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In today’s cloud-native, AI-driven world, CIOs are navigating unprecedented levels of IT complexity. Hybrid architectures, sprawling microservices, and ever-changing user expectations have pushed traditional monitoring tools beyond their limits. As a result, many organizations face blind spots, escalating costs, and slow incident resolution—issues that can directly impact revenue and customer experience. Today’s CIOs face several core observability challenges that complicate performance management and digital transformation efforts, including: Cost management: Without full visibility into app and infrastructure performance, IT leaders struggle to spot inefficiencies, driving up cloud spend and slowing time to value. IT complexity: Distributed systems make it difficult to pinpoint root causes, which delays troubleshooting and frustrates users. Tool sprawl: Many teams rely on a patchwork of monitoring tools, each focused on different layers of the stack. This results in fragmented insights and operational inefficiency. Cloud challenges: Cloud-native applications are dynamic, with frequent changes in deployments, scaling, and configuration. Lack of observability can create blind spots and slow resolution. AI complexity: Organizations are facing AI architecture challenges around all of the above—cost for AI models, architecture complexity, multiple tools, and the need for cloud-native integration. To meet those challenges head-on, organizations need an observability solution that’s built for the scale, speed, and complexity of modern IT. IBM’s Instana can help monitor AI: it’s a full-stack, AI-powered observability platform designed for today’s hybrid and multicloud environments. With high-fidelity, single-second granularity and real-time context across applications, infrastructure, and services, Instana delivers continuous visibility without slowing down development or burdening operations. “With cloud and AI driven architectures growing more complex by the hour, static monitoring tools can’t keep up,” says IBM CTO Isabell Sippli. “Instana gives teams a live view into everything from infrastructure to user experience so organizations can spot issues early, reduce downtime, and keep innovation moving at full speed.” Unlike static tools that only monitor infrastructure metrics, Instana provides deep, automated observability across containers, microservices, APIs, and user experiences. It complements native tools like Amazon CloudWatch by going beyond logs and metrics to provide true application performance monitoring, dynamic dependency mapping, and AI-powered root cause analysis. The value of enhanced observability Instana doesn’t only show what’s happening, it also explains why. Powered by IBM’s watsonx technology, Instana leverages agentic AI for its Intelligent Incident Investigation and casual AI to identify the probable root cause of an incident to detect, diagnose, and resolve application performance issues, reducing downtime and enhancing system reliability. By combining summarization, root cause analysis, prescriptive recommendations, and automation, it empowers IT teams to proactively manage complex environments with greater speed and precision. It has been shown to reduce mean time to resolution by up to 70%. Organizations using Instana have experienced a wide range of benefits, including a 60% reduction in revenue-impacting incidents, a 90% decrease in troubleshooting time, and 99.99% application uptime. “The power of Instana is how quickly it connects the dots, and either does the next step, or recommends it,” Sippli says. “Instead of drowning in alerts, organizations get clear, actionable insights so they can spend less time guessing and searching, and more time building solutions.” With built-in integrations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions like EC2, EKS, Lambda, and DynamoDB, and monitoring for Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker, Instana accelerates cloud migrations and ongoing optimization efforts. Together with AWS, Instana delivers not only deep technical integration but also AI monitoring and flexible deployment options that meet the needs of diverse IT environments. Organizations, such as those in highly regulated industries, can choose to self-host. They can deploy Instana directly from AWS Marketplace. Enterprises with strict data residency or compliance requirements can quickly start with the SaaS version. The strategic partnership between IBM and AWS also helps customers simplify procurement, consolidate billing, and apply purchases toward their AWS committed spend via the Marketplace. Instana is also an AWS Cloud Operations Software Competency Partner, making it one of the most trusted options for observability in AWS environments. As digital transformation accelerates, observability can no longer be an afterthought. With IBM Instana, CIOs gain the real-time visibility, automation, and intelligence they need to manage complexity, reduce costs, and drive innovation across the business. Delve deeper into how IBM Instana accelerates end to end observability and visibility into your AWS environments. source

Cloud adoption in 2025 continues to surge, with over 94% of enterprises worldwide now relying on cloud services to run critical workloads, and hybrid or multi-cloud strategies deployed in more than 80% of large organizations (source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report). Security, compliance, and cost optimization remain chief concerns for CIOs and IT leaders as they shift business applications from legacy systems to modern cloud environments. Managed cloud services have become essential for organizations looking to maximize uptime, modernize their infrastructures, strengthen regulatory posture, and accelerate digital transformation. VMware Cloud Service Providers collectively operate thousands of data centers across the globe, millions of production workloads, handling everything from regulated workloads in healthcare and finance to dynamic, AI-driven processes in retail and manufacturing. Customers value not only the rock-solid underlying infrastructure but also the operational excellence, local expertise, and flexible engagement models these providers deliver. The power of partnership: Core customer value from VCSP managed services 1. Deep consulting expertise and end-to-end cloud delivery VCSPs don’t just “run the cloud”; they act as hands-on advisors, helping organizations design, build, migrate, and continuously optimize cloud operations across virtualized, containerized, and AI-powered workloads. “We are really focused on consulting … designing infrastructures, implementing, operating and managed services. And, we are really proud to be a VMware partner … we have the knowledge and the experience to develop it and help the customer. So that’s very unique. There’s not many service providers who do that end to end kind of capacity.”Lars-Gobel – Chief Commercial Officer – evoila GMBH – Link to showcase Think of VCSPs as an extension of your IT team’s capabilities, offering multi-lingual support across verticals from banking and insurance to retail and the public sector, and helping you find the right cloud in the right country for your business needs. 2. Flexible, co-managed, and sovereign service models Modern businesses, especially those in regulated sectors, require sovereignty, compliance, and flexibility. VCSPs excel at multi-dimensional delivery models: from full outsourcing to “managed service light” where companies retain control and gradually increase provider involvement as needed. “A lot of companies … are not ready to do outsourcing … What they look for is …to stay within responsibility, but they need a partner who’s helping them to fulfill the requirement and to deliver, take care that SLA is working, and so on. And that’s something we fit in with our managed service light … customers still have their permissions and rights in the infrastructure.”Lars-Gobel – Chief Commercial Officer – evoila GMBH Certified for standards such as GDPR and BSI C5, providers like plusserver offer customers the assurance of data residency, regulatory compliance, and geo-redundancy—all within national borders. “We are a GDPR compliant provider. We have four data centers, all based in Germany and geo redundant set up. Our cloud services are tested and certified according to BSI, C5 … a very high-level certification that keeps customers happy that it’s all compliant.”Katarina Cordes – Product Director – plusserver – Link to showcase 3. Scale, security, and zero-downtime migrations Whether you’re an SME or a major enterprise, VCSPs scale their offerings, delivering managed services and migration projects from dozens to thousands of VMs, including support for the largest production environments in Europe. “We have customers starting from a handful of virtual machines, up to our largest customers, which are up to several thousands of VMs. I think we are currently running one of the largest NSX deployments in Europe … In our private cloud offering, we are doing micro segmentation by default because I think it’s zero trust … It’s something which will massively increase your security.”Marcel Mertens – Product Manager, Private Cloud Services – Arvato Systems – Link to Showcase The real-world customer story: massive migrations completed at scale with zero downtime, rigorous governance, and meticulous documentation. “We are running the IT infrastructure for … around 8 million citizens in Germany … Before Kubus was running their very own old data center, and they had problems … We did it (migrated) in around 15 months migrating around … 20,000 or 15,000 virtual machines … with zero downtime, around, I think 19PB of data … in a short time period and tough environment … most importantly, zero downtime.”Marcel Mertens – Product Manager Private Cloud Services – Arvato Systems 4. Sustainability and innovation as a standard It’s not just about the cloud, it’s about responsible, future-proof IT. VCSPs design for sustainability from the ground up, using renewable energy and innovative cooling technologies to minimize carbon footprint. “We are cost effective by design, and we are very sustainable by design … using unique water cooling technology … a key thing for customers who are looking to minimize their carbon footprint as part of their corporate goals.”Eric Chambriard – VP Sales Strategic Alliances – OVHcloud – Link to showcase Providers are often carbon-neutral or negative, supporting clients in hitting greenhouse gas targets, and reinvesting in R&D and new capabilities from private AI to edge computing. 5. Consulting, migration, and ongoing support, all under one roof Migration complexity, compliance documentation, and service enablement are genuine customer challenges. VCSPs uniquely serve as a “one-stop shop,” from readiness assessments and consulting to onboarding, migration, placement, and optimization, all delivered with a human touch. “What I really highly recommend is, and what we love is to get really in touch with our customers to do, a physical, visit in our one of our data centers … where you really can see where your data is … you will benefit from this comprehensive consulting when it comes to what is the right setup for your status quo, but also for your future.”Katarina Cordes – Product Director – plusserver VCSPs are not just technology vendors; they are long-term business partners, innovation enablers, and strategic advisors. If your goals include cloud agility, regulatory confidence, sustainable operations, and the ability to focus your team’s time on what matters most, there’s a VCSP solution perfect for you. “We really want to provide all choices for our

AI is already spurring CIOs to rethink how they run IT departments, invest in technology platforms, and digitally transform businesses. But a clear-eyed view of IT’s future remains elusive. source

It’s naive to think employees won’t use this tool at their fingertips. And why shouldn’t they? AI has proven time and time again that it can be extremely useful for time savings, idea generation or finding the building blocks to get started. But it’s also imperfect, and while useful for many tasks, it needs to be reviewed with a critical eye. Rather than an end-to-end solution, think of AI as a high-functioning intern — eager to perform and please, but can’t yet go unchecked. 5. Don’t assume AI has no agenda, is unbiased and rational In a much more inglorious way than scary, rebellious AGI taking over humanity, the technology companies that control AI development are not always free of political and commercial agendas. As such, these agendas can find ways to bleed into AI responses.  Even if you’ve managed to avoid the pitfalls of biased responses, the risk of hallucination still looms large. OpenAI’s own research shows that o3 and o4-mini models hallucinate 33% and 48% of the time, respectively. Again, while probably benign in personal use, a bank deciding whether to give someone a loan, taking into consideration factors like name, race and zip code, could have negative and harmful results.  source

Tableau, we might be using Power BI, but what’s, what’s the capability we really need, and are we using the right tool for the right thing? Because if we’re just visualizing some data in Excel, there’s probably a way to do it, rather than if you join in data together from different sources, etc. So it was really then looking to rationalize the the amount of systems we had delivering the capability. So that’s where we had to take the business on, on this journey with us, because it would involve them potentially changing the systems that they used. We know people get very precious about the systems that they use. They know it. They love it. They understand it. I don’t want to change it. Thank you very much. Even though that thing’s cheaper, they they don’t, they don’t necessarily like change. So actually saying that the end to end processes could be streamlined across the business. We can reduce complexity in the landscape. We can reduce cost of delivery of that to the business from an IT perspective, that gives us more money to invest in other things or future ready in our organization as well. It’s been a huge journey, but now, when I hear the business talking about we need to add this capability to the road map, and it is a true capability, and we use Lean IX and the the manufacturing model within there, I feel like I felt when the first time my daughter said please or thank you, and I didn’t have to nudge her, it’s almost like, oh yeah, they’ve learned the language. They know what to do, and they know how to do it. And that makes me feel, you know, really proud that that they’re there, and it’s taking them on that journey and explaining, rather than telling, you have to sort of explain the benefit. So what’s in it for them all the time? Not why it’s better. It strategy, yeah. And, I mean, I always it sounds like it’s very inspirational. And, you know, I always reference the IT Crowd, you know, the two guys and the woman in the base, girl in the basement. It’s like, have you tried turning it on and off again? I guess also in that roadmap, the capabilities changed, you know, especially post covid, of like, not them asking you, you know, how do I fix this? But more like, how do we build our business capabilities, right? And it’s not about just calling down to you, saying, hey, what do I do? You’re like, saying here, this is the road map we want to build, and this is how things fit together to create business excellence, yeah. And when, when we look, and we look at some of the larger enterprise systems, we’ve probably got the capability already there that we could switch these 10 things off over here, just use something we’ve already got, yeah, and make things even better for the business. So that’s been something. We’ve been working really closely with our sort of strategic partners in in those spaces. To say, you need to come on this journey with us, because actually we will then be a real, sort of success story for you to help define your products as well. To say, here’s how we added value. So I’ve been pulling everyone in. I’ve been pulling our partners in, as well as, as well as, as well as the business to to get us there. And it’s, it’s, it’s hard. I’m not going to say it’s, it is a hard thing to go on, but you just have to start. It’s like with everything, everything’s hard when you first start. Yeah, yeah, especially when it’s new, when you’re changing languages and ways of working, especially when the person doing it doesn’t know anything about building cars, you’re always going to get potentially a little bit more resistance, yeah, but that’s you need lots of persistence and patience. Yeah. Fantastic. source

Innovation complacency  Your competitors move fast. Your customers expect more. If you’re clinging to old systems, dismissing new tools, or avoiding digital transformation because “we’ve always done it this way,” you’re writing your obituary.  Legacy is not strategy. It’s a warning. Why do leaders fail?  Not because they lack skill. But because they stop looking for the cracks.  Leadership failure doesn’t happen overnight. It builds quietly. A bit of pride. A missed cue. A strategy that sounded smarter than it was. A blind spot no one dared to point out.  If you want to avoid it, start with this:  Audit yourself. Honestly.  Build a culture that talks back.  Create feedback loops that sting but save you.  And never assume success today will protect you tomorrow.  Because the best leaders don’t pretend to be flawless. They know precisely where their flaws could start fires. And they keep the extinguisher close. This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.Want to join? source

Canadian organizations are under pressure to do more with less. Labor shortages, rising customer expectations, and accelerating digital demands are creating a perfect storm—one that requires smarter strategies, not just more people. Increasingly, Canadian enterprises are turning to generative AI (genAI) to help close the gap. By transforming how teams access, interact with, and manage content, genAI is unlocking productivity, improving service delivery, and turning information into insight. OpenText is helping Canadian organizations lead this transformation with a trusted, pragmatic approach—starting with the content layer. Empowering people with AI AI isn’t replacing people—it’s amplifying them. According to research by Foundry, 76% of IT and business leaders believe genAI will enhance existing roles, while 68% expect it to create entirely new ones. Only 24% see it as a job eliminator. “Canadian innovation is pragmatic,” says Peter Theocharis, president of sales at OpenText Canada. “It’s about enabling people to thrive with the right tools.” That means automating repetitive tasks, improving access to institutional knowledge, and giving employees the insights they need to make faster, better decisions. OpenText is leading by example: Every team member now has an AI fluency goal as part of their development objectives, ensuring AI skills are as foundational as digital literacy. Content management meets AI The content layer is where genAI delivers immediate value. Rather than functioning as passive repositories, modern content systems are becoming intelligent information ecosystems. Organizations are using genAI to extract insights, generate summaries, automate document creation, and tailor content to different audiences. Today, 81% of enterprises are already integrating genAI into their content workflows. The top reported benefits include better collaboration (42%), faster content creation (32%), and improved customer experiences (34%). For sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services, these gains translate into faster response times, more accurate information delivery, and stronger citizen and client engagement. Real business value The payoff isn’t just theoretical. Organizations using genAI in advanced ways are saving an average of 2.9 hours per employee per day, seeing 23% in cost reductions, and reporting 30% increases in productivity. OpenText ensures that this transformation is not only impactful, but secure and compliant. “Our approach embeds genAI directly into the information layer,” says Theocharis. “That allows our customers to unlock value while maintaining data sovereignty, auditability, and control.” With localized data residency options and modular AI services, OpenText gives Canadian enterprises the flexibility to scale responsibly while aligning with their privacy, ethical, and regulatory requirements. The way forward The future of work in Canada isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about removing the limits that hold them back. A limitless workforce starts with access to the right information, at the right time, in the right context. With genAI-powered content management, Canadian organizations are building more resilient teams, modernizing service delivery, and reimagining what’s possible—safely and at scale. OpenText is proud to be their partner in that journey. Book a meeting with us today. Contact Us | OpenText Canada source

Overview Cassie Shum, VP of Field Engineering at RelationalAI, joins host Keith Shaw on DEMO to showcase how enterprises can unlock the power of their data using relational knowledge graphs directly within Snowflake. Learn how RelationalAI leverages generative AI, predictive analytics, and ontological modeling to tackle long-standing data challenges like governance, lineage, and semantic sprawl. Cassie walks through a live demo showing how businesses can use AI-driven reasoning to answer complex sales, supply chain, and demand planning questions — all without moving data. 📌 Highlights:* What a relational knowledge graph really is* How AI and LLMs (like ChatGPT) interact with enterprise ontologies* Real-world retail use cases: from past sales analysis to future demand prediction* Why Snowflake’s native app marketplace makes it easy to get started* Visual demos using Streamlit, Snowpark, and notebooks inside Snowflake 🔍 Try it for yourself via the Snowflake Marketplace or visit https://www.relational.ai for docs, demos, and onboarding tools. #AI #Snowflake #DataAnalytics #KnowledgeGraph #GenAI #EnterpriseTech #RelationalAI #DEMO #ChatGPT Register Now source

And with only a third of employees believing their organizations have a high level of AI literacy, while nearly two-thirds of executives do, change management efforts are sorely needed, she says. “When you’re somebody at the top of the food chain, you’ve got the best tools, the best access, the best employees on your team, you have an executive assistant, and when you can see how much you’re able to crunch and process and see and how good the insights are, it is such an eye-opener,” Habib says. “But if you’re an employee and you’re being asked to do AI as a side gig on the weekend as an extracurricular with no incentive, no extra pay, why would you do it?” Christina Inge, an instructor on AI in marketing at Harvard University, sees the AI disconnect in her business consulting work. “Leaders often believe their AI strategy is effective because they’ve invested in tools or set policies,” she says. “But many employees … are the ones navigating tool limitations, workflow friction, and a lack of practical training or access.” source

Product owners focus on what can be built in a given timeframe, not always on why it matters. Project managers report on risk, scope, and timeline not whether the work is still solving the original business case.  Sponsors often disengage post-launch, trusting that delivery equals success.  The result? Delivery is moving “blindly” with no formal role that monitors whether the change is still solving the problem it set out to solve. Even worse, post-launch measurement usually focuses on usage, not value.  It’s easy to conflate usage with success, but the two aren’t always aligned. A system might be accessed daily, yet fail to influence decision-making or reshape workflows. High adoption can lull teams into believing change has occurred, when in fact, the status quo persists. Delivery might mark a milestone, but it doesn’t guarantee the transformation is real or lasting.  When no one is tasked with staying aligned with the original problem we set out to solve, it becomes all too easy for delivery to disconnect.  source