Working remotely or working at the office? Choices for the modern workplace. Photo: Tom Foremski The Omicron surge has forced businesses to again delay a date for a return to the office. And that means a delay to an inevitable showdown: between workers and managers over remote or office-based work. To a degree, every business will have by now adapted to the reality of a hybrid workplace and the fact some staff will remain home-based while others will come back to the office.  Any business that cannot offer a hybrid workplace will face problems in recruitment during this worker shortage. And problems in developing in-house, the skills of managing a modern workforce. HOME MONITORS For work at home advocates the future looks rosy. With the current jobs boom it looks certain that they’ll get what they want – either at their current employer — or somewhere else.  But will workers agree to allow their employer to monitor their home office activities? Is it something that can be refused or not? How is the home different from the office where people can be seen to be working at their desks, engaged in meetings, and logging into their IT systems?  Do remote workers have a right to refuse to be monitored?  Digital.com released a survey late last year that found widespread use of remote worker monitoring software especially in IT (77%) and advertising (83%).  One in seven workers hadn’t been told about it.  Working from home might not be such a wonderful thing when you consider that people worked harder – a 10% boost in productivity was reported in the survey after the software was installed.  REMOTE WORKER ANXIETY Being away from the office can be very isolating and cause anxiety by being out of the informal communication loops. Further anxiety comes from the jobs that aren’t hourly paid – how many hours is enough to prove your worth? You’ll be competing against the unknown productivity of your colleagues.   You’ll feel pressured to go the extra distance especially since 88% of employers said they had fired people based on their remote work reports. Work from home might even become the norm for some organizations because if done right, they get a lot more productivity – and also they can confidently outsource some of their operations for big savings.  The home could easily become a dismal backwater for remote workers, always-on and always watching. I’d rather leave all that at the office, imho.  See also: source

Choice Is A Mirage Well, sort of. Customers still want choice, and networking vendors claim to offer it. But this isn’t my first rodeo. When I see “choice” claims from vendors, I see it as just marketing’s way of saying that it’s a messy product portfolio. I’m not innocent. When I worked at Cisco and HP ProCurve, I mentioned “choice” during briefings and presentations countless times. At one point or another, every single traditional networking vendor used the tagline to make up the excuse for having multiple product lines. In reality, it’s just the aftermath of internal developments or acquisitions. To react quickly to market changes, vendor execs find it quicker and easier to do one of the following: 1) develop a new product with almost zero backward compatibility with previous hardware or solutions, instead of evolving an existing one that supports a seamless transition, such as Huawei’s first- and second-generation Wi-Fi or 2) buy another company, such as Juniper Networks’ acquisition of Mist Systems. There is nothing wrong with companies starting new product lines or acquiring companies to expand their portfolio. These tactics should give customers choices on different architectures or approaches to solving a problem based on their needs or abilities. But customers don’t actually get a real choice, because it’s too costly for vendors to manage two or more product lines that produce the same results. Most of the time, the vendors are offering: 1) a new product line with new capabilities that will be supported for a long time with new enhancements and 2) a legacy solution with a short shelf life. As an example, in the past networking vendors retired their controllerless product lines in favor of controller-based ones. To actually deliver on choice, customers expect to be able to choose solutions with all things being equal, such as support, longevity, future feature enhancement, etc., between the product lines. Why Bring This Up? Early this year, I commented on the HPE and Juniper acquisition. I said that Juniper was bringing HPE many components (such as a data-center-quality switch and operating system, cloud-based management system, sophisticated networking AI, and telecom product line). But there was a lot of overlap between the two companies, and ultimately, executives should eliminate a lot of product lines, mostly on the Aruba side. It seems that I’m not the only one with this opinion. I’ve spoken with technology teams at retailers, hoteliers, and manufacturers that have or are in the process of considering these vendors; they’ve reinforced their concerns about the longevity of the product lines from HPE and Juniper. And most recently, Cisco’s CFO reiterated this in a SDxCentral article by saying that the market was showing some uncertainty with those vendors. And although we are quick to dismiss competitive conjecture, this claim seems to have some merit. Since the announcement, Arista Networks has seen their networking revenue grow quarter-over-quarter for the last two quarters; Cisco and Huawei grew their network product revenue this last quarter while Juniper and HPE Aruba have declined for the past two straight quarters. While HPE and Juniper can’t get into the specifics around the future of product lines due to regulatory constraints, is HPE acknowledging the problem of overlap? No. HPE executives are doubling down on the importance of customer choice rather than acknowledging there is any overlap or the overlap as problematic. Like it or not, tough decisions will need to be made and the Band-Aid must be ripped off. This is a critical time for many networking organizations, and bad investments can cripple digital initiatives. These orgs are amid three major transitions: virtual network infrastructure (VNI), business-optimized networks (BONs), and blending security and networking together into Zero Trust edge (ZTE). To land these transformations, organizations must empower business units and non-IT employees to manage networks via a businesswide networking fabric. The emergence of businesswide networking fabrics to support digital businesses requires cloud-based management solutions, augmented by AI, for local area networks (LAN), wireless, wide area networks (WAN), and cloud networks. Networking teams don’t have the resources, skills, or time to try to make different products from the same vendor, such as HPE Aruba Central, Juniper Apstra, and Juniper Mist, work together with half a dozen operating systems. Case in point? ZTE. Customers are tired of integrating security and network solutions. They are opting for solutions that blend these capabilities together. This is why HPE and Juniper competitors’ networking has made major changes in their strategies: Cisco has started to pivot and is combining once-disparate product lines under Meraki and its data center cloud management system. Extreme Networks has been quietly doing the same thing over the last five years by integrating Avaya, Enterasys, Extreme, Brocade, and Foundry, to name a few, into Extreme’s single-cloud-based management for wired and wireless. Many business and technology leaders are realizing that the network is critical to the success of business digitalization and need strategic partners to ensure a BON. Strategic vendors should not only provide more products and assistance during a business boom but also help eliminate waste and unused infrastructure during times of operational changes, such as infrastructure alterations. A partnership includes mutual vulnerability and risk-sharing. HPE and Juniper must do better than providing choice, or they will be left behind. The new executive team after the merger needs to be up-front about the future of product lines since the current executives can’t do it until the deal closes because of regulatory rules. Customers know that certain ones will go away, so to be a good strategic, not transactional, partner, HPE should work with customers to create a transition plan that fairly balances the cost to customers for the disruption and evolution that the HPE-Juniper merger is creating. I daresay networking hasn’t been this exciting in years. Keep an eye out for the report, “The State Of IT Networks, 2024.” It should be on the website in a few weeks. And as always, please share your thoughts with me. If you are a Forrester client

“Key Highlights from the 2023 CIO Sentiment Survey” by Mona Liddell provides key insights to understanding the operational dynamics and strategic directions of IT organizations. In this blog, we’ll cover four that rise to the surface. Let’s dive in to some of them! Firstly, let’s discuss Digital Transformation (DX). While integrated, continuous enterprise-wide DX strategies once took the spotlight, organizations are now leaning towards shorter-term approaches. This shift may stem from factors like organizational learning curves, economic uncertainty, or the aftermath of global disruptions, such as the ongoing recovery from the pandemic. Figure 1 shows significant growth in organizations who have transformed or are integrated than over the previous year. Almost 65% were in the transformed or integrated maturity groups versus even a year previous where it was only 45% – an almost 45% increase. Next on the agenda is Generative AI (GenAI), a topic sparking both excitement and caution. While about 32% of IT organizations have already adopted GenAI, a considerable number are still either not investing or only developing the use cases. This means these more conservative organizations are not developing the skills, building the data platforms, or examining the competitive advantages GenAI can provide. IDC recommends piloting GenAI as a way to understand the potential business benefits, develop governance structures, and identify gaps within the organization to deliver its potential. Efforts can start with the simplest use cases, such as productivity, before expanding to functional and industry use cases. GenAI isn’t a fad, like NFTs or the metaverse. It is a sea change on the level of the ’80s PC revolution and the ’00s smart phone transformation. A notable 22% of organizations are already adapting to the emergence of GenAI by actively changing their hiring plans. These companies may be creating new roles to leverage the early benefits of GenAI.  Meanwhile, cybersecurity remains a perennial concern, with varying investment priorities across organizations of different sizes. Both midmarket and large enterprises struggle to recruit cybersecurity talent, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Larger enterprises due to more resources are less affected by this cybersecurity skill gap, but still struggle. The question organizations need to consider is whether creative solutions can help bridge the gap, like using GenAI tools to summarize security alerts for less experienced staff, retraining existing staff, implementing robust internship programs, machine learning, and moving from discrete applications to a platform approach to security to simplify security management. Technical debt poses another challenge, with a majority of organizations failing to allocate adequate resources or establish formal processes for its management. While a majority of organizations allocate a small portion (12.8% average) of their IT budget to reduce technical debt, a significant number (79%) do not have formal processes for tracking and reporting this debt. This gap in tracking and reporting could affect the strategic planning and alignment of IT initiatives with business objectives. It also reflects a need for more structured reporting and management practices to ensure that technical debt is accounted for in executive decision-making. However, amidst these challenges, there’s a silver lining: widespread adoption of cloud-based solutions and virtualization as integral parts of digital transformation endeavors. These insights prompt several recommendations: Balance Short and Long-Term DX Strategies: Maintain equilibrium between short-term necessities and long-term digital roadmaps. Establish agile practices that allow for rapid adaptation between immediate market demands and long-term digital evolution to help ensure that short-term shifts don’t disrupt the broader business goals of the organization. Develop a Strategic Approach to GenAI Adoption: Plan strategically, incorporating governance principles and adoption roadmaps. In anticipation of GenAI-driven market changes, proactively revise IT hiring strategies while also upskilling current employees to ensure alignment with the future demands of GenAI integration.  Invest in Cybersecurity Talent: Prioritize recruiting and developing cybersecurity professionals. Prioritize investments in training programs (e.g., certifications and workshops) to upskill current employees in cybersecurity practices and incorporate an internship program for fostering new talent, thereby mitigating the talent shortage by internally growing cybersecurity skills and introducing fresh perspectives through internships. Establish Formal Processes for Technical Debt Management: Implement structured processes for tracking and mitigating technical debt.. This should include regular audits of existing systems, quantification of debt, and documentation of remediation plans. Second, develop a prioritization framework to tackle technical debt, focusing on areas that yield the highest risk to the business or present opportunities for quick wins. A future tease is IDC will be releasing a methodology to assess technical debt in a report to be published in April 2024. These insights, drawn from a global survey of IT leaders, provide valuable guidance. However, it’s essential to tailor strategies to fit individual organizational contexts and needs. The findings from this survey have been exclusively depicted in an eBook for technology leaders like you. Click the button below to download the eBook now. Learn what matters most to your customers with IDC’s AI Use Case Discovery Tool—find out more. source

Marketers constantly ask how AI will shape content strategy and creation and improve business impact. Today’s announcement that Siteimprove is acquiring MarketMuse provides one potential answer, pointing to a new era with an AI-driven approach to the content lifecycle. Marketers will soon be able to create high-quality, discoverable content that engages audiences and delivers measurable business results. Integrating Content Strategy, SEO, And Accessibility Matters Despite advancements in digital marketing, many B2B marketers struggle with inefficiencies throughout the content lifecycle. Decision-making about what content to create or update often relies on subjective judgment rather than data, resulting in wasted efforts and missed opportunities to engage audiences. Content creation workflows also remain inefficient, with SEO frequently treated as an afterthought rather than a core component from the start. And without a deliberate, inclusive approach, accessibility is overlooked, preventing content from reaching its full potential. The combination of Siteimprove and MarketMuse shows promise in closing these gaps to ensure that marketers’ efforts work together and deliver higher return at a lower cost. In an AI-driven future, marketers will transform their content strategy by: Prioritizing content efforts with quality data and analysis. Platforms such as the combined Siteimprove and MarketMuse will allow you to analyze their website and search engine results, along with competitor content and rankings. With this data, you can quickly create a plan that identifies what content is needed, how much to produce, and when to update it — ensuring a more targeted and efficient content strategy. Incorporating SEO best practices into content development processes. Optimize your content for user intent, traditional search engines, and AI-powered platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. By embedding SEO throughout the content creation cycle, you make every piece of content resonate with your audience and rank effectively across both traditional and AI-driven search environments. Owning topical authority and ensuring content accessibility. Establishing your brand as a topical authority not only expands your reach but also strengthens your credibility. By combining expertise with accessibility, making your content usable by all audiences, you boost your chances of appearing in search-generative results. This dual focus on authority and inclusivity enhances brand reputation and drives conversions, ensuring that your content is both impactful and widely discoverable. Aligning cross-functional expectations with clear content briefs. Provide content creators with detailed briefs that outline specific topics, competitor insights, and strategic goals. This helps creators focus on delivering content that audiences value, rather than being left guessing, filling gaps with purpose and precision. Avoid inefficient review cycles and unnecessary rewrites with clearer direction at the content brief stage. A Case For Tech Stack Unification As generative AI reshapes what’s possible in marketing, many companies will move toward tech stack unification to streamline their processes and improve efficiency. For B2B marketers, this means consolidating the tools they use and considering whether an all-in-one platform that integrates content planning, creation, SEO, and marketing performance tracking can better meet their needs. With the combined capabilities of Siteimprove and MarketMuse, the opportunity to step into the future content lifecycle is here. Having AI-driven insights directly in the content management system empowers marketers to work with greater clarity, speed, and impact. We’re here to help you transform your content strategy and content creation process to better engage your audiences. If you’re a Forrester client and want help evaluating your tech stack, refining your workflows, or assessing your team’s readiness for AI-driven approaches to content, connect with your account team or schedule a guidance session today. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Hugging Face, the fast-growing AI startup valued at about $4.5 billion, has launched Gradio 5, a major update to its popular open-source tool for creating machine learning applications. The new version aims to make AI development more accessible, potentially speeding up enterprise adoption of machine learning technologies. Gradio, which Hugging Face acquired in 2021, has quickly become a cornerstone of the company’s offerings. With over 2 million monthly users and more than 470,000 applications built on the platform, Gradio has emerged as a key player in the AI development ecosystem. Bridging the gap: Python proficiency meets web development ease The latest version aims to bridge the gap between machine learning expertise and web development skills. “Machine learning developers are very comfortable programming in Python, and oftentimes, less so with the nuts and bolts of web development,” explained Abubakar Abid, Founder of Gradio, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Gradio lets developers build performant, scalable apps that follow best practices in security and accessibility, all in just a few lines of Python.” One of the most notable features of Gradio 5 is its focus on enterprise-grade security. Abid highlighted this aspect, telling VentureBeat, “We hired Trail of Bits, a well-known cybersecurity company, to do an independent audit of Gradio, and included fixes for all the issues that they found in Gradio 5… For Gradio developers, the key benefit is that your Gradio 5 apps will, out-of-the-box, follow best practices in web security, even if you are not an expert in web security yourself.” AI-assisted app creation: Enhancing development with natural language prompts The release also introduces an experimental AI Playground, allowing developers to generate and preview Gradio apps using natural language prompts. Ahsen Khaliq, ML Growth Lead at Gradio, emphasized the importance of this feature, saying, “Similar to other AI coding environments, you can enter a text prompt explaining what kind of app you want to build and an LLM will turn it into Gradio code. But unlike other coding environments, you can also see an instant preview of your Gradio app and run it in the browser.” This innovation could dramatically reduce the time and expertise needed to create functional AI applications, potentially making AI development more accessible to a wider range of businesses and developers. Gradio’s position in the AI ecosystem is becoming increasingly central. “Once a model is available on a hub like the Hugging Face Hub or downloaded locally, developers can wrap it into a web app using Gradio in a few lines of code,” Khaliq explained. This flexibility has led to Gradio being used in notable projects like Chatbot Arena, Open NotebookLM, and Stable Diffusion. Future-proofing enterprise AI: Gradio’s roadmap for innovation The launch of Gradio 5 comes at a time when enterprise adoption of AI is accelerating. By simplifying the process of creating production-ready AI applications, Hugging Face is positioning itself to capture a significant share of this growing market. Looking ahead, Abid hinted at ambitious plans for Gradio: “Many of the changes we’ve made in Gradio 5 are designed to enable new functionality that we will be shipping in the coming weeks… Stay tuned for: multi-page Gradio apps, navbars and sidebars, support for running Gradio apps on mobile using PWA and potentially native app support, more built-in components to support new modalities that are emerging around images and video, and much more.” As AI continues to impact various industries, tools like Gradio 5 that connect advanced technology with practical business applications are likely to play a vital role. With this release, Hugging Face is not just updating a product — it’s potentially altering the landscape of enterprise AI development. source

Cloud computing in 2021 has become  the go-to model for information technology as companies prioritize as-a-service providers over traditional vendors, accelerate digital transformation projects, and enable the new normal of work following the COVID-19 pandemic.  And while enterprises are deploying more multicloud arrangements the IT budgets are increasingly going to cloud giants. According to a recent survey from Flexera on IT budgets for 2021, money is flowing toward Microsoft Azure and its software-as-service offerings as well as Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud Platform is also garnering interest for big data and analytics workloads. But hybrid cloud and traditional data center vendors such as IBM, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and VMware have a role too.  Meanwhile, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, and Workday are battling SAP and Oracle for more wallet and corporate data share. Salesforce and ServiceNow launched successful back-to-work enablement suites and cemented positions as major platforms.  Also: The best web hosting providers: Find the right service for your site    Key themes for 2021 include: The COVID-19 pandemic and the move to remote work and video conferencing are accelerating moves to the cloud. Enterprises increasingly are seeing the cloud as a digital transformation engine as well as a technology that improves business continuity. As work was forced to go remote due to stay-at-home orders, tasks were largely done on cloud infrastructure. Collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Google Meet became cogs in the companies’ broader cloud ecosystem. Zoom not only lands subscription revenue, but also runs on cloud providers such as AWS and Oracle. Multicloud is both a selling point and an aspirational goal for enterprises. Companies are well aware of vendor lock-in and want to abstract their applications so they can be moved across clouds. The multicloud theme is being promoted among legacy vendors that have created platforms that can plug into multiple clouds — often with a heavy dose of VMware or Red Hat. (See: Multi-Cloud: Everything you need to know about the biggest trend in cloud computing and Multicloud deployments become go-to strategy as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud grab wallet share). However, multicloud deployments still boil down to an AWS vs. Azure battle.  The game is about data acquisition. The more corporate data that resides in a cloud the more sticky the customer is to the vendor. It’s no secret that cloud computing vendors are pitching enterprises on using their platforms to house data for everything from analytics to personalized experiences.  Artificial intelligence, analytics, IoT, and edge computing will be differentiators among the top cloud service providers — as will serverless and managed services.  Every flavor of cloud vendor wants to be a management layer to manage your other clouds. Public cloud vendors such as Google Cloud Platform and AWS have offerings to manage various cloud services. Traditional enterprise vendors such as Dell and HPE do too. Which platform becomes that “single pane of glass” for cloud management will be positioned well.  Sales tactics that play to fear, uncertainty, and doubt will be the norm. Right around AWS re:Invent, there appeared to be a mindshare battle in the press as the big three sniped at each other across multiple industries. Google Cloud has been hiring executives to sell into industries and has ramped its Anthos hybrid cloud effort to close its AWS and Azure sales gap. (See: What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know) There’s a sales war happening by industry. Cloud providers are going vertical to corner industries. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on public cloud providers noted that the “capability gap between hyperscale cloud providers has begun to narrow; however, fierce competition for enterprise workloads extends to secondary markets worldwide.” Indeed, the financials from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have all been strong. Gartner With that backdrop, let’s get to the 2020 top cloud computing vendors.  Infrastructure as a service Show less Amazon Web Services The leader in IaaS and branching out AWS was the early leader in public cloud computing and has become a major player in AI, database, machine learning and serverless deployments.  Show Expert Take Show less AWS was the first to offer cloud computing infrastructure as a service in 2008 and has never looked back. It’s launching new services at a breakneck pace and is creating its own compute stack that aims to be more efficient and pass those savings along. That plan isn’t likely to change as Adam Selipsky returns to become CEO of AWS as Andy Jassy takes over Amazon for Jeff Bezos. AWS has expanded well beyond cloud compute and storage. If processors based on Arm become the norm in the data center, the industry can thank the gravitational pull of AWS, which launched a second-generation Graviton processor and instances based on it. If successful, the Graviton and the Nitro abstraction layer can be the differentiator for AWS in the cloud wars.  At re:Invent 2020, a virtual conference, AWS outlined custom processor roadmap, database advances and a bey of tools that solidify its lead in the cloud market. Jassy also took aim at Microsoft Azure in his keynote as well as Oracle and touted an AWS annual revenue run rate approaching $48 billion.  While 2020 will be the year known for Amazon’s ability to deliver goods during COVID-19 lockdowns, it’s still worth noting that AWS delivers the most operating income in the company.  The biggest question is whether enterprises are going to worry about AWS’ dominance as a digital transformation enabler. For now, AWS is becoming everything from a key AI and machine learning platform to call center engine to edge compute enabler.  Some key developments include: AWS rolls out S3 Object Lambda to process data for multiple applications Amazon makes Alexa Conversations generally available AWS’ Mac EC2 instances now support macOS Big Sur Amazon AWS says ‘Very, very sophisticated practitioners of machine learning’ are moving to SageMaker AWS builds out IoT, edge computing technical building blocks AWS starts gluing the gaps between its databases Amazon AWS analytics director sees analysis spreading much more widely throughout

To assess how well brokerage firms acquire customers looking for self-directed investment accounts, we recently kicked off our first investing sales Forrester Digital Experience Review™ (DXR). We will evaluate the functionality and user experience of 13 North American websites that target new self-directed investors. This review follows those we’ve previously done for mobile app experiences in North America and desktop experiences in the US and Canada. This research will cover the first stages of the customer lifecycle: discover, evaluate, commit, and initiate (onboarding). The DXR methodology evaluates a brokerage firm’s website through the lens of a prospect who is looking to open a brokerage account, scoring the site across 26 criteria spanning four of the digital experience categories in the Forrester Customer Lifecycle Framework. As part of this research, we will also create a functionality assessment tool. Digital leaders and their teams can use this tool to identify areas for improvement in their prospects’ digital journeys. By assessing elements of the digital experience yourself, you will be able to gauge the quality of your offerings versus our criteria. A heatmap in the tool will highlight areas of strength and weakness. Here is the tool we created as part of our most recent Digital Experience Review of mobile investing apps. Forrester clients can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to discuss how they can enhance the digital functionality of their desktop and app experiences. source