The National Alliance for Insurance Education and Research has partnered with SambaSafety, a leading provider of cloud-based risk management solutions, to release their first annual research report, titled "From Perception to Practice: An Insight into Insurer Data Strategies and Sentiments." The report offers a deep dive into the increasing role of telematics within the insurance landscape.

"In this dynamic era, where data steers our choices, it's crucial for the insurance industry to remain informed, proactive, and tactical," said Paul Martin, CPCU, Director of Academic Content for The National Alliance. "The report not only captures current industry sentiments but also provides a roadmap for the future; it encapsulates the evolving storyline of insurance, fueled by data, insights, and modern technology."

The report includes a comprehensive look at how insurance carriers and brokers are embracing telematics in personal and commercial lines. Key insights underscore the industry's desire for more personalized, data-driven offerings. Specifically:

• 72% of commercial insurance companies are offering or planning to offer a telematics-based product.
• One-third of commercial auto respondents anticipate launching a usage-based insurance (UBI) product within the next 1-2 years.
• 15% of broker respondents offer telematics value-added services.
• Commercial carriers face unique challenges when leveraging telematics data, with the greatest obstacles being varying data formats (53%) to resource constraints (32%) and compliance/processing data (21%).

Demonstrating its support of industry partners as they navigate the complexities of telematics and commercial auto, SambaSafety announces a significant expansion of its integrations footprint including three leading Telematics Service Providers (TSPs): Lytx, Verizon, and Motive. "We enable insurers to accelerate time to value for their telematics programs by aggregating and enriching data from multiple TSPs. The depth and breadth of our coverage allow us to support nearly 50% of connected commercial vehicles on U.S. roads today," remarked Rich Lacey, Chief Product Officer at SambaSafety.

As the insurance sector grapples with technological shifts, SambaSafety's report and its strategic integrations promise to guide industry players through the complexities, empowering them to drive forward with data and innovation at the helm.

Virtualitics, Inc., an artificial intelligence and data exploration company, today announced its partnership with Databricks, a Data Lakehouse Architecture and AI company. As a Databricks Technology Partner, Virtualitics will enable Databricks customers to unlock the full potential of their data with AI-powered exploration and gain valuable insights to drive business success.

With the exponential growth of data and the need to conduct increasingly complex analytics, organizations are seeking innovative solutions to extract actionable intelligence from their data. The Virtualitics AI Platform uses Intelligent Exploration—AI-powered analytics coupled with immersive data visualizations—to enable users to intuitively explore and understand complex datasets, transforming raw data into meaningful insights.

As a Databricks Technology Partner, Databricks allows users to access the Virtualitics AI Platform and begin exploring their data through a reliable and secure connection to Databricks' Lakehouse Platform.

"In today's data-driven world, organizations have invested significantly in collecting, organizing, and managing their data within the Databricks Lake House," said Michael Amori, CEO and co-founder of Virtualitics. "However, the true challenge lies in making sense of this wealth of information and extracting actionable insight. Intelligent Exploration is the key that unlocks the untapped potential within these vast data lakes."

Virtualitics' partnership with Databricks equips analysts with advanced data science techniques to quickly reveal valuable data connections and hidden insights, uncovering new opportunities and deeper business understanding.

Joint customers can easily analyze and understand complex data in the cloud, including:

• AI-Driven Exploration: Virtualitics' Intelligent Exploration uses AI to analyze rich, multi-dimensional data and quickly finds the patterns in data.
• Intelligent Network Graph Analysis: Patented machine learning (ML) technology detects relationships and generates network graphs in 3D to explore communities and their connections, without having to set up a graph database.
• Multi-Dimensional Data Analysis: Virtualitics brings complex data stories to life with dynamic 3D visualizations designed to clearly illustrate multiple relationships and facilitate exploration from every angle.

Research from Ascend.io reflects the shift toward a postmodern data stack as data teams seek to address tool sprawl, burnout, and workload inefficiencies

Ascend.io, the leader in data pipeline automation, today released the results from its fourth annual DataAware Pulse Survey, unveiling trends in data tool adoption, productivity rates, and automation's central role in the post-modern data stack. While the number of data tools is increasing, productivity and workload capacity declines are putting a strain on data teams and prompting them to implement automation to work faster and smarter.

The number of tools is increasing, but team productivity does not track

Data teams now use five tools on average in their data stack and over two-thirds (68%) plan to maintain or increase this number in the next year. Despite this trend, data teams report stagnation in their overall capacity. Virtually all data professionals surveyed (95%) report being at or above their work capacity for the fourth year in a row, with data engineers reporting being significantly overworked more than three times as often as their peers in data analytics and data architecture. The majority of data engineers report spending 50% or more of their time just maintaining existing programs.

Nine percent of data engineers and 8% of data analysts actually report being less productive this year compared to last year. The data reveals why: despite the surge in tools, the average data professional spends an equivalent of two business days per week simply trying to access data to do their job. This reveals a significant shortcoming of their fragmented data pipeline technology which was intended to close this gap.

These insights reflect the immense pressure and inefficiencies data teams face at a time when corporate data has skyrocketed to an all time high, and is expected to double by 2026 according to IDC.

"The reality is that data teams are not equipped to contend with the brittle, manual data pipelines that are required to deliver analytics and AI projects today," said Sean Knapp, co-founder and CEO of Ascend. "It's no surprise that teams are feeling this strain as the number of tools they need to manually integrate and coordinate across steadily increases. Fortunately, there's a solution in consolidated platforms like Ascend.io that can use metadata paired with an intelligent controller to automate up to 90% of the construction and maintenance of these pipelines."

Data teams view automation as the answer

To address tool sprawl and strained capacity, data teams are overwhelmingly turning to automation. Ninety-one percent of teams have either implemented data automation technologies or plan to in the next 12 months, including a 20% increase in teams who are "very likely" to implement automation in the next year compared with the 2022 results. More than one-quarter (27%) report plans to adopt automation as their primary mitigation strategy for data team capacity issues, second only to a desire for continued hiring (28%).

Additionally, data professionals are incorporating generative AI into their workflows for tasks such as test automation (50%), code generation (45%) and documentation (42%).

Managers must serve as the bridge between data engineers and executives

The data shows misalignment between data engineers, who are overwhelmingly stretched thin, and executives, who experience the pain of brittle data pipelines in other ways. The survey reveals that executives are twice as likely to perceive basic tasks with data as taking too long and spend nearly six more hours per week than individual contributors simply trying to get access to data (17.8 hours vs. 12.2 hours). Both of these represent opportunities for middle management to help their leaders understand why brittle data pipelines cause basic tasks to take longer, and result in them having to do more work to find the required data. Executives were overwhelmingly supportive of plans to implement data automation technologies in the next 12 months (74%). Middle management has the opportunity to help the C-Suite understand how these automation projects affect their daily experiences with data.

Misalignment was also found in the following areas:

• Individual contributors prefer a reduction of tools, and are nearly twice as likely as executives to favor removing tools from their data stack (22% vs. 12%). Team leads were more than twice as likely as individual contributors to favor consolidating onto a single platform rather than removing functionality from the stack.
• Time to complete tasks is perceived differently, with executives twice as likely as individual contributors to perceive basic data tasks as taking too long (53% vs. 26%).
• Key performance indicators vary across the team, with executives three times as likely to rank presentations created, and one-and-a-half times more likely to cite a number of new dashboards created as their top impact measurement compared with individual contributors, who rank errors fixed and tickets closed as their top metrics.
• Individual contributors are the least bullish on AI: they are 200% less likely to believe AI will increase their impact on their organizations' business outcomes compared to the rest of their teams.

"Managers and Directors are the connective tissue between the doers in the engine room and the planners in the C-Suite. This gap in alignment speaks to the need for them to do more to bridge between both worlds," said Knapp. "They need to help executives understand why these things are hard, and where they can invest to help it go faster. They need to help their team understand the connection between errors & tickets and the overall objectives of the business."

Leading master data management solution earns top honor from IT and business professionals with a +92 Net Emotional Footprint

Semarchy, a master data management (MDM) and data integration leader, today announced their placement as a champion in the Master Data Management category of SoftwareReview's Emotional Footprint Awards.

SoftwareReviews' Emotional Footprint Awards evaluate and rank products based on emotional response ratings from IT and business professionals. Placements are based on sentiment scores across 26 dimensions of the vendor-client relationship and product effectiveness, divided into five categories:

• Purchasing
• Service experience
• Product impact
• Vendor strategy
• Conflict resolution

Based on users' responses, products and services are sorted into one of four quadrants: contenders, value players, relationship builders or champions — the highest ranking.

"At Semarchy, we strive to be champions by providing a robust and seamless data management experience for our customers," said Brett Hansen, Chief Growth Officer of Semarchy. "From achieving rapid time-to-value to delivering swift scalability, we're only satisfied if we exceed expectations. Today's announcement signals that our customers are realizing the emotional and organizational benefits of those goals."

SoftwareReviews is a division of the IT research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group. The division's Emotional Footprint Awards are based entirely on user review data and free of traditional "magical" components like market presence and analyst opinion, which are opaque in nature and may be influenced by vendor pressure.

In addition to being awarded for its customer experience, Semarchy recently attained an average rating of 4.78 in the Gartner Peer Index. The Gartner Peer Index tracks ratings and reviews of enterprise technology solutions by and for end-user professionals. The Semarchy xDM was also recognized as a Summer 2023 category leader by SourceForge, a complete business software and services comparison platform. This recognition is awarded to select products that have attained the highest levels of praise from user reviews on SourceForge.

Today's news also follows Semarchy's recent announcement about becoming a Snowflake Ready Technology Validation partner, which further emphasizes the company's priority of providing customers with outstanding integration performance.

ComposeID for Cloud Data Warehouses combines flexible and transparent identity resolution with the ability to plug directly into your cloud data warehouse.

Today, mParticle unveiled its latest innovation in a series of releases that directly support the cloud data warehouse ecosystem. mParticle is now offering ComposeID, its identity resolution service directly accessible in cloud data warehouse environments to all brands. Built on IDSync, mParticle's industry leading, enterprise-grade framework, ComposeID is designed to help teams flexibly support any identity strategy on any data architecture, and is available for new customers to get started for free.

Traditional identity products offer basic identity resolution on a rigid and opaque framework. ComposeID has no limit on the number of identities or identity types that are supported, along with the hierarchy that can be set based on your business rules and compliance with local and industry privacy regulation. ComposeID helps consumer brands focus on delivering customer value not only by leveraging existing data warehouse investments but by unlocking several new cases.

By creating a unified and adaptive customer view in the data warehouse via mParticle, the entire organization gains a deeper understanding of their customers to deliver:

• Better machine learning models powered by better data and more accurate stitching of user profiles.
• Better compliance with an increasing complicated regulatory environment.
• Better understanding of the full customer journey unlocking new opportunities for engagement and churn prevention strategies.
• Better personalization strategies, ensuring targeted and consistent messaging across multiple channels, from paid ads to loyalty to retention marketing.
• Better customer support, leading to higher customer satisfaction through an always-on approach to identity stitching.
• More targeted marketing execution to improve customer lifetime value, and successful incremental uplift.

"Having an identity solution that can keep pace with the fluid nature of your consumers while accommodating any data architecture is a competitive advantage in today's rapidly evolving ecosystem," said Michael Katz, CEO and co-founder of mParticle. "We are excited to launch this as our next step on the journey to fully supporting our [data] architecture agnostic vision."

Fueling Generative AI Innovation for Enterprises

Orion Innovation ("Orion"), a leading digital transformation and product development services firm, today announced the launch of OI Labs.ai, a new global initiative to drive innovation in Generative AI. OI Labs.ai is dedicated to developing proactive and customer-specific proof of concepts, solutions, and accelerators for clients to rapidly deploy AI technologies into their businesses.

OI Labs.ai is Orion's platform for experimenting with emerging technologies and tools in the rapidly evolving Generative AI space. The lab ensures that Orion keeps an eye on the future while staying realistic about the near horizon and focusing on immediate business value creation. 

"Embracing Generative AI is no longer an option but a necessity for companies looking to thrive and grow," said Rajul Rana, CTO of Orion. "We developed OI Labs.ai to co-innovate and incubate new AI tools and technologies to power our clients' businesses and give them a competitive advantage. Our team has built a series of industry-specific AI proofs of concepts and we're excited to bring them to clients."

"AI is a top priority for every business and OI Labs.ai is another example of our commitment to deliver emerging technologies that transform our clients' businesses and serve as a catalyst for growth," said Raj Patil, CEO of Orion. "Combining both our deep domain expertise and engineering capabilities allows us to design and incubate new AI solutions for our clients."

In addition to co-innovating new Generative AI solutions, Orion's team will consult with clients on the best AI solution strategy and implementation roadmap for their business. That includes the level of investment and best type of application, cloud and data management platform, large language model, and infrastructure for their use case.

GAINS, a profitable leading provider of cloud-based solutions for optimizing supply chain performance, today announced record growth as the company's Performance Optimization Platform revenue increased 42 percent year-over-year, contributing to a 115 percent net customer retention rate.

"The incremental and rapid results that our customers are achieving is propelling our market momentum," said Dave Shrager, President of GAINS. "I'd like to thank our customers for partnering with GAINS to drive positive outcomes within their businesses."

Delivering Continuous Customer Results
The first half of 2023 has seen GAINS realize market-shaping milestones driven by a surge in successful implementations and resulting new customer engagements. GAINS is focused on companies that operate at the intersection of cost, complexity, and service, where bad decisions breed inventory. With its proven P3 methodology aimed at achieving incremental and rapid results, GAINS and its customers have the industry's highest successful implementation rate of 100 percent.

Deploying a Record-Setting Number of Go Lives 
More than 25 new customers have gone live on the GAINS Performance Optimization Platform in 2023, ranging from complex, multi-national tier-one enterprises to emerging, high-growth SMB companies looking to improve performance, harness volatility, and meet customer promises.

Notable go-lives of the GAINS Performance Optimization Platform in 2023 include:

• A $40B distributor of health and beauty products optimizing highly seasonal inventory within a multi-echelon network across more than 50,000 SKULs.
• An $8B steel distributor using diverse demand signals to mitigate ordering across a complex network of business units.
• A $6B global service business leveraging supply, demand, and inventory planning across 12 countries with over 200 users.
• A $4B construction product retailer with over 400 branches automating replenishment and procurement across 300 planners and buyers.
• A $700M discrete home goods manufacturer improving its replenishment strategy using simulation and scenario planning to engineer better decisions.
• A $120M hyper-specialized e-commerce vendor managing demand, supply, inventory, and replenishment planning.

News from GAINS Labs
The company continues to extend its leadership position by delivering continuous, incremental results to its customers and deploying innovations using GAINS' machine learning, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering technologies to improve decision-making for companies of all sizes.

• Leveraging Machine Learning in GAINS
  GAINS Labs is operationalizing pragmatic ML advances in lead-time and multi-horizon demand prediction to significantly reduce uncertainty and errors. GAINS focuses on delivering repeatable solutions via Explainable AI (XAI) with resilient methods across teams and time.

• New Decision Engineering Platform
  GAINS introduced a new decision engineering platform to a record number of attendees at the sold-out GAINS Summit in Chicago, leapfrogging traditional supply chain planning and network design solutions.

From the foundations of our 3 Tenets Optimization acquisition, GAINS has developed from the ground up a purpose-built decision engineering platform that will address VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and redefine the real math and science behind supply chain decisions, expanding beyond design and into policy and decision execution. With a new probabilistic solver, GAINS is creating a design decision and policy platform that sits above the tactical supply chain planning and network design tools traditionally used by enterprises. Data science and decision science are converging into a single platform where decisions can be composed with unique tools and methods suitable for each decision, engineered and optimized probabilistically, with proper risk assessment and policy impacts.

New math, New tools, New methods. A design decision and policy platform that embraces AI, ML, OR, and heuristics enables decisions to be engineered and composed based on what method(s) best suit the problems to be solved and the decisions to be made—Decision Engineering™.

Top Talent Converges at GAINS 
In October, GAINS added two new executive roles, including former Gartner supply chain analyst Amber Salley as Vice President of Industry Solutions and Michael Wagner as Vice President of Engineering. GAINS increased its total headcount by 20 percent in 2023 and is actively hiring in all key areas.

Movius, the leading global provider of cloud-based, secure, and purpose-driven communications software, today announced Chethan Visweswar has joined the company’s executive team as Chief Product Officer. In this new role, Visweswar will oversee key elements of the company’s product innovation team while increasing both process efficiencies and profitability.

Movius provides mobile industry-leading software-driven Phone 3.0^™ and GenAI service in over 62 industry categories, including financial services, professional services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, transportation, public sector, education, not-for-profit, and small to medium-sized businesses.

“Chethan’s depth of knowledge in the SaaS space, combined with his advanced leadership skills, are the perfect ingredients to help propel Movius into, and beyond, our next phase of rapid growth,” said Ananth Siva, CEO at Movius.

Visweswar brings with him nearly 30 years of software and technology experience, building large-scale enterprises and consumer applications. Most recently, he served as the Global Vice President of Products for Nextiva, where he led that company’s transformation from a VOIP solution provider to a communication SaaS company while doubling the customer base and revenues. He was also the Chief Technology Officer at Zoosk, where he led the organization to support a global dating business in 18 countries with 60 million monthly active users and oversaw the Zoosk merger with Spark Networks.