Backcountry modernizes for the cloud era

Undertaking a top-to-bottom modernization of a dusty enterprise stack can feel a bit like scaling a mountain. At least that has been the experience of Backcountry CTO Sridhar Nallani, who was hired in 2020 specifically to overhaul the online retailer’s digital presence. Despite nearly $1 billion in online revenue in 2020, the web-based outdoor recreational…

Harvesting the Benefits of Cloud-Native Hyperconvergence

The logical progression from the virtualization of servers and storage in VSANs was hyperconvergence. By abstracting the three elements of storage, compute, and networking, data centers were promised limitless infrastructure control. That promised ideal was in keeping with the aims of hyperscale operators needing to grow to meet increased demand and that had to modernize…

Databricks’ new data lakehouse aims at media, entertainment sector

After launching industry-specific data lakehouses for the retail, financial services and healthcare sectors over the past three months, Databricks is releasing a solution targeting the media and the entertainment (M&E) sector. Now generally available, the M&E data lakehouse comes with industry use-case specific features that the company calls accelerators, including real-time personalization, said Steve Sobel,…

Build a Collaborative Network to Mitigate Supply Chain Risks

It’s no secret that companies face major hurdles and risks when it comes to global supply chains. The hurdles include pandemic-related disruptions, short product life cycles, quickly changing consumer preferences, growing regulations, and resource volatility. One way to protect against disruptions and manage increasingly complex supply chains is to enhance collaboration with suppliers by committing…

Scrumfall: When Agile becomes Waterfall by another name

The Church of Agile is being corrupted from within by institutional forces that have refused or been unable to adapt to the radical humanity embodied in its collaborative, self-organizing, cross-functional teams. A hollowed-out husk of Scrum concealing taskmasters of Waterfall is the Trojan Horse of this betrayal. With Waterfall methods masquerading as Scrum — call…

The Right Recipe for a Real-time Data Stack

By George Trujillo, Principal Data Strategist, DataStax Think about your favorite recipe. You might have all the ingredients for an apple pie, but there’s no guarantee all the elements will come together to produce a delicious dessert. Similarly, many organizations have built data architectures to remain competitive, but have instead ended up with a complex…

Cloud momentum sees SAP start the year strong

German software group SAP reported first-quarter revenue growth of 11% for 2022 on Friday, driven in large part by its cloud business. The company’s cloud revenue climbed 31% to €2.8 billion (US$3.02 billion) in the first quarter of 2022, while revenue for its S/4HANA cloud software was €400 million, up 78% year-on-year. Total revenue for…

How MLOps Is Helping Overcome Machine Learning’s Biggest Challenges

Enterprises are betting big on machine learning (ML). According to IDC, 85% of the world’s largest organizations will be using artificial intelligence (AI) — including machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and pattern recognition — by 2026. And a survey conducted by ESG found, “62% of organizations plan to increase their year-over-year spend on AI, including investments…