Validation program optimizes Semarchy xDI's Snowflake integrations with emphasis on functional and performance best practices.

Semarchy, a master data management (MDM) and data integration leader, today announced that its Semarchy xDI product has been approved by Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, as a Snowflake Ready Technology Validation partner, confirming that the company's Snowflake integrations adhere to the platform's best practices around performance, reliability, and security. 

As part of the Semarchy Unified Data Platform, Semarchy xDI extracts and integrates data from and to Snowflake, allowing users to leverage Snowflake's computational power and scalability synergistically to transform their data. The Semarchy xDI templates take care of the complex technical details of the data processes, allowing integration designers to focus on their data flows using xDI's Universal Data Mappings. For example, Semarchy xDI natively supports processing pushdown to Snowflake, bringing all operations to unmatched performance, as well as bi-directional integration for Snowflake hierarchical formats (VARIANT), and JSON data transformation into staging tables out of the box.

"Semarchy and Snowflake are built around similar principles to provide an easier, faster, and more flexible data integration and processing. xDI has been supporting the Snowflake technology for several years, serving Snowflake customers with outstanding integration performance," said FX Nicolas, Chief Product Officer of Semarchy. "It was the natural next step for us to complete the Snowflake validation process to confirm and strengthen our partnership."

Semarchy xDI data integration mappings use templates to generate Snowflake-optimized code with no additional effort for integration designers. For example, they support easy data loads via external Cloud storage, internal staging tables creation, Snowflake COPY, or Snowpipe.

The Snowflake Ready Validation Program recognizes partners that have completed a 3rd party technical validation to confirm their Snowflake integrations are optimized with an emphasis on functional and performance best practices. Semarchy is partnering with Snowflake to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data with unlimited scale.

"Semarchy xDI's Technology Ready status reflects the company's continued investment in providing robust data solutions for our joint customers," said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. "We look forward to strengthening our partnership and commitment to efficiently deliver data across our joint customers systems."

Findings Show Organizations Are Turning More to Technology and Shifting Their Internal Priorities Toward Greater Alignment and Use of Third-Party Data as They Strive for Efficiency

Demandbase, the Smarter GTM™ company that uses AI to help B2B organizations hit their revenue goals, today announces the results of its 2023 C-Suite Go-to-Market (GTM) Benchmark Survey in partnership with Demand Gen Report. The survey gathered responses from 200 high-level B2B leaders across marketing and sales to better understand how the industry is changing and the GTM approaches that separate successful companies from the rest. Through this research, Demandbase uncovered how teams are handling the current economic landscape, trends in their technology use, the GTM strategies and practices that are driving growth, and more.

"In the year since our last survey, we've seen increased challenges in the B2B industry, but there has been just as much — if not more — progress," says Jon Miller, chief marketing officer at Demandbase. "Many companies are being forced to cut budgets, but our research reveals that tech stacks are the least likely to be cut, demonstrating that teams recognize technology's value in driving efficiency. Additionally, more leaders are viewing GTM through a broader lens than they did in 2022, which is paving the way for greater internal alignment and a more holistic approach to campaigns and tactics. Overall, B2B leaders are recognizing that what worked in the past isn't working today, causing them to place a premium on efficiency and, ultimately, a Smarter GTM™."

Important findings from the report include:

Key Priorities that Promote Growth & Efficiency

• Respondents marked customer acquisition and customer expansion as the top two efforts they rely upon most to drive growth.
• Leaders indicated their top three priorities are improving alignment (66%), increasing win rates (63%), and increasing marketing investments (56%).
• Leaders were also more likely to cater to self-service needs than laggards, with many reporting they've enabled such options to streamline operations. In particular, they're using demo videos (48%), interactive demos (41%), online calculators (40%), and product tours (39%).

An Evolving View of Metrics

• The primary metrics that marketers are being measured on today include total revenue (18%), marketing qualified leads (MQL) (16%), marketing-influenced revenue (12%), and marketing-sourced revenue (10%).
• SDR and BDR success is primarily being tracked by activity (35%), opportunities (34%), meetings (17%), and points-based (10%).

Internal Alignment Relied on to Increase Efficiency

• Encouragingly, 52% of respondents reported that they do not struggle with alignment, with roughly half of sales responders saying they're aligned with marketing and roughly half of marketers saying they're aligned with sales. While this shows improvement over last year, it still means that nearly half have work to do in this area that can help drive efficiency and results.
• Of those who continue to struggle with alignment, their top challenges include looking at different data/operating in different systems (45%), being measured on different metrics (37%), poor handoffs (33%), and lack of communication (25%). These are roughly in line with the primary challenges from last year's study, reinforcing the fact that these issues must be addressed if companies are to achieve greater alignment.

The Changing Data Landscape 
Data has become necessary for nearly all elements of modern marketing, but the survey revealed that practitioners are still facing difficulties with getting it right.

• Specifically, respondents cited the following challenges: data quality (dirty, out of date, duplicates) (55%), missing or incomplete information (50%), disconnected/siloed data sources (40%), actioning data (34%), and an inability to digest data the way they want (34%). While the first four obstacles were also cited in last year's study, the inability to digest data how they'd like to is a new — and far-reaching — problem brought to the surface this year.
• Today, third-party data is primarily being used for competitive intelligence (61%), account prioritization (55%), personalizing messaging and outreach (54%), account selection (43%), and timing engagement (28%). This last number reveals that almost 75% of respondents are missing a great opportunity to use intent data to show up at the right time, when buyers are in-market and most likely to buy.

Based on the results of the 2023 C-Suite Go-to-Market (GTM) Benchmark Survey, it's clear that successful B2B organizations today are focused on improving their GTM strategies to address the uncertainties presented by an unstable economy. Leaders shared many priorities and approaches, including incorporating third-party data, adopting a singular platform/data source, viewing GTM through the lens of all revenue-generating activities, investing in technology and efficiency, and prioritizing self-service buying experiences.

Revolutionary AI Empowers Organizations to Leverage the Latest Tech to Take Control of Their Data, Reduce Security Risks, & Accelerate Innovation

BigID, the leading platform for data security, privacy, compliance, and governance, today announced native AI support to copilot organizations' innovation and adoption of generative AI: revolutionizing data management and security. With BigID's AI, organizations can now achieve better data visibility, clarity, and organization to accelerate their ability to improve their data security posture, wherever their data lives.

To effectively safeguard critical data, security teams need comprehensive visibility and understanding of their data assets, relying on an updated and comprehensive data inventory. Legacy tools leave organizations with fragmented perspectives, lacking the context needed to identify data requiring protection.

BigID accelerates organizations of all sizes to get the most out of AI - and adapt & innovate while they're doing it.

Benefits at a Glance:

• Get Better Data Clarity: Automatically assign easy-to-understand names and business terms to data tables and columns for better insight into sensitivity and business value.
• Intelligently Organize Your Data: Quickly group similar types of documents and apply human readable titles and descriptions.
• Accelerate Risk Reduction: Generate summaries of data security posture management, automate risk assessments, and get recommended actions based on the data itself.
• Govern large language models (LLMs) securely: Reduce risk of adapting AI by flag, tag, and labelling LLM data as safe for use - ensuring these models aren't being trained on personal, sensitive, regulated, or private information.

"With BigID's AI-driven automation, customers can now effortlessly navigate their data landscape, prioritize security efforts, and gain a level of clarity that was previously unattainable," said Tyler Young, CISO of BigID. "The world of generative AI brings risk and uncertainty around security - BigID makes it easy to innovate and adapt AI - all while decreasing the attack surface."

Leading innovators in 3D NeRF Technology, Luma Labs AI and RECON Labs' 3Dpresso, to explore development and 3D asset publishing on Shutterstock's Turbosquid platform

Volinga AI to explore licensing and distribution of NVOL library assets and collaboration with Shutterstock on first-ever network of creators to produce on-demand NVOL environments 

Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a leading global creative platform offering high-quality content and full-service creative workflow solutions for transformative brands, digital media and marketing companies, today announced its intent to sign three distinct collaboration deals with Luma Labs AI, RECON Labs and Volinga AI, leading startup innovators in emerging neural radiance fields (NeRF) technology. The companies announced their respective plans at this week's SIGGRAPH 2023, the 50th Annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 

"We are incredibly excited to expand our research and development efforts into this next phase of 3D AI technology and to do so in collaboration with some of the most innovative and forward-thinking minds in creative production," said Dade Orgeron, Vice President of Innovation at Shutterstock/Turbosquid. "What's critically important to us as we work to evolve awareness and adoption of NeRF technology is working with innovators who share our commitment to advancing creative technology that hyper-enables the creative process while also protecting and compensating our artist community."

With both Luma and RECON Labs' 3Dpresso, Shutterstock intends to explore the rapidly developing field of NeRF technology using Shutterstock's extensive, ethically sourced 2D/3D asset database and adding each companies' existing 3D assets to Shutterstock's platform, Turbosquid, for commercial licensing.

"3D is a powerful creative medium that will be a leading format for stories of the future, which is why we founded Luma in 2021. We are on a mission to democratize 3D and make Hollywood quality, photorealistic 3D accessible to everyone. Realtime, high quality, and lifelike 3D scenes are now a reality for everyone using Luma, whether on the web or in Unreal Engine with the new .luma scenes," said Amit Jain, Cofounder and CEO of Luma. "As the world's leading NeRF research and product company, we are excited to explore a partnership with Shutterstock and bring Luma's best-in-class 3D generative platform to Shutterstock's creators. This will further accelerate the arrival of this incredible 3D technology to every artist, every studio, and every phone!"

Traditionally, 3D scene creation has taken artists several hours to produce depending on the desired complexity and resolution to be achieved for the desired landscape or environment. With the introduction of NeRF technology, built using advanced machine learning and computer vision, 3D creators can produce high-resolution, photorealistic 3D scenes from 2D video in minutes.

"NeRF technology will unlock the opportunity for Shutterstock's community of video contributors to help build the world's largest library of NeRF based content, from full environments to individual objects from around the world," said Orgeron. "NeRF will revolutionize the way we create 3D content, by utilizing the tool photographers and videos are already comfortable with—their cameras."

Shutterstock has also entered into an agreement with Volinga AI to explore licensing and distribution of NVOL files. Volinga, through its professional NeRF Suite, offers a comprehensive range of NeRF-related products and services to support virtual production, VFX, TV and broadcasting, XR and videogames. As part of the agreement, Shutterstock and Volinga will also explore the creation of an NVOL library of high-quality content for Volinga users and the first network of creators to produce on-demand NVOL environments.

This Volinga network would add to Shutterstock's existing network of more than two million artists and creators around the world who contribute to the Shutterstock library of ethically-sourced, licensable 2D, 3D, video and audio content. To date, Shutterstock has compensated hundreds of thousands of artists, with anticipated payments to millions more, through its Contributor Fund for the role their content IP has played in training Shutterstock's generative technology and has provided artists with ongoing royalties tied to licensing activity for newly generated assets.

"We are on a mission to unleash the full potential of NeRF and make this groundbreaking technology accessible to professionals," said Fernando Rivas-Manzaneque, Co-Founder of Volinga AI. "This library of production-ready NVOL assets will allow our users to start experimenting and using NeRF in their volumes straight away, lowering the entry barrier for this technology. Furthermore, the network of creators to produce on-demand NVOL environments we are envisioning with Shutterstock will definitely take virtual production to the next level."

Under the new TurboSquid Labs, where Shutterstock will release the first example of its Virtual Locations product—complete, production ready NeRF environments—the company will also be working closely with Luma, Volinga and RECON Labs, and other innovators in NeRF and generative AI fields, to develop a specification and best practices standard for capturing high quality NeRFs.

In March, Shutterstock also announced its collaboration with NVIDIA to build AI foundation models for generative 3D artist tools. Through this collaboration, generative AI models will be trained with Shutterstock assets using NVIDIA Picasso generative AI cloud services to rapidly convert text prompts into high-fidelity 3D content for industrial digital twins, entertainment and gaming.

These announcements follow several strategic steps Shutterstock has taken as one of the leading innovators bringing ethical and responsible AI advancements to the creative industry. Shutterstock also recently joined the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), through which the company will support the CAI's goal of addressing the prevalence of misleading information online through the implementation of technical standards for certifying the source and history of media content by integrating Content Credentials. Shutterstock intends to integrate the CAI's underlying Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard into its AI capabilities and various creativity tools, including its DALL·E-powered AI Image Generator and suite of AI-powered applications to further protect its users with verifiable and tamper-evident information across all forms of content. With Content Credentials, this will include ensuring each asset is certified with secure metadata about its creation, authorship and edit history.

As a trusted partner, Shutterstock also collaborates with NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, LG and other leaders in the tech industry to develop foundational generative AI tools and standards for creators across 3D, images and text.

MSPs now have more options, flexibility, and control when it comes to managing teams

Syncro, an all-in-one professional services automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform for managed service providers (MSPs), today announces the addition of the new Team plan for MSPs. Syncro is providing this new premium tier plan to equip growing MSPs with more advanced features and onboarding support that will help them better manage their team’s tasklist and business growth.

The new Team plan is designed for MSPs with multiple technicians and empowers them to organize and automate their workflows how they choose. The plan includes PowerBI reports with in-depth data aggregation and insights, more automation, stronger remote access capabilities, and ticket workflow enhancements offering more management oversight. The Team plan also provides more support convenience, giving MSPs the ability to schedule one on one troubleshooting sessions with Syncro technicians.

The addition of the Team plan allows MSPs to take advantage of features that will help them to solve the challenges that come with managing a growing business efficiently with many technicians and even more clients. This powerful plan offers the following benefits and features:

• Enhanced Splashtop: Includes multi-monitor support and multiple techs per session.
• Azure AD sync: Seamless integration with Azure AD to enable contact syncing and Microsoft 365 billing automation.
• Real-time ticket automations & assignments: Streamlines your service desk operations.
• PowerBI integration: Facilitates advanced analytics and business intelligence.
• Scheduled database exports: Automatically export your Syncro data to a database of your choosing.
• Personalized support and onboarding experience: Enjoy scheduled callbacks for technical issues and implementation experts to help you onboard.

The Team plan is available for $189/user/month. Syncro's current base plan (now renamed as Core) at $139/user/month is still available with all existing features, and at the same price. Both the Core and Team plans offer a no-contract monthly per user price, with unlimited endpoints and access to the entire Syncro platform including PSA/RMM and remote access functionality.

“Syncro’s first priority has been and will always be helping MSPs expand their business – from MSPs who are just starting out to MSPs who are well-established and experiencing rapid growth. The launch of the Team plan and the newest features is a direct result of listening to the needs of our growing partners and just another way we are supporting MSPs and enabling them to be more profitable,” said Emily Glass, CEO of Syncro.

Creates new advertising inventory category for SSP Partnership: CTV Out of Home

Loop Media, the free streaming television media company for business which provides over 2 billion video views every month via restaurants, retail businesses, office buildings, doctors’ offices, airports, bars and college campuses, announced today Microsoft Advertising has created a new inventory category for SSP partnerships, called CTV Out of Home (OOH).

This first of its kind SSP category will provide an additional distribution category to advertisers and DSPs from which they can access and purchase Loop Media advertising impressions. On other DSP and SSP platforms, Loop Media is categorized as DOOH (Digital Out of Home), CTV (Connected TV), Streaming, or other. This new category expands Loop Media’s potential reach in the marketplace for all potential DOOH advertising buyers, including those advertisers looking to distribute ads on CTV Out of Home service platforms.

“With this new category, Loop Media may be seen and purchased by an expanded group of advertisers in the marketplace,” said Bob Gruters, Chief Revenue Officer for Loop Media. “My team and I have been working diligently to get Loop Media positioned well across all revenue advertising categories including Microsoft Advertising’s CTV Out of Home category.”

“We are pleased to launch our new CTV-OOH library on the Microsoft Advertising platform which provides a path for clients to buy CTV-OOH supply in the proper context with clear labeling in our new venue category packages,” said Erik Zamkoff, Microsoft Advertising, associate director of Marketplace Development. “We are thrilled to feature Loop CTV-OOH supply in our new venue category packages.”

DigiCert^® Trust Lifecycle Manager enables full certificate lifecycle management of public and private trust for complex IT environments, supporting Microsoft CA and AWS Private CA

DigiCert also supports enrollment to a broad range of natively integrated Microsoft and AWS technologies, as well as workflow integration to ServiceNow

DigiCert today announced the expansion of its certificate management platform, DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager, to provide full lifecycle support for multiple CAs including Microsoft CA and AWS Private CA, as well as integration with ServiceNow to support existing IT service workflows. Trust Lifecycle Manager additionally supports enrollment to a broad range of Microsoft and AWS technologies, providing organizations a unified approach to managing public and private trust for use cases such as biometric authentication, device authentication, WiFi/VPN provisioning, cloud workloads and infrastructure management.

"DigiCert customers place high priority on ensuring continuity of security across diverse IT infrastructure, as data and processes cut across clouds and environments," said DigiCert Chief Product Officer Deepika Chauhan. "Trust Lifecycle Manager provides organizations a centralized way to secure users, servers and devices across all these environments."

With support for Microsoft CA and AWS Private CA, Trust Lifecycle Manager enables discovery, issuance, automation and revocation, including the ability to tag, filter and apply policy to imported and discovered third-party digital certificates. Certificates can be enrolled to a broad set of technologies through ACME, SCEP, EST and other enrollment methods. DigiCert's native integration reduces the effort and expertise needed to extend the value of internal CAs, with embedded, pre-built capability that accelerates time to value and eliminates human error.  

Additional Microsoft technologies supported with native integration include:

• Active Directory, for autoenrollment of certificates and zero-touch provisioning using DigiCert^® Autoenrollment Server
• Windows Hello for Business, for support for certificate-mediated biometric authentication
• Microsoft Intune, for management of certificates provisioned to end-entity devices
• Azure Cloud Services, for deployment of DigiCert^® ONE solutions on Azure cloud infrastructure

Additional AWS technologies supported with native integration include:

• Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, for governing certificate-mediated authentication to multiple targets
• Amazon Cloudfront, for securing CDN-networked domains

 New Kyndryl Consult-led AI-readiness program launched to help customers explore the use of generative AI in their enterprises

Kyndryl, the world’s largest technology infrastructure services provider, and Microsoft today announced a joint effort to enable the adoption of enterprise-grade generative AI solutions for businesses on The Microsoft Cloud.

Leveraging the partnership’s Joint Innovation Centers, Kyndryl’s growing patent portfolio in data and AI, and its access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Fabric, the two companies will rapidly design, develop and drive new generative AI innovations and solutions across their enterprises. To further the advancement of new AI capabilities, Kyndryl is also committing to utilize the Kyndryl University for Microsoft to educate thousands of Kyndryl employees on new Microsoft AI technologies.

Advancing Customer AI-Readiness

Central to enabling the expanded collaboration, Kyndryl is launching an AI-readiness program within Kyndryl Consult that is dedicated to responsibly exploring the adoption of generative AI solutions. Highly skilled Kyndryl experts will help new and existing customers build a trusted data foundation and navigate the complexity of using new generative AI technologies. Leveraging its deep domain and enterprise-grade AI expertise - spanning across industries and solution areas – the Company will help customers evaluate the benefits of generative AI through key service areas, including:

• Collaborative Innovation: Customers can tap into Kyndryl Vital and the Microsoft and Kyndryl Joint Innovation Centers to explore and co-create custom use cases and identify unique ways to leverage generative AI in their enterprises and unlock business value.

• Enhanced Customer and Employee Experience: Using its expertise in managing complex IT environments, Kyndryl will pilot new technologies and develop industry specific models, use cases and solutions that further build on its existing capabilities to help customers improve enterprise automation and workplace productivity.
  • Of note, Kyndryl has supported several customers, as well as itself, in leveraging AI and a virtual assistant to automatically summarize problem descriptions and dynamically surface relevant information to improve efficiency and response rates.

• Build a Strong Data Foundation: Kyndryl will work with customers to provide end-to-end services – from building a trusted data foundation and architecture, to managing customers’ data from the point of creation to the time of consumption, enabling higher quality data and improved reliability.

• Execution & Management: Leveraging its data and AI architectural expertise, Kyndryl will deploy bespoke frameworks for customers to derive value from data and generate AI insights at scale, in a responsible and optimal manner.

“Kyndryl is creating a trusted environment for organizations to explore the benefits and value it can bring to organizations as they look to drive efficiencies, grow and deliver greater business outcomes,” said Stephen Leonard, Global Alliances and Partnerships Leader, Kyndryl. “With over three decades of experience in delivering data services, advanced security capabilities and managing complex IT environments, we are well-positioned to work alongside Microsoft to help organizations confidently apply generative AI at scale and positively impact their businesses while being mindful of known risks.”

“Together with Kyndryl, we have a shared vision to responsibly enable our customers to jointly explore, design and deploy generative AI solutions across their enterprises, and to do it in a way that enables them to realize business value,” said Stephen Boyle, GM Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft. “As a leader in the delivery of generative AI and data platforms, we believe partners such as Kyndryl are critical to the successful use of emerging technologies for business.”

Together, Kyndryl Consult, Kyndryl Bridge and Kyndryl Vital represent a cohesive approach to helping customers envision the outcomes they want, design and implement solutions, and assess results, while continuously evolving their IT infrastructures for the future.

As greater volumes of data and analysis require more computing power, Kyndryl Bridge will enable customers to easily manage their complex technology estates through services such as AIOps and FinOps, and will leverage AI to help customers achieve their business goals in a cost-effective, insightful and security rich manner. Kyndryl also will continue to enrich its advanced delivery capabilities through additional generative AI services.

The strategic partnership with Microsoft was Kyndryl’s first global strategic alliance upon becoming an independent public company. Together, the companies continue to unlock new areas of innovation that drive better business outcomes for customers, and taps into incremental multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunities in fast-growing areas such as data modernization, governance and AI.

Kyndryl is uniquely qualified to offer customers a first-hand perspective on AI implementations as it continuously tests, innovates, improves, and becomes an expert in AI and other technologies before they are integrated into customers’ businesses. For instance, after becoming an independent company, Kyndryl embarked on its own technology transformation journey and has integrated AI across its operations, on Kyndryl Bridge and through its workforce productivity tools. The Company plans to continue to develop new use cases for deploying generative AI internally and for its customers across industries.