Slack and AWS recently announced a new partnership that will see the productivity service adopt Amazon’s Chime backend, with Amazon offering Slack services to all employees. It’s a big partnership for both parties, but does it signal broader intentions to eventually absorb Slack into Amazon? The implications are huge.
Cisco SecureX Reaches General Availability | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 17, 2020
Cisco announces that its SecureX platforms becomes generally available on June 30th, GitHub will change repository names from “master” to “main”, and Intel integrates CET into Tiger Lake CPUs. All this and the rest of the IT news of the week on the Gestalt IT Rundown, streaming live at 12:30pm ET every Wednesday.
Ep. 6: Why Microsoft’s Embrace of Open Source Feels Weird
If you only paid attention to IT in the last five years, you’d think Microsoft is one of the premier voices in the open source community. From owning GitHub to developing on Android and making major contributions to open source projects, the company seems to be a stalwart open source citizen. Then why do so many people still conjure up images of the “evil empire” when it comes to the company? Microsoft has had a long history of hostility to open source, going back almost to the very founding of the company. Let’s look into the history and find out why this embrace of open source feels so weird.
Russia’s Elbrus And The Custom Silicon Future
There seems to be a state-sponsored push for countries to develop their own custom silicon solutions. Dr. Ian Cutress at Anandtech recently highlighted some new information about Russia’s Elbrus VLIW design. This has been used in the country for several years, but new information shows how its approaching binary translation of x86 code, and indicating it may have its roots in SPARC.
The Advantages of Virtual Events
With COVID-19 travel restrictions not looking like they’re easing any time in 2020, virtual events will be the order of the day for the foreseeable future. While it’s easy to focus on what is lost by meeting virtually rather than in person, but in a recent CTO Advisor video, Keith Townsend and Greg Ferro discuss why virtual events have many benefits for both organizers and attendees.
NetApp Buys Spot.io | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 10, 2020
NetApp buys Spot.io, VMware gets LastLine, IBM exits the facial recognition business, and Slack cozies up to AWS. Tom Hollingsworth and Rich Stroffolino discuss all this and more of the IT news of the week on the Gestalt IT Rundown.
Microsoft Containerizes Office with Fluid
Microsoft has a long history with productivity software, but on the collaboration front, there’s a perception that they’ve fallen behind, or at least are only keeping up, with rivals. At Microsoft Build 2020, they previewed Fluid, a new document type that attempts to containerize the core functions of collaboration and sharing in a way they’ve never done before.
Ep. 5: Virtual Events Are More Than “Good Enough”
To say virtual events have become common in 2020 is an almost criminal case of understatement. For almost every event, there don’t seem to be other options given the current pandemic. That’s why it’s so shocking to see events being planned for physical events like the CTA did when they said CES 2021 was going forward in Vegas. That got Rich Stroffolino thinking, why are we so quick to jump back into physical events? Is it just a craving for any type of normalcy? What are the actual advantages? And why are we so quick to turn away from the very real advantages of our virtual event reality?
Cisco Postpones Cisco Live | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 3, 2020
This week we’re doing a headlines only version of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Cisco announced it is postponing Cisco Live, ThousandEyes and Edgewise Networks are acquires, OpenAI details a new learning model, and Zoom will provide end-to-end encryption to only paid users.
Ep. 4: Why is the Enterprise the Home for “Dead” AR?
It seems like the lifecycle for a wearable augmented reality product is to release an impressive tech demo, raise a ton of venture funding, utterly fail to attract consumers, then quietly pivot to the enterprise. While media coverage may be quick to declare these platforms “dead,” many of the most notable are thriving within the much less visible enterprise market. What is it about AR that makes it so hard to sell to consumers, yet attractive to large organizations?