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.
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.
DocuSign's service was built before the cloud, but last year it realized it needed to move to the cloud to handle data residency requirements and its plans for AI services.
Soon after making the decision to get out of the data center business and into cloud computing about five years ago, Intuit realized that it was going to have to change nearly everything about how it built and managed its application infrastructure to operate in this new world.
"We're the proud stewards of a 175-year-plus company with a deep history," said Bill Cassidy, chief information officer, in a recent interview. "But you know, we're not dissimilar from large organizations with a fair amount of technical debt that we're trying to remediate."
