Industry analyst group ranks Cequence as top vendor among vendors in the API Security space

Cequence Security, the leading provider of Unified API Protection (UAP), today announced the company has been recognized as a “best-in-class” solution in the Datos Insights Vendor Evaluation: API Security Solutions report, earning one of the highest product scores in the history of Datos Insights vendor evaluation reports.

The Datos Insights Vendor Evaluation is an in-depth analysis and voice of the customer of API security solutions. Participants of the report represent startups and public companies that submitted API security solutions and completed a comprehensive 200-point company, customer and product questionnaire, provided a product demo and submitted customer references.

Cequence is rated as a “best-in-class” solution across all four evaluation components, including vendor stability, client strength, client service and product features. The report highlights that Cequence’s Unified API Protection Platform displays the maturity and efficacy customers should expect and receive from cybersecurity investments. With the CQ Prime Threat Research team at the core of product development, Cequence keeps up with the latest API threats and attackers, providing actionable intelligence to customers to improve API security posture through advanced threat hunting.

“Cequence has scored the highest vendor score in the history of Datos Insights producing industry evaluation reports and has grown to be one of the most respected API protection vendors. Datos Insights believes that organizations selecting Cequence will receive the advertised value and more from the product, stay on the leading edge of threat intelligence and substantially reduce their API risk,” said Tari Schreider, Strategic Advisor, Datos Insights.

The report indicates that Cequence has an API protection solution to match where any organization is in the API security journey, leading to a fully managed unified API protection platform. Additionally, Cequence’s managed API security offering removes the heavy lifting and burden of protecting APIs from organizations with limited resources and API knowledge.

The Cequence Unified API Protection (UAP) platform, is the only solution that unifies discovery, compliance and protection across all internal and external APIs to defend against fraud, business logic attacks, exploits and unintended data leakage. The UAP solution is comprised of the following:

• API Spyder: Proactively discover all external and internal APIs that could expose your organization to data loss, compliance violations or system compromise. All without deploying any software or traffic flow modifications.
• API Sentinel: Achieve API security posture management. Understand your security risks, obtain API compliance and test for OWASP API Top 10 vulnerabilities.
• API Spartan: Prevent targeted attacks, business logic abuse and fraud without any code instrumentation. Track attackers no matter how quickly they retool and thwart detection.

“We are honored to earn a best-in-class designation from Datos Insights and to hear that our customers are enthusiastic about our platform and appreciate our company’s emphasis on transparency and accessibility,” said Varun Kohli, CMO of Cequence. “This recognition is a testament to our commitment to providing our customers with real value that gives them the leading edge in threat intelligence to help substantially reduce their API risk.”

Proven Operator and Team Leader with Significant Experience Driving Transformative Growth to Lead IDG's Continued Evolution and Focus on Innovation

International Data Group, a leading market intelligence and data platform for the technology industry, today announced the appointment of Genevieve Juillard as Chief Executive Officer, effective September 5^th, 2023. The appointment builds on other recent additions to IDG's leadership team, including Tiziana Figliolia, who joined as Chief Financial Officer in May 2023.

Ms. Juillard is a proven operator with nearly two decades of experience scaling the businesses of increasingly large and complex organizations and leading high-performance teams to execute transformation and growth initiatives. She brings significant people, strategic planning and operational skills to continue expanding IDG's leading proprietary data products and technology platforms, and a global business perspective, having held executive roles in Chicago, London and Australia. Prior to joining IDG, Ms. Juillard spent more than 15 years at Experian, most recently as President of the Experian Marketing Services, where she led the strategic transformation of the business, including the acquisition and integration of Tapad. She previously served as Managing Director of Global Expansion within Experian's Credit Services business, where she led the expansion of Experian's global product, data and innovation capabilities, and as President of the US Consumer Credit Bureau.

"We are thrilled to welcome Genevieve as CEO as we continue to build on IDG's long history of innovation and commitment to expanding knowledge across the world through trusted content and data," said Steve Singh, Executive Chairman, Board Member at IDG. "Genevieve brings a keen understanding of how to build and lead impactful teams and has achieved transformational results throughout her career, positioning her to achieve our growth objectives. With the continued support of Blackstone, the Board and I look forward to partnering with Genevieve and IDG's experienced and tenured leadership team to propel the Company's continued evolution and focus on taking decisive steps to anticipate and meet the needs of tomorrow's customer."

"IDG has been ingrained in the global tech community for nearly 60 years, serving top digital companies around the world with a connected global team, and I could not be more excited for the opportunity to join at a pivotal time for the business and industry," said Ms. Juillard. "I am confident that IDG is uniquely positioned to capitalize on tailwinds in the technology, data and information sectors with incredible opportunities ahead of us. IDG has a talented team to accelerate long-term growth, drive operational excellence and deliver value for all our stakeholders, and I look forward to what we will accomplish together."  

"As a leader in the global technology data and analytics ecosystem, IDG continues to innovate to help its customers and partners navigate a continually changing technology landscape," said Vikram Suresh, Senior Managing Director, Private Equity and Peter Wallace, Global Head of Core Private Equity at Blackstone. "Since first partnering with IDG in 2021, we have been impressed with the team's ambitions, focus on finding the best solutions for its customers and partners and the growth IDG has been able to achieve. We are proud to support Genevieve as IDG's next CEO and believe she is the ideal person to lead IDG in its next chapter of growth."

Ms. Juillard holds a B.S. and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA and MPP, Management & Public Policy from UCLA Anderson School of Management. She also serves as a Director on the Board of Innovid, an independent CTV advertising and measurement platform.

The latest version of ModernMT (version 7) enhances translation quality by up to 42% using Trust Attention, a novel technique developed by Translated that links the origin of data to its impact on translation accuracy.

Translated, a leading provider of AI-powered language solutions, announced the launch of ModernMT Version 7, a significant upgrade to its adaptive machine translation (MT) system. The latest version introduces Trust Attention, a novel technique inspired by the human brain's ability to prioritize information from trusted sources, improving translation quality by up to 42% (see attached graph). This innovation sets a new industry standard, moving away from traditional MT systems that are hampered by an inability to distinguish between trustworthy data and lower quality material during the training process.

ModernMT now uses a first-of-its-kind weighting system to prioritize learning from high-quality, qualified data – meaning translations performed and reviewed by professional translators – over unverified content from the Web. As it did when introducing adaptivity, Translated looked to the human brain for inspiration in developing this new technique. Just as humans sift through multiple sources of information to identify the most trustworthy and reliable ones, ModernMT V7 similarly identifies the most valuable training data and prioritizes its learning based on that.

"ModernMT's ability to prioritize higher quality data to improve the model is the most significant leap forward in machine translation since the introduction of dynamic adaptivity five years ago," said Marco Trombetti, CEO of Translated. "This exciting innovation opens new opportunities for companies to use MT to take their global customer experience to the next level. It will also help translators increase productivity and revenue."

The introduction of this new approach is a major step forward for companies seeking greater accuracy when translating large volumes of content or requiring a high degree of customization of the MT engine, as well as for translators integrating MT into their workflow.

Today, there's considerable discussion regarding the application of large language models (LLM) in translation. While traditional machine translation prioritizes accuracy over fluency, LLMs tend to emphasize fluency. This can sometimes result in misleading outputs due to hallucinations, where outputs aren’t grounded in the input received from training data. We believe that Translated’s Trust Attention can enhance the accuracy of generative models, reducing the chances of such errors. This could set the stage for the next era of machine translation.

All Translated clients will benefit from the improved quality of the new MT model, resulting in faster project turnaround times. Translators working with Translated will experience the power of the new model through Matecat, Translated's free, web-based, AI-powered CAT tool. Translators using an officially supported CAT tool (Matecat, memoQ, and Trados) with an active ModernMT license will also experience the power of the new model.

New community program provides exceptional user experience, bringing industry experts together to address generative integration and automation challenges and opportunities

SnapLogic, the leader in generative integration, today introduced Integration Nation, a new community program designed to bring together customers, employees and industry experts alike. The new SnapLogic community now connects members to other community-based programs to even better address generative integration and automation challenges, recognize leading customer and partner use cases, highlight individual champions and supporters, and celebrate members’ personal growth.

SnapLogic’s Integration Nation community offers a crisp, elegant look into the future of community-based programs and collaboration,” said Bojan Velevski, Technical Consultant at IWConnect. “Our industry has the opportunity to move away from a classic ‘community.’ This new platform offers all the resources, tools and services that I need in one place to be engaged and grow within my profession.”

Available today, the Integration Nation community platform offers members new features, including:

• Improved navigation: Based on customer, user and prospect feedback, SnapLogic has improved the navigation of its community platform, including a revamp to its content structure, making it more intuitive and user-friendly.
• Expanded discussion areas: Engaging discussions are the cornerstone of a thriving community. While SnapLogic continues to support peer-to-peer product discussions, the company has introduced new discussion areas dedicated to thought leadership integration topics and business use case solutions. To broaden these discussions, SnapLogic will now open these forums to anyone interested in joining Integration Nation.
• New architecture center: The SnapLogic Enterprise Architecture team has created many resources to help members build the best integration solutions for their business needs. In the Architecture Center, members will find videos, technical white papers and other educational assets.
• Enhanced events area: The new platform makes staying informed about events and opportunities to engage with the SnapLogic team easier. With the ability to filter by region or virtual events, members can find events that meet their needs and interests.

“Cultivating a strong collaborative culture is critical to building a transformative business, no matter which industry you are in,” said Dayle Hall, Chief Marketing Officer at SnapLogic. “We’ve always been committed to providing first-class user experience, and we're excited to launch Integration Nation to empower professional growth, development and learning among our peers. We look forward to seeing members connect, share their knowledge and experiences, and engage with other professionals to further break down the barriers of integration and automation challenges.”

Access and Availability

Available today, existing members will have instant access to the new platform, where they can easily find updated community content and support.

Powerful Data Modeling Environment Promotes Centralized Governance while Empowering Power BI and Excel Users to Build Innovative Analytics Experiences

AtScale, the leading provider of semantic layer solutions for modern business intelligence and data science teams, today announced expanded integrations with Power BI and Excel to support enterprise data and analytics teams leveraging the breadth and flexibility of the Microsoft analytics suite.

AtScale is introducing five important enhancements to its Microsoft Analytics integration:

• AtScale Connector for Power BI: Power BI Desktop now includes a connector enabling simple connection of a Power BI workspace to an existing AtScale model.
• Support for both Tabular and Multidimensional Connections to Power BI: This new capability offers maximum flexibility to Power BI users with both tabular and multidimensional interfaces to the same AtScale model. This enables Power BI developers to use custom DAX calculations while also maintaining the structure and governance offered by a multidimensional model.
• Advanced Modeling Utilities: AtScale now provides BI architects with a set of modeling utilities that simplify creation of common, but complex, model elements like time-relative measures, intelligent dimensions, and calculation groups. By leveraging native DAX and MDX connectivity, Power BI and Excel users inherit the full intelligence embedded in the AtScale model, thereby simplifying sophisticated dashboard design and analytics product development.
• Model Object Shareability: BI architects can now easily share model objects, such as metric definitions, conformed dimensions, or time-relative calculations, across AtScale models. This simplifies BI modeling and enables Power BI and Excel dashboard designers to leverage pre-built model elements as they build the data sets in their analytics workspaces.
• Analytics Governance Utilities: AtScale now supports data mesh and hub-and-spoke analytics design principles, empowering centralized analytics teams to enforce consistent dimensions and metrics definitions. These governed model elements can be implemented by Power BI dashboard designers or business analysts working with Excel.

For a demo on how to leverage the new Power BI enhancements and build a brand-new model from scratch, watch AtScale’s informative video here.

“AtScale brings a new, very practical paradigm for supporting the Power BI community with enterprise-scale governance and scalability,” said Greg Deckler, seven-time Microsoft MVP for Data Platform, author, and active member of the Power BI community. “Even with the introduction of Microsoft Fabric, the Power BI community still needs solutions for efficiently scaling performance and managing the complex data models supporting business intelligence.”

Microsoft Power BI is the market share leader for business intelligence (BI) with widespread adoption across the Global 2000. Microsoft remains at the forefront cutting edge of enterprise BI, delivering ongoing innovation in data visualization, interactive analytics experience, AI-augmented analytics, and embeddability across the Microsoft 365 stack.

“This integration represents AtScale’s commitment to empowering organizations with robust analytics capabilities through seamless integration and maximum flexibility, while simplifying BI modeling and accelerating the development process,” said Leon Gordon, founder, Onyx Data, and Microsoft MVP.

AtScale has a long history of partnership and co-innovation with Microsoft, having been the first semantic layer platform to introduce native support for Microsoft’s Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) query language. Native DAX support lets Power BI users connect to AtScale in live connection mode, establishing high performance, live query access to data sets managed on cloud data platforms, including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, and Amazon Redshift. AtScale supports an open data fabric approach, connecting best-in-class analytics platforms such as Power BI and Excel to the world’s most powerful cloud data platforms.

“Microsoft has become a dominant force in enterprise analytics and business intelligence based on the pervasive adoption of Power BI and Excel,” added Christopher Lynch, CEO for AtScale. “AtScale gives data teams a pathway to embrace the power and flexibility of Microsoft Analytics, while leveraging the full capability and elasticity of modern cloud data platforms, creating the scalable analytics infrastructure necessary to support growth and innovation.”

Collaboration Injects Predictive AI Capabilities into Twilio’s CustomerAI Roadmap

Today at AWS Summit New York, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, announced an extension of their longstanding strategic work together that will place powerful artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities at the fingertips of Twilio customers.

This news follows the recent announcement of Twilio CustomerAI. With its CustomerAI technology layer, Twilio powerfully combines customer engagement platform data, generative and predictive AI, and large language models (LLMs) to unlock stronger customer relationships for brands.

One priority area where AWS and Twilio are doubling down is the implementation of predictive AI technology. Bringing together Amazon SageMaker technology and Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform, the upcoming features will help businesses better understand their customers and empower them to provide deeper value to them via more relevant, timely, and personalized experiences. In particular, marketers and data scientists will soon have out-of-the-box access to new machine learning powered tools that can intelligently anticipate future customer actions and help inform product or marketing strategy. For example, AI can predict with high accuracy a customer’s propensity to make a new purchase, or identify ‘VIP’ customers who should be prioritized or rewarded with loyalty-focused campaigns, and much more. In today’s fast-paced, increasingly competitive economic environment, AI will provide marketers with new ways to understand, attract, convert, and retain high-value customers.

“At AWS Summit New York, we’re delving into the innovative ways companies are leveraging the power of AWS to revolutionize industries. In particular, we’re excited to hear from customers and partners at the forefront of AI innovation, which is certainly where Twilio is playing in the customer engagement space,” said Shaown Nandi, Director of Technology, Industries at AWS. “It’s great to see Twilio and our portfolio of AI/ML services working together to help businesses meet customers where they are, improve engagement, and deliver highly personalized experiences.”

"Our vision for Twilio CustomerAI is to empower businesses to recreate the types of trusted relationships you have with a local business at digital scale. It’s clear to me that Twilio has the strongest dataset of customer engagement interactions and the platform to make this happen,” said Alex Millet, Senior Director of Product at Twilio. “With AWS' predictive AI technologies, we are rapidly developing AI-native features and APIs. We believe our tools will change the way marketers, contact centers, developers, and data teams deliver these world class customer experiences. Join us at our conference, SIGNAL, in August to learn more.”

AWS and Twilio have a rich and extensive history of working together bi-directionally to innovate and bring value to respective and shared customers, from Twilio Segment’s long-held status as an AWS Marketplace partner, to deep product alignment that includes collaboration leveraging Twilio’s Programmable APIs,¹ and integrations between Segment and more than six² AWS products.

Both AWS and Twilio are committed to building AI safely and responsibly. Twilio builds privacy and security by design into its product development lifecycle and will ensure companies have full transparency and control of the data that informs AI-powered interactions with their customers.

Innovid's identity framework, Innovid Key, enables advertisers to track conversions on second screens from CTV campaigns without violating consumer privacy

Innovid, an independent advertising platform for the delivery, personalization, and measurement of converged TV across linear, CTV, and digital, today announced the launch of a cookieless cross-device solution that effectively matches multiple devices to user interactions with the goal of increasing conversion rate accuracy.

Powered by Innovid's identity framework, Innovid Key, the technology enables marketers to maintain a transparent and cohesive understanding of the actions their current or potential customers are taking across all devices.  

Innovid Key was built on the principle of interoperability across signals rather than exclusivity. This allows Innovid to connect across privacy-compliant partners and sources to accurately map consumer behavior, without resorting to unethical methods like browser fingerprinting.

"Traditional methods of tracking audience behavior leave actions isolated to the devices they originated in, providing an incomplete picture of the customer journey and the risk of losing valuable conversion traffic with only a partial view of campaign effectiveness," said Dale Older, Chief Product Officer at Innovid. "This is especially prevalent with CTV, where most viewers are directed to second-screen experiences to convert. With Innovid's cross-device conversion reporting, advertisers can accurately gauge the impact and effectiveness of their CTV campaigns, attributing views directly to site activity and justifying the growing investment of ad dollars. Now, marketers can match events that a household did across different devices in a cookieless, privacy-compliant manner, resulting in a more accurate conversion rate."

Despite pending cookie deprecation, Innovid's cross-device conversion reporting equips advertisers with the tools necessary to make informed decisions based on which campaigns, channels, and creatives drive success. Armed with these insights, advertisers can optimize marketing efforts, strategically allocate resources, and ultimately achieve better business outcomes.