Stephanie Simone

Blockchain is poised to underpin more and more financial transactions, as the traditional finance world (TradFi) starts to embrace decentralized finance (DeFi), opening them up to cryptocurrency transactions and more. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2027, 10% of global GDP could be tokenized (where assets of value are represented by digital tokens) and stored on blockchain.

Graphiant, a provider of private, next-generation Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), is introducing its groundbreaking Data Assurance service, providing end-to-end control and visibility for data in motion throughout the entire business network.

EnterpriseDB (EDB), the leading Postgres data and AI company, is adding a variety of enhancements to EDB Postgres AI, empowering enterprises to deploy secure, flexible AI-driven applications in a sovereign, hybrid environment.

Cloud remains important as ever as AI makes gains in the industry. Other key factors leading to the continued importance of the cloud include the increasing adoption of cloud services by businesses for cost-efficiency and scalability, advancements in cloud technologies, the growth of big data and analytics, and the rising need for remote work solutions.

Back in July, CrowdStrike pushed out a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor that caused worldwide outages on Microsoft operating systems. Users experienced the BlueScreen of Death (BSOD) error, which caused their systems to shut down or restart unexpectedly.

Big data is continuing to grow, this time spurred by AI and machine learning within enterprise software tools, followed by advancements in software for managing unstructured data, and the substantial increase in data volume.

Linkerd, created by Buoyant, is releasing Linkerd 2.17, a new version of Linkerd that introduces several major new features to the project: egress traffic visibility and control; rate limiting; and federated services, a powerful new multicluster primitive that combines services running in multiple clusters into a single logical service. This release also updates Linkerd to support OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing.

Nuon Inc. announced it has secured $16.5 million in funding and is providing an early access release of its Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) platform. Nuon is currently powering a few dozen AI and data infrastructure companies already using the platform to deliver BYOC solutions. The company plans to launch general availability by late Q1 2025.

KNIME, the open source data analytics and AI company, is releasing its AI companion, K-AI, enabling users to co-create powerful data workflows with AI. According to the company, K-AI will answer questions, make recommendations, and extend or build whole data workflows based on user prompts. The AI companion speeds up the time to insight, while giving users complete transparency into and control over what AI is doing.

AI innovation in the big data space shows no signs of slowing down, with companies rushing to adopt or create their own solutions based on AI, automating redundant tasks, and spinning up all kinds of use cases to justify spending big bucks in the area.