It's an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year - on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don't carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset. In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds on OSS investments even if they haven't always had the time…
Read More »When we have a big OSS transformation to undertake, we tend to start with the use cases / requirements, work our way through the technical solution and build up an implementation plan before delivering it (yes, I've heavily reduced the real number of steps there!). However, we sometimes overlook the organisational change management part. That's the process of getting the customer's organisation aligned to assist with…
Read More »Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. Microsoft Corp. announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and…
Read More »"The global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services. By that point, there will be more than 25 billion IoT connections (cellular and non-cellular), driven largely by growth in the industrial IoT market. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to become the largest global IoT region in terms…
Read More »There are so many actions that could be automated by / with / in our OSS. It can be hard to know where to start can't it? One approach is to look at where the largest amounts of manual effort is being expended by operators. Another way is to employ the "paint the fence" analogy. When envisaging fulfilment workflows, it's easiest to picture actions that start…
Read More »"For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of size are turned on their head. Economies of unscale are enabled…
Read More »"Many systems are moving beyond simple virtualization and are being run on dynamic private or even public clouds. CSPs will migrate many to hybrid clouds because of concerns about data security and regulations on where data are stored and processed. We believe that over the next 15 years, nearly all software systems will migrate to clouds provided by third parties and be whatever cloud native becomes…
Read More »“In the past, business-oriented groups have had ideas about what they want to do and then they come to us… Now, they want to know what technology can bring to the table and then they’ll work on the business plan. So there’s a big gap here. It’s a phenomenon that’s been happening in the last year and it’s an uncomfortable place for IT. We’re not used…
Read More »"In 1972, the Club of Rome in its report The Limits to Growth predicted a steadily increasing demand for material as both economies and populations grew. The report predicted that continually increasing resource demand would eventually lead to an abrupt economic collapse. Studies on material use and economic growth show instead that society is gaining the same economic growth with much less physical material required. Between…
Read More »"All over the world - from America's National Football League (NFL) to the National Basketball Association (NBA), from our own AFL to NRL - athletes and coaches are cultivating club cultures in which tales of personal hardship and woe are welcome, even desirable. All are clamouring to embrace the biggest buzzword in professional sport: vulnerability. The most publicised incarnation of this shift was the "Triple H"…
Read More »"Skills multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. You can chop a tree down with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. That’s called labor. But if you trade the hammer in for an ax, you can chop the tree down in about 30 minutes. What's the difference in 30 days and 30 minutes? Skills—skills make the difference." Jim Rohn, here. OSS can…
Read More »You're probably familiar with strangler figs, which grow on a host tree, often resulting in the eventual death of the host. You're probably less familiar with the strangler fig analogy as an OSS transformation or cutover model. The concept is that there is a "host tree" (ie legacy system) that needs to be obsoleted and replaced, but it's so dominant and integral (eg because of complex…
Read More »What if the objectives of every large OSS project were actually perceived as a stretch goal by internal and external stakeholders of the project? Sim Sitkin, et al describe a stretch goal as, "We’re not talking about merely challenging goals. We’re talking about management moon shots—goals that appear unattainable given current practices, skills, and knowledge." Dymphna Boholt describes it thus: "The reality is that if everything…
Read More »"The myth is that people play games because they want to avoid challenging work. The reality is, people play games to engage in well-designed, challenging work. The only thing they are avoiding is poorly designed work. In essence, we are replacing poorly designed work with work that provides a more meaningful challenge and offers a richer sense of progress. And we should note at this point…
Read More »First ZTE was banned, then given a lifeline by President Trump, but then Trump has also been rebuked. "The House Appropriations Committee unanimously accepted an amendment to an appropriations bill on Thursday that reinforces sanctions against Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, a rebuke to President Trump, who earlier this week tweeted support for the company." reported TheHill.com.
Read More »AT&T Working With SKT and Intel to Launch a New Open Infrastructure Project, Airship. As part of our ongoing commitment to open and collaborative innovation, we’re working with SKT, Intel Corporation and the OpenStack Foundation to launch a new open infrastructure project called Airship. This project builds on the foundation laid by the OpenStack-Helm project launched in 2017. It lets cloud operators manage sites at every stage from…
Read More »Oracle Buys DataScience.com. Oracle announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire DataScience.com, whose platform centralizes data science tools, projects and infrastructure in a fully-governed workspace. Data science teams use the platform to organize work, easily access data and computing resources, and execute end-to-end model development workflows. Leading organizations like Amgen, Rio Tinto, and Sonos are using the DataScience.com platform to improve productivity, reduce operational…
Read More »DGIT Systems acquires billing systems vendor Inomial. DGIT Systems announced the acquisition of Inomial Pty Ltd. Inomial Pty Ltd is a Billing Systems Vendor with a strong customer base predominantly located in the Asia Pacific region. “Inomial’s suite of billing related products complement DGITs award winning Telflow Service Delivery Platform”, Greg Tilton CEO DGIT Systems said today. “The acquisition of Inomial provides us with a significant…
Read More »As promised in yesterday's post about lumpy revenues for OSS product companies, today we’ll discuss OSS professional services revenues and the contrasting mindset compared with products. Professional services revenues are a great way of smoothing out the lumpy revenue streams of traditional OSS product companies. There's just one problem though. Of all the vendors I've worked with, I've found that they always have a predilection -…
Read More »HPE to Acquire Plexxi. Ric Lewis of HPE writes in his blog... "Our customers live in a hybrid world, running a mix of workloads on traditional IT, as well as private, managed and public clouds. They need to be able to move at cloud-like speed, regardless of where the data lives. HPE is focused on delivering a portfolio of products and services that simplify hybrid IT,…
Read More »Verizon is migrating over 1,000 business-critical applications and database backend systems to AWS. Courtesy of Businesswire. Amazon Web Services announced that Verizon Communications has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider. Verizon is migrating over 1,000 business-critical applications and database backend systems to AWS, several of which also include the migration of production databases to Amazon Aurora—AWS’s relational database engine that combines the speed and…
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