Of all the trade-off decisions you may have to make as an IT executive, few stand to alter the course of your career as dramatically as that of whether to serve a firm owned by private equity (or “PE”). On the one hand, such firms (often referred to as portfolio companies, or “PortCos”), can excite…
It’s interesting how the number of projected IoT devices being connected in 2023 can differ by 26 billion from article to article. What it tells me is that no one really knows because new devices are being introduced on a daily basis and it’s hard to keep track. I can’t imagine being an IT administrator…
Dear SAP Support, I don’t think we should see each other anymore. It’s not you; it’s me. No … wait … it’s mostly you. Our relationship started as expected, but we’ve grown apart. We now want different things. You aren’t who you were You’ve changed. It used to be that my annual maintenance fee got…
“Plastic soup” is one term that’s been used to describe the pollution that’s plaguing our oceans. The phrase was coined by Captain Charles Moore in 1997. Moore came across massive amounts of plastic floating in the middle of the ocean and his accounts of this experience helped raise awareness of the scope and severity of…
If there’s an industry steeped in computations, it’s the financial services sector. Optimization problems, for which a whole chorus of variables must be fine-tuned and modulated, routinely plague financial firms, especially when it comes to highly engineered financial products such as those developed through quantitative analysis. That need for complex mathematical modeling at scale makes…
For 158 years, Minneapolis-based Cargill is the largest privately held company in the US and employs 155,000 people across 70 countries, earning an estimated $165 billion in annual revenue. Having joined its executive team 18 months ago, CDIO Jennifer Hartsock oversees its global technology portfolio, and digital and data strategies, so she has to keep…
For the last 140 years, specialty manufacturing business Huber has been run as a portfolio company, with four decentralized businesses comprising some $3b in annual revenue. The portfolio model, and a healthy appetite for acquisitions, has served the company well with profitable businesses that manufacture everything from engineered wood to specialty food ingredients. Today, however,…
Google has opened a second cloud region in Germany as part of its plan to invest $1.85 billion in German digital infrastructure by 2030. Dubbed the Berlin-Brandenburg region, the new data center will be operational alongside the Frankfurt region and will offer services such as the Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent…
In today’s interconnected digital landscape, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are instrumental in ensuring seamless communication between software systems. As APIs gain significance, cybercriminals are also drawn to exploit vulnerabilities and abuse them. Gartner studies indicate that by 2025, half of all data theft will be attributed to unsecured APIs. Detecting and mitigating API abuse is…
If digital transformation is a journey, when does it end? This is a question I am asked often by IT leaders who prefer slowing down the pace of transformation and technology innovation. Others who believe the term digital transformation is watered down take a more cynical tack, viewing it as a phrase leaders use to…