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.
Salesforce said it has closed 5,000 Agentforce deals since October with 3,000 of them paid, but the company's fourth quarter results were mixed relative to estimates.
Snowflake Cortex AI will integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry. That move will put OpenAI's models Snowflake and make them available as data agents in Snowflake's AI Data Cloud.
Amazon launched Alexa+, a revamped version of its voice assistant powered by generative AI models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude via AWS' Amazon Bedrock.
Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller referred to customer and employee experience as a soup where data, people, process and AI all blend together to create a holistic approach.
Workday reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings as the company saw strong demand for its AI products and more penetration across industries.
The plan for IBM is to leverage DataStax's technologies and combine them with its Granite large language models. IBM will also be a bigger player in vector databases and leveraging unstructured data for enterprises.
Qualcomm said it has launched a new brand called Dragonwing as it expands its footprint more into enterprise and industrial use cases.
Salesforce and Google Cloud have expanded a partnership that will bring Google's Gemini models to Agentforce, integrate Salesforce Service Cloud tightly with Google Customer Engagement Suite and enable handoffs between the companies' AI agents.
Voyage AI embeds and reranks models based on accuracy in retrieval augmented generation (RAG). MongoDB's bet is that these tools should be in the database layer to improve accuracy of models before they wind up in the AI agent pipeline.
CxOs say that software-as-a-service business models that include consumption are going to require a learning curve as well as a few surprise bills. Nevertheless, there may be benefits to consumption-based models even with drawbacks. Here's the breakdown of the pros and cons.
Broadcom has made VMware more profitable and has kept large customers in the fold, but the next wave of competitors, notably HPE and Platform9, is ramping up efforts to migrate them to a new virtualization platform.
