The Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Service Market report offers key insights into the worldwide Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Service market. It presents a holistic overview of the market, with an in-depth summary of the market's leading players. The report is inclusive of indispensable information related to the leading competitors in this business sector and carefully analyzes the micro- and macro-economic market trends. The latest report specializes in studying primary and secondary market drivers, market share, the leading market segments, and comprehensive geographical analysis. Vital information about the key market players and their key business strategies, such as mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, technological innovation, and trending business policies, is one of the key components of the report.

After the stock market closed today, Five9 announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) company Inference Solutions. The purchase price is $172 million, $148 million in cash and $24 million when certain bookings targets are met. Inference brings 550 customers, among them several joint Five9 customers -- including Chick-fil-A and Wyndham Hotels. Inference was founded in 2005, spun out from Telstra Research Labs -- think of it as the Australian version of Bell Labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has additional offices in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia.

Intel has been doubling down on building chips and related architecture for the next generation of computing, and today it announced an acquisition that will bolster its expertise and work specifically in one area of future technology: artificial intelligence. The semiconductor giant today announced that it has acquired SigOpt, a startup out of San Francisco that has built an optimization platform that can be used to run modeling and simulations (two key applications of AI tech) in a better way. Anthony described SigOpt as a startup built to "optimize everything" when we covered its Series A, but Intel specifically will be integrating the tech into its AI business, specifically into its AI Analytics Toolkit, a spokesperson tells me. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SigOpt already counted a number of large enterprises -- "SigOpt's customer base includes Fortune 500 companies across industries, as well as leading research institutions, universities and consortiums using its products" -- among its customers. The product was still in a closed beta, however.

Call center software provider Five9 Inc. has come up a winner yet again, comfortably beating Wall Street's targets with its third-quarter financial results and delivering strong guidance on top of that. The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 27 cents per share on revenue of $112 million, up 34% from a year ago. That was well ahead of Wall Street's forecast of 18 cents per share in earnings and $101 million in revenue. Five9 sells cloud-based contact center software and services for enterprises that enable them to keep track of and manage their interactions with customers. Its software covers traditional phone calls, as well as video calling services, emails and social media interactions.

Founded by Eilon Reshef and Amit Bendov, Gong is also a cloud-based business and uses AI (artificial intelligence) to transcribe and analyze …

The acquisition includes the Nand SSD business, the Nand component and wafer business, and the Dalian Nand memory manufacturing facility in China. Intel will however keep its distinct Intel Optane business. The companies hope to close the deal after receiving all of the necessary governmental approvals in late 2021. Under the agreement, SK hynix will first acquire the Nand SSD business (including NAND SSD-associated IP and employees), and the Dalian facility, with a first payment of USD 7 billion. SK hynix will acquire the remaining assets, including IP related to the manufacture and design of Nand flash wafers, R&D employees, and the Dalian fab workforce, upon final closing sometime in March 2025 with the remaining payment of USD 2 billion.

Today Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring smart wide area networking startup 128 Technology for $450 million. This marks the second AI-fueled networking company Juniper has acquired in the last year and a half after purchasing Mist Systems in March 2019 for $405 million. With 128 Technology, the company gets more AI SD-WAN technology. SD-WAN is short for software-defined wide area networks, which means networks that cover a wide geographical area such as satellite offices, rather than a network in a defined space. Today, instead of having simply software-defined networking, the newer systems use artificial intelligence to help automate session and policy details as needed, rather than dealing with static policies, which might not fit every situation perfectly.

ZoomInfo, a global leader in go-to-market (GTM) intelligence solutions, announced that it has acquired Clickagy, a leading provider of artificial intelligence-powered buyer intent data. Along with this acquisition, ZoomInfo is launching Streaming Intent, an innovative solution that identifies companies with above-average search volume on business-to-business (B2B) topics within minutes of their web activity. As ZoomInfo continues to enhance its comprehensive go-to-market intelligence platform, the acquisition of Clickagy provides sellers and marketers with streaming behavioral intent data that is expansive and customizable. Using an advanced natural language processing engine which correctly identifies context, Clickagy's technology delivers stronger, more reliable intent signals in real time. Clickagy's extensive database gathers intent data from over 300,000 publisher domains and includes 6 trillion-plus new keyword-to-device pairings each month, sourced from over 91 percent of accessible devices in the United States.

In the more advanced consumer goods and services economies, the personal data of billions of people is the most precious of all digital fuels. An entire industry is emerging around the concept that data is the most precious asset in any enterprise, in any industry. Economists are working to determine how to value personal data. Its immense value is reflected in the soaring stock values and astronomical cash flows and profits of companies that monopolize and leverage data. Personal data is a uniquely magical economic asset.

In the financial sector, a reliable forecast the future financial performance of a company is of great importance for investors' investment decisions. In this paper we compare long-term short-term memory (LSTM) networks to temporal convolution network (TCNs) in the prediction of future earnings per share (EPS). The experimental analysis is based on quarterly financial reporting data and daily stock market returns. For a broad sample of US firms, we find that both LSTMs outperform the naive persistent model with up to 30.0% more accurate predictions, while TCNs achieve and an improvement of 30.8%. Both types of networks are at least as accurate as analysts and exceed them by up to 12.2% (LSTM) and 13.2% (TCN).