Back in the early days of the cloud, I had a nice little business taking enterprise applications and reengineering them so they could be delivered as software-as-a-service cloud assets. Many enterprises believed that their custom application, which provided value by addressing a niche need, could be resold as a SaaS service and become another source of income. I saw a tire company, a healthcare company, a bank, and even a bail-bond management company attempt to become cloud players before infrastructure as a service was a thing. Sometimes it worked out. To read this article in full, please cli ..read more

Buzz is building around the idea that it’s time to claw back our cloud services and once more rebuild the company data center. Repatriation. It’s the act of moving work out of cloud and back to on-premises or self-managed hardware. And the primary justification for this movement is straightforward, especially in a time of economic downturn. Save money by not using AWS, Azure, or the other cloud hosting services. Save money by building and managing your own infrastructure. Since an Andreesen Horowitz post catapulted this idea into the spotlight a couple of years ago, it seems to be gaining mome ..read more

Cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake has developed an open-source large language model (LLM), Arctic, to take on the likes of Meta’s Llama 3, Mistral’s family of models, xAI’s Grok-1, and Databricks’ DBRX. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

OpenAI, known for its large language model ChatGPT, is making a strong push for the enterprise market. In what could intensify competition among enterprise AI players, the company announced a slew of new features designed to give businesses more control, enhance security, and offer cost-effective options when integrating OpenAI’s AI technologies in their operations. “We’re deepening our support for enterprises with new features that are useful for both large businesses and any developers who are scaling quickly on our platform,” OpenAI said. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is moving some features of its generative AI application-building service, Amazon Bedrock, to general availability, the company said on Tuesday. These features include guardrails for AI, a model evaluation tool, and new large language models (LLMs). To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

The exponential growth of data, and in particular unstructured data, is a problem enterprises have been wrestling with for decades. IT organizations are in a constant battle between ensuring that data is accessible to users, one the one hand, and that the data is globally protected and in compliance with data governance policies, on the other. Added to this is the need to ensure that files are stored in the most cost-effective manner possible, on whichever storage is best at that point in time. The problem is there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all storage platform that can serve as the ..read more

As I’ve been saying for the past year or so, cloud conferences have become generative AI conferences, as have data center conferences, databases conferences, and you name it. It’s clearly more than just a trend—it’s a game-changing push. But we’ve seen this happen enough times in the past 30 years to know nothing is guaranteed to be a true trend. Remember “push technology?” Exactly. As enterprises rush headlong into generative AI, selecting an appropriate infrastructure is critical for optimal performance and cost-effectiveness. Comparing cloud computing and traditional on-premises solutions r ..read more

Some developers and business leaders believe that low-code is only for small, lightly used applications such as replacing spreadsheets and building dashboards. “These tools, in general, aren’t well suited to more advanced applications,” says Steve Jones, devops advocate at  Red Gate Software. With heavier use and more complex data manipulation requirements, he says, “they often start to fail and cause workload and performance issues.” I've used low-code and no-code platforms for over two decades and have written extensively about them, including articles on how generative AI is changing l ..read more

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has slowly and silently phased out its Snowmobile service—an offering launched at its annual AWS re:Invent conference in 2016 to help enterprises move data from their on-premises servers to the cloud provider’s data centers to accelerate their migration to the public cloud. The Snowmobile service, essentially an eighteen-wheel truck and trailer or “big rig” with 100 petabyte data storage and network connectivity, was commissioned by AWS then-CEO Andy Jassy (now CEO of Amazon) to help enterprises who wanted to transfer vast amounts of data, measured in the petabytes or ..read more

Asia/Pacific companies are struggling with wasteful cloud spending, according to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study found that cloud cost management initiatives and tools are being introduced too late and without a full picture of their environment to be very effective. The study, paid for by IPaaS provider Boomi, found that 87% had exceeded their set cloud budgets over the past two years and that 69% foresee exceeding their cloud budgets during the current fiscal year. In other words, we’ve spent too much money on the cloud and will continue to spend too mu ..read more