Deeply assimilating its Red Hat technology, IBM this week rolled out a set of new platforms and services designed to help customers manage edge-based application workloads and exploit artificial intelligence for infrastructure resiliency.

The announcements came at IBM’s virtualized Think! 2020 event that also featured the first Big Blue keynote by the company’s new CEO Arvind Krishna, during which he told the online audience about challenges of COVID-19: “History will look back on this as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated,” but also that hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving digital transformation.

read more

With the 2019 acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat under its belt and a new cloud-savvy CEO at the helm, IBM is looking to reverse a decade of declining revenue and sagging stock prices with a bold strategy focused on hybrid cloud.

CEO Arvind Krishna, who formerly led IBM’s cloud and cognitive computing division and engineered the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, made IBM’s intentions clear in a LinkedIn post to employees in his first day on the job: “Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company. IBM has already built enduring platforms in mainframe, services, and middleware. I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud.”

read more

DevOps has been established for a while—about 10 years—but many enterprises are still encountering barriers to implementing it successfully.

For the record, via Webopedia: “DevOps (development and operations) is an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units.”

Some of the barriers to adoption of DevOps relate to a natural human resistance to new ideas and change in general. Other barriers are more measurable, such as budget constraints or a lack of specific skills. One of the main barriers to DevOps is a lack of camaraderie between Dev and Ops. In addition, some teams are wary of experimentation in an area where responsibilities have long been staked out.

read more

Business software maker Zoho is at it again, reaching out to help customers old and new with tools they can use to get work done during the coronavirus pandemic.

Following the March 6 announcement that the company will offer free use of its Remotely productivity platform, the Austin, Texas-based company revealed March 19 that it is launching a Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to help customers and potential customers worldwide weather this global pandemic crisis.

ESAP is designed for small businesses. For up to 20,000 qualified paying customers with 25 employees or less, Zoho is waiving the cost of every single application they currently use, for up to three months. Zoho offers a pick-and-choose menu of dozens of business productivity applications in its platform.

read more