What type of innovation is needed to overcome enterprise IT inertia? Blackberry filled a need we didn't know existed. Blackberry Enterprise Servers were everywhere. REM had enterprise mobile email sewn up. Then, users started to demand the ability to receive email on their iOS devices. Inertia was defeated. REM didn't lose. It was out-innovated from the bottom up. Apple's support for the enterprise was horrible in the early days. Apple did the user interface better. We rarely see this type of movement. Even the rapid adoption of the public cloud ran into the oak that's enterprise IT inertia. T ..read more

Chatbots are easy… My peer Alastair Cooke demoed one running locally on a mobile workstation. These demos are dangerous as they show how “easy” it is to use RAG to extend the usefulness of the 7 billion parameter model. However, it creates tunnel vision for use cases. How do you use these models to create business value outside the typical chatbot scenario? Where do you start? It all starts with data. Logic is the difference between GenAI models and search engines. GenAI models take a large data set and add predictive results. So, any data analysis area requiring additional logic is a great ..read more

It’s been a long time, and I should have left you some AI-related content to step to… In short, AI is real, and I’ve spent the last few months coming up to speed. What have I learned? From an IT infrastructure perspective, we will likely see patterns similar to those of modern application development and hosting. As with traditional applications, we’ll see a shortage of resources, including infrastructure, talent, and services. We’re well along the journey for custom model generation. Due to the lack of resources, much of this will happen in the cloud. Inferencing is a different story. Talk ..read more

Look, I understand. Who wants to lug around both a personal PC and a company machine when they travel? Or, why buy a laptop when your company’s PC has plenty of resources? Hear me out. First, check your employment agreement. At worst, there’s a clause in the agreement that says something to the effect anything you create while employed for your organization is your organization's intellectual property. At best, the clause may read that anything you make using company resources belongs to your employer. There are many other good reasons why using your company’s resources for personal use is a b ..read more

I’ve been slowly working on the CTO Advisor BYOI Cloud Capability Matrix. The matrix will summarise the hybrid cloud capabilities of each primary cloud provider. Each of the hyperscalers offers a Kubernetes Anywhere service. But Kubernetes isn’t a cloud platform. It’s an orchestration framework at best. Managed database, storage, identity, and compute (VM, Serverless, and containers) are all part of a full spectrum IaaS solution. Not to mention billing. Yes, several Cloud-Native projects fill the gaps, but this is an example of stretching Kubernetes far beyond what it was designed to accomp ..read more

I'm hearing increasing messaging from IT hardware manufacturers about private cloud offerings. It's starting to feel like 2015 again. Customers have realized the public cloud isn't the destination for all IT workloads. IT vendors are reacting by providing private cloud solutions. Don’t fall for the hype - again. My Perspective Is private cloud the answer? If you've followed me for any time, you know I’d say it depends on the challenge. Do you need a private cloud to repatriate workloads to a co-location or data center? Maybe or maybe not. It depends on what you want to accomplish. We learne ..read more

Your ever-expanding landscape. We've squeezed a decade of change into just the past few years as an industry. That has an impact on your work and communities of practice. There was a time when I could attend one or two conferences a year and get my networking and educational needs met.  I feel overwhelmed by the need to track the various opensource and vendor communities to stay current. What's needed to stay ahead?  I want to know if I'm alone in this experience. How are you getting your community needs fulfilled? We put together a 5-min survey that asks that question. We'd lo ..read more

We are moving from QTS Data Centers to Equinix today—two very different use cases. QTS' Chicago facility is a showroom quality facility. When we envisioned #CTOAHI data center, we envisioned use cases such as teaming up with Tech Field Day and bringing in delegates to hammer at presenters' solutions deployed in our environment. Or a customer experience center. QTS has plenty of conference rooms, parking, and a beautiful lobby. It's like the perfect outsourced EBC. That was back in March 2020. We all know what happened at the same time. So the business model shifted. The Equinix facility ..read more

We are moving the CTO Advisor Hybrid Infrastructure physical DC from one data center to another data center. As a service level, we don’t need redundant network connectivity. We could go a couple of weeks without connectivity. That’s the theory. However, the network engineer in me can’t deal with the fact that there’s no ETA when we’ll have the connectivity issue worked out. We’ll have our fancy all flash storage array connected via 100Gbps to a vSphere cluster for 1TB of RAM. However, we will not have connectivity externally. I know it’s there. I just can’t access it. It feels wrong. I cou ..read more

I looked at my invite and flights to AWS re:Inforce today and felt tired. I generally enjoy conferences. However, I’m starting to feel the impact of how thinly we are spread across so many communities. The future is hybrid infrastructure. However, that means we all must know a little about many different things. It also means that we have more relationships across many communities of practice. Over the past few years, I’ve joined the AWS, GCP, and Cloud-Native communities. Within Cloud-Native, I have sub-communities based on projects I’m interested in. I’ve also had to maintain relationship ..read more