Enterprise Technology News for the Week of November 15th
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The editors at Solutions Review have curated a "greatest hits" collection of noteworthy enterprise technology news from the week of November 15th.
Keeping tabs on the most relevant enterprise technology news can be time-consuming. To help, the Solutions Review editorial team has summarized some of the week's top headlines in the marketplace from various categories, including cybersecurity, data management, ERP, marketing technology, and more.
Enterprise Technology News for the Week of November 15th
Cloudera Acquires Octopai
Cloudera, a hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Octopai’s data lineage and catalog platform. The acquisition will allow Cloudera to significantly expand its data catalog and metadata management capabilities. Charles Sansbury, CEO of Cloudera, says, "The acquisition of Octopai’s platform enhances Cloudera’s data, analytics, and AI platform, enabling customers to have greater visibility of their data regardless of their data management provider.”
DemandScience and Terminus Announce Their Merger
DemandScience, a B2B revenue intelligence and demand generation company, and Terminus, an account-centric platform for revenue growth, announced that they are merging into a single company. The newly combined company will operate under the DemandScience brand, with Peter Cannone continuing to serve as CEO and Terminus CEO Rich Howarth becoming CTO. In the announcement, Howarth says, "Our new organization has moved to the next level—if you're a B2B marketer or seller, we can help you unlock revenue potential and exceed your company targets."
Gartner Releases its 2024?Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2024 edition of its Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, identifying twelve of the marketplace's most effective marketing automation platform (MAP) providers for B2B companies. The researchers behind the report—Rick LaFond, Jeff Cohen, Alan Antin, Upasna Chandna, and Nicholas Mortensen—evaluated each listed vendor's strengths and weaknesses and ranked them on the signature "Magic Quadrant" graph, and the editors at Solutions Review highlighted the updates worth knowing about.
Hitachi Vantara Extends Hybrid Cloud Storage Platform
Hitachi Vantara—the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi—has launched several new solutions through its Virtual Storage Platform One data platform. The new solutions are designed to "redefine" storage and data management efforts for AI and analytics workloads and include an all-new quad-level cell (QLC) flash storage array with public cloud replication and an object storage appliance.
IBM Introduces Debuts New Quantum Hardware and Software Advancements
IBM has announced several quantum hardware and software advancements at its inaugural IBM Quantum Developer Conference. These enhancements are designed to help companies execute complex algorithms on IBM quantum computers with "record levels" of speed, scale, and accuracy. As part of these enhancements, IBM Quantum Heron can now leverage Qiskit, a performant quantum software, to accurately run certain classes of quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations. These capabilities will allow users to expand their exploration into how quantum computers can tackle scientific problems across use cases.
Microsoft, Accenture, and Avanade Announce a Joint Venture
Microsoft has announced that Accenture and Avanade, through their joint venture with Microsoft, are launching a copilot business transformation practice focused on addressing the demand for AI transformation services and solutions. As part of this venture, the companies will co-invest in new capabilities, solutions, and training offerings to help organizations reinvent their business functions with generative and agentic AI and Copilot technologies. Those technologies include agent templates, extensions, connectors, and plug-ins that can help teams leverage their data and GenAI to reduce costs and drive growth.
Northflank Raises $22 Million in Series A Funding
Northflank, a workload platform for developers, has raised $22.3 million in new financing in a $16 million Series A round. Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) led the Series A round, which was bolstered by a $6.3 million seed led by Vertex Ventures US. Additional investors participating in these rounds include Kindred Ventures, Tapestry VC, Pebblebed, and Uncorrelated Ventures. Northflank will use this funding to continue to work toward "becoming the default way that engineering teams deploy and operate software."
Qlik Secures New Investment from Thoma Bravo & ADIA
Qlik—a data integration, data quality, analytics, and AI provider—has secured a new investment from Thomas Bravo and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). As part of the terms, Thoma Bravo will sell a significant minority stake in Qlik to ADIA while maintaining the majority stakeholder and making an additional equity investment in the company. Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik, said, “We look forward to accelerating Qlik’s impact in the era of AI and welcome ADIA into our next phase of growth. Our team has seized the AI opportunity, grounded in a commitment to strong partnerships, customer success, and solutions that drive real competitive advantage."
Red Hat Acquires Neural Magic
Red Hat, a global provider of open-source solutions, has signed an agreement to acquire Neural Magic, a provider of software and algorithms capable of accelerating generative AI inference workloads. Neural Magic's experience in vLLM will allow Red Hat AI to enhance its ability to support LLM deployments across the hybrid cloud with ready-made open inference stacks. Matt Hicks, president and CEO of Red Hat, says, "We're thrilled to complement our hybrid cloud-focused AI portfolio with Neural Magic's groundbreaking AI innovation, furthering our drive to not only be the 'Red Hat' of open-source, but the 'Red Hat' of AI as well."
ServiceNow Expands its Now Platform with New AI Innovations
ServiceNow, an AI platform for business transformation, has announced new generative AI and governance innovations for its Now Platform. As part of this launch, ServiceNow has introduced new capabilities to the Now Assist solution, including the Now Assist Guardian, Now Assist Data Kit, and Now Assist Analytics. These tools can help companies better control how they use GenAI on the Now Platform, streamline the process of consuming data for AI use cases, and maximize visibility into the adoption, usage, and performance of Now Assist across their enterprise. Additionally, ServiceNow released new features for Configuration Management Database (CMDB), legal service delivery, and contract management.
Silverfort Announces its Acquisition of Rezonate
Silverfort, an identity security company, has acquired Rezonate, an identity-first security provider for cloud environments. The acquisition will allow Silverfort to integrate Rezonate's cloud-focused capabilities?into its Unified Identity Security Platform, offering companies a solution capable of protecting identities across all on-premises assets, cloud identity providers, SaaS applications, and cloud infrastructure. Other benefits of the integrated offering include faster deployments, additional context for identity security, and more. The combined solution will be available in mid-2025.
Snowflake Unveils New Snowflake Intelligence
Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, has announced Snowflake Intelligence, a new platform designed to allow enterprises to ask business questions across their enterprise data to unlock data-driven answers and create data agents capable of taking action on those insights. Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, says, “With Snowflake Intelligence, teams can easily create data agents that allow business users to talk to their enterprise data using natural language and then analyze, summarize, and take action on those results from one unified platform."
Software AG Extends its ARIS Platform with New AI-Powered Capabilities
Software AG, a digital transformation solution provider, has launched a new AI-enabled release of its ARIS platform. With ARIS 10 SR27, users have access to the platform's AI Companion, which is integrated into key functions of the ARIS Process Intelligence suite. The functions and capabilities available through the AI Companion include AI-based process model generation, an AI-based search tool, AI-generated calculated fields and visual insights, and the ARIS Process Explore, which enables users to extract actionable insights from any data within the ARIS suite.
Zendesk Reveals a Dynamic Pricing Plan for AI Adoption
Zendesk, a customer experience solution provider, has announced its AI Dynamic Pricing Plan, a new pricing and usage approach to make AI in service more accessible and adaptable for businesses of all sizes. The new model will offer companies additional flexibility in adopting AI for customer service by allowing them to adapt and scale their approach to meet their changing needs. For example, companies can use human agents, AI agents, or a combination of both and shift their investments as needed. This makes it easier for CX leaders to curate AI adoption processes that scale and adjust to their business requirements.
Expert Insights Section
Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review's enterprise tech community for business software pros. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, trends and predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.
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On-Demand: Solutions Review Hosts Impetus, Deluxe, and Forrester Research for Exclusive Expert Roundtable on Unlocking the Power of Enterprise GenAI
The team at Solutions Review has partnered with Impetus to bring you a discussion from experts from Forrester Research, Impetus, and Deluxe Corporation that will help you take a dive deep into the real-world success stories of enterprises that are leading the charge with GenAI while discussing current and future trends.