AWS Re:Invent 2019: Meeting Old Friends of MapD & New Friends of OmniSci

OmniSci had an amazing time last week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas as an exhibiting sponsor. Although some of us had to beat post-Thanksgiving travel to get there, everyone came with high energy and were ready to learn about innovations, including OmniSci’s accelerated analytics platform running on modern hardware available on AWS. Just look at the thousands ready to enter the expo hall moments before the welcome reception started last Monday night:

Here are some highlights from OmniSci’s week at AWS re:Invent:

1. Our Newest OmniSci Release 5.0 is Now Available on AWS Marketplace

At our own user conference, Converge, back at the end of October, we announced our major release 5.0, which does the following:

• Lay the building blocks to enable machine intelligence pervasively and transparently within our platform
• Launch key features that build on the theme of “data fusion” that will allow users to find and integrate external reference datasets to develop a broader and deeper understanding of their own data
• Continues OmniSci’s value of performance at scale

Key features include

• Cohort analysis and the new filter experience with spatial-temporal datasets
• Launch of data catalog of generally useful public datasets
• User-Defined Functions (UDFs) to set the foundation for ML/AI

2. Re-launching Hourly OmniSci Enterprise Edition

With the release of 5.0 and availability on AWS Marketplace, we’ve re-launched our hourly OmniSci Enterprise Edition in addition to the open source and Bring You Own License (BYOL) options available on the AWS Marketplace.

There’s many effortless ways to try OmniSci and our new 5.0 features on AWS Marketplace:

• OmniSci Open Source DB - Try our open source SQL engine only (doesn’t include our rendering & visual analytics client) with fast SQL and open source interfaces such as  Python, JavaScript, Java/ODBC, and Julia clients. Create custom applications.
• OmniSci Enterprise Edition (BYOL) - Sign up for a 30-day Enterprise Edition free trial to get your trial key for this Bring Your Own License (BYOL) version for usage on enterprise-level NVIDIA GPUs on AWS. Enterprise Edition is for always-on, large scale production workloads with the full-feature platform for interactive, real-time analysis.
• OmniSci Enterprise Edition (Hourly) - Hourly option is back for a quick start and flexible usage of accelerated analytics! This edition can be used for workgroup projects limited to three users and supports newer instance types for developers wanting to use OmniSci incrementally.

3. Meeting Old Friends of MapD (our former company name) and Introducing OmniSci Accelerated Analytics Platform on Modern Hardware Available on AWS

Does GPU-accelerated analytics software sound familiar? At AWS re:Invent we were more than happy to hear that we had some old friends of MapD, which was our former company name and stood for “Massively Parallel Database” in reference to the parallel processing power of GPUs.

Late last year, MapD rebranded to OmniSci to reflect to the broadening vision of the platform beyond just being a database (and sounding like a mapping company although we do wonders with your large spatiotemporal datasets). OmniSci is inspired by our updated mission statement, which is, to make analytics instant, powerful and effortless for everyone. “Omni” captures the concept of every or all. In this context, “Omni” connects with our vision to make our technology available to everyone, everywhere, including our recent announcement to bring accelerated analytics at scale from not only GPUs but to CPUs with our collaboration with Intel. The “Sci” part of the name is our subtle nod to the field of Data Science, which we believe is emerging as one of the most powerful forces of change inside organizations, pushing them to be ever more data-driven. Analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning–they all fit under the broader umbrella of data science. And you see our path towards accelerating data science with the new features available in Release 5.0 (see above).

4. OmniSci at the Jefferies Public Cloud Summit

“We are the Porsche you drive on weekends, but keep your minivan if you’re happy with it,” says Aaron Williams, OmniSci VP and Head of Global Community.

OmniSci was invited to speak to Jefferies investors at their Public Cloud Summit, where Aaron Williams, our VP and Head of Global Community, joined the executive leaders of other technology companies running on cloud, including AWS, of course.

Sharing some Q&A from the summit:

• Q: Why is OmniSci different from mainstream analytics tools?

• A: OmniSciDB, our underlying in-memory columnar analytic database, leverages the parallel processing power of GPUs for speed at scale. The GPUs provides the ability for analysis of the full fidelity of the data. Not only can you find the needle in the haystack but you can understand the haystack.

• Q: Is OmniSci only available on the AWS?

• A: OmniSci is available on the cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, & NVIDIA GPU Cloud) and on-premises.

• Q: How does OmniSci fit into the trend for embedded analytics?

• A: We have partners who OEM OmniSci, including Tutela, who crowdsources mobile data. Check out the telecom demo. Recently, we announced our new OEM Startup Accelerator program to help data-rich startups accelerate their time to market and build their own branded, enterprise-grade analytics solutions. With our open source version of our OmniSciDB, you can create new custom applications such as our Tweetmap.

5. OmniSci on NVIDIA GPUs available on AWS

Speaking of old friends, we visited NVIDIA at their booth and had an awesome time at their happy hour. OmniSci brings performance at scale with NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 GPUs with Amazon EC2 P3 instances along with other GPU instances.

And that’s a wrap! OmniSci hopes to meet old friends of MapD and new friends of OmniSci again next year at AWS events.

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