AWS Expands Amazon Bedrock to Give Users a Choice of LLMs for Generative AI Apps

AWS has announced innovations to Amazon Bedrock that expand Large Language Model (LLM) choices and deliver powerful capabilities making it easier for customers to build and scale generative AI applications customised to their business. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers easy access to LLMs and other foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon.

Acknowledging that one model is not ideal for every use case as models vary across capabilities, price, and performance, AWS developed Bedrock to give customers easy access to a variety of model choices so they can try out different models, switch between them, and combine the best models for their needs. Building with, and moving between, LLMs is achieved using an API call.

Informatica and MongoDB Partner to Offer Cloud-Native Data-Driven Applications

Informatica, a cloud data management provider, has made a new strategic partnership with MongoDB. The partnership enables customers to create a modern class of cloud native, data driven, industry tailored applications powered by MongoDB Atlas and fed with data from Informatica’s AI-powered MDM solution.

“We already leverage the performance and scale of MongoDB Atlas within our cloud-native MDM SaaS solution, so this partnership is a natural next step,” says Rik Tamm-Daniels, group vice president of strategic ecosystems and technology at Informatica. “As a strategic MDM partner of MongoDB, we can help customers consolidate and sunset multiple legacy applications and bring in cloud-native ones built on a trusted data foundation.”

Snowflake Adds Market Operations in Colombia

Snowflake has officially launched market operations in Colombia as it focuses on expanding its customer base in the county and across Latin America. The Colombia base adds to more than 40 Snowflake offices across 19 countries and will be led by Ernesto Serrano, country manager for Colombia. The company plans to build on the professional services team already located in its Colombia office and expand hiring to focus on sales and customer support.

Companies using Snowflake in Colombia include Belcorp, a provider of personal care products, which uses Snowflake to make near real-time business decisions on pricing, sales and inventory; and Juan Valdez, a Colombia-based multinational coffee retailer, which uses Snowflake’s secure data exchange to centralise and analyse data from its stores in more than 500 outlets and offer better and more personalised experiences for users.

Boston Partners Goes Live with Rimes Matrix Investment Management Platform

Boston Partners, a provider of equity strategies, has gone live with Rimes’ Matrix investment management platform as its enterprise data warehouse. The initiative has enabled Boston Partners to streamline its data management operations and integrate data from multiple sources for enterprise reporting, business intelligence, historical retention, and distribution to downstream consuming systems.

The initiative started in January 2023, with the platform going live on 1September 2023. The rapid implementation was orchestrated to ensure a seamless transition, avoiding disruption to day-to-day business operations. More recently, Boston Partners has extended its relationship with Rimes to rely on its ongoing maintenance of the platform and delivery of a constantly improving managed service.

FSB Adds Bank of Communications to 2023 G-SIBs List, Drops Credit Suisse and UniCredit

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has published its list of 2023 global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) using end-2022 data and applying the assessment methodology designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

One bank, China’s Bank of Communications, has been added to the list of G-SIBs that were identified in 2022, and two banks, Credit Suisse and UniCredit, have been removed. The overall number of G-SIBs has decreased from 30 to 29.

FSB member authorities apply requirements to G-SIBs that are higher, in terms of additions to the minimum standards that apply to all internationally active banks under the Core Principles of the BCBS. These requirements include a higher capital buffer, total loss-absorbing capacity, resolvability, and higher supervisory expectations.

A new list of G-SIBs will next be published in November 2024.

KX Releases KDB.AI Server for Enterprise Scale Generative AI

KX, a provider of vector and time-series data management, has announced general availability of KDB.AI Server, a highly-performant, scalable, vector database for time-orientated generative AI and contextual search. Deployable in a single container via Docker, KDB.AI Server offers a smooth setup for various environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid systems, allowing businesses to quickly adopt and use its AI capabilities without complex setup processes.

Built to handle high-speed, time-oriented data and multi-modal data processing, KDB.AI Server handles both structured and unstructured enterprise data and enables developers to bring temporal and semantic context and relevancy to AI-powered applications. The server is also optimised for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, which ensures that, rather than continuously training or fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLM), developers can bring data relevancy to their prompts delivering better accuracy, lower cost, and less need for GPUs.

Immuta Integrates Data Security Platform with Amazon S3 Access Grants

Data security specialist Immuta has made a native integration between its Data Security Platform and the object storage service Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The integration provides customers with streamlined data access control and security across storage and compute platforms using Amazon S3 Access Grants, a new Amazon S3 access control feature that enables customers to manage data permissions at scale for user identities managed by corporate directories.

With the Immuta platform and Amazon S3’s Access Grants, users can centralise access control management and use attribute-based access controls to grant permissions for objects in Amazon S3 storage. Immuta builds on Amazon S3 controls, increasing efficiencies with fewer policies and lower manual effort, reducing operational costs and opening new revenue streams.

“Amazon S3 access control is paramount due to the sheer amount of data that moves through the service,” says Steve Touw, Immuta chief technology officer. “Immuta helps simplify data access and security for data stored in Amazon S3 so users can more safely leverage that data for analytics and AI initiatives. This, paired with Immuta’s ‘write once, apply everywhere’ policy approach, helps customers democratise and increase data usage while still adhering to global regulations.”

Yotascale Brings Yota AI Assist Cloud Cost Management Solution to Market

Palo Alto, California based Yotascale, a specialist in cloud cost management in digital organisations, has brought Yota AI Assist to market with the claim that it is the first FinOps copilot powered by Generative AI. Yota AI Assist continuously analyses AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Datadog, Databricks and other infrastructure costs providing insights and optimisation recommendations for each manager based on their objectives and role, keeping it high level if you are the CFO and making it detailed if you are an engineer.

The solution is based on Yotascale’s extensive industry domain knowledge in cloud cost management and total platform engineering cost management. Asim Razzaq, CEO of Yotascale, says: “Our goal was to supercharge FinOps and platform engineering teams with cloud spend intelligence, so they never again experience the anxiety of feeling like costs are out of control, with no path to bring them down.” Or as one user put it: “This is really good because you don’t need to click click click, just ask a question.”

Informatica Extends Access to Intelligent Data Management Platform in Canada

Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management provider, has established a Microsoft Azure pod in Canada for its Canadian customers. For Informatica customers that use the Azure ecosystem – particularly those in highly-regulated sectors such as financial services – the pod provides access to the company’s Intelligent Data Management Platform (IDMC) to manage complex and fragmented data estates, better comply with strict data residency requirements and support complex cloud modernisation projects.

It also gives Canadian Azure customers access to the latest Informatica-Microsoft integrations, including IDMC as an Azure Native Service and its integration with Microsoft Fabric.

With the availability of the Azure pod, Canadian customers can purchase IDMC as an Azure SaaS solution through the Azure Marketplace.

KX Expands Integration with Microsoft Azure to Foster AI Application Development

KX, a provider of vector and time-series data management, has announced two offerings optimised for Microsoft Azure customers: the integration of KDB.AI with Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service; and KX Copilot. The integration of KDB.AI with Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service allows developers that require turnkey technology stacks to speed up the process of building and deploying AI applications by accessing fully configured instances of KDB.AI, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure OpenAI Service inside their customer subscription.

KX Copilot helps business eases the execution of complex queries on substantial datasets. Using the Azure-powered KX Copilot and a Microsoft Teams plug-in, customers can leverage vectorised data housed in kdb Insights Enterprise to facilitate better queries using natural language prompts. Users can then manage and explore the data more intuitively to generate critical real-time business insights.

Ashok Reddy, CEO at KX, says: “Generative AI is the defining technology of our age. The introduction of these services will help organisations harness its power for greater risk management, enhanced productivity and real-time decision-making.”

General availability of each KX offering in Azure Marketplace is expected in 2024.