Converge 2019 in Review

“From our beginning, OmniSci has been focused on providing our users the fastest and most frictionless path to insight on the largest datasets," stated Todd Mostak,  OmniSci CEO & co-founder. And throughout the inaugural Converge user conference, Todd and the rest of the OmniSci team shared many examples of how this vision has become reality. Nearly 250 people gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to attend OmniSci’s first-ever user conference, which featured industry-leading keynote speakers, over 30 insightful sessions, more than 40 speakers, and seven sponsors.  The conference was spread out over three days, and each day was filled with exciting announcements. Let’s take a look in the rearview mirror at all the activity that happened at Converge 2019.

Connecting with OmniSci Users at Community Day

The conference kicked off with Community Day, a gathering of OmniSci experts, top Community `contributors and learners from the fast-growing fields of accelerated analytics and data science. OmniSci VP of Global Community, Aaron Williams, opened the day with a keynote presentation where he unveiled OmniSci’s new program OmniSci for Good. The program provides non-profit organizations and researchers with free access to the powerful OmniSci platform. Aaron shared a compelling use case of how the program is already making an impact in the community of Flint, Michigan, where researchers trained a machine learning model to predict where to find thousands of lead pipes that contributed to the water crisis there.

The day included a series of lightning talks with speakers from StreamSets, NC State University, Tailored Brands, NVIDIA and i2enabled, Inc. Two workshops were included in Community Day and offered attendees the option of digging into all facets of OmniSci Immerse, from loading data to creating dashboards, or learning how to create their own custom visualizations and applications using mapd-connector and other related JavaScript libraries. To round out the day, an insightful fireside chat shared a glimpse into the minds at work behind the OmniSci platform.

Extra, Extra, Read All About It!

The keynotes at Converge were packed with exciting announcements. On day one of the conference, OmniSci leaders unveiled Version 5.0, coming later this year. This release enables users to gain deeper insights, interactively on multi-billion row datasets, thanks to the newly announced data fusion and data science capabilities. However, the announcements didn’t end there. Shortly after announcing Version 5.0, we broke the news about our new collaboration with Intel, which coincides with the launch of a CPU version of OmniSci Enterprise Edition. A CPU version of OmniSci allows us to reach a bigger audience of data scientists and analysts than ever before, furthering our mission to make analytics instant, powerful and effortless for everyone.

The second day of the conference featured the announcement of OmniSci’s OEM Startup Accelerator Program. The program offers a new way for early-stage companies focused on data accumulation, enrichment and insight to benefit from partnering with OmniSci. Some of these benefits include licensed access to the OmniSci platform, co-sell opportunities through the OmniSci Data Catalog and marketing placement opportunities on OmniSci’s sales channels. “Our new OEM Startup Accelerator Program accelerates time-to-market, creates a marketable point of difference, and leaves young technology companies free to focus on their core business,” Ashish Bambroo, OmniSci VP of business development, said of the program.

Challenge Accepted

A Converge Data Challenge was launched during Community Day, and over the course of the 3 days of the conference, attendees had the chance to flex their analytics and data science skills by finding insights in a large telco dataset. The dataset was available exclusively to Converge attendees, and free OmniSci Cloud instances were provided. This gave them a chance to discover different OmniSci features and how to work with them effortlessly. It was amazing to see the beautiful dashboards that were created by the attendees. Congrats to all the winners of the Data Challenge: Robert Luciani, Velisarios Milouli, Karam Singh!

We are thrilled with the success of our first user conference. We heard fascinating new use cases of how users are taking advantage of OmniSci accelerated analytics, and appreciate everyone who took the stage to share their stories. In the coming weeks and months, be sure to check back in as we share all of the rich content that was created at the conference. Thank you to everyone who joined us for Converge 2019!