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.
Dell Technologies Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said “there’s no question that AI is coming to the enterprise” due to data gravity and proprietary information that won’t be moved to the cloud.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the company is increasingly monetizing AI based on consumption models, volumes of data and selling agents to line of business executives over IT.
Oracle CTO Larry Ellison hit the stage with AWS CEO Matt Garman to talk about their multicloud partnership and optimizing. Ellison also talked about Oracle's autonomous security efforts to prevent ransomware, identity theft and other attacks.
Microsoft and Quantinuum said they have created 12 highly reliable logical qubits by combining Azure Quantum's qubit virtualization system to Quantinuum's H2 trapped-ion quantum computer. Microsoft also said it would work with Atom Computing to add a new quantum system to Azure Quantum.
Nuclear-powered data centers are on the horizon (and here in some cases), but deployments will take time and likely extend into 2026 or 2027. What's driving the nuclear data center concept? Generative AI workloads and an electricity grid that's currently under strain.
ServiceNow launched the Xanadu version of its Now Platform, which includes AI Agents that can autonomously perform tasks without human intervention, RaptorDB Pro, a new back-end database that improves performance, industry-specific features, and a new integrated development environment (IDE).
Oracle is going after the lakehouse market with HeatWave to go along with a bevy of generative AI features including HeatWave GenAI and HeatWave on AWS. Oracle also launched a zettascale supercluster built on Nvidia Blackwell.
Oracle and Amazon Web Services announced a strategic partnership to complete CTO Larry Ellison's multicloud trifecta. Oracle first partnered with Microsoft Azure, then Google Cloud and now AWS. Oracle also delivered strong cloud revenue growth in the first quarter.
Apple’s iPhone 16 event added a bevy of hardware upgrades in a bid to entice customers to upgrade devices even though Apple Intelligence will be delivered via software updates over the next year. Apple, however, does have a knack for useful killer apps and AirPod Pro as a clinical grade hearing aid will sell well.
The parade of cybersecurity vendors looking to capitalize on the CrowdStrike and Microsoft outages has gone by, but it's unclear whether enterprises will be able to have both resiliency and vendor consolidation.
