – even as their data grows. Neo4j's full graph stack delivers powerful native graph storage with native vector search capability, data science, advanced analytics, and visualization, with enterprise-grade security controls, scalable architecture, and ACID compliance. Neo4j's community of data leaders comprises a vibrant, open-source community of more than 250,000 developers, data scientists, and architects across hundreds of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and NGOs. Visit neo4j.com
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