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.

Vendor News

AWS expanded its cloud reach in Europe including the launch of a new cloud region in Switzerland and data centers in Spain. In addition, AWS announced several partnerships including:

• a strategic agreement with IBM to make its IBM SaaS products available via the AWS marketplace, in what the two organisations are describing as a boost for supply chain digitalisation.
• a cooperation with Formula 1 to spearhead innovation and digital transformation of the sport
• the teaming-up with Duke Energy to build out cloud technologies to support Duke Energy’s grid-planning solutions.
• a cooperation with AIQ to accelerate digital transformation in the energy sector.

Microsoft: Microsoft and NVIDIA teams will build a massive Cloud AI Computer, powered by Microsoft Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure combined with NVIDIA GPUs, networking, and a full stack of AI software to help enterprises train, deploy and scale AI, including large, state-of-the-art models.

Lockheed Martin and Microsoft announced a landmark expansion of their strategic relationship to help power the next generation of technology for the Department of Defence. They are charting a new course in the classified cloud, AI/ ML, 5G.MIL and Digital Transformation.

VMWare: VMware sales have risen to $3.2bn thanks to surging SaaS revenue.

Trend Micro: Picus Security announced integration with Trend Micro Vision One XDR – NR. This will enable joint users to automatically simulate real-world threats and ensure that detection policies are continuously tuned to identify and alert on them.

SoftwareOne news

SoftwareOne welcomes Julia Braun as Chief Human Resources Officer. Julia joined SoftwareOne from ISS Switzerland where she served as Director, People & Culture and member of the Management Board. Read more.

SoftwareOne is delighted to announce that it has achieved AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status. In addition, we have gained the AWS Financial Services competency, AWS Marketplace Skilled Consulting Partner Program membership, AWS Public Sector Partner Program membership, and AWS Security, AWS DevOps, AWS SAP and AWS Migration Competencies. Read more

Successfully moving your organization to the cloud means answering a lot of questions first: Which of my applications are the best candidates for migration? How should I prioritize? How can I migrate with minimum disruption and expense? And of course: Which cloud do I migrate to? Read more

In 2027, SAP will end its support for SAP Business Suite 7, which includes SAP ECC 6. For IT teams who have spent years honing their ECC skills and customizing their systems to perfectly fit their business needs, this poses a conundrum. Do they stay on the ECC system they know and trust or do they choose to modernize to SAP’s latest version – SAP S/4HANA? In this series of three posts, we will outline the different options you have, reflecting on the advantages of moving to SAP S/4HANA and providing some first recommendations on how to best prepare for this move.

1. ECC End of Life – What are Your Options?
2. 5 Compelling Reasons to Move to SAP S/4HANA
3. Key Decisions on Your Road to SAP S/4HANA

Software procurement and lifecycle management doesn’t come without challenges. In our work with customers, we’ve identified a few  main issues when it comes to these topics: Read more

IT Asset Management (ITAM) can be an extremely complex and difficult project to implement. Various challenges ranging from Management buy-in, limited resource, lack of spend can all make implementing a new framework difficult, time consuming and costly. This is where IEC/ISO19770-1 and the soon to be published IEC/ISO19770-10 guidance standard can help. Read more

SoftwareOneE had a big presence at AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, NV. SoftwareOne’s North American President Ashley Gaare participated in theCUBE x Women of the Cloud live panel; SoftwareOne’s Bernd Schlotter, President of Solutions and Services, and Neil Lomax, President of Software and Cloud, were interviewed live on Silicon Angle’s theCUBE; At the Apptio booth, SoftwareOne’s Director of Cloud FinOps Dan Ortman discussed the 5 Cs of FinOps. SoftwareOne was a bronze sponsor of the event and had a booth on the show floor.

Tech news

Layoffs vs. tech growth – what to expect in 2023 and beyond

There has been a recent spate of layoffs at technology firms including Amazon, HP, Salesforce, Cisco and Meta, as well as Microsoft who announced layoffs across multiple divisions. At the same time, IBM’s CEO says that tech spending is expected to grow unless catastrophe strikes the economy, while Gartner predicts worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.6 trillion in 2023 an increase of 5.1% from 2022.

Certain sectors are predicted to grow too, like the global healthcare cloud computing market which is expected to reach $ 148.19 billion by 2028 while the cloud network infrastructure market is set to expand at a stunning CAGR of ~28%.

The global Edge computing market is estimated to be worth $101.3 billion by 2027 and will shape more opportunities in the markets in 2023. This expected rise in market demand for edge computing infrastructure is being driven by AI, AR/VR, IoT and a renewed drive for 5G adoption across industries.

Another area of growth is Analytics as a service (AaaS), which is expected to see huge growth by 2027. AaaS cloud services are complete and customizable solutions for organizing, analyzing and visualizing data.

ZDNet has done a roundup of the top IT trends predicted by the major analyst firms for 2023. Read them here.

Even with the predictions of growth, the global economic uncertainties mean that CIOs need to make their technology investments deliver real results. Gartner firm has also outlined four actions that CIOs can take to accelerate the impact of their digital technology investments.