..lots of promise there.. and the follow up prs get even better...
Market update for 2019
Over the past year, Sonasoft has acquired 3 key companies:
Hotify Inc. created NuGene, the unified artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which now underpins much of Sonasoft’s AI work. NuGene was developed by Ankur Garg, recently appointed Chief of AI at Sonasoft.
E-Connect Software Inc. is a data engineering and AI consultancy with expertise in data migration, cloud data management, and data integrations. This allows Sonasoft to offer full AI transformation services to their customers.
OptimAIze is an innovative company focussed on AIOPs (AI operations for IT server management). AIOps is one of the biggest growth areas in enterprise IT, applying AI to improve efficiency and cut operating costs.
In 2019, the Company procured several significant contracts and POCs.
Awarded a contract with a major regional transit system ($350k)
Won a contract with a major California School District ($100k)
Won a contract with a Fortune 600 Tech Company ($270k)
Received several contracts for AI professional consulting services ($650k)
Won a key contract to provide AI solutions to Padmini NVA
Won a proof of concept (POC) AI project with Delaware Electric Cooperative
Sonasoft has also entered into key strategic partnerships to enhance its existing data archiving and eDiscovery products.
Predikly is a Silicon Valley-based data innovation and robotic process automation (RPA) company. The partnership agreement will enable the acceleration of intelligent process automation (IPA) technologies and solutions.
Trusted Data Solutions is a leader in legacy data management and transformation. The partnership and integration of TDS’s Evolve email archive migration solutions provide a trusted and efficient email and data migration path.
Globanet is a leader in data source and application capture for archiving, compliance, and eDiscovery. The partnership enables Sonasoft to integrate Globanet’s Merge1TM into SonaVault Archiving and eDiscovery Software Solution.
2020 and beyond
Looking to the future, AI is clearly going to continue to transform business in significant ways. Currently, almost all applications of AI are based on so-called narrow intelligence. That means they rely on machine learning techniques that solve a very specific problem. The next big step is deep learning, where a computer seeks to mimic human-like intelligence using massive deep neural networks. Much research is being done on specialized computer chips that are optimized for this sort of learning. Google DeepMind is leading the pack here, but you can expect to see deep learning becoming far more prevalent over the coming years.
AI is also expanding into areas that touch our very lives. Many companies are developing products that use AI to diagnose diseases, sometimes outperforming the best human specialists. Other companies are focusing on using AI to help with things like credit scoring, recruitment, and even criminal profiling.
This is opening up some ethical conundrums that will probably require legislation to solve. GDPR (the general data protection regulation) already gives EU citizens the right to refuse to allow their data to be used for automated decision making, and companies must tell users if they are intending to do this.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is mired in controversy over the way its Streams App accessed the detailed health records of millions of British citizens. As a result, the chances are that companies will soon have to address the ethics of AI head-on.
Another related change is towards so-called white-box AI. By their very nature, most AI models are black-box – no one, not even the developer, can tell you exactly what is happening inside. As a result, it’s hard to understand whether the system is fair or biased.
This courted controversy for the Apple credit card last year when it appeared that men were receiving many times the credit limit available to their wives even when they had shared financial status. One of the biggest sources of bias is the original raw data. So, increasingly, we will see approaches that seek to identify and remove this bias.
This is one place where NuGene is ahead of the curve since it can take completely raw data without the need for pre-processing (one of the biggest sources of bias). Whatever the future, Sonasoft will continue to lead the way in AI and data engineering and will ensure they keep up with the very latest trends and legislation.
The Company plans to continue its aggressive acquisition strategy to grow it's AI and data engineering services and significantly expand its enterprise pipeline throughout 2020, in anticipation of becoming SEC-compliant, and subsequently uplisting to a senior exchange.
