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I've spent a lot of time recently (and used plenty of digital ink) discussing the challenge that CIOs and other IT leaders face: balancing the demands of driving innovation with operational optimization (or efficiency, if you prefer).

I've talked about how Generative AI has been the thing that has finally made non-IT executives and boards realize the strategic relevance of IT.

Implicit in this shift is that IT has always overwhelmingly focused on improving efficiency and optimization. There's nothing inherently wrong with seeking to boost efficiency — except when it becomes the sole measure of impact.

The conundrum that CIOs face in balancing this mandate for innovation against the need to drive optimization is clear in how economists look at technology.

The Productivity Paradox

One of the articles we discussed in this week's episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech is about Daron Acemoglu, an MIT labor economist, questioning whether we'll see a significant enough productivity boost from AI to finally resolve the so-called productivity paradox. He's skeptical.

The productivity paradox is the observation that despite decades of employing technology, organizations haven't seen significant productivity gains—unlike the massive gains during the industrial revolution.

There are many theories as to why this productivity paradox exists, but few answers.

Acemoglu argues that he is skeptical AI will resolve this paradox, and thus its hype is unwarranted.

His position created a paradox of its own — at least for me. As I've made clear repeatedly, I believe that AI (Generative AI, specifically) is over-hyped, to say the least. Still, I don't agree with Acemoglu's position mostly because I think productivity is the wrong way to assess the impact of AI — and almost every other enterprise technology — in the first place.

Piercing the Productivity Paradox by Focusing on Competitive Value

Another article we discussed from The Wall Street Journal highlights how many CIOs are changing how they evaluate AI investments. They are no longer primarily looking at AI from a productivity perspective, finding it difficult to justify on that basis.

Instead, they are looking at AI and evaluating its revenue contribution potential. And the primary way that AI is providing revenue opportunities is by creating an experiential differentiation that is elevating the organization's competitive value and positioning in the market.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

I've been extolling for years that enterprise value now hinges more on the digital experience than on efficiency and optimization. This shift is because the experience has become the main driver of competitive differentiation.

We've been in this value-creation transition for over a decade. AI is just the latest tool for creating experience-driven, value-generating differentiation. If it’s what finally awakens enterprise executives, then I celebrate it.

However, the fact is that old habits die hard. I expect most members of the executive team — and even many CIOs — will continue to look at technology investments primarily though the lens of efficiency and optimization. That will be a mistake that ultimately holds them back from making the critical investments that have the potential to truly transform their organizations and competitive positioning. But those investments — and the transformation that will result from them — can only happen if we pierce the productivity paradox once and for all.

Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 22

In this episode, we delve into the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise technology, with a spotlight on innovations and disruptions brought by AI and automation. Key discussions include the transformative potential of AWS App Studio in democratizing app development and the strategic push by AMD through its acquisition of Silo AI to challenge NVIDIA in the AI ecosystem. We also address the contentious debates around AI’s role in productivity, employee replacement, and revenue generation, underscored by emerging thought leadership and industry reactions.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15420786

📔 Show Notes

[01:05] Will AWS App Studio Disrupt Enterprise App Development?

Amazon Web Services has just launched their App Studio with the goal of democratizing enterprise app development. Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park take a step back and ask "just what IS an enterprise app?" They contextualize where the App Studio fits into the current world of low-code and no-code app development.

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/aws-app-studio-promises-to-generate-enterprise-apps-from-a-written-prompt/

Tags: Amazon Web Services, App Studio, Low-code app development, no-code app development, Generative AI

[08:49] Celonis + Emporix = End-to-End Process Automation?

Celonis and Emporix announced the launch of an end-to-end process orchestration offering combining Celonis' process mining and task automation capabilities with Emporix' Orchestration Engine to sequence tasks into end-to-end processes. Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo study this offering in context of the process and workflow automation markets as well as prior enterprise application process augmentation promises to assess this launch.

Diginomica: https://diginomica.com/celonis-and-emporix-aim-end-end-process-automation-launch-new-orchestration-engine

Tags: Celonis, Emporix, process orchestration, orchestration engine, process mining, process automation

[16:43] AMD Acquires Silo AI to Pressure NVIDIA

AMD acquires the largest AI lab in Europe, Silo AI, with over 600 employees and over 200 AI deployments under its belt. This acquisition helps AMD to build custom models for enterprise clients and to be a one-stop shop across chip, software tools for AI management, and the professional services needed to deploy models. In trying to compete with NVIDIA, AMD is racing to have the most complete AI ecosystem under its corporate umbrella. Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo look at this announcement from the CIO's perspective of supporting AI in production.

ComputerWorld: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2517498/ai-chip-battleground-shifts-as-software-takes-centerstage.html

Tags: AMD, AI Lab, Silo AI, NVIDIA, Lisa Su, Jensen Huang, LLM

[22:35] Why CEOs Fail to Replace Employees with AI

A recent editorial in VentureBeat points out how CEOs are getting excited about replacing employees with AI, only to see poor results and dissatisfied customers. Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park discuss what AI should really be used for.

Cangrade CEO Gershon Goren for VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/can-we-please-stop-talking-about-replacing-employees-with-ai/

Tags: employee replacement, AI for business, customer experience

[29:06] What if AI Doesn't Improve Productivity?

MIT labor economist Daron Acemoglu posits that AI will only provide incremental gains to productivity, which flies in the face of the hyped gains pushed by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and other think tanks. What happens if Acemoglu is right?

MIT labor economist Daron Acemoglu for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/business/dealbook/ai-productivity.html

Tags: Daron Acemoglu, MIT, labor economist, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, value mapping, pricing

[33:50] AI Should Be All About The Money

This Wall Street Journal article written by Isabelle Bousquette points out that AI needs to be about improving top-line revenue. Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park discuss some of the metrics associated with AI, such as the potential for increasing revenue and profit up to 5% with AI, the Sequoia Capital estimate of AI becoming a $600 billion business, and the real-life assumptions that CIOs need to make if these are the metrics that define AI investments in the enterprise.

Isabelle Bousquette for the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-time-for-ai-to-start-making-money-for-businesses-can-it-b476c754?mod=djemCIO

Tags: Isabelle Bousquette, top one revenue, AI, Sequoia Capital

[37:12] OpenAI Debuts A New Maturity Scale for Gen AI

OpenAI recently discussed a new 5 Level Scale for AI and claims everyone is working at Level 1.  But Hyoun and Charles agree that this scale looks odd when it comes to describing the current state of AI.

TechRadar: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/openai-has-a-new-scale-for-measuring-how-smart-their-ai-models-are-becoming-which-is-not-as-comforting-as-it-should-be

Tags: OpenAI, PhD level AI, Autonomous AI, AI Hype

[41:30] Generative AI Can't See, Needs Bullshit Detector

Based on several articles, Charles and Hyoun quickly look at the latest science stating that generative AI struggles to "see" images because of a lack of training data. And then they also see how people are fighting back against generative AI bots and malware both through dedicated solutions such as Patronus AI as well as simply counterprompting with the simple phrase “ignore all previous instructions.”

VentureBeat: Meet Patronus: https://venturebeat.com/ai/meet-patronus-ais-lynx-the-open-source-bullshit-detector-outsmarting-gpt-4/

NBC News: Hunting for AI Bots? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna161318

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What are you missing?

I've been doing a lot of work recently with SymphonyAI's Enterprise IT division on messaging around its new Copilot offering. One of the things I've been telling the leadership team is that one of its super powers is the ability to help enterprise IT leaders catch the thing they may have otherwise missed.

The need to identify those potential misses was one of the earliest lessons I learned from a mentor CIO at the very beginning of my career.

I called her on a Saturday unsure if I should have bothered her about an issue that I felt could cause significant issues come Monday if we were unable to resolve it.

She assured me that I should ALWAYS call. She explained that she'd rather give the executive team a heads up about something that might happen and then explain that we rallied and resolved it rather than have to explain, after the fact, why something went terribly wrong.

Her greatest risk and fear was the miss.

Not much has changed.

The never-ending and constantly growing complexity of the enterprise IT tech stack continues to challenge even the most disciplined IT organization. How great would it be, then, to have an AI-powered assistant that you can ask to help identify anything that you might be missing, right?

The Risk of the AI Governance Miss

But I digress.

There are lots of potential gotchas lying around the floor of the modern IT organization. But one of the biggest is likely the issue around AI governance.

I've been talking about the need to address it for a while, so I was encouraged when I saw a recent CIO article on the topic. Unfortunately, the article was mostly a nothing burger suggesting that all you need to do is leverage existing data and corporate governance policies and approaches.

I think this is a big potential miss.

AI governance is going to be exponentially more difficult to address because of its widespread impact and its shear breadth.

And I don't think there's a clear cut approach to it — at least not yet.

Hyoun and I dove into this subject a bit this week. But the big message is beware what you don't know or what you think you know, but don't!

Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 21

In a holiday-shortened week, Charles Araujo of the DX Report and Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights still found some critical topics for enterprise IT leaders. We cover Anthropic's funding the development of new AI benchmarks, why CIOs are recklessly underestimating AI governance needs, and how AI power costs are becoming materially important for upcoming CIO budget forecasts.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15383552

📔 Show Notes

[01:20] Anthropic to Fund New AI Benchmarks

Anthropic recently announced its intentions to both develop and fund new benchmarks that more accurately describe the behavior and performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). Charles and Hyoun discuss why this is a good move from Anthropic in terms of the needs for better benchmarks, an enhanced understanding of generative AI, as well as Anthropic's own self-interest in standing out from OpenAI and other large AI competitors.

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/anthropic-looks-to-fund-a-new-more-comprehensive-generation-of-ai-benchmarks/

[08:15] CIOs Recklessly Underestimating AI Governance Needs

A recent article from CIO.com kicked off a discussion between Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo on the massive chasm between the current discussions in AI governance and the reality of the breadth of AI governance challenges that CIOs seem poorly prepared for. It is not enough to just lean on legacy data governance policies and a decade of cloud computing experience. CIOs need to look across the challenges of data, model development, model training, talent management, infrastructure management, power management, and environmental concerns.

CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/2510265/4-essential-lessons-in-ai-governance.html

[17:27] AI Power Costs Enter CIO Budget Forecasts

A firm called Phaidra got Hyoun and Charles' attention in tackling the challenges of data center power management. After a decade of CIOs thinking that they had built their last data center, the cost of unmanaged cloud and the challenges of AI are starting to force CIOs to reconsider their on-premises IT strategies. In a world where data center infrastructure management is making a comeback and practically every large enterprise is now a hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem, CIOs will be forced to take a broader role in translating electricity, power, and utilities into digital outcomes.

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/02/phaidras-ai-helps-manage-data-center-energy-consumption/

Venture Beat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/will-the-cost-of-scaling-infrastructure-limit-ais-potential/

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Forgive my mixed metaphors, but I think they are apt, given our situation. There is no question that the bombardment of AI-everything for the past year and a half has put us smack in the middle of an accelerated hype cycle.

But I also think that we can look at all of this as a crazy storm — one in which we find ourselves right smack in the eye.

The thing about being in the eye of a storm — especially when it's a big one — is that you don't really know what's going on. You think you can see clearly, but you may not be able to see the tumult swirling just out of sight.

There is no question that AI — generative AI, specifically — is going through the traditional, albeit accelerated, hype cycle. But while the hype cycle is typically a linear affair, this one is going to act more like a dynamic, constantly shifting, and hard to predict storm system. The unpredictability factor is made all that more challenging by the fact that we're in the middle of it all.

So, whether you're an enterprise IT leader of the leader of an enterprise software company, the question is the same: how do you develop a cohesive go-forward strategy in this swirling mess?

Reading the Tea Leaves

This week's episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech serves as a bit of a framework to answer that question.

To continue my pursuit of leaving no metaphor disabused, the key is to get good at reading the tea leaves.

The actual process of tea leaf reading is, of course, bogus. But the idea that we can look to small things for hints to the future is a useful metaphor — and essentially what we do each week on the podcast.

This week, we covered how many of the recent funding rounds for enterprise software companies are for what Hyoun called bridge technologies — tech that fills in the gaps left by other, more established tech. Whether it's solutions to deploy workflow automation to close business process gaps, solutions to simplify enterprise search, or tools to enable organizations to leverage multiple AI models, there are plenty of gaps to be filled.

We also covered the march toward the operationalization of AI. Anthropic and OpenAI took wildly different approaches (a new interface and some key acquisitions, respectively), but both moved in the direction of making their foundational AI models more usable on a day-to-day basis. Likewise, we covered some new research from Together.ai that proposed what it calls long inference models and a mixture-of-agent approach to simultaneously reduce the cost and increase the speed of generative AI — another key part of the operationalization process.

Finally, we covered a piece by MIT professor Rodney Brooks cautioning against overly rosy expectations and a piece in the Wall Street Journal that made clear that reality as CIOs grapple with making AI deliver results in the real world.

As you think about your go-forward strategy, the question is what does all of this tell you?

Using Signals to Create Informed Strategic Alignment

There's a common misconception that a solid strategy is one that has successfully predicted the future. But that's not it. Instead, a winning strategy is one that can read these tea leaves to directionally understand where things are headed and then align the investments and actions to that direction. You can call this the Wayne Gretzky approach to strategy: skate to where the puck is going to be.

The trick is, Gretzky wasn't using some divine insight to know where it was going to be, he was watching everything happening — the signals — and using that information to figure it out.

That's was the secret to his greatness and almost every success story ever written. It's no different here.

We're all sitting in the middle of this chaotic, constantly changing, AI-powered storm. At moments, it may seem clear and obvious. But the truth lies deeper. You need to find the signals and put them all together to really see what's happening and where the opportunities may emerge and the risks may lie.

That's what Hyoun and I try to help you do each week. Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 20

This week, Charles Araujo of The DX Institute and Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights cover the wide-ranging news of the week, including the current investing climate for enterprise software companies, the move toward AI operationalization, and the limits of generative AI along with some new approaches that may make it faster and cheaper.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15345536

📔 Show Notes

[00:59] Emergence Seeks to Bridge All the Agents

Emergence recently came out of stealth raising over 90 million in capital as well as access to 100 million in debt to manage agents. It’s first product is an agent orchestrator that can bring workflows and models together, which speaks to a feature when we will all need to coordinate multiple agents in the workplace

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/24/emergence-thinks-it-can-crack-the-ai-agent-code/

[05:00] Can Creatio Bridge CRM + Workflow Automation?

Creatio just raised $200 million to take on the twin problems of CRM and workflow automation. Their approach involves bringing best in breed applications together to support a united Voltron of CRM suite functionality.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/26/creatio-raises-200m-at-a-1-2b-valuation-for-its-no-code-crm-and-workflow-platform/

[08:20] Zoho Blueprint Bridges Automation Gaps

Zoho has expanded its Blueprint capability over time to support management, document management, and document signing capabilities. We quickly discuss what it means to expand automation across an application suite

https://www.zoho.com/news/zoho-announces-strategic-updates-across-collaboration-solutions.html?zwcDate=june%205,%202024 

[09:56] Hebbia Bridges Documents for Search

Hebbia is taking on an interesting role in supporting search across multiple documents. This allows it to bridge some of the capabilities of LLM’s and of traditional search. We discuss whether this is a matter of being stuck in the middle or bridging important gaps.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/27/hebbia-raises-nearly-100m-seriesb-for-ai-powered-document-search-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/

[14:40] Perplexity and Anthropic Face Legal Challenges

LLM‘s continue to run into legal challenges and requests to desist in its current data collection activities. The most important thing here is to try to not use LLM‘s that are currently facing legal challenges in the particular activities that you were using the LLM for.

https://fortune.com/2024/06/29/amazon-web-services-perplexity-ai-scraping-online-news-content-without-approval/ 

[15:27] OpenAI and Anthropic Chase After AI Collaboration

Open AI has been on an acquisition streak over the past week, purchasing both database company Rockset and collaboration company Multi. We couldn’t help but see a trend as Anthropic has developed Artifacts to continue AI-based work in a separate window

https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-rockset/ 

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet 

[21:54] MIT Pioneer Rodney Brooks Side-Eyes AI

iRobot cofounder Rodney Brooks has been tracking AI a long time and prescribes caution for enterprise IT organizations currently working on generative AI projects. Although we are bullish on generative as a whole, we are glad to see this voice of restraint from a long time AI practitioner and professor

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/29/mit-robotics-pioneer-rodney-brooks-thinks-people-are-vastly-overestimating-generative-ai/ 

[28:09] Mixture-of-Agents Can Supersede ChatGPT, for now

We recently ran into this interesting Medium post by Ignacio de Gregorio that goes over the mixture of agents approach, which is showing superiority over top performing LLM‘s. By using A layered architecture of prioritized models, primary research is finding that models can actually make up for each other’s weaknesses and provide better answers when used in combination.

https://medium.com/@ignacio.de.gregorio.noblejas/mixture-of-agents-beats-chatgpt-4o-6470a74f1525 

[33:15] AI Agent Studio Pursues Agent Governance

We took a quick look at how Automation Anywhere is preparing businesses for the future of agent governance with its AI agent studio

https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/press-room/automation-anywhere-unveils-new-ai-automation-enterprise-system-empowering 

[35:25] AI Assistants Need a Work Buddy

This article by Isabelle Bousquette at the Wall Street Journal shows that out of the box agents are still struggling to handle business challenges. This isn’t a big surprise given the past decade of enterprise history with AI, but it is still a warning that generative AI is not simply a matter of finding the right model and hoping you can set it and forget it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-work-assistants-need-a-lot-of-handholding-500c2bd8?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink&st=3fw2cabupostiqa 

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Have you missed me? Ok, that may be too much. How about: Did you notice I was missing from your inbox?

It's been over a month since I sent out an issue of The DX Report and the uninteresting and all-too-common reason is also an object lesson for both enterprise IT leaders and the enterprise software companies trying to get through to them.

When Important Loses Out to Urgent

When I was a teenager, my father taught me about the Eisenhower Matrix, popularized by Stephen Covey.

If you're not familiar with it, it is a simple mechanism to prioritize your work by evaluating any potential task based on its urgency and importance. While I attempt to use this approach to prioritize my work, I often fail. In some cases, I assign a degree of importance to something that it doesn't warrant or I mistake urgency for importance. And sometimes, I am just tired and the "urgent" is easier to address than the important.

Sending out The DX Report is a classic example.

I know it is important. It is one of the primary ways that I connect with you, put myself out into the world, and maintain my "influence" (I hate that word, but you get the idea).

And yet, there are so many demands on my time — client projects, a vacation, a business trip to India, family responsibilities — that it's easy to let something I know is important slip through the cracks.

And you don't need to raise you hand or anything, but I'm willing to bet that many of you are in the same boat.

Breaking Through the Static

Why is this important in the context of the IT leader and enterprise software companies?

The answer is found in an old cartoon (that I can't find). It shows a medieval king fighting a battle with swords and shields. His page is asking him if he'd like to talk to the salesman at the door — who just happens to be selling a Gatling gun. The king, of course, answers that he doesn't have time to talk to the sales person because he has a war to fight.

Now, I'm sure that this cartoon was written by a sales manager somewhere, but it raises a valid point.

IT leaders are bombarded by pitches. Most of which consist of no more than hand waving and hyperbole. But amid all that static, are the key technologies that will be essential to them achieving their critical business goals.

Likewise, IT leaders are dealing with another form of static — the constant barrage of competing priorities. I consistently tell the enterprise software companies I work with that IT leaders spend only a tiny fraction of their time focused on the tech space. The vast majority of their time is (rightly) focused on dealing with their enterprise peers and the issues facing the organization.

But all of those issues are also a form of static that can substitute the urgent for the important.

So, regardless of which side of the table you are on, it is imperative that you make a concerted effort to break through your static. If you're an IT leader, get hyper-focused on what is truly important for your organization — and recognize that emerging technologies and their smart deployment will be an essential element of achieving your goals.

If you're a tech vendor, acknowledge this reality and ditch the hyperbole. Instead, address the real issues and how you can rapidly and pragmatically solve them.

</Soapbox> What's Happening

Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now.

All of this was directed at myself as much as anyone. Particularly because there has been so much happening over the last several weeks that I've failed to share. I'm going to include links to the most recent episodes of This Week in Enterprise Tech, but this week is particularly relevant in the context of what I just shared.

We got a little break from the hype and hyperbole around AI this week (although we got a double serving with last week's press release from Nice). Much of this week's news was of this more practical variety: The FinOps Foundation released a standard way to address cloud billing, Oracle is playing nice with Microsoft Azure making it easier for enterprise IT leaders to manage their stack in one place, the FTC fired a shot across the bow to all tech companies that are using deceptive cancellation practices, and Apple is staking its AI claims around its focus on privacy.

This is all real-world stuff and blessedly missing the breathless claims of AI changing everything.

For myself, I'm going to try (once again) to be more consistent and to remain focused on what's truly important (hint: that's you!).

And I should have some exciting news to share shortly that will help explain why I've been so distracted! For now, stay tuned and happy listening/watching!

P.S. Here are links the episodes of This Week in Enterprise Tech that I missed:

• Episode 15

• Episode 16

• Episode 17

• Episode 18

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 19

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo of the DC Institute take on the CIO office ramifications of recent announcements including the FinOps Foundation’s launch of FOCUS 1.0 for Cloud Billing Unification, Oracle Autonomous Database on Microsoft Azure, the United States’ Federal Trade Commission Accusing Adobe of Hiding early termination fees, the Biden administration banning US sales of Kaspersky software over Russia ties, whether Poolside’s new $400 million raise makes Paris another Silicon Valley, and enterprise considerations for AI as Apple focuses on more personalized AI.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15311852

📔 Show Notes

FinOps FOCUSes on Cloud Billing Unification

Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo reflect on the evolution of cloud billing at the FinOps X show in San Diego, highlighting a new collaboration among Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on billing specifications and their collective market response to mounting pressure on cloud providers to enhance cost transparency. They discuss the potential for these standards to expand beyond cloud services to encompass other IT expenses, aiming to simplify enterprise billing complexities.

FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org/insights/focus-1-0-available/

Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Get Friendlier

Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park discuss Oracle's recent move to bring their autonomous database to Azure data centers. This collaboration allows Azure customers to run Oracle databases on Azure infrastructure, marking a significant partnership between the two tech giants. They see this as a strategic play by Oracle to maintain relevance in cloud services while leveraging Microsoft's widespread adoption. Charles views it as a smart move for both companies, emphasizing Oracle's focus on their core database strength rather than competing directly as a major cloud provider.

Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-autonomous-database-now-generally-available-on-oracle-database-at-azure-2024-06-20/

FTC Takes On Adobe Early Termination Fees

Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park note how Adobe was one of the first champions of subscription sales for Software as a Service. But their lack of transparency over early termination fees has gotten the Federal Trade Commission’s attention. This may be an opportunity for IT expense and SaaS management pros over the next 12-18 months. This action also demonstrates the challenge Adobe faces as a company that has seen success both in enterprise and consumer/prosumer markets.

FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/ftc-takes-action-against-adobe-executives-hiding-fees-preventing-consumers-easily-cancelling

Biden Administration Bans Kaspersky Antivirus

Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo note that 2024 is a US election year and both major candidates have faced political pressure associated with software, which has driven the politicization of Tiktok as well as this new ban on Kaspersky security software in the United States based on its Russian roots. United States-based IT departments need to take account of this aspect of geopolitics and identify both perceived and actual compliance issues that may be related to Russian and Chinese ownership and operations of current vendors.

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-ban-us-sales-kaspersky-software-over-ties-russia-source-says-2024-06-20/

Mon Dieu, Is Paris the New Silicon Valley?

Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo noted that Poolside is currently raising $400 million to support a coding CoPilot, making it just the latest in a series of Paris-based startups to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in this AI gold rush.  With Poolside, Mistral, and H, is Paris now the European Silicon Valley for AI?

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/poolside-raising-400m-at-a-2b-valuation-for-supercharged-coding-copilot/

Apple Takes a Privacy-Focused Approach to AI

Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park saw that Apple recently announced “Apple Intelligence” which takes a private cloud and device-centric view of AI. Ideally, Apple is seeking to provide a personalized approach to AI where consumers may be able to support some or all of their AI capabilities on their device without the challenges of public cloud security and governance. But can Apple create the small models that will be performant and provide the Apple magic on phones? And, given Apple’s track record with search and Siri, can Apple actually deliver on AI?

MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/11/1093577/apple-is-promising-personalized-ai-in-a-private-cloud-heres-how-that-will-work/

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The good thing about the podcast I produce with Hyoun Park is that it forces me to stay up on Enterprise IT news.

The bad news is that it can create a hype bubble that focuses just on what's new and getting attention. The double bad news is that lately it seems that we're getting an all-AI diet.

That's led me to spend a lot of digital ink talking about the need for a pragmatic outlook and focus on the less-than-sexy parts of leading an IT function.

This week, that perspective has led me to focus on a more specific element of this line of thought: automation.

We've been talking about automation since the dawn of the IT function. You could say it's the reason IT exists in the first place. As a result, it can seem almost blasé to talk about it when you have more fun stuff — like AI — to kick about.

But automation is once again a top-of-mind issue for enterprise IT leaders because it is part of a foundational trio, along with data and process, that will serve as the necessary building blocks to take advantage of modern advancements, including AI.

However, unlike automation efforts of the past, the current evolutionary path is leading us to a different place. Past approaches to automation were effectively automating between points of human action. A human actor would take an action, some automation would occur to speed a transaction, and a human would take a next action. The human was almost always in complete control.

Today, we are increasingly talking about much more autonomous sorts of automation.

And it begs the question: how far do we want to take things?

From Automation to Autonomous

This week, there was plenty of talk about AI, as usual. But the combination of two stories really caught my attention. The first was the on-going battle between OpenAI and Google as they rush to introduce a much more agent-based approach to their chat interfaces. (Microsoft may be leading the charge on this front, which I'm sure we'll be covering in next week's episode.)

The second was an intriguing blog post by the CTO of ScienceLogic that introduced the concept of Autonomic IT.

Leaving aside the specifics of each of these technologies for the moment, they both represent a move toward greater levels of intelligent, autonomous automation.

Of course, the concept isn't new. We've been talking about things like lights out operations for decades and companies like BMC have been talking about the autonomous enterprise for several years.

Still, it's mostly been just that: talk.

Even this iteration is still more talk than substance. Much of the talk from OpenAI and Google was a preview of what's coming and I'm frankly not sure how much ScienceLogic claims to be delivering on their concept of autonomic IT. But the promise is now feeling much more real.

And for me, anyway, it left me wondering, how much autonomy would I be willing to accept as an enterprise IT leader?

There is obvious appeal to the idea of a tech stack that runs and heals itself. I love the idea of an autonomous assistant that can act on my behalf.

Well, until you think about it for a minute. Particularly in an enterprise context, there is a ton of risk involved and lots at stake. So, what's the limit? The technology capabilities are rapidly approaching the point where we're going to need an answer.

I don't have one for you, but I do believe it's a question that every IT executive will be facing sooner rather than later. So, you may want to start thinking about what your answer will be.

Happy Listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 14

OpenAI and Google go head-to-head, OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team is dissolved, Matt Garman is the new CEO at AWS, what’s the current state of IT budgeting and planning, and how far should you trust the concept of autonomy when it comes to your IT environment? Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo are here again to discuss This Week in Enterprise Tech.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15104402

📔 Show Notes

OpenAI vs. Google Google I/O was last week, where they announced Google Astra, an AI assistant based on Google Gemini models. But OpenAI may have stolen their thunder by releasing GPT 4.o, a new model powering ChatGPT, immediately prior. Sure, it’s jockeying for position, but what’s the upshot? Charles and Hyoun discuss the implications, and what else may be coming down the pike.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/13/ope...

https://www.businessinsider.com/googl...

Does Risk Still Matter for AI? GPT 4.o wasn’t the only OpenAI news; their “superalignment” team focused on governance and risk has fallen apart, with high-level resignations and reassignments to other teams. With OpenAI’s assertive moves, what does this mean, both for OpenAI itself, and for other AI companies? Is the world currently at risk from “superintelligent” AI? Charles and Hyoun dig in.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/18/ope...

https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498...

AWS Names Matt Garman as New CEO Adam Selipsky is out and Matt Garman is in at AWS. Hyoun and Charles consider what this means for Amazon’s strategic direction; why the shakeup now?

https://www.runtime.news/adam-selipsk...

CIO Challenges in Managing IT Budgets In the planning and budgeting world, software is getting to the point where a realtime assessment of a company’s financial picture is quite possible. IT has done well with providing realtime information on a company’s network performance, but what about IT budgeting and planning? Charles and Hyoun debate: is it time for IT departments to start prioritizing that, too?

https://diginomica.com/planful-perfor...

“Autonomic” IT: Finding the Heartbeat of Your Company ScienceLogic proposed the concept of “autonomic” IT: an autonomous IT environment where your systems achieve IT utopia: always available, issues are automatically responded to and quickly addressed, sometimes without needing any human intervention at all. How far off from that are we? What parts of your business could operate like this with AI assistance? What parts do you trust to operate like this? Hyoun and Charles assess the possibilities, and the necessary work.

https://sciencelogic.com/blog/go-beyo...

https://www.fastcompany.com/91125164/...

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Recently, I've been harping — repeatedly — about not getting caught up in the hype and keeping it real and pragmatic.

But I don't want to ignore the fact that all this hype exists for a reason: we love it.

At its core, hype represents hope. Hope for a brighter future. Hope of the possibilities of what a new piece of technology can bring to the world.

And it's our human nature to get swept up in the awe inspiring, positive vibes that hope represents. Moreover, hope is essential to our ability to generate forward progress.

When I work with tech companies, one of the first things I tell them is that they need a compelling and inviting vision of the future. Essentially, I'm telling them that they need to be telling a story of hope. They need to be painting a picture of a brighter future and an essential purpose.

We all respond to this sort of story because our greatest motivator is always an aspirational vision. But that's also the opening that allows hype to latch on and not let go.

Balancing Hype vs. Hope

Selling an authentic vision of hope is easy when you've got the goods to back it. When what you're doing is truly aspirational and forward looking, you can share your vision plainly. No hype is necessary because you have all the natural excitement you need baked into the story.

But what if nothing is really happening? What if there is little that's really new?

You resort to hyperbole. You shout louder and hope that people take it as something new and exciting. Do it long enough and people may start to believe it.

I'll let you be the judge of who is landing on which side of this equation, but in this week's episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech, we covered announcements from ServiceNow, Boomi, and Red Hat. Boomi and Red Hat were very focused on the more practical elements of helping enterprises respond to the changes happening. ServiceNow left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

But was it hype over hope? I'll let you decide.

What is clear from both the story about engineer burnout from responding to hype demands and Apple's unusual blunder with their iPad ad is that there is overwhelming pressure to create noise and at least appear relevant.

So, what do you do with all of this information?

If you're a CIO, develop an internal hype-o-meter and teach it as a skill to your senior leadership team. Being able to separate hype from an authentic vision of hope will be mission critical as you select your partners.

And if you're the leader of a tech company, put yourself in a position to be sharing that authentic vision. Start with making sure you've got the real deal from a product perspective, and then hone and refine your vision so the hope comes through without any hyperbole necessary.

We all want to be inspired. Inspire us. Happy listening.

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 13

Spring means trade show season in tech, and both Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and the DX Institute’s Charles Araujo have been on the road in recent weeks. In Week 13 of This Week in Enterprise Tech, Hyoun and Charles break down the key announcements from ServiceNow Knowledge, Boomi World, and Red Hat Summit, along with taking a look at burnout caused by the rush to meet AI hype and Apple's iPad blunder.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15064548

📔 Show Notes

ServiceNow Knowledge 2024

ServiceNow made a number of announcements at its Knowledge 2024 conference last week, including new generative AI capabilities in Now Assist and a partnership with Genesys. Charles and Hyoun dig into the ramifications.

https://www.servicenow.com/company/me...

Boomi World 2024

Boomi made some key acquisitions from APIIDA, and is moving beyond traditional integration to include AI API management and data management. What do Hyoun and Charles make of Boomi’s new strategic direction?

https://www.businesswire.com/news/hom...

Red Hat Summit 2024

Red Hat has expanded to Oracle Cloud, made improvements to Ansible, and partnered with Elastic to manage retrieval augmented generation. Hyoun and Charles consider Red Hat’s focus on practical AI.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press...

Burnout: Squandering AI Engineer Talent

CNBC recently published an article on AI engineer burnout. Charles and Hyoun assess what’s really going on, how executives are focused on achieving feature parity with competitors instead of building AI solutions that support business goals, how this is causing a morale crisis among AI engineers, and how this is going to hamper companies’ AI innovation plans.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-en...

Crushed: Apple Reinforces AI Apprehension

Finally, everyone is talking about Apple’s misfire on their new iPad ad - prevailingly perceived as celebrating the destruction of human creativity rather than enabling it in electronic form. What does this say about how enterprises need to handle AI?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/9/241...

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Despite the constant hype around AI — or maybe because of it — I've recently found myself hyper-focused on the pragmatism of being an enterprise IT leader.

I just published a piece for SymphonyAI on how AI Copilots are going to transform ITSM and I was very focused on the blocking and tackling they can help IT organizations handle. I also just finished the draft of a report covering how several enterprise executives are leveraging Zoho to drive what I referred to as pragmatic digital transformation (I'll share the link once it's published).

And, I'm sure you've seen this theme come through in my writing here.

When you're bombarded with hype, I think it's natural to try to focus on what's real. That's what I loved about this week's conversation on This Week in Enterprise Tech, the podcast I host with Hyoun Park, CEO of Amalgam Insights.

The full video and audio links, as well as show notes and links to all the articles we discussed, are below, but first let me explain what I mean.

The Only Job: Business Value

In this week's episode, we covered a story about how we're seeing cloud spending rise across the board. What appeared to be driven by AI, may be just a function of the continued shift from on-prem to the cloud. Blocking and tackling.

We talked about Tableau hitting its stride and broadening its focus beyond the data analyst. We discussed Amazon's new AI assistant, Q, and their laser-focus on the enterprise.

And we talked about the threat of a GenAI winter and my LinkedIn post that exploded because I claimed that IT Service Management (ITSM) is dead because it's lost strategic relevance.

The common thread in all of these wildly divergent news items was that they were really all about going past the hype and getting back to the blocking and tackling basics that enterprise IT leaders face everyday. And the root of all of it is that there's really only one job you need to tackle: delivering business value.

My little ITSM firestorm was perhaps most instructive.

My point was that ITSM had lost strategic relevance. That no one is talking about it. No one is investing in it. It's something that needs to be done, but it's in a race to the bottom because it isn't seen as something that contributes to value creation.

The irony is that ITSM is really just a specific form of business process digitalization and automation — now a top-of-mind concern for virtually every enterprise IT leader.

The point I was trying to make was that the dogmatic hole that ITSM fell into obscured its true worth. That if ITSM adherents could get out of their own way and see that it was really just about process, workflows, and automation, they could leverage it as a transformational tool.

The flip isn't in the tool or the process — it's in the focus.

I think we're going to see a lot of the same happen across a bunch of enterprise IT dimensions over the next couple of years. There is so much focus on the hype right now. But I believe this week's stories are a glimpse into a future where pragmatism will reign supreme once again one day soon.

Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 12

This week, Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo weigh in on five relevant trends for CIOs and strategic techies. Of note: Tableau’s plans to expand beyond their core data analyst users, IT service management becoming perceived as increasingly irrelevant with the rise of AI-driven configuration and deployment assistants, and the perpetual speculation around the next AI Winter.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15031244

📔 Show Notes

Cloud spend is rising again. Synergy Research reported Q1 numbers stating the cloud infrastructure market grew 21% YOY last quarter, the fastest this market has grown since Q3 2022. A combination of open wallets and AI-related work are driving spend, but Hyoun points out that vendors are continuing to tip the balance away from on-prem and towards cloud, and that large enterprises account for the majority of the spending spree. On a related note, Amazon 1Q earnings numbers came out and AWS is now up to $25 billion in revenue, $9.6 billion in income per quarter.

https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/...

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-tr...

Hyoun flew down to sunny San Diego for the Tableau Conference. Tableau’s next steps include expanding beyond their core data analyst users, making their data management tools more accessible to a wider variety of employees, and there’s a roadmap to bring analytics and AI together. But how has the Salesforce acquisition and partnerships with Databricks and Microsoft affected this?

https://www.tableau.com/blog/product-...

Charles was in Denver for SupportWorld last week, a support and service management conference. With attendance down 75% from its peak, is IT support management itself a dying concept? Innovate or die seems to be the watchword.

https://www.hdiconference.com/

The race to release Gen AI assistants is on: Amazon officially released its Gen AI assistant, Amazon Q, while Anthropic announced the latest version of its business-focused bot, Claude 3. Hyoun and Charles debate how these bots are a harbinger of change to traditional IT services, focused on standardizing configuration and deployment.

https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/4/...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/an...

Finally, the world has been through several AI Winters, and after the most recent rush of development and trialing, some are stepping back to parse what’s been effective, and what’s been hype. But “winter” doesn’t necessarily mean the end of all things Gen AI, Hyoun and Charles agree, it’s about strategic investment in what matters for your business.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91112588/...

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How do you run and manage an enterprise IT organization today?

There's a pretty good case to be made that it will come down to cloud, security, and AI. All were topics in last week's episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech (sorry, I'm late!).

Of course, it's not quite that simple, is it? While those are three critical top-of-mind issues, they're also underpinned by two foundational concerns that I talk about a lot: business process and data.

And even that's not enough. Because underpinning those critical capabilities are all the functional expertise necessary to manage the network, administer servers (real or virtual), develop apps, manage projects, etc.

The truth is that the organizational and technical complexity of managing an enterprise IT organization far surpasses that of any other function in the enterprise (even if those other functions will never admit it).

So, what's an enterprise leader to do? One of this week's news items offers a clue.

Why You Should Borrow the Mix of Experts (MoE) Concept

In this week's episode, we covered IBM's purchase of Hashicorp, which is all about helping enterprises manage cloud infrastructure. We also covered Thoma Bravo's acquisition of Darktrace, which is all about cybersecurity. And we covered a whole bunch about governing and managing AI. They represent the current triumvirate dominating the enterprise IT conversation: cloud, security, and AI.

But as I just mentioned, there is so much more to manage for an enterprise IT leader, which is why I found one other item so interesting. Snowflake introduced their own LLM (partially in response to Databrick's release several weeks ago), which is notable for its enterprise focus.

However, it also represented a doubling-down within the industry on a newer concept called Mixture of Experts (MoE). The general idea is that rather than continually leveraging a full model with its hundreds of billions of parameters, which is slow and expensive, you can train a bunch of "experts" within the LLM that specialize on a specific domain. Then, after an initial request, the system leverages those "experts" by calling on only the appropriate subset of parameters and get the answer faster, cheaper, and with better context.

While I think this approach is a promising way to evolve and improve LLMs, I also think its a fabulous metaphor for how enterprise leaders can grapple with the onslaught of new and emerging technologies and the resulting complexity that is now essential to IT operations.

We've always done this with functional specialization. But what happens when we take a similar approach with exploring and tackling emerging technologies and looking for ways to apply them within the enterprise? By assigning ownership of the continual research, education, and application of new technologies to various members of your team you can generate excitement and engagement without leaving anyone behind.

Some process and commitment will be necessary, but I think taking this approach could add new life to what may otherwise seem overwhelming. And if you're looking for a place to start, how about by assigning the concept of Mixture of Experts to someone? 😉

Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 11

After a long hibernation, the tech market is waking up. IBM and Thoma Bravo make key acquisitions, and Rubrik goes public. Snowflake debuts its new LLM, the DHS reveals the members of its new AI Safety and Security board, and companies continue to overcommit to AI hype. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo sift through This Week in Enterprise Tech.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/14993962

📔 Show Notes

IBM acquired HashiCorp last week for $6.5B. Given IBM’s history of buying companies providing products and services similar to what they already have on hand, whether developed in house or picked up in a previous acquisition, what’s the strategy here? Hyoun and Charles discuss how HashiCorp fits into the IBM portfolio, and what downstream effects will be felt in the multicloud space.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-I...

In other acquisitions news, Thoma Bravo acquired Darktrace last week for $5 billion, taking it private. The market appetite has been renewed after a quiet time, but the trends are confusing. Charles and Hyoun dig into the specifics, and how it will affect CIOs evaluating mid-size vendors.

https://www.thomabravo.com/press-rele...

Microsoft’s AI advancements are starting to have a noticeable effect on cloud spending, driving more Azure adoption in an environment where AWS has been dominant forever. How can CIOs balance the needs of their AI adopters and AI holdouts? Will the AI golden ticket allow Microsoft to finally catch up to Amazon in cloud adoption?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/mi...

Snowflake recently revealed its new LLM, Arctic. Hyoun and Charles analyze its pragmatic “mixture of experts” approach, and how that will help make AI adoption more manageable and affordable.

https://www.snowflake.com/blog/arctic...

Sifting through AI hype: Cleanlab uses AI to detect AI “hallucinations” - at great expense, where a human expert is still more reliable. Moderna plans to automate all business processes using LLMs. Are there practical lessons to be taken away from these examples? Charles and Hyoun dig in.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-moder...

The Department of Homeland Services announced the formation of its AI Safety and Security Board. Who’s advising the government on AI governance? How will they address AI governance challenges?

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2024/04/26/o...

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When it comes to my career in enterprise IT, there are two terms that I think best define me: storyteller and pragmatist.

I have always excelled at making complex, technical concepts understandable through storytelling, and I've always been focused on translating hype and strategic direction into pragmatic action.

The challenge is that so much of the world of tech seems to favor — at least initially — the sensational rather than the pragmatic. But I love it when the good guy (the pragmatist, in this case) wins one!

Well, this week's episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech (hosted, as always, with Amalgam Insights' CEO, Hyoun Park) was a win for pragmatists everywhere! Let me explain.

As I’m now doing, the video and audio links as well as show notes and links to all the articles we discussed are below, but first, let me set the stage for you.

The Fallacy of Sexy

One of the rules of marketing enterprise tech is that you need to stand out and get some attention before you can make any real inroads. That's why we spend so much time talking about competitive differentiation and positioning. If you're just like the next guy, why should anyone pay attention?

And it's the same story within the enterprise. One of the primary objectives should be to leverage technology to enable your organization to create competitive advantage. The question is, how do you do that?

It's tempting to think that it's about breaking all the rules and creating something brand new that the world has never seen.

Sometimes that works.

Most of the time, it doesn't.

Exhibit A was the launch of the Humane AI pin. It was roundly panned, and for good reason. It put all the focus on being new and sexy, but failed to remember that delivering value in the form of a solution to a real problem must always be the starting point to any innovation.

Unfortunately, they're not alone. The world of the now AI-fueled enterprise IT market right now seems to be almost exclusively powered by hype. But this week, we saw a bunch of news that was just the opposite.

Pragmatism May Not Be Sexy, But It Gets the Job Done

This week, we covered a lot of AI news, but what was fascinating is how much of it focused on the less sexy, but more practical elements of it. We led off with Meta's release of Llama 3. Zuckerberg is admitedly in the hype horse races, but the significance of this release is less that it competes favorably with models from OpenAI and Anthropic and more that it represents a new, more open opportunity for enterprises to bring a degree of portability and control. Pragmatic concerns.

Likewise, we covered challenges with how CIOs are looking at copilots, the Linux Foundation's effort to create an open portability standard for enterprise AI, and Workday's shift to a more open and inclusive platform approach.

All were testaments to the practical and, dare I say, mundane considerations surrounding AI implementations and enterprise software rather than the more hypey elements.

But the winner of this week's news battle was Zendesk. They announced an entire AI-augmented service platform at their annual user conference, Relate 2024. When I read through the announcements, my first reaction was, "Meh. Nothing new here."

That's because most of their innovations — AI agents, workflow automation, a copilot, AI-powered QA, etc. — have existed for some time. The thing is that they have predominately been provided by fringe players. But this is Zendesk bringing them to market in a very big way, essentially resetting the game that this is now the defacto operating model for customer service operations.

Much like companies like Apple tend to do, this isn't about Zendesk being first as much as it is about them nailing execution, taking it mainstream, and operationalizing it.

That's the essence of pragmatism. And in our hype-filled AI-focused enterprise IT world, we could use a few more heaping servings of it.

Happy listening!

🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 10

For the 10th week of This Week in Enterprise Tech, Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo weigh in on eight trends for the CIO office and the strategic techie ranging from product launches to reorgs. We run the gamut in exploring Meta, Slack, Humane AI, Android, the Linux Foundation, Zendesk, Workday, and why CIOs distrust the value of Copilots (hint, it’s about the Future of Work). But who won this week in a crowded list of announcements, achievements, and launches?

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/14938633

📔 Show Notes

Meta Releases Llama 3 and Meta AI to the Wild

Meta goes all-in on AI, just as they once went all-in on the Metaverse. But this time, Mark Zuckerberg’s vision and ambition feel a bit more real, despite some initial missteps. Why did Meta have the biggest announcement of the week?

https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3/

Slack Embraces GenAI Summarizations

Slack was the one-time leader in translating text into business activity before LLM’s took the air out of the room for basically all other technology. Is Slack’s moves towards Gen AI moving fast enough? We take a look at Slack’s latest moves with a hat tip to Venturebeat’s Shubham Sharma

https://venturebeat.com/ai/salesforce...

Why CIOs Don't Trust Productivity Claims for Copilots

$30 a month seems like a high price to pay for a lot of AI copilots. Vendors seem to be taking a cost-plus approach to pricing, but CIOs are having trouble justifying the price? Why? There’s fault on all sides, whether it be vendor inability to create trust in the value proposition or the CIO’s inability to manage teams and maximize skill utilization. Both sales and management are revealing issues here. Thanks to CIO.com’s Grant Gross for this article.

https://www.cio.com/article/2089717/c...

Lessons from the Humane AI Pin for Judging AI Claims

At first glance, Humane AI reminds us a lot of Magic Leap, which is a tough comparison. We want to like the Star Trek-like tech, but at the end of the day, Humane AI looks like an object lesson in how to differentiated between cool AI tech and well-researched AI products.

https://www.macworld.com/article/2307...

Enterprise Mobility Considerations for the New Android Team

Google says that their new Android reorganization is “all about AI.” But does everything always have to be about AI? We think there are some more practical ramifications for enterprise mobility, field service, and retail environments. Thanks to The Verge’s David Pierce for the perspective!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/18/24...

The Linux Foundation Launches Open Platform for Enterprise AI

As AI becomes harder to parse, we are starting to see companies come together to build portability and partnerships in Enterprise AI. It’s hard to ignore Intel’s role here, but 15 companies ranging from enterprise stewards to hungry startups have come together for this initial iteration of companies focusing on OPEA

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press...

Zendesk Puts AI At Your Service at Relate 2024

Zendesk announced a slew of AI augmentations throughout their service platform at Relate 2024 including AI agents, workflow automation, an agent copilot, Workforce Management, and Quality Assurance (QA). Although the announcement sounds similar, we found a lot of meat on these bones as Zendesk aligned AI to work better than any other vendor we heard from this week.

https://www.zendesk.com/newsroom/arti...

What Workday Needs To Become The Next Great Platform

Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park attended the Workday Innovation Summit last week where Workday made partners and platform front and center goals for the future. Although Workday is well known as a cloud-first HR platform, it has also traditionally been known to be inflexible and closed. What needs to change for Workday to be seen as a first-class enterprise platform like SAP, Oracle, and ServiceNow? We share the tough love, both for Workday and for other vendors wanting to be seriously considered as a “Platform” by the CIO Office.

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One of the things I love about enterprise tech is that it sort of lives in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, things are changing at a breakneck pace. On the other, so much of what it takes to run an enterprise IT organization never changes.

It was this dichotomy and the need for the nasty four-letter word — alignment — that came through for me in this week’s episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech, the podcast I host with Amalgam Insights’ CEO, Hyoun Park.

As I’m now doing, the video and audio links as well as show notes and links to all the articles we discussed are below, but first, let me set the stage for you.

The Multi-Dimensional Job of Being an IT Leader

This week, we covered a ton of ground, everything from a new partnership between Oracle and Palantir, security breaches (including a doozy that was narrowly avoided!), AI oversight, Google maybe acquiring Hubspot and what that means, and the shift to tech companies being platforms.

What is almost shocking is how every last bit of it matters to you.

Given that your feed is basically wall-to-wall AI, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that you have ALL of this to deal with everyday.

And, as we were having the conversation, it occurred to me that the big takeaway was that you need a way to sort through all of it to make it make sense.

Alignment is Still Sexy (Sort Of)

As I was processing everything, it occurred to me that the critical question that you should be asking with each piece of this news is, “How will this impact my organization?”

I don’t think it’s generally going to be a question of “if it will,” but just “how it will.”

As always, it should be your organization’s business priorities and strategies that dictate how these issues will impact you and how you should respond. Which leads me to that much maligned word: alignment.

While I get all the arguments about it’s not IT-to-business alignment because IT is the business, blah, blah. The fact remains that every IT leader is executing a continual alignment process to digest the fast moving world of tech to the often slower pace of business change.

That alignment is not only necessary, I find it sexy. It represents your ability to execute that distillation and leverage changes happening in the world of tech to propel your organization forward in just the right ways. And that’s something to get excited over.

So, I don’t know where the advantage in this week’s topics lies for you and your organization, but my hope is that we help you identify them in some small way. Happy listening!

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 8

Welcome to This Week in Enterprise Tech! Five big topics for the CIO Office to consider this week by Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo. Oracle and Palantir team up in the cloud, Cybersecurity issues, EU Regulations for AI, Google is interested in Hubspot, and we wonder if every cloud must become an enterprise app platform.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.

Watch the full episode here:

Show Notes

1. Oracle and Palantir Team Up in the Cloud: Oracle and Palantir partner up to bring AI to every cloud. How should CIOs think about Oracle as a cloud provider based on this new announcement?

Articles discussed:

• https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-and-palantir-join-forces-to-deliver-mission-critical-ai-solutions-to-governments-and-businesses-2024-04-04

TWIET topic video: 

2. Security Issues: Microsoft, AT&T, and Social Security: This has been a wild few weeks for security between the XZ Utils data-compression tool compromise, the Cyber Safety Review Board review of the Microsoft Exchange Online hack, AT&T having 73 million accounts hacked, and even Social Security numbers getting stolen! How can CIOs prepare when even the largest tech giants are under attack?

Articles discussed:

• https://www.securityweek.com/microsofts-security-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost/amp/

• https://bgr.com/tech/over-70-million-att-accounts-were-hacked/

• https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/08/hackers-stole-340000-social-security-numbers-from-government-consulting-firm/

• https://www.runtime.news/sabotage-in-the-software-supply-chain/

TWIET topic video: 

3. EU Regulation Complicates Global AI Standards: European Union Regulations have effectively been setting global governance standards for AI. How should CIOs prepare for the future of AI legislation?

Articles discussed:

• https://www.marketwatch.com/story/somethings-got-to-give-european-regulators-crack-down-on-ai-as-u-s-tech-companies-plunge-into-the-market-23fffd87

• https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/05/rubrik-ai-governance-committee/

TWIET topic video: 

4. Will Google Acquire Hubspot? Alphabet is rumored to be looking at Hubspot at a potential $40 billion+ purchase price. Hubspot has been successfully expanding and gaining market share in a variety of markets. Is this a good idea for Google Cloud and what potential obstacles exist in an acquisition?

Articles discussed:

• https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/google-parent-alphabet-weighs-offer-hubspot-sources-say-2024-04-04/

TWIET topic video: 

5. Must Every Cloud Become an Enterprise App ~*~PLATFORM~*~: PLATFORM PLATFORM PLATFORM! TWIET discusses whether every public cloud has to also be an enterprise application platform.

Articles discussed:

• https://finance.yahoo.com/news/q4-earnings-roundup-appian-nasdaq-123933866.html

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TWIET topic video: 

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Another week, another episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech, the podcast I produce with Hyoun Park, CEO of Amalgam Insights.

Publishing note: Travel, a freak April snowstorm, and some power outages conspired to make this episode a little late. Sorry!

But rather than simply summarizing the podcast and providing links as I’ve been doing, I’ve decided that I’m going to provide a little more meat on the bones for you as a subscriber to The DX Report. Beginning with this episode, I’m going to give you a little analysis of what I think the news of the week means in the broader context for you as an enterprise IT leader or industry follower. My hope is that it will help you digest our discussion more readily and help you put things into action.

So here goes.

AI is All Around

The big take away from this week’s news is that it is impossible to avoid AI.

Before we recorded, Hyoun and I asked ourselves if there was perhaps some non-AI news we had missed. The short answer: no!

AI is dominating the news because it is the big game changer in virtually every domain. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s dominating your day-to-day existence. I’m quite confident that it’s barely registering.

But it should be dominating your strategic planning cycles because it is now the driving force behind most transformative actions.

The trick will be to maintain balance and context.

Making AI Practical, Defensible, and Sustainable

Balance and context will be all important when it comes to doing your real job when it comes to AI: making it practical, defensible, and sustainable for your organization.

We led off our discussion talking about Databrick’s somewhat surprising release of a quasi open sourced LLM that it claims it developed in only a few months for $10MM. The promise, of course, is that the company can help you do the same — building a proprietary LLM using your own data at a reasonable cost and timeframe. If it lives up to its promise (and hype), that’s a solid pathway to creating practical competitive advantage from generative AI.

Along these same lines, we discussed two Wall Street Journal articles covering some of the first efforts to calculate ROI from these efforts — no easy feat yet — and how some organizations are applying generative AI to streamline and supercharge their supply chains. The big takeaway here is that there are some short-term wins to be had if you focus appropriately and don’t get caught up in the big, sweeping elements of the AI story and, instead, focus on the immediate business value you can create using this technology.

In the end, that’s always the story with any tech and any transformation effort: there is a direct correlation between your focus on business value (and organizational change/adoption) and the success of your efforts.

Finally, we stepped back and talked a bit about the emerging “AI wars” between NVIDIA and everyone, and between Microsoft and OpenAI on one side and AWS and Anthropic on the other — and the bets you may (or may not) need to make. And we talked a little bit about the lessons you can take from the government’s recent AI mandates: yes, you need to be aware of the risks and take concrete steps to mitigate them, but you also had better be looking at the opportunities to leverage this tech to create competitive advantage.

As always, there was a lot to cover, but these are essential topics that you need to get into to remain relevant as an enterprise IT leader. Enjoy the episode!

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 7

This Week in Enterprise Tech? More like This Week in Enterprise AI as your intrepid heroes Hyoun Park from Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo from the DX Report analyze AI products from multiple startups, AI value mapping challenges, a new alliance taking on NVIDIA, and the United States' Government's new policies on AI and what they mean for enterprise CIOs.

Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are below in the show Notes.

Watch the full episode here:

Show Notes

1. Databricks DBRX Gen AI Model. Databricks unleashed a 132 billion parameter open source model developed in 3 months on a $10 million budget based on a Mixture-of-Experts approach that exceeds other open source models in performance while providing greater speed and compute efficiency. Find out why MoE is the new RAG in Gen AI and why we found this so surprising.

Databricks' announcement https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-dbrx-new-standard-efficient-open-source-customizable-llms

Additional commentary from Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/databricks-spent-10m-on-a-generative-ai-model-that-still-cant-beat-gpt-4/

2. Hume AI's "Empathic AI." Hume AI announces a $50 million B round to support "Empathic AI". Charles and Hyoun debate the efficiacy of pursuing empathic AI based on previous approaches from startups such as Kanjoya and Textio and some of the hurdles and challenges associated with an empathy-based standard of AI for the enterprise.

For more on the funding announcement: https://www.hume.ai/blog/series-b-evi-announcement

3. The Practical Business Value of Gen AI. Hyoun and Charles saw a couple of pieces in the Wall Street Journal this week on the ROI of AI as well as the use of AI in supply chain through established vendors such as Celonis. We discuss what key metrics and ratios CIOs should consider in the value of AI and how to align AI to practical business outcomes.

The WSJ takes on ROI in AI: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cfos-tackle-thorny-calculus-on-gen-ai-whats-the-return-on-investment-24ebf435
And the WSJ take on AI and supply chain:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-seeking-real-world-supply-chain-gains-in-new-ai-tools-023045e7?mod=djemCIO

4. NVIDIA vs. the World in AI. A new consortium including Amazon is seeking to unseat NVIDIA's dominance in AI. Will it succeed? And what does it mean for CIOs seeking to place their bets on AI?

Based on the following Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/behind-plot-break-nvidias-grip-ai-by-targeting-software-2024-03-25/?taid=6601616d9876060001c70b64

And the following WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-invests-2-75-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic-87bb869e?mod=djemCIO

5. US Government Takes a Stance on AI. We saw a two-for-one this week from the US government as the executive branch announced a policy to require every agency to define AI safeguards and have an AI head. And in the legislative branch, the staffers of the House of Representatives have banned Microsoft CoPilot for now. What lessons can enterprise IT take from Government-grade Gen AI?

White House Fact Sheet on AI govermance: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/28/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-omb-policy-to-advance-governance-innovation-and-risk-management-in-federal-agencies-use-of-artificial-intelligence/

Axios breaking the story on the US House banning the use of CoPilot: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/29/congress-house-strict-ban-microsoft-copilot-staffers

Often, it begins with transforming your own business model so that you can help your customers transform the customer and employee experiences they deliver.

And all of it is underpinned by the tools that enable it directly and indirectly.

I recently attended Zoho’s analyst summit and had the opportunity to speak with Sean Rivers, Director of Technology with Relay, Inc. about this transformational process.

We cover how they started with their own business transformation as they had to pivot as they found the right product-market fit for a new technology. Then, we talk about how they help their customers execute a #businesstransformation, changing the way they communicate.

Finally, we talk about how Zoho became the enabler of both of these transformational forces, driven by its simplicity, flexibility, and adaptability.

Watch the full video interview here:

You might think that getting together each week with Hyoun Park to discuss what’s happening in Enterprise Tech would become a challenge. I mean, we’ll eventually run out of things to discuss, right?

Well, you have nothing to worry about as long as companies like NVIDIA, ServiceNow, and the countless enterprise tech companies trying to reshape the industry are on the job.

There’s always plenty to discuss! And everything that’s happening is important to you, as long as you can process all of it. And that’s why we’re doing this! Enjoy!

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 6

Welcome to Week 6 of This Week in Enterprise Tech! Taking a slightly different approach this week by including snippets of the full podcast in each section. The full podcast episode is still available at the end.

This week, we discuss six big topics from a week that was jam-packed with enterprise tech relevance, including NVIDIA GTC, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and changes in the tech venture capital world that affect CIO decisions.
--
1. NVIDIA, The Prom King of Tech. In a week where everyone who is anyone in enterprise tech put out a press release talking about their AI, what did NVIDIA actually announce that will affect enterprise IT departments this year? 

Here’s This Week in Enterprise Tech's take based on:

Jensen Huang’s keynote 

NVIDIA’s NIM Announcement https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/generative-ai-microservices-for-developers
And a relevant Fast Company article on the potential for NVIDIA-powered digital twins https://www.fastcompany.com/91062084/nvidia-omniverse-digital-twin-apple-vision-pro-nissan-z

2. ServiceNow Releases Washington DC. ServiceNow, a staple in the enterprise IT environment, made its biannual release. 

In tradition with naming platform updates for major world cities, this newest platform of Washington DC came out and it was all about AI. This Week in Enterprise's Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo discuss the implications. 

ServiceNow Release - https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/now-platform-genai-washdc-release.html

3. CIO Concerns for VC-Backed Firms. The rules for venture capital have changed in recent years, which makes it harder for CIOs to figure out which startup tech vendors are worth taking a chance on. 

What should enterprise IT be looking for in today’s world of IT consolidation? 

Reference Article - 

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4. Microsoft Bails Out Inflection AI. In 2023, Inflection AI took on 1.3 billion in funding commitments to build out AI capabilities. 

 
Microsoft decided it made more sense to basically acquihire the executive team. What does it mean for startups when 1.3 billion isn’t enough to compete in AI? 

Microsoft Blog https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/

5. The SEC Goes After "AI-Washing” The SEC has decided to push against unsupported claims of being AI-powered or having AI products. 

But how should this be interpreted after a decade when everything with even the slightest hint of math has been breathlessly proclaimed a game-changing AI service? Here’s This Week in Enterprise Tech's take with a nod to Crunchbase: https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/startups-sec-ai-washing-warnings

6. The Decline of Open Source in IT. This Week in Enterprise Tech's Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park explore why Open Source businesses are struggling in 2024 and how going Open Source is less attractive as a business model in today’s economic environment. 

Runtime, featuring long-time enterprise tech surveyor Tom Krazit https://www.runtime.news/the-slow-decline-of-the-open-source-startup

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch the full episode here:

As usual, AI seems to consistently dominate enterprise tech news. But in that fact lies an important point: AI is a nuanced, complex topic that you must address from several angles.

In this week’s podcast that’s exactly what we do looking at it in the context of regulation, the impact on the job market, how Oracle’s bet on it is now buoying it in a race many (including me) thought it had lost, leading to an evolution of both RPA and Intelligent Automation, and its impact on the Contact Center.

And every one of these topics should be of critical interest to every enterprise IT leader. Enjoy!

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 5

This week, we take on six engaging topics for the CIO's consideration: 

1. We respond to Broadcom's Hock Tan comments on the first 100 Days of VMware: https://www.broadcom.com/blog/vmware-by-broadcom-the-first-100-days. We discuss what it means if you’re a VMware customer — and who isn’t?
   

2. The European Union adopts the first AI legal safeguards. Did they get it right? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IPR19015/artificial-intelligence-act-meps-adopt-landmark-law
   

3. CNBC looks at tech layoffs, which have reached the highest point since the dot-com bust. Have they gone too far? https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/03/15/laid-off-techies-struggle-to-find-jobs-with-cuts-at-highest-since-2001.html
   

4. Silicon Angle notes that Oracle surprised critics, including us, with almost 50% year-over-year growth in cloud infrastructure. How did it happen? We look at both Oracle's capabilities and review star analyst Rebecca Wettemann's perspective.  https://siliconangle.com/2024/03/11/new-cloud-deals-demand-generative-ai-drive-strong-growth-oracle/

5. We explore the rapidly evolving workflow & intelligent automation space, based on three separate stories: 

   1. Automated code developer Devin from CognitionAI,

   2. Automation Anywhere's growth, & 

   3. the B round of funding for Nanonets

6. What is the future of the contact center? Accenture puts out its perspective and we temper it with our dose of reality: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/where-is-customer-care-in-2024

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch here:

If last week was a slow news week, this one was packed! We had a lot of ground to cover in this week’s episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech — and all of it is critical for you to understand as an entperise IT leader! Check it out.

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 4

This week, Hyoun Parkof Amalgam Insights and I take on six of the most important topics that should be considered by the CIO Office.  

1.  The Wall Street Journal explored how multiple companies have 10x'ed their SaaS vendor portfolios over the last decade. We discuss IT-LOB responsibility splits, key SaaS categories to watch, and adoption trends as well as some representative vendors such as Zylo, Productiv, Vendr, Bettercloud, and Torii. 

2.  CNBC pointed out how Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris is more hands on with Slack, which has been both a long-standing priority for CEO Marc Benioff and a revolving door of executives as of late.We discuss the future of software UX & why Generative AI is not enough. 

3.   Techcrunch noted a $25 million funding round for EMA which focuses on explicitly selling AI as a virtual employee. We discuss the need for trust and what can be learned from prior attempts over the past decade such as IBM Watson.

4.  United States Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announces $10 million for a new NIST AI safety lab. How much will this affect AI standards, governance, and purchasing decisions? We take into account both the Senate's official stance as well as modern governance standards & a Washington Post article on this topic  https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/06/nist-ai-safety-lab-decaying/

5.  The Wall Street Journal explores how market darling Databricks is avoiding the IPO while seeing record sales. We compare Databricks to publicly traded Snowflake and other companies that have successfully increased valuations by prolonging the path to IPO, such as Uber. And we explore how Databricks' private status is helping with AI acquisitions Glean and Mosaic ML. 

6.  The MIT Technology Review analyzes how robots are intersecting with AI and enabling humans to explore inaccessible frontiers ranging from deep sea exploration to collaborating with cockroaches. We explore how robotics affect telemedicine, field service, and the future of work as CIOs are held responsible for innovation and empowering employee productivity. 

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch here:

Zoho’s annual analyst day (several days, actually) is always one of the highlights of my year. It always brings together the who’s who of the analyst community and provides a window into Zoho’s unique approach to the tech industry.

But the highlight is always the opportunity to talk with its customers about how they’re leveraging the Zoho suite to drive transformational efforts. This year, I had the privilege of interviewing two customers on video.

The first is Ponappa PM, the head of Brigade Plus, part of one of India’s largest real estate developers. He and his team have taken a unique approach to transforming the customer experience — and they’re doing the whole thing on the Zoho suite.

Check out the interview here:

I’m really enjoying hosting our new weekly podcast with Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights. He and I agreed that doing it keeps us both sharp — and hopefully provides you with some meaningful and useful insights.

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 3

This week, we dig into six big topics for CIOs across innovation, the value of data, strategic budget management, succession planning, and enterprise AI:

1. We start with the City of Birmingham, which is struggling with its SAP to Oracle migration. We discuss how this IT project has shifted from the promise of digital transformation to the reality of being in survival mode and the cautions of mistaking core services for innovation. Article link: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/birmingham_city_council_to_spend/

2. We then take a look at Salesforce's earnings, where the Data Cloud is the Powerhouse of the earnings and CIOs are proving the value of data with their pocketbooks and the power of the purse.

3. We saw NVIDIA's success in AI as a sign that CIO budgets are changing. Find out about the new trend of CIO-led budgets that are independent of the traditional IT budget, as well as Charles' framework of separating the efficiency bucket from the innovation bucket from his first book, The Quantum Age of IT (https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Age-Charles-Araujo/dp/1849283753). Article link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-ai-investment-is-surging-to-nvidias-benefit-5611ffc5?mod=djemCIO

4. One of the hottest companies in enterprise software sees a big leadership change, as Frank Slootman steps down from Snowflake and Sridhar Ramaswamy from the Neeva acquisition takes over. We discuss why this is a good move to avoid stagnation and discuss how to deal with bets in innovation. Article link: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/28/new-snowflake-ceo-says-ai-will-keep-him-busy-for-many-years-to-come.html

5. Continuing the trend of innovation management, we talk about what Apple's exit of the electric car business means in terms of managing innovative moonshots and what CIO's often miss in terms of setting metrics around leadership and innovation culture. Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/business/dealbook/apple-car-project-to-drive-wider-innovation.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share

6. And finally, we talk about the much-covered Google Gemini AI mistakes. We think the errors themselves fall within the range of issues that we've seen from other large language models, but we caution why the phrase "Eliminate Bias" should be a massive red flag for AI projects. Article link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085445/google-ceo-gemini-ai-diversity-scandal-employee-memo

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch here:

So a funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago: I started a podcast and forgot to tell you!

Late last year, Hyoun Park, CEO of Amalgam Insights, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in starting a podcast with him. Of course, I said yes!

Hyoun is a highly respected analyst who also focuses on helping CIOs and other enterprise IT leaders make sense of the changes impacting everything. But he does it from a completely different perspective, so it made a ton of sense to join forces.

Last week, we launched This Week in Enterprise Tech. The format is simple: the two of us get together and talk about the latest news in enterprise tech, specifically focusing on how it may impact YOU.

We’re just getting started, so things will obviously change and improve over time, but so far I’m really thrilled with what we’re putting out there. I think you’ll find that we are sharing great insights that are well worth your time (if I may humbly say so!).

Because I was an airhead and completely forgot to post anything here, I’m including the snippets for both episodes. In the future, expect an email with the summary and embed for each episode. Hope you enjoy it!

P.S. Please comment and let me know what you think!

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 1

This week, we dig into:

• The philosophy of fast-rising Zoho, an enterprise application company that has grown over 10x over the past decade

• The Apple Vision Pro and what this means for enterprise IT organizations based on Apple's track record.

• The complexities of Cloud FinOps and managing cloud costs at a time when layoffs are common in the tech world

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch here:

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 2

This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by the DX Report's Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park, explores four key topics.

First, we discuss the emergence of the AI app layer and what this means for enterprise IT organizations.

Second, we dig into KKR's $3.8 billion acquisition of VMware's End User Computing business and what this means both for the EUC business and for VMware customers as a whole.

Third, we explore NVIDIA's quarterly earnings by going beyond the obvious growth of data center sales of GPUs to the ramifications for Cloud FinOps.

And finally, we consider the nature of trust on the internet based on a recent Wired article that explores the use of robots.txt.

Click here to listen and subscribe on Buzzsprout.

Or watch here:

I'm not sure that I realized it until this moment, but I guess I have long traded in what you might call the intangibles.

I've been pondering a recent Zoho analyst event, reading what so many of the other analysts have written, and processing a strangely complex set of feelings from the event. It's strange mostly because your typical analyst event doesn't engender any emotions at all. And analysts are hardly known for their heartfelt reaction to a vendor's pronouncements and prognostications.

Yet, in post-after-post, analysts were gushing. Moreover, at the event itself, there was a consistent chorus of praise for both the event and the company it represented. Don't get me wrong, we're all still analysts and there were plenty of hard questions and productive criticism to go around. Still, the air is just a bit different at a Zoho event — and I couldn't help but contemplate why.

While the answer to that question is important in its own right, particularly as I analyze what it means for Zoho, it is its meaning to both IT and tech company leaders that may be more profound. For within the answer lies the secret to everything from a successful digital transformation program to why one tech company breaks through in a crowded and noisy market and others don't.

Exposing the Data Crutch that Hinders True Transformation

"You can't manage what you don't measure."

Often attributed to Peter Drucker, no business management mantra may have had a greater or more lasting impact on how we manage almost every organization.

Entire generations have marched into the worlds of IT, marketing, and management seeking to collect as much data as possible — all in the name of effective management. As a past adherent to countless management frameworks, I drank gallons of this particular Kool-Aid.

But I'm beginning to see that — at least in some ways — this axiom has led too many of us astray.

Don't get me wrong. There is much value in the premise that we must collect copious amounts of data to understand and decipher the complexities that underpin so much of the modern enterprise. When there are more moving parts than the human brain can process, the ability to collect data and leverage algorithms to make sense of what is happening is a distinct advantage.

In addition, there is a long enterprise history of poor by-the-gut decision-making. If you've ever seen the movie Moneyball (or read the book), you well understand that subjective biases, no-longer-relevant past experiences, and any number of other subjective factors can lead even the most well-informed and best-intentioned leader to make bad decisions.

Data is the tool that helps us break through our own limitations and make sense of a complex and otherwise impossible-to-understand world.

Still, my experience with Zoho laid bare another unassailable fact: data is not the foundation of any meaningful transformation.

While Zoho's executive team shared plenty of data, it was not the crux of the company's ethos. As I pondered what I had experienced, I thought back to the most impactful digital transformation efforts and most significant marketing efforts I had been a part of in my career. As I did, I found a common thread: while all of these deeply transformational efforts collected and reported data, their driving force of change was something altogether different and intangible.

The Undeniable Power of a Pervasive Culture

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast"

Another business axiom, also often attributed to Peter Drucker (he was a busy guy, apparently), gives voice to the idea that an organization's culture is more important than any strategy or tactic it may develop and employ.

But while this axiom is oft repeated, it is seldom manifest as viscerally as it is at these Zoho events. The company's culture is always front-and-center.

As I reflected on this fact, I realized that other companies that have had significant impact have a similar front-and-center culture. Think companies such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, among others. Still, what makes Zoho's particular brand of culture unique is its almost counter-culture approach to the tech industry.

While I've heard other companies described as "a rocket ship tied to a rocket ship," Zoho's culture comes across in "the Zoho way" — a slower, methodical approach that is little-worried about keeping pace and more concerned with marching to the beat of its own mission-driven and principles-first drum.

The result is an abundantly enthusiastic and loyal employee base. I suppose that should be expected given a culture that is less focused on hard-charging and more focused on employee well-being and work-life balance.

But what is perhaps more surprising is the impact this culture has on its customers. The company's annual customer events are called Zoholics for good reason. Its customers are almost always rabid fans of not only the company's products, but its ethos, how it sees itself in the world, and how it seeks to treat them as humans.

As I have thought back to other successful projects I've worked on, I realized something similar was beneath the surface. Whether on an organizational level or driven by a specific team leader, it is always the foundational culture of an organization or team that is the driving force of an authentic transformational effort.

And, perhaps, most importantly, those efforts have two inevitable factors: they result in a number of other intangible elements, and almost none of them are measurable.

Why It's the Intangibles that Make All the Difference

During questioning of the Zoho executive team, they acknowledged that their suite of products was often not great at measuring employee productivity. As the company likes to say, "Zoho runs on Zoho" — which is its way of saying that they often develop their products based on their own needs as an organization. And, one thing they don't do much of is measure employee productivity.

Instead, the company puts significantly more value on the intangible aspects of how it interact with its employees as humans and as individuals.

I believe its approach applies to a broad spectrum of things that add significant value, and yet are almost impossible to effectively measure. For instance, the company puts a tremendous amount of energy and focus into building authentic relationships with the analyst community — and in fostering relationships amongst the analysts. Has this significant investment paid off?

I recently had another analyst tell me that they became aware of Zoho and its approaches through my writing (much like this piece). I've had enterprise executives tell me that they've taken a fresh look at Zoho based on my analysis. Has it made a difference? Multiply my work across the hundreds of analysts within its community and the answer is obvious. But good luck measuring it.

Likewise, I've spoken to numerous enterprise executives who have told me that a report or book I've written has changed their perspective on things in significant ways. But did they put in their email address into some form themselves? Was some marketing executive able to directly attribute my piece to the sales pipeline? Probably not.

The reality is that much of what I do (and everyone like me) is to help educate, challenge assumptions, and shape opinions. It's incredibly valuable work that often has deep and lasting impact in the most important ways with the most important audiences. But good luck actually measuring its impact!

The same is true with your digital transformation efforts and almost anything truly of value in any organization.

When it comes to any transformational effort, you can — and should — measure as much as you can. Quantification is essential to demonstrating the value of your effort.

But never discount the intangibles in what we do. Those intangibles — the culture, the small gestures, the impassioned endorsement of someone doing the actual work — are the things that will be almost impossible to measure, but will always be what ultimately makes the difference between success and failure.

I hate my email feed at the end of the year because it’s filled with the two types of content I find the most meaningless: annual recaps and prediction pieces. Thankfully, I think we're mostly through that phase!

Still, the wrapping up of one year and the fresh start of a new one invites reflection. And reflection is something I do believe is worthwhile.

This year, in particular, I found myself contemplating how I'd be looking at my 2024 plans if I were a CIO. It is an unquestionable period of change and disruption in the world of enterprise tech — a combination that always creates both risk and opportunity. So, I found myself contemplating all of this change from the perspective of what I would be doing if I were still running an IT organization.

As an industry analyst focused on digital transformation, let me share my perspectives on the bets and investments I’d be making in 2024 if I were once again in your shoes. These aren’t predictions, but they are based on my beliefs about what is happening, the pace of change you can expect, and the implications they may have on your current state and future ability to execute.

Shifting to a Capabilities-First Posture

My first course of action in 2024 would be a mental mindset shift. As I've spoken with executives over the last year, there's been plenty of talk (and debate) over things like whether or not you should be "cloud-first" or "SaaS-first" or other similar postures. While there's value in these sorts of positions, they remain technology-focused.

As a leader, you have only a few anchor positions that you can take that will resonate with your team. You can only rally them around one or two organizing principles that will guide day-to-day decisions. Therefore, I think it's critical that you focus on those that will create the greatest lasting impact and guide the greatest number of decisions.

Because of this, my focus in 2024 would be to become a capabilities-first organization.

I believe that the one thing we can be certain of over the next several years is that we will be living through a period of incredible — and unpredictable — change. But the key word there is unpredictable. Frankly, you can ignore most of those prediction pieces you read over the last few weeks. Things are changing so fast, it's very hard to understand which technologies (or even management practices) will have an appreciable impact and which will fade away.

As a result, the most important thing you can do is to focus on building sustainable capabilities that give your organization the ability to adapt, shift, and change as the unpredictability sweeps over your organization.

This capabilities-first posture would result in me focusing on three specific capabilities:

• Business Architecture

• Building a Data-driven Culture

• Embedding the employee experience and an adoption mindset into the operating management model

These three capabilities are very involved (in fact, I feel another article on these three capabilities coming in the near future!), but let me briefly explain them.

Business Architecture

I've written about the power of a business architecture capability previously in the context of the architecture stack of the Digital Transformation Platform. When you build a business architecture capability you are creating the ability to understand your entire organization through a common, value-oriented lens and then rationalize activities and investments in the context of their overall impact to the organization's mission. This capability is the anchor that allows the organization to pivot and adapt without destroying itself — and it's virtually impossible to do effectively without a solid connection between the overarching business architecture and the technologies that support it.

Data-driven Culture

If the rise of Generative AI has taught us anything, it is the supremacy of data in creating organizational value in the digital era. It was true long before the latest hype cycle, and it includes much more than just AI use cases. An organization's ability to leverage data, holistically and dynamically across the organization, will be inextricably linked to its ability to generate differentiated value. Everything from creating unique customer experiences, to improving automation-powered efficiency, to deploying AI will all require a disciplined ability to leverage data at scale and velocity. And, because the most powerful data in any organization is that which crosses functional domains, it will be IT's ability to marshal and foster this data-driven culture that will make all the difference.

An Employee Experience and Adoption Mindset

It may not feel it with the rash of layoffs last year and continuing in the first weeks of 2024, but the ability to attract and retain the right talent will remain a chief competitive driver as organizations become evermore reliant on data and the customer experience to compete. As a result, the ability to deliver and manage an employee experience that creates a positive relationship between the organization and the employee is essential. Moreover, there is ample data that now clearly shows the relationship between a positive employee experience and a better customer experience, improved efficiency, and increased productivity. Almost universally, a better employee experience is one that is streamlined and efficient, creating the proverbial win-win for IT leaders.

At the same time, the continually increasing rate of change means that those same employees are consistently struggling with adapting to new technologies. Creating an adoption mindset, ensuring that employees are learning, leveraging, and benefiting from new technologies, will become a critical capability that ensures your ability to continually adapt to market shifts. It also has the added benefit of protecting your massive investments in new technology.

Embrace a Hybrid IT Footprint Rooted in Two Estates: Effieciency & Innovation

Mindset. Check. That's the most critical place to start and will go a long way to moving the organization forward. But it's still a bit abstract. I'd be looking for a next layer of guidance to help my team understand how we should be operating on a day-to-day basis. I call this my organizational footing.

Here, I'd be rooting my organization — culturally and strategically — around two modalities: a hybrid model and a two-estate model.

Hybrid IT for the Foreseeable Future

The first, rooting to the concept of a hybrid IT operating model, is fairly straightforward. Amid all the talk about cloud-first, SaaS-first, and so on, one fact gets skipped: the vast majority of workloads are still running on legacy architectures, at least in part. Any organization that has been around for more than a decade almost certainly has significant parts of its technical operating model running on older technologies.

And while there is plenty of cause for IT leaders to be embarking on modernization efforts, for many of these workloads, the appropriate adage is, "If it aint broke, don't fix it."

The natural (and correct) result is that the vast majority of enterprise IT organizations will be operating in a we-run-it-all hybrid model for the foreseeable future. I don't expect this will change for at least the next decade — if not longer. Enterprises will run workloads on-prem, in co-lo facilities, in private clouds, in public clouds, on SaaS, and everywhere in between. You should considered it the de facto state and establish a footing that these various environments are neither good, nor bad.

But you and your team should also not consider them to be sacrosanct.

Just because a workload has always run in a certain environment doesn't mean you shouldn't move it — nor does it mean you should. In this semi-permanent hybrid IT world, every workload must be consistently evaluated for best fit and evaluated solely based on its characteristics.

Your Two Tech Estates

While a Hybrid IT footing is really about accepting the de facto state and embracing a workload-to-environment alignment perspective, the second footing will require a bigger shift.

Most IT organizations look at their tech stack through a single lens — it's all part of one big organizational mission. While that's true, it also belies the fact that an organization's mission is almost always complex and often at odds with itself. On the one hand, every organization is constantly looking to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Technology is, and has always been, a huge part of that process. In fact, I'd argue that technology-fueled efficiency has been IT's raison d'être.

But organizations are also fighting to create market differentiation in an ever-changing world — and looking to IT to deliver innovation that can shift the balance of power.

The challenge is that how you structure and operate a tech stack for efficiency — removing variability, focus on reliability — is vastly different from how you do so when you're focused on innovation, where it's all about speed and agility.

The result is that IT must operate two tech estates: one focused on efficiency and the other focused on innovation. They obviously need to exist cohesively as part of the larger whole, but it will be essential that your organization evaluate how you design, build, deploy, and manage the various components of these two estates from their respective perspectives.

Go All-In on Tech to Drive Competitive Advantage (and yes, this includes GenAI)

Beyond mindsets and posture, the business of IT remains technology. So what technology bets would I be making in 2024?

It would be a three-part bet:

• In-house development

• Artificial Intelligence

• Capabilities Support

In-House Development

I've been somewhat dismayed that many of the enterprise IT execs I've spoken with are putting little focus on in-house development capabilities. While I'm firmly in the camp of not wasting internal effort on commodity functionality (e.g., customizing a CRM, ERP, etc.), the fact remains that technology now drives competitive advantage — and you can't create it from out-of-the-box software.

The ability to deliver bespoke technology that moves the competitive needle for your organization should be a top priority — and that will mean that you invest in an in-house development capability. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have an army of developers on-staff. You can achieve much of this capability using the ever-improving breed of no-code and low-code development platforms that allow you to both democratize development and get more bang for your development buck.

Likewise, the recent advent of development co-pilots using various forms of generative AI will allow you to extend your development productivity even further, making it easier to invest in this capability without breaking the bank. But whatever approach you take, the smart enhancement of your in-house development capability should be a foundational investment.

Artificial Intelligence

It will be hard to escape AI in 2024. However, the trick will be to not be an also-ran when it comes to how you apply it.

The starting point to leveraging AI to create an advantage will be to recognize that AI is not synonymous with Generative AI. While GenAI will unquestionably see exponential growth and improvement, its use cases in the enterprise will remain nascent and speculative. Its blackbox nature, security risks, and unpredictable penchant for hallucinations will demand a slow and cautious approach for most use cases.

But it will be the potential to mix GenAI with more established forms of AI that will likely present the greatest and most potent opportunities. I would be actively and aggressively looking for opportunities to harness the fascination with GenAI and mix it with more stable and mature forms of predictive and conversational AI to create breakthrough opportunities directly aligned with the organization's go-to-market value propositions.

There will also be ample opportunities to leverage AI and various forms of co-pilots to goose productivity gains. Those use cases will be well and good, but will also be insufficient (in most cases) to move the competitive needle and will likely result in hand-waving and disillusionment. Harvest productivity gains, but remain steadfastly focused on how you can leverage a mix of AI technologies to move the ball forward for your organization.

Capability-Supporting Technologies

The last area of technology focus will be on those technologies that support specific organizational capabilities you are developing. For instance, if you do not already have technologies that support the development of a business architecture capability, that would be a place for targeted investment. Likewise for technologies that support the development of a data culture or the employee experience.

However, the capabilities that will move your organization forward are, by definition, unique to your organization. Understand those capabilities and then create a technology strategy that will enable them. The overarching focus should always remain on those capabilities that will drive competitive, differentiating value for the organization. Any investment in technologies that support those capabilities will always be a winning bet.

2024: A Tumultuous Year of Opportunity

I don't know that we've ever had a quiet, steady-as-you-go, year in the world of IT. Still, even by our chaotic standards, 2024 will likely be a tumultuous year for CIOs.

The volatility of the broader market, geopolitical instability, the rise of GenAI, and the continued disruption of traditional enterprises along multiple fronts will continue to put pressure on IT leaders to strike the ever challenging balance between leveraging technology to drive organizational efficiency and enable innovation that delivers competitive advantage.

As has been the case for some time, it will be no simple task.

Still, this year may represent one of the greatest opportunities for those IT leaders who can harness the power of technology to drive meaningful, value-driven change in the enterprise. Doing so will require some calculated risks and placing the right bets, but this may be the year that it all finally pays off.