This Week in Enterprise Tech

This week on TWIET, Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo of the DX Institute discuss the following topics:

[00:59] Emergence Seeks to Bridge All the Agents

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/24/emergence-thinks-it-can-crack-the-ai-agent-code/

[05:00] Can Creatio Bridge CRM and Workflow Automation?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/26/creatio-raises-200m-at-a-1-2b-valuation-for-its-no-code-crm-and-workflow-platform/

[08:20] Zoho Blueprint Bridges Automation Gaps

https://www.zoho.com/news/zoho-announces-strategic-updates-across-collaboration-solutions.html?zwcDate=june%205,%202024 

[09:56] Hebbia Bridges Documents for Search

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/27/hebbia-raises-nearly-100m-seriesb-for-ai-powered-document-search-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/

[14:40] Perplexity and Anthropic Face Legal Challenges

https://fortune.com/2024/06/29/amazon-web-services-perplexity-ai-scraping-online-news-content-without-approval/ 

[15:27] OpenAI and Anthropic Chase After AI Collaboration 

https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-rockset/ 

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet 

[21:54] MIT Pioneer Rodney Brooks Side-Eyes AI

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/29/mit-robotics-pioneer-rodney-brooks-thinks-people-are-vastly-overestimating-generative-ai/ 

[28:09] Mixture-of-Agents Can Supersede ChatGPT, For Now

https://medium.com/@ignacio.de.gregorio.noblejas/mixture-of-agents-beats-chatgpt-4o-6470a74f1525 

[33:15] AI Agent Studio Pursues Agent Governance 

https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/press-room/automation-anywhere-unveils-new-ai-automation-enterprise-system-empowering 

[35:25] AI Assistants Need a Work Buddy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-work-assistants-need-a-lot-of-handholding-500c2bd8?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink&st=3fw2cabupostiqa 

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo of the DC Institute take on the CIO office ramifications of recent announcements including the FinOps Foundation’s launch of FOCUS 1.0 for Cloud Billing Unification, Oracle Autonomous Database on Microsoft Azure, the United States’ Federal Trade Commission Accusing Adobe of Hiding early termination fees, the Biden administration banning US sales of Kaspersky software over Russia ties, whether Poolside’s new $400 million raise makes Paris another Silicon Valley, and enterprise considerations for AI as Apple focuses on more personalized AI.

FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org/insights/focus-1-0-available/ 

Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-autonomous-database-now-generally-available-on-oracle-database-at-azure-2024-06-20/

FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/ftc-takes-action-against-adobe-executives-hiding-fees-preventing-consumers-easily-cancelling

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-ban-us-sales-kaspersky-software-over-ties-russia-source-says-2024-06-20/

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/poolside-raising-400m-at-a-2b-valuation-for-supercharged-coding-copilot/

MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/11/1093577/apple-is-promising-personalized-ai-in-a-private-cloud-heres-how-that-will-work/

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Databricks and Shutterstock Take on AI Images

At Data and AI Summit, Databricks announced an partnership with Shutterstock to develop image models based on Shutterstock’s copyrighted images. But these models still leave questions around IP use for AI in the enterprise, and the risks and potential indemnification issues that enterprises face in using AI.

Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/introducing-shutterstock-imageai-powered-databricks-image

How NICE is Your AI?

NICE came out with an enthusiastic press release regarding their new AI capabilities. But as long-time techies who cover AI, Hyoun and Charles struggled to figure out the practical implications behind the hype. What lessons does this press release hold for enterprise software vendors?

NICE: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611678712/en/NICE-Unveils-CXone-Mpower-The-Ultimate-CX-Aware-AI-Offering-Providing-Continuous-Memory-Driven-Human-and-AI-Collaboration

Mistral Raises €600 Million. LLM Soooo Expensive

Last week, Mistral announced a $600M funding round for a soon after its competitor Cohere announced at $450M round (mistakenly stated as $240M in the podcast). Primary LLM model development is both extremely expensive and risky, as many of the inventors face the potential for failure. What do CIOs need to consider given the volatility of the foundational market?

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/paris-based-ai-startup-mistral-ai-raises-640-million/

Academic Research on LLM Simplification Continues 

Several academic institutions, including the American University UC Santa Cruz, recently came out with a paper describing the potential to massively simplify LLM‘s. This finding potentially allows new LLM’s to be supported with conventional CPU rather than the GPU and other specialized hardware currently used to support AI models. This paper serves as an important reminder that the foundational science and techniques behind AI are still changing, and that CIOs cannot get too caught up in trying to optimize the current state of the art in AI.

Ben Dickson for VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-transformer-architecture-could-enable-powerful-llms-without-gpus/ 

NetApp Makes Storage Sexy-ish for Business Champions

In the era of AI, one of the big challenges to justifying IT investment is that all the air in the room is being sucked out by AI. And there are many AI products that are asking for investment as well. But the demands of supporting storage, compute, and network resources associated with AI still exist. Hyoun and Charles look at NetApp positioning as a starting point to consider how tech companies can provide a better value proposition for technologies that may be considered commoditized or deprioritized. 

WalkMe and Asana Strike Balance in AI Launches

Both WalkMe and Asana have made recent AI announcements regarding their support of the future of work. Charles and Hyoun think this is a fundamental time for future of work technology ventures to put up or shut up when it comes to providing products for the future.

WalkMe: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/06/18/2900355/0/en/WalkMe-Unveils-WalkMe-X-The-Premier-Contextual-AI-Copilot-Designed-For-The-Enterprise.html

Asana: https://register.inc.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?email=NjEwLUxFRS04NzIAAAGTjRU_M3tWgdJj-vNuseHDU5nJS8RTd7UG0-uZR4sU0VQ3Kb7L74CzXU_N5-id-wfOOoZ8bcY3xqkm57dxlMjOQo-XJDbQVamEUA

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

So many tech trade shows - Snowflake Summit, Cisco Live, SAP Sapphire, Zoholics, Qlik World - and corresponding announcements. Plus, Cloudera acquires Verta, MultiOn raises $20M, and how power constraints will affect your AI - all on This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights (Charlie Araujo is off this week).

Among 200+ announcements at Snowflake Summit, several of them pointed towards Snowflake’s evolution into being an AI platform.

Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/press-and-news/news-releases/

Cloudera manages 25% of the world’s data. What does their acquisition of data science and machine learning support platform Verta mean?

Cloudera: https://www.cloudera.com/about/news-and-blogs/press-releases/2024-06-03-cloudera-acquires-verta.html

With the acquisition of Splunk, Cisco is now emphasizing “full stack observability.” It’s a crucial concept, but is it integrated enough to make a difference yet?

Cisco: https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2024/m06/cisco-and-splunk-launch-integrated-full-stack-observability-experience-for-the-enterprise.html

With a CEO changing of the guard and acquisitions aimed to enhance usability and user-friendliness, is SAP becoming easier to use?

SAP: https://news.sap.com/2024/06/sap-enters-agreement-to-acquire-walkme/

Hyoun considers Zoho’s security ethos, which could be their gateway to broader enterprise adoption.

Zoho: https://www.zoho.com/press.html

At Qlik World, Qlik announced Talend Cloud and Qlik Answers. But in 2024, such offerings are commonplace. How did a former analytics leader fall to the middle of the pack? 

Qlik: https://www.qlik.com/us/news/company/press-room/press-releases/qlik-anounces-qlik-talend-cloud-and-qlik-answers 

A small funding round for MultiOn, a company bridging the gap between robotic process automation and large language models, caught Hyoun’s attention. Hat tip to Bret Kinsella of Synthedia.

Cohere: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/cohere-closes-450m-funding-round 

MultiOn: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/multions-nine-figure-valuation-highlights 

What strategies are necessary to support the power consumption of your AI models in the near future?

EPRI: https://www.epri.com/research/products/3002028905

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

AI interfaces, vendor dependencies, C-suite changeups, addressing common security breaches even at cutting-edge AI companies, and CIO strategies for business growth - all on this week’s This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo of The DX Report.

Can AI be too simple? Hyoun and Charles discuss Rex Woodbury’s assertion that “just add water” agentic AI may be dissatisfactory to its users. Particularly with the concept of AI agents as “co-pilots,” what is the correct balance of AI assistance and human agency?

Digital Native: https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/the-egg-theory-of-ai-agents

What do enterprise IT buyers need to be prepared for when a private equity firm acquires a vendor you depend on? Charles and Hyoun discuss what happened to PluralSight, a technology learning platform, after Vista Equity Partners bought it three years ago.

Axios: https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight

Daniel Dines is back in as CEO at UiPath, cutting short Rob Enslin’s brief tenure. What does that say about UiPath and the broader RPA market?

UiPath: https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-ceo-transition-daniel-dines

Recent security breaches at Snowflake and Hugging Face underscore the need for broader adoption of more effective security measures. But even tech companies struggle with sufficient compliance from internal end users.

Snowflake - https://community.snowflake.com/s/question/0D5VI00000Emyl00AB/detecting-and-preventing-unauthorized-user-access

Hugging Face - https://huggingface.co/blog/space-secrets-disclosure 

A profile of Nutanix CEO Rami Mazid prompts Hyoun and Charles to consider CIO strategies for business growth.

Mark Chillingworth for Diginomica - https://diginomica.com/next-2024-nutanix-cio-optimizes-estate-growth-opportunities

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

130 CoPilots, AI infrastructure concerns, smaller task-specific AI models, LLMs as more than mere “autocompletion engines,” IBM Concert’s potential, and the challenges of optimizing work management environments across your IT ecosystem. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo dig into This Week in Enterprise Tech.

Charles Araujo and Hyoun Park take a closer look at how Microsoft's vision both aligns and conflicts with enterprise IT standards.

Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2024/windows-returns/

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/21/24158030/microsoft-copilot-ai-automation-agents

The CIO's responsibility is to support all corporate technologies, including the most dreaded and hyped one, AI. NVIDIA and Dell show an intriguing approach to supporting all the infrastructure needed to make private AI environments.

Venturebeat on NVIDIA https://venturebeat.com/ai/nvidias-jensen-huang-says-20000-genai-startups-are-now-building-on-its-platform/

SiliconANGLE on Dell Tech World https://siliconangle.com/2024/05/23/dell-ai-factory-edge-workloads-delltechworld/

CIOs must also be concerned with supporting smaller language models. Companies must start thinking about how to index and scale their data while building appropriate models.

Wired: https://link.wired.com/public/35474099

Scale raises $1B Series F https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-series-f

In response to common claims that large language models are just "autocompletion" engines, Anthropic has been analyzing more deeply how its LLMs behave when it references specific concepts or phenomena.

Wired - https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-black-box-ai-research-neurons-features/

At IBM Think, Hyoun Park noticed the debut of IBM Concert, which shows a practical side to the use of AI for managing IT, but leaves a few questions.

IBM - https://newsroom.ibm.com/Blog-Introducing-IBM-Concert-Control-your-operations-with-generative-AI-insights

Work Management has become one of the most varied subcategories of software in the enterprise world. The opportunities to optimize work management costs and tools often come at the cost of internal political capital in working on a cross-functional basis.  What can CIOs do about this trick subcategory of the SaaS world?

Wall Street Journal - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-battle-over-project-management-software-is-getting-personal-821b1927?mod=djemCIO

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

OpenAI and Google go head-to-head, OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team is dissolved, Matt Garman is the new CEO at AWS, what’s the current state of IT budgeting and planning, and how far should you trust the concept of autonomy when it comes to your IT environment? Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo are here again to discuss This Week in Enterprise Tech.

Google I/O was last week, where they announced Google Astra, an AI assistant based on Google Gemini models. But OpenAI may have stolen their thunder by releasing GPT 4.o, a new model powering ChatGPT, immediately prior. Sure, it’s jockeying for position, but what’s the upshot?

OpenAI debuts GPT-4o ‘omni’ model now powering ChatGPT

Google just gave us a tantalizing glimpse into the future of AI agents

GPT 4.o wasn’t the only OpenAI news; their “superalignment” team focused on governance and risk has fallen apart, with high-level resignations and reassignments to other teams. With OpenAI’s assertive moves, what does this mean, both for OpenAI itself, and for other AI companies? Is the world currently at risk from “superintelligent” AI?

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

Jan Leike: Yesterday was my last day as head of alignment, superalignment lead, and executive @OpenAI.

Adam Selipsky is out and Matt Garman is in at AWS. Hyoun and Charles consider what this means for Amazon’s strategic direction; why the shakeup now?

Adam Selipsky's race comes to an end

In the planning and budgeting world, software is getting to the point where a realtime assessment of a company’s financial picture is quite possible. IT has done well with providing realtime information on a company’s network performance, but what about IT budgeting and planning? Is it time for IT departments to start prioritizing that, too?

Planful Perform 2024 - customers kick tires on AI, but will financial planning break down the decision silos?

ScienceLogic proposed the concept of “autonomic” IT: an autonomous IT environment where your systems achieve IT utopia: always available, issues are automatically responded to and quickly addressed, sometimes without needing any human intervention at all. How far off from that are we? What parts of your business could operate like this with AI assistance? What parts do you trust to operate like this? 

Go Beyond with Autonomic IT to Drive the Autonomous Business

Meta is discontinuing Workplace to focus on AI and metaverse

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Spring means trade show season in tech, and both Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and the DX Institute’s Charles Araujo have been on the road in recent weeks. In Week 13 of This Week in Enterprise Tech, Hyoun and Charles break down the key announcements from ServiceNow Knowledge, Boomi World, and Red Hat Summit, along with taking a look at 

ServiceNow made a number of announcements at its Knowledge 2024 conference last week, including new generative AI capabilities in Now Assist and a partnership with Genesys. Charles and Hyoun dig into the ramifications.

https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/now-platform-innovations-knowledge-24.html

Boomi made some key acquisitions from APIIDA, and is moving beyond traditional integration to include AI API management and data management. What do Hyoun and Charles make of Boomi’s new strategic direction?

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240508488304/en/ 

Red Hat has expanded to Oracle Cloud, made improvements to Ansible, and partnered with Elastic to manage retrieval augmented generation. Hyoun and Charles consider Red Hat’s focus on practical AI.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-extends-mission-critical-automation-customers-across-hybrid-cloud

CNBC recently published an article on AI engineer burnout. Charles and Hyoun assess what’s really going on, how executives are focused on achieving feature parity with competitors instead of building AI solutions that support business goals, how this is causing a morale crisis among AI engineers, and how this is going to hamper companies’ AI innovation plans.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html

Finally, everyone is talking about Apple’s misfire on their new iPad ad - prevailingly perceived as celebrating the destruction of human creativity rather than enabling it in electronic form. What does this say about how enterprises need to handle AI?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/9/24153113/apple-ipad-ad-crushing-apology 

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

This week, Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo weigh in on five relevant trends for CIOs and strategic techies. Of note: Tableau’s plans to expand beyond their core data analyst users, IT service management becoming perceived as increasingly irrelevant with the rise of AI-driven configuration and deployment assistants, and the perpetual speculation around the next AI Winter.

Cloud spend is rising again. Synergy Research reported Q1 numbers stating the cloud infrastructure market grew 21% YOY last quarter, the fastest this market has grown since Q3 2022. A combination of open wallets and AI-related work are driving spend, but Hyoun points out that vendors are continuing to tip the balance away from on-prem and towards cloud, and that large enterprises account for the majority of the spending spree. On a related note, Amazon 1Q earnings numbers came out and AWS is now up to $25 billion in revenue, $9.6 billion in income per quarter.

Hyoun flew down to sunny San Diego for the Tableau Conference. Tableau’s next steps include expanding beyond their core data analyst users, making their data management tools more accessible to a wider variety of employees, and there’s a roadmap to bring analytics and AI together. But how has the Salesforce acquisition and partnerships with Databricks and Microsoft affected this?

Charles was in Denver for SupportWorld last week, a support and service management conference. With attendance down 75% from its peak, is IT support management itself a dying concept? Innovate or die seems to be the watchword.

The race to release Gen AI assistants is on: Amazon officially released its Gen AI assistant, Amazon Q, while Anthropic announced the latest version of its business-focused bot, Claude 3. Hyoun and Charles debate how these bots are a harbinger of change to traditional IT services, focused on standardizing configuration and deployment.

The world has been through several AI Winters, and after the most recent rush of development and trialing, some are stepping back to parse what’s been effective, and what’s been hype, saying winter is coming. But “winter” doesn’t necessarily mean the end of all things Gen AI, Hyoun and Charles agree, it’s about strategic investment in what matters for your business.

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

After a long hibernation, the tech market is waking up. IBM and Thoma Bravo make key acquisitions, and Rubrik goes public. Snowflake debuts its new LLM, the DHS reveals the members of its new AI Safety and Security board, and companies continue to overcommit to AI hype. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo sift through This Week in Enterprise Tech.

IBM acquired HashiCorp last week for $6.5B. Given IBM’s history of buying companies providing products and services similar to what they already have on hand, whether developed in house or picked up in a previous acquisition, what’s the strategy here? Hyoun and Charles discuss how HashiCorp fits into the IBM portfolio, and what downstream effects will be felt in the multicloud space.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp-Inc-Creating-a-Comprehensive-End-to-End-Hybrid-Cloud-Platform

In other acquisitions news, Thoma Bravo acquired Darktrace last week for $5 billion, taking it private. The market appetite has been renewed after a quiet time, but the trends are confusing. Charles and Hyoun dig into the specifics, and how it will affect CIOs evaluating mid-size vendors.

https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/thoma-bravo-announces-a-cash-offer-to-acquire-cybersecurity-leader-darktrace

Microsoft’s AI advancements are starting to have a noticeable effect on cloud spending, driving more Azure adoption in an environment where AWS has been dominant forever. How can CIOs balance the needs of their AI adopters and AI holdouts? Will the AI golden ticket allow Microsoft to finally catch up to Amazon in cloud adoption?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-ai-lead-puts-amazon-cloud-dominance-watch-2024-04-24/

Snowflake recently revealed its new LLM, Arctic. Hyoun and Charles analyze its pragmatic “mixture of experts” approach, and how that will help make AI adoption more manageable and affordable. 

https://www.snowflake.com/blog/arctic-open-efficient-foundation-language-models-snowflake/

Sifting through AI hype: Cleanlab uses AI to detect AI “hallucinations” - at great expense, where a human expert is still more reliable. Moderna plans to automate all business processes using LLMs. Are there practical lessons to be taken away from these examples? Charles and Hyoun dig in.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/25/1091835/chatbot-hallucination-new-tool-trustworthy-language-model/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-moderna-openais-gpts-are-changing-almost-everything-6ff4c4a5?mod=djemCIO

The Department of Homeland Services announced the formation of its AI Safety and Security Board. Who’s advising the government on AI governance? How will they address AI governance challenges?

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2024/04/26/over-20-technology-and-critical-infrastructure-executives-civil-rights-leaders

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights