Environmental sustainability objectives have rapidly become a top CEO priority. Achieving these objectives requires a shared responsibility approach: responsible use by organizations, coupled with responsible provision by vendors. Linking these two fundamental contributors is the sourcing function. Although the enterprise can act internally on sustainability, many are limited by their vendors’ priorities and capabilities to ...

At KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2023 this past week in Chicago, discussion turned from the ubiquity of the software container orchestrator Kubernetes as the heart of cloud-native development to addressing a vast ecosystem of projects and vendors, which in turn are enabling applications and data to become more distributed and independent from any particular underlying cloud or on-premises ...

A friend of mine from high school once wrote on his senior yearbook inscription, “For every question, there is an answer that is simple, direct, forthright, and wrong.” The boilerplate answers that are provided by general-purpose large language models such as ChatGPT simply reinforce that truism. And we’re starting to get the same impression about ...

Introduction In the ever-evolving landscape of data platforms, dbt Labs Inc. stands out as a pivotal player, driving the modern data stack’s transformation and offering innovative solutions that bridge the gap between data engineering and data analytics. We see the lines in the sand being drawn as organizations build data features and products on top ...

As chief information officers strive to maximize technologies’ impact on the business, they must establish a structured approach to cost management within information technology and with business partners. This requires CIOs to build a programmatic and strategic cost optimization discipline. Strategic cost optimization is more than cost-cutting. It is an ongoing discipline of analysis, review, ...

In the next three to five years, we believe a set of intelligent data apps will emerge requiring a new type of modern data platform to support them. We refer to this as a sixth data platform. In our previous research we’ve used the metaphor “Uber for everyone” to describe this vision, meaning software-based systems that ...

In June, we put forth our scenario about “Uber for all.” We believe a new breed of intelligent data apps is emerging and we used Uber Technologies Inc. as an example where data about people, places and things is brought together in a data-coherent, realtime system. The premise is that increasingly, organizations are going to ...

Cloud operating models vary by industry, organization size, structure and technology adoption profiles. However, successful models will almost always contain a cloud enterprise architecture or EA function, such as a cloud center of excellence, that leads cloud adoption, as well as a cloud computing advisory council for cloud strategy and policy feedback, and a cloud ...

Application programming interfaces gave millions of developers instant access to powerful and complex software services, changing the world. As generative artificial intelligence enters that world, we’ll see new forms of access to data and services, machines talking to people and other machines in new ways, and an explosion of activity, collaboration and creativity. What should ...

In a world where the post-pandemic dust is beginning to settle, one thing has become increasingly clear: Data teams are in high demand. The driving force behind this demand is not just hype but the tangible impact of large language models or LLMs and the challenges of effectively using them — especially as LLMs become ...