Fun with charts:

Relative to your interests

• How Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget - ”Essentially, yes, the cloud can be cheaper — but only if you’re using it the right way.”

• Microsoft and Google Are Forcing Customers to Adopt AI at a Premium Price: What Customers Need to Know - “84 million customers x $36 (the annual increase per subscription) = $3,024,000,000”

• Core Principles of AI Data Readiness - Maybe enterprise AI is all about getting your data into shape. Historically, that is very difficult. Good luck!

• DeepSeek and the Enterprise - ”Enterprises that want to embrace AI, in other words, have reasons to want to do so on their own infrastructure. But that has posed its own set of challenges, challenges which have led many enterprises to scale back their ambitions and turn their eyes from large, expensive foundational models to small, more cost efficient and easily trained alternatives.”

• 1,156 Questions Censored by DeepSeek - ”It will matter less once models similar to R1 are reproduced without these restrictions (which will probably be in a week or so)."

• Year in review: Google’s biggest AI advancements of 2024

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies - That should get a lot of enterprise CISO’s to move on allowing AI in their orgs. // ”Since the beginning of 2024, OpenAI said that more than 90,000 employees of federal, state and local governments have generated more than 18 million prompts within ChatGPT, using the tech to translate and summarize documents, write and draft policy memos, generate code, and build applications. The user interface for ChatGPT Gov looks like ChatGPT Enterprise. The main difference is that government agencies will use ChatGPT Gov in their own Microsoft Azure commercial cloud, or Azure Government community cloud, so they can “manage their own security, privacy and compliance requirements,” Felipe Millon, who leads federal sales and go-to-market for OpenAI, said on the call with reporters.” // Also, coverage from The Register.

• What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far - Lessons learned.

• IDG to divest Foundry, what’s next for IDC? - Forester and IDC merging would be awesome. They’re have great qualitative and quantitative coverage. See some comps here. And if they breathed new life into the Wave, maybe by adding in IDC’s market estimates, that’d be interesting. There’s, of course, the PE roll-up firms like Futurum, but those seem too small. Maybe some i-bankers find someone with cash and roll-up the roll-ups with an IDC anchor. Anyhow, I like both of their stuff so I hope they keep it going.

• Struggling with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Here’s some things to think about in 2025 - I think that, like all struggling corporate functions, the answer is to make sure you’re actually doing the basics. // Also, less planning, more clicking the publish button: quality through quantity. // And, some AI use suggestions.

Wastebook

• The only people who don’t like The Register are the people it covers.

• “the FIG triumvirate,” used for Forrester, IDC, and Gartner.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

I’ve got the first conference of the year next week, my annual attendance of cfgmgmtcamp, and often speaking at it too like this year. I’ve got a new talk on private cloud. This is a bit of a risk: I don’t know if that cloud will be interested or throw tomatoes. Who knows: they’re a pretty good crowd.