Five years ago, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were on top of the world. These executives played mission-critical roles in driving multi-million dollar projects that delivered massive change. However, a global recession and the inability of CIOs to deliver on business value have tarnished their status. Today's CIOs are under pressure to deliver on requests for innovation, cost reduction, connectivity, and a growing demand for business intelligence. Just as previous technology and business shifts have changed the role of the CIO, the new, more consumer-oriented business models of the social revolution will favor a new breed of business and technology leader. These leaders will have to navigate myriad converging and disruptive technologies, align new initiatives to both business value and technology feasibility, and identify strategies to leverage existing investments to fund innovation. Constellation's research and advisory offerings arm the CIO w/ the knowledge, best practices, and strategies required to manage the four personas of the next generation CIO.
Google Cloud launched Threat Intelligence, Cisco and Splunk outlined integrations and new security offerings, Palo Alto Networks outlined its AI and cybersecurity future and CrowdStrike, Fastly and a bevy of others had announcements. Akamai acquired Noname Security.
Palantir continued to gain enterprise customers in the first quarter as it delivered first quarter earnings in line with expectations. Commercial revenue was up 40% in the US from a year ago with global government revenue up 16%.
Expect Software Giant Hunters To Soon Be The Hunted In A Digital Giant's Quest For Growth
Six of the Magnificent Seven (Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet [Google], Amazon, Meta [Facebook]) stocks have entered the four comma club -over $1 trillion in market cap. With a combined market cap of over $13.2 trillion, these six players continue to defy physics with continuous quarters of double digit organic growth. Digital giants by definition have deployed five key strategies:
Generative AI will drive IT budgets, but the spending is likely to be spread around a bevy of business units too. The more likely outcome is that generative AI spending for projects will be spread around business units and be absorbed in the budgets that run the entire enterprise.
Apple's second quarter results were better-than-expected, but revenue fell 4% from a year ago. The company said it plans to buy back an additional $110 billion in shares.
CrowdStrike and Amazon Web Services expanded a partnership where Amazon will standardize on CrowdStrike's Falcon platform and CrowdStrike will expand usage of Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker.
MongoDB launched new Atlas features and integrations with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services as well as an expanded partner program. The effort, announced at MongoDB.local NYC, is designed to make it easier for developers to scale MongoDB applications across clouds and edge infrastructure.
Atlassian launched Atlassian Rovo, a generative AI assistant built on Atlassian Intelligence, which will operate across the company's teamwork platform. In addition, Atlassian said it was combining Jira Software and Jira Work Management into one project management tool.
Anthropic said it will launch a Team plan and iOS app for its Claude large language model for $30 a month with a minimum of five seats.
By unit, AMD posted record data center revenue in the first quarter of $2.3 billion, up 80% from a year ago. Growth was driven by AMD Instinct GPUs and 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs.
AWS delivered Q1 operating income of $9.4 billion on revenue of $25 billion, up 17% from a year ago.
