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
Kinetica | September 22, 2023
Kinetica, a renowned speed layer for generative AI and real-time analytics, has recently unveiled a native Large Language Model (LLM) integrated with Kinetica's innovative architecture. This empowers users to perform ad-hoc data analysis on real-time, structured data with the ease of natural language, all without the need for external API calls and without data ever leaving the secure confines of the customer's environment. This significant milestone follows Kinetica's prior innovation as the first analytic database to integrate with OpenAI.
Amid the LLM fervor, enterprises and government agencies are actively seeking inventive ways to automate various business functions while safeguarding sensitive information that could be exposed through fine-tuning or prompt augmentation. Public LLMs, exemplified by OpenAI's GPT 3.5, raise valid concerns regarding privacy and security. These concerns are effectively mitigated through native offerings, seamlessly integrated into the Kinetica deployment, and securely nestled within the customer's network perimeter.
Beyond its superior security features, Kinetica's native LLM is finely tuned to the syntax and industry-specific data definitions, spanning domains such as telecommunications, automotive, financial services, logistics, and more. This tailored approach ensures the generation of more reliable and precise SQL queries. Notably, this capability extends beyond conventional SQL, enabling efficient handling of intricate tasks essential for enhanced decision-making capabilities, particularly for time-series, graph, and spatial inquiries. Kinetica's approach to fine-tuning places emphasis on optimizing SQL generation to deliver consistent and accurate results, in stark contrast to more conventional methods that prioritize creativity but yield diverse and unpredictable responses. This steadfast commitment to reliable SQL query outcomes offers businesses and users the peace of mind they deserve.
Illustrating the practical impact of this innovation, the US Air Force has been collaborating closely with Kinetica to leverage advanced analytics on sensor data, enabling swift identification and response to potential threats. This partnership contributes significantly to the safety and security of the national airspace system. The US Air Force now employs Kinetica's embedded LLM to detect airspace threats and anomalies using natural language.
Kinetica's database excels in converting natural language queries into SQL, delivering responses in mere seconds, even when faced with complex or unfamiliar questions. Furthermore, Kinetica seamlessly combines various analytics modes, including time series, spatial, graph, and machine learning, thereby expanding the range of queries it can effectively address. What truly enables Kinetica to excel in conversational query processing is its ingenious use of native vectorization. In a vectorized query engine, data is organized into fixed-size blocks called vectors, enabling parallel query operations on these vectors. This stands in contrast to traditional approaches that process individual data elements sequentially. The result is significantly accelerated query execution, all within a smaller compute footprint. This remarkable speed is made possible by the utilization of GPUs and the latest CPU advancements, which enable simultaneous calculations on multiple data elements, thereby greatly enhancing the processing speed of computation-intensive tasks across multiple cores or threads.
About Kinetica
Kinetica is a pioneering company at the forefront of real-time analytics and is the creator of the groundbreaking real-time analytical database specially designed for sensor and machine data. The company offers native vectorized analytics capabilities in the fields of generative AI, spatial analysis, time-series modeling, and graph processing. A distinguished array of the world's largest enterprises spanning diverse sectors, including the public sector, financial services, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, retail, and automotive industries, entrusts Kinetica to forge novel solutions in the realms of time-series data and spatial analysis. The company's clientele includes various illustrious organizations such as the US Air Force, Citibank, Ford, T-Mobile, and numerous others.
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Big Data Management
PR Newswire | September 27, 2023
Congruity360, a leading unstructured data management and risk mitigation provider, announces the addition of data mobility in Enterprise Insights.
As unstructured data grows at the annual rate of 55% to 65% and accounts for more than 80% of all enterprise data, businesses must find a way to identify, classify and move data intelligently and automatically during its lifecycle. As enterprises grow, their valuable data must mature with their business. This may require a journey to the cloud, SLA changes which optimize storage costs, classification to mitigate risk, and moving the right data to additional key AI platform initiatives.
A simple, scalable, high-performance data classification engine, Enterprise Insights delivers next-generation data lifecycle management for storage optimization, security and risk optimization, and IT business optimization.
Enterprise Insights Approach to Successful Data Optimization:
Identify – Securely analyze PBs of unstructured data across on premises (NAS & object) and cloud (files/objects & SaaS) sources by harnessing the power of the platform's rapid insights and auto-discover technologies, which can reduce data identification times by 1,000%.
Classify – Quickly identify key client data attributes for cost savings, risk mitigation, and business impact with simple to consume dashboards and drill down capabilities.
Review – Confidently create and take actions by leveraging the comprehensive search engine to quickly find and preview data for movement without ever leaving the platform.
Remediate – Seamlessly take action (migrate and tier) on classified data to ensure it's properly protected, optimally stored, and most effectively serving the business.
Enterprise Insights offers three use case-driven insight analysis modules:
Storage and Migration Optimization – Insights into over 35 file data attributes including systems' aged, stale, obsolete, redundant, trivial, and types of systems files.
Business Optimization – Insight into and classification by business units' or cost centers' aged, stale, obsolete, redundant, trivial, and types of files.
Data Security and Risk Optimization – Insights into files containing PII and SPII, financial, legal, security, and risk data, as well as open shares and other network & storage security vulnerabilities.
By leveraging Enterprise Insights, clients can classify data for simple and secure migration both on premise and in the cloud. Equally important is Insights data tiering capabilities, enabling users to match data storage costs to data usage.
Powered by the Classify360 Platform, Enterprise Insights' secure hybrid approach to data analysis scales capabilities to exabyte levels at unmatched speed. Enterprise Insights is the industry's most powerful weapon to tackle the costs, time, and complexity of cloud migration projects, backup modernization, storage tiering, hardware refresh, and security posture management. By providing users with dashboards highlighting their existing storage costs and risks, Enterprise Insights frees clients from hidden, legacy, CapEx and OpEx expenditures, performance, and scalability bottlenecks while discovering and acting on sensitive and risk data.
Unstructured data insanity is treating all data equally with zero insights into its business impact, said Brian Davidson, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of Congruity360. Enterprise Insights is the first step in implementing optimized data lifecycle management. With historically high data growth and new business uses for unstructured data, it is essential to attack the costs and risks inherent in unmanaged data. Our customers have realized 7-10x returns on their data lifecycle management implementations while reducing risk in an auditable compliance framework. As AI continues to gain steam, don't overpay by moving useless data to your expensive AI platforms.
The Classify360 Platform is comprehensive, simple to implement, scale, and operate. Businesses leverage the Classify360 Platform for unstructured data discovery, classification, business workflows, remediation actions, and insightful reporting. Congruity360 continues to tackle additional data governance challenges through innovations to the Classify360 Platform to continue delivering revolutionary data governance and classification, at scale, to the enterprise world.
ABOUT CONGRUITY360
Congruity360 delivers the only data life cycle management solution built on a foundation of classification, by expert data storage engineers alongside expert data privacy consultants. The Classify360 Platform is easy to implement, requires no outside consultants, and quickly analyzes your data at the petabyte scale in days, not weeks or months.
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Big Data
Business Wire | September 29, 2023
Radiant Logic, the Identity Data Fabric company, today announces the completed integration of Brainwave GRC following the April 2023 acquisition. These new capabilities solidify Radiant Logic’s entrance in the Identity Analytics market and position our platform in the Identity Governance and Administration market, as seen in the recent Gartner® Market Guide for IGA. With a new website launching today and the release of the full RadiantOne Identity Data Platform, including Identity Analytics, the company celebrates the final integration of Brainwave into Radiant Logic.
Radiant Logic, the longtime leader in Identity Data Management, enters the field of Identity Analytics with unprecedented capabilities including Observability, Governance, and Compliance. With 90% of organizations experiencing at least one identity-related breach in the past year, according to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), organizations are realizing the essential role of identity data quality and visibility within cybersecurity and overall IT operational maturity best practices.
Identity data is the lifeblood for all access decisions, and must be made accessible as the authoritative source for all authentication, authorization, and administration engines. In a recent research note, Gartner recommends that organizations: “Accelerate IAM data improvements for their IAM program by increasing the priority of visibility/observability improvements, including applying the visibility, intelligence, action model to program prioritization decisions."
The new release from Radiant Logic represents a major step forward in the ability to use identity data management and identity analytics in cybersecurity and governance practices. Access to the right identity data, at the right time, is critical for any IAM tool, process, or policy. Visibility into all identity data and infrastructure gives clear insight into who has access to what and uncovers outliers and over-privileged access, which helps identify and close security gaps. It’s a powerful combination for any organization.
We’re thrilled to announce the full integration of Radiant Logic and Brainwave GRC as one company, one website, and one platform. The new RadiantOne Identity Data Platform will strengthen operational maturity for customers, improve regulatory compliance and audit responses, and enable data-driven security best practices, said John Pritchard, Chief Product Officer, Radiant Logic. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg regarding the potential for leveraging data science and artificial intelligence in IAM, and we believe that by pairing vast amounts of identity data with analytical inferencing, the possibilities for innovation are endless.
With the new capabilities from RadiantOne, identity data can be supplied in a flexible and automated way, allowing organizations to base their security and policy decisions on the most accurate and complete data available. The addition of Identity Analytics brings visibility and intuitive visualization techniques, allowing organizations to use comprehensive identity data to find anomalies, add risk scores, easily respond to audits, and improve their overall security posture.
Complete documentation is now available on the Radiant Logic developer portal, the support function is integrated via the customer support portal, and the full platform will be available as an integrated SaaS offering in Q4. The integrated platform combining Identity Data Management and Identity Analytics capabilities will accelerate Zero Trust projects, enable digital transformation, and simplify audit and compliance. Visit our new website at www.radiantlogic.com to learn more.
About Radiant Logic
Radiant Logic, the identity data experts, helps organizations turn identity data into a strategic asset that drives automated governance, enhanced security, and operational efficiency.
Our RadiantOne Identity Data Platform removes complexity as a roadblock to identity-first strategies by creating an authoritative data source for real-time, context-aware controls. We provide visibility and actionable insights to intelligently detect and remediate risk using AI/ML-powered identity analytics.
With RadiantOne, organizations are able to tap into the wealth of information across the infrastructure, combining context and analytics to deploy governance that works for the most advanced use cases.
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