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Phocas Software selected as preferred data analytics technology by ADS Solutions

Phocas Software | March 21, 2022

A new partnership between Phocas Software and ADS Solutions will help small- to mid-sized businesses in the wholesale distribution and light manufacturing industries use their business data to improve reporting, insights and decision making. ADS Solutions, creator of cloud-based Accolent ERP, has selected Phocas as its preferred data analytics platform to complement the ADS Solutions application.

Together, Phocas and ADS Solutions will create a list of standardized reporting and dashboards for Accolent ERP customers by industry with a goal of delivering a more efficient reporting solution and allowing users to quickly and easily monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).

“As cloud-based solution providers with thousands of users in wholesale and manufacturing, Phocas and ADS Solutions understand the value of delivering technology that is intuitive, readily available and optimized for specific industries,” said Jay Deubler, president of Phocas U.S. “Out-of-the-box, Phocas is primed to help Accolent ERP customers with reporting and dashboards they need to eliminate guesswork and be more strategic with critical business decisions. We have purposely built Phocas to integrate seamlessly with solutions like Accolent ERP and encourage quick and broad adoption because of its simplicity and familiarity.”

“Accolent ERP customers need an intuitive data analytics and reporting solution that Phocas Software can provide. With only a few clicks, Phocas will provide Accolent ERP customers with access to easy-to-understand, actionable business intelligence, allowing them to fully capitalize on the value of their information.”

Ian Pereira, CEO of ADS Solutions

Phocas has more than 30,000 daily users, and is built with KPIs and metrics that are specific to roles and industries of ADS Solutions’ customers. Phocas will provide ADS Solutions with extensive sales and technical training about its base business intelligence platform, Financial Statements solution and Budgeting and Forecasting workflows. ADS Solutions’ customers will also have access to Phocas vast online training and support tools, including Phocas Academy and Phocas User Group Forum.

About Phocas Software
Phocas is a cloud-based, SaaS company specializing in data analytics for the manufacturing, distribution, retail industries. The software incorporates sector knowledge to consolidate essential business data from common ERP, CRM, and AP/AR systems to make it simple to access companywide insights and financial performance through historical and predictive analysis. A core philosophy at Phocas is to make software intuitive so users of all skill levels can track and report on essential KPIs that are specific to their roles and industries. Phocas comes with out-of-the-box metrics, powerful interactive dashboards and broad functionality to provide immediate benefits and adoption. Users can also customize the software to meet their unique analytics and reporting needs.

About ADS Solutions
ADS Solutions is a leader in providing powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use Cloud-based ERP software to wholesale distributors, light manufacturers and services businesses. ADS Solutions’ Accolent ERP software delivers fully integrated, end-to-end functionality for sales, CRM, order management, inventory control, warehouse management, fulfillment, purchasing, eCommerce and GAAP financial reporting capabilities. Accolent ERP is optimized for the wholesale distributors, light manufacturers and services businesses, across a broad range of vertical industries.

Spotlight

The Deciding Factor: Big Data & Decision Making

When it comes to making business decisions, it is difficult to exaggerate the value of managers’ experience and intuition, especially when hard data is not at hand. Today, however, when petabytes of information are freely available, it would be foolhardy to make a decision without attempting to draw some meaningful inferences from the data. This is certainly true, but improvements in computing power and artificial intelligence systems mean that asking direct questions of big data and getting an answer, in real time, is now a reality (see WellPoint case study). Although these systems are still very costly and not widely deployed, this research suggests that the appetite for real-time decision-making is huge. And when there is a business demand, it is only a matter of time before the need if fulfilled.


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BIG DATA MANAGEMENT

Fluree Announces Significant Momentum in Digital Trust and Privacy Collaboration, Strategic Partnerships and Developer Adoption, on the Path to Web3

Fluree | December 27, 2021

Fluree, provider of the Web3 data platform, today announced significant momentum as the technology of choice for privacy-preserving data ecosystems. Fluree’s immutable semantic graph database played a key role in a wide range of projects in 2021, including secure academic credentials for projects funded by the Department of Education, a tamper-proof and fair blockchain-backed election, and off-chain data storage for Cardano, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency in the world. “It’s inspiring to see the ways that developers are taking advantage of Fluree’s ability to deliver trust, semantic context and security to data projects,” said Fluree Co-CEO and Co-Founder Brian Platz. “Support for our platform is at an all-time high, driven by data-centric architecture that can power trusted, interoperable data ecosystems.” “Mainstream adoption of Web3 — the decentralized Internet of data — is on the horizon. As the rise of data ecosystems are met with privacy, trust and interoperability challenges, Fluree is uniquely poised to become the infrastructure of choice in the emerging Web3 market,” said Dan Malven, Managing Director at 4490 Ventures. Surge in Developer Adoption: 500% Growth in 2021 Fluree’s open source technology grew 500% in users in 2021, topping 100,000 total downloads to date as it becomes the technology of choice for privacy-preserving data ecosystems. Key use cases in verifiable credentials, education technology, enterprise knowledge graphs, and blockchain applications continue to emerge. Fluree’s recently overhauled developer portal and growing Slack community accommodates the influx in developer adoption, prioritizing the Fluree developer experience and community. Fluree’s rise in both developer adoption and strategic partners has been recognized, winning local awards such as Tech Tribune’s Best Tech Startup in Winston-Salem to being recognized as CRN’s Coolest Database System Company of 2021 as well as a winner of Business Intelligence Group’s Fortress Cyber Security Award. Digital Privacy and Verifiable Credentials for the Public Sector, Supporting Education and Health Care Improvements Verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers have become a central theme in rising Fluree use cases across education ecosystems and healthcare. As the world begins to understand the value of privacy in digital ecosystems, organizations have chosen Fluree to power solutions that return ownership of information to consumers. Education Credentials: Two winning projects of the American Council of Education’s Blockchain Innovation Challenge, funded by the Department of Education, are using Fluree's technology to transform credentialing in academic ecosystems. The LifeLong Learner Project focuses on providing teachers with a wallet to store and present certifications as they move throughout their careers. The UnBlockED project is focused on creating an open transfer exchange that will empower college students by streamlining transfer credit recognition. In both projects, Fluree’s technology provides the foundation for the exchange of secure and interoperable verifiable credentials across owners, issuers, and third-party institutions. Key partners within these initiatives include the University of Arizona, the Gardner Institute, and Georgia Tech. Healthcare Credentials: Pulse Connect has partnered with Fluree to build verifiable credential solutions for patients and health providers. This will help support verification requirements around vaccine credentialing in view of increasing vaccine mandates. Strategic Partnerships: Supporting Cryptocurrency Advancements, Tamper-Proof Elections and Codifying Unstructured Data Much of Fluree’s 2021 momentum stems from Fluree’s growing partner ecosystem, which recently won the CRN’s “Channel Chiefs Award.” Examples of rising stars in Fluree’s Partner Ecosystem include: Building a Metadata Sidechain Solution for the Sixth Largest Cryptocurrency: The community supporting the high-ranking cryptocurrency blockchain platform Cardano selected Ikigai Technologies and Fluree to power Logosphere. The Logosphere project proposes Fluree as an "off-chain decentralized app (dApp) data storage solution" for the metadata related to Cardano transactions. Instead of placing data into siloed databases, Fluree will act as a secure and interoperable metadata layer for dApp developers. This will enable a new class of data-driven dApps, such as non-fungible token (NFT) exchanges, decentralized knowledge graphs, and other data-centric Web3 applications. Powering the World’s First End-to-End Blockchain Election: Marzex.tech technologies delivered a Fluree-powered digital voting platform for the International Islamic University of Malaysia. The digital platform used Fluree’s backend to successfully register identities, facilitate private voting, and thwart efforts to tamper with the election. Turning Text into Trusted, Interoperable Data: Fluree integrated with Lead Semantics to offer TextDistil, a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for unstructured data. The integration will allow organizations to transform their text and other unstructured data into a rich set of queryable information, readily integrated into data fabrics and enterprise knowledge graphs. This is particularly valuable for the healthcare industry, which deals largely with unstructured data and has experienced an 878% increase in health data over the last five years. About Fluree Founded in 2016 by Brian Platz and Flip Filipowski, Fluree PBC is headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Fluree is pioneering a data-first technology approach with its data management platform.

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BIG DATA MANAGEMENT

NV5 Acquires AT Advanced Technologies, Strengthening Data Center Commissioning and Mission Critical Services

NV5 | December 28, 2021

NV5 Global, Inc. , a provider of compliance, technology, engineering, and environmental consulting solutions, announced today that it has acquired AT Advanced Technologies Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. (AT), an international consulting firm providing commissioning management and engineering services for high tech facilities and data centers. AT’s clients include large international technology and financial companies that depend on the efficiency and reliability of mission-critical data centers for their day-to-day operations. The acquisition was made with a combination of cash and stock and will be immediately accretive to NV5’s earnings. “Data center commissioning and mission critical engineering is a high-margin, high-growth sector that NV5 entered in early 2021 with the successful acquisition of Industrial Design Associates International. Singapore is one of the largest and fastest growing data center markets in the world, and AT Advanced Technologies’ give us a competitive edge in capitalizing on data center market growth in Singapore and throughout Southeast Asia.” Dickerson Wright, PE, Chairman & CEO of NV5 Founded in 1999, AT has completed more than 350 projects in Asia and Australia and operates out of three offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. “We are excited to join NV5 and the acquisition strengthens our existing platform for further expansion,” said Victor John Carey, CEO and Founder at AT Advanced Technologies. “AT Advanced Technologies complements our energy efficiency and building analytics services and expands our international commissioning capabilities. We look forward to presenting our combined capabilities to existing customers and new client pursuits,” said Gary Hui, PE, Vice President of NV5 Energy Efficiency and Mission Critical Services. About AT Advanced Technologies AT Advanced Technologies is a building services engineering, commissioning management, and energy management consulting firm providing clients with integrated skills and expertise to match the expectation of blue chip multi-national companies. With a unique blend of qualified technical staff from the UK, Australia, Singapore, and various countries in South East Asia, AT Advanced Technologies delivers world class services to clients in the financial and technology markets. AT Advanced Technologies is a member of the USGBC (LEED), the Commissioning Specialists Association (CSA) and is bizSAFE Star certified. About NV5 NV5 Global, Inc. is a provider of compliance, technology, engineering, and environmental consulting solutions for public and private sector clients supporting sustainable infrastructure, utility, and building assets and systems. The Company focuses on multiple verticals: testing, inspection & consulting, infrastructure, utility services, buildings & program management, environmental health sciences, and geospatial technology services to deliver innovative, sustainable solutions to complex issues and improve lives in our communities. NV5 operates out of more than 100 offices nationwide and abroad.

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DATA ARCHITECTURE

Alluxio Expands Data Access and Security for Data-driven Applications in Heterogeneous Environments with v2.8 Release

Alluxio | May 05, 2022

Alluxio, the developer of the open source data orchestration platform for data driven workloads such as large-scale analytics and AI/ML, today announced the immediate availability of version 2.8 of its Data Orchestration Platform. This new release features enhanced interface support for the Amazon S3 REST API; security improvements for sensitive applications with strict encryption compliance and regulatory requirements; and strengthened automated data movement functionality across heterogeneous storage systems without the need to manually move or copy the data. Alluxio 2.8 enhances S3 API compatibility, so onboarding and managing Alluxio on existing large data pipelines becomes much easier. As a major enhancement to enterprise-grade security, Alluxio 2.8 adds features to support server-side encryption capabilities for securing and governing data. Data migration is a major challenge for organizations having data stored cross-vendors, cross-clouds, or cross-regions. Alluxio 2.8 improves reliability of data movement across heterogeneous storage systems with enhanced usability of policy-based data management and high availability. “At Uber, we run Alluxio to accelerate all sorts of business-critical analytics queries at a large scale,” said Chen Liang, Senior Software Engineer, Uber’s interactive analytics team. “Alluxio provides consistent performance in our big data processing use cases. As compute-storage separation continues to be the trend along with containerization in big data, we believe a unified layer that bridges the compute and storage like Alluxio will continue to play a key role.” “The support for S3 API is significant, making Alluxio much more accessible to a huge number of customers. Together, our rich set of S3, HDFS and POSIX APIs enables true storage-agnostic and multi-cloud deployments. The data migration capabilities further eliminate vendor lock-in and provide organizations with the flexibility to choose whatever they want to run their applications or store their data.” Adit Madan, Director of Product Management, Alluxio Alluxio 2.8 Community and Enterprise Edition features new capabilities, including: Enhanced S3 API with Metadata Tagging Alluxio 2.8 enhances the support for the S3 RESTful API with metadata tagging capabilities. With S3 API, applications can communicate with Alluxio without a custom driver or any additional configuration. By using S3 API, data-driven applications, end-users, and admins can seamlessly and rapidly onboard Alluxio for new uses. Metadata operations can be achieved through the S3 object and bucket tagging APIs. Data Encryption for Enterprise-grade Security The Enterprise Edition of Alluxio 2.8 supports encryption of data in Alluxio managed storage at REST as an essential security feature. In conjunction with SSL, this new feature supports server-side encryption, ensuring data security. Alluxio now offers multiple encryption zones for data it manages to meet the demands of security. Data stored on the Alluxio worker is protected, and decrypted on the server before being sent to a client. Data Movement Across Heterogeneous Storage Systems Alluxio 2.8 Enterprise Edition also improves the policy-based data management features, which facilitate data access and movement between heterogeneous storage systems for better performance and lower cost. Alluxio manages data placement between the different storage systems with predefined policies. With transparent storage options, organizations can choose whichever storage best suits their needs without undergoing complex manual data migrations. About Alluxio Proven at global web scale in production for modern data services, Alluxio is the developer of open source data orchestration software for the cloud. Alluxio moves data closer to data analytics and machine learning compute frameworks in any cloud across clusters, regions, and clouds, providing memory-speed data access to files and objects. Intelligent data tiering and caching deliver greater performance and reliability to customers in financial services, high tech, retail and telecommunications. Alluxio is in production use today at eight out of the top ten internet companies. Venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Seven Seas Partners, Volcanic Ventures, and Hillhouse Capital. Alluxio was founded at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab by the creators of the Tachyon open source project.

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DATA ARCHITECTURE

Databricks Launches Data Lakehouse for Retail and Consumer Goods Customers

Databricks | January 14, 2022

Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse architecture, today announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Retail, the company's first industry-specific data lakehouse for retailers and consumer goods (CG) customers. With Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail, data teams are enabled with a centralized data and AI platform that is tailored to help solve the most critical data challenges that retailers, partners, and their suppliers are facing. Early adopters of Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail include industry-leading customers and partners like Walgreens, Columbia, H&M Group, Reckitt, Restaurant Brands International, 84.51°(a subsidiary of Kroger Co.), Co-Op Food, Gousto, Acosta and more. "As the retail and healthcare industries continue to undergo transformative change, Walgreens has embraced a modern, collaborative data platform that provides a competitive edge to the business and, most importantly, equips our pharmacists and technicians with timely, accurate patient insights for better healthcare outcomes," said Luigi Guadagno, Vice President, Pharmacy and HealthCare Platform Technology at Walgreens. "With hundreds of millions of prescriptions processed by Walgreens each year, Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail allows us to unify all of this data and store it in one place for a full range of analytics and ML workloads. By eliminating complex and costly legacy data silos, we've enabled cross-domain collaboration with an intelligent, unified data platform that gives us the flexibility to adapt, scale and better serve our customers and patients." "Databricks has always innovated on behalf of our customers and the vision of lakehouse helps solve many of the challenges retail organizations have told us they're facing," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder at Databricks. "This is an important milestone on our journey to help organizations operate in real-time, deliver more accurate analysis, and leverage all of their customer data to uncover valuable insights. Lakehouse for Retail will empower data-driven collaboration and sharing across businesses and partners in the retail industry." Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail delivers an open, flexible data platform, data collaboration and sharing, and a collection of powerful tools and partners for the retail and consumer goods industries. Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, new Lakehouse for Retail Solution Accelerators offer a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization's data engineers and data scientists. Popular solution accelerators for Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail customers include: Real-time Streaming Data Ingestion: Power real-time decisions critical to winning in omnichannel retail with point-of-sale, mobile application, inventory and fulfillment data. Demand forecasting and time-series forecasting: Generate more accurate forecasts in less time with fine-grained demand forecasting to better predict demand for all items and stores. ML-powered recommendation engines: Specific recommendations models for every stage of the buyer journey - including neural network, collaborative filtering, content-based recommendations and more - enable retailers to create a more personalized customer experience. Customer Lifetime Value: Examine customer attrition, better predict behaviors of churn, and segment consumers by lifetime and value with a collection of customer analytics accelerators to help improve decisions on product development and personalized promotions. Additionally, industry-leading Databricks partners like Deloitte and Tredence are driving lakehouse vision and value by delivering pre-built analytics solutions on the lakehouse platform that address real-time customer use cases. Tailor-made for the retail industry, featured partner solutions and platforms include: Deloitte's Trellis solution accelerator for the retail industry is one of many examples of how Deloitte and client partners are adopting the Databricks Lakehouse architecture construct and platform to deliver end-to-end data and AI/ML capabilities in a simple, holistic, and cost-effective way. Trellis provides capabilities that solve retail clients' complex challenges around forecasting, replenishment, procurement, pricing, and promotion services. Deloitte has leveraged their deep industry and client expertise to build an integrated, secured, and multi-cloud ready "as-a-service" solution accelerator on top of Databricks' Lakehouse platform that can be rapidly customized as appropriate based on client's unique needs. Trellis has proven to be a game-changer for our joint clients as it allows them to focus on the critical shifts occurring both on the demand and supply side with the ability to assess recommendations, associated impact, and insights in real-time that result in significant improvement to both topline and bottom line numbers. Tredence will meet the explosive enterprise Data, AI & ML demand and deliver real-time transformative industry value for their business by delivering solutions for Lakehouse for Retail. The partnership first launched the On-Shelf Availability Solution (OSA) accelerator in August 2021, combining Databricks' data processing capability and Tredence's AI/ML expertise to enable Retail, CPG & Manufacturers to solve their trillion dollar out-of-stock challenge. Now with Lakehouse for Retail, Tredence and Databricks will jointly expand the portfolio of industry solutions to address other customer challenges and drive global scale together. About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.

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BIG DATA MANAGEMENT

Fluree Announces Significant Momentum in Digital Trust and Privacy Collaboration, Strategic Partnerships and Developer Adoption, on the Path to Web3

Fluree | December 27, 2021

Fluree, provider of the Web3 data platform, today announced significant momentum as the technology of choice for privacy-preserving data ecosystems. Fluree’s immutable semantic graph database played a key role in a wide range of projects in 2021, including secure academic credentials for projects funded by the Department of Education, a tamper-proof and fair blockchain-backed election, and off-chain data storage for Cardano, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency in the world. “It’s inspiring to see the ways that developers are taking advantage of Fluree’s ability to deliver trust, semantic context and security to data projects,” said Fluree Co-CEO and Co-Founder Brian Platz. “Support for our platform is at an all-time high, driven by data-centric architecture that can power trusted, interoperable data ecosystems.” “Mainstream adoption of Web3 — the decentralized Internet of data — is on the horizon. As the rise of data ecosystems are met with privacy, trust and interoperability challenges, Fluree is uniquely poised to become the infrastructure of choice in the emerging Web3 market,” said Dan Malven, Managing Director at 4490 Ventures. Surge in Developer Adoption: 500% Growth in 2021 Fluree’s open source technology grew 500% in users in 2021, topping 100,000 total downloads to date as it becomes the technology of choice for privacy-preserving data ecosystems. Key use cases in verifiable credentials, education technology, enterprise knowledge graphs, and blockchain applications continue to emerge. Fluree’s recently overhauled developer portal and growing Slack community accommodates the influx in developer adoption, prioritizing the Fluree developer experience and community. Fluree’s rise in both developer adoption and strategic partners has been recognized, winning local awards such as Tech Tribune’s Best Tech Startup in Winston-Salem to being recognized as CRN’s Coolest Database System Company of 2021 as well as a winner of Business Intelligence Group’s Fortress Cyber Security Award. Digital Privacy and Verifiable Credentials for the Public Sector, Supporting Education and Health Care Improvements Verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers have become a central theme in rising Fluree use cases across education ecosystems and healthcare. As the world begins to understand the value of privacy in digital ecosystems, organizations have chosen Fluree to power solutions that return ownership of information to consumers. Education Credentials: Two winning projects of the American Council of Education’s Blockchain Innovation Challenge, funded by the Department of Education, are using Fluree's technology to transform credentialing in academic ecosystems. The LifeLong Learner Project focuses on providing teachers with a wallet to store and present certifications as they move throughout their careers. The UnBlockED project is focused on creating an open transfer exchange that will empower college students by streamlining transfer credit recognition. In both projects, Fluree’s technology provides the foundation for the exchange of secure and interoperable verifiable credentials across owners, issuers, and third-party institutions. Key partners within these initiatives include the University of Arizona, the Gardner Institute, and Georgia Tech. Healthcare Credentials: Pulse Connect has partnered with Fluree to build verifiable credential solutions for patients and health providers. This will help support verification requirements around vaccine credentialing in view of increasing vaccine mandates. Strategic Partnerships: Supporting Cryptocurrency Advancements, Tamper-Proof Elections and Codifying Unstructured Data Much of Fluree’s 2021 momentum stems from Fluree’s growing partner ecosystem, which recently won the CRN’s “Channel Chiefs Award.” Examples of rising stars in Fluree’s Partner Ecosystem include: Building a Metadata Sidechain Solution for the Sixth Largest Cryptocurrency: The community supporting the high-ranking cryptocurrency blockchain platform Cardano selected Ikigai Technologies and Fluree to power Logosphere. The Logosphere project proposes Fluree as an "off-chain decentralized app (dApp) data storage solution" for the metadata related to Cardano transactions. Instead of placing data into siloed databases, Fluree will act as a secure and interoperable metadata layer for dApp developers. This will enable a new class of data-driven dApps, such as non-fungible token (NFT) exchanges, decentralized knowledge graphs, and other data-centric Web3 applications. Powering the World’s First End-to-End Blockchain Election: Marzex.tech technologies delivered a Fluree-powered digital voting platform for the International Islamic University of Malaysia. The digital platform used Fluree’s backend to successfully register identities, facilitate private voting, and thwart efforts to tamper with the election. Turning Text into Trusted, Interoperable Data: Fluree integrated with Lead Semantics to offer TextDistil, a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for unstructured data. The integration will allow organizations to transform their text and other unstructured data into a rich set of queryable information, readily integrated into data fabrics and enterprise knowledge graphs. This is particularly valuable for the healthcare industry, which deals largely with unstructured data and has experienced an 878% increase in health data over the last five years. About Fluree Founded in 2016 by Brian Platz and Flip Filipowski, Fluree PBC is headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Fluree is pioneering a data-first technology approach with its data management platform.

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BIG DATA MANAGEMENT

NV5 Acquires AT Advanced Technologies, Strengthening Data Center Commissioning and Mission Critical Services

NV5 | December 28, 2021

NV5 Global, Inc. , a provider of compliance, technology, engineering, and environmental consulting solutions, announced today that it has acquired AT Advanced Technologies Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. (AT), an international consulting firm providing commissioning management and engineering services for high tech facilities and data centers. AT’s clients include large international technology and financial companies that depend on the efficiency and reliability of mission-critical data centers for their day-to-day operations. The acquisition was made with a combination of cash and stock and will be immediately accretive to NV5’s earnings. “Data center commissioning and mission critical engineering is a high-margin, high-growth sector that NV5 entered in early 2021 with the successful acquisition of Industrial Design Associates International. Singapore is one of the largest and fastest growing data center markets in the world, and AT Advanced Technologies’ give us a competitive edge in capitalizing on data center market growth in Singapore and throughout Southeast Asia.” Dickerson Wright, PE, Chairman & CEO of NV5 Founded in 1999, AT has completed more than 350 projects in Asia and Australia and operates out of three offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. “We are excited to join NV5 and the acquisition strengthens our existing platform for further expansion,” said Victor John Carey, CEO and Founder at AT Advanced Technologies. “AT Advanced Technologies complements our energy efficiency and building analytics services and expands our international commissioning capabilities. We look forward to presenting our combined capabilities to existing customers and new client pursuits,” said Gary Hui, PE, Vice President of NV5 Energy Efficiency and Mission Critical Services. About AT Advanced Technologies AT Advanced Technologies is a building services engineering, commissioning management, and energy management consulting firm providing clients with integrated skills and expertise to match the expectation of blue chip multi-national companies. With a unique blend of qualified technical staff from the UK, Australia, Singapore, and various countries in South East Asia, AT Advanced Technologies delivers world class services to clients in the financial and technology markets. AT Advanced Technologies is a member of the USGBC (LEED), the Commissioning Specialists Association (CSA) and is bizSAFE Star certified. About NV5 NV5 Global, Inc. is a provider of compliance, technology, engineering, and environmental consulting solutions for public and private sector clients supporting sustainable infrastructure, utility, and building assets and systems. The Company focuses on multiple verticals: testing, inspection & consulting, infrastructure, utility services, buildings & program management, environmental health sciences, and geospatial technology services to deliver innovative, sustainable solutions to complex issues and improve lives in our communities. NV5 operates out of more than 100 offices nationwide and abroad.

Read More

DATA ARCHITECTURE

Alluxio Expands Data Access and Security for Data-driven Applications in Heterogeneous Environments with v2.8 Release

Alluxio | May 05, 2022

Alluxio, the developer of the open source data orchestration platform for data driven workloads such as large-scale analytics and AI/ML, today announced the immediate availability of version 2.8 of its Data Orchestration Platform. This new release features enhanced interface support for the Amazon S3 REST API; security improvements for sensitive applications with strict encryption compliance and regulatory requirements; and strengthened automated data movement functionality across heterogeneous storage systems without the need to manually move or copy the data. Alluxio 2.8 enhances S3 API compatibility, so onboarding and managing Alluxio on existing large data pipelines becomes much easier. As a major enhancement to enterprise-grade security, Alluxio 2.8 adds features to support server-side encryption capabilities for securing and governing data. Data migration is a major challenge for organizations having data stored cross-vendors, cross-clouds, or cross-regions. Alluxio 2.8 improves reliability of data movement across heterogeneous storage systems with enhanced usability of policy-based data management and high availability. “At Uber, we run Alluxio to accelerate all sorts of business-critical analytics queries at a large scale,” said Chen Liang, Senior Software Engineer, Uber’s interactive analytics team. “Alluxio provides consistent performance in our big data processing use cases. As compute-storage separation continues to be the trend along with containerization in big data, we believe a unified layer that bridges the compute and storage like Alluxio will continue to play a key role.” “The support for S3 API is significant, making Alluxio much more accessible to a huge number of customers. Together, our rich set of S3, HDFS and POSIX APIs enables true storage-agnostic and multi-cloud deployments. The data migration capabilities further eliminate vendor lock-in and provide organizations with the flexibility to choose whatever they want to run their applications or store their data.” Adit Madan, Director of Product Management, Alluxio Alluxio 2.8 Community and Enterprise Edition features new capabilities, including: Enhanced S3 API with Metadata Tagging Alluxio 2.8 enhances the support for the S3 RESTful API with metadata tagging capabilities. With S3 API, applications can communicate with Alluxio without a custom driver or any additional configuration. By using S3 API, data-driven applications, end-users, and admins can seamlessly and rapidly onboard Alluxio for new uses. Metadata operations can be achieved through the S3 object and bucket tagging APIs. Data Encryption for Enterprise-grade Security The Enterprise Edition of Alluxio 2.8 supports encryption of data in Alluxio managed storage at REST as an essential security feature. In conjunction with SSL, this new feature supports server-side encryption, ensuring data security. Alluxio now offers multiple encryption zones for data it manages to meet the demands of security. Data stored on the Alluxio worker is protected, and decrypted on the server before being sent to a client. Data Movement Across Heterogeneous Storage Systems Alluxio 2.8 Enterprise Edition also improves the policy-based data management features, which facilitate data access and movement between heterogeneous storage systems for better performance and lower cost. Alluxio manages data placement between the different storage systems with predefined policies. With transparent storage options, organizations can choose whichever storage best suits their needs without undergoing complex manual data migrations. About Alluxio Proven at global web scale in production for modern data services, Alluxio is the developer of open source data orchestration software for the cloud. Alluxio moves data closer to data analytics and machine learning compute frameworks in any cloud across clusters, regions, and clouds, providing memory-speed data access to files and objects. Intelligent data tiering and caching deliver greater performance and reliability to customers in financial services, high tech, retail and telecommunications. Alluxio is in production use today at eight out of the top ten internet companies. Venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Seven Seas Partners, Volcanic Ventures, and Hillhouse Capital. Alluxio was founded at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab by the creators of the Tachyon open source project.

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DATA ARCHITECTURE

Databricks Launches Data Lakehouse for Retail and Consumer Goods Customers

Databricks | January 14, 2022

Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse architecture, today announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Retail, the company's first industry-specific data lakehouse for retailers and consumer goods (CG) customers. With Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail, data teams are enabled with a centralized data and AI platform that is tailored to help solve the most critical data challenges that retailers, partners, and their suppliers are facing. Early adopters of Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail include industry-leading customers and partners like Walgreens, Columbia, H&M Group, Reckitt, Restaurant Brands International, 84.51°(a subsidiary of Kroger Co.), Co-Op Food, Gousto, Acosta and more. "As the retail and healthcare industries continue to undergo transformative change, Walgreens has embraced a modern, collaborative data platform that provides a competitive edge to the business and, most importantly, equips our pharmacists and technicians with timely, accurate patient insights for better healthcare outcomes," said Luigi Guadagno, Vice President, Pharmacy and HealthCare Platform Technology at Walgreens. "With hundreds of millions of prescriptions processed by Walgreens each year, Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail allows us to unify all of this data and store it in one place for a full range of analytics and ML workloads. By eliminating complex and costly legacy data silos, we've enabled cross-domain collaboration with an intelligent, unified data platform that gives us the flexibility to adapt, scale and better serve our customers and patients." "Databricks has always innovated on behalf of our customers and the vision of lakehouse helps solve many of the challenges retail organizations have told us they're facing," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder at Databricks. "This is an important milestone on our journey to help organizations operate in real-time, deliver more accurate analysis, and leverage all of their customer data to uncover valuable insights. Lakehouse for Retail will empower data-driven collaboration and sharing across businesses and partners in the retail industry." Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail delivers an open, flexible data platform, data collaboration and sharing, and a collection of powerful tools and partners for the retail and consumer goods industries. Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, new Lakehouse for Retail Solution Accelerators offer a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization's data engineers and data scientists. Popular solution accelerators for Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail customers include: Real-time Streaming Data Ingestion: Power real-time decisions critical to winning in omnichannel retail with point-of-sale, mobile application, inventory and fulfillment data. Demand forecasting and time-series forecasting: Generate more accurate forecasts in less time with fine-grained demand forecasting to better predict demand for all items and stores. ML-powered recommendation engines: Specific recommendations models for every stage of the buyer journey - including neural network, collaborative filtering, content-based recommendations and more - enable retailers to create a more personalized customer experience. Customer Lifetime Value: Examine customer attrition, better predict behaviors of churn, and segment consumers by lifetime and value with a collection of customer analytics accelerators to help improve decisions on product development and personalized promotions. Additionally, industry-leading Databricks partners like Deloitte and Tredence are driving lakehouse vision and value by delivering pre-built analytics solutions on the lakehouse platform that address real-time customer use cases. Tailor-made for the retail industry, featured partner solutions and platforms include: Deloitte's Trellis solution accelerator for the retail industry is one of many examples of how Deloitte and client partners are adopting the Databricks Lakehouse architecture construct and platform to deliver end-to-end data and AI/ML capabilities in a simple, holistic, and cost-effective way. Trellis provides capabilities that solve retail clients' complex challenges around forecasting, replenishment, procurement, pricing, and promotion services. Deloitte has leveraged their deep industry and client expertise to build an integrated, secured, and multi-cloud ready "as-a-service" solution accelerator on top of Databricks' Lakehouse platform that can be rapidly customized as appropriate based on client's unique needs. Trellis has proven to be a game-changer for our joint clients as it allows them to focus on the critical shifts occurring both on the demand and supply side with the ability to assess recommendations, associated impact, and insights in real-time that result in significant improvement to both topline and bottom line numbers. Tredence will meet the explosive enterprise Data, AI & ML demand and deliver real-time transformative industry value for their business by delivering solutions for Lakehouse for Retail. The partnership first launched the On-Shelf Availability Solution (OSA) accelerator in August 2021, combining Databricks' data processing capability and Tredence's AI/ML expertise to enable Retail, CPG & Manufacturers to solve their trillion dollar out-of-stock challenge. Now with Lakehouse for Retail, Tredence and Databricks will jointly expand the portfolio of industry solutions to address other customer challenges and drive global scale together. About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.

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The Deciding Factor: Big Data & Decision Making

When it comes to making business decisions, it is difficult to exaggerate the value of managers’ experience and intuition, especially when hard data is not at hand. Today, however, when petabytes of information are freely available, it would be foolhardy to make a decision without attempting to draw some meaningful inferences from the data. This is certainly true, but improvements in computing power and artificial intelligence systems mean that asking direct questions of big data and getting an answer, in real time, is now a reality (see WellPoint case study). Although these systems are still very costly and not widely deployed, this research suggests that the appetite for real-time decision-making is huge. And when there is a business demand, it is only a matter of time before the need if fulfilled.

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