More Free Software Offered in Response to COVID-19

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Organizations researching treatments for the novel coronavirus have an abundance of software and services at their disposal, including a range of additional offerings that analytics vendors are offering for free. But groups of all stripes can benefit from the free and discounted offers being made during these strange COVID-19 times.

We recently told you about a wave of free software and services from the big data community in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world grapples with the lingering disease, software vendors and service providers have continued to step up by offering free tools for fighting the pandemic.

Yellowbrick, which develops an MPP database designed to run on fast solid-state drives, is offering free access to its data warehouse in the cloud for groups that are doing research into a potential vaccine for COVID-19.

The company is partnering with Virtusa, which develops a life sciences computer platform, to roll out a COVID-19-fighting setup in the cloud. Researchers can connect the warehouse to a range of synthetic data supplied by Virtusa relating to drug development and media sources. “We think our innovative technology can give them a powerful boost and help speed the time to insight,” says Yellowbrick CEO Neil Carson.

Graph databases have proven to be powerful tools in the fight against COVID-19. Now groups that are researching disease spread in local communities have another source for these tools from Thinknum Alternative Data & Knowledge Graph Base. The two companies recently announced that they’re working with graph database companies Neo4j, TigerGraph, and OntoText to provide free or discounted access to graph tools for people and groups who are studying the spread of the virus.

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Interested parties can go to https://covid19.kgbase.com/ to request access to the free or discounted software or services, including Neo4j Enterprise Edition, TigerGraph Cloud and TigerGraph Enterprise Edition, KGBase’s interactive software, and Ontotext GraphDB Enterprise Edition.

Enterprise search firm Sinequa is also offerings its services for free via COVID-19 Intelligent Insight, a free and open portal designed to help people find relevant information about the novel coronavirus.

“This portal brings together scientific papers, publications, health authority guidance, and clinical trial information into a single interface, allowing researchers to quickly surface critical insights and analyze the vast and growing information about the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company says.

As of last week, the portal, which can be accessed at covidsearch.sinequa.com/app/covid-search/, contained 70,000 papers focused on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, with new material added daily. Current sources include the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), as well as papers from Elsevier, clinical studies from clinicaltrials.gov, and publications from the World Health Organization database and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Business intelligence software vendor MicroStrategy has waived fees for accessing its entire education catalog for the next three weeks. “All of our virtual instructor-led and online education courses and certifications will remain free through May 15,” the company announced today.

The MicroStrategy Education Center contains hundreds of hours of training courses, certifications, and video tutorials centered around working with the vendor’s BI tool. There are courses designed for data analysts, data scientists, data architects, and demonstrators.

Initially, the company had planned on offering its entire course catalog for free through the end of April. But after tens of thousands of people signed up, the company decided to extend it, according to Hugh Owen, the company’s EVP of worldwide education.

BigSquid, the developer of the Kraken AutoML tool, is offering free access to Kraken through the end of May. The company is also offering free access to its “AI Adoption Training Courses” to help people learn how to build their first machine learning model.

Next-gen OLAP vendor AtScale is offering free access to its special collection of COVID-19 data in the cloud for researchers working on treatment to the coronavirus, the company announced today.

The COVID-19 Cloud OLAP Model was built to analyze COVID-19 data sets, including Starschema COVID-19 Epidemiological Data, which is available through Snowflake’s Data Exchange, as well as Boston Children’s Hospital’s COVIDNearYou.org. AtScale’s OLAP model also includes datasets from The New York Times and World Health Organization.

AtScale’s OLAP model allows users to use their preferred BI tool, such as Tableau or even Microsoft Excel, to perform granular level multidimensional analysis on the COVID-19 data, with an eye toward fast, interactive results. “It has been inspiring to see the amount of effort from the global community to better understand and combat the COVID-19 virus,” said Cort Johnson, vice president of growth at AtScale.’

Sumo Logic, a provider of cloud-base analysis tools for log data, announced its Work-From-Home solution last month. The new offering puts Sumo Logic’s popular analytics tools for remote access, VPN, endpoint security, and SaaS productivity apps into the hands of IT and security teams, who are working from home like the rest of us.

Sumo’s WFH offering includes pre-built hooks into many of the most popular WFH offerings that IT and admins are now dealing with during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Auth0, Duo, Oka, One Login, and Azure Active Directory for single sign on; Cisco Meraki and zScaler Web Security for remote access; Crowdstrike Falcon, Carbon Black, and Cylance for endpoint security; and Google’s G-Suite, Office 365, Salesforce, and Slack for productivity apps.

Sumo is offering a free 90-day trial to its WFH offering.

New Relic is also providing free access to its big data analytics platform for 90 days to any new customer that’s engaged in COVID-19 relief efforts with a specific public benefit. That includes organizations that are providing direct humanitarian relief, public and private school education delivery, and relief coordination efforts.

“These important organizations are increasingly relying on software to accomplish their missions, and New Relic has an opportunity to help them keep their software and systems up and running throughout this pandemic,” writes Erin Dieterich, the director of NewRelic.org in a recent blog post.

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