The new suite, which includes Pluralsight IQ, advanced skills analytics, and advanced channels analytics, is designed to provide technology professionals and leaders with a fast, accurate, and affordable way to measure technology skills. It uses machine learning and modern testing theory to significantly reduce the amount of time and cost usually dedicated to validating technology skills.

“Learning only matters if it turns into skills that can be used on a project, to solve a problem or to build a product. We developed these new capabilities to give technology professionals and leaders real, quantified and actionable insights for developing the skills required to create world-changing products and solutions,” said Aaron Skonnard, Co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight.

Pluralsight’s new skills assessment and development suite empowers individuals and enterprises to identify where their knowledge lies and to develop a plan for acquiring new or strengthening existing skill sets.

The new suite includes:

• Pluralsight IQ — provides technology professionals with a free, easy and consistent way to measure and verify their current aptitude in a specific technology.
• Advanced skills analytics — gives technology leaders unprecedented visibility into individual technologists’ skill sets and current levels of proficiency.
• Advanced channels analytics — allows technology leaders to track the progress of each technologist’s skill development as it relates to strategic objectives.

“Traditional testing methods don’t work when it comes to measuring tech talent; they’re tedious, costly and quickly become obsolete,” said Nate Walkingshaw, Chief Experience Officer at Pluralsight.

“With Pluralsight IQ and our advanced analytics, we’ve built an assessment and development suite that will disrupt resumes, certifications, degrees and endorsements while providing a true understanding of the skills each individual possesses,” Walkingshaw added.

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In addition to the investment round, Ted Schlein, General Partner, Kleiner Perkins will join Incorta’s board of directors.

“We invested in Incorta because its advanced platform delivers true ‘information freedom’ to business users, at a low total cost of ownership to the business at-large. Some of today’s fastest-growing companies, driven by Incorta’s no-data-warehouse approach to analytics, have fundamentally changed how business information travels and how work gets done,” said Schlein.

Rather than the traditional model of performing slow and expensive extract, transform, load (ETL) projects to combine data from different data sources, Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping engine combines large, complex business data in real time. Since data maps directly to source data regardless of its form or structure, Incorta aims to develop highly secured, real-time analytic applications in only days, and reduces query times from hours to seconds—even at massive scale. With Direct Data Mapping, business users gain easy, secure, sub-second access to meaningful business insight.

“We’re very pleased to welcome to the Incorta family Kleiner Perkins, one of the top VCs in Silicon Valley, and Ted himself—a highly respected, experienced technologist,” said Osama Elkady, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Incorta. “The response to our Direct Data Mapping technology launched in March far exceeds our initial expectations. We’re signing new customers at a record rate, while existing Fortune 500 customers are expanding their implementations and re-signing seven-figure contracts with us.”

“The market opportunity for Incorta is now. This funding will help us boost our investments in product development, sales, and marketing to bring Direct Data Mapping to more businesses around the world at a faster rate,” Elkady added.

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Investors in the round include PSP Growth, the venture and growth equity arm of PSP Capital, a private investment firm founded by entrepreneur and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, as well as Alpha Edison and other existing investors.

HouseCanary will use the funds from this investment to further innovate on predictive analytics, technology, and go-to-market. With more than 100 employees headquartered in San Francisco, the company will continue to grow its list of 250 enterprise customers, spanning established industry leaders like Invitation Homes, a US mortgage bank, and fintech innovators like LendingHome and Roofstock. Google Cloud, RE/MAX, and First American are among the company’s notable distribution partners.

According to the company, its platform leverages machine learning models drawing on 40 years of US home sales and millions of trending insights to value properties and forecast prices for 4 million residential blocks and 20,000 city markets with never-before-seen accuracy.

“HouseCanary’s unique technology represents an industry revolution, bringing access to transparent and actionable data to all segments of the largest asset class in the world,” said Jeremy Sicklick, CEO of HouseCanary. “Our vision continues to be validated by both the technology and real estate industries, and is further underscored by the support from PSP Growth and Penny Pritzker, one of America’s most prominent entrepreneurs and business builders.”

“The US real estate industry is poised for incredible innovation-driven transformation, as technology and data reach new segments of the market, opening up new opportunities for residential and commercial real estate alike,” said Penny Pritzker, founder and Chairman of PSP Capital. “As a business builder, I recognized the tremendous potential of HouseCanary’s technology, as well as the expertise and vision of their strong management team. We are excited at the opportunity to work with the HouseCanary team as this dynamic company grows.”

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Mike Oleshansky, Managing Director and head of PSP Growth, added, “HouseCanary is quickly modernizing one of the biggest industries in the United States. Its robust technology enables users, from mortgage lenders to private investors to bond traders to realtors, to make truly data-driven decisions. We look forward to supporting the HouseCanary team as the business continues to grow.”

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With its two prime offerings into AI (Artificial Intelligence) and BI (Business Intelligence), Kato claims to provide pre-built plug and play platforms for businesses. AI understands the existing business use case, analyses and comprehends the data based on pre-defined algorithms and makes informed decisions. BI offering includes setting up analytics driven custom dashboards built on a base platform IP to address client specific requirements.

“Kato is unique because we are innovating in distribution of technology by integrating AI, and bringing it to all types of businesses so they can make decisions powered by in-depth data analysis,” said Samar Singla, CEO, Click Labs.

The platform ensures integration with third party software; and helps in forecasting and setting up various business trends. It further assures a turnaround time of 2-3 weeks.

Some of the key features of Kato include:

• Real-time data with AI
• Key performance indicators (KPI)
• In-depth data analysis to give business insights;

The company claims that these features help in Dynamic Pricing, Route optimization, Spatial Analytics and Predictive Analytics. Additionally, Kato aims to provide a niche offering in the AI and BI software space by creating a single marketplace for various AI modules that address specific use cases, leveraging open source software tools, and changing the consumption model of Analytics.

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This is Freshwork’s ninth acquisition in the last two years, including the acquisition of chatbot startup Joe Hukum in July this year. The company says that the latest acquisition will help it to focus on building marketing solutions for businesses of all sizes.

“Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers. Also, I have known the Zarget team for many years and I am personally thrilled to have them join the Freshworks family and power our expansion into the marketing software category,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshworks.

Founded in 2015 by former Zoho executives Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar, Chennai-based Zarget offers tools to businesses and marketers to understand user behavior on websites. Mathrubootham, and some of the early employees were angel investors in Zarget. It later raised $7.5 million over two rounds from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India.

“We built Zarget to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, we expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions,” said Arvind Parthiban, CEO, Zarget.

Through this acquisition, Freshworks seeks to further develop Zarget’s marketing suite and provide the team with expertise, technology and operations as well as access to over 120,000 customers.

“Today, our software powers customer engagement across every aspect of the customer journey, from customer acquisition to customer support. Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers,” Mathrubootham added.

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Druva will aim to leverage this late-stage investment to accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data.

“We see today’s digital transformation as a data transformation, and protecting data in today’s cloud connected environment requires a fresh approach. Druva’s as-a-service solution eliminates costly and complex infrastructure to quickly and seamlessly protect, govern, and gain intelligence from their data when and where it’s needed,” said Jaspreet Singh, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Druva.

Druva attributes its growth to the rapid expansion of the data protection market, with market size expected to be $28 billion in 2022 for both cloud-based and on-premises servers, in addition to the rapid cloud data protection and management adoption by Global 5000 organizations. Additionally, the company claims that its cloud deployments now span more than 4,000 enterprise customers, including 10 percent of the world’s Fortune 500 companies.

“Cloud Data Protection and Management solutions are massively disrupting the secondary storage industry. Druva delivers an as-a-service protection and management solution for all enterprise data encompassing infrastructure, endpoints, and cloud applications. We are impressed by Druva’s ability to help organizations re-define their data protection and management strategy in a cloud first world leveraging the performance, scale, ease of use and TCO benefits of the public cloud and SaaS,” said Jeff Parks, Co-founder and General Partner, Riverwood Capital.

“The effectiveness of Druva’s technology has been lauded by a large list of customers. With high customer satisfaction, strong brand loyalty, proven technology innovation and seasoned leadership team, Druva is best positioned to drive the as-a-service transformation of enterprise data protection and management,” Parks added.

Earlier this month, the company announced the Druva Cloud Platform Tech Preview, which delivers a single view for protection and management of endpoints, servers, and cloud applications. The platform converges Phoenix and inSync cloud solutions, and offers a unified view into services and data.

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The decision to add Carmody comes at a time of rapid growth for Zyme as it expands its portfolio of solutions that empower companies to sell more through the channel while lowering channel investment. Carmody will be responsible for product development and operations across the company’s businesses and will report directly to Chandran Sankaran, CEO, Zyme.

“Paul has deep experience leading companies that combine technology and service, which made him a perfect fit for this new leadership role at Zyme. Paul also embodies Zyme’s culture of transparency and excellence in people leadership, and providing world-class service to customers,” said Sankaran.

Carmody has held a variety of senior leadership roles in the high-tech industry, including his work as CEO of AchieveIt, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that helps businesses successfully implement strategic plans and manage teams. He also led business units at the internet infrastructure provider Internap and served as vice president of product development at Rackspace, serving with the company through its IPO. Carmody began his career at McKinsey & Company as a consultant providing strategy and operational advice to high-tech businesses.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to combine my own professional experience with the deep knowledge of the Zyme team to transform how companies leverage indirect sales. I’m honored and excited to help Zyme continue to revolutionize channel data management with a growing portfolio of solutions and services,” said Carmody.

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It also made public AWS Glue, a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and databases running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for query and analysis.

Amazon Macie recognizes sensitive data

Amazon Macie recognizes sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, and provides customers with dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how this data is being accessed or moved. The fully managed service continuously monitors data access activity for anomalies, and generates detailed alerts when it detects risk of unauthorized access or inadvertent data leaks. Today, Amazon Macie is available to protect data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with support for additional AWS data stores coming later this year.

“When a customer has a significant amount of content stored in Amazon S3, identifying and classifying all of the potentially sensitive data can feel a bit like finding needles in a very large haystack — especially with monitoring tools that aren’t smart enough to effectively automate what is now a very manual process,” said Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer, Amazon Web Services.

“Amazon Macie approaches information security in a more intelligent way. By using machine learning to understand the content and user behavior of each organization, Amazon Macie can cut through huge volumes of data with better visibility and more accurate alerts, allowing customers to focus on securing their sensitive information instead of wasting time trying to find it.”

Amazon Macie can send all findings to Amazon CloudWatch Events and will support API endpoints through the AWS SDK later this year, allowing for robust interoperability with third-party solutions. Planned integrations include solutions from leading providers such as Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Trend Micro, and more, allowing customers to easily incorporate intelligence from Amazon Macie into their existing security workflows for deeper analysis and forensics.

According to an official release, Autodesk, Edmunds.com and Netflix are few early companies using Macie.

AWS Glue is serverless

Coming back to Glue, the other service launched by AWS today, customers can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Customers simply point Glue at their data stored on AWS, and Glue discovers the associated metadata (e.g. table definitions) and classifies it, generates ETL scripts for data transformation, and loads the transformed data into a destination data store, provisioning the infrastructure needed to complete the job.

Since AWS Glue is serverless, customers only pay for the compute resources they consume while executing data preparation and loading jobs.

“AWS’s scalable, reliable cloud storage, combined with our broad range of analytics services make it easier than ever for customers to collect, store, analyze, and share data,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and AI, Amazon Web Services.

“While it’s amazing to see how much analytics are being run on AWS today, many have told us that there is one piece of the equation that is still way too hard – cleaning and preparing huge volumes of data for analysis. We developed AWS Glue to eliminate much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved with ETL. By cataloging all of a customer’s data and automating the ETL process, AWS Glue not only takes a lot of the hassle out of analytics. It also makes it possible for customers to store their data in as many sources as they want, and very quickly start analyzing all of it with whatever AWS service they choose.”

AWS Glue is currently available in the US East (N Virginia) region and will expand to additional regions in the coming months.

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The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium will develop an ecosystem for connected cars to support emerging services such as intelligent driving and transport, creating of maps with real-time data as well as driving assistance based on cloud computing.

Joining Toyota InfoTechnology Center and Toyota Motor Corporation are auto manufactirer, DENSO Corporation, telecommunications company, Ericsson, semiconductor manufacturer, Intel Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation DOCOMO.

The vehicle manufacturer estimates that the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes (10.7 billion Gigabytes) per month till the year 2025, which is approximately 10,000 times larger than the present volume.

According to the consortium, with the increase in data volume, there will be a need for new architectures of network and computing infrastructure to support distributed resources and topology-aware storage capacity. The body will be working towards making the architectures compliant with the applicable standards to include local and global collaboration.

Using edge computing and network design, the consortium claims to focus on increasing network capacity to accommodate automotive big data in a reasonable fashion between vehicles and the cloud.

It will define requirements and develop use cases for emerging mobile devices with a particular focus on the automotive industry, bringing them to standards bodies, industry consortiums and solution providers.

The consortium claims that it will also encourage the development of best practices for the distributed and layered computing approach, which has been recommended by the members, and in the next few months initiate activities to invite relevant global technology leaders and expand the consortium.

Interestingly, apart from kick-starting the consortium, Toyota has also made an investment of $96 million to Preferred Networks for accelerating a joint research and development of AI technology in the mobility field including autonomous driving. In May this year, Toyota Research Institute along with MIT’s Media Lab and a few partners to see how blockchain technology can be applied to the car industry and how people can become comfortable with autonomous technologies.

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“We are thrilled to bring the ClearGraph team to Tableau to enable people to ask questions of their data using natural language,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau.

“Natural language queries will make it easier for more people to interact with Tableau, whether you’re an executive who needs an answer quickly, or on a mobile phone and want an answer from your data on the move. We’re excited about this acquisition as the ClearGraph team shares our mission and is aligned with our innovation perspectives on conversational analytics,” Ajenstat added.

Founded in 2014 by Andrew Vigneault and Ryan Atallah, ClearGraph helps in analyzing data using natural language. It brings a consumer-like experience to users by connecting disparate data sources and making them accessible and intelligible through simple conversational style search. It’s natural language query technology stores semantic data in knowledge graphs that can expand and learn over time.

“We founded ClearGraph because we saw a need to bridge the gap between humans and computers through natural language, especially when it comes to exploring data. Tableau is a natural fit for us because we have similar missions, cultures and genuine desire to help more people around the world access, interact with and get answers from their data,” said Andrew Vigneault, CEO, ClearGraph.

The startup claims that accessing and analyzing data using ClearGraph requires no technical training, as the system can infer users’ intent through natural language. For example, people could ask questions such as, “Total sales by customers who purchased staples in New York,” then filter to, “orders in the last 30 days,” then group by, “project owner’s department.”

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