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Autumnal Tech Advice from Amalgam Insights

Amalgam Insights has been busy the past month in exploring a variety of trends across IT subscriptions, DevOps, Brain Science, and Data Science. In case you’ve missed it, check out our seasonal newsletter and get educated on the key trends that are augmenting our use of technology including:

  • For IT budget and spend management, traditional asset and spend management approaches are falling short
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being treated as a ubiquitous technology
  • Open Source is now a foundation for enterprise IT
  • Learning and Development suffers from the challenge of taking on cognitive bias.

Catch up with Amalgam Insights’ analysts at work this Fall and find out how to:

And to subscribe to our newsletter, please sign up here.

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Data Science and Machine Learning News, October 2018

On a monthly basis, I will be rounding up key news associated with the Data Science Platforms space for Amalgam Insights. Companies covered will include: Alteryx, Anaconda, Cambridge Semantics, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot, Datawatch, Domino, Elastic, H2O.ai, IBM, Immuta, Informatica, KNIME, MathWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, Paxata, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS, Tableau, Talend, Teradata, TIBCO, Trifacta, TROVE.

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Is IBM’s Acquisition of Red Hat the Biggest Acquihire of All Time?

Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Internally, Amalgam Insights has been discussing why IBM chose to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion dollars fairly intensely. Our key questions included:

  • Why would IBM purchase Red Hat when they’re already partners?
  • Why purchase Red Hat when the code is Open Source?
  • Why did IBM offer a whopping $34 billion, $20 billion more than IBM currently has on hand?

As a starting point, we posit that IBM’s biggest challenge is not an inability to understand its business challenges, but a fundamental consulting mindset that starts with the top on down. By this, we mean that IBM is great at identifying and finding solutions on a project-specific basis. For instance, SoftLayer, Weather Company, Bluewolf, and Promontory Financial are all relatively recent acquisitions that made sense and were mostly applauded at the time. But even as IBM makes smart investments, IBM has either forgotten or not learned the modern rules for how to launch, develop, and maintain software businesses. At a time when software is eating everything, this is a fundamental problem that IBM needs to solve.

The real question for IBM is whether IBM can manage itself as a modern software company.

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Hanging out with the Cool Oracle Kids

When I wrote my last article on open source at Oracle, I got some feedback. Much of it was along the lines are “Have you hit your head on something hard recently?” or “You must be living in an alternate dimension.” While the obvious answer to both is “perhaps…” it has become increasingly obvious that…

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Todd Maddox Ph.D.’s Top Four Scientific Observations on DevLearn 2018

If you have a passion for learning then DevLearn is for you. DevLearn 2018 was quite the event. With excellent keynote addresses, breakout sessions, numerous vendors and great demos it was action-packed. I enjoyed every minute of DevLearn 2018 and I am already looking forward to 2019.

I took a few days to gather my notes and thoughts, and I have a number of observations on DevLearn 2018. I am sure that others who attended DevLearn 2018 will highlight different topics, and acknowledging that I was only able to speak in detail with a dozen or so vendors, here are my Top Four Scientific Observations.

Whether Talent, Behavioral or Data……The Impact of Science Continues to Grow

Relevant Vendors That I Spoke With: Adobe, Allego, EdCast, Inkling, iSpring, Learning Tribes, LEO Learning, MPS Interactive, Mursion, OttoLearn, Rehearsal, Schoox, STRIVR, Valamis

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Tom Petrocelli Provides Context for IBM’s Acquisition of Red Hat

In light of yesterday’s announcement that IBM is planning to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion, we’d like to share with you some of our recent coverage and mentions of Red Hat to provide context for this gargantuan acquisition. In February, DevOps Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli explained how Red Hat’s purchase of CoreOS was transformative for…

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Why Skillsoft’s Digital Transformation Portfolio Effectively Drives Digital Readiness: A Market Milestone

 In a recently published Market Milestone, Todd Maddox, Ph.D., Learning Scientist and Research Fellow for Amalgam Insights, evaluated Skillsoft’s industry-first Digital Transformation Portfolio from a learning science perspective—the marriage of psychology and brain science. This involves evaluating the portfolio’s content and delivery to determine whether it engages psychological processes and learning systems in the brain effectively. It does. Amalgam’s overall evaluation is that Skillsoft’s Digital Transformation Portfolio is highly effective.

The digital transformation is fundamentally altering the modern workplace and is requiring companies to modify organizational structures, create new roles and develop new skill sets. This transformation affects every aspect of skill learning from “what” we need to know, “how” we need to behave, and the “feel” or awareness that we need to be effective in ever-changing digitally-driven corporate settings. Skills associated with the “what”, “how”, and “feel” are each mediated by a distinct learning system in the brain. Thus, digital readiness requires content construction and delivery that effectively engages each of these systems. Skillsoft’s Digital Transformation Portfolio meets this challenge and is poised to continue to meet this challenge as new and exciting digital technologies transform the workplace.

For more information, read the full Market Milestone.

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From Calero World Online: From TEM to ITEM: Leveraging TEM for Non-Traditional Expenses

On October 18th, I presented a webinar at Calero World Online on the future of IT cost and subscription management. In this presentation, I challenge existing telecom and IT expense management managers to accept their destiny as pilots and architects of enterprise digital subscriptions.

Telecom expense has traditionally been the most challenging of IT costs to manage. With the emergence of software-as-a-service, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and software-defined networks, the rest of the IT world is quickly catching up.

In this webinar, you will learn:

  • How the latest trends and technology are driving change to enterprise management strategies
  • How the challenges of traditional TEM and cloud expense management are similar in nature (and why TEM is a good place to start)
  • How organizations are benefiting from ITEM best practices using sample use cases

To learn more about the upcoming challenges of IT expense management, aligning technology supply to digital demand, and being the shepherd for your organization’s technology sourcing, utilization, and optimization, click here to watch this webinar on-demand.

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Allego’s Point-in-Time Video Feedback Trains People Skills in the Sales Brain

If you are in sales, you have likely heard stories similar to this on numerous occasions.

“I have been in sales for over a year now, and I just can’t seem to learn out to give an effective sales pitch. My sales manager tells me that my body language is off, and my verbal skills are unnatural and forced. I read all of the required sales training materials and I have even read other articles, books and blogs on the art of an effective pitch. My manager demonstrates how to give an effective pitch and I have watched many videos of others giving an effective pitch. I feel like I understand the material, but when I get in front of potential clients it doesn’t feel right, and they don’t react positively to me. I am at a loss and don’t know what to do…”

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ICYMI: On Demand Webinar – Four Techniques to Run AI on Your Business Data

On October 17th, I presented a webinar with Incorta’s Chief Evangelist, Matthew Halliday, on the importance of BI architectures in preparing for AI. This webinar is based on a core Amalgam Insights belief that all enterprise analytics and data science activity should be based on a shared core of trusted and consistent data so that Business Intelligence, analytics, machine learning, data science, and deep learning efforts are all based on similar assumptions and can build off each other.

While AI is beginning to impact every aspect of our consumer lives, business data-driven AI seems to be lower on the priority list of most enterprises. The struggle to understand the practical value of AI starts with the lack of ability to make business data easily accessible to the data science teams. Today’s BI tools have not kept up with this need and often are the bottlenecks that stifle innovation.

In this webinar, you will learn from Hyoun Park and Matthew Halliday about:
  • key data and analytic trends leading to the need to accelerate analytic access to data.
  • guidance for challenges in implementing AI initiatives alongside BI.
  • practical and future-facing business use cases that can be supported by accelerating analytic access to large volumes of operational data.
  • techniques that accelerate AI initiatives on your business data.

Watch this webinar on-demand by clicking here.