Getwizer, the hybrid consumer insights platform, announced today the appointment of industry veteran Bruce Friend as its new CEO. Bruce is an industry-leading media and marketing insights executive with over 30 years of global expeience in media measurement, entertainment research, brand insights and strategic planning.

Most recently, Bruce held the positions of Chief Product and Innovation Officer and Chief Data Monetization Officer at Screen Engine/ASI. His extensive experience also includes roles as President of Ipsos/OTX MediaCT and following that at Vision Critical. He has also held various senior executive research positions at major companies such as Sony Pictures Entertainment, MTV, Nickelodeon, HBO, The Disney Channel, Telemundo Group Inc., Saatchi & Saatchi, and Y&R Advertising.

"I'm very excited to be joining Getwizer as CEO to lead the company's future global development and growth," says Bruce Friend. "As someone who's worked in the research technology space for the past 20 years, it is evident to me that Getwizer has built a unique and innovative offering that combines the speed, efficiency and utility of an end-to-end, DIY insights platform with customization and exceptional research services support. Simply put, it's the best of DIY without clients needing to do it themselves."

During his seven-year tenure at OTX, Bruce spearheaded the growth of OTX's Media, Entertainment and brand Insights practice, helping to elevate annual revenue from $8 million to $70 million, and positioning OTX among the fastest-growing research companies at that time.

Bruce replaces former CEO Gilad Gans, who held the position for the previous 3 years and is helping the transition in leadership after managing Getwizer's acquisition by Prytek in 2022.

"I'm delighted to have Bruce continue the growth and momentum we built in recent years with top customers, and take the company to new heights," commented Gilad on the appointment.

As Getwizer's new CEO, Bruce will focus on client and strategic partnerships, product innovation and diversification, data quality, and profitable growth.About Getwizer.

New joint innovations enhance data management, improve customer experiences, and enable AI-powered applications

Salesforce significantly expands its use of AWS across its full portfolio and is taking an AWS-native approach to its most strategic and fastest growing innovation, the Salesforce Data Cloud. AWS increases its company-wide use of Salesforce’s CRM offerings, including adopting Data Cloud to manage its unified customer profiles

With Salesforce now available on AWS Marketplace, thousands of joint customers can accelerate their deployment of Salesforce products through seamless buying and billing experiences

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, and Salesforce, the #1 AI CRM, today announced a significant expansion of their long standing, global strategic partnership, deepening product integrations across data and artificial intelligence (AI), and for the first time offering select Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace. The expanded agreement makes it easier for customers to seamlessly and securely manage their data across Salesforce and AWS, and safely and responsibly infuse the latest generative AI technologies into their applications and workflows.

To make it easier for customers to benefit from the combined value of Salesforce and AWS, the companies will deepen the integrations between their industry-leading products. Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available through a single application programming interface (API), as part of Salesforce’s open model ecosystem strategy. This will make Amazon Bedrock available through the Einstein Trust Layer, powering AI-driven apps and workflows in Salesforce. In addition, Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies. These Data Cloud integrations will be governed by new centralized access controls, giving customers the ability to manage secure user access at the folder, object, and file level for Data Cloud content stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

As part of this partnership, Salesforce will expand its use of AWS, including compute, storage, data, and AI technologies through Hyperforce to further enhance popular services like Salesforce Data Cloud. AWS will also expand its use of Salesforce products such as Salesforce Data Cloud. Data Cloud will allow AWS to create a single unified customer profile allowing them to deliver more personalized experiences to customers.

These new and enhanced integrations will include:

• Streamlining Purchasing Options for Customers in the AWS Marketplace: For the first time, Salesforce will begin offering its products, including Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku, on the AWS Marketplace, making it even easier for AWS customers to subscribe to and manage Salesforce offerings. Customers will benefit from a single view across their IT spend, simplified procurement processes, and flexible options like private pricing and consolidated billing through AWS, providing a seamless way to leverage pre-approved budgets and increase business performance. Joint customers in the U.S. may now purchase select Salesforce products through AWS Marketplace, with expanded product and regional support planned for 2024.

• Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Unified Data Management: AWS and Salesforce are making Data Cloud a comprehensive, flexible, and secure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data platform for their customers. New Zero-ETL (extract, transform, and load) integrations reduce the need for customers to build their own ETL pipelines between Data Cloud and AWS data services. As a result, customers can easily and seamlessly unite all of their data to support improved and faster insights, predictions, and more powerful applications. Additionally, customers will be able to securely run their own code for data processing tasks such as complex transformations, calculated insights, data triggers, or user-defined functions with Data Cloud that will be powered by AWS compute services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Lambda.

• Securely Bringing AWS Data and AI Services to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform: Customers will be able to use new solutions like Salesforce Prompt Builder, part of the Einstein Copilot Studio, to create custom prompt templates grounded in their data. Custom prompt templates can be sent to their preferred FMs, which will include leading models hosted on Amazon Bedrock. This will enable customers to securely use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with models from leading AI companies including AI21 Labs, Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI. In addition to accessing their own FMs through an integration between Data Cloud and Amazon SageMaker, developers will be able to use simplified tooling to fine-tune FMs on Amazon Bedrock through the Einstein Trust Layer and power generative AI experiences across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

• Seamless Customer Service with Service Cloud and Amazon Connect: Deepening the Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect integration, Salesforce and AWS are bringing Amazon Connect Chat to Service Cloud Digital Engagement and Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling to enhance the Salesforce Service Cloud Omnichannel supervisor experience. This, together with integrated generative AI capabilities powering unified customer insights and both agent and manager automated assistance, will enable a unified customer experience, more productive agents across channels, and more informed supervisors. This first phase of this deeper integration is planned for release in early 2024.

• Empowering Developers with New AWS Compute and Development Services: Salesforce is working with AWS to reimagine Heroku as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer (available in the first half of 2024) for development of AI-first apps across Salesforce and AWS. Heroku will fortify its Dyno compute functionality by using the most powerful and cost-effective infrastructure from AWS, including accelerated Amazon EC2 instances powered by Nvidia GPUs, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia for machine learning (ML) training and inference, along with additional GPU-optimized EC2 instances for graphics-intensive applications. They will also use AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances for the best price-performance compute. This will provide Heroku customers with the most performant, cost-effective infrastructure across resource-heavy workloads such as development with FMs. In addition, Heroku will help customers build applications faster and more securely with Amazon CodeWhisperer. Salesforce developers will also be able to use Einstein Copilot Studio to create custom actions that Einstein Copilot can invoke, which range from workflows in Salesforce to services hosted on AWS, creating a new AI-first pattern for cross-platform process automation.

“Today’s announcement is an incredible milestone in the evolution of our longstanding partnership with AWS,” said Marc Benioff, chair and CEO, Salesforce. “We’re bringing together the #No. 1 AI CRM provider and the leading cloud provider to deliver a trusted, open, integrated data and AI platform, and ensuring we meet massive customer demand for our products on the AWS Marketplace. With these enhancements to our partnership, we’re enabling all of our customers to be more innovative, productive and successful in this new AI era.”

“Salesforce and AWS make it easy for developers to securely access and leverage data and generative AI technologies to drive rapid transformation for their organizations and industries,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO, AWS. “With this expanded partnership, our joint customers gain powerful new ways to innovate, collaborate, and build more customer-focused applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services.”

Customers benefiting from the expanded relationship between AWS and Salesforce include:

“As an industry leading insurance company, State FarmⓇ has teamed up with both AWS and Salesforce for years, and each collaboration has yielded tremendous value for our teams and the customers we serve,” said Fawad Ahmad, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, State Farm. “As these two leading companies expand their partnership even further, we anticipate unlocking even more value for the 94 million policies & accounts State Farm serves today.”

The Integration Delivers Seamless Generative AI Capabilities in a Unified Data Lake for Advanced Observability, Security Lake, and Application Insights

Today, ChaosSearch, a leader in data analytics, announced the integration of Chaos LakeDB with Amazon Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS), a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies accessible via an API to build and scale generative AI applications. This integration is designed to transform the way organizations leverage generative artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with their unified data lakes for observability, security lakes, and application insight use cases, providing clients with enhanced simplicity, choice, and security. Chaos LakeDB customers can select any large language model (LLM) from Amazon Bedrock’s choice of high-performing FMs.

The combination of generative AI and ChaosSearch’s unified data lake offers new possibilities for enterprises. Chaos LakeDB opens these opportunities while delivering cost-effective scaling and simplifying working with data pipelines, data preparation, and data islands. It integrates with and orchestrates pre-trained generative AI models as a complement to Search and SQL analytics, creating an ideal launch point for enterprises to immediately realize efficiency improvements across observability, security lake, and application insight use cases.

"As a long-term partner with ChaosSearch, we've witnessed firsthand the transformative impact of their technology on our data analytics capabilities," said Jimmy McDermott of PATHWAYos. "The integration of Chaos LakeDB with Amazon Bedrock represents a leap forward in our ability to harness the full power of generative AI within our data strategy. The seamless and secure interaction with LLMs has allowed us to tap into a new dimension of data intelligence, optimizing our workflows, and enhancing our decision-making process. ChaosSearch's vision for the future of data interaction is not just a promise; it's a reality that's delivering exceptional value to our organization."

Chaos LakeDB integration with Amazon Bedrock allows users to engage with their data through a conversational AI interface, leveraging public and private LLM models. By utilizing prompt engineering and orchestrating chain-of-thought interaction, users can converse directly with their data with enhanced security. The integration leverages AWS’s data security and privacy best practices and no confidential or proprietary data is shared with the LLM. Furthermore, this design removes the challenges of complex and costly model training while preventing data hallucinations.

With the integration of Chaos LakeDB with Amazon Bedrock, organizations can further isolate their data in a private workspace where all exchanges of information between the database and the LLM are private. None of the customer’s data is used to train or fine-tune the underlying LLM. In essence, the LLM is private to the user account.

Chaos LakeDB’s integration with Amazon Bedrock delivers:

• Intuitive Data Exploration: Understand complex data effortlessly with ChaosSearch AI Assistant's ability to suggest, process queries, and surface crucial insights, eliminating the barrier of advanced analytical skills.
• Code Co-pilot: Receive smart support for writing and refining Elastic and SQL queries, with the assurance of secure processing.
• Enhanced Team Collaboration: Promote efficient teamwork and shared understanding through user-friendly data sharing and exploration tools, suitable for various expertise levels.
• Immediate Insights: Obtain real-time visibility into key operational areas such as system behavior, security monitoring, and application performance.

"AI is transforming business intelligence," said Dr. Sherry Marcus, director of Applied Science of Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan at Amazon Web Services. "The Chaos LakeDB integration with Amazon Bedrock is simplifying how customers engage with and analyze their data—and with the security and scalability that enterprises demand. Using conversational queries to interact with their data, customers will be able to glean deeper insights and make more informed decisions. We look forward to seeing how the power of generative AI will enhance customers’ business strategies."

"At ChaosSearch, we are deeply passionate about empowering our clients to conquer the ever-growing mountain of data analytics challenges," said Thomas Hazel, founder and CTO of ChaosSearch. "The integration of Chaos LakeDB with Amazon Bedrock is a critical milestone on our ambitious roadmap. It's designed to provide a straightforward, high-impact entry point for organizations embarking on their generative AI journey. We're not just enhancing our platform; we're providing a key that unlocks high-value insights while simplifying the journey to scale analytics. Our dedication to innovation is relentless, and this integration exemplifies our commitment to delivering not just solutions but pathways to transformation and growth that redefine analytics at scale for our clients."

An innovative solution for data interaction and analysis, Chaos LakeDB's integration with Amazon Bedrock is a powerful tool for businesses worldwide. As the company moves forward with its dynamic roadmap, clients can anticipate even more advanced features and capabilities tailored to their specific needs. As clients look to train their own models or augment existing FMs, Chaos LakeDB will play a critical role for creation, test data access and exporting for training and deploying generative AI models in production at scale without breaking the bank.

Insight Enterprises, a global Solutions Integrator driving client success through digital transformation, has been recognized by Cisco as the Americas IoT/Industry Partner of the Year and SMB Partner of the Year, USA West Area.

The Geo Awards, announced Nov. 9 at the Cisco Partner Summit in Miami, reflect the top-performing partners within specific technology markets across a geographical region. Award recipients are selected by a committee of executives representing Cisco’s Global and Regional Partner Sales Organizations.

“Our partnership with Cisco enables us to deliver unparalleled levels of innovation to our clients, maximizing their investments in networking and data center modernization,” said Megan Amdahl, senior vice president of client experience and North America chief operating officer, Insight. “Insight’s expertise across the entire IT spectrum allows us to tailor solutions using the best Cisco products and technology for IoT, security, cloud and data platforms that meet their evolving business demands.”

For over 25 years, Insight and Cisco have helped companies scale efficiently, reduce development costs and risks, and quicken the time-to-value of new business solutions from years down to months. As a Cisco Gold Partner with more than 350 Cisco engineers, Insight holds 2,500+ Cisco certifications and master specializations in Data Center and Hybrid Cloud, Networking, Collaboration, Security and Service Provider Technology.

Through Insight OneCall™ for Cisco infrastructure, Insight helps organizations of all sizes scale applications across cloud and edge devices while upholding platform dependability and enabling future-ready data centers via managed cloud services, network security and 24/7/365 remote technical support.

“The theme at Partner Summit 2023 was ‘Greater Together’ and winners of the Geo Awards are fantastic examples of how we partner to achieve shared success in various regions of the world,” said Rhonda Henley, vice president, Americas partner organization at Cisco. “I am pleased to recognize Insight as the winner of the IoT and SMB Partner of the Year 2023, further underscoring their outstanding accomplishments in the Americas and USA West Area.”

ContentGPT will better understand open internet user interest and intent to optimise results and deliver more accurate targeting for clients

In a significant development, RTB House, a leader in digital marketing, has announced the introduction of ContentGPT. This innovative technology component is set to revolutionize the way marketers understand and engage with online audiences. By leveraging the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and Large Language Models (LLMs), ContentGPT provides unparalleled insights into the specific interests and intents of webpage readers across the Open Internet.

A Leap Forward in Digital Marketing

Making more extensive use of publishers’ first-party data is supposed to be the main element allowing marketers to run Open Internet campaigns as effectively as before, in the cookieless era. Understanding the exact interests and intents of webpage readers is crucial to achieving it. The introduction of deep learning algorithms like GPT and LLMs has already disrupted various digital applications, including chatbots, by facilitating a more sophisticated understanding of text. Now, RTB House is taking this technology further by applying it to marketing, offering a degree of precision in content understanding that surpasses currently available general context-based targeting and audience classification mechanisms.

The Challenge of Scale

While there is no doubt that applying GPT/LLM models can significantly enhance the quality of content understanding, the real challenge lies in managing the sheer scale. The Open Internet is vast, comprising billions of articles. To process this immense volume of content efficiently using LLM models demands extensive computing power. This is where RTB House's expertise comes into play. As a pioneer and known for successfully adapting advanced deep learning algorithms for marketing purposes within the tough Real-Time-Bidding environment, RTB House has once again demonstrated its capability to harness state-of-the-art technology for practical marketing applications.

ContentGPT: Versatile and Powerful

This cutting-edge technology is poised to be a transformative tool within RTB House's product portfolio. In its flagship performance-oriented service, ContentGPT will enhance the optimization of client results. In the AdLook Smart buying platform, it will refine the accuracy of content targeting. Furthermore, in the PrimeAudience solution, ContentGPT will improve the quality of audience segmentation.

A Vision for the Future

"Integration of GPT/LLM models into our system tremendously improves the value we can deliver for our clients, especially in the upcoming cookieless future. This innovative approach to leveraging insights from first-party publisher data will help mitigate the impact of reduced cross-domain signal availability. With ContentGPT, we are bringing to market a best-in-class solution that redefines the standards in this field," states Robert Dyczkowski, Chief Executive Officer at RTB House.

Michael Lamb, Chief Commercial Officer at RTB House, adds: “Our vision is to become open internet marketing leaders and ContentGPT is an essential component to achieve it. Ultra-accurate understanding of content across the open web is crucial for programmatic advertising, so we’re proud to be at the forefront of ensuring that brands can capitalise on this data.”

Empowering DOOH buyers to navigate the complexities of the programmatic ecosystem, Hivestack Curate provides an exclusive, centralized and transparent marketplace to transact with multiple supply sources across one deal

Hivestack, the world's leading, independent programmatic digital out of home (DOOH) ad tech company today announced the launch of Hivestack Curate, a new DOOH marketplace that enables buyers to customize their inventory sourcing and build strategic, curated deals based on their specific business goals.

Hivestack Curate provides a unique opportunity that puts buyers in the driver's seat to create tailored, transparent, customized deals. It also enables them to have full control over their inventory sourcing to build and purchase strategic, goal-oriented supply into a single, unified deal ID. Curators will be able to build premium inventory deals from over 390 media owners integrated with Hivestack's global DOOH marketplace across 35+ markets. Furthermore, Hivestack Curate's sophisticated solution allows DOOH data providers to integrate powerful first and third-party data, driving greater levels of audience reach and engagement for their curated deals.

With this new platform, Hivestack is offering efficiency without sacrificing quality or scale allowing buyers to intentionally select specific, highly curated inventory for their campaigns according to business needs, all within a single, unified deal ID. In addition, buyers will be able to leverage high quality first or third-party data at scale, to create custom data sets delivering unique audience targeting and measurement features only available within the Hivestack platform.

Andreas Soupliotis, CEO & Founder of Hivestack, commented: "Hivestack Curate provides DOOH buyers with enhanced tools to operate and navigate the fragmented and complex programmatic landscape, enabling them to have more control and autonomy to strategically curate their supply inventory in a transparent and centralized platform. This new marketplace will offer buyers unparalleled supply side decisioning power that can be managed across teams and platforms across the globe."

Kevin McDonald, CEO at AgencyX Inc. added: "It has always been a priority across all of our clients to drive efficiencies and deliver the most impactful business outcomes for our partners. Hivestack Curate provides us with enhanced abilities to streamline inventory selection in a more strategic and customized way and is a welcome addition to the programmatic DOOH buying process. We are now in a position to prioritize deal curation unlocking incremental value from DOOH deals and giving our clients improved visibility over their supply strategy."

With Hivestack Curate, Hivestack demonstrates its continued commitment to improve efficiencies and drive additional value for both buyers and media owners, across the DOOH landscape. With simple, easy-to-use navigation coupled with a premium curated marketplace of global inventory and audience data, DOOH buyers have a new opportunity to gain greater control and visibility over their campaigns, from planning through to activation and measurement.

To consolidate, harmonize and modernize the digital landscape of TK Elevator with an AI-first strategy

Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced a strategic long-term collaboration with TK Elevator (TKE), one of the world's leading urban mobility companies. As a part of the engagement, Infosys will consolidate, harmonize, and modernize TK Elevator's digital landscape. The engagement aims to continually innovate and transform the company's application and IT environment, leveraging an AI-first strategy powered by Infosys Topaz, an AI-first set of services, solutions and platforms using generative AI technologies.

The two companies will work together to transition the operations of all TK Elevator's business applications across North America and major markets in Europe to Infosys, thereby enabling integrated applications management. This will not only help unify the underlying infrastructure operations to enable an end-to-end, business process-focused operational paradigm, but also contribute to a simplified and agile digital landscape.

Some of the key deliverables of this collaboration include:

• Application management: Infosys will leverage its Live Enterprise Application Management Platform (LEAP), a cloud-enabled platform to provide NextGen Application Management Services and part of Infosys Cobalt, to deliver a user-centric, business outcome-driven solution.
• Underlying infrastructure: Infosys will lead Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD WAN) transformation and operations, in addition to the existing Service Desk, Data Center, Cloud, LAN, and Workplace.
• Future-ready IT model: Infosys will also work towards delivering an integrated applications and underlying infrastructure operating model, including Service Integration and Management (SIAM).

Susan Poon, Global CIO at TK Elevator, said, "Technology empowers our employees and business associates to deliver high-quality services to customers and users across the value chain. We are delighted to significantly expand our collaboration with Infosys, which brings end-to-end digital transformation capabilities, helping us accelerate our business transformation and to realize our strategic vision."

"We aim to bring diverse geographies and business units together with this strategic collaboration. The enhanced collaboration with Infosys will enable a strong, globally harmonized technology backbone, while simultaneously contributing to deliver savings for TK Elevator. With this new initiative, we are confident that Infosys will help us stay a step ahead in a dynamic and competitive landscape," said, Sebastian Oberst, Global Head – IT Governance at TK Elevator.

Jasmeet Singh, Executive Vice President and Global Head, Manufacturing, Infosys, said, "As manufacturers reimagine their business, they are increasingly looking to refresh the core of their technology stack and application support processes. We are excited to collaborate with TK Elevator and usher an advanced infrastructure and applications services operating model that will help harmonize and future-proof their IT operations and accelerate their digital transformation objectives. Infosys Cobalt and Infosys Topaz will serve as the core of TK Elevator's digital strategy, providing the agility and resilience needed to realize their vision."

Multi-cloud Industry Veteran Brings Extensive Architecture Leadership and Managed Services Experience

2bcloud, a leading next-generation multi-cloud managed service provider for technology companies on their cloud journey, today announced that Hemant Javeri has joined 2bcloud as the new Head of Solution Architecture. The appointment of Javeri, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ambassador, as part of 2bcloud's continued expansion of its U.S. service offerings and capabilities. Javeri will play a pivotal role in helping companies on their cloud journey and cost savings, particularly in the realms of cloud adoption, data modernization, and enhancing security.

Javeri joins 2bcloud with a wealth of experience, most recently serving as Head of the Solution Architecture Team at Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, where he led significant initiatives in architecture leadership, cloud migration, and managed services for AWS, Azure, and GCP Cloud platforms.

"Hemant Javeri's extensive experience in multi-cloud environments, especially with AWS and Azure, makes him an ideal leader to advance 2bcloud's service offerings," said Gil Ron, CEO and Co-Founder of 2bcloud. "His expertise will be crucial as we continue to develop innovative, customer-centric solutions in a dynamic cloud market, enhancing our managed services and consultancy to meet the evolving needs of our customers."

With more than 25 years of diverse experience in the tech industry, including healthcare and financial verticals Javeri has demonstrated his prowess in Cloud Strategy and Adoption, Application & Infrastructure Modernization, Data Modernization, Security and Data Architecture, IT Strategy and Planning, Application Portfolio Management, and Application Portfolio Rationalization.

As an AWS Ambassador, Javeri stands out for his expertise in AWS technologies and his ability to drive AWS proficiency within his organization. This prestigious recognition reflects his commitment to advancing cloud solutions and his role in supporting customer success in the AWS ecosystem.

"My career has been dedicated to guiding customers in meeting their cloud security and compliance goals," said Hemant Javeri, Head of Solution Architecture at 2bcloud. "AWS is a powerful tool for cloud transformation, and with 2bcloud's expanded capabilities, I'm eager to contribute to our clients' success across various stages of their AWS and/or Azure journey."

Javeri's diverse skill set, and certifications underscore his ability to lead 2bcloud's solution architect team effectively. This strategic appointment marks a significant step for 2bcloud in bolstering its expertise and capacity to meet growing market demands, reinforcing the company's position as a leading provider of cloud technology solutions.