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Lewis Ward spent sixteen years covering games as an analyst at IDC. Now he runs Design Desk at Player Driven, and his obsession has moved upstream, into the design layer where games are still just ideas. In this episode he and Greg get into the part of game-making most teams skip: the psychology underneath the code, the math underneath the fun, and the reason a strong blueprint so often falls apart on the way to a shipped game. It's a conversation about why design is never really separate from the real world, and why the gap between theory and practice is where studios quietly lose.What they get into:Lewis's move from market-research analyst to Design Desk, and why the early "kernel of an idea" stage is the part that fascinates him nowThe Guild Wars 2 lesson from Kristen Cox: architect your live ops systems to be surprised by players, then have the humility to say "we were wrong" and roll with it (the 80-to-100-person "champ trains" nobody designed for)Why gaming is a verb, not a noun, and how even a single-player game is a conversation with the team that built itGame economy vs. monetization: Catalin Alexander's argument that every forced choice in a game is an economic decision, and that the math underneath the core loop is what holds the whole thing togetherThe three loops of a live game, from moment-to-moment to season to multi-year progression, and why they all have to line up mathematicallyGenres as psychological needs: how self-determination theory (autonomy, mastery, relatedness) maps onto why players pick what they pick, and why too many designers treat psychology as "frou frou" and skip itThe dark power fantasy problem: why letting one player feel like a god works in single-player and breaks the moment a game goes social (and what that means for web3 games that turned everyone else into serfs)A preview of the upcoming Charlie Olsen episode on skill-based matchmaking, framed as Activision managing skill like a scarce resource to engineer close, uncertain, "sweaty" matchesWhere AI playtesting tools might let smaller teams get design insight without spending six figures on a data clean roomGuest: Lewis Ward, VP of Content, Design Desk at Player Driven. Former IDC games analyst (2009–2025), covering PC, console, and mobile. Reading list referenced: The Rules We Break (Eric Zimmerman), A Theory of Fun (Raph Koster), and a self-determination theory text.Mentioned in the episode: Kristen Cox (ArenaNet / Guild Wars 2), Oscar Clark (Arcanix), Catalin Alexander (behavioral game economist), Nick Yee (Quantic Foundry), Mark Otero (dark power fantasy take), Charlie Olsen (Invokation Games, ex-Activision matchmaking), and an upcoming Zach Letter / WonderWorks episode on Roblox and real-time live ops.A line worth pulling: On social games, Lewis: "Once you get into a social context, it's very difficult to make one person a god, because that makes everybody else a serf. And you know what the serfs will do? They'll quit the game."
Send us Fan MailWe break down depletion allowance, the oil and gas version of depreciation, and show how it can reduce taxes on production income without reducing your actual cash distributions. We also explain why many high-income investors use depletion to improve after-tax yield while keeping an eye on the rules and the real-world limits. • depletion allowance defined as a deduction tied to shrinking natural resources • why depletion can increase after-tax cash flow through paper losses • cost depletion basics using units produced and remaining reserves • percentage depletion explained as a revenue-based formula • why percentage depletion can continue beyond original investment • key limitations in loss years plus rolling unused depletion forward • working interest versus royalty interest as different investing paths • what investors see on a K-1 and where it lands on the 1040 • IDC versus depletion, upfront deduction versus ongoing deduction • example math showing why the effective tax benefit can exceed 15% of cash received • combining depletion with broader tax planning like real estate losses, charitable planning, cost segregation, Roth timing, and state planning If you're interested, you can go to https://www.prosperlcpa.com/apply to learn more.
Recent data from IDC indicates that Apple has successfully entered the mainstream laptop market with the launch of its MacBook Neo. The device achieved significant early momentum by shipping 1.1 million units during its initial weeks of availability. This strategic move targets budget-conscious buyers who typically purchase Windows-based machines from competitors like Dell and HP. By leveraging optimized silicon technology and more accessible pricing, Apple is challenging the long-standing dominance of traditional PC manufacturers. Analysts suggest this shift could permanently alter industry dynamics if Apple maintains its sales velocity through upcoming shopping seasons. Ultimately, the Neo's debut represents a major effort to expand the Apple ecosystem beyond its traditional high-end niche.
The MacBook Neo shipped 1.1 million units in its first weeks on sale, IDC estimates, as Apple pushes deeper into the mainstream laptop market. Also, Meta told TechCrunch that it's considering ways to monetize the new feature, but didn't share specifics on what that could look like. And X will now let you 'react with video' to posts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
1、天涯社区2026年6月1日,承载了无数初代网民青春记忆的“天涯社区”在停摆近三年后终于正式恢复访问,官方承诺,用户二十余年积累的历史发帖、社交关系及收藏好文等核心数据均已完整保留。天涯社区创办于1999年,巅峰期注册用户超1.3亿,曾被誉为“全球华人网上家园”,是《明朝那些事儿》《鬼吹灯》等经典IP的孵化地及初代网红的发源地。2023年4月起,因公司遭遇资金流动性困难及拖欠电信IDC服务器费用,平台被迫暂停访问。尽管重新回复访问,许多网友却并不买账,认为以当下的互联网环境,天涯注定不会回到曾经能够“畅所欲言”的状态。【话题】那些珍贵的互联网回忆2、这样的衣服才配预售网络视频,一女孩先在纸上画出自己设计的衣服款式草图,然后从调色染线到手工编织全部一人完成,把衣服做了出来。精致和还原度让网友发出如上感慨。在商品生产前先上架销售,等到生产后再交给消费者,预售已经成为现在商品市场常见的销售策略。【话题】你等过最久的预售
Summary In this episode of Grit, Grace, and Glitz, host Erika Rothenberger welcomes Christina Langdon, who shares her journey through leadership, resilience, and redefining success. She discusses the importance of belief, confidence, and intentionality in achieving your goals, along with practical tools like the IDC framework and the Human AI Index assessment. Connect with Christina https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinalangdonkeynotespeaker/ Connect with your host, Erika: LinkedIn (primary) https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikarothenberger IG https://www.instagram.com/erikalearothenberger?igsh=MmhjeTRhbnB1aXM2 FB https://www.facebook.com/share/69wqEYVzFKKnci9u/?mibextid=LQQJ4d Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, cybersecurity experts Ivo Wiens and Ben Boi-Doku unpack findings from CDW's Canadian Cybersecurity Study that point to a disconnect between leadership confidence and actual cybersecurity capabilities. Based on research conducted with IDC, the discussion explores why many organizations are layering advanced security tools on top of fragile foundations, leaving critical gaps in identity, third-party security and insider threat protection. Learn how overconfidence can undermine zero trust initiatives, complicate AI governance and increase ransomware risk through supplier and identity-based attack paths. To learn more, visit cdw.ca Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Twenty-five years ago, the goal was to build a website as a digital "single source of truth." In an era of AI agents and hyper-personalized realities, is the very concept of a single, universal brand "truth" now an obstacle to creating a truly relevant customer experience?Agility requires not just adopting new channels and technologies, but fundamentally rethinking the role of content and data in a constantly shifting landscape. It's the ability to move from managing a static digital property to orchestrating a fluid, dynamic relationship with your audience.Today, we're going to talk about the 25-year evolution of digital experience, from the early days of enterprise content management to today's complex ecosystem of AI-driven, composable platforms. We'll explore how seismic shifts—from the introduction of the iPhone to the rise of agentic AI—have not just changed the tools we use, but have fundamentally redefined the relationship between brands and their customers.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO at Sitecore, a company that is turning 25 this year and has managed to maintain its leadership in the space through many changes and a few curveballs. About Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek (BB) is the Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore, where she leads a global team of marketers who are redefining what's possible in modern marketing. Together, they're putting the power of generative and agentic AI to work – creating digital experiences that connect people and possibilities across the globe. Michelle is a trailblazer in bringing AI into marketing. At IBM, she served first as Global Head of B2B Marketing at the Weather Company, and then as CMO of IBM Watson, the company's pioneering AI platform. There, she served as the steward of the Watson brand, helping the world understand how AI can transform both work and life. Since then, she's become a Fellow at the Marketing Academy, a founding member of CMO Huddles, and has held CMO roles at both Skillsoft and IDC. At IDC, Michelle reimagined marketing as a strategic growth engine, launching a bold new brand identity, spearheading the company's first GenAI initiatives, and aligning brand, demand, and strategy to drive global impact. Michelle is a frequent speaker on marketing leadership, AI, and purpose-led growth. A lifelong learner, she's also a runner, rescue dog mom, and dark roast devotee. Her best ideas rarely arrive in a meeting, but often hit mid-stride or mid-walk. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellebb/ ---------- Resources ---------- Sitecore: sitecore.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fDon't miss We Make Future - the International Festival of Innovation in AI, Tech, and Digital Marketing, June 24-26 in Bologna. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/c80991afff416bb2The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Twenty-five years ago, the goal was to build a website as a digital "single source of truth." In an era of AI agents and hyper-personalized realities, is the very concept of a single, universal brand "truth" now an obstacle to creating a truly relevant customer experience?Agility requires not just adopting new channels and technologies, but fundamentally rethinking the role of content and data in a constantly shifting landscape. It's the ability to move from managing a static digital property to orchestrating a fluid, dynamic relationship with your audience.Today, we're going to talk about the 25-year evolution of digital experience, from the early days of enterprise content management to today's complex ecosystem of AI-driven, composable platforms. We'll explore how seismic shifts—from the introduction of the iPhone to the rise of agentic AI—have not just changed the tools we use, but have fundamentally redefined the relationship between brands and their customers.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO at Sitecore, a company that is turning 25 this year and has managed to maintain its leadership in the space through many changes and a few curveballs. About Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek (BB) is the Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore, where she leads a global team of marketers who are redefining what's possible in modern marketing. Together, they're putting the power of generative and agentic AI to work – creating digital experiences that connect people and possibilities across the globe. Michelle is a trailblazer in bringing AI into marketing. At IBM, she served first as Global Head of B2B Marketing at the Weather Company, and then as CMO of IBM Watson, the company's pioneering AI platform. There, she served as the steward of the Watson brand, helping the world understand how AI can transform both work and life. Since then, she's become a Fellow at the Marketing Academy, a founding member of CMO Huddles, and has held CMO roles at both Skillsoft and IDC. At IDC, Michelle reimagined marketing as a strategic growth engine, launching a bold new brand identity, spearheading the company's first GenAI initiatives, and aligning brand, demand, and strategy to drive global impact. Michelle is a frequent speaker on marketing leadership, AI, and purpose-led growth. A lifelong learner, she's also a runner, rescue dog mom, and dark roast devotee. Her best ideas rarely arrive in a meeting, but often hit mid-stride or mid-walk. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellebb/ ---------- Resources ---------- Sitecore: sitecore.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fDon't miss We Make Future - the International Festival of Innovation in AI, Tech, and Digital Marketing, June 24-26 in Bologna. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/c80991afff416bb2The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Resilient Cyber, I sit down with Katie Norton, Research Manager for DevSecOps and Software Supply Chain Security at IDC, to unpack what application security looks like as AI moves from copilot to autonomous teammate across the software development lifecycle.We dive into:
The episode reveals a growing governance gap as the central structural shift in the IT services sector, driven by accelerated AI adoption and increasing automation. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Veeam, and Auvik are reframing their market positions around the operational risks and requirements introduced by AI agents, data automation, and new service delivery models. This evolution is underscored by the rising number of AI agents—projected by IDC to reach 2.3 billion by 2030—operating largely outside of current oversight and frequently with excessive or inappropriate permissions. The principal development discussed is Veeam's announcement of its Data AI Command Platform. According to Dave Sobel and Rich Freeman, this platform is intended to address data-centric failures beyond traditional ransomware or accidental deletion. Veeam's platform is designed to handle issues such as AI-generated data hallucinations, inappropriate data exposure, and policy enforcement failures. The platform's architecture builds on the acquisition of Security AI, combining data security posture management with backup, compliance, and governance capabilities, although, as of now, key remediation features are only available for Microsoft 365, with further expansion expected over the coming months. Supporting developments include Auvik's expansion of automated network management based on a large historical dataset and the simultaneous entrance of OpenAI and Anthropic into direct services for mid-market clients, backed by billions in private capital from entities such as Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. Both companies now embed applied AI engineers at client sites, bypassing traditional channel partners. Channel operator feedback, reflected in research by Techisle and discussions at vendor conferences, indicates a lack of MSP readiness and a slow response to developing governance and compliance services, despite evidence from end-user data pointing to significant unmet demand and risk exposure. Operationally, MSPs face a growing liability trap where the speed and delegation of decisions to AI systems increase the potential for unnoticed errors or breaches. There is a disconnect between customer demand for governance, compliance, and data controls, and the preparedness of MSPs to deliver those services. This exposes providers to heightened contractual, operational, and reputational risk, particularly as vendors and large AI companies move directly into the mid-market service delivery space. Practical safeguards, clear accountability frameworks, and objective benchmarks for automation and governance effectiveness will be required to mitigate exposure and support safe, durable service offerings. Supported by: CometBackup HaloPSA Moovila
AI was supposed to kill services businesses. Instead, it made partners—and ecosystems—indispensable to deliver customer value. In 2025, HubSpot's top partner tiers grew by 30%. IDC set the opportunity ahead at $42 billion by 2030. And just last month, the companies building the world's most powerful AI concluded that human expertise is still the distribution layer. Season 2 of Owning the Outcome goes deeper into how HubSpot's partners are leading in the AI era—from building agentic solutions to focusing on customer value when the technology changes every day. New episodes drop every week, starting June 3.
Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies For most of the history of managed services, backup has been foundational but frankly unremarkable. You back up the data. Customers sleep better. Everyone moves on. That model needs to evolve. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, makes a compelling case for why MSPs need to reframe their entire backup practice around cyber resilience – and why the opportunity to do so has never been bigger or more urgent. The stat that sets the table: 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. Attackers know that if they can compromise the backup, the game is essentially over. An MSP whose backup practice is not built around isolated, immutable copies is not selling a last line of defense – it’s selling false assurance. Central to the conversation is the idea of the “minimum viable company”: a framework Emsley encourages MSPs to bring to their customers, ideally at the board level. The question is deceptively simple – if everything goes down, what are the absolute minimum systems and data sets required to bring the business back online? Building a resilience strategy around that answer changes how you architect backup, and how you price and position it. Emsley walks through Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, including the Data Domain platform and its multi-tenant capabilities for MSP environments, the Workspace Protection endpoint play, and the new premium rebate incentives for cyber resilience solutions in Dell’s Modern Partner Platform. His most practical advice for the mid-market? Have an incident response plan – and print it out. Because when ransomware strikes, the runbook sitting on the encrypted server is not going to help anyone. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re still coming to you from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, where AI Factory and agentic AI have understandably grabbed most of the headlines. But while I was on the show floor, I also wanted to bring you a conversation that I think is going to resonate long after the conference fades. The question of how MSPs should be thinking about cyber resilience – not just backup or data recovery, but the full picture of what it actually takes to bring a customer’s business back to life after a ransomware attack – sits at or near the top of virtually every board-level buying agenda right now. And with AI increasingly in the hands of the bad guys as much as the good guys, the calculus around protecting data is changing fast. I sat down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, for a conversation about the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, the concept of the minimum viable company, and why MSPs who are still selling backup the old-fashioned way may be leaving both value and their customers seriously exposed. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Emsley. Robert Dutt: Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Rob Emsley: Yeah, great to meet you, Robert. Robert Dutt: Director of cyber resilience marketing. You’re sitting in a pretty fascinating place right now, I have to think. Let’s start by sort of setting the table a little bit for an MSP and solution provider audience. How do you define cyber resilience at Dell today and how is that different from what it looked like even a couple of years back? Rob Emsley: Yeah, I mean, for many years, what the portfolio that I market was really the data protection portfolio. And like many vendors in the industry, one of the things that’s dramatically changed over probably the last decade, I would say, is the increase in cyber attacks and really the concern over things like ransomware, over things like insider threats, basically anything where bad actors are going after your data. And over the last probably 10 years, you’ve seen a lot more interest in cyber recovery as opposed to disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been around forever. Bad things happen to good people. Do I have a set of infrastructure that I can restart from, whether it’s a natural disaster or human error, et cetera, et cetera. And the interesting thing with cyber recovery is the frustrating reality is that your hardware is probably still in good shape. You’re not under five feet of water or your infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed by a tornado. So everything looks as if it’s recoverable, but you know it isn’t because it’s been impacted, it’s been infected, and your good data is now bad data. So many MSPs that work with vendors in this market have seen an evolution of those vendors changing their messaging to certainly become more security companies. And some of that, you could argue, is based on vendor evaluations, especially private companies that are looking to go public or be acquired, et cetera, et cetera. So Dell Technologies was probably one of the last to really make a hard pivot from the products that we sell, predominantly delivering backup and recovery, but really to position those products and market those products as cyber resilience offerings. And cyber resilience really drives us to have new conversations with different parts of the customer’s team. Certainly it’s the old adage that when you’re selling data protection, you take the elevator to the basement to talk to the infrastructure team. When you’re selling cyber resilience, you take the elevator to the top floor to talk to the board, and it really has become a board-level discussion. So I think for managed service providers, the topic of cyber resilience is a much broader conversation that they can have with prospective customers. I think that customers know that there’s only two things that they’re afraid of losing. One is their employees, and two is their data. Losing either of them is really a bad day. So I think that when you look at buying intentions from many analyst firms that do those types of research projects – Omdia, for instance, is one – cyber resilience tops the top three, if not the top two or even top one, buying intentions for the coming years. And it has done for many, many years. So I think that’s why cyber resilience is an opportunity for managed service providers to expand the conversations and the people that they’re talking to, because it’s a horizontally required discipline. One of the things that customers, unfortunately over the years, have overspent on – maybe not overspent, but maybe not got the balance correct – is they’ve spent a lot of their budgets on cybersecurity products, trying to make their environments more secure. Basically build a wall. Firewalls fall into that category of technology, ransomware detection, those types of things. The area where we’ve tried to get a better balance in IT budgets is on recovery and resilience, based on the premise that there’s no such thing as absolute security. So you need to be prepared to have a good copy of your data to bring back to life, to bring your company back to life. Robert Dutt: Obviously, a lot of talk about AI because it’s the 2020s and we’re at a tech conference. Everyone’s going that way, which is good news in some regards and bad news in other regards in the security sphere, because it turns out the bad guys have access to it. Rob Emsley: Yeah. And that’s true for, as you imagine, a lot of technology. If you think about just life in general, there’s a lot of things that are available in the market that can be used for good and can also be used for bad. It all depends on what hands those technologies are in. And certainly, if you look at the use of AI to manufacture more sophisticated cyber attacks, certainly if you think about the use of AI to provide more sophisticated phishing emails, that’s certainly one thing I think we’ve seen. And certainly the concern around using AI to more quickly identify vulnerabilities – that’s been something that’s been top of mind in the news over the last few weeks, a couple of months. But again, I think both of those just reinforce the importance of having a surety that you have a good known copy of your data that you can take to the bank to bring the company back online. And I think from an MSP perspective, offering an infrastructure that gives their customers that assurance is really beneficial to customers. The old adage of customers want to sleep well at night – and if an MSP can help them do that, then a good night’s sleep is worth a fortune sometimes. Certainly my wife would say so. Robert Dutt: I think after 365, backup has been a fundamental underpinning of managed services for such a long time. I’m curious what you think is most common for MSPs to miss in terms of evolving and doing more than just the old-fashioned backup technology and getting more out of that. Rob Emsley: Yeah, I think if you look at a lot of the backup technologies that are available, certainly backup has always been that last line of defense. And unfortunately, being that last line of defense, the bad actors realize that if you compromise the backup infrastructure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. All bets are off. The customer doesn’t have a last line of defense. So if you think about some of the research that’s in the industry, 97% of cyber attacks involve attacking the backup infrastructure. And that doesn’t matter whether or not it’s managed by the customer or managed by an MSP. So I do think that MSPs need to become much more conversant in explaining what they are doing and how they have implemented a backup infrastructure that really is that last line of defense. And that’s something which you start getting into the concept of offering isolated copies of backups – maybe not for every single data type, but certainly we believe wholeheartedly in the concept of the minimum viable company, which really is a discussion to have with the board about when everything is gone, what needs to come back in order for you to be viable. Because I think that’s the killer – some people have a laissez-faire attitude to, well, everything’s important. But if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. So I do think that the MSPs that are in the backup industry need to realize that the backup value has changed. It used to be very much around being there for operational recovery. Having backups is just good hygiene, but having backups that aren’t secure is a no-no in today’s market. So that becomes a very important shift for MSPs that are in the backup market. Because I do agree with you – backup, God bless it, has been a great value creator for MSPs. Many customers realize that they need to back up their data. Subscribing to a service to do that is certainly an easy way to use your resources for more productive work to drive revenue. But at the end of the day, if you’re not secure, it’s difficult to innovate with confidence. Robert Dutt: All right. How does the portfolio that you guys are offering today help partners position their customers to be able to bounce back based on what really happens when they get attacked, breached, when their backup is part of that? Rob Emsley: Yeah. So within the Dell Technologies portfolio, this occurred probably about seven years ago. When I came back to Dell in 2018, we were simplifying the infrastructure portfolio of the company – storage predominantly, servers, and at the time data protection and cyber resilience. So many of our customers and our partners realized we have a portfolio of Power-branded products: PowerEdge, PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerSwitch. And probably in 2019, we introduced PowerProtect. So PowerProtect is the umbrella portfolio for everything we do in that backup and recovery, data protection, and cyber resilience space. Within there, we sell software to create copies of data and store them on hardware. And the hardware that we sell is something that we’ve been very lucky to have ownership of for literally 20 years. It’s an acquisition that was made by Dell Technologies, actually prior to the acquisition of EMC – it was an EMC acquisition, a company called Data Domain. And Data Domain has been really foundational for delivering cyber resilience. It falls into the category of what IDC calls the purpose-built backup appliance market. So unlike general purpose storage that many backup vendors use, this is a storage tier that was specifically developed for the purpose of storing backups. So it was developed with three attributes in mind. One was performance – how fast can I back up, how fast can I recover? It was built on efficiency – backup is a very repetitive process, so how can I store multiple backups in less physical capacity? So data reduction, deduplication. And then scalability – how can I start small and scale? But then overarching to that is how can you make it rock solid and secure? So the security features of our PowerProtect Data Domain appliances are something that’s very advantageous. And many of our managed service providers have stood that up in their data centers and offered that as the foundation for cyber resilience. The nice thing is that Data Domain, as well as supporting Dell Technologies software – so PowerProtect Data Manager, and other software assets that we’ve had for even longer, products like Networker and Avamar – it also has a very healthy ecosystem. There’s a protocol called Data Domain Boost that we use to allow third parties to integrate with Data Domain directly. Because the reality is that an MSP, when they go and talk to a customer, that customer has more than likely already made choices around the backup software that they’re using. And it’s more than likely not just one. And sometimes when they go to the MSP, they’ll say, well, can you basically choose a backup software application? But even the nice thing is, from an MSP perspective, Data Domain is multi-tenant. So you can slice up Data Domain into an ability to serve many MSP customers using different software if the customer so chooses. So if you look at our expo floor this year, we’ve got companies like Commvault exhibiting, companies like Veeam exhibiting. That’s the way that our portfolio is set up to provide that backup infrastructure for MSPs to leverage. Robert Dutt: Obviously, one of the big occurrences here from a partner point of view is the Modern Partner Platform that’s rolling out. And in part of all of those changes, you got the specific call out for cyber resilience solutions as one of the differentiated product areas for premium rebates. That’s a pretty big carrot. What does it say about the signal to the channel about where you see the biggest growth opportunities across Dell? Rob Emsley: Yeah, we have historically done the majority of our business through the channel, but we also recognize that the channel has a lot of choices. Many of our competitors, in fact most of our competitors in that cyber resilience backup solution space, are all pure-play individual companies, most of which have very little direct sales capabilities. So very channel-focused and therefore have blanketed the channel to sell their wares, sell their products. We wholeheartedly believe that the Dell Technologies portfolio, either standalone from a cyber resilience solutions perspective, but also taken in context of the other key elements – you think about things like private cloud and AI – gives a channel partner the concept of delivering secure infrastructure and the opportunity to take advantage of that broader portfolio. And as we talked about earlier, you can’t deny that cyber resilience is top of mind. It’s as high on the board’s agenda as, hey, how are we going to take advantage of artificial intelligence? Some could argue that cyber resilience is either on par or if not, for many customers, more of a concern, because it’s that ever-present danger of – is the infrastructure that I have now, even before I’ve implemented AI, secure enough to allow us to sleep at night? We certainly see the pivot from data protection to cyber resilience fitting well with the other vendors that our MSPs talk to. We certainly have a portfolio that addresses small customer needs to large customer needs, can absolutely be leveraged by our MSP partners to build a practice behind. And also, with cyber resilience solutions, there’s that upfront services component built in – identifying what is the minimum viable company that needs to be the most secure, the most isolated, to give those customers the peace of mind and actually show the MSPs as valued trusted partners. Robert Dutt: So much of the focus is obviously on enterprise data, on the data center, on the infrastructure side. But you also have the Workspace Protection offering going on. How important is securing the endpoint in the overall resilience strategy, and what’s the play there for partners from a resilience point of view? Rob Emsley: Yeah, certainly if you think about the entry point into most networks, the endpoints are clearly the most numerous, just by the volume of endpoints compared to the volume of elements in the data center. So certainly when we look at cyber resilience, we look holistically – not only at the data center infrastructure, but absolutely the endpoints that we sell. We continually look at the elements of security across the portfolio. And there’s a lot of foundational technology across the Dell product line, whether it be in the client space or in the server or storage space. The concept of trusted boot, secure BIOS, really carries forward through the PC line all the way into our server line and then the leverage of those servers into our storage portfolio. And then from an MSP standpoint, when you engage with Dell from a purchase perspective, you gain the advantage of the secure supply chain that Dell uses to its advantage. Our supply chain forever has been an incredible value, not only to ourselves, but also to anybody that buys from us, including our partners. But the fact that the way that we leverage that supply chain securely gives a lot of peace of mind. Because many of our partners, when they’re working with security companies, those security companies are not manufacturing their devices. Certainly they’re not manufacturing endpoints. Most of the time, they’re not manufacturing data center servers and data center storage solutions. They’re buying from somebody else. So the concept of a secure supply chain becomes harder to rationalize when you have multiple suppliers providing your solution. So at the end of the day, one of the advantages when it comes to Dell is that if you choose to work holistically with Dell, you get this foundational benefit across the portfolio of a lot of commonality when it comes to security and resilience. That’s one take-it-to-the-bank benefit that an MSP can achieve when they work with Dell Technologies across the entire portfolio. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position to have that entire portfolio, and long may that continue. And certainly that’s one of the advantages – when we look at security and resilience, we can look at it from the endpoint all the way to the data center and beyond. And I think that’s something that is a big benefit for MSPs to lean into the whole portfolio, as well as the advantages of aggregation of benefits and different tier levels by having a single-vendor, multi-portfolio opportunity, as opposed to slicing and dicing their vendor engagements across half a dozen different vendors. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the most common gap, especially in the mid-market, in terms of incident response plans today? Rob Emsley: I think it’s one, having one that is documented and printed out. That may seem very basic, but… Robert Dutt: Until your systems are locked down by ransomware. Rob Emsley: Exactly. So the very basic advice of have a plan and print it out may sound very old-fashioned and simplistic, but in the mid-market, that is probably something that people should consider. Certainly, practice does make perfect is not a trite saying. Practice, practice, practice in the mid-market becomes important. You don’t want to be developing a plan or using a plan for the first time when the house is on fire. You want to know where the exits are, where the fire extinguisher is, and you want to know how to use it. You want to make sure that when you use it, they work. Something which we can probably all think about in our own home lives, to be honest. So I think that’s probably something which, no matter what size company you are, it comes back to – you don’t want to lose your employees, you don’t want to lose your data. And when it comes to cyber resilience, you’re never too small or too big to take a fresh look at what you do and what your plan is. Robert Dutt: Once again, I appreciate you taking the time. Great chat. Rob Emsley: Great. Thanks, Robert. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Emsley from Dell. I’d like to thank Rob for carving out some time during what has been a very busy week on the show floor at DTW. A couple of things from the conversation that I think are worth mentioning. First, that 97% figure – 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. If you’re an MSP and your backup practice is still built on the assumption that the backup is the safe harbor, that’s a foundational problem. The attackers know exactly where the life raft is. And second, the idea of the minimum viable company sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s actually a board-level conversation that most MSPs probably aren’t having and probably should be. What are the absolute minimum systems, data sets, and processes that a business needs to restart their operations? Answering that question and then building a resilience stack around that answer is the real difference between selling backup and selling business continuity. And his parting advice – have a plan and print it out – almost laughably basic until you consider how many organizations discover their incident response runbook is sitting on the encrypted server when they need it the most. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always help. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
Melissa Mariano is a 43-year-old Canadian flight attendant living in Dubai who was diagnosed with triple positive (ER+, PR+, HER2+) breast cancer after a routine mammogram...zero symptoms, zero lumps. She almost skipped her follow-up appointment. In this episode, she shares how she went from stage 0 DCIS to navigating Herceptin without chemo, low-dose "Baby Tam," the Dutch test, and a radical people-pleasing wake-up call that changed everything. In this episode we cover: How calcifications on a mammogram went from "nothing to worry about" to a biopsy — and why she delayed 4 months The vacuum-assisted biopsy that may have removed her invasive cancer entirely before surgery even happened Why her final pathology came back DCIS only, stage 0 — and what triple positive actually means 18 rounds of Herceptin (anti-HER2) with NO chemo — and the NCCN guideline that made that possible The Italian Clancy study on "Baby Tam" (5mg Tamoxifen) and why she's tapering down from 20mg Dutch test results: high estrogen, good methylation — what it means and what she's doing about it Supplements she's using: L-theanine, Relora, liposomal glutathione, DIM (cycled), NAC Sauna 2x/week, red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, yin yoga, sound healing, Reiki, breathwork — her full protocol Egg freezing for fertility preservation before starting Tamoxifen The people-pleasing pattern she believes contributed to her diagnosis — and the shift that changed everything Why she says: "I'm no longer a phony — but I am my priority" Links & Resources: Clancy Study on Low-Dose Tamoxifen (Baby Tam / 5mg): READ HERE NCCN Guidelines for Breast Cancer: READ HERE Connect with Melissa Mariano: https://www.instagram.com/melidubai/ Not Today Cancer Inner Circle (weekly live calls, community support): [INFO HERE] BrocElite: 20% off here Chapter Markers (estimated) 00:00 — Intro: Meet Melissa — Dubai life, flight attendant, Italian roots 04:00 — The mammogram that almost didn't happen: calcifications and a delayed follow-up 08:30 — Biopsy results: triple positive, Grade 2 IDC + high-grade DCIS 13:00 — MRI showed no mass enhancement — the biopsy may have removed the cancer 19:00 — Surgery, clear margins, final pathology: stage 0 DCIS 22:00 — 20 rounds radiation — spinning and yoga the whole way through 25:00 — Herceptin without chemo: the NCCN guideline that changed everything 28:00 — Tamoxifen side effects, Baby Tam, and the Italian Clancy study 34:00 — Dutch test results, functional gynecologist Dr. Maria, supplement protocol 38:00 — Sauna, red light, hyperbaric oxygen, yin yoga, sound healing 44:00 — "I'm no longer a phony — but I am my priority": the people-pleasing shift 50:00 — What cancer gave her: resilience, perspective, advocacy 54:00 — Closing: the "Nope. Not Today." shirt moment + not today cancer Medical disclaimer: This episode is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your own oncologist, physician, or qualified healthcare provider before making any decisions about your diagnosis, treatment, or supplement protocol.
The dominant structural shift identified is the emergence of agentic AI as a direct operator within multi-system business environments, triggering a governance and accountability gap. Vendors and cloud platforms—including AWS, Stripe, and Cloudflare—are enabling AI agents not only to recommend actions but also to directly access payment rails, provision infrastructure, and execute transactions. This movement turns automation into an operating model issue rather than a feature deployment, as the identity, authority, and accountability of non-human actors become central operational questions. Primary evidence is drawn from a range of industry signals. According to an AMD-commissioned IDC report, 81% of enterprises are engaged in AI PC adoption and 61% are embedding AI into workflows. AWS has expanded managed agent packaging for AI deployments, Stripe has launched the Link wallet allowing AI agents to process payments on users' behalf with controls on payment credentials, and Cloudflare has demonstrated agents autonomously provisioning cloud resources with enforced monthly spend limits. While these statistics carry vendor-driven optimism, the combined actions of these companies confirm a shift from advisory AI to operational AI. Related developments reinforce this trajectory. The SolarWinds survey reported by Computer Weekly finds 71% of IT workers experiencing higher demands due to AI, with only 19% noting reduced cognitive load, reflecting operational burdens rather than efficiencies. Similarly, Forrester data cited by The Register highlights a change in CIO responsibilities from system building to outcome governance as agentic AI exposes gaps in decision rights and process completeness. Security risks are elevated, as the Kela report counts 2.86 billion stolen credentials in a year, indicating that agent-driven credentials can trigger machine-speed purchases and changes, compounding the challenge of oversight and recovery. Operational implications for MSPs are significant. Without explicit governance, spend limits, approval paths, and audit trails, MSPs face increased liability and support burden when AI agents initiate actions across client systems. The episode underscores that automation is not just a technical project but a contract and service design issue; if accountability is not clearly defined, MSPs bear the risk and cost of unauthorized transactions and exception handling. To mitigate exposure, there is a need to formalize agent governance as a priced, intentional service encompassing identity management, financial controls, and documented operational guardrails before agentic AI is deployed in client environments. 00:00 Agents Take Over 04:39 Who's Accountable? 06:48 Who Owns This? 09:58 Why Do We Care? Supported by: NerdioScalePad Upcoming event: The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera
Na hora de comprar um celular, um notebook ou até um smartwatch, você está escolhendo apenas um produto ou entrando em um ecossistema? Esse é o tema do novo episódio do Podcast Canaltech, que discute como a integração entre dispositivos se tornou um dos principais fatores na decisão de compra de tecnologia. Hoje, mais do que especificações técnicas, muitos consumidores já consideram como celular, computador, TV e outros aparelhos funcionam juntos no dia a dia. Para explicar esse movimento, conversamos com Reinaldo Sakis, diretor de pesquisa da IDC para a América Latina. Ele mostra como o conceito de ecossistema evoluiu nos últimos anos, por que empresas como Apple, Samsung e Lenovo apostam tanto nessa estratégia e como isso impacta diretamente o comportamento do consumidor. Na prática, o ecossistema promete mais praticidade e produtividade, com recursos como compartilhamento rápido de arquivos, integração entre dispositivos e continuidade de tarefas. Por outro lado, também pode limitar a liberdade de escolha e pesar no bolso. No episódio, você entende como esse modelo funciona, quais são os benefícios reais e o que considerar antes de decidir se vale a pena investir em um único ecossistema ou buscar o melhor custo-benefício. Você também vai conferir: Xiaomi pode lançar celular com bateria gigante de 8.000 mAh, Dona do ChatGPT é processada após falha em caso de massacre e eSIM já é realidade no Brasil, veja como aposentar o chip físico. Este podcast foi roteirizado e apresentado por Fernada Santos e contou com reportagens de Wendel Martins, André Lourenti e Bruno de Blasi, sob coordenação de Anaísa Catucci. A trilha sonora é de Guilherme Zomer, a edição de Livia Strazza e a arte da capa é de Erick Teixeira.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The war with Iran has upended supply chains including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use everyday, such as a certain kind of thermoplastic, copper, and helium. We are now dealing with shortages of all of them. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst with the research firm IDC, to learn more.
The war with Iran has upended supply chains including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use everyday, such as a certain kind of thermoplastic, copper, and helium. We are now dealing with shortages of all of them. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst with the research firm IDC, to learn more.
Every major enterprise platform this quarter — Salesforce Headless 360, Workday Agent System of Record, Microsoft Copilot Studio, SAP Joule, Oracle agentic, ServiceNow Moveworks, IBM watsonx Orchestrate — is pitching a control plane for your AI agents. But none of them is solving the real problem: who inside your organization actually owns the agent workforce, and who's steering it at the speed agents now act? In this edition of Lens Four,
Every major enterprise platform this quarter — Salesforce Headless 360, Workday Agent System of Record, Microsoft Copilot Studio, SAP Joule, Oracle agentic, ServiceNow Moveworks, IBM watsonx Orchestrate — is pitching a control plane for your AI agents. But none of them is solving the real problem: who inside your organization actually owns the agent workforce, and who's steering it at the speed agents now act? In this edition of Lens Four,
Send us Fan MailWe share an exclusive client workshop on advanced oil and gas tax planning and how the tax code can turn a passive energy investment into a powerful deduction strategy. We lay out how IDC and depletion work, where the real risks live, and how to coordinate oil and gas with real estate, capital gains, and retirement moves. • why working interest oil and gas can create non-passive losses that offset W-2 income • how intangible drilling costs drive large first-year deductions and why timing matters • what depletion deduction does for ongoing cash flow tax efficiency • differences between investing with an operator, a diversified fund, or royalty rights • oil and gas versus real estate tradeoffs on appreciation, leverage, and tax control • stacking cost segregation losses with oil and gas profits for smoother tax outcomes • using oil and gas planning for capital gains mitigation and potential 1031 exchange paths • retirement planning ideas including self-directed IRA considerations and Roth conversion tax math • gifting strategies for estate planning and income shifting to family members • qualified opportunity zone fund concepts tied to oil and gas and why the exit can matter • how we model after-tax ROI so decisions are based on math, not hype *If you want to see how any of these strategies may apply to you, go to http://www.prosperlcpa.com/apply and I'll personally send you a video illustrating what's possible.
A patient advocate/cancer survivor and a healthcare professional discuss key topics including early breast cancer diagnosis, role of self-agency in pursuing optimal cancer care, encouraging trial participation with patient testimonials, and other considerations for the patient care journey such as appropriate screening, follow-up encounters for questions, guideline-based treatments, and side effect management. Participants Kristen D. Whitaker, MD, MS Breast Medical Oncologist Medstar Georgetown Center Institute at Washington Hospital Center Assistant Professor of Medicine Georgetown University School of Medicine Washington, DC Asha Miller Founder, Asha Miller Creative Patient Advocate and Consultant Patient Experience and Health Equity Breast Cancer Veteran Columbus, Ohio Link to full program:https://bit.ly/47XIKV7 Get access to all our new podcasts by subscribing to the Decera Clinical Education Oncology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or Spotify. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Jessica Steinrock, a pioneering intimacy coordinator, joins host Candice Bloch to discuss the value and particulars of intimacy coordination. Jessica shares her journey from theater to film, emphasizing the importance of consent, safety, and professionalism in intimate scenes. In their conversation, they explore the significance of intimacy coordination, the range of situations that require it, terminology, equipment, and common misconceptions surrounding the role. Intimacy coordination is more than just guidance for “spicy” sex scenes - it's about ensuring safety and consent in all types of intimate moments on screen. From shower scenes to intense makeouts, these professionals support actors' well-being on sets and create a space where they can explore their craft without fear, thereby focusing on the artistry of their performances. Jessica is also the CEO of Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (or IDC), a SAG-AFTRA accredited training organization for intimacy coordinators. She shares how IDC is helping educate, train, and certify intimacy coordinators and discusses their resources and offerings, including a two-day virtual Summit on May 2-3, 2026.Follow Jessica on Instagram @intimacy_coordinator_Learn more about Jessica here: jessicasteinrock.comLearn more about IDC here: www.idcprofessionals.comAnd their upcoming 2026 SummitSupport the show---Subscribe to learn more about filmmaking, production, media makers, creator resources, visual storytelling, and every aspect that brings film, television, and video projects from concepts to our screens. Check out the MediaMakerSpotlight.com show page to find even more conversations with industry professionals that inspire, educate, and entertain!We on the Women in Film & Video (WIFV) Podcast Team work hard to make this show a great resource for our listeners, and we thank you for listening!
On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we discuss all of the rumors surrounding Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone, now said to be called the “iPhone Ultra," which is shaping up to be a comprehensive redesign unlike anything the company has shipped before.The iPhone Ultra is expected to launch alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max this fall, though reports suggest it will ship after the Pro models, potentially as late as December. Pricing is expected to start at over $2,000, making it the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold.The device will have a book-style, passport-shaped design with a 4:3 aspect ratio, wider than it is tall and unlike any foldable currently on the market. When closed, it will have a 5.5-inch outer display; when open, a 7.8-inch inner OLED panel takes over, making it just slightly smaller than the 8.3-inch iPad mini. According to design leaks from Instant Digital, the device will measure just 4.5mm thick when unfolded, which would make it Apple's thinnest iPhone to date. The outer frame is said to be made of titanium for durability at that thinness, while the inner frame uses aluminum. The back features a glass finish with a shorter, iPhone Air-style camera plateau housing two horizontally arranged rear cameras.The same leak revealed that volume buttons are relocated to the top edge of the device, aligned to the right. The inner display features a single punch-hole cutout resulting in a smaller Dynamic Island, while a Touch ID power button and Camera Control remain on the right edge. Reports indicate the iPhone Ultra will support iPad-style multitasking and layouts for running apps side by side when unfolded, befitting its iPad mini-sized inner display. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has described it as the "most significant overhaul in the iPhone's history."Achieving that ultra-thin form factor comes with tradeoffs, and the iPhone Ultra will be missing several features that iPhone users have come to expect, in some ways echoing the compromises Apple made with the iPhone Air. The iPhone Air went without stereo speakers, a SIM card slot, and multiple rear cameras to achieve its 5.6mm frame; the iPhone Ultra faces similar constraints at an even more demanding 4.5mm. The ultra-thin chassis leaves no room for a triple-lens camera setup, so the telephoto lens found on iPhone Pro models is absent, leaving just a dual 48-megapixel rear system. More significantly, there is no space for the TrueDepth sensor array required for Face ID, meaning the iPhone Ultra will rely on a side-button Touch ID module instead.Under the hood, the iPhone Ultra is expected to feature Apple's A20 chip paired with 12GB of RAM. Storage options are said to include 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. Battery capacity is reportedly in the 5,400mAh to 5,800mAh range, which would put it among the largest ever in an iPhone despite its slim dimensions.The scale of Apple's production ambitions for the iPhone Ultra has already been tempered by manufacturing realities. Kuo initially indicated Apple placed orders for 15 to 20 million total foldable iPhones, though he noted demand would likely be limited due to the device's cost. By December, Kuo warned that early-stage yield and ramp-up challenges could mean smooth shipments may not occur until 2027, with potential shortages lasting through at least the end of 2026.The high asking price is expected to be a further constraint on volume: IDC projects the device will capture over 22% unit share of the foldables market in its first year, but that market remains a niche segment overall. The iPhone Air's underwhelming sales performance, with Kuo reporting suppliers cut production capacity by more than 80% after demand fell short of expectations, may serve as a cautionary tale for premium iPhone form-factor experiments.
Send us Fan MailWe break down seven common field mistakes that quietly ruin structured cabling performance even when the work looks clean. We also share the mindset habits that separate average installs from work that passes certification, earns trust, and holds up years later. • untwisting pairs too far at termination and losing noise resistance • setting the punch tool wrong and risking bad IDC terminations • ignoring bend radius rules and creating internal crosstalk • pulling cable with too much tension and stretching or breaking conductors • treating heat, storage, and jacket damage as “no big deal” • labeling late or inconsistently and making troubleshooting painful • mixing manufacturers and undermining optimization and warranties • skipping certification testing or trusting continuity too much • slowing down to prevent rework and protect profit • learning from mistakes, finding a mentor, taking pride in craft If you're watching the show on YouTube, would you mind hitting the subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being produced? If you're listening to us on one of the audio podcast platforms, would you mind leaving us a five-star rating? If you found value in this, please share this with another technician who's coming up behind you because at the end of the day, knowledge is power. Support the showKnowledge is power! Make sure to stop by the webpage to buy me a cup of coffee or support the show at https://linktr.ee/letstalkcabling . Also if you would like to be a guest on the show or have a topic for discussion send me an email at chuck@letstalkcabling.com Chuck Bowser RCDD TECH#CBRCDD #RCDD
Thabo Shole Mashao speaks to Mark Goliath, Divisional Executive for Marketing at the IDCon the work of the IDC. They also touch on some of the concerns entrepreneurs and general South Africans have raised around funding in the country. The Clement Manyathela Show is broadcast on 702, a Johannesburg based talk radio station, weekdays from 09:00 to 12:00 (SA Time). Clement Manyathela starts his show each weekday on 702 at 9 am taking your calls and voice notes on his Open Line. In the second hour of his show, he unpacks, explains, and makes sense of the news of the day. Clement has several features in his third hour from 11 am that provide you with information to help and guide you through your daily life. As your morning friend, he tackles the serious as well as the light-hearted, on your behalf. Thank you for listening to a podcast from The Clement Manyathela Show. Listen live on Primedia+ weekdays from 09:00 and 12:00 (SA Time) to The Clement Manyathela Show broadcast on 702 https://buff.ly/gk3y0Kj For more from the show go to https://buff.ly/XijPLtJ or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/p0gWuPE Subscribe to the 702 Daily and Weekly Newsletters https://buff.ly/v5mfetc Follow us on social media: 702 on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TalkRadio702 702 on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@talkradio702 702 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/talkradio702/ 702 on X: https://x.com/Radio702 702 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@radio702 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The episode outlines a structural shift in the managed services landscape, moving from technology stack standardization toward continuous governance as the primary product. Increasing AI adoption is driving volatility in both hardware costs and cloud billing, expanding the complexity and risk profile that MSPs must manage. Companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Akamai are actively shaping this shift by revising product rollouts and pushing for workload placement strategies that prioritize cost, control, and risk mitigation rather than platform ideology. The core evidence highlighted is that volatile AI-related costs are directly impacting endpoint and cloud spend, undermining the traditional set-it-and-forget-it approach. IDC has revised global PC shipment expectations downward by 11.3% for 2026, citing memory shortages and supply chain disruptions, which is driving up hardware refresh costs and complicating standardization efforts. Wasabi reports that 48% of cloud storage budgets are being consumed by fees instead of capacity, while 72% of organizations now operate with hybrid storage strategies. These developments are increasing the need for contractual controls and workload governance to protect MSP margins. Supporting developments reinforce the market's pivot toward governance. Microsoft's rollback of Copilot integration and the US government's warnings after the Stryker incident emphasize the operational risk of rapid or unmanaged AI deployments. Akamai's expansion of AI inference to thousands of edge locations and OpenAI's launch of smaller, cost-targeted models underscore the growing significance of workload placement and model selection as ongoing operational decisions. According to a Westcon-Comstor survey, nearly a third of MSPs are already repositioning themselves as hybrid advisors, reflecting this market adjustment. For MSPs and IT leaders, the implications are clear: traditional fixed-fee models that bundle variable costs are now a liability, absorbing unpriced volatility as AI usage increases. Sustainable operation requires MSPs to separate governance from consumption within contracts and clearly define policies for workload placement, spend guardrails, and permission controls. The episode indicates that successful providers will be those who document, enforce, and price for governance, while those who treat hybrid as a generic technology support issue will face margin erosion and increased risk exposure. 00:00 AI Cost Shock 03:18 Placement Is Strategy 06:06 Margin Splits Here 08:54 Why Do We Care? Supported by: JumpCloud HaloPSA
There's an ongoing narrative that Windows is worse than ever today and people are leaving in droves. Paul does not see that, and will simply point to Windows 8 and remind folks that it can be (and was) worse. Also, PowerToys 0.98 adds a major new feature to Command Palette, big changes to Keyboard Manager and CursorWrap, and about 100 other updates. This is a big one. Plus, Mozilla Firefox is staging a comeback and may be worth another look. Windows Rajesh Jha is retiring and Microsoft is reorging its Experiences + Devices team Release Preview: A peek at next week's Week D update (and April's Patch Tuesday) shows we're getting improvements to Narrator, Settings, Smart App Control, Pen settings, Display, File Explorer, and the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). The trend continues! New Canary, Dev, and Beta builds - Nothing new in Canary. Dev/Beta: Drag Tray is being renamed to Drop Tray, you can change the user folder name during Setup, Restore points are getting a modern update finally Intel goes nuts with new "Arrow Lake refresh" processors; these are not Copilot+ PC capable and it's unclear what the Panther Lake comparison looks like IDC now expects 11.3 percent decline in PC market in 2026, 7.6 percent decline for tablets AI Microsoft may sue OpenAI for contract breach - the best Microsoft divorce since IBM Major reorg in Microsoft's AI businesses Former Snap exec in charge of consolidated Copilot offerings across consumer and commercial Mustafa Suleyman to focus on Microsoft's foundational models There has been a lot of retiring and a lot of outside hires for top-level executive positions in Microsoft over the past year or more. Curious. Rumors vs. reality in Microsoft scaling back AI ambitions in Windows Rumor: Microsoft is backtracking on some Copilot features Reality: Microsoft is not backtracking on its AI ambitions, it's just going to try to do a better job with branding and positioning Microsoft launches Copilot Health in the U.S. Google Personal Intelligence ships in the U.S. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano models GPT-5 mini is available as a reasoning model on Duck.ai Xbox and gaming Rumor vs. reality in Xbox strategy Rumor: Microsoft removed "This is an Xbox" messaging from website so it must be focusing on consoles again Reality: Literally nothing has changed Xbox Insiders is testing per-game Quick Resume toggle Also more groups on Home, custom colors, profile badges in guide Big half month for Game Pass, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, more coming Starfield is coming to PS5 on April 7 NVIDIA launches DLSS 5, changes existing games, people are freaking out Tips and picks Tip of the week: The grass is always greener App pick of the week: PowerToys 0.98 RunAs Radio this week: Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah Brown liquor pick of the week: Teeling Small Batch Whiskey Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security
There's an ongoing narrative that Windows is worse than ever today and people are leaving in droves. Paul does not see that, and will simply point to Windows 8 and remind folks that it can be (and was) worse. Also, PowerToys 0.98 adds a major new feature to Command Palette, big changes to Keyboard Manager and CursorWrap, and about 100 other updates. This is a big one. Plus, Mozilla Firefox is staging a comeback and may be worth another look. Windows Rajesh Jha is retiring and Microsoft is reorging its Experiences + Devices team Release Preview: A peek at next week's Week D update (and April's Patch Tuesday) shows we're getting improvements to Narrator, Settings, Smart App Control, Pen settings, Display, File Explorer, and the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). The trend continues! New Canary, Dev, and Beta builds - Nothing new in Canary. Dev/Beta: Drag Tray is being renamed to Drop Tray, you can change the user folder name during Setup, Restore points are getting a modern update finally Intel goes nuts with new "Arrow Lake refresh" processors; these are not Copilot+ PC capable and it's unclear what the Panther Lake comparison looks like IDC now expects 11.3 percent decline in PC market in 2026, 7.6 percent decline for tablets AI Microsoft may sue OpenAI for contract breach - the best Microsoft divorce since IBM Major reorg in Microsoft's AI businesses Former Snap exec in charge of consolidated Copilot offerings across consumer and commercial Mustafa Suleyman to focus on Microsoft's foundational models There has been a lot of retiring and a lot of outside hires for top-level executive positions in Microsoft over the past year or more. Curious. Rumors vs. reality in Microsoft scaling back AI ambitions in Windows Rumor: Microsoft is backtracking on some Copilot features Reality: Microsoft is not backtracking on its AI ambitions, it's just going to try to do a better job with branding and positioning Microsoft launches Copilot Health in the U.S. Google Personal Intelligence ships in the U.S. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano models GPT-5 mini is available as a reasoning model on Duck.ai Xbox and gaming Rumor vs. reality in Xbox strategy Rumor: Microsoft removed "This is an Xbox" messaging from website so it must be focusing on consoles again Reality: Literally nothing has changed Xbox Insiders is testing per-game Quick Resume toggle Also more groups on Home, custom colors, profile badges in guide Big half month for Game Pass, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, more coming Starfield is coming to PS5 on April 7 NVIDIA launches DLSS 5, changes existing games, people are freaking out Tips and picks Tip of the week: The grass is always greener App pick of the week: PowerToys 0.98 RunAs Radio this week: Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah Brown liquor pick of the week: Teeling Small Batch Whiskey Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security
There's an ongoing narrative that Windows is worse than ever today and people are leaving in droves. Paul does not see that, and will simply point to Windows 8 and remind folks that it can be (and was) worse. Also, PowerToys 0.98 adds a major new feature to Command Palette, big changes to Keyboard Manager and CursorWrap, and about 100 other updates. This is a big one. Plus, Mozilla Firefox is staging a comeback and may be worth another look. Windows Rajesh Jha is retiring and Microsoft is reorging its Experiences + Devices team Release Preview: A peek at next week's Week D update (and April's Patch Tuesday) shows we're getting improvements to Narrator, Settings, Smart App Control, Pen settings, Display, File Explorer, and the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). The trend continues! New Canary, Dev, and Beta builds - Nothing new in Canary. Dev/Beta: Drag Tray is being renamed to Drop Tray, you can change the user folder name during Setup, Restore points are getting a modern update finally Intel goes nuts with new "Arrow Lake refresh" processors; these are not Copilot+ PC capable and it's unclear what the Panther Lake comparison looks like IDC now expects 11.3 percent decline in PC market in 2026, 7.6 percent decline for tablets AI Microsoft may sue OpenAI for contract breach - the best Microsoft divorce since IBM Major reorg in Microsoft's AI businesses Former Snap exec in charge of consolidated Copilot offerings across consumer and commercial Mustafa Suleyman to focus on Microsoft's foundational models There has been a lot of retiring and a lot of outside hires for top-level executive positions in Microsoft over the past year or more. Curious. Rumors vs. reality in Microsoft scaling back AI ambitions in Windows Rumor: Microsoft is backtracking on some Copilot features Reality: Microsoft is not backtracking on its AI ambitions, it's just going to try to do a better job with branding and positioning Microsoft launches Copilot Health in the U.S. Google Personal Intelligence ships in the U.S. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano models GPT-5 mini is available as a reasoning model on Duck.ai Xbox and gaming Rumor vs. reality in Xbox strategy Rumor: Microsoft removed "This is an Xbox" messaging from website so it must be focusing on consoles again Reality: Literally nothing has changed Xbox Insiders is testing per-game Quick Resume toggle Also more groups on Home, custom colors, profile badges in guide Big half month for Game Pass, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, more coming Starfield is coming to PS5 on April 7 NVIDIA launches DLSS 5, changes existing games, people are freaking out Tips and picks Tip of the week: The grass is always greener App pick of the week: PowerToys 0.98 RunAs Radio this week: Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah Brown liquor pick of the week: Teeling Small Batch Whiskey Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security
There's an ongoing narrative that Windows is worse than ever today and people are leaving in droves. Paul does not see that, and will simply point to Windows 8 and remind folks that it can be (and was) worse. Also, PowerToys 0.98 adds a major new feature to Command Palette, big changes to Keyboard Manager and CursorWrap, and about 100 other updates. This is a big one. Plus, Mozilla Firefox is staging a comeback and may be worth another look. Windows Rajesh Jha is retiring and Microsoft is reorging its Experiences + Devices team Release Preview: A peek at next week's Week D update (and April's Patch Tuesday) shows we're getting improvements to Narrator, Settings, Smart App Control, Pen settings, Display, File Explorer, and the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). The trend continues! New Canary, Dev, and Beta builds - Nothing new in Canary. Dev/Beta: Drag Tray is being renamed to Drop Tray, you can change the user folder name during Setup, Restore points are getting a modern update finally Intel goes nuts with new "Arrow Lake refresh" processors; these are not Copilot+ PC capable and it's unclear what the Panther Lake comparison looks like IDC now expects 11.3 percent decline in PC market in 2026, 7.6 percent decline for tablets AI Microsoft may sue OpenAI for contract breach - the best Microsoft divorce since IBM Major reorg in Microsoft's AI businesses Former Snap exec in charge of consolidated Copilot offerings across consumer and commercial Mustafa Suleyman to focus on Microsoft's foundational models There has been a lot of retiring and a lot of outside hires for top-level executive positions in Microsoft over the past year or more. Curious. Rumors vs. reality in Microsoft scaling back AI ambitions in Windows Rumor: Microsoft is backtracking on some Copilot features Reality: Microsoft is not backtracking on its AI ambitions, it's just going to try to do a better job with branding and positioning Microsoft launches Copilot Health in the U.S. Google Personal Intelligence ships in the U.S. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano models GPT-5 mini is available as a reasoning model on Duck.ai Xbox and gaming Rumor vs. reality in Xbox strategy Rumor: Microsoft removed "This is an Xbox" messaging from website so it must be focusing on consoles again Reality: Literally nothing has changed Xbox Insiders is testing per-game Quick Resume toggle Also more groups on Home, custom colors, profile badges in guide Big half month for Game Pass, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, more coming Starfield is coming to PS5 on April 7 NVIDIA launches DLSS 5, changes existing games, people are freaking out Tips and picks Tip of the week: The grass is always greener App pick of the week: PowerToys 0.98 RunAs Radio this week: Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah Brown liquor pick of the week: Teeling Small Batch Whiskey Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security
There's an ongoing narrative that Windows is worse than ever today and people are leaving in droves. Paul does not see that, and will simply point to Windows 8 and remind folks that it can be (and was) worse. Also, PowerToys 0.98 adds a major new feature to Command Palette, big changes to Keyboard Manager and CursorWrap, and about 100 other updates. This is a big one. Plus, Mozilla Firefox is staging a comeback and may be worth another look. Windows Rajesh Jha is retiring and Microsoft is reorging its Experiences + Devices team Release Preview: A peek at next week's Week D update (and April's Patch Tuesday) shows we're getting improvements to Narrator, Settings, Smart App Control, Pen settings, Display, File Explorer, and the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). The trend continues! New Canary, Dev, and Beta builds - Nothing new in Canary. Dev/Beta: Drag Tray is being renamed to Drop Tray, you can change the user folder name during Setup, Restore points are getting a modern update finally Intel goes nuts with new "Arrow Lake refresh" processors; these are not Copilot+ PC capable and it's unclear what the Panther Lake comparison looks like IDC now expects 11.3 percent decline in PC market in 2026, 7.6 percent decline for tablets AI Microsoft may sue OpenAI for contract breach - the best Microsoft divorce since IBM Major reorg in Microsoft's AI businesses Former Snap exec in charge of consolidated Copilot offerings across consumer and commercial Mustafa Suleyman to focus on Microsoft's foundational models There has been a lot of retiring and a lot of outside hires for top-level executive positions in Microsoft over the past year or more. Curious. Rumors vs. reality in Microsoft scaling back AI ambitions in Windows Rumor: Microsoft is backtracking on some Copilot features Reality: Microsoft is not backtracking on its AI ambitions, it's just going to try to do a better job with branding and positioning Microsoft launches Copilot Health in the U.S. Google Personal Intelligence ships in the U.S. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano models GPT-5 mini is available as a reasoning model on Duck.ai Xbox and gaming Rumor vs. reality in Xbox strategy Rumor: Microsoft removed "This is an Xbox" messaging from website so it must be focusing on consoles again Reality: Literally nothing has changed Xbox Insiders is testing per-game Quick Resume toggle Also more groups on Home, custom colors, profile badges in guide Big half month for Game Pass, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, more coming Starfield is coming to PS5 on April 7 NVIDIA launches DLSS 5, changes existing games, people are freaking out Tips and picks Tip of the week: The grass is always greener App pick of the week: PowerToys 0.98 RunAs Radio this week: Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah Brown liquor pick of the week: Teeling Small Batch Whiskey Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security
In this EDUCAUSE episode, Lester Godsey from Arizona State University, Dan Kent from Cloudflare, and Matthew Leger from IDC break down why most institutions are still in the AI Wild West - and what it actually takes to govern, secure, and scale AI across a campus before agentic systems make the problem exponentially harder.FeaturingLester Godsey is Chief Information Security Officer at Arizona State University - back at ASU after 30 years, having previously served as CISO at Maricopa County where he led cybersecurity through the 2020 and 2024 elections.Matthew Leger is Senior Research Manager at IDC covering worldwide education and EdTech digital strategies - previously an academic researcher at Harvard Kennedy School and administrator at SUNY Albany, with over a decade across nearly every seat in higher education minus professor (though it's on the list). : )Dan Kent is Field CTO at Cloudflare - focused on helping public sector customers navigate emerging technologies, with 18 years working alongside higher education organizations and five kids who between them have given him more higher ed exposure than most.Timestamps(2:40) The Higher Ed AI Wild West - Matt on aimless experimentation, siloed adoption, and why coordination is the real governance problem (5:45) ASU's Create AI Platform - Lester on the walled garden approach, 50+ LLMs, and the internal ethical AI engine built before he arrived (8:00) AI in 2025 is where cloud was in 2010 - Dan on why undefined terminology is creating fear in boardrooms and legislatures (10:00) Agentic AI is the biggest security concern - Dan on why giving agency to a machine is a fundamentally different risk than generative AI (17:00) Shadow AI is just shadow IT - Lester reframes the governance problem and walks through ASU's nuanced three-tier DeepSeek response (22:00) Less than 50% have a data governance plan - Dan on what he's hearing from public sector customers on AI readiness (27:00) Declining trust in higher ed - Matt on whether the ROI skepticism is real and how AI can help institutions demonstrate value (30:40) ASU's student-led SOC - Lester on training the next generation of analysts with agentic AI and security orchestration (33:00) Final takes - AI as a security tool, tabletop exercises for AI threats, and why today's students will shape AI's ethical futureListen now: YouTube x Apple x SpotifyWhenever you're ready, there are 3 ways you can connect with TechTables:1.
Broadcasting live from the Proudly SA Buy Local Summit & Expo at Sandton Convention Centre, Clement Manyathela is joined by Andile Africa, CEO of Automotive Industry Development Centre, to speak about their partnership with Proudly SA, aimed at strengthening relationship between players in the local manufacturing space. The Clement Manyathela Show is broadcast on 702, a Johannesburg based talk radio station, weekdays from 09:00 to 12:00 (SA Time). Clement Manyathela starts his show each weekday on 702 at 9 am taking your calls and voice notes on his Open Line. In the second hour of his show, he unpacks, explains, and makes sense of the news of the day. Clement has several features in his third hour from 11 am that provide you with information to help and guide you through your daily life. As your morning friend, he tackles the serious as well as the light-hearted, on your behalf. Thank you for listening to a podcast from The Clement Manyathela Show. Listen live on Primedia+ weekdays from 09:00 and 12:00 (SA Time) to The Clement Manyathela Show broadcast on 702 https://buff.ly/gk3y0Kj For more from the show go to https://buff.ly/XijPLtJ or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/p0gWuPE Subscribe to the 702 Daily and Weekly Newsletters https://buff.ly/v5mfetc Follow us on social media: 702 on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TalkRadio702 702 on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@talkradio702 702 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/talkradio702/ 702 on X: https://x.com/Radio702 702 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@radio702 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this episode, we explore why enterprises often trust their CX service partners with their customers — but not their revenue.A new IDC study, sponsored by TELUS Digital, reveals a striking imbalance between the percentage of enterprises that rely on a CX service partner for support and analytics and those that engage those same partners for inbound B2B or B2C sales, despite revenue growth ranking among their top desired outcomes.Host Robert Zirk sits down with Robin Jakobsen, director of product strategy for Customer Experience Management at TELUS Digital, to find out what's behind that disparity and what enterprises could gain from closing the gap. Along the way, the two discuss a shift from outsourcing as a defensive cost center to a CX partnership enabling revenue growth.Visit our website to learn more about TELUS Digital.Show notesDownload the full IDC InfoBrief, "From Efficiency to Excellence: Driving Enterprise Value Through Customer Experience Partnerships": https://www.telusdigital.com/insights/customer-experience/resource/idc-cx-outsourcing-revenue-growth-research
Key Takeaways Overview: Companies are drowning in AI tools, most of which "do not talk to each other." Today, Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, officially launching May 1st for $99. The suite brings together Microsoft 365 E5, M365 Copilot Wave 3, and Agent 365. Manage agents: IDC projects 1.3 billion AI agents by 2028, creating major governance, access control, and data management challenges that Agent 365 addresses by giving teams a single place to track, secure, and manage them all. Big idea: Work IQ, which will be explored at AI Agent & Copilot Summit, signals that Copilot has gone mainstream, with 160% YoY growth and large-scale enterprise deployments. "This isn't experimentation anymore. This is enterprise AI going mainstream." Visit Cloud Wars for more.
Let's pull back the curtain on the "AI gold rush" to reveal a staggering reality: last year alone, businesses lost $285 billion on failed AI initiatives. While social media is flooded with "get rich quick" app builders, the corporate world is facing a massive ROI crisis. Brought to you by - http://www.ojoy.ai The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in 2026 We are currently standing at the precipice of an AI Apocalypse. But for those who know how to navigate it, this represents the single greatest economic opportunity in history. As traditional job markets face a "tsunami" of disruption, a new class of AI Producers is rising to claim the future. Key Highlights From This Episode: The Failure Rate: Why 95% of the $300 billion spent on AI last year failed to produce a return on investment. The 2025-2026 Layoff Wave: Analysis of the 1.17 million U.S. layoffs in 2025 and why companies like Amazon and Meta are pivotally shifting toward AI-integrated roles. The 0.05% Club: Why only 1 out of every 2,000 people actually knows how to build consistent, functional AI applications. The "Magic Trick" to Prompting: Why you should stop telling AI what to do and start asking it how to train itself. Trillion-Dollar Projections: Why the IDC and Pearson project up to $6.6 trillion in losses for the U.S. economy due to AI illiteracy. Critical Stats & Data Mentioned: Statistic Source/Context $285 Billion Total money lost on failed AI projects last year. 1.17 Million U.S. workers laid off in 2025 (Challenger Gray Report). 2.5x Profitability Increase in revenue for companies properly using AI (Accenture). $300 Million Meta's contract offers for top-tier AI talent. "AI is hitting the labor market like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it." — International Monetary Fund (IMF) The Producer vs. The Consumer By 2027, if you haven't mastered the ability to make AI work consistently, you risk becoming irrelevant in the white-collar workforce. This episode breaks down how to move from a Consumer—someone who just uses ChatGPT for recipes—to a Producer who can build automated workflows, research tools, and content engines. What's Next? Are you ready to join the 0.05%? Stop watching the "30-second app" tutorials and start learning how to think differently about human-AI collaboration.
Best-selling author and strategist Kathleen Schaub, former VP of the CMO Advisory Practice at IDC, shares how chasing more data, tools and a tighter strategy doesn't automatically calm the chaos. Don't fall into the trap of viewing marketing as a "vending machine," and embrace AI with a "navigator" mindset. Focus on the good things versus dwelling only on the bad, and open yourself up as a leader that amazing possibilities await you might not even see today. Creating a work culture focused on continuous learning, composure, entrepreneurialism, empathy and trust creates your greatest impact.
As tech companies rush to build data centers to power their AI models, they're eating up power, money, and memory. Specifically, memory chips. The research firm IDC says demand from data centers has driven up prices for these chips and that we are dealing with an unprecedented memory chip shortage. That has knock-on effects for other devices that need these chips, including smartphones, PCs, and external hard drives. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes spoke with Linda Tadic, a digital archivist and founder of Digital Bedrock, about how the memory shortage is affecting her work right now.
As tech companies rush to build data centers to power their AI models, they're eating up power, money, and memory. Specifically, memory chips. The research firm IDC says demand from data centers has driven up prices for these chips and that we are dealing with an unprecedented memory chip shortage. That has knock-on effects for other devices that need these chips, including smartphones, PCs, and external hard drives. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes spoke with Linda Tadic, a digital archivist and founder of Digital Bedrock, about how the memory shortage is affecting her work right now.
Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4sg3a3k Episode summary: In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Jason Giles sits down with Andrew Hogan, who leads insights at Figma, to explore what the future of design looks like as AI reshapes product development. Drawing from Figma's State of Design 2026 report and recent hiring research, Andrew shares why more people than ever are participating in design—and what that means for craft, quality, and leadership. With 60% of new Figma files created by non-designers, design is becoming shared infrastructure across organizations. Andrew and Jason unpack the tension between speed and confidence in AI-enabled workflows, debating whether craft is about polish, problem solving, or something deeper. They explore why taste and discernment matter more in a world where you can generate 30 design variations in seconds—and how leaders must define what “good” looks like if they want to scale quality. The conversation also dives into hiring trends, the growing demand for senior designers who can navigate complexity, and the importance of strong design systems as more cross-functional teams begin prototyping. Ultimately, the episode reframes AI not as a replacement for designers, but as an accelerator that increases the need for thoughtful validation, customer understanding, and clear decision-making. You'll learn: Why AI makes taste and discernment more important—not less What the State of Design 2026 reveals about craft and hiring trends Why speed is increasing faster than confidence How design systems help scale quality across teams What leaders should define before scaling AI-driven workflows How to avoid false confidence when using AI prototypes Why design is becoming infrastructure inside modern organizations Resources & links: Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahhogan/) Figma State of Design 2026 report (https://www.figma.com/reports/state-of-the-designer-2026/) IDC study on the growing design workforce (https://www.figma.com/blog/idc-design-population-study/) Jason Giles on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaygiles/) UserTesting's latest report: Defensible Design in the Age of AI (https://www.usertesting.com/resources/reports/defensible-design-in-the-age-of-ai) Nathan Isaacs on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanisaacs/) Learn more about Insights Unlocked: https://www.usertesting.com/podcast
Empezamos poniendo el foco en el Galaxy S26 Ultra y su innovadora pantalla con filtro de privacidad integrado a nivel de píxel. Comentamos la impresionante estabilización de vídeo por software y las nuevas funciones de inteligencia artificial, debatiendo cómo estas características podrían inspirar futuras mejoras en el iPhone.Explicamos el movimiento de Apple para trasladar parte del ensamblaje del Mac Mini a Texas, analizando si se trata de una estrategia puramente simbólica o logística, y reflexionamos sobre las dificultades reales de replicar la capacidad de manufactura asiática en suelo estadounidense.Evaluamos los rumores recurrentes sobre un futuro MacBook Pro con pantalla táctil y cómo esto podría desafiar la filosofía tradicional de la compañía sobre la ergonomía y la convergencia con el iPad.También traemos una curiosa conexión familiar entre Apple y OpenAI, dado que el hijo de Eddy Cue está trabajando en el primer dispositivo de hardware de la empresa de inteligencia artificial.Cerramos como es habitual con Apple TV, destacando el curioso acuerdo entre Apple y Netflix en Estados Unidos para intercambiar los derechos de emisión del Gran Premio de Canadá de Fórmula 1 por el documental "Drive to Survive". Aprovechamos para comentar las mejoras en Apple Maps con los circuitos renderizados en 3D y repasamos los próximos estrenos de Apple TV+, como la temporada final de "For All Mankind" y una nueva miniserie protagonizada por Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Samsung presenta los Galaxy S26 con la primera pantalla de privacidad integrada y una apuesta total por la IA Gadgets Apple accelerates U.S. manufacturing with Mac mini production - Apple Apple's Touch-Screen Laptop to Have Dynamic Island, New Mac Interface - Bloomberg Smartphone market set for biggest-ever decline in 2026 on memory price surge, IDC says Reuters Apple Pay set for biggest ever expansion, likely to boost iPhone sales Apple And Netflix Swing Unusual Simulcast Deal For Formula 1 Race And 'Drive To Survive' Julia Louis-Dreyfus & Cecily Strong To Star In Limited Series At Apple Eddy Cue: Brazil is Apple TV's second-largest market, talks Netflix-Warner merger - 9to5Mac OpenAI's first Jony Ive device sounds like HomePod 2.0: report - 9to5Mac Steve Jobs in Exile - Geoffrey Cain You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account | Philip Heltweg
Zainab Sow returns to Test Those Breasts to share how daily self-exams helped her find a 1.8 cm lump at 38 and led to a Stage 1 IDC diagnosis. We talk family history without BRCA, survivorship realities, and the side effects many women face after treatment, especially aromatase inhibitors and medically induced menopause. Zainab is a three-time author and founder of Melanin Breast Cancer Alliance, Inc., a nonprofit providing grants to newly diagnosed patients in the U.S. and West Africa, and shares why self-advocacy and boundaries matter.Find Zainab: Instagram @zainab_underscore_air to breast cancer | Heir to Breast CancerHope Beyond Hormones
Stephen Grootes speaks to Mr Rute Moyo, Vision Consortium Member, about the escalating tensions between Vision, the IDC and the Business Rescue Practitioners as the future of Tongaat Hulett hangs in the balance. In other interviews, Farzana Botha, Senior Communications Manager at Sanlam Risk & Savings talks about new research released ahead of Budget 2026 that reveals what South Africans refuse to cut from their personal budgets, even under mounting financial strain. The survey shows education, housing and savings remain top priorities for households, reflecting a strong focus on long-term security despite rising living costs. It also highlights how healthcare, connectivity and even small personal treats are viewed not as luxuries, but as essential to stability and well-being The Money Show is a podcast hosted by well-known journalist and radio presenter, Stephen Grootes. He explores the latest economic trends, business developments, investment opportunities, and personal finance strategies. Each episode features engaging conversations with top newsmakers, industry experts, financial advisors, entrepreneurs, and politicians, offering you thought-provoking insights to navigate the ever-changing financial landscape. Thank you for listening to a podcast from The Money Show Listen live Primedia+ weekdays from 18:00 and 20:00 (SA Time) to The Money Show with Stephen Grootes broadcast on 702 https://buff.ly/gk3y0Kj and CapeTalk https://buff.ly/NnFM3Nk For more from the show, go to https://buff.ly/7QpH0jY or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/PlhvUVe Subscribe to The Money Show Daily Newsletter and the Weekly Business Wrap here https://buff.ly/v5mfetc The Money Show is brought to you by Absa Follow us on social media 702 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalkRadio702 702 on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@talkradio702 702 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/talkradio702/ 702 on X: https://x.com/CapeTalk 702 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@radio702 CapeTalk on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@capetalk CapeTalk on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ CapeTalk on X: https://x.com/Radio702 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We take a listener question about digital sovereignty, tariffs and UK/EU independence from large US cloud providers, also Brian reaches out to the Melbourne, AUS listeners. SHOW: 998SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #998 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTESAWS European Sovereign Cloud Azure European Sovereign ServicesGoogle Cloud Sovereign CloudRed Hat Digital SovereigntyBroadcom Digital SovereigntyOracle Digital SovereigntyDigital Sovereignty in Europe, What's the Plan B? (IDC)Digital Commons EDIC Established (2025)EU AI Act“Sovereign Clouds and the Digital Sovereignty Imperative: Europe's Quest for Digital Independence” (IDC #EUR149098122, December 2022)The Evolution of Digital Sovereignty: Moving Beyond Data and Cloud” (Rahiel Nasir, IDC, January 13, 2023)THE FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY What is the definition of Digital Sovereignty? What about Digital Assurance? Sovereignty from who or what? What laws are you attempting to comply with? How are they audited or measured? Data Sovereignty - Maintaining control over how data is collected, classified, processed and stored to ensure that data regulations are metTechnical Sovereignty - Running workloads without dependence on a provider's infrastructure or software, and protected from all extra-territorial interference and scrutiny.Operational Sovereignty - Visibility and control over provider operations from provisioning and performance management, to monitoring of physical and digital access, to the infrastructure.Assurance Sovereignty -Ability to independently verify and assure the integrity, security, and reliability of digital systems and processes including resilience of critical services.FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodBlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod
Couldn't make it to IDC 2026? Hear from some of our IDC plenary speakers this weekend for special IDC Weekend services! Speaker: Rev. Paul JeyachandranSeries: IDC 2026 Weekend Scripture: 1 Peter 5:1-11
Satya Nadella gave up much of his CEO duties in 2025. Are we on the cusp of a new CEO? And does some money manager/political duo like Amy Hood and Brad Smith actually make more sense in this role than an engineer-type for the modern Microsoft? Microsoft is trying to win our hearts and minds on AI After spending three years trying to jam AI down our collective throats, Microsoft has only met resistance. Now, the real marketing begins Governments and regulators: Microsoft will build out its AI infrastructure by actually paying for it and respecting the communities in which this happens Customers: Satya Nadella is blogging, and he wants us to stop complaining about AI. He's the wrong messenger Windows 11 First Patch Tuesday of 2026 brings security and bug fixes but no new features First update of 2026 brings Copilot-powered image descriptions in Narrator, new IT policies for Copilot, other changes to Dev & Beta Dev is about to switch to 26H1 IDC says that PC sales rose 8.1 percent in 2025, warns again about 2026 The good & bad of Paul's Panther Lake laptop Dell doesn't sell any PCs to consumers so it obviously has opinions about why consumers don't buy PCs for AI Microsoft will soon retire its Lens mobile app AI Apple predictably partners with Google to bring Gemini to Siri Samsung correctly points out we're all using AI already so there's no reason to complain about it We can't trust AI, so Microsoft is letting Copilot go shopping with our credit cards We can't trust AI, so OpenAI is giving ChatGPT access to our private health data Gmail is getting more AI because email is the low-hanging fruit of data collection Xbox and gaming Developer Direct returns on January 22 with Fable and Forza 6 gameplay Microsoft to bring Avowed to PS5 in February Tips and picks Tip of the week: Kick off 2026 with a security checkup App pick of the week: Microsoft Local Foundry RunAs Radio this week: Azure in 2026 with Jeremy Winter Brown liquor pick of the week: Don Julio 70 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: zscaler.com/security helixsleep.com/windows
Much like graphics processing units, high bandwidth memory is essential for training and running AI. It's paired with all those NVIDIA chips that have been selling like hotcakes and only a small handful companies in the world make it. Now the surge in demand from data centers has created a global shortage for everything else — the PCs and smartphones and other consumer electronics that also use memory chips. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Tom Mainelli, vice president of device and consumer research at IDC, about how long this shortage could last.
Much like graphics processing units, high bandwidth memory is essential for training and running AI. It's paired with all those NVIDIA chips that have been selling like hotcakes and only a small handful companies in the world make it. Now the surge in demand from data centers has created a global shortage for everything else — the PCs and smartphones and other consumer electronics that also use memory chips. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Tom Mainelli, vice president of device and consumer research at IDC, about how long this shortage could last.
PC makers are shaking up CES with wild designs and next-gen chips, but the real story is Microsoft's bold software moves, AI's hardware hunger, and a candid debate over whether any tech company still puts users first. Come for the Windows updates, stay for the whisky warnings and robot bathroom assistants. CES 2026 is here with the 4K hummingbird feeder of your dreams New PCs and more from HP consumers/commercial, HP gamers, Lenovo, others The first official Copilot+ PC desktops Snapdragon X2 Plus joins X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme Intel Panther Lake has meaningful CPU and graphics performance gains, but predictable reliability issues AMD Ryzen AI 400 series is a minor bump Windows Paul was the first to report that Microsoft is refactoring it all with Rust A Microsoft distinguished engineer wrote about his desire to refactor all C/C++ code in the company with Rust by 2030 Some mistook this to mean "rewriting Windows with Rust,ˮ so he had to issue a clarification. But I never wrote that. Heads-up: That will happen, but this is really about Azure first and the core underlying code in Microsoftʼs most important platforms Microsoft released hardware-accelerated BitLocker in late 2025 and never told anyone. It requires the latest PC CPUs Copilot app update that adds text editing actions to Copilot Vision across channels Dev and Beta got first previews of AI agents on the Taskbar, starting with the Researcher agent, plus underlying Agent Launchers experience IDC says the global memory shortage (thanks, AI!) could screw up PC and smartphone growth this year AI ChatGPT now has an app store, but it has a ways to go Mozilla Firefox will have a "killswitchˮ for AI Our national nightmare will soon be over, LG will let users remove Copilot app from their smart TVs Xbox and gaming First Xbox Game Pass releases of 2026 include Resident Evil Village and Star Wars Outlaws Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Hisense smart TVs and to the latest Fire TV smart TVs GOG goes independent, will continue DRM-free push "Have a blastˮ and other FPS throwbacks from the 1990s Valve quietly killed the LCD Steam Deck model Tips and picks Tip of the week: Itʼs time to give Little AI a look App pick of the week: Bonjourr RunAs Radio this week: What AI can do for SysAdmins in 2026 with Cecilia Wiren Brown liquor pick of the week: The Singleton of Dufftown 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: threatlocker.com/twit cachefly.com/twit