Industry Insight: Microsoft’s Flight to the Hyper-converged Edge Cloud

In the last three months, Microsoft has been on a tear building out its portfolio of 5G core and virtualized network service management technologies having acquired Affirmed Networks, and most recently, Metaswitch. The acquisition of these telecom tech companies by the leading enterprise IT technology company and cloud service provider may seem curious at first, but these transactions highlight the acceleration of a transformative trend that we at neXt Curve dubbed Under-the-Bottom (UTB) in our 2019 technology horizon study for Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s communications and media sector regulator.

Smart Living: Moving Beyond the Smart Home

For years the Smart Home has promised to enrich the lives of consumers and has inspired waves of manufacturer innovation such as smart speakers, intelligent thermostats and much more. While these innovations have offered incremental improvement in our home lives, the consumer reality has been a deluge of devices and services, greater complexity, and less security. In truth, the Smart Home remains elusive, the problems it intends to solve unclear. Only when manufacturers reach beyond devices and services with purpose-driven “Smart Living” solutions at home will this market cross the chasm to rapid market growth.

Industry Insight: AT&T’s Alliances with Microsoft and IBM/Red Hat – A Tale of Two Clouds?

July has been a watershed month for AT&T as it enters into two major “cloud deals”, one with Microsoft and another with the newly merged IBM and Red Hat. At first glance, the two deals seem oddly contradictory – a collision of proprietary Microsoft cloud (although about half of Azure workloads run on top of Linux) with open source cloud from the combined IBM and Red Hat. But why two cloud deals? What makes them different? What does it mean for the companies involved?

Industry Insight: IBM+Red Hat, The Great Cloud Brokerage Play

It’s official, IBM will now become the biggest Cloud broker play in the ICT universe with its acquisition of Red Hat for a whopping $34 billion in cash. It seems only yesterday that neXt Curve sat down with IBM to discuss the future of cloud and the future is the hybrid cloud. The cloud landscape is poised to change as cloud brokerage models are poised inject transparency (economic and service quality) and portability of workloads into enterprise cloud strategies. Are the walled public cloud gardens about to come down? 

Digital Reinvention – Part 3 : What Comes After Digital Reinvention?

Special guests from IBM joined neXt Curve to discuss the future of digital, their thesis on “Digital Reinvention” and what comes after Digital Reinvention in the final installment of this 3-part webcast series. 

Digital Reinvention: Part 2 – How Do Organizations Get Ready for Digital Reinvention?

Special guests from IBM joined neXt Curve to discuss the future of digital, their thesis on “Digital Reinvention” and how organizations need to take a different approach to their business, culture and leadership models to ready themselves for Digital Reinvention in part 2 of this 3-part series. 

Digital Reinvention – Part 1: What Makes Digital Reinvention Different?

Special guests from IBM joined neXt Curve to discuss the future of digital, their thesis on “Digital Reinvention” and what enterprises need to do as they look past digital transformation to capitalize on new opportunities to reinvent their businesses and their industry in this first installment in a 3-part webcast series. 

The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights

The cloud landscape continues to change and evolve. Our current assumptions about cloud and how it will influence IT and our IT investments will need to evolve as well.  When you consider the fluidity of the cloud vendor landscape, it is important to consider price/performance market intelligence to make the best decisions for your cloud strategy – your hybrid cloud strategy. 

The Future of Cloud: The Cloud Continuum

Cloud of yesterday is not Cloud as we know it today.  The computing model continues to evolve and virtualized enterprise data centers converge with public cloud service in creating the emerging frontier of hybrid computing.  Where is cloud computing going and what is next?