Roll For Enterprise

The entire team was back together this week and there was a lot to discuss. There have been a slew of acquisitions in technology lately including Rocket Software acquisition of ASG, Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance and then Dell decided to finally spinoff VMWare. IBM also renamed its services spinout Kyndryl. Nvidia’s ARM announcement, among what felt as 100 others from Nvidia, was also discussed as Nvidia seems to be getting better and better with every announcement and product they release. Finally the team is dreaming of conferences, but gone are the days of Cisco Live and VMWorld being the go to conference as Re:Invent and Ignite have taken the reigns as the go to conferences moving forward.

Rocket Software acquires ASG Technologies

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/news/rocket-software-extends-its-technology-and-global-reach-agreement-acquire-asg-technologies

70-90% of acquisitions fail

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/06/24/most-mergers-fail-because-people-arent-boxes/

Kyndryl https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/12/business/kyndryl-ibm-corporate-names/index.html

Dell spinning off VMware https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/14/dell-jumps-as-it-unveils-vmware-stock-spinoff-plan.html

Nvidia ARM server CPU https://www.anandtech.com/show/16610/nvidia-unveils-grace-a-highperformance-arm-server-cpu-for-use-in-ai-systems

Microsoft buys Nuance, creators of Siri https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/microsoft-nuance-aws-google-ai

Note: Microsoft is aiming to take over the desktop for the doctors with long-term target set on the front-end workflows in healthcare.

Microsoft HealthVault is officially shutting down in November (2019)

https://medcitynews.com/2019/04/microsoft-healthvault-is-officially-shutting-down-in-november/

Recommendations

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Zack, Mike, and Dominic discuss Tim Cook's interview in which he talks about AR, some news about the long-expected AirTags, and Dominic's delayed plans to spend more money on Apple's products. We also talked about the massive Facebook contact data leak — check if your details were included here. Dominic may have gone off on a bit of a rant about the ills of adtech and surveillance capitalism, but then again, he does have form here.

Recommendations

Dominic: when you register for some site, append the name to your Gmail address, like so: [email protected]. That way, when one site inevitably leaks your info, at least you'll know where it came from.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Fortinet invest in Linksys to focus on securing home office network in a clear play to take advantage of the long term changes due to COVID. Meanwhile at AWS they announced that Tableau CEO, Adam Selipsky, an ex-AWS employee is replacing Andy Jassy. Could this be a sign that AWS is getting ready to spinout or is everyone too busy wondering why someone from the AWS ranks didn’t get the job? In silicon wars Intel announced a 20 billion dollar investment into new foundries in the US and proclaimed it is back with a vengeance. Surprising to us but definitely entertaining as usual!

Fortinet invests $75 million in router maker Linksys with focus on securing home office networks https://www.zdnet.com/article/fortinet-invests-75-million-in-router-maker-linksys-with-focus-on-securing-home-office-networks/

IBM TV AD - Universal Business Adapter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I

Amazon building a networking chip https://seekingalpha.com/news/3677611-amazoncom-pursues-its-own-networking-chip-amid-frosty-broadcom-relationship-report.

AWS New Leader

AWS Picks Tableau’s Adam Selipsky As New CEO, Replacing Jassy

https://www.crn.com/aws-picks-tableau-s-adam-selipsky-as-new-ceo-replacing-jassy

AWS customers and partners confident in CEO transition — for now

https://www.cio.com/article/3610228/aws-customers-and-partners-confident-in-ceo-transition-for-now.html

Amazon News tweets https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/you-cant-trust-amazon-when-it-feels-threatened/

Intel

Intel CEO Gelsinger commits to being a 'world-class foundry business', two new factories in Arizona

https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-ceo-gelsinger-outlines/

Justin Long commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLsAEBAnGd4

Aftershow

Recommendations

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

This week's guest is Grace Marshall. Author of the award-winning How to be Really Productive, Grace  is known for her ‘refreshingly human’ approach to productivity. Featured in The Guardian, Forbes and Huffpost, her work as a Productivity Ninja with global productivity training company Think Productive has helped thousands of people to replace stress, overwhelm and frustration with success, sanity and satisfaction. 

We mainly discussed her new book Struggle: the surprising truth, beauty and opportunity hidden in life’s sh*ttier moments:

In a world that’s obsessed with fast hacks, quick wins, and Instagram-perfection, struggle has become a taboo. A sign that something’s gone horribly wrong.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong about getting it wrong?

What if struggle isn’t a battle to fight, a trap to avoid, or a sign of weakness?

What if struggle is precisely where the magic happens – where we do our best, most important work?

With everyday observations and practical encouragement, Grace’s new book Struggle, shines a surprising new light on the truth, beauty and opportunity hidden in life’s shittier moments.

You can find out more at StruggleTheBook.com.

Grace lives in Stafford in the middle of the UK with her husband and two kids, continually working on being a good-enough mum most of the time, with intermittent lapses into hopelessness and brilliance. 

She can be found at GraceMarshall.com, on Twitter @GraceMarshall, IG @gracemarshallninja and LinkedIn.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Our theme music is by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

MS Ignite

https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

Industrial IoT was a trend at re:invent and continued at MS Ignite with the cloud reaching into the network edge and deep into manufacturing.

Manufacturing is going through an evolution, and that's why the cloud is focused there. Companies are taking more of a nationalistic approach toward manufacturing. There's a real push for the first time in a long time for all countries, not only the US, to build more factories at home. This push will result in a revolution, so it's a market that will accelerate, so Amazon and MSFT see the opening and push for new technologies.

Microsoft Power Fx

The low-code programming language for everyone https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-power-fx-the-low-code-programming-language-for-everyone/ Based on Excel syntax!

Convergence with "real" programming https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/02/microsoft_debuts_lowcode_power_fx/

And wtf was going on with Cirque du Soleil?

MSFT for the win again!! microsoft-ai-powerpoint-presenter-coach-available-desktop-mobile

No Code/Low Code 

One major analyst firm doesn't buy-in and only views "lower code."

Virtual events — Gartner charging $1000 plus for virtual events

What does the future hold for analysts?

Are analysts being surpassed by business consultants? Are analysts seeing a risk for the first time that wasn't there before? Will the analyst and their research maintain staying power? The business analysts with newsletters and opinions are taking the story telling may be taking away from traditional analysts. You go to the analyst for thought leadership, but you can get that from talking to CIOs, industry leaders, and platforms, including podcasts and Clubhouse.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

With special guest Jason Garbis from Appgate.

Jason has worked in the software industry for over 30 years, in roles that include software engineer, technical consultant, marketing, product marketing, and product management. This makes him extremely old! Despite his advanced age, he manages to remain productive in his role as SVP of Products at Appgate, a security vendor. He is also co-chair of the SDP Zero Trust Working Group at the Cloud Security Alliance, and just published a book - “Zero Trust Security: An Enterprise Guide”.

You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn

Try different things: skill stacking 

Music by Renato Podestà.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

In this episode of Roll For Enterprise the team sits down with Brian Singer of Nobl9 to discuss SLOs and SREs.

Brian Singer is a product-focused entrepreneur with a passion for enterprise software, cloud computing, and reliability engineering. He is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Nobl9, a Battery-backed company building a platform to optimize software reliability. His previous company, Orbitera, was acquired by Google where he adapted the SaaS product to follow Google’s best practices for production and reliability. Prior to Orbitera, Brian worked for BMC and Novell. Brian holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Brown University and an MBA from MIT. He resides in the Boston area where he is perfecting his golf swing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/briantsinger/

Nobl9 is the first Service Level Objective (SLO) platform that transforms your existing reliability metrics (i.e. Datadog, Prometheus, New Relic etc.) into actionable indicators of application performance and user experience via a modern engineering workflow (think GitOps / Infra-as-Code) resulting in greater ROI from your reliability initiatives.

https://nobl9.com

Nobl9 news:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/nobl9-raises-21m-series-b-for-its-slo-management-platform/

Brian’s book recommendation:

Implementing Service Level Objectives https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FBP3ZRH/

Site Reliability Engineering: https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems-ebook/dp/B01DCPXKZ6/

Brian’s Community Reference:

Beyond Seattle SRE https://www.meetup.com/Beyond-Seattle-SRE/

SLO Conference mentioned by Brian:

SLOconf https://twitter.com/SLOConf

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

What would it mean for IT Ops to be an actually mature discipline, rather than one that is still maturing? 

One indication would be that there would be no need to follow the developing trends as new ideas (slowly) percolate through to the mainstream.

Top 8 DevOps Trends for 2021

Rise of serverless: Is serverless hitting the mainstream?

2021 DevOps Predictions 

The blog post by Mike Gualtieri at Forrester that started the NoOps conversation: I Don’t Want DevOps. I Want NoOps.

Dominic's reaction: Not NoOps, but SmartOps 

Recommendations/Rants

Mike: Zapier — automate all the things (but we're not sure how to pronounce it)

Zack: Lemonade — new style insurance

Dominic: a rant about CarPlay and Apple Car rumours that turned into a whole aftershow — skip it if you're not interested!

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Recently there has been a lot of talk of getting into technology with a degree and the value of degrees compared to online training and certifications, etc..

Dominic, Zack, Mike and Lilac discuss the IT Career Roller Coster. They go through everything from career progression, generalist versus specialist and then dive into education. The differences in education in different countries, specifically US versus other countries. They also touch on the value of a degree and specifically an MBA. Is the value of an MBA the degree or the connections and social connection it creates? Listen to find out their thoughts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/business/dealbook/education-student-loans-lambda-schools.html

Recommendations/Rants

Dominic

Daylight

Mike

Best Espresso Beans in the US!

https://herkimercoffee.com/

Lilac

Kitty letter.

Zack - All things Apple (https://www.twelvesouth.com)

https://www.twelvesouth.com/products/hirise-wireless

https://www.twelvesouth.com/products/hirise-for-macbook

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!