Net new customers drive Data Integrity Suite sales, expanding Precisely reach into AI and advanced analytics use cases

Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, today announced continued momentum for its Precisely Data Integrity Suite. The company has added dozens of customers spanning data integration, data governance, and geo addressing Suite services, with nearly half of global Suite sales attributed to new customer logos. Precisely is helping companies, such as Belfius Bank, Smiley Technologies, UK Power Networks, and Vantage Towers, to quickly build trust in the data they store in modern cloud and hybrid environments. These organizations use this data in AI, advanced analytics, and other high-value, data-driven initiatives to achieve greater operational efficiencies and improved business outcomes.

“In our ongoing commitment to make data easy to discover, understand and use reliably, we are procuring the Precisely Data Integrity Suite,” said Zachary Decent, Data Governance & Quality Manager, Enterprise Data Management at UK Power Networks, providing power to a quarter of the UK’s population. “This move signifies our dedication to fostering Data Best Practice principles, leveraging this platform to offer stakeholders an enriched experience through a comprehensive data catalog, with clearly defined data responsibilities and robust quality monitoring mechanisms.”

"Smiley's Analytics Services depend on a very high level of accuracy for address validation and location data,” said Chris Raper, Chief Strategy Officer, Smiley Technologies Inc., a provider of core banking software and services for community banks and financial institutions. “Leveraging Precisely Data Integrity Suite has allowed us to seamlessly integrate these services into our overall analytics solution supporting Community Banks.”

Research and consulting firm Gartner® identified data integrity as one of four themes in its recent Hype Cycle™ research^1. According to the report, “AI relies on data, and better data leads to more reliable AI solutions. Without automated support, validating massive volumes of data is impossible.”

“We chose the Precisely Data Integrity Suite because it will provide us with a strong data governance framework that enables us to leverage trusted data across our organization,” said Sascha Glomski, Manager BI & Finance Transformation, Vantage Towers. “As one of the largest operators of mobile towers in Europe, having end-to-end visibility and a better understanding of our data will help us improve operations, reduce costs, and accelerate time to market.”

In addition to customer traction, Precisely added new partner certifications for the Data Integrity Suite this year. With the Suite, organizations can natively run data integrity processes at scale within leading data cloud environments, such as AWS Redshift, Databricks, Snowflake, and more, accelerating analytics where the data resides.

“Precisely allowed us to scale our integrated data governance and data quality program in order to reach our 2025 ambitions,” said Jérôme Sandron, Head of Data Governance at Belfius Bank, a leading Belgian banking and insurance group.

With the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, businesses harness trusted data to improve customer experiences, increase revenues, reduce costs, and mitigate risk. Comprising interoperable cloud services that share a common data catalog and user experience, the Suite gives organizations confidence their data, wherever it’s stored, has maximum accuracy, consistency, and context. The Data Integrity Suite includes Data Integration, Data Quality, Data Governance, Data Observability, Geo Addressing, Spatial Analytics, and Data Enrichment services.

“The strong customer momentum for the Data Integrity Suite confirms that it is essential to deliver cloud-native data integrity processing,” said Eric Yau, Chief Operating Officer at Precisely. “There is a need for trusted data, and we’re here to solve the complexities for business and data teams alike. We have extensive expertise to provide a clear path for businesses focused on achieving faster insights and optimal efficiencies for their organizations.”

Annual cnvrg.io survey reveals majority of organizations are still in the research and testing phase for generative AI

cnvrg.io, an Intel company and provider of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) platforms, today released the results of its 2023 ML Insider survey. While every industry appears to be racing toward AI, the annual survey revealed that despite interest, a majority of organizations are not yet leveraging generative AI (GenAI) technology.

Released for the third year, cnvrg.io's ML Insider survey provides an analysis of the machine learning industry, highlighting key trends, points of interest and challenges that AI professionals experience every day. This year’s report offers insights from a global panel of 430 technology professionals on how they are developing AI solutions and their approaches to applying generative AI to their businesses.

“While still in early development, generative AI has been one of the most talked-about technologies of 2023. The survey suggests organizations may be hesitant to adopt GenAI due to the barriers they face when implementing LLMs,” said Markus Flierl, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel Cloud Services. “With greater access to cost-effective infrastructure and services, such as those provided by cnvrg.io and the Intel Developer Cloud, we expect greater adoption in the next year as it will be easier to fine-tune, customize and deploy existing LLMs without requiring AI talent to manage the complexity.”

GenAI Adoption Trends

Despite the rise in awareness of GenAI technology in 2023, it is only a slice of the overall AI landscape. The survey reveals that adoption of large language models (the models for training generative AI applications and solutions) within organizations remains low.

Three-quarters of respondents report their organizations have yet to deploy GenAI models to production, while 10% of respondents report their organizations have launched GenAI solutions to production in the past year. The survey also shows that U.S.-based respondents (40%) are significantly more likely than those outside the U.S. (22%) to deploy GenAI models.

While adoption may not have taken off, organizations that have deployed GenAI models in the past year are experiencing benefits. About half of respondents say they have improved customer experiences (58%), improved efficiency (53%), enhanced product capabilities (52%) and benefited from cost savings (47%).

Adoption Challenges

The study indicates a majority of organizations approach GenAI by building their own LLM solutions and customizing to their use cases, yet nearly half of respondents (46%) see infrastructure as the greatest barrier to developing LLMs into products.

The survey highlights other challenges that might be causing a slow adoption of LLM technology in businesses, such as lack of knowledge, cost and compliance. Of the respondents, 84% admit that their skills need to improve due to increasing interest in LLM adoption, while only 19% say they have a strong understanding of the mechanisms of how LLMs generate responses.

This reveals a knowledge gap as one potential barrier to GenAI adoption that is reflected in organizations citing complexity and lack of AI talent as the biggest barriers to AI adoption and acceptance. Additionally, respondents rank compliance and privacy (28%), reliability (23%), high cost of implementation (19%) and a lack of technical skills (17%) as the greatest concerns with implementing LLMs into their businesses. When considering the biggest challenge to bringing LLMs into production, nearly half of respondents point to infrastructure.

There is no doubt GenAI is having an impact on the industry. Compared with 2022, the use of chatbots/virtual agents has spiked 26% and translation/text generation is up 12% in 2023 as popular AI use cases. This could be due to the rise in LLM technology in 2023 and the advances in GenAI technology. Organizations that have successfully deployed GenAI in the past year see benefits from the application of LLMs, such as a better customer experience (27%), improved efficiency (25%), enhanced product capabilities (25%) and cost savings (22%).

Intel’s hardware and software portfolio, including cnvrg.io, gives customers flexibility and choice when architecting an optimal AI solution based on respective performance, efficiency and cost targets. cnvrg.io helps organizations enhance their products with GenAI and LLMs by making it more cost-effective and easier to deploy large language models on Intel's purpose-built hardware. Intel is the only company with the full spectrum of hardware and software platforms, offering open and modular solutions for competitive total cost of ownership and time-to-value that organizations need to win in this era of exponential growth and AI everywhere.

According to new study from Merge, B2B SaaS companies must adopt a growing number of product integrations to meet customer demands

Merge, a leading product integration platform, released its first-ever State of Product Integrations Report based on a survey of 260 product managers and engineers.

Organizations are increasingly demanding that their B2B SaaS vendors offer seamless integrations with their technologies, which include accounting, CRM, HR, payroll, project management, recruiting, ticketing, and file storage systems. These integrations (i.e. product integrations) allow organizations to see more value from their B2B SaaS vendor’s product, whether that’s by letting them automatically provision and deprovision users, perform more robust analysis, access up-to-date documents, and much more.

But product integrations don’t just benefit the organizations that use them. According to the report, B2B SaaS companies that provide integrations have found that they’ve helped their business capture revenue in a variety of ways. This includes closing new business (59%), retaining more clients (53%), and expanding into new markets (52%).

Given the benefits that product integrations provide to both consumers and providers, more than 4 in 5 organizations (83%) have identified product integrations as one of their top priorities for 2024—leading them to set ambitious integration targets. For instance, while most (68%) organizations have built less than 10 integrations to date, 50% of organizations want to build 15 or more integrations in 2024, and nearly a fifth (19%) want to build 30 or more integrations.

Organizations, however, may struggle to meet these integration targets. Seventy-one percent say that they take at least three weeks to bring a single integration to market. Based on this pace of development, the prospect of building upwards of 10 integrations in 2024 may fall out of reach—leading organizations to disappoint clients and their go-to-market teams.

“B2B SaaS companies are under increasing pressure to offer a diverse range of integrations to set themselves apart and stay ahead of competitors. But based on our own experience and what we’ve seen in the B2B SaaS market, building and maintaining these integrations in-house simply isn’t sustainable,” said Shensi Ding, Co-Founder and CEO of Merge. “Merge’s Unified APIs can help these organizations integrate at scale; they can simply build once to one of our unified APIs to offer a whole category of integrations. In addition, we handle all of the integration maintenance and provide the necessary management tooling for customer-facing teams—all but ensuring that our clients’ integrations are reliable and performant over time.”

New Research Demonstrates Marketers Open to Experimenting with AI While Influencers Remain Optimistic But Cautious Regarding the New Technology

SocialPubli, the leading global micro-influencer marketing platform, today announced the release of the AI in Influencer Marketing 2023 study, the latest in a series of annual industry reports covering the evolution of the content creation economy through the perspectives of its key players. The global study engaged both influencers and marketers to better understand how AI is impacting and reshaping the industry.

AI is still in its early stages of development but has already impacted essential aspects of influencer marketing, including content brainstorming and creation, influencer discovery and vetting, and campaign performance measurement and analytics. The study's findings indicate that the adoption of AI within the influencer marketing space continues to increase but that there are still areas of uncertainty related to the use of this burgeoning technology.

"Nine in ten influencers report already being familiar with artificial intelligence while half are already using AI to support their work. On the agency side, nearly eight in ten marketers are leveraging AI for work, demonstrating its growing potential to support and enhance partnerships between brands and the influencers they work with," said Ismael El-Qudsi, CEO of SocialPubli. "At SocialPubli, what we've seen is that AI is not only expediting processes but also enhancing campaign effectiveness and opening up new possibilities for creativity and engagement."

When conducting the survey, SocialPubli polled 1,235 influencers as well as marketers from 73 agencies across Europe and the Americas.

INFLUENCERS AND AI

While influencer perceptions of AI vary, the majority of influencers lean toward cautious optimism regarding the impact AI has had on society and on their field of work.

• AI - A Threat or an Opportunity? 71.4 percent of influencers view AI as an opportunity for growth and success.
• Current Use of AI: 51.7 percent of influencers report already using AI to support their work. Top AI uses include brainstorming ideas (45 percent) and generating images, video or copy (34 percent).
• Virtual Influencers: About 30 percent of influencers polled reported following or engaging with virtual influencers.
• Trust and Reliability: In the case of influencers, a majority of them trust the information provided by AI, with nearly 64 percent relying on the data it offers.
• Future Outlook: 36.9 percent of influencers report excitement as their main feeling toward the increased use of AI, while 41 percent report feeling equally excited and concerned.
• Transparency: About two-thirds of respondents said they would disclose the use of AI to their followers, while one-third said they don't consider such disclosures necessary.

MARKETERS AND AI

Marketers typically see AI as an opportunity, using it for various tasks, and emphasizing trust in AI data while advocating for transparency in disclosure.

• AI - A Threat or an Opportunity? 81.7 percent of marketers indicate that they see AI as an opportunity.
• Current Use of AI: The most common uses include social media copy (47.2 percent); generating images or video (38.9 percent); editing (36.1 percent); research (34.7 percent).
• Virtual Influencers: 62 percent of marketers are open to teaming up with virtual influencers, but only 27.5 percent have worked with virtual influencers. Of those that have, 21.7 percent have had positive results.
• Trust and Reliability: 76.1 percent of marketers surveyed trust AI data, indicating their willingness to incorporate AI into their processes.
• Future Outlook: Almost 55 percent of marketers feel more enthusiasm than concern about the rise of artificial intelligence. Only 15.5 percent are concerned or have a negative perception.
• Transparency: 84.7 percent of marketers want influencers to disclose whether they are using AI in sponsored campaigns.

According to El-Qudsi, influencer marketing can flourish with AI, but only when both sides are transparent and communicative about their efforts. "Authenticity has always been a hallmark of influencer marketing," El-Qudsi said. "AI is a technology in development and there are many gray areas to be identified and addressed as it becomes more widely adopted. As the potential for incorporating AI into marketing efforts grows, it will be critical for brands and influencers to agree together on the aspects that matter to them, including transparency in their communication and in their use of AI tools to support their content efforts."

FourthWall, a leader in media audiences and analytics, is thrilled to announce its strategic partnership with DIRECTV Advertising, to include DIRECTV's set-top-box and streaming data from millions of households within FourthWall's Reveal™ Platform. This sets the stage for a transformative era in multi-platform data solutions, enabling greater accuracy for audience targeting and full-funnel analytics, yielding higher-performing campaigns and optimized solutions for brands.

DIRECTV's nationwide scale and deterministic audience is a strong foundation to power insights for marketers of any size across all U.S. markets. Combined with FourthWall's advanced Reveal™ Platform, with its 24-hour turnaround for custom audience creation, instantaneous 1^st party data onboarding, and same-day audience-to-attribution analytics, the partnership will help empower customers' data-driven decisions with unmatched quality insights, speed, and scale.

DIRECTV Advertising plans to use FourthWall's Reveal™ Platform to expand its advertising portfolio with powerful new solutions for its clients and partners. This includes the ability to create customizable audience segments for advertisers, which will enable faster turnaround times to meet market demand in a digital environment.

"DIRECTV's viewership data has always been trusted by our agency and advertising partners to enhance their advertising solutions and yield valuable insights," said Amy Leifer, Chief Advertising Sales Officer at DIRECTV Advertising. "Now, the partnership with FourthWall makes it faster and more seamless to leverage our data across various platforms."

"FourthWall's partnership with DIRECTV Advertising is a significant step forward for the industry," added FourthWall's CEO, Paul Haddad. "Our innovative approach, unmatched infrastructure flexibility, and speed in providing results will now be combined with DIRECTV's impressive scale and precision to benefit all local, regional, and national advertisers."

Moody's Corporation today announced the launch of Moody's Research Assistant. It is the first search and analysis tool powered by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The product leverages Moody's extensive proprietary content and the latest large language models (LLMs) to help clients gain new insights from the breadth and depth of Moody's credit research, data and analytics.

As the first commercially available research tool powered by generative artificial intelligence for financial market participants, Moody's Research Assistant synthesizes large amounts of information, allowing users to evaluate lending or investment opportunities quickly and at scale, monitor developments, compare entities and enhance Analyze workflow. Moody's Research Assistant builds on Moody's extensive proprietary content and incorporates the latest generative artificial intelligence technology to enable users to generate more comprehensive risk insights faster.

Cristina Pieretti, general manager of digital insights at Moody's Analytics, said: "For financial market participants, successfully navigating today's complex risk environment requires resource-intensive analysis of large volumes of research and data across multiple risk areas. With Moody's Research Assistant, analysis that once took hours can now be completed in minutes, freeing up more time for strategic decision-making.”

Moody's Research Assistant pilot users reported improvements in their productivity and effectiveness. Based on metrics observed during the pilot, users can save up to 80% of data collection time and up to 50% of analysis time after adding Moody's Research Assistant. Overall, study results show that Moody's Research Assistant saves users up to 27% of time when performing common tasks and functions of a financial analyst.

Moody's Research Assistant is available as an add-on to CreditView, Moody's flagship ratings and research solution. Moody's Research Assistant uses Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service and uses advanced language processing technology to complement CreditView's existing information retrieval system to effectively identify relevant entities, industries and geographic regions in text content.

Moody's Research Assistant covers the latest rating actions, credit opinions and research reports from Moody's Investors Service, providing users with real-time answers. Eventually, Moody's Research Assistant will expand to leverage more Moody's data and content, covering credit, climate, cyber, compliance, supply chain and other risk areas.

The launch of Moody's Research Assistant is the latest chapter in Moody's integration of artificial intelligence into its products, solutions and processes to help decision makers interpret risks and unlock opportunities. Moody's approach to continuous innovation is based on three principles: grow rapidly, empower employees and prioritize customer impact.

Fortune ranks Cloudflare among the world's top 50 publicly traded companies best positioned for long-term revenue growth

Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced that it has been named a 2023 Fortune Future 50 company and ranked sixth among the fifty best companies. Fortune and the BCG Henderson Institute examined more than 1,700 publicly traded companies worldwide and ranked the top 50 based on an assessment of their long-term growth prospects, taking into account indicators and signals related to their future potential. Cloudflare's inclusion on Fortune's Future 50 list comes amid the company's remarkable financial, customer and technology momentum. In the first three quarters of 2023, Cloudflare managed to grow its already large customer base by 34% year-over-year. The company also helped uncover the online threat that led to the largest cyberattack in the history of the Internet .

“At Cloudflare, we believe we have both the privilege and responsibility to promote a safer, more reliable, and more connected Internet. Companies of all sizes and industries turn to Cloudflare to protect and connect everything online. “We help them make their people, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and costs,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Our inclusion on Fortune's Future 50 list is further evidence of how the industry has recognized our proven pace of innovation and commitment to delivering mission-critical solutions for our customers and the Internet as a whole.”

The Fortune Future 50 Index complements traditional performance metrics by assessing the long-term growth prospects of the world's largest publicly traded companies. The ranking of companies was determined by basing 30% of a winning company's score on market potential, that is, expected future growth determined by the valuation of stocks in financial markets. The remaining 70% is based on the company's ability to meet that potential. The latter part of the assessment includes 19 factors selected for their ability to predict growth over the next five years, divided into four categories: Strategy, Technology and Investments, People and Structure.

Today, about 20% of the Internet runs on Cloudflare's network. Added to this are Internet properties such as mobile apps and APIs, corporate networks and AI infrastructure. Cloudflare has millions of customers, more than 182,000 of whom are paying customers, including approximately 30% of Fortune 1000 companies, small and medium-sized businesses, nonprofits, government organizations and the leading AI companies.

In addition to being named a Fortune Future 50, Cloudflare has received industry and editorial recognition for its business, culture, leadership and innovation, including:

• The Webby Awards Top 5 Nominee Apps, dApps and Software - Technical Achievement 2023
• Newsweek Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces 2023
• CRN Security 100: 20 Coolest Web Application And Email Security Companies 2023
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 2023
• The Webby Awards People's Voice Winner 2022
• Newsweek Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces 2022
• Human Resources Campaign Corporate Equality Index (CEI) 100 Perfect Score Company: Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality 2022
• The Financial Times The Americas' 500 Fastest Growing Companies 2022
• CRN Edge Computing 100: 25 Hottest Edge Security Companies 2022
• CRN 5-Star Software Vendor: Partner Program Guide 2022
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 2022
• Reuters Events The Global Responsible Business Awards 2021
• Human Resources Campaign Corporate Equality Index (CEI) 100 Perfect Score Company: Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality 2021
• Inc. Magazine Best Led Companies 2021
• Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2021
• Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2021
• CRN The Security 100: The 20 Coolest Network Security Companies 2021
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 2021
• BuiltIn 100 Best Places to Work in Austin 2021
• Reuters Events The Global Responsible Business Awards 2020
• Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2020
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 2020

Unveiled at Apidays Paris, Latest Version of API Secure Shines Light on Complex API Exploits to Help IT Security Teams Easily Digest and Understand Full-Stack Attack Chain

Data Theorem, Inc., a leading provider of modern application security, today introduced the industry’s first API Attack Path Visualization capabilities for the protection of APIs and the software supply chain. This latest enhancement of its award-winning API Secure solution empowers organizations with a first-ever comprehensive understanding of the attack chain, traversing all layers of an application, and extending protection to crucial underlying cloud assets including containers, storage, databases, and serverless functions.

Launched today at Apidays Paris, Data Theorem will unveil and demonstrate these industry-first API and software supply chain protection capabilities in its Booth No. 5 this week.

As cyberthreats continue to evolve in sophistication, especially in the era of generative AI, understanding the complete attack path has become paramount for organizations to fortify their digital defenses. As a result of today’s launch, Data Theorem’s API Secure, renowned for its robust API discovery, security testing, and protection capabilities, now introduces API Attack Path Visualization to provide organizations with an unparalleled depth of insight into potential vulnerabilities and their potential impact. These new full-stack visualization capabilities start with API exploits and expand to the broader perspective of how vulnerabilities impact mobile, web, serverless, and a variety of cloud-native applications.

According to Gartner®, “75% of organizations that run cloud-native applications in production still use web application firewalls (WAFs) or web application and API protection (WAAP) tools to protect their applications during runtime. Attackers have shifted their attention to applications, making it evident that security leaders need to focus on application protection. Security and risk management leaders must innovate their approaches to application runtime protection and avoid stacking multiple functionally similar, overlapping products.” ¹

Key features of API Secure’s new Attack Path Visualization capabilities include:

• Deeper Understanding: Gain a full-stack view from client to infrastructure layers of the attack chain, allowing for a more in-depth analysis of potential security risks and impact.
• Broader Coverage: Extend visibility beyond the API layer to encompass underlying cloud assets, ensuring a holistic understanding of the entire application ecosystem.
• Visual Clarity: Intuitive visualizations uniquely make complex attack paths easily digestible, enabling security teams to make informed decisions with speed and precision.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Keep abreast of dynamic threat landscapes with real-time monitoring, allowing for proactive observability and threat mitigation.
• Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly integrate API Attack Path Visualization into existing workflows, CI/CD tools, and traditional security tools like web application firewalls (WAF) for alerting and blocking to streamline and make efficient API protection practices.

“Data Theorem is committed to staying at the forefront of API security innovations, and our latest addition of the industry’s first API Attack Path Visualization for API Secure exemplifies this dedication,” said Doug Dooley, COO at Data Theorem. “By providing our customers with a holistic full-stack view of the attack surface, including underlying cloud assets, we empower them to proactively safeguard their cloud-centric applications against evolving threats like never before.”

According to Gartner, “Modern application protection tools must support these organizational changes and perform one or ideally more of the following functionalities – Discovery: identifying and classifying assets; Posture management: identifying security misconfigurations and proposing fixes; Detection and response: identifying and reporting (or blocking) anomalous or suspicious behavior.” ¹

Data Theorem’s API Secure delivers discovery, posture management, and detection and response as a base-offering, with enhanced protection and an industry’s first API Attack Path Visualization with this latest release. This groundbreaking enhancement helping protect modern applications reaffirms Data Theorem’s position as a leader in API security, continuously innovating and providing organizations with the tools they need to navigate the complex landscape of modern cybersecurity threats.

Data Theorem’s broad AppSec portfolio protects organizations from data breaches with application security testing and protection for modern web frameworks, API-driven microservices and cloud resources. Its solutions are powered by its award-winning Analyzer Engine which leverages a new type of dynamic and runtime analysis that is fully integrated into the CI/CD process, and enables organizations to conduct continuous, automated security inspection and remediation. Data Theorem is one of the first vendors to provide a full-stack application security analyzer that connects attack surfaces of applications starting at the client layers found in mobile and web, the network layers found in APIs, and the infrastructure layers found in cloud services.