Today on Product Saturday: Anthropic may have found a way to deliver on the promise of agents, Oracle puts up a lakehouse, and the quote of the week.
Today: F5's disclosure that hackers had "long term" access to its systems is just the latest sign that the federal government is focused on the wrong problems, Salesforce does damage control on behalf of its CEO, and the latest enterprise moves.
Today: How Salesforce hopes to start generating real revenue from AI agents, why the merger of Fivetran and dbt Labs signals the end of an era in data infrastructure, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Any business that survived the digital revolution is very familiar with how quickly networking requirements can shift. But few are prepared for the speed with which emerging technologies today are challenging existing environments.
For companies with sensitive data requirements or substantial investments in data centers, a hybrid cloud strategy offers the best of both worlds — and a significant management challenge. Eight members of our Roundtable discussed how to balance cloud and on-premises deployments.
Last year Mastercard conducted a review of the different workflow patterns used by employees across the 35,000-person payments giant. In some cases generative AI tools didn't really move the needle, but the company encouraged adoption with proper training and connectors to vital data sources.
One of Houston's largest hospitals began using AI during the pandemic to check in on vulnerable seniors, and now uses it as part of its follow-up care for discharged patients.
LibertyGPT is an internal application that is currently being used by more than 10,000 Liberty Mutual employees to summarize information and answer common questions. An early version was built in just two weeks thanks to previously established data pipelines and cost controls.
Figma's collaboration tools are a hit with designers thanks to its decision to take a page from the gaming software playbook and rebuild its databases for "infinite scale."
Like many companies that have grown through acquisitions over the years, Rajesh Naidu's job involves integrating those acquisitions onto a common tech stack, which requires taking a hard look at the SaaS applications used by those companies.
When the CNCF accepts open-source projects, it requires that any trademarks related to the project be handed over. Synadia never did that, and is now backing down from an attempt to use its ownership of the trademark as leverage to regain control of NATS.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) was introduced last November by Anthropic, which called it "an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools." After kicking the tires for a few months, vendors are jumping on board.
It was only in the last six months that Canva decided generative AI coding assistants were good enough for its employees. It got there through a period of trial and error that suggests GenAI vendors need more flexible pricing strategies.
Vercel's serverless infrastructure was designed at a time when speed was the most important goal. AI apps are a little different, and Fluid Compute is an effort to rebuild that infrastructure for the AI era.
Schmidt discussed the frequency and style of the attacks Amazon fends off every day, the capabilities that cybersecurity defenders can bring to bear thanks to generative AI, and the potential that machine-generated code could lead to the rise of a new class of software vulnerabilities.
Linear started off as an issue-tracking tool helping developers coordinate on eliminating blockers and fixing problems, but has expanded into a product-development system. "We have this fairly simple idea that engineering is really the front line of all this information," Saarinen said.
As worries about the economy accelerate, CIOs are regaining control over sprawling application footprints. According to McDermott, "What's happening is technology is the only way out. It's not kind of, sort of; it's the only way out."
Under Woodside, Freshworks is taking direct aim at ServiceNow, which has been the leading company in several aspects of IT management software for several years. "Three years ago, our product wasn't anywhere near as enterprise-ready as it is today," he said.
Generative AI apps could help software designers break out of a decades-old rut when it comes to how we use their tools. At the very least, they need to rethink their approach to avoid frustrating users.
GitHub's independence within the Microsoft ecosystem was treasured by company executives in the years following in 2018 acquisition. But that era is over, and GitHub is now just another Microsoft product.
Visual Studio Code is a vital pieces of Microsoft's enterprise strategy, which banks on the goodwill developers have for both products to drive business to Azure and its other enterprise software products. But software development practices and preferences are changing rapidly.
GitHub Copilot users will be able to swap in AI models from Anthropic and Google in place of the default models from OpenAI. When the flagship product of the generative AI era takes such a step, it's a sign OpenAI's leadership position is waning.
Tuesday's $32 billion acquisition of Wiz — a cloud security platform designed to work across all major cloud providers — will be a test of Google Cloud's commitment to work with its competitors and a signal of whether security trumps other considerations when it comes to buying cloud services.
Nobody has any idea when a real quantum computer will actually impact enterprise tech, but NIST wants companies to upgrade their security sooner rather than later.
A software update with one more variable than expected crashed 8.5 million Windows computers. Should Windows security vendors continue to have access to the kernel?
The shared-responsibility model is groaning under the weight of the modern security environment. Snowflake's ongoing nightmare should be a wake-up call for any infrastructure or SaaS provider that they need to do more to protect their customers, because the old model is no longer working.
Last year at the Databricks Data & AI Summit Ghodsi pledged to bring Delta Lake and Iceberg together in a "USB-C format" for data. The communities behind both formats have made progress toward that goal, but the last mile is tricky, and new tools could let end users worry about other problems.
Companies working with vector databases have to balance performance, cost, and speed as they try to get apps into production. Pinecone's new update promises to thread that needle.
No one really agrees on a strict definition of "agent," but recent breakthroughs in large-language models have allowed companies to build enhanced versions of chatbots that can respond to natural-language queries with a plan of action.
Now that open data formats are here to stay, unifying them to remove incompatibilities will be a challenge. Delta Lake and Iceberg get all the attention, but tech developed by the creators of Hudi could make it happen.
