News

Berlin, March 15, 2017 – Today at the KNIME Summit, KNIME.com AG announced that equity investor INVUS has invested €20 million in the company to support its ongoing work in transforming the data science industry.

“We’re excited to have an investor that truly understands open source and recognizes the potential for expanding across the enterprise,” says CEO Michael Berthold of KNIME.com AG. “Even though KNIME was already profitable and is growing strongly, we see a huge window of opportunity for our open source strategy combined with our vision of bringing Guided Analytics to the large group of users who have not been able to benefit from using advanced analytics to date.”

KNIME, with a growing group of software companies, believes that opening up previously closed or exclusive platforms, processes, tools, organizational boundaries and idea sourcing can speed up innovation while reducing risk. That understanding provides the basis for KNIME’s software development as well as its approach to working with the community in the analytics space.

Today, KNIME users can be found in large-scale enterprises in over 50 countries and across a wide range of industries including life sciences, financial services, publishers, retailers and e-tailers, manufacturing, consulting firms, government and research.

“We see KNIME as a company with a real competitive advantage and a vision for expanding on it,” say Mario Kaloustian and Wassim Sacre, Managing Directors at INVUS and Board Members of KNIME.com AG. “That, combined with passionate founders who care about growing the business long-term, an enthusiastic user community and an excellent platform, adds up to a clear opportunity.”

With independent analysts overwhelmingly acknowledging KNIME as a leader, recent interest from venture capital firms has been high. But it was important to KNIME to work with a partner that would not change the focus, the management team or – most importantly – the open source philosophy that has contributed so much to the company’s success.

“Invus is a perfect match for KNIME: they have a reputation for long-term involvement and have pledged to empower the KNIME management team. They also understand and support our open source model for bringing advanced analytics to many users,” says Berthold. “This will in no way change our dedication to open source or our relationships with our customers while enhancing our ability to help organizations tap into the benefits of advanced analytics.”

For more information, contact KNIME at info@knime.com, or download KNIME and discover it for yourself. KNIME – Open for Innovation.

About Invus

Since 1985, Invus has been an equity investor in companies who seek to transform their industries. Invus partners with owner-managers of private and public companies to help them achieve extraordinary business performance. Over its 30 year history, Invus has achieved both cash on cash multiples and annual internal rates of return that are at the very top of the private equity industry. Today Invus manages assets over $5 billion through an evergreen fund structure and has offices in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong. Invus has invested in companies across a wide range of industries including consumer products and services, specialty retail, software, biotech, medical devices. Read more about Invus here.

Zurich, February 16, 2017 – In recognition of its ability to execute and completeness of vision, KNIME, the open platform for data-driven innovation, has again been placed among the Leaders in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Science Platforms.

Gartner, Inc. describes Leaders as having “a strong presence and significant mind share in the market. Resources skilled in their tools are readily available. Leaders demonstrate strength in depth and breadth across a full model development and implementation process. While maintaining a broad and long-established customer base, Leaders are also nimble in responding to rapidly changing market conditions, driven by the overwhelming interest in data science across all industries and domains. Leaders are in the strongest position to influence the market's growth and direction. They address all industries, geographies, data domains and use cases. This gives them the advantage of a clear understanding and strategy for the data science market, with which they can become disrupters themselves and develop thought-leading and differentiating ideas. Leaders are suitable vendors for most organizations to evaluate.”

“This is the fourth year in a row that KNIME has placed in the leadership quadrant,” says Michael Berthold, CEO of KNIME.com AG. “That is never a given. I firmly believe it is because of the strong KNIME Community that not only provided us great references but continues to help us extend the platform and support each other.”

KNIME owes the recent accolades to users from thousands of organizations enjoying its open source platform and commercial enterprise extensions. “KNIME continues to disrupt the market by extending and enhancing its solid open source (and free) platform. As a matter of fact, it is the only true open source platform reviewed in the report. The leadership recognition is well deserved” says Phil Winters, independent consultant and member of the KNIME Board.

“We’re investing heavily in our development to provide KNIME users with what they need to not only get up to speed fast but to share and make what they do of relevance for other users within their organization. “ continues Berthold. “We are profoundly committed to open source – it’s a strong, honest and transparent business model that works for everyone.”

For further information, contact KNIME at info@knime.com, or download KNIME and discover it for yourself. KNIME – Open for Innovation.

Save the date and join us for this year’s KNIME Spring Summit in Berlin from March 15-17, 2017!

Come and network with our global KNIME Community and Team. We have engaged some of the most brilliant minds and innovative influencers in the field of data science to share their experiences and insights from the past year and their outlook for this year. So join us and discuss your ideas with other KNIME users and leaders around data analytics, machine learning, product development, organizational strategy, and more.

Don't miss the kick-off sessions by the KNIME team in which we will announce new and upcoming features for the most recent KNIME Analytics Platform versions.

Our line-up of speakers will be talking about their applications from the fields of Electro-Mobility (ACCUmotive), Banking (BW Bank), IoT (Datatroniq), Life Sciences (Eli Lilly, Friedrich Miescher IBR, Vernalis), Cybersecurity (Palo Alto Networks), Manufacturing and Electronics (Siemens) and Transportation (Venice Airport). The list does not end here, as we are still adding new speakers and presentations daily.

The conclusive talk this year will tell you how to explain what your models do to your boss, of course by Dean Abbott. Dean Abbott is the Chief Data Scientist at Smarter HQ and an expert in data analytics best practices.

The Special Session, hosted this year by Iris Adä and Phil Winters from KNIME will tackle the problem of model management including model dependencies, scheduling, retraining checks, and general model orchestration and control.

The second day of talks includes two new features – parallel tracks with Track 1 Talks on Life Sciences and Industry 4.0 and Track 2 Talks on Life Sciences & Customer Intelligence. In the afternoon, we’re hosting a panel discussion on our new “Will they blend?” experiment series. Rosaria from KNIME with a group of blending experts will take questions from the audience on what data science means in real life, when the poetry of new models collides with the reality of the many formats, data sources, and vendors.

Before the Summit – take the opportunity to dive deeper into our KNIME Training Program - and learn more about our Analytics Platform, Big Data, Text Mining and IoT Analytics. Simply register for any of the 1 or 2-day courses on Monday 13 and Tuesday 14  March, together with your Summit registration!

And lastly but importantly: Make sure to book your room at Hotel Berlin, Berlin – which is the summit venue this year. We've reserved a block of rooms, but we will have to release any remaining rooms soon! The promotion code KNIME SPRING SUMMIT 2017 at the hotel site gets you a Superior room and breakfast at a big discount.

For more details check the KNIME Spring Summit 2017 web page.
To register use the KNIME Spring Summit 2017 Registration page.

Looking forward to see you in Berlin!

Your KNIME Team

The things most likely to immediately catch your eye are the new curved connections; we like to think they get the data sliding even faster through workflows ;-) There are some other nice noteworthy additions:

The Excel integration has been reworked both in terms of speed and support for really large excel files. There are a couple of new convenience nodes for dealing with variables such as the String Manipulation (Variable) while the Text Processing extension comes with a bunch of new integrations, including Apache Tika to read major document formats such as PDF, EMail, or Microsoft Office documents.

Are you storing your data in the cloud? With this new release you can seamlessly read and write your data to systems such as Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure Blob storage.

Our KNIME Server customers will find the KNIME WebPortal now supports interactivity. Many of the JavaScript views have been reworked and new ones were added, including an interactive decision tree viewer and a parallel coordinates plot.

Big Data analysts will be interested to try out the new file connectors to read and write standard Hadoop file formats (Avro, Parquet, etc.) and they will appreciate an improved integration of databases into their Apache Spark workflows, including nodes to embed database systems transparently and to query Spark tables by means of simple SQL as part of the KNIME Big Data Extensions.

These are just some of the improvements in this Christmas Release. You can find more detailed information on our What's New page and on the ChangeLog page. And note that upgrading from a previous KNIME Analytics Platform 3.x version is as easy as choosing the update link in KNIME Analytics Platform’s Welcome Page or by choosing File -> Update KNIME.

A new O’Reilly Media course is now available to learn the basics of Data Analytics and KNIME Analytics Platform. This is the course to recommend to beginners taking their first steps with KNIME Analytics Platform.

Introduction to Data Analytics with KNIME
A Data Science Approach to Analytics
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920054214.do

About the course
This O’Reilly Media course will guide you step by step with hands-on exercises through the application of data analytics techniques using the KNIME Analytics Platform. It’s designed for learners with very little experience in data analytics or in programming. It is taught by our Principal Data Scientist, Dr. Rosaria Silipo here at KNIME and it covers everything a beginning data analyst needs to know.

About the tutor
Dr. Rosaria Silipo is not only an expert in data mining, machine learning, reporting, and data warehousing, she has become a recognized expert on the KNIME data mining engine, about which she has published three books: KNIME Beginner’s Luck, The KNIME Cookbook, and The KNIME Booklet for SAS Users.