Application types: “The first result is that the airline will migrate to the IBM Cloud some of its critical applications, including the main website, its customer-facing mobile app and its global network of check-in kiosks. Other workloads and tools, such as the company’s Cargo customer website, also will be moved to the IBM Cloud.” Managed data-centers/cloud: “The airline will be able to utilize the global footprint of IBM Cloud, which consists of more than 50 data centers in 17 countries, in addition to a wide range of application development capabilities.

[O]ne well-publicized case in that vein, they said, was Home Depot directly working with Pivotal Software to introduce Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Google Cloud Platform. The home improvement retailer wanted to continue to use the popular development environment in the public cloud, but avoid giving business to Amazon's largest profit-generating division. A Pivotal spokesperson told CRN that Home Depot, like other Fortune 500 retail customers using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for app development, prefer Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure above AWS.

The 20th century was a graveyard for old, tested, and, yes, diverse belief systems and moral traditions that worked fairly well in steering lives for a long time despite their fatal flaws. Source: Trying to lead a valid life • DecodeDC

“Ansible, a DevOps automation engine that's often used with Kubernetes deployments, was big, responsible for six of the quarter's transactions of over $1 million. This included one deal valued at over $5 million -- "our largest deal ever for Ansible," according to Shander.” Also, updates on RHEL, OpenStack, and OpenShift. And Oracle. Link

Many quotes of HPE’s CEO, Meg Whitman, explaining the state of HPE, 18 months after all the hijinks. Also, notes on some further cost reductions in the works: “We believe we can take out another $200 million to $300 million in cost in just the second half of this year.” Stuart Lauchlan’s conclusion: No-one can doubt the ambition in play here, a corporate reinvention on a massive scale that was never going to be entirely without bumps in the road.

From The Economist a few weeks back: The real difference is that Trumponomics (unlike, say, Reaganomics) is not an economic doctrine at all. It is best seen as a set of proposals put together by businessmen courtiers for their king. Mr Trump has listened to scores of executives, but there are barely any economists in the White House. His approach to the economy is born of a mindset where deals have winners and losers and where canny negotiators confound abstract principles.

Appian raised just $48m as a private company, compared with $163m for Alteryx, $220m for Okta, $259m for MuleSoft and more than $1bn for Cloudera. In fact, all four of the unicorn IPOs raised more in a single round of private-market funding than Appian did in total VC funding.Not having done an IPO-sized funding in the private market meant that Appian could come public with a more modest raise. (It took in just $75m, compared with this year’s previous IPOs that raised, on average, $190m for the four unicorns.

Since the late 2000’s, one of the cloud strategy theories was that existing telcos and network providers could become public cloud providers. Many, if not all have tried and/or trying. Thus far, it’s been a rocky road: few synergies seem to be sleeping on the ground, ready to roused up to go fight the giants, or, at least, carve out niche spaces. As summarized in a 451 report on CenturyLink:

flic.kr/p/nJR5oK There’s a few stories out about Canonical, likely centered around some PR campaign that they’re seeking to IPO at some time, shifting the company around appropriately. Here’s some highlights from the recent spate of news around Canonical. Testing the Red Hat Theory, competing for the cloud-native stack Why care? Aside from Canonical just being interesting - they’ve been first and/or early to many cloud technologies and containers - there’d finally be another Red Hat if they were public.

So says Ben Thompson in his newsletter today: This is why Twitter’s increased focus on securing these video deals feels like such an admission of failure: the company is basically admitting that, despite the fact it contains some of the best content — given to it for free — in the world, it simply can’t figure out how to make that into a business, so instead it is (presumably) paying to create content that it can monetize more easily.