Profiles
In 2024, Chen Goldberg left a prestigious role at Google as GM and VP of engineering for the Kubernetes and serverless portfolio after more than eight years at the company. It took a bold new challenge to compel her to make such a change, and she found it at neocloud
Analysis
Few tech companies have survived as many platform shifts as IBM, from mainframes to PCs to the cloud, and its next big bets are on AI and quantum computing. Last week, the company held its Think customer conference in Boston, where the message was clear: AI is hard, and IBM
Commentary
As any sports fan knows, teams thrive when they have players with a variety of experience. Having a pipeline of younger players in various stages of development helps give the team new blood, cheaper talent and a way to transition from older players as they move on or retire. Organizations
Newsletters
I spent the early part of the week in Boston at IBM Think. Boston is a town with a lot of colleges. The talk of AI mixed with upcoming graduations got me thinking about entry level jobs. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward
Analysis
In the middle of 2023, the cloud market was fading. Companies had tired of big bills and they were looking to cut back on their usage. Amazon, the original cloud infrastructure vendor, was experiencing its lowest growth rates in years, dropping all the way down to 12% YoY in mid-
Profiles
Twilio was founded in 2008 to solve a telecom problem using software. If developers could tap into communications APIs, they could start creating software that disrupted the biggest telecommunications companies by putting previously expensive and rare capabilities into the hands of just about anyone who knew how to code. With
Commentary
One lesson we learned during the pandemic is the value of in-person connections. I was at TechCrunch at the time and like many publications, we tried to keep the conference engine revving with a series of virtual gatherings. Of course, it worked from a content standpoint, but the true
Newsletters
Hi everyone. As we turn to May with the flowers blooming and the apple trees in my yard bursting, I've been thinking a lot about the value we humans bring in a world of AI hype. This week, I decided to explore that idea. If you like my
Analysis
Last week, Google held its annual Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas. There were announcements aplenty, from new TPUs to new security and data products, but perhaps the biggest was Google’s expanded Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which the company is positioning as a more complete orchestration and
Analysis
Much of the world's text-based content has been used to train large language models. There is actually a shortage of available content because LLMs are constantly sucking up the supply, but there is a large untapped supply of unstructured data – sound, video and images. Why aren'
Analysis
As companies struggle to implement AI in the enterprise, one of the things that tends to happen is letting perfect get in the way of good enough. One of the problems of working with AI as an individual, team or a company is that it’s easy to go down
Commentary
Last month I attended the CRM Playaz IRL event in Atlanta, where I had a memorable conversation with Alan Berkson, who runs analyst relations at Contentful, a headless content management company. Headless is simply a term for separating the front end user interface from the back end code. It was