ML/AI Vendor Roundup: August 2018

Product enhancements, customer references, partnerships, acquisitions, financials, or other significant news for ML/AI vendors in August 2018.
Alteryx
- Announces general availability for Release 2018.3. Key new bits: interactive visualization; enhanced Spark integration; a Jupyter notebook for Python scripting. Andrew Brust opines.
- Releases Q2 financials, revealing 54% YOY topline growth.
Amazon Web Services
- Adds support for custom attributes to SageMaker model deployment endpoints.
- Updates SageMaker prebuilt containers to support Apache MXNet 1.2, TensorFlow 1.9.
- Announces SageMaker support for S3 datasets in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
- Publishes a Quick Start for SageMaker and a data lake.
- Announces AI Application Hackathon, with cash prizes. Submissions due November 7.
CognitiveScale
- Dell selects CognitiveScale to provide AI for customer experience management.
Databricks
DataRobot
- Announces general availability of DataRobot Time Series for automated time series analysis and forecasting.
Domino Data Lab
Google Cloud Platform
- Publishes a roundup of recently added AI capabilities.
- From July: GCP announces BigQuery ML, currently available in beta. Product Manager Sudhir Hasbe summarizes the new bits.
IBM
- The Wall Street Journal reports IBM struggles with Watson. It seems that oncology is a little more difficult than winning a rigged game show. Medscape, Slate, pile on.
Oracle
- Releases GraphPipe for model serving. Stephanie Condon reports.
- Offers sneak peek at Autonomous Data Science (DataScience.com, rebranded)
RapidMiner
- Releases RapidMiner 9.0. New bits include interactive data prep, improved time series analysis, new security and governance features, and new operators in Radoop.
Salesforce
- Releases TransmogrifiAI, an automation harness for Spark ML, to open source.
From what I understand, the customers aren’t beating a path to SAS’s door to purchase Viya. They are staying on the older platforms. SAS probably sold Wake County the software at a tremendous discount in order to use them as a Viya customer reference.
Vaya Con Dios, SAS!
Exactly.