This Week in Enterprise Tech

For the 10th week of This Week in Enterprise Tech, Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo weigh in on 8 trends for the CIO office and the strategic techie ranging from product launches to reorgs. We run the gamut in exploring Meta, Slack, Humane AI, Android, the Linux Foundation, Zendesk, Workday, and why CIOs distrust the value of Copilots (hint, it’s about the Future of Work). But who won this week in a crowded list of announcements, achievements, and launches?

Meta goes all-in on AI, just as they once went all-in on the Metaverse. But this time, Mark Zuckerberg’s vision and ambition feel a bit more real, despite some initial missteps. Why did Meta have the biggest announcement of the week?

Slack was the one-time leader in translating text into business activity before LLM’s took the air out of the room for basically all other technology. Is Slack’s moving towards Gen AI fast enough? Hat tip to Venturebeat’s Shubham Sharma.

$30 a month seems like a high price to pay for a lot of AI copilots. Vendor inability to create trust in the value proposition, the CIO’s inability to manage teams and maximize skill utilization, more. Thanks to CIO.com’s Grant Gross.

At first glance, Humane AI reminds us a lot of Magic Leap, a tough comparison. We want to like the Star Trek-like tech, but at the end of the day, Humane AI looks like an object lesson in how to differentiate between cool AI tech and well-researched AI products.

Google says their new Android reorg is “all about AI;” does everything always have to be about AI? There are  more practical ramifications for enterprise mobility, field service, and retail environments. Thanks to The Verge’s David Pierce for the perspective!

As AI becomes harder to parse, we are starting to see companies come together to build portability and partnerships in Enterprise AI. 15 companies ranging from enterprise stalwarts to hungry startups have come together for this initial iteration of companies focusing on OPEA.

Zendesk announced a slew of AI augmentations throughout their service platform at Relate 2024 including AI agents, workflow automation, an agent copilot, Workforce Management, and Quality Assurance (QA). We found a lot of meat on these bones as Zendesk aligned AI to work better than any other vendor we heard from this week.

Finally, Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park attended the Workday Innovation Summit last week where Workday made partners and platform front and center goals for the future. Although Workday is well known as a cloud-first HR platform, it has also traditionally been known to be inflexible and closed. What needs to change for Workday to be seen as a first-class enterprise platform like SAP, Oracle, and ServiceNow? We share the tough love, both for Workday and for other vendors wanting to be seriously considered as a “Platform” by the CIO Office.

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Welcome to This Week in Enterprise Tech! Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo explore seven big trends for the CIO office’s consideration. Open AI goes enterprise, Andy Jassy continues a venerable tradition, Google Next struggles to find its footing, FloQast shows the value of automation and workflows, Salesforce considers purchasing Informatica, CIOs need to get real about supporting AI, and we explore the ongoing power of the floppy disk in 2024.

Open AI is ambitiously pursuing enterprise business based on its foundation in ChatGPT-based business. We explore what this means for Microsoft and why this reminds us of Apple.

Belle Lin in the Wall Street Journal

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy continues the venerable tradition of providing an annual letter to Amazon’s shareholders. In this letter, Amazon provides valuable guidance on its self perceived role in supporting AI and continuing the customer centricity that has been the core of its business practices.

Amazon’s Shareholder Letter

Google Next just completed with a couple hundred announcements, but the announcements fell flat as they all sounded derivative of services already provided by other cloud providers. We provide some thoughts on what Google needs to do in improving its messaging and maintaining its number three position as a public cloud platform.

Google Next announcements

Financial close management solution flow cast recently announced a $100 million series E round that values the company at $1.6 billion. We explore what that means for the world of enterprise software as processes and workflows have superseded data and analytics as key differentiators.

FloQast announcement

Salesforce is rumored to be in advanced talks with data management market leader Informatica. Charles and Hyoun debate and disagree on whether this is a good idea for Salesforce to double down on data.

Anirban Sen on Reuters

Bret Kinsella provided an interesting structural breakdown of AI challenges that every CIO should be considering based on an interview with Yann LeCun. LLM weaknesses in understanding the world, persistence, reasoning, and planning all provide challenges for the CIO. Hyoun and Charles explore what this means for the future of IT.

Bret Kinsella on Synthedia

Finally, Charles and Hyoun look at a more amusing story as San Francisco’s MUNI mass transit system is running on 5.25 inch floppy desks. We explore what this means from a digital transformation perspective, as is appropriate for the DX Institute.

Scharon Harding on Ars Technica 

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Welcome to This Week in Enterprise Tech! Five big topics for the CIO Office to consider this week by Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo. Oracle and Palantir team up in the cloud, Cybersecurity issues, EU Regulations for AI, Google is interested in Hubspot, and we wonder if every cloud must become an enterprise app platform.

1. Oracle and Palantir Team Up in the Cloud: Oracle and Palantir partner up to bring AI to every cloud. How should CIOs think about Oracle as a cloud provider based on this new announcement?

Oracle announcement: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-and-palantir-join-forces-to-deliver-mission-critical-ai-solutions-to-governments-and-businesses-2024-04-04

2. Security Issues: Microsoft, AT&T, and Social Security: This has been a wild few weeks for security between the XZ Utils data-compression tool compromise, the Cyber Safety Review Board review of the Microsoft Exchange Online hack, AT&T having 73 million accounts hacked, and even Social Security numbers getting stolen! How can CIOs prepare when even the largest tech giants are under attack?

- Tom Krazit's Runtime looks at the XZ Utils hack
- CSRB's review of the Microsoft Exchange Online
- BGR reports on 73 million AT&T accounts hacked
- Techcrunch covers 340,000 Social Security numbers getting stolen

3. EU Regulation Complicates Global AI Standards: European Union Regulations have effectively been setting global governance standards for AI. How should CIOs prepare for the future of AI legislation?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/somethings-got-to-give-european-regulators-crack-down-on-ai-as-u-s-tech-companies-plunge-into-the-market-23fffd87

4. Will Google Acquire Hubspot? Alphabet is rumored to be looking at Hubspot at a potential $40 billion+ purchase price. Hubspot has been successfully expanding and gaining market share in a variety of markets. Is this a good idea for Google Cloud and what potential obstacles exist in an acquisition?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/google-parent-alphabet-weighs-offer-hubspot-sources-say-2024-04-04/

5. Must Every Cloud Become an Enterprise App ~*~PLATFORM~*~: PLATFORM PLATFORM PLATFORM! TWIET discusses whether every public cloud has to also be an enterprise application platform.

- Process and service platforms are hot
- Rex Woodbury explores Distribution vs. Production, a challenge that every cloud platform faces

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

This Week in Enterprise Tech? More like This Week in Enterprise AI, as your intrepid heroes Hyoun Park from Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo from the DX Report analyze AI products from multiple startups, AI value mapping challenges, a new alliance taking on NVIDIA, and the United States' Government's new policies on AI and what they mean for enterprise CIOs.

1. Databricks DBRX Gen AI Model. Databricks unleashed a 132 billion parameter open source model developed in 3 months on a $10 million budget based on a Mixture-of-Experts approach that exceeds other open source models in performance while providing greater speed and compute efficiency. Find out why MoE is the new RAG in Gen AI and why we found this so surprising.

Databricks' announcement: https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-dbrx-new-standard-efficient-open-source-customizable-llms

Additional commentary from Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/databricks-spent-10m-on-a-generative-ai-model-that-still-cant-beat-gpt-4/

2. Hume AI's "Empathic AI." Hume AI announces a $50 million B round to support "Empathic AI". Charles and Hyoun debate the efficiacy of pursuing empathic AI based on previous approaches from startups such as Kanjoya and Textio and some of the hurdles and challenges associated with an empathy-based standard of AI for the enterprise.

For more on the funding announcement: https://www.hume.ai/blog/series-b-evi-announcement

3. The Practical Business Value of Gen AI. Hyoun and Charles saw a couple of pieces in the Wall Street Journal this week on the ROI of AI as well as the use of AI in supply chain through established vendors such as Celonis. We discuss what key metrics and ratios CIOs should consider in the value of AI and how to align AI to practical business outcomes.

The WSJ takes on ROI in AI: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cfos-tackle-thorny-calculus-on-gen-ai-whats-the-return-on-investment-24ebf435

And the WSJ take on AI and supply chain:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-seeking-real-world-supply-chain-gains-in-new-ai-tools-023045e7?mod=djemCIO

4. NVIDIA vs. the World in AI. A new consortium including Amazon is seeking to unseat NVIDIA's dominance in AI. Will it succeed? And what does it mean for CIOs seeking to place their bets on AI?

Based on the following Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/behind-plot-break-nvidias-grip-ai-by-targeting-software-2024-03-25/?taid=6601616d9876060001c70b64

And the following WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-invests-2-75-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic-87bb869e?mod=djemCIO

5. US Government Takes a Stance on AI. We saw a two-for-one this week from the US government as the executive branch announced a policy to require every agency to define AI safeguards and have an AI head. And in the legislative branch, the staffers of the House of Representatives have banned Microsoft CoPilot for now. What lessons can enterprise IT take from Government-grade Gen AI?

White House Fact Sheet on AI govermance: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/28/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-omb-policy-to-advance-governance-innovation-and-risk-management-in-federal-agencies-use-of-artificial-intelligence/

Axios breaking the story on the US House banning the use of CoPilot: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/29/congress-house-strict-ban-microsoft-copilot-staffers

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

Welcome to Week 6 of This Week in Enterprise Tech! The DX Report’s Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park bring up 6 big topics from a week that was jam-packed with enterprise tech relevance. 

1. NVIDIA, The Prom King of Tech. In a week where everyone who is anyone in enterprise tech put out a press release talking about their AI, what did NVIDIA actually announce that will affect enterprise IT departments this year? Here’s our take based on

Jensen Huang’s keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2F8yisiS6E
NVIDIA’s NIM Announcement https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/generative-ai-microservices-for-developers
And a relevant Fast Company article on the potential for NVIDIA-powered digital twins https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/generative-ai-microservices-for-developers

2. ServiceNow Releases Washington DC. ServiceNow, now a staple in the enterprise IT environment, made its biannual release. In tradition with naming platform updates for major world cities, this newest platform of Washington DC came out and it was all about AI. https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/now-platform-genai-washdc-release.html

3. CIO Concerns for VC-Backed Firms. The rules for venture capital have changed in recent years, which makes it harder for CIOs to figure out which startup tech vendors are worth taking a chance on. What should enterprise IT be looking for in today’s world of IT consolidation? https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/two-roads-diverged-the-splitting

4. Microsoft Bails Out Inflection AI. In 2023, Inflection AI took on 1.3 billion in funding commitments to build out AI capabilities. Microsoft decided it made more sense to basically acquihire the executive team. What does it mean for startups when 1.3 billion isn’t enough to compete in AI? https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/

5. SEC Goes After "AI-Washing”. The SEC has decided to push against unsupported claims of being AI-powered or having AI products. But how should this be interpreted after a decade when everything with even the slightest hint of math has been breathlessly proclaimed a game-changing AI service? Here’s our take with a nod to Crunchbase: https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/startups-sec-ai-washing-warnings

6. The Decline of Open Source in IT. Based on the following articles, we explore why Open Source businesses are struggling in 2024 and how going Open Source is less attractive as a business model in today’s economic environment.
Runtime, featuring long-time enterprise tech surveyor Tom Krazit https://www.runtime.news/the-slow-decline-of-the-open-source-startup

Grok goes Open Source https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-no-choice-open-chatbot-grok

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

In Week 5, we take on six engaging topics for the CIO's consideration: 

1) Broadcom's Hock Tan comments on the first 100 Days of VMware and we respond: https://www.broadcom.com/blog/vmware-by-broadcom-the-first-100-days

2) The European Union adopts the first AI legal safeguards. Did they get it right? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IPR19015/artificial-intelligence-act-meps-adopt-landmark-law

3) CNBC looks at tech layoffs, which have reached the highest point since the dot-com bust. Have they gone too far? https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/03/15/laid-off-techies-struggle-to-find-jobs-with-cuts-at-highest-since-2001.html

4) Silicon Angle notes that Oracle surprised critics, including us, with almost 50% year-over-year growth in cloud infrastructure. How did it happen? We look at both Oracle's capabilities and review star analyst Rebecca Wettemann's perspective.  https://siliconangle.com/2024/03/11/new-cloud-deals-demand-generative-ai-drive-strong-growth-oracle/

5) We explore the rapidly evolving workflow & intelligent automation space, based on three separate stories: 

• Automated code developer Devin from CognitionAI,
• Automation Anywhere's growth, & 
• the B round of funding for Nanonets

6) What is the future of the contact center? Accenture puts out its perspective and we temper it with our dose of reality: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/where-is-customer-care-in-2024
 

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

This week, enterprise gurus Charles Araujo of The DX Report and Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights take on six of the most important topics that should be considered by the CIO Office.  

1.  The Wall Street Journal explored how multiple companies have 10x'ed their SaaS vendor portfolios over the last decade. We discuss IT-LOB responsibility splits, key SaaS categories to watch, and adoption trends as well as some representative vendors such as Zylo, Productiv, Vendr, Bettercloud, and Torii.

2.  CNBC pointed out how Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris is more hands on with Slack, which has been both a long-standing priority for CEO Marc Benioff and a revolving door of executives as of late. We discuss the future of software UX & why Generative AI is not enough.

3.   Techcrunch noted a $25 million funding round for EMA which focuses on explicitly selling AI as a virtual employee. We discuss the need for trust and what can be learned from prior attempts over the past decade such as IBM Watson.

4.  United States Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announces $10 million for a new NIST AI safety lab. How much will this affect AI standards, governance, and purchasing decisions? We take into account both the Senate's official stance as well as modern governance standards & a Washington Post article on this topic  https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/06/nist-ai-safety-lab-decaying/

5.  The Wall Street Journal explores how market darling Databricks is avoiding the IPO while seeing record sales. We compare Databricks to publicly traded Snowflake and other companies that have successfully increased valuations by prolonging the path to IPO, such as Uber. And we explore how Databricks' private status is helping with AI acquisitions Glean and Mosaic ML.

6.  The MIT Technology Review analyzes how robots are intersecting with AI and enabling humans to explore inaccessible frontiers ranging from deep sea exploration to collaborating with cockroaches. We explore how robotics affect telemedicine, field service, and the future of work as CIOs are held responsible for innovation and empowering employee productivity. 

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by the DX Report's Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park, explores six big topics for CIOs across innovation, the value of data, strategic budget management, succession planning, and enterprise AI.

1) We start with the City of Birmingham, which is struggling with its SAP to Oracle migration. We discuss how this IT project has shifted from the promise of digital transformation to the reality of being in survival mode and the cautions of mistaking core services for innovation. Article link: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/birmingham_city_council_to_spend/

2) We then take a look at Salesforce's earnings, where the Data Cloud is the Powerhouse of the earnings and CIOs are proving the value of data with their pocketbooks and the power of the purse.

3) We saw NVIDIA's success in AI as a sign that CIO budgets are changing. Find out about the new trend of CIO-led budgets that are independent of the traditional IT budget, as well as Charles' framework of separating the efficiency bucket from the innovation bucket from his first book, [The Quantum Age of IT](https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Age-Charles-Araujo/dp/1849283753). Article link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-ai-investment-is-surging-to-nvidias-benefit-5611ffc5?mod=djemCIO

4) One of the hottest companies in enterprise software sees a big leadership change, as Frank Slootman steps down from Snowflake and Sridhar Ramaswamy from the Neeva acquisition takes over. We discuss why this is a good move to avoid stagnation and discuss how to deal with bets in innovation. Article link: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/28/new-snowflake-ceo-says-ai-will-keep-him-busy-for-many-years-to-come.html

5) Continuing the trend of innovation management, we talk about what Apple's exit of the electric car business means in terms of managing innovative moonshots and what CIO's often miss in terms of setting metrics around leadership and innovation culture. Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/business/dealbook/apple-car-project-to-drive-wider-innovation.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share

6) And finally, we talk about the much-covered Google Gemini AI mistakes. We think the errors themselves fall within the range of issues that we've seen from other large language models, but we caution why the phrase "Eliminate Bias" should be a massive red flag for AI projects. Article link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085445/google-ceo-gemini-ai-diversity-scandal-employee-memo

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by the DX Report's Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park, explores four key topics for the CIO's consideration.

First, we discuss the emergence of the AI app layer and what this means for enterprise IT organizations. It is not enough to simply think of AI in terms of what models are being used, but also the augmentation, tuning, app interface, maintenanace, and governance of AI in the enterprise

Second, we dig into KKR's $3.8 billion acquisition of VMware's End User Computing business and what this means both for the EUC business and for VMware customers as a whole as the market leader in virtualization is now owned by one of the best money makers in the tech industry, Hock Tan of Broadcom.

Third, we explore NVIDIA's quarterly earnings by going beyond the obvious growth of data center sales of GPUs. What do the rest of NVIDIA's sales say about the current state of Cloud FinOps and compute investments in areas such as gaming and smart autos?

And finally, we consider the nature of trust on the internet based on a recent Wired report that explores the use of robots.txt. You probably best know this file as a tool to keep Google from caching your site. But what does it mean as more and more spiders seek to automate the caching of all your web-accessible intellectual property?

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights

In this episode, we dig into the philosophy of fast-rising Zoho, an enterprise application company that has grown over 10x over the past decade to become a leading CRM and analytic software provider on a global basis based on our recent visit to Zoho's Analyst Event in McAllen, Texas. Find out how "transnational localism" has supported Zoho's global rocket-ship growth.

We then TWIET about the Apple Vision Pro and how Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google have been pushing the boundaries of extended reality over the past decade as well as what this means for enterprise IT organizations based on Apple's track record.

And finally we confront the complexities of Cloud FinOps and managing cloud costs at a time when layoffs are common in the tech world and IT economics and financial management are becoming increasingly complex.

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights