Business Technology Roundtable

The telecommunications sector is at a pivotal intersection of technological evolution and digital transformation. What was once primarily focused on connectivity infrastructure has now emerged as a critical enabler and adopter of artificial intelligence (AI). As telcos serve billions of customers worldwide, their embrace of AI represents not merely an operational upgrade but a fundamental reimagining of how communication networks are built, managed, and monetized. From Pilots to Production: AI Goes Mainstream The most striking revelation from NVIDIA's "2025 State of AI in Telecommunications" survey is the velocity of adoption. Nearly all telecom companies are now actively engaged with AI, either deploying it in production or rigorously assessing its potential to create value. This represents a significant leap from just two years ago. More importantly, the industry has crossed the chasm from experimentation to implementation, with 49 percent of respondents actively using ...

Are you open to new ideas, and given a compelling choice are you really prepared to change? That’s what informed CEOs are asking their C-suite leadership team. The context of those questions is about determining who is most qualified to guide the organization’s digital transformation journey. It’s also about setting expectations for C-level executives to partner. IT and business leaders must acknowledge that they’ve likely reached a significant turning point. Business technology advances are disrupting the legacy status quo and bringing huge market turmoil in their wake. Industries are converging, and unfamiliar competitors are surfacing. Granted, that convergence is creating opportunities for growth by shifting from products and services made by solo entities to new cross-sector customer experiences built via strategic partnerships. But it’s also intensifying market competition. One company’s convergence can become another’s encroachment. So, how do you navigate through this laby...

Worldwide, there's a growing appreciation for the many benefits of the Open Source way. Clearly, being truly Open is a frame of mind that can apply to just about anything in life -- including the development and nurture of a progressive company culture that's equipped for the challenges and opportunities of today's Global Networked Economy. Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, recently launched his new book entitled " The Open Organization " -- Igniting Passion and Performance. He says, "The conventional approach to business management was not designed to foster innovation, address the needs and expectations of the current workforce that demands more of jobs, or operate at the accelerated speed of business." Granted, savvy senior executives within numerous multinational companies across the globe have already embraced the open way, and others will surely follow. Why would any forward-thinking CEO settle for the constraints of a legacy organization model, ...

Digital  Business Transformation projects gained momentum in 2014, as more companies moved their legacy IT workloads to cloud computing platforms and launched a variety of new cloud-native applications. This pervasive trend will continue and accelerate for the duration of 2015. Total cloud IT infrastructure investment (server, storage systems , and ethernet switch) is forecast to grow by 21 percent year-over-year to reach $32 billion in 2015 -- accounting for about 33 percent of all IT infrastructure spending this year, which will be up from about 28 percent in 2014. Private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16 percent year-over-year to $12 billion, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 25 percent in 2015 to $21 billion, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4 billion, up 18.7 percent year over year from $22.3 billion -- priva...

During the course of the last twelve months the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open-source cloud technology have been reporting their progress -- with the help of their partners -- towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives. We've also learned how these progressive technology users are pioneering changes in their own organizations -- enabling them to become more competitive in the Global Networked Economy. The OpenStack Summit 2014 opened with a keynote on the first day of the conference featuring lessons learned from industry leading organizations that have already deployed these open cloud technologies. Each case study had multiple instances of OpenStack that have been applied for a variety of commercial application scenarios. Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the Foundation, introduced the growing community of  OpenStack Superusers . Glenn Ferguson, Head of Private of Cloud Enablement at Wells Fargo Ba...

If you're an executive that's concerned about the high-cost of proprietary software, you're not alone. If your IT team pushes back whenever Line of Business leaders ask them for feature enhancements that goes beyond the limits of the commercial software packages they've licensed, then you already know that frustration. Are you wondering if there's an alternative to this legacy business technology scenario? Consider Open Source Software (OSS) and follow in the footsteps of the previously enlightened. North Bridge Venture Partners recently announced the results of the eighth annual investigation into OSS trends. The latest market study findings point toward the increased role that OSS solutions have in today's enterprises. "Open source is enjoying a proliferation that starts with a growing number of new developers at the grass roots. Many then go on to join enterprises who themselves are engaging in open source projects," said Michael Skok, genera...

The CEOs of leading companies are already striving to create an agile business model -- one that responds quickly to competitive pressures and shifting market demands. Commercial agility often requires a corresponding accelerated business technology deployment. Meaning, the IT requirement is for applications to be provisioned in hours -- not weeks or months. That's a tall order for many corporate IT departments. Regardless, it must be done. More often than not, it's accomplished via a cloud services-based methodology. Savvy executives that proactively migrate their IT infrastructure to a cloud-centric architecture will generate new revenue that could surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017, according to the latest market study by IHS. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion this year -- that's up by 20 percent from $145.2 billion in 2013. By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will r...