AI Tooling, Data & MLOps

Nokia Corporation is expanding its partnership with Microsoft Corporation to build an agentic, unified data foundation aimed at helping telecom providers scale artificial intelligence-driven operations. Under the agreement, Nokia Data Suite integrates with Microsoft Fabric, combining telco-specific data products with unified analytics, governance and AI capabilities across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. The company is initially applying these capabilities to autonomous Voice over New Radio assurance, where AI agents detect network anomalies, analyze service issues and recommend corrective actions. Nokia faces competition from Ericsson, which expanded its Intelligent Automation Platform to support automation across radio and core networks, and from Cisco Systems, which is integrating AI agents into its networking portfolio. Nokia shares have soared 123.6% over the past year compared with the industry's 20.6% growth, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 2.42 versus the industry tally of 4.93.

Snowflake raised its fiscal 2027 product revenue guidance to $6.07 billion, implying 36% year-over-year growth, up from its previous outlook of $5.84 billion and 31% growth. In the fiscal second quarter 2026, product revenues rose 37% to $1.49 billion and accounted for 96% of total revenues. Management said AI products contributed roughly half of the recent acceleration, with CoCo surpassing 9,100 accounts after adding more than 2,000 in the quarter and CoWork expanding to 5,800 accounts, up nearly 11% sequentially. The company ended the second quarter of fiscal 2027 with 14,554 total customers, up 32% year over year, including 828 customers generating more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenues, up 27%, and 65 customers above $10 million. Fiscal third-quarter product revenues are expected between $1.588 billion and $1.593 billion, indicating 37-38% growth, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 earnings stands at $2.19 per share, up 11.16% over the past 30 days.

Datadog's enterprise new logo annualized bookings more than doubled year over year in the second quarter of 2026, with customers generating $100,000 or more in annual recurring revenue climbing to about 4,720, a 23% increase from roughly 3,850 a year prior, while total customer count rose to approximately 33,400 from 31,400. Over 750 AI-native customers now rely on Datadog, and all 10 of the largest AI companies are counted among its customers, with MCP tool calls quadrupling quarter over quarter. The momentum builds on a quarter in which revenues grew 36% year over year to $1.12 billion, non-GAAP operating margin reached 23% from 20%, free cash flow rose to $279 million from $165 million, and remaining performance obligations reached $3.47 billion, up 43%. Third-quarter revenue guidance of $1.135 billion to $1.145 billion and a full-year range of $4.45 billion to $4.47 billion embed a previously flagged usage reduction from its single largest customer, while full-year non-GAAP operating income guidance of $1.01 billion to $1.03 billion points to continued margin discipline against elevated GAAP operating expense growth tied partly to the Adaptive ML acquisition. Rivals Dynatrace and Elastic are reporting comparable enterprise expansion, with Dynatrace posting record new-logo annual recurring revenue growth of more than 160% and total ARR of $2.14 billion, up 17%, and Elastic growing its $100,000-plus ACV customer cohort past 1,800 accounts alongside 27% remaining performance obligation growth. Datadog shares have surged 74.7% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 earnings stands at $2.52 per share.

MongoDB executives said the company's self-managed Enterprise Advanced business is reaccelerating, with double-digit growth over each of the past three quarters, and now view it and the Atlas cloud platform as complementary "two growth engines." Chief Financial Officer Mike Berry said during a fireside chat that demand for deployment flexibility has risen over the past 12 to 18 months, driven by regulated industries, government customers, data requirements, cloud capacity constraints and economics, and that growth among large customers using both self-managed MongoDB and Atlas has exceeded the companywide average. Chief Product Officer Ben Cefalo said customers value the ability to build an application once and move it among cloud and on-premise environments, and that MongoDB recently made Search and Vector generally available for self-managed customers after developing those capabilities first in Atlas. Berry said the self-managed licensing model generally offers higher upfront profitability and may deliver higher gross margins over time, and that shared underlying technology limits incremental research and development needs. On AI, Cefalo cited investments in MCP Server capabilities, Voyage AI integration, auto-embedding and a LangChain partnership, while noting enterprise adoption of custom AI applications remains early as security, governance, privacy and regulatory concerns slow production deployments. For the current fiscal-year guidance discussed at the event, Berry said research and development spending is projected to rise about 30%, sales and marketing spending is expected to increase in the mid-teens and general and administrative spending by lower single digits.

Varonis Systems, Inc. launched Varonis Data Lifecycle Management, a new capability that automatically identifies and remediates redundant, obsolete, and trivial data across enterprise environments using its existing Data Security Platform. The launch ties data cleanup directly to sensitivity, access, and activity context, aiming to reduce storage waste, improve AI output quality, and help organizations address compliance exposures from scattered sensitive information. The DLM tool stacks on top of Varonis Atlas, the AI security platform that went generally available in March 2026, which targets discovery, posture management, and runtime protection for AI workloads. Together, Atlas and DLM broaden Varonis' role from guarding unstructured data to governing how that data is stored, used, cleaned up, and exposed across Snowflake, Claude, Cursor, and other cloud and AI partnerships. Varonis Systems' narrative projects $1.1 billion revenue and $120.7 million earnings by 2029, yielding a $50.68 fair value, an 8% upside to its current price, while the most pessimistic analysts were already modeling about US$1.0 billion of 2029 revenue.

Salesforce pushed deeper into the AI stack at Dreamforce by creating a bridge between its business data and outside AI models, a move that sent shares down approximately 1.4% to $252.10 Wednesday. The offering, AIforce, connects Salesforce data, applications and autonomous agents with platforms including Slack and Anthropic's Claude, while the company also introduced Koa, a model built with Nvidia's Nemotron technology and Salesforce's massive store of CRM data. Salesforce is leaning harder into consumption-based pricing, meaning revenue growth increasingly depends on how much customers actually use these AI tools rather than how many software seats they purchase. Agentforce annual recurring revenue has already topped $1.5 billion, equivalent to roughly 3.2% of the midpoint of Salesforce's $46.25 billion fiscal-year revenue guidance, and adding Data 360 lifts that comparison to about 8.4%. At $252.10, the stock sits 26.52% below the $343.08 GF Value estimate, a gap that will depend on Salesforce proving easier AI distribution can translate into durable consumption growth without sacrificing its projected 20.1% GAAP operating margin.

Elastic rolled out Elasticsearch Vector Database on September 11, a serverless offering that lets developers ship large-scale vector search and AI applications without assembling infrastructure themselves. The launch came less than three weeks after Elastic reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 results on August 27 for the period ended July 31, when total revenue reached $478 million, up 15% year over year, current remaining performance obligations grew 21% and remaining performance obligations grew 27%. Sales-led subscription revenue rose 18% year over year to $399 million, and the company added more customers with annual contract value above $100,000 than in any prior quarter, pushing that cohort past 1,800 from over 1,720 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 and over 1,550 a year earlier, while net expansion rate held around 111% and adjusted free cash flow reached $143 million. Guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, ending October 31, calls for revenue of $486 million to $487 million and a swing to positive GAAP operating margin, with full fiscal 2027 non-GAAP operating margin guided to roughly 19.4%, up from 16.2%. The company still posted a GAAP operating loss of $24 million, a -5% operating margin, and a GAAP net loss per share of $0.16, against $77 million in non-GAAP operating income and $0.70 in non-GAAP diluted earnings per share, while repurchasing about 0.8 million shares for roughly $40 million under its $500 million buyback program and acquiring Deductive AI.

Cisco Systems is expanding its Splunk portfolio with new artificial intelligence security and observability capabilities after the unit posted double-digit order growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Splunk contributed to several whole-portfolio agreements, added more than 280 customer logos and notched its highest number of competitive wins in any quarter of fiscal 2026, pushing Cisco past its full-year target of adding 1,000 Splunk customer logos. The enhancements include Cisco AI POD for Splunk, expanded AI-agent observability, Tokenomics capabilities and stronger agentic security operations, aimed at helping enterprises deploy, secure and monitor agentic AI at scale. More than 1,500 customers bought newer Cisco security products such as Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield and AI Defense in the fiscal fourth quarter, while the acquisitions of Galileo Technologies and Astrix Securities broaden Cisco's observability and security reach. The push puts Cisco up against Datadog, whose AI offerings include Agent Observability, Agent Console, Data Observability, GPU Monitoring and AI Guard, and CrowdStrike, whose Next-Gen SIEM ending ARR surpassed $695 million and whose Falcon Shield ARR surged more than 185% year over year in the second quarter of fiscal 2027. Cisco shares have appreciated 42.9% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings stands at $1.32 per share, implying 32% growth.

OpenText Corporation and Cohere announced a strategic partnership at the ALL IN AI conference to bring trusted agentic AI to governments and regulated industries. Under the partnership, OpenText provides the data and context layer that unlocks enterprise data, including unstructured, operational and transactional data, while Cohere supplies the application and orchestration layer through North, its secure, privately deployable agentic AI platform, along with its enterprise AI models. Clients can choose to run the solution on-premises or in a private, public, or sovereign cloud depending on their security, data, and deployment requirements. The agentic solution is expected to reach clients in early 2027, and the partnership will include product development, integration of Cohere's agentic platform and models into OpenText Aviator AI agents, coordinated go-to-market execution, and a strategic reseller relationship through SOLEX. OpenText was founded in Canada in 1991 and serves more than 120,000 enterprise clients in 180 countries, while Cohere was founded in Toronto in 2019 and has raised approximately 1.6 billion USD from investors including AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Oracle, and Cisco.

Nvidia is in advanced talks to invest up to US$10b in Anthropic's planned IPO, according to people familiar with the discussions. The chipmaker is also exploring a potential acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face for up to US$14b, a deal that would expand its software footprint. Both moves would extend Nvidia's role beyond AI hardware into deeper capital partnerships and ownership stakes in key model and tooling providers. Backing a major model provider while already supplying compute would shift Nvidia from supplier to financial partner, while owning a widely used open-source hub could strengthen CUDA-centric workflows and differentiate it further from AMD and Intel. The Hugging Face discussions also sharpen existing risks around regulatory scrutiny, customer vertical integration and energy-intensive AI factory buildouts.

Four major infrastructure vendors have now shipped standalone agent governance products at general availability, a rush that has itself become the signal that agent governance is decoupling from individual platforms to become a category of its own. Okta pushed furthest into new territory with its July 2026 product innovations, shipping Agent-to-Agent Connections at general availability to enable secure multi-agent workflows through temporary runtime tokens that enforce which agents may invoke which others, alongside the Agent Gateway, available as a research release, which sits between agents and the systems they access without requiring code changes. IBM's Think 2026 announcement positioned next-generation watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane, introduced in June on AWS and IBM Cloud, offering runtime policy management, credential health monitoring, and an Agent Access overview across an organization's entire agent estate. Broadcom embedded governance directly into the compute fabric with AgentMinder, unveiled at VMware Explore on August 31 and shipping at general availability bundled into the VMware Private AI Cloud, treating agents as enterprise-grade identities bound to a declared mission, permitted intents, approved tools, and authorized resources. Dataiku made a different architectural bet, with Dataiku Agent Management scanning agents across nine platforms including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex to provide a cross-platform control tower for discovery, certification, and audit-readiness. The urgency tracks to two numbers: Menlo Ventures found that 76 percent of AI applications are purchased rather than built internally, and the Cloud Security Alliance reported in February that 84 percent of organizations doubt they could pass a compliance audit focused on agent behavior or access controls.

Cisco unveiled new Splunk advancements at Splunk .conf in Denver, led by an expanded NVIDIA partnership that brings self-managed Splunk AI to on-premises, private cloud, and air-gapped environments. The newest configuration, Cisco AI POD for Splunk, is part of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA and is available today, with partners bitsIO, Wipro, and World Wide Technology ready on day one; Splunk AI Assistant is available now and Agent Launchpad is coming later this year. Customers can self-host models including the Cisco Deep Time Series Model, Google Gemma 4, and OpenAI GPT-OSS 20B, with NVIDIA Nemotron open models arriving in the coming months. Splunk Agent Observability, initially an on-premises offering, is now available in Splunk Observability Cloud and Cisco Cloud Control, and its new Tokenomics solution tracks and attributes token spend across AI agents and coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Splunk also detailed new agentic SOC capabilities, Exposure Analytics enhancements, and Splunk Enterprise Security Essentials and Premier editions, and said it has formalized a multi-year agreement with AWS to co-develop security solutions against AI-driven attacks.

Archer today launched Archer Evolv AI Compliance, a product that turns enterprise regulations and policies into policy as code delivered as approved Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, deployed natively inside the customer's own AWS account and enforced before a model responds to any prompt from an employee or an agent. The offering is powered by Archer's proprietary regulatory intelligence and 492 purpose-built models trained since 2017, drawing on 22 million regulatory documents, and is available today directly from Archer and in the AWS Marketplace. Enforcement runs as a continuous loop of Listen, Decide, Act, Assure and Learn, with every control traced back to the obligation that required it and every violation recorded in the customer's GRC system of record; no proxy sits in the inference path, and models outside Bedrock can apply the same control through the Amazon Bedrock Apply Guardrail API. The guardrails govern organizational obligations such as credentials and secrets, source code, confidential business information and customer-defined usage rules, as well as regulatory obligations including personal data under GDPR, CCPA and state privacy law, protected health information under HIPAA, payment and cardholder data under PCI DSS, and regulated categories such as export-controlled, securities and biometric data. Archer connects through one scoped, least-privilege AWS IAM role and reads guardrail configuration and events but never customer traffic, so prompt content, model responses, documents, embeddings, PII, model weights and training data never reach Archer, and native Bedrock guardrails continue enforcing as last deployed if connectivity is interrupted. Customers can introduce enforcement in stages through Observe, Advise and Enforce modes, with each version subject to approval and rollback, and Chief Product & Technology Officer Kayvan Alikhani said a guardrail is only as good as the obligation behind it, adding that Archer has already built that chain so customers do not have to.

Snowflake reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 results showing higher sales of US$1,546.79 million and a reduced net loss of US$191.72 million, while also completing a US$3,697.59 million share repurchase program that retired 25,378,000 shares. Management attributed the stronger performance to growing adoption of its AI offerings, including CoCo and CoWork, and raised full-year fiscal 2027 product revenue and operating margin guidance, signaling increased confidence in demand for AI-driven workloads. The company's narrative projects $11.7 billion revenue and $172.1 million earnings by 2029, requiring 29.1% yearly revenue growth and about a $1.3 billion earnings increase from -$1.1 billion today. The most optimistic analysts had already assumed revenue could reach about US$11.8 billion by 2029, so the acceleration in AI workloads could either support that upside case or expose how dependent the story is on aggressive assumptions. Sayari's decision to rebuild its Commercial World Model on Snowflake using CoCo was cited as a concrete example of how AI workloads can deepen usage on the platform.

Temporal announced a $550M Series E raise at a valuation of $12.55B, led by Lightspeed with co-leads Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global, plus participation from T. Rowe Price and SV Angel and returning investors a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify. The company said its annualized revenue run rate recently surpassed $250M, growing more than 200% year-over-year, while net dollar retention has exceeded 200% since February. Temporal Cloud processed 1.9 trillion or more actions in August, up more than 350% year-over-year, and open-source installs surpassed 43 million in August, up 134% since January 2026. Paying customers now exceed 4,300 and include OpenAI, Snap, NVIDIA, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase, and the company said it will use the funding to deepen platform R&D, grow developer and enterprise go-to-market, and scale teams and infrastructure, building on a workforce that has doubled to 570 employees over the past year.

US stock futures moved lower on Monday as investors weighed calls for a slowdown in advanced artificial intelligence development, upcoming Federal Reserve policy decisions and renewed uncertainty over Middle East oil supplies. At 03:04 ET, Dow futures were down 63 points, or 0.1%, while S&P 500 futures declined 46 points, or 0.6% and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 431 points, or 1.5%. AI-linked shares came under pressure after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called in a Saturday essay for AI companies to slow the pace of development of advanced models, following Anthropic's disclosure that several actors had used its Claude AI models in activities ranging from weapons development to fraud; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI chief Elon Musk also voiced support for concerns about the pace of AI development, and Altman said OpenAI would not proceed with a potential initial public offering this year because of safety concerns. Deutsche Bank analysts said the debate could affect the composition of AI capex rather than its scale, with companies potentially directing more investment toward safety, monitoring and governance. A planned meeting between Gulf states and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz was postponed, with Oman's foreign minister citing the interests of consensus, and attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen closed a major Saudi east-west oil pipeline. Brent crude futures briefly moved above $108 a barrel, with ANZ analysts saying Saudi Arabia has now lost the option to use western exports if the Strait of Hormuz deteriorates again.

Snowflake raised its fiscal 2027 product revenue target to $6.07 billion from $5.84 billion after second-quarter product revenue rose 37% to $1.49 billion, with CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy saying AI products drove roughly half of that growth acceleration. UBS analyst Karl Keirstead said the figures, alongside rapid growth at Palantir and Databricks, offered compelling proof of robust enterprise AI adoption. The beat lifted enterprise software broadly, with ServiceNow, Atlassian, Adobe, Intuit and Salesforce all up 3.5% to 6% the next day and the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF up 3%. Salesforce's own move came a week earlier, when its second-quarter fiscal 2027 results showed revenue of $11.35 billion, up 11% year over year, current remaining performance obligations up 14% to $33.5 billion and adjusted EPS of $5.90 against a $3.27 consensus, though $2.61 billion in net gains on strategic investments added $2.53 per share to non-GAAP EPS. Salesforce also announced Claudeforce with Anthropic, a partnership that initially brings Salesforce data, workflows and business logic into Claude through a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, with further integrations planned across Claude, Salesforce and Slack.

Datadog and Dynatrace are racing to own the emerging market for AI-agent observability, as AI coding agents threaten to generate more software changes and production failures to monitor. Datadog told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 10 that monetization of AI-agent observability has begun, with thousands of customers using the capability, describing an emerging inference economy in which more AI applications and agents mean more activity to monitor. One day later, Dynatrace launched a verified Cursor Marketplace plugin that gives coding agents access to live production context through MCP and 30 Dynatrace skills. Datadog's second-quarter revenue rose 36% to $1.12 billion, and customers generating at least $100,000 of annual recurring revenue increased 23% to roughly 4,720, while Dynatrace's latest quarterly ARR grew 17% to $2.136 billion and annualized log-consumption reached $200 million after almost doubling over the previous two quarters. Dynatrace also faces execution and integration risk from its planned $915 million Arize acquisition, and the deciding question is whether autonomous agents prevent enough problems to reduce monitoring or create enough software activity to make observability a larger machine-to-machine market.

Cloudflare now sees agentic artificial intelligence as a growth opportunity that will dwarf its previous drivers, and has raised its long-term "North Star" growth target to 50% from 40%. Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert, speaking at an investor event, said the company's network architecture is positioned to support low-latency, secure and distributed AI inference workloads, and that Cloudflare expects to exit the year with momentum toward that objective. Demand is showing up through the Workers developer platform, where the company added 2 million developers quarter over quarter, and through variable consumption revenue, with companies including Lovable, Figma, Anthropic and OpenAI building on Workers; Cloudflare estimates that about 80% of significant AI enterprise infrastructure customers use its services. Seifert said Cloudflare is focused on inference rather than training the largest models, and that capital expenditures could rise but any increase would be expected to coincide with higher revenue. The company is also building monetization infrastructure for the agentic economy, including "pay per crawl," a Monetization Gateway, Cloudflare Wallets and identity tools, working with partners including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Coinbase, though Seifert acknowledged that significant technical work remains and that Cloudflare cannot yet process transactions at the millions-per-second scale it believes may be necessary.

John Wiley & Sons reported fiscal first-quarter revenue fell 3% to $386 million and adjusted earnings per share dropped 10% to $0.44 from $0.49, a decline the company attributed largely to a known comparison problem. The research business brought in $293 million, up 4%, with research publishing climbing 12% to $259 million, while the AI business generated $14 million in the quarter, of which $10.5 million came from model training and $3.5 million was recurring, with another $14 million already contracted for delivery across the next two quarters. The learning segment was the clear soft spot, with revenue down 20% to $93 million as academic revenue fell 20% to $45 million and professional revenue fell the same amount to $48 million, partly reflecting the loss of a $29 million non-recurring AI licensing benefit from last year's quarter. The Emerald Publishing acquisition added $13 million in revenue and $5 million in adjusted EBITDA but pushed net debt to $1.2 billion and net debt to EBITDA to 2.7 times from 1.9 times a year earlier, while free cash flow remained negative at a $70 million use of cash. Wiley reaffirmed its full-year guidance, including adjusted EPS of $4.60 to $5.05, up from $4.19, and organic revenue growth in the low to mid single digits.

Tempus AI announced an initiative to build a research platform containing 100,000 whole genomes linked to longitudinal clinical information over the next several years, with a long-term goal of reaching one million genomes. The company said the effort will create the first de-identified multimodal whole-genome sequencing dataset built around disease populations and patient outcomes and specifically optimized for AI-driven research. The new dataset will be integrated into Tempus' existing de-identified multimodal data environment, where researchers can access genomic information alongside clinical histories, imaging, pathology and patient outcomes, and analyze it through Tempus Lens without moving datasets between systems. Development is already underway and the initial dataset is available through Tempus' Early Adopter Program, with additional members onboarded in waves and general availability planned for mid-2027. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky said adding whole genome data linked to longitudinal outcomes gives researchers a richer foundation to build AI models and ultimately improve patient care.