Today on Product Saturday: MongoDB focuses on performance and resilience, Microsoft tackles event handling with a new open-source project, and the quote of the week.
Today: why agents are the new vehicle for enterprise AI ambitions, OpenAI secures the bag, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
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.
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.
This week a U.K. regulatory agency published summaries of hearings it conducted this past July with AWS, Microsoft, and Google Their responses provide an interesting look into how the cloud providers see themselves, their competitors, and the current state of the market.
For years, Oracle tried to convince longtime database customers who wanted to shed their on-premises data centers to run those databases on Oracle's public infrastructure cloud, slamming AWS at every turn. Times have changed.
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.
A convoluted series of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures had left Cushman & Wakefield with "hundreds" of separate enterprise-resource planning applications. It wanted a flexible but standardized base to get everyone on the same page.
For many years financial services companies Principal Financial Group started its transition to the cloud just before the pandemic made the need for modern digital services an existential crisis, and has only accelerated that process since Kathy Kay came on board.
A generation of cloud architects, developers, and systems engineers has stayed loyal to AWS over nearly two decades in part because of its reputation for supporting anything it launched that was used by a customer to build their infrastructure. That commitment appears to be changing.
Kubernetes has become the second-most widely used open-source project in the world, behind only Linux itself, thanks to a dedicated community that celebrated its 10th birthday last week.
The AI boom is pushing the limits of clean-energy sources, forcing utilities to push back on new data-center construction plans and keep their coal-fired plants running. A relatively small but fast-growing number of people believe the solution is nuclear power.
Microsoft is bent on installing Copilots into all of its services across Azure, Microsoft 365, and GitHub, which continues to enjoy the most visible success of Microsoft's AI kick.
Anyscale is built around Ray, an open-source project that was designed to help AI workloads scale. But in recent years, commercial pressures have forced several companies with similar open-source origin stories to put restrictions on their projects to ward off competition.
In an interview at the Data Cloud Summit, Ramaswamy described how enterprise customers are working with generative AI, outlined growth opportunities for Snowflake's future, and lamented the "insular" culture at Google that denied it the opportunity to lead the generative AI transition.
Certainly, the generative AI craze has been good for C3 AI, but according to chairman and CEO Tom Siebel, it also has the potential to go to a really dark place.
Google announced plans this week to bring its Gemini foundation model into its database strategy, giving administrators new tools to maximize uptime and generate SQL code.
After Cockroach Labs announced earlier this month that CockroachDB would switch to a proprietary model, Oxide Computer Company decided to take a unique approach to preserving its investments in Cockroach's open-source software.
There are lots of companies interested in generative AI apps with money but limited skills. They'll need helpful platform tools to get up and running, and competition in this category could set the tone for the enterprise AI era.
It's getting hard to understand why any company should consider using open-source software released under a traditional license by a venture-backed startup.
The premise behind the Agile Manifesto is that developers, the users they serve, and business stakeholders all benefit by working together. But too often, organizations are faking true change by plastering a new label on older software development practices.
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.
Global teams across an enterprise are likely to speak different languages, of course, but also might be using different keyboard layouts with different characters. Those differences can lead to confusion about password requirements that could hinder collaboration and even compromise security.
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.
Tech and media leaders are increasingly worried that the push to use generative AI to automate analytical business tasks could produce a generation of workers that never develop the foundation to do the job well at a senior level.
As Snowflake and Databricks gear up for back-to-back user conferences in early June, their customers are increasingly betting on open storage formats that give them new flexibility.
"The more significant decision is, 'what is your strategy for centralizing the data?' Because these data platforms do not do that; they are the place that it gets centralized to, but they do not centralize anything."
