Friday Tech News

Good morning and happy Friday!

Well, we made it through 2024 and I hope that you had a wonderful holiday season with friends, family, and loved ones.

I’m going to use this post as a lengthier one to give some updates around my life, then we’ll jump into the tech news and a recap of FTN in 2024.

I’ve spent the last two weeks reflecting on all that happened in 2024 and can without a doubt say it was the best year of my life. I want to thank you for being part of my journey and you know I’m super grateful for you as a reader and friend.

Personal Reflection 2024

On a personal note, my son James entered the world and completed our family. He’s a wonderful boy, who is THRIVING and growing so well. He’s never without smile, or exploring some new part of the house nowadays.

Olivia, my curious minded, future vet (as of now) is blossoming into the most wonderous little toddler I’ve ever met (sorry to brag, but she’s my kid. You get it). She’s confident, brave, adventurous, and always asking “why” and “how”. She uses humungous words that I don’t often expect, and she’s always surprising me in the best ways.

I never mention her as I know she’d hate it, but my wife Hailey is the rock of our family. She supports me in writing this weekly on personal time and juggles more things than I can ever imagine with grace and dignity I’ve never seen in another human being. Kudos to her in all her accomplishments this year and for what’s to come. I love you and am grateful beyond what simple words on the internet can express.

Personally, I ran a the Kiawah Island Marathon in December (4:22:38) which was a personal goal I set the day before James was born. LOL. At the end of mile 26, I found my daughter and family waiting for me 100 yards from the finish, so I decided in that moment to bandit run Olivia across the finish. It was a moment I will never forget.

For FTN purposes, I had a great year and wrote 45/52 weeks of the year, taking only certain special times off. If you want to hear what AI has to say about it, checkout my notebookLM from Google that overviews each article in podcast format. It’s a fun way to listen to everything that AI thinks was important based off the raw data inputs I provided it. Keeps getting better too….what errors do you find in it?

Overall, we had an unbelievable year. We had a baby (Hailey’s Marathon), went to Europe with 2 kids alone, traveled, ate well, and woke up everyday to smiling happy kids. We’re grateful and looking forward to a challenging but fun 2025 full of growth and new adventures.

Professional Updates 2024 & 2025

Professionally, you might have noticed I just changed roles. In Q4 I met several individuals from Phoenix.security and was highly attracted to joining in on the work that they are doing. While it was bittersweet to make a decision to part ways with Presidio and my teammates there, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to work alongside people that are actually making a difference in clearing out the Jira boards of critical vulnerabilities for the world’s largest businesses and entities. Just take a look at some of their advertised results:

The MAIN thing you’ll notice is that Francesco and Alfonso aren’t pivoting and rushing to incorporate AI this and AI that in their marketing / product. I love that. 2024 saw a massive shift in the way everyone came to market. Many came out with Agentic AI assistants, used GenAI in new flavors, or even just rebranded themselves as AI based companies. I have tons of data to back that up. I’d love to see a return to Cyber focus in 2025 and beyond, without everyone just saying “look what our model does” and “look at this model over here!”

I’ll use future editions to talk about AppSec and why I joined Phoenix, but in the meantime I’d encourage you to check out our page and what we’re doing. Let’s do something about remediating all these alerts and the associated cognitive overload.

With that, I’d like to say welcome to 2025, and I hope you stay physically and digitally safe! Cheers!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

OpenAI | OpenAI launches o3 and o3mini

• o3 and o3 mini reasoning AI models have been launched to tackle complex challenges, with the o3 mini expected to be released by end of January.

• The o3 model has shown significant improvements, scoring 96.7 accuracy on the AIME 2024 math competition.

• They’re also introducing a variety of new safety methods called deliberative alignment to better identify and manage unsafe prompts.

Zenity | Zenity Introduces AISPM

• Zenity has introduced comprehensive AISPM for Microsoft Fabric Skills

• Their platform now provides visibility into the skills built by users, what data they access, etc…

Antrhopic | Anthropic releases Model Context Protocol for LLM app ingestion

• Anthropic has released the Model Context Protocol (MCP) an open standard for integrating external resources and tools with LLM apps.

• MCP uses a client-server architecture and includes SDKs for Python and TypeScript, along with reference implementation.

• The protocol aims to solve the “MxN” problem by providing a standard protocol for LLM vendors and tool builders. If you don’t know what that problem is, it’s a cost and complexity one associated with using multiple LLMs. Huge announcement IMO.

Kubernetes | Kubernetes 1.32 comes out with enhancements to DRA

• Kubernetes 1.32 introduces enhancements to Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA), improving resource management for AI/ML workloads that rely on specialized hardware like GPUs.

• The release includes support for the Graceful Shutdown of Windows Nodes for pods running on Windows nodes.

• New alpha feature includes asynchronous preemption in the scheduler and new HTTP status endpoints for core components, making it easier to gather cluster health and configuration details.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

Neowin | Microsoft is reportedly trying to decrease reliance on OpenAI models for Copilot

Google | Meet Willow - in case you haven’t seen this. 

• Is anyone else legit scared by this?

Honestly - I took a huge break from reading the last 2 weeks. Hope you don’t mind!

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

Anysphere | Anysphere Cursor raises $100M

• Anysphere is a California based company that makes a really cool agentic AI assistant that assists developers in fixing code and using the cursor proactively in an AI assistant.

Databricks | Databricks raises a ridiculous $10B

• Databricks is a California based data and AI company and one of the big players in the space.

Coralogix | Coralogix acquires Aporia

• Coralogix is a California based streaming data platform that offers solutions such as log data monitoring, cost optimization, analytics, and CD acceleration for businesses.

xAI | xAI raises more money with another $6B

• Elon is at it again raising more money for his ambitious xAI platform.

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

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 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. End User Tools & Workspace Tech

5. 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