Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.
The top two business priorities for CIOs of midsize enterprises (MSEs) in 2018 are growth and digital transformation. However, 57 per cent of MSEs are not yet delivering digital initiatives, according to findings from Gartner Inc.'s 2018 CIO Agenda Survey.
"Digitalization has the benefit of expanding MSEs' market horizons — a critical success factor for this size of organization," said Luis Anavitarte, Research VP at Gartner. "As part of an overarching digital business technology platform, MSEs should build an ecosystem platform to strengthen their competitiveness and enable sustainable business growth."
Digital business is supported by technology platforms in five areas — the ecosystem, customer experience, data and analytics, information system and Internet of Things (IoT).
"As vital as these platforms are, it's important to recognize that they can be built incrementally. By focusing on the ecosystem platform, you can build the digital business technology platforms over time as your digital business expands — and may even find that they are not all needed," said Anavitarte.
As a first step, MSEs should align the organization's strategic thinking to the platform concept through an internal digital platform, because the platform shapes the organisation's reasoning around the concept of platforms. It will help employees to share best practices across business units, leverage competencies including operational and strategic innovation, achieve rapid prototyping, bring new business capabilities to market more quickly, and coordinate the business ecosystem.
Plan and Execute on Ecosystem Platform
An ecosystem platform is a collaborative architecture that enables internal and/or external business ecosystem partners to work together in new ways. With effective resource management, planning and executing on an ecosystem platform at the scale of the organization will be an effective step for MSEs in their digital transformation and business growth efforts.
"The ecosystem platform offers MSEs a swift entrance into digital and digital deliveries, with the potential for short-term positive impact on the business because it innovates, creates new business models, and sparks business moments," said Anavitarte.
APIs Will Play Critical Role in Ecosystem Platform Evolution
An ecosystem platform will support the creation of and connection to external ecosystems, marketplaces and communities, through application programming interfaces (APIs).
APIs connect people, businesses and things, which enables market access by making MSE systems available. In essence, APIs make digital business — and digital society as a whole — work. They enable new digital products and business models for services, and create new business channels.
Industry News
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of the enterprise Linux platform.
ActiveState unveiled Get Current, Stay Current (GCSC) – a continuous code refactoring service that deals with breaking changes so enterprises can stay current with the pace of open source.
Lineaje released Open-Source Manager (OSM), a solution to bring transparency to open-source software components in applications and proactively manage and mitigate associated risks.
Synopsys announced the availability of Polaris Assist, an AI-powered application security assistant on the Synopsys Polaris Software Integrity Platform®.
Backslash Security announced the findings of its GPT-4 developer simulation exercise, designed and conducted by the Backslash Research Team, to identify security issues associated with LLM-generated code. The Backslash platform offers several core capabilities that address growing security concerns around AI-generated code, including open source code reachability analysis and phantom package visibility capabilities.
Azul announced that Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul’s cloud analytics solution -- which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity -- now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution.
F5 announced new security offerings: F5 Distributed Cloud Services Web Application Scanning, BIG-IP Next Web Application Firewall (WAF), and NGINX App Protect for open source deployments.
Code Intelligence announced a new feature to CI Sense, a scalable fuzzing platform for continuous testing.
WSO2 is adding new capabilities for WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 API Platform for Kubernetes (WSO2 APK), and WSO2 Micro Integrator.
OpenText™ announced a solution to long-standing open source intake challenges, OpenText Debricked Open Source Select.
ThreatX has extended its Runtime API and Application Protection (RAAP) offering to provide always-active API security from development to runtime, spanning vulnerability detection at Dev phase to protection at SecOps phase of the software lifecycle.
Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed “Noble Numbat.”
JFrog announced a new machine learning (ML) lifecycle integration between JFrog Artifactory and MLflow, an open source software platform originally developed by Databricks.
Copado announced the general availability of Test Copilot, the AI-powered test creation assistant.