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Salesforce execs at TDX 25: Agentforce a whole system AI play

At the TDX 2025 developer conference in San Francisco, Salesforce executives presented its Agentforce agentic AI technology as a “whole system” approach, where large language models (LLMs) are less significant than a “trinity” of data, applications and agents. Relatedly, they consistently disparage “DIY” artificial intelligence (AI) programmes.

Paula Goldman, the supplier’s chief ethical and humane use officer, said: “I think a lot of the public discourse about AI has been about [large language] models. But if you think about Agentforce, it’s a whole system. There’s a foundation model, and then there’s a series of smaller models that go into our Atlas system, and there are workflows that are automated that people can draw on. We’ve got used to talking about AI as models over the past few years, but I think we need to be talking about systems.”

David Schmaier, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, said the supplier’s entire technology stack, including Slack and Tableau, comes into play with Agentforce. He also pointed to its Data Cloud platform as central to its AI offer.

“You couldn’t have a computer without a microprocessor; you need storage and RAM and a display and an operating system around it. That’s what we’ve done. We have our data cloud, which harmonises hundreds of thousands of systems. It gives you the data, the metadata and the semantics. That’s why we can outperform an LLM by itself. LLMs have hallucinations, they have bias, toxicity. An LLM is necessary but insufficient. We add to the LLM. Our view is the data powers the AI and then the AI powers the customer experience of the future,” he said.

An LLM is necessary but insufficient. We add to the LLM. Our view is the data powers the AI and then the AI powers the customer experience of the future David Schmaier, Salesforce

“We call it the ‘holy trinity’. We have the Data Cloud, then we have our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud apps – which is how we got the name Salesforce – as well as Slack, Mulesoft and Tableau. And now we have Agentforce on top of all that. That’s how we can turn on 10,600 customers over three days with agents. It’s because we are using the same platform as we have for 25 years. So, with a healthcare company, for example, that has workflows it has bult in its Salesforce deployment, it can make all those available for [virtual] agents,” Schmaier added.

He believes too many organisations are doing DIY AI. “Most people are just trying to take whatever apps they have, whether it’s Salesforce or SAP or Workday, and just buying ChatGPT and trying to plug it in. No other competitor has what we have, in terms of agents. We think we have a real lead in this agentic field. We’ve sold to 5,200 customers since launching at Dreamforce [in September 2024]. Now, we have 200,000 customers, and most don’t use Agentforce today,” he said.

Rahul Auradkar, executive vice-president and general manager of Unified Data Services and Einstein at Salesforce, made a similar argument about what the provider calls DIY AI.

“What we are doing with agents is an entire system. We’re not shipping a model, an app or a copilot. We’re shipping an AI system on a deeply unified platform. What that system allows our enterprise customers, who don’t want to do the DIY, to do is surface customer-centric analytics and workflows, and listen to the customers to feed back to the system so the agents get better. Copilots are a narrow sliver of what AI can be,” he said.

“The difference between a DIY AI and an enterprise using [our] system is that the enterprise can focus on things that they are good at, which is plenty of things. They have their data. The have their transactions. They have their engagement data. They have their AI policies, their workflows, their automations. We bring all that together within a deeply unified platform and drive value for our customers,” added Auradkar.

DIY AI programmes strongly in evidence among users

And yet, analyst research from Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) offers a contrast with Salesforce’s disparagement of DIY AI – a complicating contrast rather than a confutation, but a contrast nevertheless.

Towards the end of 2024, ESG surveyed 832 professionals at organisations across the globe involved in the strategy, decision-making, selection, deployment and management of generative AI (GenAI) initiatives and projects at their organisations and familiar with their organisation’s use of third parties to support GenAI initiatives.

The resulting report, The state of the generative AI market: Widespread transformation continues – authored by Mark Beccue, principal analyst, Mike Leone, practice director and principal analyst, and Emily Marsh, associate research director – does find support for an agentic AI philosophy: “Respondents most often said that they see AI agents, virtual assistants, and intelligent chatbots powered by AI as valuable productivity tools, though they also often said they view them with cautious optimism (41%). Over two-thirds of organisations are planning for or considering AI agents, which represents a significant opportunity for AI vendors to target these requirements with capabilities and services.”

They also note, however: “The AI agent market is extremely nascent and loaded with challenges, including managing single-task agents, interoperability problems, the potential emergence of multitask agents and security.”

But the authors also remark, similarly to Salesforce’s Auradkar, that: “A wide majority (84%) of respondents agreed it is important to incorporate their own enterprise data into models that support generative AI. GenAI models themselves are not a competitive differentiator. Rather, effectively identifying, organising and vetting internal data for use with GenAI models is the key to creating unique and highly actionable insights.”

The research also found user organisations to be embracing a variety of LLMs – open source and proprietary. The largest percentage of respondent organisations (43%) are both proprietary and open source models.

Alongside this enthusiasm for using large language models, the study found that organisations are placing “their bets on internal resources, planning to reskill or upskill employees (58%) and provide education and awareness training to employees (43%)”. This suggests a growing cadre of employees who will want to do DIY AI.

The authors comment: “Employee enthusiasm for these technologies is likely at a high point as GenAI excitement pervades many facets of society, so this internal investment will likely be a win-win situation whereby personnel receive welcome development opportunities and the business gains valuable GenAI expertise.”

At Dreamforce in September 2024, Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, was in combative mood in respect of Agentforce, positioning it as a wholescale alternative to generative AI copilot usage, associated with Microsoft and Google, but with other vendors too.

“There’s a lot of narratives out there from vendors, and a lot of it is not true,” he said at the time. “You need to sit with those customers [at the Dreamforce event], look at the code and break the hypnosis coming from all the vendors. There’s plenty of real customers here who are really deploying real AI. But there are billions being invested in copilots, delivering how much productivity increase? Is there a better way to do it? And so, that’s our gambit.”

The game is still being played. The middle game lies ahead.

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Want to buy an RX 9070 or 9070 XT but fed up of the GPUs being out of stock? AMD promises that “more supply is coming ASAP”

  • AMD’s RX 9070 GPUs are currently out of stock pretty much everywhere
  • An AMD exec says that more supply of RX 9070 models is “coming ASAP”
  • Some gamers are still worried about the prospect of entry-level RDNA 4 graphics cards not sticking to the MSRP, though

An AMD executive has promised that fresh stock of RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards – which are currently all sold out in the US, and seemingly most other regions besides – is winging its way to stores across the globe.

This news comes from Frank Azor, who is AMD’s head of consumer and gaming marketing, via a statement shared on X about the launch of these RDNA 4 graphics cards.

Azor assures us that: “More [RX 9070] supply is coming ASAP to partners all over the world.”

The use of the term ‘ASAP’ suggests that AMD won’t be messing around when it comes to restocking RX 9070 models, and that’s also suggested by what we’ve heard on the rumor mill recently.

Namely that AMD has a sizeable quantity of RDNA 4 stock rolling off the production lines, which has clearly not been the case with Nvidia’s Blackwell launch since the RTX 5000 GPUs debuted at the end of January.

A PC Gamer looking happy sat in front of their desktop monitor

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Analysis: Better stock prospects all round (but what about pricing?)

Actually, the hope expressed via the rumor mill – and it is just a hope, mind – is that Nvidia’s RTX 5000 stock is also going to become more robust. Or at least RTX 5090 supply will increase – quite dramatically, the theory is – and perhaps other Blackwell graphics cards, too.

AMD’s Azor is generally pretty reliable, too, so we can hope that it’s the case that both RDNA 4 and Blackwell GPUs will benefit from a spike in supply in the near future.

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Notably, Azor wouldn’t be drawn on MSRP pricing, though. If you scrolled through the comments on the exec’s latest post on X, you’ll have seen a few gamers calling out AMD over the MSRP, and the reported practice of only having an initial batch of (subsidized) RX 9070 graphics cards pegged at that official recommended asking price. (And that was indeed what seemed to happen at the RDNA 4 launch).

Previously, Azor has addressed this issue though, and said that “MSRP pricing will continue to be encouraged” beyond the launch, so we should see some (entry-level) RDNA 4 GPUs back at those baseline prices. That said, words like ‘encouraged’ and a feeling of slight evasiveness around the issue of pricing in the latest post from Azor leave some room for doubt as to exactly what policy AMD is pursuing here.

As ever, time will tell, and with any luck, we won’t have long to wait for the next batch of RX 9070 graphics cards to hit the shelves. Keep an eye on our guide to where to buy AMD’s RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 which highlights the retailers you should be watching to grab stock when the supply lines open up again.

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AMD’s big RX 9070 launch might happen later in February – and we could find out how these GPUs compare to the Nvidia RTX 5070

  • Rumor has it there’ll be a press event for AMD RX 9070 GPUs at the end of February
  • This should be a big reveal, hopefully complete with pricing details
  • It makes sense that it’d come just ahead of a confirmed on-sale date of March for the RX 9070 and its XT sibling

AMD’s RX 9070 models might be formally announced later in February, a new rumor suggests, ahead of the scheduled March arrival for these graphics cards.

Harukaze5719 on X noticed that Benchlife, a Chinese tech site, posted this info in a story that was primarily about Nvidia’s incoming RTX 5070 GPUs, which will be direct rivals for the RX 9070 cards. (Although AMD’s next-gen GPUs are potential RTX 5070 killers, if some rumors are right).

We’re told that the current plan is for AMD to “hold a press conference for the Radeon RX 9000 series” at the end of February, but the exact details are still to be confirmed.

I’d advise a thick coating of seasoning with this one due to the way the nugget of info is crowbarred in at the end of the article, and the fact that this is translated. Also, Benchlife isn’t top of our list of reliable sites for rumors, but that said, it has got things right in the past – and this makes some sense, as I’ll discuss next.

A PC gamer looking happy

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Analysis: Pricing details for RDNA 4, ASAP, please

The way this rumor is phrased (again, remember the translation leaves some room for doubt) is that things still sound rather up in the air for RDNA 4. However, it is AMD’s intention to debut these RX 9070 GPUs in March as that has been formally announced as an on-sale date, not just a reveal.

Team Red subsequently noted that more time was being taken to hone elements like GPU drivers and FSR 4 support, as well as ensuring healthier stock levels for the RX 9070s, which sounds like a good idea to me, particularly given how the Nvidia Blackwell launch has gone (terribly, stock-wise).

If we are looking at March for the RX 9070 graphics cards to be on shelves, some kind of formal announcement should come before that (AMD has promised a launch event too – indeed, it was rumored for late January at one point). And so a late February timeframe does make sense in that light, but we still need to maintain an appropriate level of skepticism here.

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The big hope is that we’ll get some pricing details with that reveal in possibly a few weeks’ time, as those MSRPs will be absolutely key in how these RDNA 4 graphics cards stack up to Nvidia’s RTX 5070 models. Although AMD has made another promise here, too, namely that RDNA 4 will be very competitively priced, and so we can hope the RX 9070 models will really pack a value punch in the mid-range of the GPU spectrum.

Right now, all we have is a lot of promises, though. We just need to hope that they manifest into a reality of AMD gunning for Nvidia’s mid-range Blackwell offerings in a big way, as that should force Team Green to be more competitive, too.

Via VideoCardz

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Software AG shrinks with sale of Alfabet and Cumulocity

The Software AG group started the new year with a slew of changes, announcing the close of the sale of its Alfabet enterprise architecture and strategic portfolio management product and of its IoT platform Cumulocity, the departure of CEO Sanjay Brahmawar, and the relaunch of its Adabas & Natural [A&N] and Aris product sets as standalone businesses.

The identity of the buyers of Alfabet and Cumulocity have yet to be disclosed, according to a Software AG spokesperson.

A&N provides non-relational transactional database software, which includes its own programming language, and processes billions of transactions for business processes across platforms including mainframe, Linux and the cloud.

Aris is business process mining and management software, focused on SaaS systems for enterprises. Its process modelling and process mining software is said to be geared towards enabling its customers to manage the entire process lifecycle.

These moves follow the announcement of the sale of Software AG’s “Super iPaaS” business to IBM in December 2023 for €2.1bn, only six months after US private equity group Silver Lake had acquired Software AG for €2.6bn.

The firm has been owned by SilverLake since May 2023. Software AG has long been known as second only to SAP as a German IT supplier, and it was founded in 1969.

As the holding entity of the Software AG group, Software GmbH [limited liability company], it recently announced that it has closed the sales of Alfabet and Cumulocity, following the divestments of the webMethods, StreamSets and [industrial analytics software] TrendMiner businesses in July 2024. TrendMiner was sold to a German industrial analytics specialist provider Proemion in April 2024.

Sanjay Brahmawar has also departed as group CEO. The changes are being presented as part of a strategy to operate Adabas & Natural (A&N) and ARIS as standalone businesses, each led by their own management teams.

In a statement, the holding company described Brahmawar as “instrumental in evolving Software AG from a legacy software company to a modern, subscription and SaaS business, focused on ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue] growth. He drove the acquisition of StreamSets which, combined with webMethods, was later recognised in the market as Super-iPaaS, culminating in the business being acquired by IBM in July 2024. Brahmawar was also integral to the carve-out and divestments of the TrendMiner, Cumulocity and Alfabet businesses.”

Brahmawar said: “It has been a privilege to lead such a well-respected company through many significant moments in its recent history, and to have worked with such a talented and committed team of professionals”.

Silver Lake has appointed Martin Biegel, Martin Clemm, Robin Colman and Toktam Khatibzadeh to lead Software GmbH, which will operate Software AG’s central functions, as well as being the holding company for ARIS, and Adabas & Natural (A&N).

Software AG has an active user groups community worldwide, with European country groups in the UK, the Nordics and the Netherlands, as well as in the German-speaking countries. It has user communities for Alfabet, Cumulocity and webMethods, as well as for Aris, and Adabas & Natural.

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Justifying ECC upgrade: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

“We all want to do this,” says Conor Riordan, chair of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG),” describing the transition to cloud-based ERP with SAP Rise. “We all want to get to the end point. We just can’t get there as fast as SAP wants us to go.”

Computer Weekly met up with Riordan during the user group’s annual Connect 2024 event, which took place in Birmingham at the start of December.

Upgrading and moving to the SAP cloud has been a hot topic for UKISUG for a number of years.

Mainstream support for SAP Enterprise Core Components (ECC), officially ends in 2027. Moving to SAP Rise is regarded by many as too big a step to take in one go and instead, as Riordan explains, users need financial support to make the transition from ECC to S4/Hana, which is a stepping stone towards Rise. But for Riordan, many SAP customers will not find this step easy. However, he says: “SAP responded and it has come up with a modernisation programme,  which was well received by customers and our members.” 

He is confident the newly appointed UK and Ireland managing director for SAP, Leila Romane, has recognised this challenge and the move to SAP Rise is more of a marathon than a sprint. “User group members aren’t convinced about SAP’s strategy, but we need to manage risk,” he says, adding: “We probably need to do the migrations in multiple steps rather than one big step.”

Riordan believes that for SAP customers the move to Rise is inevitable. “The majority of customers will go to Rise at some stage, whenever it’s right for them. That might be next year. That could be 20-30 years. Who knows. It’s about doing the upgrade when it’s right for the customers rather than doing it when it’s right for SAP.”

Although upgrading SAP will offer new functionality like a more modern user experience through Fiori, for Riordan the most important consideration is “Going live with no business impact”. For a lot of companies, success is when a project goes live without business disruption.

Discussing what can seem like a push from the IT industry to make sure businesses spend a lot of money upgrading, Riordan notes that there is a constant need to be more efficient in business and drive better earnings per share to get better margins. This, in turn, means the business is rated as a growth company by the financial markets. “People are under more pressure to drive more innovation and in order to deliver more innovation, you need a more modern platform,” he says.

As Riordan points out most companies that are still on ECC tend to be running manufacturing, procurement, sales and finance business processes. “You’re doing these in the same way you have done over the last 20 years,” he says. “But now in this new digital world, you’ve got access to an infinite amount of data that can help drive better decision-making. If you want to innovate and have smarter ways of running your business, you need to be on a better platform.”

An example of this is forecasting, as Riordan explains. “In the past you’d have planners that would try and figure out a forecast and put the forecast into SAP. Now you can get artificial intelligence (AI) to do that and figure out what your demand plans are and it can probably do it better than the planners because an AI forecast can bring in many different sources of information.”

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Storage technology explained: Flash vs HDD

The past 12 months saw flash storage nudge into areas from which it had hitherto been absent. In particular, this was because of the availability of denser – and therefore cheaper per-gigabyte (GB) – quad-level cell (QLC) flash storage into array markets and use cases that were once considered nearline.

Alongside this, we saw the price-per-GB of flash drop towards the level of spinning disk hard disk drives (HDDs) then rebound rapidly as memory manufacturers chased profitability. Meanwhile, the keenest of flash storage advocates predicted the demise of the hard drive and the imminent victory of the all-flash datacentre.

In this article, we define enterprise flash storage, look into its QLC and triple-level cell (TLC) variants, the benefits of non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash, and examine the pros and cons of flash versus HDD in terms of cost, performance, flash in the cloud, and the likelihood (or otherwise) of the all-flash datacentre.

What is enterprise flash storage?

Enterprise flash storage refers to systems that comprise multiple flash drives housed in datacentre rack-mounted array form factor products.

In enterprise flash storage arrays, the capacity of many drives is aggregated, with access to storage media governed by controller hardware.

The controller is compute that powers the intelligence needed to handle input/output (I/O) from hosts to the storage, decision-making over allocation of data to media, but also in flash arrays to carry out maintenance tasks such as wear levelling, garbage collection, and so on.

Enterprise flash storage array capacities run from tens of terabytes (TB) to many petabytes (PB). As with HDD-based arrays, access to storage can be block (for performance-hungry database use cases, for example), file (for general use and unstructured data) or object (for unstructured data also).

What is QLC flash storage?

QLC is the latest generation of flash storage media. QLC stands for quad-level cell. That means that every cell in the flash chip can store four bits of data using 16 states.

That means it can store more data in the same space than TLC flash, which is also widely available. Previously widely available were single-level cell (SLC) flash and multi-level cell (MLC, meaning two states), but these have been largely superseded now.

At the start of 2024, most enterprise storage arrays are built with TLC drives for general-purpose and mission-critical use cases. But QLC has edged into the mainstream and gained traction for unstructured data workloads, in particular with key enterprise storage array makers adding QLC-based products in the past year or so.

As manufacturers increase the number of possible states per cell, storage density increases and the cost of storage per GB decreases. But, as storage density increases in terms of cell capacity, issues can arise that can limit the endurance of flash media.

What is NVMe flash?

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is a protocol developed especially for use with flash storage. Prior to NVMe, flash drives used transport protocols that originated during the HDD era, namely Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) and Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS). In fact, these are still in use and arrays that use drives with such connectivity (2.5in and 3.5in form factor) are sold by the big storage suppliers.

But NVMe is at the forefront now for flash drive performance. NVMe’s key innovation was to optimise queues and buffers for use with flash, which improved performance many times over.

As a follow-on, suppliers then developed ways of allowing NVMe connectivity across physically more distant connections across the datacentre. Such NVMe-over-fabrics technologies include the ability to carry NVMe via Ethernet, Infiniband, TCP, RDMA (ie, memory-to-memory connectivity) and more.

What is HDD?

Hard disk drives (HDDs) that rely on magnetic read/write heads and mechanically spinning disks have been around for decades, with flash a competitor that has emerged in the past 10 years or so.

As with flash, HDDs can be aggregated into datacentre rack-mounted array products and the capacity of multiple drives pooled for enterprise users. In fact, HDD-based arrays long preceded enterprise flash arrays and are still widely used.  

What’s the difference in performance between flash and HDD?

When we look at flash versus disk, the key thing that stands out is that flash is fast – many times faster than spinning disk HDD.

Flash drives offer lower latency, with access times down to low milliseconds, or even microseconds, compared with the multiple milliseconds of spinning disk, particularly for reads. That means enterprise flash can also offer vastly more input/output operations per second (IOPS) when aggregated into a storage array.

In throughput terms, flash offers gigabit-per-second (Gbps) rates four or five times quicker than HDD.

Such rapidity has been the key draw for enterprise flash storage and is a result of the lack of moving parts. With spinning platters, HDD is limited by physics in ways that solid-state storage is not.

In terms of capacities, HDD is available in up to around 22TB units. And while some flash drives have been marketed that run to 60-plus terabytes, they generally come in smaller sizes, but part of that is because of cost. 

What’s the cost difference between flash and HDD?

In terms of per-GB cost at drive level, flash costs more than spinning disk.

Flash prices spiked significantly in late 2023 and the early months of 2024 as manufacturers throttled back production in an effort to raise prices and achieve profitability.

Solid-state drive (SSD) prices per gigabyte reached an average of $0.095/GB by April 2024, which was a rise of 26.67% since autumn 2023.

But, flash drive prices then fell steadily over the first three quarters of 2024 to an average of $0.085 per gigabyte (GB) in September 2024.

In October 2023, flash had averaged $0.075/GB while HDD averaged $0.05/GB for SAS and $0.035/GB for SATA drives.

Average spinning disk (SAS and SATA) hard drive prices held steady during the six months to September 2024 at $0.039 per gigabyte. That figure was $0.041/GB in early April.

For a customer that planned to deploy 20TB of flash, based on those prices, it would have cost $1,500 in October 2023, $1,900 in April 2024, and $1,700 in September 2024. That compares to the equivalent for spinning disk of $850 in October 2023 and $780 in September 2024.

Will flash kill HDD? How much longer for HDD?

In particular, Pure Storage has declared HDDs will be dead by 2028, with its flash products the chief agent in the cull, and all owing to its ability to aggregate much more flash capacity on its proprietary modules than occurs on commodity flash drives.

With flash module sizes of up to 300TB by 2026 promised by Pure, it contends that spinning disk will be commercially unviable.

Meanwhile, companies such as Panasas, which specialises in storage for unstructured data, point to hyperscaler datacentres’ overwhelming use of spinning disk in ratios up to 90/10 against flash. Panasas argues that there’s still a five-times differential between the lowest-cost flash and HDD, and that for most, something like the hyperscaler solution is optimal.  

When can you use flash and HDD in the cloud?

Enterprise users can also specify flash storage and spinning disk in the cloud. It is more likely in most cases that cloud storage will be specified by performance and cost criteria, in which case the customer may never know what media underlies it.

But it is possible also to specify flash storage in the cloud and the three largest hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – have solid-state storage options that mix cost, capacity and performance. 

The hyperscalers all offer flash storage to support compute with service levels based on capacity and IOPS per volume that range from general-purpose to premium levels aimed at specific workloads (eg, SQL, Oracle, SAP Hana) and environments (eg, Windows, Lustre, MacOS).

There are also options aimed at flash for file storage and flash storage from named suppliers, such as Azure’s NetApp Files.

What is the all-flash datacentre?

For about a decade, the idea of the all-flash datacentre has been discussed. The all-flash datacentre replaces HDD and other media such as tape with flash storage.

Driving it is the continued decrease in the cost of flash storage – as with QLC flash – but also the advantages of flash in terms of rapid access. The latter becomes more relevant as customers want to run analytics on bigger subsets of their data.

So, for example, where backups may previously have been held on nearline media such as slower HDDs, advocates of flash for such use cases point to the ability to run artificial intelligence (AI) on large customer datasets and to gain value therefrom.

Also, with backups as an example, the idea of being able to recover quickly from flash media in case of a ransomware attack is another use case touted by all-flash datacentre boosters. 

When will the all-flash datacentre arrive?

While enthusiastic suppliers of flash storage such as Pure talk down the obstacles to the all-flash datacentre, analysts point to the spread of (especially QLC) flash into secondary workloads but not necessarily all use cases, with spinning disk likely to retain its usefulness for some time for some datasets.

Meanwhile, HDD suppliers such as Toshiba say around 85% of all data is still on spinning disk. That fact, it says, is not likely to change rapidly, not least because the flash capacity to replace it doesn’t exist.

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Gartner Symposium: Why ServiceNow wants to be seen as the AI platform for business transformation

ServiceNow and Rimini Street have expanded their partnership to enable organisations to use older enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as a starting point for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

Using a single architecture and single data model from ServiceNow with Rimini Street’s third-party enterprise software support, the offering is being positioned as a way to enable organisations to innovate across procurement, finance, supply chain, HR, customer service and IT.

The partnership with Rimini Street represents a major step in the company’s strategy to evolve from case management to delivering AI-enabled workflow management that can coordinate and orchestrate systems of record in business, and also improve by learning from the data these systems hold.

During a presentation at the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, Hartmut Mueller, chief transformation officer at ServiceNow, described the company’s platform as “connecting all systems of record and connecting [their] metrics to the value stream”.

In other words, if an AI can learn from the data held in traditional enterprise systems, it can figure out how to improve the business processes these applications power.

AI without new enterprise systems

Business and IT leaders need to justify the cost of new platform investments, and this is where the partnership with Rimini Street has been positioned.

Speaking to Computer Weekly during the Gartner conference, Eric Helmer, chief technology officer at Rimini Street, said that in the past, the chief information officer (CIO) role has traditionally been back-office. “People were expected to keep the lights on, run the business of IT and firefight,” he said. “The new role of the CIO is in the front office.” This implies their actions have a direct impact on the organisation’s bottom line.

“Today’s CIOs are expected to be the ideas people, and they are expected to figure out things like artificial intelligence and come up with revolutionary ideas that will be game-changers for the business,” he added.

However, as Gartner warned at the start of the annual European conference, it’s easy to lose a lot of money on misguided AI initiatives. A Gartner survey of 300 CIOs conducted in July found that 90% believe managing costs is limiting the value they can get from AI. Moreover, as every enterprise software provider AI-enables their products, Gartner expects a large proportion of IT budgets are likely to be spent on these products. 

But ServiceNow, in collaboration with Rimini Street, is trying to offer a different approach, which relies on the third-party support provider’s track record in keeping ERP systems from the major providers running, even after mainstream support has officially ended. These older systems of records remain useful, if not essential, data sources for machine learning to improve ServiceNow’s understanding of how the business operates.

Helmer said the partnership with ServiceNow helps IT departments make more use of existing enterprise IT assets. “If the value of an ERP system for AI is the data it contains, then the version of ERP you run becomes irrelevant because you already have the data,” he said.

While ServiceNow is often seen as a company specialising in case management, Helmer said it has a raft of tools focused on IT modernisation, which sit on top of existing IT assets. These, he said, can be used to modernise the user interface, automate workflows, and run AI and predictive analytics. “GenAI capabilities can be achieved in a matter of months, instead of years,” he claimed, since the ERP system does not have to be upgraded to the latest AI-capable version first.

Bill McDermott, chairman and chief executive officer at ServiceNow, described the enterprise systems deployed in businesses as 20th-century systems that hundred progress. “ServiceNow’s partnership with Rimini Street gives customers a more unified, intelligent platform to maximise their existing software investments, for faster paths to transformation,” he said.

The fact that ServiceNow can be applied to manage business processes just as it’s used in case management offers a way, according to Helmer, to route and automate workflows between various line-of-business applications, which means IT leaders do not need to go through the cost and disruption of an enterprise application modernisation programme to get the benefits of AI.

Switching software maintenance to third-party support has traditionally been regarded as something only a few brave IT leaders embark on.

Being a premier sponsor at the Gartner Symposium, alongside the likes of AWS, PWC and SAP among others, is perhaps an indication of where ServiceNow sees itself in the corporate IT landscape. If it’s successful at offering an AI platform for running and optimising business processes, there may well be a compelling reason not to upgrade to the latest AI-enabled enterprise system and rely, instead, on third-party support of an existing ERP system.

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