The past few years have been exciting ones for containers. All types of tools are available and a defined deployment pipeline has begun to emerge. Kubernetes and Docker have come to dominate the core technology. That, in turn, has brought the type of stability that allows for wide-scale deployments. The container ecosystem has exploded with lots of new software components that help maintain, manage, and operate container networks. Capabilities such as logging, load balancing, networking, and security that were previously the domain of system-wide software and appliances are now being brought into the individual application as components in the container cluster.
Open Source has played a big part in this process. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or CNCF, has projects for all things container. More are added every day. That is in addition to the many other open source projects that support container architectures. The ecosystem just keeps growing.
In a recently published Market Milestone, Todd Maddox, Ph.D., Learning Scientist and Research Fellow for Amalgam Insights, evaluated Allego’s Point-in-Time Video Feedback offering from a learning science perspective—the marriage of psychology and brain science. This involves evaluating the offering to determine whether it engages psychological processes and learning systems in the brain effectively. Amalgam’s overall evaluation is that Allego’s Point-in-Time Video Feedback offering is highly effective.
Allego’s Point-in-Time Video Feedback offering allows feedback to be inserted and embedded throughout the sales professionals’ videotaped pitch. This feedback can be targeted and specific to some aspect of the pitch at that point-in-time. From a learning science perspective, the sales professional can visualize themselves and “relive” the experience giving the pitch and can receive corrective feedback on the fly. This simulates real-time, interactive feedback and is much more effective at engaging the appropriate people skills brain regions than receiving feedback at the end of the pitch. It is also scalable, which is a serious challenge for truly interactive offerings.
Simulating Learning Processes in the Brain With AI/ML
Key Stakeholders: Chief Learning Officers, Chief Human Resource Officers, Learning and Development Directors and Managers, Corporate Trainers, Content and Learning Product Managers.
Why It Matters: The skills necessary for success in the corporate world are varied and include hard skills, people skills and situational awareness. While L&D is embracing the use of AI/ML to analyze learners’ data and to personalize learning paths, curate effective content, and attempt to better engage learners, what L&D has failed to embrace is the application of AI/ML to model each of these distinct learning systems, and their interactions.
Top Takeaway: Corporate learning vendors would be well served to develop AI/ML models that capture the processing characteristics of the three learning systems in the brain known to mediate hard skills, soft skills, and situational awareness learning. A comprehensive AI/ML model that captured the processing characteristics of each of these three distinct learning systems could be used to develop and test products and tools that optimize content curation, learning paths, engagement, and delivery processes that will differ substantially across systems and tasks to be learned.
Vendors with the Skillset and Expertise to Build this AI/ML Tool: Cornerstone, CrossKnowledge, IBM, Infor, LTG, Oracle, Saba, Salesforce, SAP, Workday, and likely many others.
Leveraging Brain Science to Build a Modern Learning Ecosystem
Key Stakeholders: Chief Learning Officers, Chief Human Resource Officers, Learning and Development Directors and Managers, Corporate Trainers, Content and Learning Product Managers.
Why It Matters: Many companies today aim to deliver a more modern learning experience to their employees, but they’ve already invested heavily in a Learning Management System (LMS) or other tools that may lack some of the learner engagement and content curation features that can be found in emerging Learning Experience Platforms. They need a hybrid solution that provides services associated with a modern Learning Experience Platform that can be integrated with their existing LMS. Continue reading The Scientific Case for Augmenting Learning Management Systems with Percipio Experience Services
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.
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.
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 Oracle is trying very hard to be one of the cool open source kids. They have spent money, both in for product development and acquisition, to build up their open source portfolio. This is what I saw front and center at Oracle OpenWorld.
When many IT professionals think about Oracle, they think about their flagship enterprise database. That’s fair since Oracle is still the clear leader in industrial strength databases. They are continuing to evolve the database platform with the Autonomous Database. Oracle is also well known for their enterprise applications especially ERP and CRM. The Oracle technology and product portfolio, however, is large and extends much further than the database and enterprise application categories. The cloud has given Oracle the opportunity to extend even further into emerging technology such as serverless or blockchain. It was also an opportunity to adopt open source technology across the board.
Open source, for example, is clearly on the minds of Oracle executives. Larry Ellison himself talked briefly about open source in his keynote. That’s a tectonic shift for Oracle. It can no longer be said that it is just a few people inside the company giving lip service to it. Oracle Cloud has embraced Docker containers with the Oracle Container Engine, and Kubernetes with the Oracle Kubernetes Engine. What was remarkable was that they are deploying unforked versions of these technologies. By deploying unforked i.e. standard versions of container images and Kubernetes, Oracle is demonstrating that they are not trying to turn these technologies into proprietary Oracle software that cannot be migrated to other cloud services or platforms. Instead, they are betting that large enterprise customers will want to run containers on the Oracle Cloud platform, which emphasizes security and reliability. In addition, they also believe that customers will want more automation to make enterprise cloud infrastructure easier to manage. These are Oracle’s strengths and are well suited to enterprise customers with complex applications.
Oracle is also heavily vested in important open source projects. One such project, Fn, is a project to develop serverless technology that can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud. What is remarkable is that they began this as an open source project before commercialization. This differs from some other Oracle open source projects, such as OpenJDK, which first came out of a commercial product, the Oracle Java VM. Fn is also the basis for Oracle Functions, Oracle’s serverless offering. Even here, they are taking an open approach by using the standard, unforked Fn so that Fn functions are not locked into the Oracle Cloud platform. Again, Oracle believes that customers will eventually decide on Oracle Functions because of the reliability and security of their cloud but they aren’t forcing customers into it.
OpenJDK is arguably one of the most strategic open source projects that Oracle is involved in. It is the project that is developing the next generations of the Java language and platform. Oracle has a commercial version of the VM but it is differentiated through service and support, not additional features. The IT community has a right to be a bit leery of the true openness of OpenJDK, especially given Oracle’s history with the platform, but their approach is strictly open source. Some of the upcoming OpenJDK features currently in the pipeline are designed to make Java a more competitive language while still maintaining the concurrency and typesafe features that have made Java the language of choice for secure, performance-oriented enterprise applications. Project Amber, for example, is trying to reduce the amount of code a developer has to type by inferring more from the code itself. The reduction in the ceremonials alone will make Java a more efficient and modern language. Project Loom, on the other hand, is building out a lightweight concurrency system for those instances where Threads are too resource intensive and OS level concurrency isn’t necessary.
More than Oracle’s products and contributions to projects, it is clear that the attitudes within the company have changed. Speaking with Oracle executives about open source sounds more like talking to Google or Red Hat. They are not losing the focus on automation, reliability, and security, which is why large enterprises do business with Oracle. They are, instead, trying to make open source fit the enterprise better. This, for Oracle, is the path to success.
As someone who has been in the IT industry a long time, I know that we can be tribal and chauvinistic about companies. Sins of the past and impressions from years ago form our opinions about what companies offer. Thirty years ago, Oracle and Microsoft were the cool kids on the block and IBM was my father’s IT provider. Unfortunately, we miss out on opportunities when we divide companies into the old and the new. It’s time to consider that a company such as Oracle could change and might have embraced the open source movement.
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
To learn more about the state of Enterprise Free Open Source Software and the state of DevOps, make sure you continue to follow Tom Petrocelli on this website and his Twitter account.
Internally, Amalgam Insights has been discussing why IBM chose to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion dollars fairly intensely. Our key questions included: