Leading Conversational AI company earns Best AI-Enabled Content Solution and Best Customer Service Solution awards from the principal trade association for software

LivePerson, a global leader in Conversational AI, won Best AI-Enabled Content Solution and Best Customer Service Solution at the 2023 SIIA CODiE Awards. The prestigious annual CODiE Awards recognize companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the world.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, announced the CODiE winners in a virtual winner ceremony. A SIIA CODiE Award win follows rigorous reviews by expert judges whose evaluations determine the slate of finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products, and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select winners.

LivePerson's wins highlighted its leadership in both artificial intelligence and customer engagement solutions:

• Best AI-Enabled Content Solution: LivePerson's AI Search capability won this category for using AI to provide the most relevant answers to customer questions and queries. As an integral part of LivePerson's ability to enrich answers via large language models (LLMs), this award validates the company's approach to using cutting-edge AI to resolve intents.
• Best Customer Service Solution: LivePerson's Conversational Cloud platform, trusted by thousands of the world's top brands for customer engagement, took home this award for helping businesses deliver safer, more secure AI-powered experiences.

Since its inception inventing webchat for brands, LivePerson has continually delivered award-winning, enterprise-grade solutions for trustworthy digital engagement. The company focused on leveraging LLMs early and is now uniquely positioned to help enterprises leverage generative AI and LLMs for better business outcomes.

"The truth is, not all AI is created equal. LivePerson's EAI approach, which makes the power of generative AI and LLMs accessible to everyone in ways that restore a sense of control and safety, truly raises the bar for AI-powered engagement," said Rob LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson. "We're proud to have earned this recognition of our vision and technology from our peers in the AI and customer service industries."

"The 2023 Business Technology CODiE Award Winners maintain the vital legacy of the CODiEs in spotlighting the best and most impactful apps, services, and products serving the business tech market", said SIIA President Chris Mohr. "We are so proud to recognize this year's honorees – the best of the best! Congratulations to all of this year's CODiE Award winners."

ThinkNow, a leading market research company specializing in the U.S. Hispanic and multicultural markets, has announced a partnership with Fuel Cycle, a leading market research and customer insights platform to deliver both multicultural and general population insights side by side in one platform with access to multiple communities. By leveraging this integrated approach, companies can aggregate real-time data to gain valuable insights, enabling them to make strategic marketing decisions based on a comprehensive understanding of their target audiences.

Fuel Cycle leverages its unified continuous and agile research ecosystem – the FC Market Research Cloud™ – to connect brands to their key audiences, enabling everything they need to acquire, retain, and expand customer relationships. ThinkNow harnesses technology-driven market research solutions to ensure that the experiences and perspectives of critical multicultural consumer segments are accurately represented in strategic decision-making processes. By collaborating, ThinkNow and Fuel Cycle leverage best-in-class cloud-based market research solutions to make culturally relevant multicultural data easily accessible to premium brands.

"Consumers today have higher expectations of brands. They want personalized marketing experiences that speak to their needs and appeal to what's important to them and their communities," shares Mario Carrasco, Co-Founder and Principal at ThinkNow. "As the U.S. consumer market grows increasingly diverse, it has become imperative that brands level up their understanding of diverse consumers to remain relevant."

"We recognize the mounting challenges that researchers and insights professionals encounter as they strive for remarkable outcomes within the confines of tighter budgets and limited resources," said Rick Kelly, Chief Strategy Officer at Fuel Cycle. "Understanding the urgency of generating actionable insights crucial for organizational success, we firmly believe that the union of ThinkNow and Fuel Cycle can significantly accelerate the time required to attain these invaluable insights." 

The integration of NVIDIA NeMo with Snowflake will let businesses securely build custom large language models using their own proprietary data in the Snowflake Data Cloud

Snowflake , the Data Cloud company, and NVIDIA today announced at Snowflake Summit 2023 that they are partnering to provide businesses of all sizes with an accelerated path to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data, all securely within the Snowflake Data Cloud.

With the NVIDIA NeMo™ platform for developing large language models (LLMs) and NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing, Snowflake will enable enterprises to use data in their Snowflake accounts to make custom LLMs for advanced generative AI services, including chatbots, search and summarization. The ability to customize LLMs without moving data enables proprietary information to remain fully secured and governed within the Snowflake platform.

“Snowflake’s partnership with NVIDIA will bring high performance machine learning and artificial intelligence to our vast volumes of proprietary and structured enterprise data, a new frontier to bringing unprecedented insights, predictions and prescriptions to the global world of business,” said Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO, Snowflake.

“Data is essential to creating generative AI applications that understand the complex operations and unique voice of every company,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Snowflake will create an AI factory that helps enterprises turn their own valuable data into custom generative AI models to power groundbreaking new applications — right from the cloud platform that they use to run their businesses.”

NVIDIA and Snowflake’s collaboration represents a new opportunity for enterprises. It will enable them to use their proprietary data — which can range from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of raw and curated business information — to create and fine-tune custom LLMs that power business-specific applications and services.

By integrating AI technology from Snowflake and NVIDIA, customers can quickly and easily build, deploy and manage customized applications that bring the power of generative AI to all parts of their business across a variety of use cases. In addition, expanding AI capabilities in the Data Cloud enables these customers to create generative AI applications where their governed data already resides, a benefit that significantly reduces cost and latency while maintaining the security of their data.

“More enterprises than we expected are training or at least fine-tuning their own AI models, as they increasingly appreciate the value of their own data assets,” said Alexander Harrowell, principal analyst for advanced computing for AI at technology research group Omdia. “Similarly, enterprises are beginning to operate more diverse fleets of AI models for business-specific applications. Supporting them in this trend is one of the biggest open opportunities in the sector.”

Custom Models for Healthcare, Retail, Financial Services and More

With over 8,000 customers worldwide (as of April 30, 2023), the Snowflake Data Cloud gives enterprises the ability to unify, integrate, analyze and share data across their organizations, as well as with customers, partners, suppliers and others. In addition, customers can build and share leading data applications at scale with the Data Cloud.

Snowflake’s unified platform offers industry-specific Data Clouds to help deliver innovative solutions across multiple verticals and lines of business spanning advertising, media and entertainment, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, retail and CPG, technology and telecom. Most recently, Snowflake launched the Government and Education Data Cloud to enable data-driven decision making for the public sector.

Snowflake and NVIDIA’s collaboration will further enable customers to transform these industries by bringing customized generative AI applications to different verticals with the Data Cloud. For example, a healthcare insurance model could answer complex questions about what procedures are covered under various plans. A financial services model could share details about specific lending opportunities available to retail and business customers based on a variety of circumstances.

NVIDIA NeMo is a cloud-native enterprise platform for building, customizing and deploying generative AI models with billions of parameters. Snowflake plans to host and run NeMo in the Data Cloud, enabling customers to build, customize and deploy custom LLMs used for generative AI applications, such as chatbots and intelligent search.

With NeMo Guardrails software, developers can ensure that their applications are aligned with business-specific topics, safety and security requirements.

To learn more about the latest product integrations and trends in generative AI, watch Slootman and Huang’s fireside chat at Snowflake Summit 2023.

Collaborate to offer advanced Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for enterprises to deliver contextual and personalized customer experience by integrating all communication channels

Comviva, the global leader in customer experience and data monetization solutions, today announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with e& enterprise to offer an advanced omnichannel CPaaS platform for enterprises.

e& enterprise, is a specialized business vertical within e& focused on providing advanced digital solutions to transform the way companies conduct business. e& enterprise enables organizations across multiple sectors to maximize their digital potential. Through Cloud, Cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), e& enterprise is propelling organizations and economies towards a smarter, safer and more sustainable world. 

Comviva and e& enterprise partnership will develop an advanced (CPaaS) ecosystem leveraging Comviva's next-gen CPaaS platform and e&'s market reach. It will enable real-time communication capabilities, helping enterprises enhance and personalize their end-user customer experience seamlessly across multiple channels.

Enterprises across industries can self-onboard, create customized applications and experiences for their end customers. With a cloud-based delivery model, Comviva CPaaS Platform seamlessly integrates with business applications and enables secured real-time customer interactions serving all customer engagement use cases from marketing to operations to customer service.

Speaking on the partnership, Miguel Villalonga, CEO, e& enterprise Cloud, said: "e& enterprise has always been at the forefront of ushering in innovative digital solutions. The opportunity to partner with Comviva is another step forward in our journey to create an open, collaborative CPaaS ecosystem that will help enterprises deliver seamless, personalized experiences for their customers. We are excited to offer engageX, our CPaaS solution to enterprises, and help them craft a customer journey that is engaging and effective."

Manoranjan Mohapatra, CEO at Comviva, said: "We are thrilled to partner with e& enterprise to help them transform the enterprise customer experience journey. This partnership shall enable a new era of enterprise customer experiences built on simplicity, rich customer experience and personalization. With the new CPaaS platform e& enterprise is well positioned to create new possibilities for enterprises."

Comviva's CPaaS Platform is a full-stack platform to empower Telecom service providers to drive real-time customer interactions for enterprises. The platform supports messaging services and chats powered with conversational AI capabilities across the industry verticals. Its cognitive automation and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities empower enterprises to deliver enriched customer experience by automating user interactions in a human-like language. It is one of the most scalable platforms in the industry handling over 80+ billion messages in a year.

Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round will fuel the streaming data company’s investments in WebAssembly, Apache Iceberg and serverless

Redpanda Data announced today that it has raised $100M in Series C funding, led by returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with GV and Haystack VC. With $165M in funds secured to date, Redpanda will leverage this latest capital infusion to enable data-intensive applications with new foundational capabilities that are beyond the scope of legacy streaming data platforms.

Redpanda continues to cement its position as the streaming data platform of choice for both transactional and analytical applications. With the ongoing cross-industry transformation of applications from batch to real-time and the rapid adoption of AI and ML, Redpanda has experienced a bumper fiscal year including 5X revenue growth and a workforce that has more than doubled.

“The hero of the Redpanda story has always been the engineer, hands on keyboard, behind a terminal, materializing her ideas into a working system. That’s who we built Redpanda for, and why we made it easy to use, scalable to double-digit ​​gigabytes per second, and compatible with all the existing applications,'' explained Alex Gallego, Founder and CEO of Redpanda. “Last year we grew to thousands of production installations. The funds will help us accelerate this growth while building a future where all data is instantly available, with embedded processing in a multi-tenant platform that truly scales to zero, finally making streaming accessible to the 44 million developers in the world.”

In December 2022 Redpanda pioneered its industry-first Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model, which combines the efficiency of a fully managed service with the data sovereignty and security of self-hosting. BYOC has quickly become the preferred deployment model of more than 30% of Redpanda’s customers.

Redpanda has demonstrated tremendous momentum under Alex’s leadership,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner at lead investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Redpanda’s data platform was built from the ground up for the cloud era and has delivered incredible performance and efficiencies for our innovative customer base. We’re excited that this funding will help to extend Redpanda’s go-to-market activities, bringing its benefits to an even greater audience.”

“When selecting a streaming data platform, the choice for Jump was obvious,” said Alex Davies, CTO at Jump Trading. “For starters, we needed assurance we’d have zero data loss. We also needed something that would meet our high throughput requirements. That put Redpanda in a class of its own.”

“As a new game studio, we needed to build a flexible data platform that empowers our developers to get real-time insights from game events, without having to worry about the backend infrastructure,” said Colin Riddell, Director of Data Engineering at Fortis Games. “Redpanda quickly rose to the top of our list for a streaming data solution because we knew that its engineers obsess over performance and reliability at scale, and we loved the fact that it is Kafka API-compatible and just works with the ecosystem we already know.”

Redpanda has seen broad adoption of its offerings across data-intensive industries such as finance, technology, cybersecurity, manufacturing, gaming, aerospace and more. The Redpanda streaming data platform is source-available to developers under the BSL license. Enterprises also partner with Redpanda for self-hosting in production environments and to access Redpanda cloud offerings

This game-changing integration provides free access for teachers to create collaborative, engaging lessons that reach students in the classroom and on their devices, wherever they are.

Lumio, the digital learning tool used by millions of teachers and students worldwide, is pleased to announce its integration with Canva for Education. This new integration allows teachers to seamlessly add Canva designs to Lumio, merging the power of Canva's visual communication platform with Lumio's ability to add interactivity for engaging, dynamic lessons.  

The integration offers educators free access to export and upload Canva lessons, presentations, and other materials into Lumio to create interactive lessons with game-based activities, formative assessments, and more. Educators will also be able to access libraries from both Canva and Lumio to explore thousands of high-quality, ready-made templates and infographics.

"The Lumio team is excited to roll out our integration with Canva for Education," said Dan McMahon, Lumio Vice President of Software. "This collaboration reinforces our commitment to inspiring creativity, saving teachers' time, and creating an active learning environment that is accessible and collaborative for all."

Canva for Education makes it easy to create and communicate visually in the classroom and beyond. It allows educators to bring their ideas and lessons to life with thousands of ready-to-use educational templates. Lumio is an intuitive digital learning tool that transforms lessons into active, collaborative learning experiences that engage students on their devices, in class, or remotely.

"Empowering educators and students through creativity and collaboration are core values for both Lumio and Canva for Education," says Head of Canva for Education, Jason Wilmot. "We are thrilled to come together with Lumio to support both teachers and students and to provide them with the high-quality resources they deserve and need for fantastic learning experiences."

Lumio, created by global EdTech leader SMART Technologies, is also unveiling several new features aimed at making teaching easier and learning more engaging and accessible for students. The latest updates include:

• Ability to edit PowerPoint slides after they have been imported into Lumio with editing support for Google Slides and PDFs to follow. This feature is now live as a public beta.
• Access to OpenDyslexic, a typeface designed to support learners with a variety of dyslexia symptoms.
• New themes available for several Lumio game-based activities, including clean, simple versions that appeal to older learners.

Also, Lumio is showcasing a new Logic Model that highlights research demonstrating Lumio's effectiveness to enable leading teaching practices to drive student outcomes.

The Canva for Education and Lumio integration will be available for teachers to work with over the summer and for back-to-school, and other new features in Lumio are available for use today.

BigID's integration with Unity Catalog delivers enhanced data protection and simplified governance for customers

BigID, the leading platform for data security, compliance, privacy, and governance, today announced an expanded partnership with Databricks, the data and AI company, to provide cutting-edge data security, privacy, and governance solutions to customers. This joint effort aims to automate data discovery and classification, alleviate the workload of data professionals, and streamline governance processes.

BigID's integration with Databricks Unity Catalog facilitates bi-directional metadata synchronization and advanced access control. This collaboration empowers Databricks' Unity Catalog customers with comprehensive visibility into their data's sensitivity, allowing the policy engine to implement effective security and governance measures.

Unity Catalog, a key priority for Databricks, is a fine-grained governance solution for data and AI on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. It simplifies security and governance of customer data by providing a central place to administer and audit data access, and track data lineage of all Databricks assets.

Customers leveraging this BigID integration will benefit from:

• Comprehensive and efficient data security and governance within their Databricks environment
• Streamlined governance processes via automated data discovery and classification
• Policy automation triggered from BigID and deployed via Unity Catalog

In addition to today's announcement, the two companies are collaborating to enable advanced automation expanding upon this integration to provide the ultimate in efficiency for governance operations.

"We are thrilled to expand our strategic partnership with Databricks to provide our customers with the most advanced data lakehouse governance capabilities," said Dimitri Sirota, CEO of BigID. "Our joint offering will enable organizations to better understand their data and ensure they are taking the necessary measures to take action for security, privacy, and governance."

"Data security and governance are top priorities for our customers, and we are excited to expand our partnership with BigID to deliver a comprehensive solution that addresses these critical needs," said Ariel Amster, Director of Strategic Technology Partners at Databricks.

New book serves as a step-to-step guide to help businesses engage and create a SSOT as a core asset to drive consistency, speed, and scale, across the enterprise

Altimetrik, a leading pure-play digital business for data quality, product innovation, core data assets and AL/ML has launched its latest book, "Digital Business Methodology: Growth Code." This comprehensive, step-by-step guide aims to empower businesses in achieving consistent, rapid, and scalable growth without disrupting their current operations. By adopting Altimetrik's Digital Business Methodology (DBM), the business can adopt a holistic incremental (bite-sized) approach, collaborate, take ownership, and lead engagement to achieve outcomes with greater agility, paving the way for unlimited growth and opportunity.

The book underscores the need for conducting digital business independently, free from the constraints of complex and isolated environments, thereby enabling outcome-driven growth characterized by greater consistency, speed, and scale. Skilled practitioners who understand both business and technology can orchestrate these end-to-end solutions within a client’s environment.

The company’s thought leadership and expertise in this field was demonstrated last year by the release of two digital business books, “Digital Simplified” and “The Digital Leader.” Building on these previous works, this book delves deeper into the obstacles faced by siloed corporate structures, disconnected data sources, and complex technology stacks, all of which impede the adoption of digital business practices and hinder operational efficiencies and growth.

“Many companies realize that digital business is not about technology transformation but business transformation,” says Raj Vattikuti, Executive Chairman and Founder of Altimetrik. “Our latest book explains how business leaders can use the DBM to build a collaborative culture among all stakeholders that allows companies to simplify workflows and become more agile to eliminate silos and focus on data-driven outcomes.” The book includes case studies showing measurable results achieved by Fortune 500 companies in various industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, retail, automotive, and manufacturing.

Altimetrik’s expertise in digital business spans over a decade and it has pioneered the core tenets of its DBM. Companies of all sizes are now recognizing the need for this step-by-step approach and are seeking partners like Altimetrik to accelerate their digital business adoption; with a proven track record to be 50%+ faster utilizing less resources than traditional app world. Furthermore, companies like McKinsey, in their recently published book “Rewired,” advocate for strategies that align with Altimetrik’s DBM.

This book emphasizes the importance of CEOs and C-Level leaders taking ownership and driving engagement leveraging an incremental approach to create operational rigor and an agile culture. This iterative process, executed at a sprint level, establishes a SSOT, empowering informed decision-making and fostering a sense of ownership. Technologies like Snowflake serve as the foundation, ensuring end-to-end security, data quality and governance, compliance, auditability, and traceability. The SSOT provides a unified and consistent view of data across the organization. This is essential for the building and deployment of AI and ML models, streamlining end-to-end workflows, enabling innovation, and enhancing productivity.

“Most businesses lack a central repository for their core data assets, which impedes growth, innovation, and customer experience,” says Raj Sundaresan, CEO of Altimetrik. “The adoption of an SSOT enables higher quality, unified data that fuels the AI and ML tools quickly gaining adoption in today’s business environment. More than a guide, this book represents a strategic tool for business leaders who want to unlock growth and accelerate their digital journey.”

Partnership between data analysts and scientists at the domain level leads to intelligence derived from ML, enabling the application of algorithms for predictive analysis. Embracing new AI technologies like OpenAI ChatGPT enhances productivity and intelligence by capitalizing on high-quality data. Scalability and consistency across the enterprise are ensured through the DBM framework, adhering to IEEE and ISO/IEC 27001 engineering standards for creating reusable engineered assets. This process is seamlessly automated, end-to-end, deriving significant productivity and integration across the enterprise ecosystem, from idea generation to product launch, on a digital business platform (DBP).

The DBM is enforced by this cloud-based self-service DBP within the client's environment enabling simplified workflows and a collaborative culture that is independent of the existing complexities and siloes. Scott Sandschafer, CEO of Calibo adds, “The DBP rationalizes tools and technologies, empowering self-service with automated governance reinforcing an agile culture, collaboration, harmonizing business functions and software development processes across the enterprise.”

Altimetrik serves as a catalyst for small, medium, and large companies with capability centers that create the platform environment to help scale talent, culture, and partner using tools like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Regardless of digital maturity, Altimetrik’s DBM and DBP paves the way for digital business with greater consistency, speed, and scale.