As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, customer experience becomes an even more critical part of retail. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss data from recent studies with host Eric Hanselman. Customers are expecting better integration of their online and in-person experiences and effective blending of digital capabilities is needed to keep from missing out on potential revenue. Digital infrastructure has to extend into stores, alongside a full complement of payment options.

There’s been rapid expansion in financial technologies and its adoption. Research director Jordan McKee joins host Eric Hanselman to look at trends and highlights from the Money 20/20 conference. Where cryptocurrencies played an outsized role in previous years, practical uses of blockchain capabilities have taken their place. Concerns about generative AI’s negative impacts on fraud overshadowed benefits. Open banking initiatives stand to create new opportunities, as well as a few risks.

With the ebb and flow of workloads to and from cloud, data doesn’t get the attention it should as a critical resource. Research director Henry Baltazar joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the need for better data intelligence and results from the recent Voice of the Enterprise study. Gaps between data and storage infrastructure and the applications using it can lead to problems with application performance or increased costs with egress or retrieval fees. Better planning can prevent pain.

The excitement for 5G has waned after its initial rollout, but there is great promise that many of its capabilities will be put to work in Internet of Things applications. Rich Karpinski joins host Eric Hanselman to explore insights from the 5G Americas conference and look at impacts in the 5G and IoT markets. There’s a lot of 4G inertia to overcome and the 5G ecosystem and related investment is still building. 5G deployments are growing unevenly. Much more is to come, but the question is when?

So many of our perspectives on technology are driven by end user studies and numbers can be informative, but there can be much more to the story. The in-depth interviews that are part of much of the study work we do can offer nuance and Amy Hedrick, who manages this process, discusses the insights with host Eric Hanselman. The real world thoughts on current technology and its transitions can aid planning and decision making. Join the 451 Alliance for more:  https://www.451alliance.com/

While the surge of interest in the last few months around generative AI might make this all seem new, we’ve been tracking attitudes about AI for a number of years and see interesting transitions in thoughts and perceptions of respondents. Sheryl Kingstone and Alex Johnston return to the podcast to explore trends in attitudes about AI with host Eric Hanselman. Strong generational differences exist in sentiment and a surprising uptick in the number of people using it and the frequency of use.

Generative AI is creating many challenges in the infrastructure that supports it. Nick Patience and Dan Thompson return to discuss these impacts and what they’ll be talking about at the Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit with host Eric Hanselman. Significant increases in power demand are creating a “Virginia Paradox” with local grid impacts. The shift from training to massive amounts of inference could only exacerbate things. Join us at HCTS to hear more! https://www.spglobal.com/hctsny

For over 15 years, the Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit has been a forum for sorting out the complexities of digital infrastructure and this year it’s back in person and in New York City on October 10th. Brian Partridge and Kelly Morgan join host Eric Hanselman to talk about the latest in edge computing and M&A activity in the datacenter world. Both areas are undergoing tremendous change and you can find out more about HCTS here: https://spglobal.com/hctsny

Managing complex application environments successfully requires not only insights into both application behavior and the infrastructure that’s supporting them but also the ability to correlate all of that data. Analyst Mike Fratto returns to the podcast to explore observability, an approach to effectively managing new application patterns that steps beyond traditional methods. From the cloud native world, it’s gaining wider traction and simplifying operations with observability pipelines.

The last month has seen larger players in digital infrastructure make the case for their views on how it should be built and what’s needed to embrace generative AI. Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey and Henry Baltazar return to the podcast to look at what was pitched at VMware Explore, Google Cloud Next and other recent industry events. Access to data is a key decision point, but many are still wrestling with cloud operating models. Fundamental questions on managing compliance concerns loom large.