This week’s Amazon Web Services’ customer conference, AWS re:Invent 2021, was Adam Selipsky’s first outing as CEO. He recently returned to AWS, where he worked from 2005 to 2016, after five years as CEO of Tableau Software, the data visualization vendor acquired by Salesforce.com. Between his opening keynote, and CTO Werner Vogels closing session, the company released an avalanche of announcements. Re:Invent opened a couple days after The Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department,” in which academic Joe Peppard advocated moving hardware and ..read more

In 2017, The Economist declared that data, rather than oil, had become the world’s most valuable resource. The refrain has been repeated ever since. Organizations across every industry have been and continue to invest heavily in data and analytics. But like oil, data and analytics have their dark side. According to IDG’s State of the CIO 2021 report, 39% of IT leaders say that data analytics will drive the most IT investment at their organization this year, up from 37% in 2020. Insights gained from analytics and actions driven by machine learning algorithms can give organizations a competitive ..read more

Kyndryl has named Microsoft its first (and for the moment only) Premier Global Alliance Partner, just a week after the managed infrastructure services business split from its former owner IBM. For Kyndryl, the separation from IBM was all about being free to address a broader share of the IT services market, and it expects this new partnership with Microsoft will give it access to new customers and new technologies to do just that. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Kyndryl, formerly IBM’s managed infrastructure services business, is now an independent company. On Nov. 4, 2021, it began trading independently on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker KD. Although there are still close ties between the two companies — IBM retains a 19.9% stake in Kyndryl, which will remain one of its largest customers — the separation is opening up new opportunities on both sides. [ Discover the latest IT outsourcing trends, the top IT outsourcing service providers, and the 11 keys to a successful outsourcing relationship. | Beware these common outsourcing myths, mista ..read more

CIOs have a significant role to play in helping enterprises report and reduce greenhouse gas emission — and it goes way beyond switching to energy-efficient cloud computing or turning off the office PCs at night. That’s the message coming out of recent customer events put on by software and IT services vendors including SAP, Salesforce, and Google, which this week is making sustainability a big feature of its Next 21 cloud computing event. [ Learn the 10 old-school IT principles that still rule and the 12 'best practices' IT should avoid at all costs. | Get the latest insights by signing up fo ..read more

UiPath is expanding its robotic process automation (RPA) platform with new features it hopes will put it on CIOs’ radar, including better security, a cloud-native delivery model, and the ability to automate through APIs as well as the UI. The security component comes through a partnership with CrowdStrike, while the API automation is the fruit of UiPath’s acquisition of Cloud Elements in March 2021. [ Learn the 10 key criteria for choosing RPA software, the 8 keys to a successful RPA implementation and why RPA implementations fail. | Find out why RPA is poised for a big business breakout and g ..read more

The top four outsourcers on Everest Group’s annual ranking of the top IT service providers remain unchanged this year, with Accenture taking the top stop for the fifth year in a row. Coming in behind Accenture are TCS, Cognizant, and Wipro. All four continue to be the preferred partners for large enterprise buyers, particularly during the uncertainty of 2020. “Despite early challenges during COVID, all of them continued to be strong on execution even as service resilience and India as a reliable location for global IT services delivery came into question,” says Abhishek Singh, partner with Eve ..read more

As the economy picks up, demand for many inputs is outstripping supply, driving up prices for things as diverse as construction materials, energy, food ingredients, and semiconductors. Soon, that list will include Office 365 subscriptions. You might not have heard about it from your sales rep yet, but Microsoft quietly announced that starting March 1, 2022, it will hike the price of many of its enterprise Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. (Consumer and education subscription prices aren’t changing — for now.) [ Stay on budget with these 6 cloud cost management tips, learn the 5 funda ..read more

Just two months after closing its acquisition of Slack, Salesforce unveiled at its Dreamforce customer conference this week a series of integrations that will put the team chat service at the heart of Salesforce.com. “We want to integrate Slack across every Salesforce cloud and every industry solution,” Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield said in a call with reporters on the eve of the event. [ Learn the 8 CRM implementation practices and how to tell your CRM system is in need of an overhaul. | Get the latest CIO insights direct, with our CIO newsletter. ] To read this article in ..read more

For years ServiceNow has been viewed predominantly as an IT service management (ITSM) vendor. Under CEO Bill McDermott, however, that strategy has shifted, and the company is evolving its Now platform to increasingly underpin processes in other areas of the enterprise. Central to this shift is Now’s emphasis on workflows. “At [Now’s] core, there is a workflow automation engine that can be used for any business process,” said Stephen Elliot, group vice president for infrastructure and operations at IDC. Because of this, Elliot and other industry analysts see ServiceNow moving beyond its ITSM ro ..read more