SAN JOSE, CA, Jan. 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE – Sonasoft Corp. (OTCQB: SSFT) is a leader in AI and data engineering. The following is a brief review of 2019.
2019 marked the completion of Sonasoft’s transformation into a world leader in AI and data engineering. The driving force for this transformation was a series of acquisitions. Together, these acquisitions ensure that Sonasoft can offer complete AI solutions for customers in any industry. Looking ahead to 2020, data engineering and AI will be key drivers of revenue expansion for Sonasoft. Central to this will be NuGene, one of the most powerful unified AI platforms in the world.
Unified AI platforms
Recently, unified AI platforms have been in the news. eBay is the latest big tech company to announce that they have developed their own platform in-house. A unified AI platform allows you to apply AI on-demand to any business problem you might have. Previously, each problem required a specific model to be developed by a data scientist. This process can easily take months. These platforms cut this down to days and are able to tackle much more diverse problems.
Most unified AI platforms take pre-processed data and try to extract narrow features from it. They are inherently biased because a human has filtered the data they see. Furthermore, this data is simply a snapshot in time. The models produced by such a system are fine, but they aren’t always as robust as they should be, and in complex scenarios, they can break down. Google DeepMind offers an alternative approach, relying on complex deep learning algorithms to allow it to outperform humans in many tasks. However, DeepMind requires massive computing power that is well beyond the reach of most companies. In contrast, NuGene allows companies of any size to get the benefits of a unified AI platform.
NuGene stands apart for three reasons. Firstly, it can take in data in any format and understands the importance of time series. This allows it to incorporate historical time trends along with current data. Secondly, it mimics how a human works to learn and solve problems. It looks for patterns in the data, forms hypotheses and then, uniquely, tests these for causation. Finally, it runs thousands of ML models to find the set that gives the most accurate outcome. This means NuGene can solve problems as diverse as planning marketing budgets to maximize ROI to augmenting customer support tools with autonomous intelligent agents or even slashing preventive maintenance costs for heavy industry.
Data engineering
Machine learning is a true disruptor in almost every area of business. As a result, we see companies large and small investing heavily in data science, hoping to see the transformative power of AI in their business. The traditional approach was to employ a data science team to solve a specific problem by analyzing the data, identifying possible patterns, and then finding a machine learning model that can spot those patterns in new data.
One of the key challenges companies face is a shortage of data science expertise. This is where Sonasoft’s data engineering consultancy comes into its own. Sonasoft employs a team of over 50 data scientists and engineers with significant industry experience covering data factories, cloud data processing, and data migration. Many companies have huge amounts of legacy data that would be a powerful resource for machine learning, but they are not in a suitable form. Sonasoft’s expertise makes it trivial to migrate this data into the cloud, analyze it, and visualize the results in a meaningful way.
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.
About Sonasoft
Based in Silicon Valley since 2003, Sonasoft is a public company (SSFT) providing solutions that create significant competitive advantages from data, the most valuable corporate asset in the digital economy. Sonasoft’s artificial intelligence solution and software capabilities harness data to enable businesses to accelerate and improve decision making, increase operational efficiency and automate critical processes.
For more information about Sonasoft, please visit: https://www.sonasoft.com
For more information about Sonasoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions, please visit: https://www.sonasoft.com/products/artificial-intelligence-ai/
For investor-specific information, please visit: https://www.sonasoft.com/investors/
Forward-looking Statements
This release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) the Company’s financing plans; (ii) trends affecting the Company’s financial condition or results of operations; (iii) the Company’s growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) the declaration and payment of dividends. The words “may,” “would,” “will,” “expect,” “estimate,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “intend,” and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company’s ability to control and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors.