Progress announced the latest release of Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform.
Regardless of the industry, we are finding these days all businesses are becoming data businesses. To keep up with competition, companies need to collect and analyze data, gain insight on that data and act on that insight.
That's easier said than done. At the moment, many companies can't keep up with their data, let alone their competition. That's not a technology problem; it's an employee skillset problem.
The proliferation of data and the pace of innovation within the open source software ecosystem are driving the convergence of Big Data, Cloud Computing, and DevOps/Automation. Proficiency across these functional areas is essential in this rapidly evolving, converging IT environment. At the moment, however, there's a lack of qualified talent with these cross-disciplinary skills.
To an extent, the emergence of DevOps itself has led to a skills imbalance across disciplines.
In the recession of 2007–2009, business cost cutting led to many technical efficiencies. This included the migration from waterfall to agile development – which created the need for DevOps, bridging software engineering, technology operations and quality assurance. DevOps, therefore, emerged as an active and growing skillset (DevOps is the convergence of software development, IT Operations and Quality Assurance). Many technologists immersed themselves in the skills related to DevOps.
In fact, though, DevOps is only a subset in the much larger convergence of technical skills needed in today's data-centric business environment.
Here's the real need:
The center of these overlapping circles is where the real action is. But it's also a real challenge.
Finding qualified candidates who can work with Big Data (Hadoop, NoSQL, Storm, Kafka, etc.) tools is very difficult. Understanding Cloud (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.) is just as hard. Those with experience with DevOps/Automation (Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt, etc.) is a little easier but nonetheless challenging.
And it's not enough to have a certification in certain technology skills. Certification and experience are not synonymous. Of course, certifications are a great prerequisite, and a start towards a true cross-disciplinary skillset, but certifications are not necessarily an indicator of real world experience.
■ In Big Data, what's important is having built a production Big Data system. What's not is something like Hadoop Certification (nice but not essential).
■ In Cloud Computing, what's important is being able to use SDKs and APIs, and to implement with best practices in your coding. What's not is something like AWS Certification (nice but not essential).
■ In DevOps/Automation, what's important is being able to work with full stack automation. What's not is working with software installation scripts (do we even need to explain why that's not important?)
It's quite uncommon to have a great developer come to the table with all three of these skill sets. Softer skills are often a good indicator of future capability. For example, when our company hires new technology talent, the most desirable traits among our qualified candidates are proven aptitude and motivation to learn.
As rare as it is to find people with the ability to work in today's converging technologies, it is still vitally important. Businesses with a shortage in these skills are definitely at a technical disadvantage compared with their better-heeled competitors.
For most companies, hiring individuals with these cross-disciplinary skills is not scalable. To level the playing field, businesses should create opportunities to gain these technology benefits.
Collaboration with integrators and consultants that have invested specifically in product and service offerings across the three disciplines of Big Data, Cloud and DevOps/Automation can go a long way to building real world capability in your own organization, without having to scale up in either internal cost or human resources.
Brad Kolarov is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at B23.
Industry News
Elastic, the Search AI Company, announced the Elasticsearch Open Inference API now integrates with Anthropic, providing developers with seamless access to Anthropic’s Claude, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus, directly from their Anthropic account.
Broadcom unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, the future of VCF that will accelerate customers’ transition from siloed IT architectures to a unified and integrated private cloud platform that lowers cost and risk.
Broadcom announced VMware Tanzu Platform 10, a cloud native application platform that accelerates software delivery, providing platform engineering teams enhanced governance and operational efficiency while reducing toil and complexity for development teams.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, the next major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Salesforce announced new innovations in Slack that make it easier for users to build automations, no matter their technical expertise.
GitLab announced the general availability of the GitLab Duo Enterprise add-on.
Tigera now delivers universal microsegmentation capabilities with Calico.
Tabnine announced a new platform partnership with Broadcom Inc., an integration with IBM, as well as continuing extensions of existing partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Wallarm released API Attack Surface Management (AASM), an agentless technology to help organizations identify, analyze, and secure their entire API attack surface.
LambdaTest launched KaneAI, an end-to-end software AI Test Agent.
Kubiya has closed its $12 million seed round with a $6 million extension of equity and debt financing and launched a paradigm-breaking new platform, AI Teammates, that enables true delegation of complex tasks to digital colleagues through organic, human-like conversations.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the schedule for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024, happening in Salt Lake City, Utah from November 12 – 15.
Diagrid announced the latest version of Dapr, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project maintained by Diagrid, Microsoft, Intel, Alibaba, and others, as well as an update to Conductor, a Software as a Service (SaaS) that helps manage, upgrade, and monitor Dapr on Kubernetes clusters.
Spectro Cloud announced two new formal recognitions of its strengthening position in the government technology space: the Government Software competency from AWS, and ‘Awardable’ status on the CDAO Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace for AI/ML solutions at the tactical edge.