It’s hard to believe that we’re halfway through 2017. I joined Anaconda as CEO back in January and I’ve been deeply impressed by this amazing team and all that we have collectively accomplished in just six short months. From new events to new products, our teams have already squeezed quite a bit into 2017. Before the year flies by completely, I wanted to take a moment to reflect and share the exciting milestones we’ve hit on the road to 2018.
New Senior Leadership Team Members
Here at Anaconda, the first half of the year was bookended by new hires. At the beginning of the year, I joined to run the company. This move allowed Anaconda’s co-founder, Travis Oliphant, to channel his energy into open source innovation and community. At the end of June, we added another new name to the executive team when Aaron Barfoot came on-board as CFO. Aaron is a world class CFO and is leading the effort to make our finance, IT and HR departments top notch. Both Aaron and I are thrilled to be a part of the next chapter for Anaconda as our numbers continue to climb past four million active users.
New Data
One of Anaconda’s most exciting projects this year was the release of our data-backed report: Winning at Data Science: How Teamwork Leads to Victory. Working with the independent research firm Vanson Bourne, we surveyed 200 data science and analytics decision makers, digging into the adoption, challenges and value of data science in the enterprise. While some of the findings were expected, others were jaw dropping. For example, 96 percent of respondents agree that data science is critical to the success of their organization, but 22 percent are failing to fully take advantage of their data. If you love numbers as much as we do, check out the full findings here.
New Events
This February, our inaugural user conference, AnacondaCON was a box office hit. Literally.
I’ve been at companies known for their stand-out conferences, and this is one of the best industry conferences I have ever attended, by far.
With speakers from the Anaconda team, our customers/users and partners, it was fantastic to have the brightest minds in data science together in the same room. If you couldn’t make it to this year’s event, you can watch the 2017 keynotes and keep your eye out for updates for AnacondaCON 2018, which will be April 8-11, 2018 at the JW Marriott in Austin, TX.
New Partners
In April, we joined forces with IBM to offer Anaconda on IBM’s Cognitive Systems, the company’s deep learning platform, as well as the IBM Power AI software distribution for machine learning. In May, we made another big announcement with our partners H20.ai and MapD Technologies with the launch of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative (GOAI). GOAI is designed to create common data frameworks using NVIDIA’s technology, accelerating data science on GPUs. We see both of these partnerships as major points of validation for data science and machine learning, as data scientists continue to stretch their legs in the enterprise. Keep an eye out for even more activity in this area later in the year.
New Products
If you’re an Anaconda user, we hope you were as thrilled as we were about the launch of Anaconda 4.4 this June. Besides delivering a comprehensive platform for Python-centric data science with a single-click installer, Anaconda 4.4 is designed to simplify working with Python 2 and Python 3 code, supporting a gradual migration and avoiding the need for any “big bang” cutover.
Why #Anaconda 4.4 is the solution to anyone working with both #Python 2 and Python 3: https://t.co/PJVEfc23Fg (@ijstokes) pic.twitter.com/XebFLe6llY
— Continuum Analytics (@ContinuumIO) June 9, 2017
New Users
In 2016 alone, Anaconda user growth products and services grew more than 100 percent. In 2017, the number of downloads-to-date has surpassed 25 million with more than four million active users, since the company’s founding in 2012. A recent poll from KDnuggets found that Anaconda usage has increased 37% since 2016, placing the platform in the top 10 ranking for the industry’s most popular analytics/data science tools. The poll also found that Python has overtaken R as the most popular data science language, a trend we anticipate will continue in the years ahead.
I’m super pleased with our accomplishments for the first half of the year and look forward to exciting second half of 2017!