This is a long-form newsletter, hand-written, speaking about inflection points influenced by technology. It’s based on articles I find relevant to share and is infused with my thoughts. It’s for critical thinkers who love to hear complex correlations, self-reflect on the consequences of trends, and exchange opinions on how to tackle the best possible approach for the future.
Market Evolution
We have seen the CrowdStrike outage that brought half the planet completely down in operations (China and Russia were running their own products and were quite untouched), and that created a clear impact on the feeling of robustness of each enterprise on its own IT environment. This touches the overall safety of supply chain reliability as well as internal operations. On what happened, what were my reflections and recommendations, you can read this article and this other one that I realized ad hoc during the last month. On top, you can find thousands of professional articles about what, why, and what’s next.
During August, we also had a strong fluctuation of the digital US businesses, following the S&P 500 down, influenced by the Nikkei. Apart from the market correlations and speculations, we have seen that the new digital businesses were influenced by the perception around the AI market evolution in their share value. Near end of August the Nvidia results, even if quite good, didn’t give a good feeling to the market on the outlook on the future chips evolution and in general there is a sense of not clear timing on AI ROI for enterprises, especially those with lower digital maturity also because a proper AI strategy includes and depends strongly on a mature Data Science in each enterprise that is not always already fully up to speed.
On one side there are big exposure of investments from big IT tech on AI (we speak about more than 800B$ by 2030 py) and on the other side, we have seen that the AI benefits are not always so immediate for enterprises and It’s happening the typical curve of disillusion that Gartner cites in realizing that some new technologies have a big effort before to show the return (and side effects like the huge increase of computer power of clouds that is putting also in discussion how to sustain such increase of energy consumption without increase of pollution)
Interestingly, at the same time, we see some exchange, for example, from Michael Dell but not only, related to the reports about migration back to Private Cloud Datacenter touching many enterprises instead of movement in the direction of public cloud as a trend in 2024 and 2025.
There is a nice correlation between these two last topics I mentioned (private cloud migration and AI). First of all, companies are realizing that public cloud is not necessarily cheaper than private cloud, and there are needs of edge computing in many firms (not only the biggest) as we start to ramp up IoT more integrated in the overall supply chain. There is now obviously more of a feeling about more control over the IT architecture to avoid unpredictable disruptions. On the other hand, AI requires a strong computational power, in a non-linear way, typical of public cloud rather than private cloud. An interesting perspective I see from my angle is that cloud is set to stay; it’s about how to use, what to migrate, and how much we plan to refactor in cloud and manage data, rather than just shifting workloads, which is making sense of use of it.
I will plan in September a summary article on strategies of multi-cloud and the reasons why refactoring in multi-cloud can make a cheaper cloud, but also more complex, and consider robustness as a key aspect to reduce risks of full infrastructure down due to a single critical event. Feel free to add comments or request me directly if you’d like to see anything special in such an article.
With the summer end is also an opportunity to summarize the main topics of the agenda of many enterprises for 2024 and 2025 in terms of deadlines set:
- October 17th 2024, is the deadline for the NIS2 compliance for enterprises, and is highly influencing the cybersecurity exposure of enterprises and poses a risk from a reputation point of view
- 02nd August 2025 and 02nd August 2026 are two important deadlines for the EU AI Act compliance, which I mentioned here in this article as brief summary
There are obviously many other deadlines in IT during the upcoming months and years (i.e. Windows 10 end of support in 2025, SAP R/3 end of support in 2027 and 2030) and is not my intention here to touch all of them and their correlation but I believe is crucial that each enterprise sets a proper overall roadmap of transformation while considering also what legacy need to keep and for how long including the compliance with all the regulations that come in place or get updated in the recent months.
On top of new waves of technologies, like AI, that are introducing new capabilities but also new threats (like, for example, the possibility to enhance cyber-offense with AI and aspects of data security of AI analysis), all these elements need to be taken into consideration as we introduce new elements in our IT enterprise ecosystem.
As usual, I like to take this new newsletter as a format to share and receive feedback, and I’m more than happy to listen to comments, suggestions for new contents or focus, and other details you would like to have touched on.
GG
