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The Threat Behind Digital Transformation

Jonah Kowall

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

The CxO organization is becoming more concerned with outsiders entering into their markets. In the past, the cost of entry into a new market was significantly higher than it is today. Digital businesses and software-driven business models are changing the playing field, for new entrants to shift into new markets. The cost of experimentation continues to decrease, with lower cost computing models that allow for the rental of resources and software.

Open source plays a key role in both building new applications and creating community leverage; and senior executives are taking notice. IBM’s Global C-Suite Study is a great data set consisting of data collected between January and June 2015. They surveyed 5,247 business leaders from 21 industries in more than 70 countries. The sample comprises 818 CEOs, 643 CFOs, 601 CHROs, 1,805 CIOs, 723 CMOs, and 657 COOs :


Today’s native digital generations prefer to work on digital channels versus in-person channels. This ongoing trend has given rise to improvements in customer service, where interactions are delivered across multiple digital channels, ranging from social channels like Twitter and Facebook to text and voice communications. However, there is still more work to be done to unify these platforms more seamlessly. Technologies such as social, chat, and more recently, bots create the personal touch in a more scalable manner, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. These trends will continually take hold, personalization and fast touch points are valued by today’s users who seemingly have less time than ever before.

The level of patience and complexity involved in making these channels seamless is an increasing challenge with today’s IT complexity. Your customers will not tolerate failure, and expect technology to just work. IBM’s survey data confirms this trend.


This accelerating trend is what will differentiate those businesses who learn to engage in new and differentiated ways across multiple channels. Companies which lead, versus those that follow have very different perspectives on what will likely transpire during a time of disruption.

In Figure 8 below, those indicated as torchbearers see companies who look for another market to expand into being able to enter these markets quickly as innovators in another segment or market. Similarly, these first-mover companies see the need to enter into new or adjacent markets. For this reason you see most companies creating labs or innovation centers. We increasingly see next generation visibility being required for these new and highly agile software systems. This demand is critical for survival, innovation, and growth.

These experiments can only be done promptly when the organization adopts smaller agile teams across the business and technology groups. Breaking up large, and likely slow moving monolithic organizations, software, and systems into smaller units which operate independently. The ability to experimentation and make decisions on their own.

The companies who lead tend to do this far more frequently than those who follow or are laggards. We see this regularly in our customer base, where a large degree of diversity exists in the autonomy within each team. The question remains as to how this will play out with economic changes or political change.


In summary, while this data and analysis confirm many trends, it shows clearly different and increasingly changed thinking as digital becomes the preferred channel for many businesses. The IBM data also informs that decentralized decision making and experimentation are clearly taking hold, but those who lead are in a different place than those who follow. It will be interesting to see how this progresses with IBMs new survey data.

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Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

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The Threat Behind Digital Transformation

Jonah Kowall

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

The CxO organization is becoming more concerned with outsiders entering into their markets. In the past, the cost of entry into a new market was significantly higher than it is today. Digital businesses and software-driven business models are changing the playing field, for new entrants to shift into new markets. The cost of experimentation continues to decrease, with lower cost computing models that allow for the rental of resources and software.

Open source plays a key role in both building new applications and creating community leverage; and senior executives are taking notice. IBM’s Global C-Suite Study is a great data set consisting of data collected between January and June 2015. They surveyed 5,247 business leaders from 21 industries in more than 70 countries. The sample comprises 818 CEOs, 643 CFOs, 601 CHROs, 1,805 CIOs, 723 CMOs, and 657 COOs :


Today’s native digital generations prefer to work on digital channels versus in-person channels. This ongoing trend has given rise to improvements in customer service, where interactions are delivered across multiple digital channels, ranging from social channels like Twitter and Facebook to text and voice communications. However, there is still more work to be done to unify these platforms more seamlessly. Technologies such as social, chat, and more recently, bots create the personal touch in a more scalable manner, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. These trends will continually take hold, personalization and fast touch points are valued by today’s users who seemingly have less time than ever before.

The level of patience and complexity involved in making these channels seamless is an increasing challenge with today’s IT complexity. Your customers will not tolerate failure, and expect technology to just work. IBM’s survey data confirms this trend.


This accelerating trend is what will differentiate those businesses who learn to engage in new and differentiated ways across multiple channels. Companies which lead, versus those that follow have very different perspectives on what will likely transpire during a time of disruption.

In Figure 8 below, those indicated as torchbearers see companies who look for another market to expand into being able to enter these markets quickly as innovators in another segment or market. Similarly, these first-mover companies see the need to enter into new or adjacent markets. For this reason you see most companies creating labs or innovation centers. We increasingly see next generation visibility being required for these new and highly agile software systems. This demand is critical for survival, innovation, and growth.

These experiments can only be done promptly when the organization adopts smaller agile teams across the business and technology groups. Breaking up large, and likely slow moving monolithic organizations, software, and systems into smaller units which operate independently. The ability to experimentation and make decisions on their own.

The companies who lead tend to do this far more frequently than those who follow or are laggards. We see this regularly in our customer base, where a large degree of diversity exists in the autonomy within each team. The question remains as to how this will play out with economic changes or political change.


In summary, while this data and analysis confirm many trends, it shows clearly different and increasingly changed thinking as digital becomes the preferred channel for many businesses. The IBM data also informs that decentralized decision making and experimentation are clearly taking hold, but those who lead are in a different place than those who follow. It will be interesting to see how this progresses with IBMs new survey data.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...