SDT333 cover_Layout 1 12/22/16 2:26 PM Page 1 A BZ Media Publication JANUARY 2017 • ISSUE NO. 333 • $9.95 • www.sdtimes.com SDT333 Full Page Ads_Layout 1 12/21/16 9:15 AM Page 2 Data Quality Made Easy. Your Data, Your Way. NAME @ Melissa Data provides the full spectrum of data Our data quality solutions are available quality to ensure you have data you can trust. on-premises and in the Cloud – fast, easy to use, and powerful developer tools, We profile, standardize, verify, match and integrations and plugins for the Microsoft enrich global People Data – name, address, and Oracle Product Ecosystems. email & phone. 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Come join us! www.sptechcon.com A BZ Media Event SDT333 page 6,8_Layout 1 12/20/16 11:59 AM Page 6 6 SD Times January 2017 www.sdtimes.com NEWS WATCH Yelp offers up Kafka OpenAI opens new tools to open source AI universe Yelp saved itself US$10 million OpenAI is giving artificial intel- by building out its Apache Kaf- ligence researchers a new way ka-based Data Pipeline, and to test and evaluate their now it wants to spread that research. The organization has love to other enterprises. Just announced Universe, a soft- before the holidays, Yelp ware platform designed to train open-sourced its Data Pipeline and measure the general intel- and assorted utilities used to ligence of AI across games, maintain and build out this websites and applications. streaming data platform. Researchers will also be able Data Pipeline is now avail- to turn their programs into Gym able on GitHub under the Google open-sources DeepMind Lab environments. (Gym is OpenAI’s Apache 2.0 license. Using recently launched toolkit for Google is open-sourcing its flagship AI 3D platform for agent- Data Pipeline, developers can reinforcement learning.) based AI research, DeepMind Lab. tie their applications into the Environments currently According to Google, the research done at DeepMind constantly flowing stream of include Atari games, Flash has been to develop intelligent agents with advanced cog- Kafka data. games, extracting rewards, nitive skills, as well as providing an environment where Jason Fennell, vice presi- browser tasks, browser inter- those agents can be trained and analyzed. Those simulated dent of engineering at Yelp, actions, and real-world brows- environments are meant to be AI labs for research. said that Data Pipeline cou- er tasks. Researchers can also take advantage of the lab’s program- pled with Kafka provides ben- OpenAI plans to release a matic level-creation interfaces. The customizable levels efits to all data streaming “transfer learning bench- can include gameplay logic, observations and the ability to through the company’s sys- mark” to help researchers pick up items. tems. “We’ll build a connector determine the progress on DeepMind Lab, along with its code, maps and level scripts, from Kafka to our Salesforce their experiments. will be available on GitHub. instance, and now we have this real-time stream of updates from our core data- The company also recently 600 million euros, and it has OpenMake open- bases into Salesforce. We released ActiveReports 11, its been approved by both boards sources ARA solution managed to make a process .NET reporting solution. The of directors. The transaction is OpenMake Software wants to that could take as long as update targets both ActiveRe- expected to close in the fourth improve how developers use three weeks to get data down ports Developer and ActiveRe- quarter of 2017. the Continuous Delivery to a few seconds,” he said. ports Server components. The This acquisition comes on pipeline with its recently open- latest features include perform- the heels of CA’s acquisition of sourced Application Release ance improvements, a faster BlazeMeter, the continuous Automation (ARA) solution, GrapeCity enters the report rendering engine, native application performance test- Release Engineer, which is support for JSON and CSV data ing company, where it inte- JavaScript market based on version 7.7 of the sources, a query builder for the grated with CA’s Continuous with SpreadJS ARA solution and offered XML data provider, and a new Delivery solutions to offer cus- GrapeCity is giving JavaScript tomers a diverse set of testing under the FreeBSD license. Excel Import tool. developers a new way to pres- capabilities. According to cofounder of ent and interact with their With the acquisition of OpenMake Tracy Ragan, the data in the latest release of its CA Technologies Automic, CA will add the com- ARA solution is fully function- enterprise spreadsheet tool. acquires Automic pany's automation and orches- al and will have an upgrade Spread Studio 10 comes with tration capabilities to its portfo- path for things like security SpreadJS, a JavaScript spread- CA Technologies continues to lio so customers can have more roles, user groups, folders, sheet and data presentation add to its cloud-based capabil- options that will address their audit tracking, and release solution. ities with its recent acquisition IT and DevOps challenges, training management, which Spread Studio version 10 of Automic, a European busi- especially for on-premises, the are all strategic features that also features new charts, for- ness automation software cloud, and hybrid cloud envi- are specific to what an enter- mula extenders, touch toolbar, company.