RedMonk May 2024 Update
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It’s James here. Wow - that month sure passed quickly. So we head into May. Spring has sprung and we’re almost onto summer. The weather is warmer and that last asparagus won’t eat itself.
The tech event season is upon us with a vengeance, which for much of the team has meant a fair bit of travel. Too many air miles, but also some nice opportunities to hang out with friends of RedMonk. The RedMonk Beers format is definitely getting a good work out, and we’ll have some news about that soon! We of course want to make it easier to hang out with us. With that in mind, I wanted to give you a heads up that all the RedMonk analysts will be in San Francisco the week of June 3rd. There will be RedMonk Beers, but for clients we’re offering blocks of advisory time - this is a fantastic opportunity to get with the RedMonk crew face to face for advisory sessions. Zoom is a powerful tool, but trust me, our in person brains trust can definitely add a lot of value in terms of the strategic advice we bring. MOAR VIEWPOINTS! If you’re not currently a client, but you’re based in SF, this is probably the best time to sign up.
Talking of Spring though, when Amazon announced its impressive financials last week (it’s on target to record $100bn in revenue in 2024). AWS CEO Andy Jassy said something interesting:
Companies have largely completed the lion's share of their cost optimization and turned their attention to newer initiatives," Jassy explained. "Before the pandemic, companies were marching to modernize their infrastructure, moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud to save money, innovated at a more rapid rate, and to drive more developer productivity. The pandemic and uncertain economy that followed distracted from that momentum, but it's picking up again.
So at AWS at least the IT Winter is apparently behind us. Jassy certainly knows his customer base - if you cut him he would surely bleed customer obsession - but at RedMonk we’re still seeing a marked focus on cost control in this post Zero Interest Rate era. Enterprises and SaaS companies alike are still in cost-cutting mode - and this is true in both the US and Europe. Layoffs continue, and Big IT is back. Finance is back - it is so back. Beans are being counted, and reallocated. Marketing budgets for events and so on are definitely not where they were.
If beans are being reallocated however then AWS is sure to benefit, new projects or not. The recent price hikes by Broadcom, and account tension between AWS and VMware, are almost certainly going to break in favour of more enterprise on prem workloads heading into the cloud. Rachel Stephens recently wrote a post about VMware’s numbers - see the link below.
One area where obviously we’re seeing a lot of excitement and some opportunity for bean allocation is of course generative AI, with its siren call of potentially offering both innovation and cost-cutting.
But as an industry it pays to remember what you’re good at. As Emily Freeman recently said:
Unpopular opinion: companies doing an about-face to focus only on AI while abandoning existing products will regret that decision.
This statement obviously makes sense. There is still plenty of upside in automation, data management, infrastructure observability, business applications, the gamut of IT services. The real opportunity is to use AI to make what you’re already making even better. The kind of strategy GitHub is following with the new Copilot Workspace, which is getting a lot of kudos from engineers - augment the developer, don’t try to replace them!
The RedMonk folks at Red Hat Summit this week were impressed with the company’s AI pitch, focused as it was not on models for their own sake, but on jobs to be done, on the business of contribution.
Always play to your strengths, whatever the season is. We can help with that.
One man that certainly knew how to get people to play to their strengths was Steve Albini, one of the greatest music producers ever, who sadly passed away this week. RIP Steve. GenX will miss you greatly. I will be writing a post about Albini and… Apple, so look forward to that in the next newsletter.
Before I sign off, I just wanted to mention our featured post this month. At the risk of really stretching the season metaphor to breaking point, we’re just about on the edge of Spring and Summer, and Kate Holterhoff has just written a great post about the edge, and what it even is. Whether the term edge is useful or not, compute is moving closer to the user, and programming and runtime models are changing accordingly. There is so much cool technology being built in this space. So if you want to know what the acquisition of PartyKit by Cloudflare means you should jump right in below. Is edge the new serverless? It just may be.
Of course you should subscribe to this newsletter and share it with your friends.
-James Governor, RedMonk co-founder.
Before we get to our awesome content though, here are some external links you’re sure to find interesting.
Links Roundup
The good folks at Write the Docs are hosting an all-virtual conference (pitched at CEST and EDT time zones) in September. CFP is open until May 15 and tickets are on sale now.
ICYMI - Here is Michael Cote, Senior Member Of Technical Staff (and former RedMonk analyst) on RedMonk client Cloud Foundry's Cloud Foundry Weekly podcast on 4/11/2024.
XZ Utils was just the beginning. Social Engineering is coming to a software supply chain near you.
This article about undersea cable maintenance is so well done, and is also an excellent metaphor for open source.
Cassidy’s metaphor for making human connection in physical and online spaces is great.
Epic hotfix! Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally returning usable data about the health status of its onboard engineering systems since November. Such an amazing engineering story.
You should definitely check out this great overview of the IBM Hashicorp acquisition by former RedMonk analyst Fintan Ryan.
Recent RedMonk Research
As software platforms increasing add AI capabilities, how will these platforms balance openness and integration with pressures to monetize the data powering their AI? Will protectionism over data start come into conflict with platform openness? When Platforms Are Lit(erary). RM clients mentioned: Atlassian
AI has fundamentally turned the developer skills building industry on its head. Coding bootcamps are scrambling to figure out how to adapt to the new AI landscape, while individuals looking to shift careers are desperate to determine how AI will affect early-career hiring. In the future, coding bootcamps will need to prepare graduates using a more in-depth and robust curriculum in order to bypass the “lack of experience” trap that AI is currently exacerbating. RM clients mentioned: AWS, Salesforce, Microsoft (GitHub), and Google
Industry perspective takeaways from the ACM SIGCSE 2024 Technical Symposium. RM clients mentioned: AWS, GitHub, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and MongoDB
Updates on an event designed to prepare Georgia Tech’s computing majors for public expos and booth duty. Interested in becoming a client for a team of CS and CM majors? Jump to the end.
A numbers-driven view of VMware's past and present M&A activity. RM clients mentioned: VMware by Broadcom
Rachel Stephens provided a recap on the talks from the 2nd day of Monki Gras 2024.
And James Governor summed up Monki Gras 2024 in this piece. The return of Monki Gras was a success and we thank all our staff, attendees, speakers, and wonderful sponsors (AWS, Civo, Deepset, CNCF, Neo4j, MongoDB, Akamai, Griptape, PagerDuty, Screenly and Betty Junod) that made it possible.
Featured Article
Whither Serverless Compute? or Why the Cloudflare-PartyKit Acquisition Matters
Client side compute and edge compute are converging. Web apps are transitioning where data is processed closer to the user—a move inclusive of not only compute on the device using client side rendering engines like V8, Google’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, but also the so-called “edge.” Although the term “edge” is rife with ambiguity, if it accomplishes nothing else (beyond exasperating critics), it does the important work of signifying servers that are geographically closer to the user than cloud data centers historically have been. RM clients mentioned: AWS, Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google, and Microsoft
Recent Media Appearances
James Governor and GitGuardian CEO Eric Fourrier sit down for a discussion on the role of large language models (LLMs) in secrets management: A RedMonk Conversation: LLMs and Secrets Management
Kate Holterhoff, senior industry analyst talks all-things developer certifications with Justin Wheeler, AWS Community Builder, Senior Software Developer at Bravo LT, and developer certification expert: A RedMonk Conversation with Developer Certification Enthusiast Justin Wheeler
Steve O’Grady and Rita Koslov, Cloudflare, explore what “edge” means today, and how the evolution of edge services is forcing users to rethink what’s possible: A RedMonk Conversation: Do You Need to Care About Edge?
Rachel Stephens and Himanshu Singh discuss how enterprises are adopting AI technology, how VMware thinks about privacy and risk when it comes to AI, and how enterprises can orchestrate AI workloads to be part of their broader technology solutions: A RedMonk Conversation: Private AI with VMware by Broadcom
Dr. Carol Lee stops by The Docs Are In to talk about her research as Principal Scientist at Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab, and how her training as a clinical psychologist comes into play: The Docs are In: Clinical Psychology, Scientific Rigor, and Developer Success (with Dr. Carol Lee)
Keri Olson, IBM VP of AI, discusses IBM's approach to generative AI, focusing on domain specific use cases such as AI-driven application modernization for IBM’s Z Mainframe platform with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z: A RedMonk Conversation: Generative AI for Application Modernization on System z
A webinar featuring Rachel Stephens with RM client Sumo Logic on how to reduce stress, and improve engineer performance with AI-driven log analytics.
An appearance from Rachel Stephens on the podcast Screaming in the Cloud: AI’s Impact on the Future of Tech
A webinar featuring Stephen O’Grady with RM client Liquibase on how to future-proof your database management strategy for long-term success.
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Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
SW2Con 2024: 5/14 - 5/15/2024, Broomfield, CO (Our very own Kelly Fitzpatrick, Kate Holterhoff, and Rachel Stephens will be keynote speakers!)
IBM Think 2024: 5/20 - 5/23/2024, Boston, MA
Microsoft Build: 5/21 - 5/23/2024, Seattle, WA
LaunchDarkly Galaxy 2024: 5/21 - 5/22/2024, San Francisco
PagerDuty On Tour: 5/22/2024, NYC
Events we'll be hosting:
RedMonk Beers Denver Area: 5/13/2024, Broomfield, CO
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