Industry-first capability enables enterprises to manage a data mesh sourced from multiple cloud platforms within a single console

Ascend.io, the leader in data pipeline automation, announced today the integration of new Data Mesh capabilities in the company's Data Pipeline Automation Platform, enabling businesses for the first time to share and link data across multiple data clouds from a single console.

The Ascend Data Pipeline Automation Platform is a single platform with intelligence to detect and propagate change across a company's ecosystem, ensure data accuracy, and quantify the cost of its  data products. Pipelines powered by Ascend seamlessly ingest, transform, and share data for the business, across the entire end-to-end journey.

The new Data Mesh capabilities allow teams to package data into products that can be easily consumed and reused across the organization, while assuring the lineage of that data to ensure that information is current and accurate. Ascend is the only company in the market that provides this capability across multiple data cloud platforms, vastly increasing the value that businesses can derive from their data.

"The reality is, the vast majority of companies now use multiple cloud data platforms, and the larger they get, the more likely that becomes," said Ascend Founder and CEO Sean Knapp. "This results in a lack of end-to-end visibility and leverage across teams, and lost lineage. Ascend for Data Mesh pulls these fragmented silos together and companies that are rapidly scaling can continue reaping the same benefits of Ascend's Data Pipeline Automation Platform regardless of how many teams or compute engines are involved. A new team and data cloud can be added in less than a minute, and engineers can be contributing to the mesh in less than three minutes"

The new Data Mesh capabilities incorporated into Ascend's platform were developed through the combination of two advancements unique to Ascend:

• First is the company's extensible architecture enabling support of multiple cloud data platforms (i.e., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark) on a unified architecture.
• Second is Ascend's fingerprinting technology built into the DataAware Control Plane,  which enables the company to link code and data together, tracking lineage and ensuring data integrity.

With these two capabilities combined, companies can fully track, automate and optimize data as it traverses across data platforms throughout the data lifecycle.

Ascend works with a range of customers across industries to help businesses get more out of their data, among them Skydio, Komodo Health, and News Corp.

"We are all excited about getting our hands on the new functionality and harnessing the power of the multi-data cloud concept," said Simon Smith, CDO at NewsCorp, "This idea of full end-to-end lineage/visibility across clouds and only bringing data together when you need to. It's really the first time that the whole data fabric/mesh has made sense to me, as I can see how it would work practically!"

New solutions will enable businesses to capture data across the event channel and visualize the attendee journey for improved experience orchestration, resulting in accelerated customer acquisition and greater customer loyalty

RainFocus™, provider of the next-generation event marketing platform, today announced that it has released new data integration solutions in collaboration with Adobe to seamlessly connect real-time behavioral event data with Adobe's technologies for accelerated growth. This announcement follows RainFocus' recent news on becoming an Adobe Certified Platinum Partner, working with Adobe to elevate customer journeys for joint clients and optimizing omnichannel marketing and sales programs.

The new capabilities easily ingest and map RainFocus data into Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), enabling customers to manage and configure their instrumentation of RainFocus' digital workflow touchpoints for analytics. The data collected and aggregated from these solutions can be used to visualize attendee journeys and power more personalized experiences at scale.

RainFocus and Adobe are collaboratively delivering personalized experiences for attendees at Adobe Summit, taking place March 21-23, 2023, in Las Vegas and virtually. This hybrid event will be powered by the RainFocus platform, enabling seamless experiences for more than 10,000 in-person and virtual attendees, 200 sessions, and over 170 sponsors.

"We have been working with Adobe on their event portfolio for the past five years, and this elevated partnership enables us to outline the customer journey so that we can deliver personalized experiences to our clients' customers, making each customer touchpoint more enticing and memorable," said JR Sherman, CEO of RainFocus. "Utilizing Adobe's innovative solutions and the RainFocus platform, we can deliver personalization at scale, measure impact, and drive sales and ROI simultaneously for Adobe Summit and beyond."

This partnership gives companies the tools to leverage zero- and first-party customer data from events to fuel engagement with unique experiences. By bringing together event and marketing data, Adobe and RainFocus enable brands to connect with audiences through experiences and further engage audiences through digital marketing programs in meaningful ways.

"RainFocus, enhanced by Adobe integrations, helps enterprises personalize experiences for an underserved component of the marketing mix – events and conferences," said Justin Merickel, Vice President of Business Development, Experience Cloud at Adobe. "Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Analytics and the RainFocus event platform together provide our mutual customers with great in-person, hybrid, and virtual event experiences. "

Study explores most commonly used data, data provider selection and data strategy planning

Digital data pioneer Datonics has released industry intelligence about the use of third-party data in the programmatic ecosystem. Its Programmatic Audience Targeting Survey, which gathered input from more than 400 media strategists, planners and buyers, reveals that third-party data remains an integral part of digital marketing strategy and execution. The study explores the types of data used, factors in selecting a data provider, and data strategy planning initiatives.

Third-party data is used in the majority of digital marketing campaigns with 53% of respondents citing use of third-party data in campaigns from an average of 11.9 data providers. Respondents also ranked the importance of various factors when selecting data.

“Third-party data remains extremely valuable to brands because of its unique ability to address various factors that other types of data such as zero, first and second-party data can’t due to scale limitations,” said Michael Benedek, CEO, Datonics. “Our study demonstrates the continued demand for third-party data in the digital marketing and programmatic ecosystems for the special value it brings. It is still the data that marketers are relying on to help them reach new audiences and acquire customers.”

Datonics’ survey also explored data strategy planning that advertisers are doing in light of technological evolutions such as the deprecation of third-party cookies and loss of signal identifiers, as well as new privacy regulations. The survey found that the majority of media strategists, planners and buyers, 69% of respondents, are fairly concerned or more about an industry change when it comes to data strategy.

“The digital marketing industry is among the fastest evolving business sectors out there. We are used to change and being agile,” said Benedek. “With new technologies such as data clean rooms, identifiers and other data sources, marketers are looking to scale their audiences in new ways with third-party data.”

Datonics data is built on 300+ million monthly users covering 90% of North America, aggregated from a network of online websites and best-in-class specialty data partners, including 1,300 segments of search, intent, life-stage, behavioral, B2B, demographic, point-of-interest and past purchase segments. Datonics also offers an unlimited number of custom segments that can be built from keywords or location visits.

Kindervag will bring his unique expertise in zero trust framework to Traceable AI in their mission to revolutionize API security

Traceable AI, the industry's leading API security company, today announced that John Kindervag, known for creating the Zero Trust Model for cybersecurity, will be joining Traceable as an advisor. As one of the world's foremost cybersecurity experts, Kindervag will be deeply involved in the product strategy for Traceable's API Security Platform, as well as  helping Traceable educate the market on the urgency of prioritizing API security.

Kindervag, who currently serves as SVP, Cybersecurity Strategy, and Global Fellow at ON2IT, is the first in a series of experts to support Traceable's mission to revolutionize the API security market. "APIs offer companies an unprecedented opportunity to drive economic growth," shared Kindervag. "But most people don't understand how they work or why they essentially offer hackers the most direct route to the sensitive data they're seeking. Traceable understands both the economic potential as well as the danger that APIs present for organizations and their customers, and I'm excited to work with them on bringing API security to the forefront of the industry's priorities."

Kindervag joins Traceable at a time of rapid growth for the company, coming off the heels of record growth in 2022, and recent industry award recognition, including the TMCnet Zero Trust Excellence Award, The DEVIES Award, and The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.  In addition to lending his voice and expertise, working closely with Traceable's customers and his unparalleled expertise in the Zero Trust framework, Kindervag will help shape Traceable's approach to product development and direction, to further empower Traceable to offer the industry and their customers innovative and advanced solutions for securing their APIs through the entire software development lifecycle.

"APIs have become the universal attack vector," said Traceable Co-Founder and CTO, Sanjay Nagaraj. "In the past, hackers had to find ways of bypassing existing solutions, such as WAFs, DLP, and API Gateways, in order to find data and disrupt systems. Now, they can simply exploit an API, and obtain access to sensitive data, and not even have to exploit the other solutions in an organization's security stack. APIs present the largest attack surface we have ever encountered in the industry. It's for this very reason, we are committed to our mission to protect every API, and that includes bringing on the right experts to help us fulfill that mission. We are thrilled to be working with John Kindervag, an industry pioneer who understands both the economic potential for APIs, as well as the urgency of API security, but also has the expertise to help us realize the full potential of Zero Trust in relation to APIs. Zero Trust without API security is simply not Zero Trust, and we are well on our way to providing the industry with innovative solutions to enhance and build on the Zero Trust framework."

Expanded Verisk data solutions power personalization and drive decisions, improving marketing ROI

Verisk, a leading global data analytics and technology provider, has launched a new product suite that helps marketers of considered purchases such as insurance make real-time decisions during inbound consumer interactions.

The new “Real-Time Decisions” product suite from Verisk Marketing Solutions empowers marketers to make split-second choices about how best to engage with consumers, enabling improved customer experiences and higher conversion rates.  

“Marketers and the analytics professionals supporting them need data available in real-time to inform instantaneous decisions that optimize consumer experiences," said Eli Schwarz, Chief Strategy Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions. "Our Real-Time Decisions (RTD) suite of data solutions addresses that need through a single API call with immediate response times, enabling marketers in insurance and other considered purchases categories to improve the profitability of their inbound calls, leads, and website interactions.”

The Real-Time Decisions product line launches with five configurable features immediately available:

1. Identity Scoring: Verifies the quality of contact data by scoring the accuracy of the identity.
2. Attribute Enrichment: Provides insight into demographics, property ownership, financial characteristics, interests, etc.
3. Lead Intelligence: Provides unique transparency into the origin and history of purchased leads.
4. Guardian: Verifies Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) consent in advance of calling and obtains visual proof in the event of a complaint.
5. Identity Completion: Turns fractional identity markers into complete identity profiles.

The launch of the Real-Time Decisions line follows a successful early adopter program.

“For the past six months, we’ve worked closely to gather feedback from strategic, trusted customers in insurance and other considered purchase verticals,” said John Park, senior product manager for Verisk’s Real-Time Decisions.  “Those customers have helped validate and prove out the core use cases for the solution that we believe will be most relevant to future customers across multiple industries.”

The most common use cases include:

• Third-party purchased leads: Gain insight to verify the consumer-provided TCPA consent on the original web form; know the origin, history, and value of the lead; and confirm and supplement consumer-provided data on the lead form, while enriching insights on each consumer to know how best to personalize engagements.
• First-party website forms: Leverage identity scoring to assess the validity of the contact data submitted by the consumer and personalize experiences in real-time by instantly enriching consumer profiles with a 360-degree view of their characteristics.
• Inbound phone calls: Transform a single, fractional input, like a phone number, into a complete identity profile to enable personalized, real-time call routing and improve conversion outcomes.

The features delivered through Real-Time Decisions products are powered by the unique data asset ecosystem that Verisk Marketing Solutions has built through the acquisition and integration of Jornaya and Infutor. Jornaya’s proprietary network of over 55,000 comparison shopping sites combined with Infutor’s unique identity graph and people-based attributes enable Verisk Marketing Solutions to deliver the three key components of personalization – Who, What, and When – across all marketing channels. Bringing this information into a single source makes it easier than ever to manage consumer consent, mitigate compliance risk, and improve the efficacy and profitability of marketing efforts.

Aporia, the end-to-end observability platform for machine learning, announced today that Shai Alani joined the company as VP of Marketing. Shai will play an instrumental part in developing Aporia's global marketing framework, including digital and brand marketing, customer acquisition, and partnerships. Shai's expertise will also help drive Aporia's events strategy, with plans to participate in leading industry events worldwide.

Shai joins Aporia with a wealth of experience in creating innovative 360° digital go-to-market strategies. Prior to joining Aporia, he was the Director of Product, Digital and Data at Partner Israel, responsible for global marketing activities and the adoption of digital technologies across the business. Previously, Shai held the Head of Digital and Data position at El Al Israel Airlines, managing the digital assets, budgets, and advertising strategy for the various products that the company offers.

"I'm thrilled to join a company that is at the forefront of the ML observability industry," said Shai Alani. "I was drawn to Aporia because of its unique approach to monitoring, explaining, and optimizing ML models, as well as its commitment to the ethical and responsible use of AI. I'm excited to work with the team to further develop Aporia's marketing initiatives and to establish the company as the go-to solution for businesses seeking to maximize the value of their machine learning models. With Aporia's cutting-edge technology and dedicated team, I am confident that we will be able to continue to drive growth and strengthen Aporia's position as a leading player in the market."

Aporia's observability platform is specifically designed to enable data science and machine learning teams to monitor, explain, and improve their ML models in production. The platform is used by Fortune 500 companies and data science teams across industries, empowering businesses to ensure responsible AI and fairness. With Aporia, teams gain production visibility, proactive monitoring and automation, advanced investigation tools, and explainability.

"Shai's appointment as our VP of Marketing comes at a crucial time for Aporia, as we continue to expand our platform's capabilities and grow our global footprint," said Liran Hason, CEO and co-founder of Aporia. "His expertise in creating successful go-to-market strategies and his deep understanding of digital technologies will be instrumental in driving Aporia's growth and ensuring our message resonates with our target audience. With Shai on board, we are confident that we can accelerate our mission to enable businesses to trust their AI and drive positive outcomes for their organizations."

Kore.ai Positioned as a Leader for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision 

Kore.ai, the world's leading conversational AI platform and solutions provider, today announced that the company has been named a Leader in the Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. This is the second consecutive year that Kore.ai has been recognized as a Leader for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. (Access a complimentary copy of the report here).

"We are proud to be positioned as a Leader again in one of the fastest-growing software markets," said Kore.ai Founder and CEO Raj Koneru. "Conversational AI will play a major role in the future of customer and employee experiences as people continue to engage with brands and enterprises. We believe Kore.ai's success is due to our ability to anticipate market needs, build a technology stack with comprehensive capabilities that are unmatched in the industry, and execute effectively. We will continue innovating in a technology space that's evolving rapidly and transforming global businesses in a fundamental way."

With over 350 customers, Kore.ai automates billions of interactions every year through its conversational AI platform and solutions, and has delivered an estimated $1 billion in cost savings to global enterprise customers. Around 200 million consumers and two million enterprise users currently leverage the company's solutions to improve customer, employee, and contact center agent experiences for optimized business outcomes.

Kore.ai offers a no-code Experience Optimization (XO) platform that allows organizations to design, build, test, and deploy conversational user interfaces, virtual assistants and process apps with little technical expertise or support required. The company also offers a growing portfolio of ready-to-use delivery platforms and domain-specific solutions such as SmartAssist, AgentAssist, BankAssist, HealthAssist, RetailAssist, SearchAssist, WorkAssist, ProcureAssist, HR Assist, and IT Assist that are deployed on a subscription model basis to accelerate adoption and time-to-value for customers.

"The platform is very user-friendly, even non-technical people can develop and configure the solution," said Santosh Kumar, Commercial Services Lead at Roche Diagnostics, reviewing the Kore.ai XO Platform. "The platform is enterprise-class and capable of integrating with internal and external systems or services using APIs. It allows us to offer cutting-edge technology through both voice and digital channels to automate customer interactions and deliver a better experience."

"Our XO Platform is the foundation upon which we unveil all our innovations," said Kore.ai Chief Technology Officer Prasanna Kumar Arikala. "We believe the recognition from Gartner is a testament to our excellence in some of the capabilities that are critical for an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform. From our perspective, Kore.ai stands unmatched when it comes to enterprise administration, natural language understanding, dialog management, back-end integrations, and agent escalations."

Early this year, the company released version 10.0 of the Kore.ai XO Platform, with upgrades that enable easy and open integration with global enterprise systems. The latest version also integrates with large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-3, and leverages generative AI technologies to further simplify the design, development, and management of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs).

"Kore.ai is among the first to embrace the use of LLMs for enterprise conversational AI use cases. By leveraging our cutting-edge technology, our customized enterprise LLMs seamlessly assimilate and orchestrate conversations using enterprise data, business rules, and user context. Exciting developments lie ahead as we continue to enhance our LLMs' capabilities," added Arikala.

In 2022, Kore.ai opened offices in Australia, Singapore, Germany, UK, UAE and Mexico in addition to bolstering its presence in North America, Japan, and Korea, and growing its employee base to 850.

The company announced a freemium model with full-fledged self-service and do-it-yourself (DIY) functionalities that empowered small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), startups and the broader developer community to easily access the XO platform and leverage the benefits of enterprise-grade scalability, security and NLU sophistication in a pay-as-you-go model. It has also formalized the learning process, and is one of the few players to offer certification through the Kore.ai Academy that empowers new developers to learn faster and accelerate their IVA development journey.

"We believe we are uniquely placed in the conversational AI space due to our strong platform capabilities, comprehensive solution stack, and a clear understanding of market needs. With key innovations and platform upgrades in the offering this year, we plan to be at the forefront of driving significant transformation in the way enterprises operate and pave the way for future growth," Koneru said.

Former Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, and Aruba Channel Executive Karl Soderlund Joins Leader in Cloud-based Zero Trust Security

Zscaler, Inc., the leader in cloud security, today announced that Karl Soderlund has been appointed as the company’s Senior Vice President, Worldwide Partners, and Alliances. In his role at Zscaler, Soderlund will be responsible for advancing and modernizing the Zscaler partner program by developing and executing a competitive go-to-market strategy, and leading a world-class channel team.

“As the leader in cloud security, Zscaler continues to become a destination for top talent,” said Dali Rajic, Chief Operating Officer, Zscaler. “Karl’s deep partner expertise and proven track record with the execution of highly strategic partner programs at top networking and cybersecurity companies demonstrates that he is the right industry veteran to take our channel partner program to the next level. As we continue to make meaningful investments in our partner model, I am excited to welcome Karl to the company and am confident that his contributions will deliver results and support company growth.”

The Zscaler partner program is comprised of leading system integrators, managed service providers, solution providers, and distributors, and continues to add new classes of partners that are expertly suited to help enterprises take advantage of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform. The partner program is responsible for delivering 95 percent of the company’s business. The Zscaler partner program goes beyond providing access to offering broad-based enablement across the lifecycle of Zscaler’s customers.

“Zscaler is an innovator and leader in cloud security that has consistently delivered on the promise of zero trust while redefining network security with the world’s largest inline cloud security platform,” said Karl Soderlund, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Zscaler. “With a total addressable market of $72B, it was a clear choice to join Zscaler. I look forward to bringing my experience to dramatically elevate Zscaler’s partner program.”

Soderlund joins Zscaler from Palo Alto Networks where he served as a Senior Vice President. Soderlund’s time at Palo Alto Networks was marked by strong accomplishments, including attracting and retaining top talent, architecting award-winning channel programs, and securing new partners. Soderlund has been awarded channel chief eight times over his career and for the past three years, he's been recognized as one of the top 50 most influential leaders in the industry.

Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Soderlund also held senior roles at Aruba Networks, Avaya, HP, Cisco Systems, and Fortinet. Soderlund received his Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Anna Maria College.