Data Forward: AI and Data Management News

How Acceldata and ServiceNow Bridge Data and Action to scale Enterprise AI w/ Lofan Leung, Dir, Data Analytics & Product Ecosystem

As enterprises race to deploy AI, many are discovering that success requires more than models and infrastructure. It demands trusted data, governed workflows, operational visibility, and measurable business outcomes. In this episode, Ramon Chen, Chief Product Officer at Acceldata, sits down with Lofan Leung, Director of Alliances at ServiceNow, to discuss how the partnership between ServiceNow and Acceldata helps organizations bridge the gap between data, AI, and business execution. The conversation explores ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric and AI strategy, including how enterprise data, metadata, workflows, and AI agents come together to create intelligent operations. Lofan also shares insights into ServiceNow's partner ecosystem and how organizations are leveraging the platform to accelerate digital transformation and AI adoption. The discussion then turns to the growing partnership between ServiceNow and Acceldata. Together, ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric and Acceldata's Data, Compute, and AI Observability capabilities provide organizations with the trust, visibility, governance, and operational intelligence needed to scale AI responsibly. From data quality and lineage to AI agent monitoring, governance, and auditability, the combined solution helps enterprises move from experimentation to production with confidence. Whether you're a CIO, CDO, data leader, or AI executive, this episode offers a practical look at how trusted workflows and trusted data can accelerate enterprise AI outcomes.

Building the Agentic Enterprise: Inside AWS's AI Stack with Rajesh Vijayaraghavan

Recorded live at Autonomous 26 in San Francisco, Ashwin sits down with Rajesh Vijayaraghavan, Principal ML & AI Specialist at AWS, to unpack how enterprises and ISVs are moving from AI experimentation to real production value. AWS's Bedrock and Agent Core platform gives companies a modular stack — covering model access, memory, observability, and multi-agent orchestration — without managing underlying infrastructure. ISVs like Box, Asana, and Cox Automotive are embedding agentic workflows to keep users in their apps and automate cross-platform tasks, with some running hundreds of agents in production. After years of "leap of faith" AI investment, the last six months have shown measurable productivity gains — with AWS's own Mantle engine built by fewer than 10 engineers in weeks using AI coding tools.

Tech Series: Engineering Cloudbridge: Zero-Config & Zero-Trust Networking for Distributed Data

How do you connect thousands of distributed data points across multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge environments without spending months on firewall tickets and VPN configurations? In this technical deep dive, Gowtham Saasivam - the Senior Staff Engineer at Acceldata, explains how the "Cloudbridge" architectural pattern is deconstucted —a novel approach to enterprise connectivity designed for planetary-scale distributed systems. Traditional networking (IP VPNs, manual TLS, and complex firewall rules) creates massive operational bottlenecks and security risks. We explore how to flip the script by moving from network-centric connectivity to identity-centric, automated secure channels. What we cover in this session: * The Death of the Inbound Port: Why traditional "inbound" firewall rules are a bottleneck for CI/CD and how Reverse Connectivity allows data planes to initiate outbound-only mTLS tunnels. * Automating the PKI Nightmare: How to implement a zero-touch certificate lifecycle that eliminates manual issuance and prevents outages caused by expired certs. * Zero-Trust in Motion: Moving beyond the initial handshake to implement continuous authorization and behavioral monitoring for every request. * Engineering Resilience: An inside look at adaptive backoff algorithms and dynamic service discovery for high-availability tunnels. Key Engineering Takeaways: 1. Reverse Connectivity: Use outbound-initiated channels to bypass complex ingress policies. 2. Identity-Driven Routing: Leverage automated mTLS certificates for both security and service discovery. 3. Operational Autonomy: Reduce the "coordination tax" between NetOps, SecOps, and App Dev teams. Who is this for? Distributed systems engineers, Cloud Architects, SecOps professionals, and anyone building global data platforms that need to reach into highly segmented or restricted environments. #CloudNetworking #ZeroTrust #DistributedSystems #DataEngineering #CyberSecurity #mTLS #DevOps #CloudBridge #SoftwareArchitecture #EnterpriseIT

Beyond Data: Why Context Intelligence Is the Missing Link in AI Success with Guy Vorster from Reltio

Abstract: In this episode of Data Forward, Ramon Chen sits down with Guy Voster to explore why AI initiatives are failing—not due to a lack of data, but a lack of context. As enterprises race to adopt AI, the conversation is shifting toward context intelligence—understanding where data comes from, what it means, and whether it can be trusted. Ramon and Guy unpack how unified, entity-centric data combined with semantics and real-time delivery creates a reliable foundation for both humans and AI agents. They also dive into: Why AI without context leads to confident—but incorrect—decisions The role of master data management and data observability in building trust How fragmented data environments create risk for AI-driven automation What it takes to move from raw data to actionable, context-rich intelligence This episode is a must-listen for data and AI leaders looking to bridge the gap between data, meaning, and action in the age of intelligent systems.

Modernizing Hadoop with VAST and Acceldata

Abstract:  On this Data Forward episode, Jason Russler of VAST Data and Ramon Chen of Acceldata discuss how enterprises can finally modernize their legacy Hadoop environments, cutting costs dramatically while positioning their data infrastructure for the AI era. Listeners will learn: How swapping HDFS for the VAST AI OS with S3A-compatible object storage eliminates 3× replication overhead and shrinks storage footprints by up to 8× — without sacrificing performance Why stable workloads like Spark ETL are moving back on-premises as cloud bills soar, and how private AI environments deliver both cost savings and data sovereignty How Acceldata's observability tooling surfaces hidden cluster inefficiencies, turning existing hardware into found money before any new infrastructure spend