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
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-2023.
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't
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
Analysis
Ten years ago, people were just getting comfortable with the cloud, never mind worrying about containing costs, but Capital One decided to open source an internal cost-control project based on policy as code. That project was Cloud Custodian. In April 2016 I wrote the story of that release for TechCrunch.
Analysis
Enterprises want to love agentic AI, they really do, but three years after ChatGPT blew onto the scene, companies are still struggling to find value. Agents are the latest manifestation of 'describe it and it will come,' yet like all enterprise automation efforts over the last couple of
Analysis
Over the last six months, I’ve interviewed a range of enterprise leaders. I went back through those conversations looking for one thing: how they’re thinking about the so-called SaaSocalypse (the predicted end of SaaS). We've been hearing a lot about the end of SaaS as we
Analysis
Databricks has spent over a decade establishing itself as a cloud data platform company. This week, the company announced a new cybersecurity product that will put it in front of an entirely different buyer: the CISO. The new Lakewatch product is predicated on the idea that security is increasingly a
Analysis
Last week, Shantanu Narayen announced he was stepping down as Adobe CEO after 18 years, leaving behind a legacy of transformation. Perhaps his biggest achievement was moving Adobe’s popular Creative Suite from boxed software to a cloud subscription business. "He did the impossible by saving and transforming an
Analysis
The following post is a collaboration with my long-time friend, colleague and writing partner Alex Wilhelm. Subscribe to Alex's newsletter ‘Cautious Optimism‘ here. You'll be glad you did! In 2023, following an uninspiring AWS re:Invent, Amazon's enormous annual customer event in Las Vegas,
Analysis
We keep hearing that agents are going to be a big deal. Even if that hasn’t happened yet at scale, it's a fair bet that agents are going to become a significant part of every company's enterprise software strategy in the years ahead. The hyperscalers