All in Artificial Intelligence
Welcome back to another FUTRtech video podcast. Today we were going to be talking about data, but we get into some other topics including what it is like to be the CEO of a startup and what it takes to be a good leader. We talked about data too, because data is a strategic asset, and it has driven some significant changes in IT in its efforts to deliver greater top-line value to the business.
Welcome back to another FUTRtech video podcast. Today we have with us some very special guests.
John Thompson started off his career at IBM back in the 70s as a salesman. He rose through the ranks to become General Manager of IBM Americas, but after 28 years at IBM in 1999 he was lured away to become CEO of Symantec building it into a true enterprise focused company. In 2014, John Stepped into the role of Chairman of the Board of Microsoft Corporation following Bill Gates’ departure. John has been an active investor and in 2018 he became a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and has put together a portfolio of truly impressive companies. One of those companies is the cyber security company Confluera, which we are really excited to talk to him about today.
As I mentioned in Part 1, attendance was high. Now in its 8th year, Re:Invent had the capacity for 65,000 with over 3,000 sessions.
This year, “Transformation” was the main theme. The main take away was that you should be moving more aggressively to the cloud. Andy Jassy in his keynote kept coming back to this theme, and much of it was aimed at senior leadership. He laid out some key points to accelerating the journey.
Managing complex environments has always been tricky, and having good tools to provide you with actionable information is invaluable. When you start talking about cloud native applications and micro services, this challenge is magnified.
I have always felt that Application Performance Monitoring tools are very under deployed. They can be such an invaluable tool to IT, but the value proposition has often been hard to translate up the chain to CFOs. While there isn’t a direct line to greater profits, reducing the time to resolution or proactively addressing problems can have enormous value. In a micro services world, having some sort of APM in place is simply a requirement.
A lot of the show floor was taken up by NetApp itself. The show floor was divided into different sections. Some for the Partner community, some focusing on their products and some focusing on specific use cases. And there were areas devoted to play and areas to relax.
Like other shows this year, there has been a focus on Social Media, which mostly involves tracking Twitter feeds talking about the company and show. I probably need to get plugged in with these folk a bit more.
NetApp held their annual Insight conference in Las Vegas again this year. There is always a lot going on in Vegas, and there were several shows in town. There was a Crypto Currency conference happening in my hotel. I can only imagine what kind of shenanigans a bunch of risk taking crypto math geeks could get up to in this town.
There were not a lot of new product announcements this year, it seemed to be more focused on delivering of promises previously made. This is not a bad thing. This is an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals of the business and realizing their multi-could/hybrid-cloud data fabric story.
Here is, finally, Part 2 of the SXSW video series. In this episode I focus on some of the reasons I feel this is the most important tech show of the year, Hyper Sciences, Sessions, and XR (VR, AR, MR). No video of SXSW is really complete without a bit of music, so I added in a little bit of Snaps For Sinners for your listening/viewing pleasure.
There were a lot of different robots at SXSW (not to mention the people in robot costumes). Here is a quick run down on the robot scene.
SXSW is the most important technology conference of the year. There, I’ve said it. The problem is, very few people in IT are aware of it, and that is a shame. This is the one show of the year that not only highlights emerging technology but wraps it in context. This conference is also very international with different countries showcasing their unique companies, technologies and talents. We can get so lost in our own small world that we miss new market opportunities and technologies from around the globe.
Meet Xin Xiaomeng, Xinhua’s newest news anchor.
Xinhua, has just debuted their latest AI news reporter to complement the previous two they introduced in November.
With the rise of Smart Information Systems, ie AI, the challenges of living with the implications of these systems is poorly understood. The quality of the information produced is limited by the design of the systems, the data that is used and the context in which the data lives. Project Sherpa looks to work with industry leaders to establish an advocacy group that seeks to address the most challenging problems.
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
