At the end of January 2016 I packed my bags and set out for a year of traveling and working abroad with 75 people I'd never met as a participant in a program called Remote Year. It would be a journey of a lifetime. In just over a year, I traveled to 26 countries spanning 11 time zones. I summited an 18,000ft (6,000m) mountain, ate piranha I caught from the Amazon rain forest, learned to scuba dive, earned my European private pilot license, and bailed a friend out of a Thai jail. And I did it all while working full time as Seeq's Architect.
In previous jobs, organizing a social gathering for my team was relatively straightforward; people do it all the time. For a co-located team, the steps are clear and obvious. First, find a conference room that is not only available, but as secret/hidden as you need it to be.
Seeq is now, and always has been, a fully distributed company. We have no physical office, and we hire people from all over the country and world. We've all come to love the benefits of working from the comfort of our homes, but people outside the company and prospective candidates tend to share a common concern: "How do you stay connected on a human level?"
The multi-billion-dollar Time Series Databases markets now find industry heavyweights vying for position in a once-quiet category.
Time series data storage and management has long been an interesting—if quiet—market category. It’s been a multi-billion-dollar business for years and a mainstay in process manufacturing plants since the 1980s.
CB Insights, an analyst firm focused on startups, is holding its Aha! conference in early December where it will unveil its list of the top “AI 100” companies. That’s right, CB Insights had to select “just” 100 AI companies claiming to use AI in their product. (More on CB Insights and their conference in the December blog.) With so much market noise, it’s no wonder the Gartner Hype Cycle (another analyst firm, for IT audiences) has “Machine Learning” and “Deep Learning” at the highest level of their July 2017 Technology Hype Cycle report, in the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” category.
Before a discussion of how Seeq is going “beyond the aha!”, a quick head’s up to let you know Seeq is now a Schneider Electric Wonderware Registered Partner. This partnership is another milestone in our effort to support the broadest range of customer data sources, including options that span a dozen historians, relational data sources like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, and open source systems for “big data.”
Creating a great product requires careful listening. When we started the journey to create Seeq, the leadership team had decades of context and user input. Companies told us that they needed to get more value out of their data. "We know the answer is in the data, it's just too hard to find," for example. “We’re data rich and information poor,” was a common complaint. So, our intent was to address this market need by creating the best visual analytics application for process manufacturing data.
Seeq support for Microsoft, and Microsoft Azure specifically, took another step forward last week. On top of Seeq’s existing investments in Microsoft technologies, including Windows Server support, Active Directory integration, PowerBI and Excel export features, and SQL Server connectivity, Seeq has now added Azure Active Directory support and integration with Azure IoT Hub.
The 4th of July is fast approaching which means summer, hot weather, beaches, and sharks. Ironically, most shark attacks in North America happen in the fall, but the important thing is sharks are what many people fear about the beach. They should instead worry about sunscreen, sandals, and a towel, but it’s the extreme edge case that captures their imagination courtesy of Jaws (and maybe Sharknado?). And if you are wondering, the odds are 1 in 3.7M (ish) of dying from a shark attack, but that likely isn’t going to calm the fears of many actually on a beach and staring out at the sea.