IT insights, November: what has been going on in the world of IT

What’s been happening in the tech and vendor world in November? We compiled the latest vendor news and trending topics of the past month. It takes just a few minutes to be up to date.

SoftwareOne news

SoftwareOne and AWS announced a collaborative initiative to help customers transition to RISE with SAP on an AWS cloud environment. Called the Ready for RISE on AWS bundle, it combines SoftwareOne’s deep SAP advisory and implementation knowledge with AWS technologies to expedite a client’s SAP transformation journey.

This month, SoftwareOne committed to science-based targets in line with the Science-based Targets Initiative (SBTi), underscoring its commitment to helping prevent the most severe impacts of climate change.

SoftwareOne also released its Cloud Skills Survey, which showed that a lack of cloud skills causes 32% of organisations to miss their financial targets. 95% say that a lack of cloud skills has negatively impacted their organisation and 93% will be investing in cloud managed services to bridge the skills gap.

Vendor & partner news

AWS

AWS held its annual re:Invent conference. Like Microsoft, there was a strong AI theme running through announcements. The recent AWS blog captures 11 major announcements that came out of the event including:

• Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant specifically for work
• Next generation AWS-designed chips to run a range of cloud workloads
• New capabilities for Amazon Bedrock, to enable generative AI applications to execute multistep tasks, and build safeguards into their applications
• New capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to make it easier for customers to build, train and deploy models for GenAI.

In other AWS news:

AWS is launching the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud for Europe that will meet the stringent regulatory data residency and operational requirements of public sector customers and highly regulated industries.

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Capacity Blocks for ML, which allows customers to access GPU compute capacity for their machine learning workloads.

SAP SE and Amazon Web Services have announced that SAP HANA Cloud now supports AWS Graviton processors. This collaboration allows SAP to optimise its compute costs and provide customers with cost savings, better performance, and energy efficiency benefits.

IBM and Oracle

IBM has announced a new cloud-native architecture for its flagship QRadar SIEM product, designed for hybrid cloud environments.

Oracle is contributing $3 million in Ampere Arm-based compute credits to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to support open source projects on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, emphasising their commitment to cloud native computing.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been recognised as a Leader by Gartner in the "Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure," offering customers diverse deployment options and flexibility.

Oracle and Microsoft have entered into a multi-year agreement to support the growth of AI services, with Microsoft utilising Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for inferencing AI models powering Bing conversational searches.

Microsoft

This month saw the return of Microsoft Ignite, with a slew of major announcements, the bulk of which focused on AI and Copilot. You can watch the highlights of the major announcements here or get all the announcements coming out of the event here. Noteworthy announcements to look out for include:

• Two new custom-designed chips for cloud infrastructure from Microsoft: Microsoft Azure Maia AI Accelerator (Athena), designed for artificial intelligence (AI) tasks and generative AI, and Microsoft Azure Cobalt CPU, an Arm-based processor tailored to run general-purpose compute workloads on the Microsoft Cloud.
• In a boost for confidential computing, Microsoft Azure announced it is the first cloud provider to preview the NCCv5 series Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Confidential computing is a technology that enables data to be protected while it is being processed in the cloud.
• Microsoft Mesh propels meeting into the future. It is a solution that enables your distributed workforce to connect in a 3D immersive space with spatial audio.
• Bing Chat is now Copilot, Microsoft AI-powered search function.
• Azure AI Studio is a groundbreaking platform that provides everything organisations need to build, test, and deploy AI innovations, including cutting-edge models, data integration, and content safety.

Outside of Ignite, Microsoft also introduced Azure Bastion Developer, which is a low-cost, zero-configuration service that provides secure access to Azure Virtual Machines. Microsoft is also expanding its startup program to offer free Azure AI infrastructure for high-end GPU virtual machine clusters.

And it has announced the availability of a new app called Meet, which is designed to enhance meeting efficiency and streamline catch-up activities.

Tech news

Probably the biggest tech news in November was the back-and-forth tussle over leadership at Open AI. This article summarises how Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was first fired, then offered a job at Microsoft to head up a new AI lab, and was then rehired back at OpenAI. It has also raised questions about trust and the development of AI as a burgeoning technology, as this article by Associated Press explains. The topic of AI safety was also highlighted at the AI Safety Summit held in the UK at the start of the month.

In other AI news, Microsoft and Siemens have announced a partnership to bring generative AI to various industries, starting with the introduction of Siemens Industrial Copilot. This AI-powered assistant aims to enhance human-machine collaboration in manufacturing by allowing users to rapidly generate, optimize, and debug complex automation code.

IBM and VMware have partnered to bring IBM watsonx to on-premises environments, enabling enterprises to access generative AI capabilities in private, on-prem infrastructure as well as hybrid cloud.

Analyst predictions

From the growth of AI to digital transformation spending, IDC has released a number of predictions for the years ahead.

• AI adoption to soar in Asia/Pacific Japan: 80% of CIOs will harness AI by 2028.
• Digital Sovereignty to impact IT investment decisions by Asia/Pacific governments in 2024.
• Worldwide digital transformation spending forecast to continue its double-digit growth trajectory.
• Revenue for Artificial Intelligence Software will reach $279 billion worldwide in 2027.
• European enterprise networking infrastructure market records strong growth based on unprecedented backlog clearing.
• 41% to redefine Retail Banking in Asia/Pacific, inclined to invest on Generative AI.
• Generative AI drives significant impact to IT operations in Asia/Pacific.