Friday Tech News

9/29/2023 - GenAI This and GenAI That

Author

Phil Moroni
September 29, 2023

Good morning and Happy Friday!

As a heads up - I’m taking some PTO next week so Friday’s issue may or may not come out / be a little light in content. Depends if I sleep in 😀. I hope you’ve had a great week so far, and this week we have a ton of announcements around AI and Generative AI in general.

Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology Services Industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!

What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.

Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and, I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.

Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.

Key areas of focus for me are:

  1. Cloud Computing, Security, Trends

  2. Developer & Security Tools

  3. Networking & Infrastructure Tools

  4. Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts

If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!

Thank you for reading, and stay digitally and physically safe!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

  • Very exciting times to see what’s to come with Generative AI inclusion into the M365 ecosystem. I’m personally excited to see what happens with ppt and excel since I spend so much of my time in those apps. Hopefully it rolls out better than Google’s extension did this week.

  • Bedrock aims to address challenges in deploying foundational models with AI by allowing customers to easily access and use foundational models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API.

  • Well this was quietly announced. Seems pretty huge to me. Agentless OS level remediation? The platform can automatically scan every layer of the cloud infrastructure and perform real-time operating system adjustments to remediate vulnerable systems or applications with a single click. 🤯 

  • Good for GoodData getting SOC2 Certification.

  • Contrast Assess is now integrated with AWS security Hub. The integration aims to provide comprehensive security management for organizations that use AWS cloud services.

  • First it was MSFT investing $10B in OpenAI…now it’s AWS investing $4B in Anthropic. Expect expanded cloud services and collaboration to make future foundational models available to millions of developers and AWS customers around the world via Bedrock.

  • Love where Knowbe4 is going and what they’re doing. Great educational product.

  • More GenAI coming into the markitecture that is the IT world. Pretty exciting to unveil these updates to the platform, I think I’d be most excited about the document automation feature that allows users to extract, validate, and analyze data from various types of documents (invoices to forms).

  • As customers leverage more 3rd party tooling in the cloud, these sort of integrations are going to become key for visibility. Expect enhanced visibility, automated security enforcement, streamlined security management, and increased security value.

  • More convenience and increased productivity. Great announcement.

  • New updated solutions such as:

    • Enterprise Service Management (ESM): new solution that extends the value of service management beyond IT teams. It’s a one stop shop view of service requests and issue management for every department in and beyond IT.

    • SQL Sentry: Upgraded solution that provides comprehensive database performance monitoring for complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

  • New feature that allows engineers to replay user interactions with their applications in a video-like format, and to access code-level telemetry data alongside the playback. It also leverages New Relic Grok, their GenAI assistant that can answer questions and provide context and insights based on the user’s data and preferences. Pretty cool.

  • If you’re looking for entry points into the MSFT Azure Stack HCI world, Dell just became the first available Premier Solution provider here. It supports most key services including Azure Arc, Portal, CLI, Backup, Monitor, and Security Center.

  • I see TeamViewer in the wild A LOT. Great announcement here that’ll create a unified platform leveraging Ivanti Neurons resulting in simplified management, increased security, and enhanced compliance overall.

  • Mesh is a new feature that enables users to easily provision modern and secure service mesh infrastructure to every application in the organization across both K8s and VM deployments.

  • Expanding the portfolio, I’d be curious to see if anyone will be interested in this service. I feel that people are super loyal to their Threat Intel providers.

  • Big news from Tanium. Will do my best to consolidate.

    • Tanium Investigate: Creates faster and more accurate incident investigations, pivots to IR, improves time to remediate. Capabilities include

      • Collection of all relevant IT Ops and Security data needed for an investigation

      • Provide historical and real-time endpoint data to enrich investigation.

      • Integrates with ServiceNow

    • Tanium Digital Employee Experience: Upgraded solution that provides custom automated self-healing and user sentiment reporting.

    • Tanium Platform Upgrade: MAJOR upgrade that delivers more data at higher speeds. Users can now monitor and manage any endpoint in half as many clicks.

      • It integrates with Splunk, ServiceNow, Defender, and AWS Security Hub. Sick.

  • Lot of benefits here. Reduced data transfer from DynamoDB to S3 as it only exports data that has changed within given time periods. Big week for AWS with this + Bedrock announcement and Anthropic investment.

  • Anyone tried these out yet? Please let me know how they work. Admittedly I’m a MSFT guy but like Bard a lot.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

  • Cybereason is a Massachusetts based Cybersecurity platform that offers solutions such as endpoint protection and incident response for businesses.

  • Vali Cyber is a Virginia based cybersecurity company specializing in linux security.

  • Anthropic is a California based AI safety and research company that researches and develops generative AI systems for individuals and businesses.

  • Gem Security is an Israeli based cybersecurity platform that provides solutions including incident response, containment orchestration, and threat detection for enterprise cloud environments.

  • Senser is an Israeli based AIOps platform that provides solutions such as SLO management, incident resolution and impact analysis for developers.

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

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