By Jane Dornemann

Image by Rachel Adams

After taking graphic design as a high school freshman in Missoula, Montana, Nicole was hooked. She was so diligent about immediately practicing her newly acquired skills that classmates came to know Nicole’s design prowess, to which she applied her great sense of humor. 

“I used to photoshop my classmates’ faces onto images. When Miley Cyrus released her ‘Wrecking Ball’ video—I had fun with that.” Soon, she was flooded with requests. It’s rare to be so certain about a career path at the tender age of 14, but Nicole’s passion for digital creativity never wavered. And sometimes, it even got her out of math class. “If the school newspaper needed something, I’d be excused from whatever class I was in to help,” she said. 

From real estate, to public health, to Gartner 

Nicole majored in graphic design at Montana State, where she interned for the athletic department’s marketing team. And she may have completed one of the more unique theses on Earth for graphics students: to raise awareness of a chronic condition from which a family member suffered, she designed a website for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). Not long after graduating, Nicole moved to Texas and embarked on a professional journey that can best be described as eclectic. She created beautiful things for a boutique real estate brokerage business; inventive images for a logistics company; stunning designs that supported public health awareness campaigns; and corporate creative at Gartner, the tech research and consulting firm. 

Finding a home away from home 

With a desire to continue trying new things and build on what she learned at Gartner, Nicole applied to 2A. “What I love most about 2A is the people—we have a great team,” Nicole said. “Everybody here cares, and that’s hard to find at other jobs.” 

Nicole learned this firsthand, when she flew to Washington state for her first 2A retreat—only to be struck down by food poisoning. “I was excited to meet my coworkers in person and was like, ‘Hi! I have to go throw up!’” she recalled. “So many people at 2A helped me get through that.” Since joining 2A, Nicole has learned a lot and said 2A’s culture has fostered that growth. “I love that we have creative freedom and are encouraged to try to do things differently.” 

A bit of botany 

Outside of design, she has a love for two kinds of living things: dogs and plants. Nicole recently added a puppy to accompany her dog Odie, and she and her husband tend to a collection of 117 plants—a habit that began after she was encouraged to take a spider plant home from the office years ago. Beyond that, Nicole paddleboards in the summer, but mostly appreciates spending time with family. Every now and then, she makes a point to check out Austin’s food truck scene. “If there is a plant nursery near a food truck, that’s where we go,” she joked (but come on, we know she’s totally serious). 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Trazillionaire Elon Musk has upped the ante on his lawsuit with OpenAI, because he apparently has nothing better to do before he starts running our government so deep into the ground that it touches the Earth’s lava core. He claims that both Microsoft and OpenAI have prevented competition from surviving in the market—in addition to prioritizing profits over the public good. Kind of like…releasing self-driving cars that burst into flames and run people over…BUT I DIGRESS.
• The principal just walked in and asked Microsoft to step outside—the US Federal Trade Commission has its sights set on the technology company’s anticompetitive practices, which include Azure’s restrictive licensing. In a couple months, I’m sure the Department of Government Efficiency will be thrilled to help. 
• Remember all those AWS employees who were “so excited” about the return to the office (RTO)? Well, they might be surprised to hear that a bunch of “distraught” employees wrote an open letter to CEO Matt Garman being like, WTF, dude. The RTO deadline is in January, which is also when the TikTok ban starts, so I hope you like misery. 
• Between January and August of this year, Amazon cut its US advertising budget by 20%. Including its AWS arm, Amazon’s budget for all types of promotional costs has decreased by millions. 
• Increased spending on AI will slow Microsoft’s growth this quarter. Financially, the company can’t address its AI capacity constraints until the second quarter. 
• It hasn’t been announced yet, but Microsoft will use HarperCollins books to train a mysterious AI model. Authors can opt in for the low, low price of one human soul. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Amazon doubled its investment in AI startup Anthropic with another $4B in funding. Moving forward, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
• This is just in time to give US intelligence the power of generative AI, along with Palantir. The press release can’t actually tell us what the CIA will do with this technology, so hats off to the author, who somehow managed to craft six paragraphs of absolutely nothing but filler text.
• On the other side of the spectrum, the press release about the expanded partnership between AWS and MongoDB tells you waaaay more than you want to know.
• Nokia will provide routers and switches for Azure datacenters in an extended agreement between the two companies. This is funny because Amazon sued Nokia a few months ago for patent grabbing. Which happened a year after Nokia sued Amazon for patent infringement—and blogged about it! Let’s all just sue each other back and forth forever until we die.
• AWS announced a Generative AI Partner Innovation Alliance that will help customers build their own AI solutions. It’s launching with nine partners, one of them being a government intelligence and weapons systems contractor, which makes complete sense because we are the worst.
• Cognizant is partnering with AWS to deliver smart manufacturing capabilities for the industrial sector. Maybe they can smartly manufacture a way for me to get out of this country.
• Technology and communications company Lumen will supply AWS with its fiber network to improve datacenter connectivity. In turn, Lumen will use AWS solutions, including those for generative AI, to modernize its systems.
• Outbrain has agreed to improve its advertising platform by scaling its operations on Azure and enhancing its services with generative AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Money launderers, we just wanna get to know ya. Is green your favorite color? AWS is partnering with Binance to help the crypto platform better screen customers using an AI integration. This comes after a shakeup in Nigeria, where one Binance exec escaped detention and left the country while another was thrown in prison for “suspicious cash flows.” But, please, focus on the customers.
• Europeans want a more compliant cloud. They’ll get one by the end of 2025, when the AWS Europe Sovereign Cloud launches, complete with regulatory-friendly partner solutions in its Marketplace.
• It’s now easier for AWS customers to extend their on-premises Nutanix environment to the cloud. Thank you, Nutanix!!!!!
• A collaboration between Microsoft and Kyndryl makes it easier for customers to extend their on-premises environment to Azure. 

World domination 

• Microsoft ran out of places to shove Copilot, so it has expanded to a larger market—the limitless universe. In partnership with NASA, “Earth Copilot” will help us collect petabytes of data from observation satellites and make it easier for the general public to access it.
• If you Google news out of Sunbury, Ohio, you’ll mostly find obituaries and an inordinate number of animal-hoarding instances (What? Why? How?). Aside from that, you’ll learn that AWS is going to open a $2B datacenter there, which will be finished in 2028.
• AWS is giving away $110M in free computing power to researchers so long as they use Trainium AI chips. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• I need to learn how to code or something for Microsoft’s bug bounty program, which is awarding $4M to those who uncover security flaws. Look, if I win this thing and go on vacation and return to work suddenly looking a decade younger, I did NOT get a facelift, I just rested…with whoever Lindsay Lohan has been resting with. And if I DID get a facelift…no I didn’t.
• As I write this, millions of personal data points are up for grabs, thanks to developers who used Power Pages to build a website without implementing proper access controls. 

New stuff 

• It was a party at Ignite, starting with Microsoft’s unveiling of a custom AMD processor for virtual machine instances and two Microsoft-made chips, which is very demure and mindful of them.
• Azure AI Student has been packaged with other services and rebranded as Azure AI Foundry.
• Azure Local is a new cloud computing platform that allows companies to extend Azure to their on-premises and edge environments.
• Microsoft launched not one, but two infrastructure chips, meant to accelerate AI adoption and increase security.
• Leaving no stone unturned and no career unthreatened, Microsoft is building AI agents for lots of specific tasks, from real-time translations using your voice to processing invoice approvals and customer returns. Does Microsoft know that we, uh, need to like, buy food and stuff? To live? Pretty please, may we?
• It also introduced new AI models for industry. It has been building these pre-trained, fine-tuned models with big partners such as Siemens and Bayer.
• Fabric Databases, an addition to Microsoft Fabric, provisions autonomous databases in seconds.
• Redis can now be fully managed by Azure.
• Not on my 2024 bingo card (then again, neither was the CEO of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation becoming the head of education), but AWS will make it possible for Amazon Q to integrate with Microsoft Office 365.
• AWS App Studio is now generally available. It uses generative AI to build enterprise-grade apps. 

Professional Pivots 

AWS has hired Julia White (who killed Mr. Body in the library with the candlestick) as the company’s new chief marketing officer and VP. She previously spent 20 years at Microsoft and several years at SAP. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Splunk’s security observability and security platform is now available on Azure. 
• AI governance company Saidot can now integrate with Azure AI. 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• IBM subsidiary Apptio’s Targetprocess solution, which helps finance teams plan and manage budgets
• DataChant’s BI Pixie, which sounds like a little booster for Power BI
• Awardco, for employee recognition and rewards
• Shift Technology offers several products for property and casualty insurers
• Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux AI, a foundation model platform
• Cribl, which is too close to an offensive term for my comfort, is a data engine for IT and security
• IntelePeer’s SmartAgent and SmartOffice, which offer AI-powered communications automation 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Jitterbit, which is also now an AWS Partner, a SaaS service that solves “hyperautomation issues”
• SugarCRM’s Sugar Sell and Sugar Market
• AttackIQ, which provides breach and attack simulation solutions
• Coder, an open-source platform for self-hosted development environments 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• This month, Satya Nadella was like “Stoppppp giving me money” but the Microsoft board was like “Shut uppppp here are some cash wads to dry your tears.” Yes, it’s true: After asking for a pay reduction, Nadella instead got a 63% raise totaling $79.1M. It would have been $5.5M higher but he lost that incentive because of the company’s security issues. 
• AWS CEO Matt Garman said employees who don’t like the return to the office (RTO) mandate should make sure the door doesn’t slam their booties on the way out. 
• The response to “Well, then just quit” was “OK”: The company’s VP of AI dipped, along with a top exec in telecom for AWS. And a survey found that 73% of employees are thinking about leaving. Nah-uh, says Garman, who insists, in a conveniently leaked transcript, that 90% want—nay, are excited about!—RTO. 
• While Amazon is recalling people to the office, Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie says don’t worry lil babies, I gotchu…with one caveat: Productivity must not drop. If it does, the floggings will continue until morale improves!!! 
• A flogging is exactly what Google is asking the EU to issue Microsoft, claiming that the cloud provider is giving Windows customers a choice between buying Azure or facing a 400% markup. 
• OpenAI will release its next-gen AI model, Orion, on Azure by December 2025. The model is expected to have 100 times more power, and be an “ultra-advanced model that approaches Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).” 
• That’s great and all (Is it, really?), except Azure’s CTO says the company is about to hit the power grid limit, tee hee. AI demands so much energy that the company may need to connect multiple data centers if it wants to train these advanced models. Energy needs underlie Microsoft’s nuclear energy efforts and its new virtual machines optimized for AI. 
• Meh, OpenAI is going full honey badger and doesn’t care—the company is telling Microsoft to move faster or move out of the way, and will start “lining up data centers and AI chips” outside of Microsoft. The New York Times says the bromance is starting to fray. 
• Despite this activity, some analysts think that interest in AI will dwindle as market demand corrects itself, forcing OpenAI to sell to Microsoft in the next three years. Or is this already happening? A Wall Street analyst with Oppenheimer lowered his projections for Microsoft in 2025 because Copilot sales fell below expectations. 
• Oh, look, exactly what I said would happen is happening. Researchers found that Whisper, OpenAI’s transcription tool that’s used by some medical centers, is whispering a whole bunch of CRAP. Eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions contained completely made-up chunks of text that were never spoken, including “racial commentary, violent rhetoric, and imagined medical treatments.” 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• When the military industrial complex says it’s too expensive, you know it’s too expensive. Yes, we’re still stuck on the Microsoft Goggles that cost $80,000 each. The Army said the price has to come down mucho if it’s going to order 121K of them. A deal would earn Microsoft $22B over a decade, also known as Satya Nadella’s next totally unwanted bonus that he absolutely must accept despite his protests. 
• Solutions provider Presidio signed a “huge deal” with AWS, applying its consulting services to the implementation of advanced AWS technology such as ML and AI. The duo will also develop industry-focused solutions. 
• Digital Domain has moved to AWS so it can build industry-specific Autonomous Virtual Humans. Because autonomous real humans must do pesky, work-disrupting things such as eat, sleep, shower, and feel feelings. 
• Smartsheet is partnering with AWS to connect with Amazon Q Business. This will let businesses answer queries on projects and other Smartsheet-related data. 
• Microsoft and NetApp collaborated with Tessell, a database-as-a-service platform, to create Copilot for Cloud Databases. 
• In China, now only enterprises, not individuals, can subscribe to OpenAI, which this article says will affect independent developers in the country. 
• Oncology technology company Ontada is collaborating with Microsoft using Azure AI to process unstructured oncology document components. I love document components! 
• Rezolve AI, which offers AI-powered solutions for commerce and retail, is using Azure to support its Brain Suite, helping increase digital customer engagement. 
• When the Beatles wrote you say you want a revolution, what they were REALLY talking about was Microsoft’s partnership with Medline to design a healthcare supply chain resiliency solution.
• AWS and SentinelOne are building on their existing partnership to improve AI-powered cybersecurity using the cloud provider’s AI infrastructure and SentinelOne’s Purple AI solution, which sounds like Prince invented it. 
• Databricks is using AWS Trainium AI chips so users can develop custom LLMs with Databricks’ Mosaic AI platform. 
• Behavioral health technology provider Kipu Health is using AI services from AWS to reduce customers’ administrative workloads through transcription note-generation and chart summaries. 
• Omnichannel payment solutions provider Valor PayTech migrated to AWS. 
• To address the lack of diversity in cybersecurity, AWS and the NFL are collaborating to provide more support and inroads for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 
• Smarsh, a communications data and intelligence platform, is working with AWS to bring AI to financial services for risk detection and compliance automation. Wow, that solved my insomnia right away. 

World domination 

• The US Department of Defense awarded a $7.2M contract to AWS for a “zero trust pilot” of AWS Virtual Private Cloud for the Pentagon. 
• The UK government signed a five-year agreement, or 1,825 tea times, with Microsoft to bring AI to the public sector as part of a broader modernization push. In Italy, Microsoft will invest 4.3B Euros over two years in regional AI infrastructure, but it must do so at top volume while fervently gesticulating its hands. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

Whoopsies! Microsoft lost a month’s worth of security logs for some of its customers. Which means there’s nothing to return to for…idk…root-cause analysis. 

New stuff 

• When it comes to nuclear power, mini meltdowns sound so much cuter than full-scale meltdowns. In an agreement with Dominion Energy, AWS will spend more than $500M to build small modular reactors that, with any luck, will be run by leprechauns (who will hopefully be piss tested every morning). 
• In a bid to capture some of Salesforce’s market share, Microsoft launched 10 ready-for-use autonomous AI agents for Dynamics 365. This comes just weeks after Salesforce announced its own autonomous agents, part of “the third wave of AI” that will move businesses beyond chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (who looks like a hitman nearing retirement in this picture) slammed Microsoft’s new product, calling it “Clippy 2.0” and claiming “it doesn’t work.” In lieu of these pre-built agents, organizations can now create their own using Copilot Studio. 
• As Microsoft and Salesforce beef up their autonomous agents, AWS has added capabilities for Amazon Q in Connect. The big reveal? Companies can customize smart assistants’ responses to brand guidelines, womp womp. Things don’t stop there—how about some Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect? This keeps joint customers from having to do the integration themselves and allows them to use one platform for both solutions. 
• Meanwhile, Google signed a $2.7B deal with Character.AI to drive forward its own agentic AI line of business. Google is basically paying a lot of money to hire the notable AI brainiacs leading Character.AI and to license the company’s technology. 
• Microsoft is coming to rescue us from AI’s bad side with new product capabilities that will correct hallucinations in real time. 
• Drasi is Microsoft’s new event-driven platform for data processing. It helps businesses track data activity to better understand changing needs. 
• IT admins can now use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS accounts from third-party apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. 

Professional pivots 

• It may have lost some, but AWS also won some: Pilar Schenk, formerly a COO at Cisco, is now VP of sales operations. And Jon Jones, formerly VP for GTM at AWS, is now VP and global head of AWS Startups. 
• OpenAI yoinked Microsoft’s VP of GenAI research. The company is being transparent about the fact that this move is focused on furthering AGI efforts. 

Best friends forever 

It was like Chrismukkah for the AWS Partner network this month. 

• Insight, which helps businesses migrate to the cloud, achieved AWS Premier Tier Service Partner status. 
• Matellio, a custom software-engineering studio, and Cloudtech, a cloud-modernization services firm, both achieved AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status. 
• Kasada, which helps defeat automated cyber threats, earned its AWS Security Competency. 
• Education technology company Everspring and appointment scheduling platform Coconut Software are now AWS Partners. 
• Cloudelligent, a managed services provider, achieved AWS Migration Competency status. Not to be confused with CloudHesive, which had its WAF validated by AWS (why does that sound inappropriate?). 
• Observability and OTel provider Embrace has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program and is also slapping its goods in AWS Marketplace. 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Zoom’s Contact Center, so you can say “Sorry, I was on mute,” but now you can say it on AWS 
• Arduino Cloud, an all-in-one platform for building IoT applications 
• Zimperium, a mobile security provider 
• StackGen’s Generative Infrastructure from Code, which eliminates developer bottlenecks 
• Finzly’s FedNow Service, an instant payment service 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• Addlly AI, a customizable, zero-prompt AI playground that simplifies content generation 
• Ascendion AVA+ GenAI Core Platform, which helps businesses customize AI for use cases
• SqlSafeKeep, a compliance solution for developers and data scientists
• Mattermost, which offers secure collaboration and communication for government and other critical sectors 

By Jane Dornemann

When Jenni was in college, she knew one thing to be true: Whatever she became in life, it had to involve art. To some, that might seem like a risky pipe dream, but to Jenni, it was a framework. The key was to find a realistic way to make art that culminated in a steady career path. Being the open-minded, curious, and adventurous spirit she is, she decided to explore. Literally! She wandered the halls of her college, popping her head into classrooms, asking senior art majors what they were working on and what kind of jobs they planned to get. She chatted with future interior designers, visual artists, and graphic designers, eventually landing on industrial design. 

“People hear that and think I’m designing industrial buildings or something,” said Jenni. “But it’s really about designing physical objects through the lens of ergonomics and form—furniture, shoes, any object you can come in contact with.” 

Shortly after graduating, she found herself designing baby products at a Brooklyn-based company, where she hired our current managing designer and design operations lead, Rachel Adams. There, Jenni ended up doing a lot of graphic design because she was so good at it. “I could only resist my fate for so long,” she said. “I admit it, I’m a graphic designer.” 

Jenni and Rachel stayed in touch after going their separate ways, reuniting years later when Rachel asked Jenni to consider freelancing with 2A. Jenni’s initial interview, which was supposed to be a “temperature check” on how she felt about 2A, ended up being an onboarding call because she was so impressed. 

Lucky for us, Jenni’s innate, calculated risk-taking sets her work apart. She gives equal weight to aesthetics and function, resulting in designs that are visually pleasing but also purposeful. “I base my work on the structural aspect, such as branded guidelines and other criteria, but also have that ‘How can I make the client smile when they see this?’ approach,” explained Jenni. It’s all about bold balance and projecting her love of freedom and discovery—with a healthy dose of practicality. That’s important in the tech industry, where things are always changing. 

“Having to be nimble is a nice challenge. You can’t get too comfortable with anything, and that’s how I live life in general,” she said. This openness to change is at the core of what keeps her work fresh and exciting. 

These days, you can find Jenni habitually stepping out of her comfort zone on a yoga mat, in a Pilates class, or on a surfboard in the San Diego waves. As a yoga practitioner and certified teacher, Jenni has come a long way from being “the least athletic, least flexible person I knew.” Yoga helps her find equilibrium amidst her adrenaline-seeking adventures, which have included autocross racing, go-karting, and car racing ride-alongs with her dad. 

“My yoga work has helped me change perspective about my perceived limitations versus my actual limitations, and to bring balance into my life,” added Jenni. It’s a good thing she’s centered, because when she’s not hitting a client’s project out of the park, she’s chasing after her toddler. “He’s doing something different every day! As I said, you can’t get too comfortable.” 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• It’s a big deal, literally: In a multi-billion-dollar co-investment, Intel has agreed to produce a custom AI chip for AWS. Following the news, Intel stock rose 14%. 
• On the brink of a history-making election and a world war, you know what we need? More dormant nuclear power plants to start back up. Despite a meltdown in 1979, Microsoft has entered a new energy-sharing agreement with Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island to produce clean energy that will power datacenters for AI. 
• You know what else we need? To never, ever let go of the HoloLens headsets for the Army. Even though it’s been an expensive, years-long failure, I say we keep going—and Microsoft agrees. It recently partnered with Palmer Luckey, an American entrepreneur who makes interesting facial-hair choices, to embed new software into the system that will “enhance soldiers,” much like “Starship troopers,” because war is a funny ha-ha movie. 
• SaaS log analytics platform Sumo Logic is strategically collaborating with AWS to enhance its services with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake. Also, Sumo Logic went full overachiever and earned three competencies in Cloud Operations for education, retail, and government. 
• Vodafone is unleashing the raw power of Microsoft 365 Copilot to help 68,000 employees get more work done. 
• AWS is the last of the three big cloud providers to say uncle to Oracle. Now, AWS customers can access Oracle’s databases on AWS infrastructure with zero-ETL integration. The companies will co-market the offering. 
• NetApp has signed an agreement with AWS to expand and accelerate generative AI efforts. This will increase AWS Marketplace purchases and make it easier for AWS customers to implement NetApp solutions. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• No single entity can fund the compute power AI needs, like, ruhl soon. So, conspiracy theory subject fan-favorite BlackRock has partnered with Microsoft to launch the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP). The program wants to raise $30 billion for datacenters and related energy infrastructure to power hungry, hungry hippos AI. NVIDIA will serve as an advisor for the initiative. I’m wondering if the first thing they’d advise is to have THOUGHT ABOUT THIS YEARS AGO before AI was forced into every Microsoft app imaginable, but maybe not. 
• After all, not everybody is down with this AI-in-everything approach. Customers testing Microsoft’s AI-shoving in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint have had a “lukewarm response” due to performance and cost issues. 
• Nonetheless, Microsoft says, ACTUALLY you’re wrong, people love us. People want to BE us—just look at these gains.
• And then Marc Benioff was like, that’s great, but no. The Salesforce CEO said that Microsoft’s AI products and strategy have “disappointed many customers,” then pivoted to why we should buy his sh*t instead, so…sounds like a bias-free assessment to me. 
• Will Amazon see a mass employee exodus after demanding a return to the office? A memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that everyone must come back in person, five days a week, by January 2, 2025, or GTFO. The company is also eliminating some management positions and bringing back assigned desks. 
• Companies that want to do new, shiny things with AI will need to cut budgets elsewhere if they hope to afford true transformation, says Microsoft’s VP for Azure. He also said some things that led his PR team to spontaneously combust, such as warning customers that there’s a risk AI could “do something unpredictable” and that organizations are encouraged to review their content because of Microsoft’s lack of transparency around data use. Finally, some honesty around here. 
• In 2024, more job postings require Azure skills and fewer are requiring AWS skills, compared to 2017. 
• Gartner named Microsoft a Magic Quadrant leader for container management and named AWS a Magic Quadrant leader for AI code assistants. 
• On-prem is back, baby! So says AWS. AWS customers are increasingly returning to on-premises infrastructure, which includes 29% of all cloud customers (not just AWS) in the UK. In EMEA, more than half of companies want to deploy workloads on legacy infrastructure. 
• Some rando in Forbes who keeps referring to “we” predicts Microsoft Azure will reach $200B in revenue in the next three years. Good thing you can use wads of cash to plug leaks in nuclear power plants. 
• Microsoft isn’t the only cloud computing company going nuclear—AWS is looking to hire a principal nuclear engineer for its datacenters. In March, the cloud provider acquired an entire nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. 

World domination 

• South African gold-mining firm Gold Fields is moving to AWS. I’d expected the press release to give it a greenwashing spin, but it was good enough to spare us the bullsh*t. 
• Brazil is getting even more datacenters after AWS pours $1.8 billion into expanding infrastructure. 
• AWS announced that it will invest more than $10 billion into AI infrastructure in the UK through 2028. 
• Oooooooo, high-speed Japanese trains! The Central Japan Railway Company is using AWS for its Yamanashi Maglev Line. The transportation company will use IoT, AI, and ML technology from AWS to reduce maintenance costs and improve operations. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Lots of people didn’t have their precious apps for nearly eight hours when a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack hit Azure. Even the UK’s Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service went down, leaving judges to sit in their wigs for HOURS with nothing to do! Microsoft said Azure’s defense response made it worse. 
• To prevent a repeat of the CrowdStrike debacle, Microsoft held a closed summit with its security partners and government officials about better collaboration for testing and deployment. Actions will include investments in anti-tampering protections, such as hiring a dad who can hear you turning up the thermostat from a different room. 
• Microsoft released a progress report six months after its promise to make security a priority across the board, which include improved audit logs, a security skilling academy, and reduced token access. Good thing it hasn’t reduced tokin’ access, or I’d be super sad. 

New stuff 

• New upgrades to Copilot include agents that you can boss around, an upgraded LLM, meeting summaries, and more.
• AWS is offering more value to partners through its new Global Passport Program. A select number of international ISVs will participate. The program includes guidance, strategic support, and resources, such as market-evaluation workshops and multi-region deployments. 
• You’ll be interested to know that Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation. JK, you won’t be interested to know. 
• Azure Advisor Well-Architected Assessment is in public preview. It provides tailored guidance to optimize cloud infrastructure. 
• Is it Fashion Week? Because Microsoft launched three new models for its open-source Phi 3.5 series to help developers with multilingual processing and video analysis, among other tasks. 
• AWS announced Parallel Computing Service, which lets customers set up and manage high-performance computing clusters. 

Professional pivots 

• Carolina Dybeck Happe has left GE to become Microsoft’s new executive VP and COO. The real question is: How legit is her LinkedIn picture? It does not disappoint. 
• Thierry Pellegrino has become the global head of advanced computing at AWS. 

Best friends forever 

• The NFL is using AWS to build a bunch of stuff for the most boring game outside of golf. Tackle Probability is an AI-powered tool that analyzes some boring game stuff. The game giant also developed Digital Athlete to improve player safety, but player safety seems like it starts with not having two 300-lb men slam into each other at top speed for the 100th time in their careers. But I’m no doctor. 
• Digital transformation solutions provider Trianz has integrated its Concierto platform with AWS. Concierto is a zero-code SaaS platform that enables “lightning fast migrations to the cloud.” I’ll forgive the hyperbole only because this had me imagine a company putting its computers in a DeLorean…then it drives really, really fast toward the clock tower…then it’s the future and it has migrated. 
• Cisco has started offering its AppDynamics application management suite as part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
• Polarin by Lightstorm, which for some reason sounds like the sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas in my weird brain, is in Azure Marketplace. It’s a cloud network infrastructure platform, which is def not as fun as my sequel.
• Kong, which develops API technologies and isn’t that giant rubber toy you hide dog treats in, has made its Dedicated Cloud Gateways available for Azure.
• Australian biz-tech provider Brennan earned its Azure Data Warehouse Migration Specialization. 
• Our friends at Pinecone have made the company’s serverless vector database available on Azure. 
• Project-management tech provider LoadSpring Solutions now integrates with Microsoft Azure. 
• Belden has integrated its CloudRail software with AWS IoT SiteWise.
• AI development platform Kore.ai’s XO Automation and Contact Centre AI is now in AWS Marketplace.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Reports of slowing Azure growth following Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, plus “light sales guidance,” led the stock to dip 5%. Even though earnings grew 10% YoY and cloud sales grew 30% that growth is smaller compared to the previous quarter’s growth. In particular, Intelligent Cloud “missed expectations.” Capital expenditure in early AI is also detracting from profitability. 
  • In response, Microsoft is going to change how it reports numbers for its business segments, kind of like when I tell my husband I put money into savings this month but leave out the part where I bought a $50 concealer (IT GOT RAVE REVIEWS AND I NEED IT, OK?). 
• Regardless of how Microsoft structures its earnings, it should be fine as long as I keep overconsuming TikTok. As of March, the platform spent $20M per month on Azure OpenAI Service through Microsoft—a whopping 25% of the revenue Microsoft was generating through that business. Is an OpenAI rep on their way to Washington, DC to beg Congress not to ban TikTok as I type this? 
• Amazon earnings were bright, with AWS as the driving force behind a quarterly profit of $13.5B—a 19% increase YoY and above expectations. But all this demand isn’t necessarily a great thing, because AWS has “a titanic backlog” for its services. It’s unclear if that’s why AWS closed some of its services to new customers, such as Amazon S3 Select, or whether they plan on retiring those services down the road.  
• Meanwhile, The demand for AI is more than Microsoft can accommodate, so the cloud giant is spending billions to use third-party centers while it builds out more of its own.
• Like Microsoft, AWS is spending a significant amount on capital ($16.4B for Q2!), which includes building new data centers instead of refurbishing old ones. Next up: Hyderabad, India. 
  • Investments also include the race to create AI chips that are cheaper and faster than NVIDIA’s.
• In a leaked internal fireside chat, the AWS CEO told the company’s software developers that they need to find other skills because AI is going to start coding for them. “Upskill and learn new technologies” was the depth of the direction they received. Are you feeling left out? Don’t—the CEO said most white-collar jobs will look completely different in five to 10 years. Time to upskill and learn new technologies!!!!
• Microsoft wasn’t the only cloud provider to experience at outage at the end of July—AWS had connectivity issues for a day, preventing customers from accessing storage, databases, and other services. The guest contributor who wrote this article asked if this dependency on two clouds calls for a plan B, and lucky for him, he’s a man and doesn’t have to think about equitable access. OH YOU MEAN THE OTHER PLAN B…right right, yes, let’s get on that. 
• Where was Microsoft’s “the customer is not always right” mentality when I was a waitress? Delta’s CEO, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike exchanged some WORDS over July’s outage. Microsoft and CrowdtSrike are blaming Delta for its slow recovery, saying the airline refused Microsoft’s help. Delta is like “We don’t need your help, also, we hate you and this is your fault.” 
• Last year, Nokia and AWS decided to collaborate. Well, they collaborated a little too hard because now AWS is suing Nokia for stealing patented intellectual property. I almost never say this, but this article about the conflict is great from start to finish, and involves rowing teams beating each other with oars, a “criminal pivot” for a business strategy, and German indifference. Thanks Iain Morris.  

World domination 

• The US government is doing its darndest to keep advanced chips and other AI capabilities out of the hands of China, but as Jeff Goldblum’s character states in Jurassic Park, nature finds a way—and that way is AWS. They are exploiting a loophole in which Chinese companies can access technology like NVIDIA A100 chips through cloud providers who are fully allowed to operate in the country (or, through intermediary companies). But this velociraptor has figured out how to have babies y’all. 
• Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service achieved FedRAMP certification, which means some federal agencies now have permission to use it for sensitive datasets. The IRS started with the prompt, “Show me everyone who is not paying their taxes,” which yielded a list of extremely wealthy individuals. So, they adjusted the prompt to say “Compile a list of poor souls who make under $30k a year and were late filing by two days so we can rain hellfire upon them without fear of them being able to afford an accountant.” 
  • That FedRAMP certification came just in time for Microsoft and Palantir to sell cloud-enabled AI and data analytics to US defense and intelligence agencies. 
• AWS is talking to UK regulators like they lied about doing their homework. The cloud provider is “disappointed in [the investigation]” of the AWS-Anthropic relationship, claiming it is in no way anti-competitive, along with calls to “end the probe” like it’s being abducted by a UFO or something. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• A hacker group is exploiting vulnerabilities in Azure subdomains to spread disinformation on Android phones via push alerts that lead users to fake news sites. My favorite part about this story is that the fake news was about—wait for it—Harry Connick Jr. Don’t they want people to actually click on the links? No offense to HCJ, but WGAF? 
• Just two weeks after the famed CrowdStrike update outage, Microsoft experienced another global outage due to a cyberattack that affected Outlook, Azure, and Minecraft. Office workers and middle school nerds everywhere were distraught. The 10-hour downtime was the result of a DDoS attack and Microsoft’s “failure to properly defend against it.” Does everybody remember the recent Microsoft announcement that executive bonuses would be tied to security performance? Looks like you’re not getting that boat this year, David. 
• At its annual conference in Vegas, Black Hat discovered six critical vulnerabilities (they didn’t get the memo that that should have stayed in Vegas). Is AWS trying to be like Microsoft with all these security headlines? AWS, just be yourself. You don’t need to Single White Female your competitor, it’s OK, we like you for YOU. 
  • But then, attackers were able to grab AWS keys and access tokens in a data extortion campaign, as uncovered by Networks’ Unit 42 arm. 
• Is there anything more ironic (or, iconic) than an infected health bot? Privilege escalation flaws in Azure’s cloud-based AI Health Bot Service allowed unauthorized access to customers’ resources via a malicious attack. When users asked what they should do about a health problem, such as a rash, the health bot responded “Put a bird on it” 100% of the time (that was for my fellow Portlandia lovers only). A research engineer at cybersecurity firm Tenable says this is what happens when AI development is rushed. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• AWS is going to power GE HealthCare’s generative AI models via Amazon Bedrock, with the aim of improving patient care. Honestly, the bar for good healthcare is so low in this country that you could put an extra garbage can in the exam room and I’d call that improving patient care. 
• I guess Leeds Teaching Hospital in England wants to put a bird on everything now that it has moved entirely to Azure.
• Telecoms company Lumen Technologies is using Azure to drive AI adoption and innovation. In return, Microsoft will use Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric to strengthen connectivity capabilities among Microsoft data centers. 
• More than half of Y Combinator startups are accepting Microsoft’s cloud credits initiative, which aims to get promising young companies to build on Azure. 

New stuff  

• As AWS wins new clients in the public sector, it has decided to expand its cohort of government tech suppliers. The AWS Champions Program highlights vendors and public agencies who use AWS for civic advancement.  
• Microsoft Teams has a new app that unifies your personal and work accounts. Sounds…like…a great…idea… 
• Mithra, which sounds like some angry Greek goddess, is the newest platform from AWS. The CIO went on to explain what it does “in simplest terms” but it was not, in fact, the simplest terms, so figure it out for yourself. 
• Oracle has an official partnership with Microsoft but doesn’t yet offer its MySQL Heatwave for Azure. However, Oracle just announced it has made the database service available on AWS despite no official partnership with the cloud provider. MySQL Heatwave itself runs on AWS. 

Professional Pivots 

• Microsoft welcomed its new AI Transformation Officer, Pamela Maynard, formerly CEO of Avanade. 

Best Friends Forever 

New to Azure Marketplace: 

• Ivanti, which sounds like a cheap clothing brand that’s trying to pass for Italian high fashion, will help Microsoft customers break down barriers between IT and security. 
• iiDENTIFii, a company that apparently never wants to be Googled properly, is bringing its biometric identity authentication to Azure Marketplace. 
• Lumifi has added its managed detection and response services 
• Pathlock Cloud, which offers identity governance solutions, is on Azure Marketplace 
• Mobile device management company Jamf became a Microsoft Partner and will enter Azure Marketplace later this year.’

New to AWS Marketplace:  

• MicroStrategy ONE for Government, a managed SaaS solution for data security and governance 
• Versium’ REACH APIs (dang, y’all don’t have to yell), a data enrichment and cleansing tool 
• Veritone’s enterprise AI solutions for media and entertainment companies 
• LastPass, a password and identity management solution 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Julianne Medenblik

Years ago, Mollie was perusing the selection at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company when she noticed an interesting neon sign logo across the street. She’d never heard of this elusive “2A” before, so she pulled out her phone to look it up. 

It was love at first Google, so she applied for a job. But it wasn’t to be—the position had just been filled. She left an impression though, and when a job opened up later, 2A reached out to her. But it was not to be (again)—she had already accepted another job. Eventually, the stars aligned, and Mollie took on freelance work with us until moving to a full-time position as one of our newest storytellers.  

Rewind 15 years and the scene is a bit different. After graduating from college with a degree that focused on creative writing and marketing (dream combo!), Mollie felt an unexpected calling that she couldn’t deny: to run a funeral home. “Growing up, I was always the morbid kid,” Mollie said. “And this was a way for me to pair my curiosity about death with my desire to help others.” While she was determined to get into the business, she soon discovered that the male-dominated industry wouldn’t afford a young woman any apprenticeships. Shut out, she put it in her back pocket and moved on to her next adventure.  

Cut to a short stint in nursing school (hey, it’s good to know what you don’t want), and then a move to California, where Mollie found herself copywriting for a school library. Running promotions for the library’s events helped her discover an interest in—and talent for—marketing. This led to positions at marketing agencies where she wrote for many industries, including healthcare.  

Did we mention that Mollie was freelancing as a journalist on the side? The woman has hustle.  

It was only after earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at Bennington College (for which she still writes articles and social media posts) that she landed in Seattle. Which brings us back to Elliott Bay books. 

Mollie describes her path to 2A as zigzagged, which is so much more interesting than a straight line. And at every step, she’s brought the depths of her creativity with her. When she isn’t telling our clients’ stories by day, she’s writing her own by night. An author of both fiction and nonfiction, she recently completed an object lessons book about the saxophone and is refining a collection of personal essays. In addition to writing, Mollie enjoys cross-stitching. But not in a zigzag. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• You win some, you lose some: Xerox is moving its legacy data-center workloads to Azure, which unfortunately doesn’t involve photocopying body parts and leaving the prints for other attorneys to discover (like when my dad used to take us to his office as kids: “It’s making people very uncomfortable, you have to stop”). Meanwhile, the Broad Institute at MIT is not renewing its Azure contract, with a TBD on where it goes next. 
• Microsoft has stepped down from its non-voting observer seat on OpenAI’s board. So, it gave up its role of doing nothing but getting the tea. Speculators say the OpenAI seat will go to an Apple executive following a recent deal between the two companies. And this might sting a little, but OpenAI is selling more of its AI models than Microsoft is. 
• That’s OK because Microsoft is busy making its own deals—starting with Adept, a young AI startup. I went to Adept’s website and I still have no idea what the company does. DM me if you can explain it like I’m five years old.
• Microsoft led a $40M investment in Armada, which provides off-grid, satellite-connected modular centers that customers can buy through Azure. Is this like the prepper of the tech world? 
• Criteo is collaborating with Microsoft Advertising. TL;DR: they’re using and selling each other’s products to retailers.
• Deloitte will use Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker in its products to help clients “augment their workflows.” Does anyone want their workflows augmented? I don’t. 
• After agreeing to essentially contract out its cloud services so Microsoft can keep offering generative AI, wouldntyaknowit, Oracle’s Autonomous Database has become available on Azure.
• Digital mapmaker TomTom signed a long-term deal with Microsoft to bring its maps and traffic data to Azure Maps and other Microsoft products. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS is investigating whether or not Perplexity AI has been “scraping” websites that have tried to block the practice. Scraping, which in this case is not about cleaning out your bong with an unbent paper clip, is the act of extracting data for things like market research or content analysis. And it’s forbidden by AWS. Because Perplexity is an AWS customer, it must adhere to the cloud provider’s rules. Do as I say, not as I do, I guess.
• AWS, Google, and Microsoft are among several tech companies calling for industry-wide adoption of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), a statement of greenhouse gas emissions that’s verified by a third party. 
• This is funny because some Amazon and AWS employees past and present are calling the company’s sustainability claims cap. (See how familiar I am with the lingo of today’s youth? How sigma of me). There have been walkouts and accusations of “creative accounting.” (I know someone who creatively accounted 34 times, but I’ll tell you about it later.) 
• Microsoft is scrapping the underwater data center it started in 2013, and in the same breath the spokesperson was basically like, “It worked, but also it didn’t work.” That last part I could have told you for free. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• By now, you know the details of the CrowdStrike/Microsoft debacle that affected almost nine-million devices—and ruined vacations, halted flights, stopped surgeries, paused banking, and crapped on emergency services. If you don’t, then you’ve been living under a rock, and I suggest you return to that rock because things are rough out here. 
• After advising customers to reboot at least 15 times to solve the issue, Microsoft and CrowdStrike realized that they’ll need to write some very large checks. (On top of the $22M settlement it paid to EU regulators for something else…. And also the $14M settlement it paid to California after penalizing workers who took medical or family care leave.) But, more importantly, the “blue screen of death” is looking like a solid Halloween costume right now. 
• It wasn’t just the faulty CrowdStrike update that caused problems: Azure and Microsoft 365 customers experienced a separate outage stemming from the Central US region, which greatly affected airlines. Let’s pour one out for anyone who had a plane ticket this past week. 

World domination 

• Microsoft is offering Chinese businesses a loophole to get around OpenAI’s exclusion of Chinese customers (even those using VPNs). But the US won’t allow China to access this advanced technology for long, because we can be next-level savage like that. 
• In the meantime, Microsoft is worming its way into Hong Kong schools by incorporating OpenAI into education services.
• Chile will soon have more than one of the world’s largest swimming pools—it will brag about a second AWS data center in 2026. And in Australia, AWS is building a high-security data center for the down-under government in a $2B, 10-year, top-secret project. This means nobody knows the location, except we do: it’s in the Outback, because where else would you secretly build a data center? 
• To get more public agencies on board with generative AI, AWS is doing what it does best: throwing money at it. The company announced a $50M investment in its Public Sector Impact Initiative, which is mostly about giving promotional credits to the government to use solutions like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Q. 
• Remember that $1.5B investment Microsoft made in G42, an United Arab Emirates–based AI company? Republican lawmakers want to know what’s up with that. They demand info and they demand it NOW. Microsoft is all like, CHILL OUT we care about security…can’t you tell? 
• Google is giving off some big Pick Me energy, per my last leaked memo. In a 500M Euro effort to lure European cloud companies away from Microsoft, the companies stuck with Microsoft anyway. Google’s incentive was offered on the condition that the companies held their ground on the anti-trust allegations against Microsoft. Does anyone have some soap, because this is DIRTY. 

New stuff 

• AWS Graviton4 Cloud Processors for EC2 R8g are now generally available; AWS claims the combo is more energy efficient and more powerful—and they have receipts. AWS is also developing an even more powerful AI chip, Trainium3, which will compete with NVIDIA’s family of Blackwell chips. AWS is preparing its data centers for increased demand—such as using liquid-cooling and cold-plate technology. So much for net-zero by 2040. 
• Amazon Q can provide customer service agents with step-by-step guides on how to handle customer calls, and never in my life have I wanted an AI to hallucinate in any given scenario. “Step 3: Tell customer your butt itches and to please hold while you scratch it. Step 4: Hang up.” 
• AWS is also throwing credits at startups, again, to win market share away from Microsoft. 
• Welcome, App Studio! It’s the newest generative AI solution from AWS that promises to build you an app based on a written prompt. Why do I feel like this will be used for evil? 
• Avoiding all hyperbole, Automation Anywhere is “automating the impossible” using Azure OpenAI Service. Does that mean it will automate Elon Musk’s donations to food banks? 

Professional pivots 

• NVIDIA hired Howard Wright, formerly AWS VP and Global Head of Startups, to lead its startup ecosystem.
• Google has hired two executives away from competitors: Saurabh Tiwary, formerly of Microsoft’s Copilot arm, and Raj Pai, formerly of the EC2 arm at AWS. They’ll help lead Google’s cloud-based AI business. 

Best friends forever 

• AWS, Microsoft, Intel, Google, and other puppeteers of humanity have joined the Fintech Open Source Foundation, which aims to “enhance the financial service industry’s technology ecosystem through open-source initiatives.” (Because what banks need is more free shit.) In partnership with financial institutions, the foundation will set common standards. 
• I scream, you scream, we all scream for ISVs! Browse Microsoft’s 2024 Partners of the Year. 
• SourceFuse earned AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status. 
• CCL, a provider of IT and hybrid cloud services, is the first launch partner for Microsoft’s New Zealand cloud region.
• Soracom, a provider of advanced IoT connectivity, has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate program. 
• Telco Systems’ Edgility platform passed the AWS Foundational Technical Review validation for AWS IoT Greengrass and has joined the AWS Partner Network. 
• New to AWS Marketplace: Observo AI, which creates security and observability data pipelines. 

Additions to Azure Marketplace 

• Raffle AI, which specializes in chat assistants and search technology. 
• Adaptive’s Aeron, a suite of low-latency messaging tools for financial traders. 
• NIQ’s Activate platform, which provides insights for retailers and CPG companies.
• ClickHouse Cloud, which gives Azure customers options for deploying and managing their analytics workloads.
• SureImpact Nonprofit, which helps charities measure outcomes. 
• Forescout’s Risk and Exposure Management Solution. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• NinjaTech AI, which seems like a not-OK name for a company in 2024, is using machine learning chips from AWS for its new service, Ninja. (Wow, they’re really leaning into this.) Ninja can plan and execute (as ninjas sometimes do) everyday tasks such as scheduling meetings, conducting research, and completing coding tasks. I’ve heard humans also do this, but who needs them anymore! 
• HashiCorp and AWS are expanding their strategic collaboration to do stuff like create policy about architecting and configuring Terraform on AWS. You can count me out of that one. I’d rather blow-dry my eyeballs. 
• Will AT&T actually work in my neighborhood now that it’s moving its 5G to Microsoft? Microsoft is acquiring AT&T’s Network Cloud Technology and staff “to eventually handle all of the wireless carrier’s 5G traffic.” It’s worth noting that both AWS and Microsoft are competing for huge telecom clients as the industry deploys new 5G networks, but so far those deals “aren’t yet generating substantial revenue.” 
• MediaTek, a Taiwanese chip designer, is designing an ARM-based chip that will run Microsoft Windows OS. MediaTek stock has risen following this news, and I am willing to bet Nancy Pelosi—I mean her husband—conveniently bought some of that stock on a total whim, just total dumb luck, the week prior. 
• SAP has committed to using three types of AWS chips to support its SAP HANA Cloud. 
• To ensure capacity meets the demands of OpenAI users, Microsoft will run some of its workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.🤯 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI are facing an antitrust investigation in the US. The goal is to determine if the arrangements among these companies are meant to shut out competition in the AI industry. Apparently, that isn’t plainly obvious and we need a whole investigation for it. 
• Microsoft is cutting around 1,000 jobs in its Azure and HoloLens divisions. It needs to free up resources for AI initiatives. 
• AWS re:Inforce 2024 had a big security theme—what timing, given Microsoft’s highly public flailing and floundering in the space. The cloud provider announced it will push multi-factor authentication and hosted many sessions around security best practices. 

World domination 

• If the government wants to monitor Microsoft’s AI dominance, then the company will just go to Sweden, which has better meatballs anyhows. Microsoft is investing $3.2B to expand its AI infrastructure in places like Staffanstorp, which sounds like one of the houses in Harry Potter. 
• Is AWS the next Eurovision contestant? Break out the mullets and costumes that make you feel weird inside, because the cloud provider is setting up (more) shop in Italy, Spain, and Germany. After dedicating 15.7B Euros to its Spain Region, Germany is ponying up 8.8B Euros to scale its Frankfurt Region and will either expand its Milan data center or build a new one somewhere else in the boot. This is like my semester abroad, but without the absinthe and space brownies!! And without the data centers. Even I had limits. 
• AWS is also launching a Region in Taiwan. This is…a choice that interests me (although, Warren Buffet can be wrong). 
• French telecom provider Orange is partnering with AWS to offer cloud computing in Morocco and Senegal. Orange will use the AWS Wavelength platform and rely on its own data centers to provide services, since these are the only two places on earth that AWS hasn’t stomped on with data centers. YET. 
• Norwegian-owned telecom Telenor Group is using AWS technology to create a sovereign cloud environment. Together, they’ll offer customers security and sovereignty solutions. Also, these dudes look chill and nice, just hangin’ outside corporate HQ talking about Norwegian things like Vikings and fjords. I bet they do cool sovereign stuff. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Summer is the perfect time for grilling out, and I don’t just mean on the BBQ—Microsoft president Brad Smith was part of a good grilling from the House of Homeland Security Committee following cyberattacks on the federal government. A ProPublica investigation found that Smith and co. ignored important warnings that could have, if heeded, prevented the breach. The government was like Will you PRETTY PLEASE stop doing that shiz and Smith was like YES ALL EMPLOYEES WILL CARE NOW, I PINKY PROMISE. 
• Probably the biggest drama this past month was Microsoft’s “embarrassing” backpedaling of its Recall software on Copilot Plus PC, which can screenshot everything someone does on the new Qualcomm-powered laptops. Researchers labeled it a “security disaster” (Microsoft broke its pinky promise!!) because it makes stealing information a piece of cake for hackers. Microsoft rolled it back “in secret” and is now testing it. Can we just love the fact that a product named “Recall” was recalled? Like, immediately? 
• Well, just cut off that pinky because a researcher found a bug that allows hackers to spoof real Microsoft corporate emails, which means they can send phishing emails using real people’s email addresses. It only works when sending to Outlook addresses, which is only a few hundred million people, so…. (At the time of reporting, the bug hadn’t been patched.) 

Professional pivots 

• Now settled in his new position as CEO of AWS, Matt Garman shared some important details on sales team structure and executive changes. Settling out is Bratin Saha, a former AI general manager at AWS who has worked on Amazon Bedrock and other AI products. He‘s now the chief product and technology officer at DigitalOcean, a nascent but promising cloud competitor, according to analysts. 
• The director of Amazon EC2 product management, Chetan Kapoor, also told AWS peace out after eight years with the company. Nobody knows where he’s going—oh Chetan, you feather in the wind, you. 

New stuff 

• AWS introduced two new AI certifications for professionals who want to serve the AWS overlords build a career in AI. These free or low-cost training courses (Machine Learning Engineer and AI Practitioner) are meant to provide the “lack of expertise” businesses need to deploy and monitor models. 
• Microsoft announced some updates to Microsoft Fabric at Build 2024 that include customized workflows, a new module called Real-Time Intelligence, and the availability of Copilot for Power BI. 
• SAP has integrated its AI Core with foundation models in Amazon Bedrock, which it claims will help businesses improve their ERP platforms by driving efficiency. Gotta drive efficiency—otherwise, why are we on this rock? 
• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is now available in Amazon Bedrock. I was going to throw a party but instead decided to get a cup of water from the kitchen. 
• After I hydrate, maybe I can plan something special to celebrate the fact that Amazon Connect now has an Analytics Data Lake. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE INSIGHTS!?! I want to get hired as a data center analyst so I can create charts that show how many times a day angry customers use the phrases “This is bullshit” and “I’ve been on hold for 40 goddamn minutes” and stuff like that. First stop on the resume train: American Airlines. 
• As we descend into the eighth circle of hell, you’ll find AI-driven contact centers, where tortured souls wait forever to speak with someone but never will. Microsoft is taking Copilot to call centers to help chatbots scan manuals so they can better answer questions and field customer calls. 
• Not that anyone cares, especially me, but it’s now easier to manage the entire machine learning lifecycle if you’re a developer on AWS with the fully managed MLflow on Amazon SageMaker. 
• There are two new previews from Microsoft: a flex consumption plan for Azure Functions and a premium version of Azure Bastion virtual machine. Truly, truly life-changing. 

Best Friends Forever 

• An expanded collaboration between Microsoft and product design software provider Ansys will allow customers to deploy Ansys Access on Azure through the Azure Marketplace. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• “Stop drinking Cokes, Jane,” they say…but how can I when Microsoft has entered the chat? Coca-Cola signed a $1B, five-year deal (partially funded by me) to use Microsoft’s cloud computing and AI services. “But how can this poisonous drink get any better?” you may ask. Don’t worry, the amazing taste that lights up your entire brain and sends your pancreas into a tailspin won’t change—they’ll just be summarizing emails and whatnot. 
• Telefonica Germany is moving one million 5G customers to AWS. This is the first time an existing mobile operation has switched its core network to a public cloud. I bet the AWS person who led that deal gets drunk at bars and screams at locals, “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I AM? I GOT THE TELEFONICA DEAL…IT’S THE FIRST…YOU PEOPLE DON’T KNOW…you don’t know….” ::sobs into melty gin and tonic:: 
• And what timing: AWS signed a multi-year deal with Mavenir—a cloud-native network infrastructure provider for networks—“to create a new telco-grade deployment model.” I still miss the good old days of Bananaphone. (Tell me that won’t be in your head for the next week.) 
• Like AWS, Microsoft is going heavy on industry. It recently developed copilot templates, integrations, and capabilities for areas such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and energy. Several industry players have announced deals this past month: Anglian Water in the UK is moving several workloads to Azure; Hexagon, a German manufacturing intelligence company, is rolling out applications using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service; and UK electrical retailer Currys is moving to Azure. 
• In an article written by a journalist who ignored 50 out of my 50 pitches while I worked in the depraved world of PR, we learn that News Corp has made a deal worth $250M with OpenAI. Per the five-year agreement, ChatGPT will use content from the empire that brought us Alex Jones. Reddit has a similar deal with ChatGPT, so fasten your seatbelts! 
• Bright Machines, a software and robotics company serving the manufacturing industry, is collaborating with Microsoft to create a software-defined manufacturing environment that spans the entire manufacturing lifecycle. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about this and I got: It’s like giving your factory a software upgrade—now it can finally stop asking for a break every five minutes! 👀👀👀 
• MongoDB and Microsoft announced an alliance with its MongoDB AI Applications Program, a “one-stop shop” for businesses wanting to build generative AI solutions. 
• Media and technology company Axel Springer is working with Microsoft “to support independent journalism around the world” (sureeeee) through AdTech and other AI-driven experiences for users, once referred to as “readers.” In the meantime, news publishers are concerned that Google’s new AI-powered search will be “catastrophic” to their website traffic. 
• If Broadcom dumped AWS, then AWS is out at the club with IBM taking selfies and posting them on Insta to make Broadcom jealous. The two have taken their relationship to the next level by “streamlining access to AI and hybrid cloud solutions.” How? IBM’s software products will be available in 92 countries through AWS Marketplace. Analysts view this as a “significant development” in the cloud industry. 
• AWS and CrowdStrike are speeding up their cybersecurity consolidation. AWS will integrate CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform for advanced security while CrowdStrike will leverage AI tools from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, to develop generative AI capabilities for its solutions. 

World domination 

• In a huge commitment to France, Microsoft will invest $4.3B in the country’s AI sector (which includes datacenter infrastructure and renewable energy). The goal is to attract foreign investment and establish an AI skilling initiative to train one million French peeps by the end of 2025. 
• Coming to Germany by 2025: an AWS “sovereign cloud,” which will be “physically and logically separate” from AWS regions. This will help AWS customers meet the country’s comparably stricter data-residency requirements, and hopefully persuade reluctant public agencies to move to the cloud. 
• When I visited Wisconsin, the best thing I saw was Katy Nally. The second-best thing I saw was a 12-person, 5-foot-tall beer bong, followed by a 50-pound cheese wheel. I guess Microsoft realized these advantages when it decided to invest $3.3B in a regional cloud-computing and AI hub (ChatGPT, show me how to set up this bong. Include the number of beers I’ll need to fill it.). Some money will also go to a manufacturing-focused AI Co-Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. 
• Microsoft is collecting datacenters like Pokémon cards. In a continued spending spree/unhinged datacenter obsession, Microsoft purchased more land outside Columbus, OH; is launching an Azure cloud region in Queretaro, Mexico; and is opening Thailand’s first regional datacenter. (But Microsoft is closing its Africa Development Centre in Lagos…without providing a reason.) 
• Amazon is spending almost $9B to expand its cloud infrastructure in Singapore, part of its larger investment in the Asia-Pacific region. 
• AWS has launched datacenters in Israel and plans to invest $7.2B through 2037. This will allow the Israeli government to migrate workloads to the cloud, run applications, and store data using in-country datacenters. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• After Uncle Sam essentially issued an ultimatum to Microsoft about its AI and cloud-computing base in China, Microsoft has asked nearly 1,000 of its China-based staff, who are largely Chinese engineers, to relocate to the US, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand. Since New Zealand is utopia, I have a plan: My husband and I will stack two-high in a trench coat and then travel to China to romance one of these engineers, who will then marry me (but kind of us; he’ll find out later), and then we can all get New Zealand citizenship! FLAWLESS PLAN. 
• Broadcom, which now owns VMware after a $61B deal, is moving its VMware workloads to Google Cloud—AND decided that it will take over sales of its VMware cloud product on AWS (among other policy changes that make me think Kendall Roy has taken over). This uber pissed off AWS, which sells a VMware Cloud on AWS service. As a result, AWS is incentivizing users of its own VMware Cloud on AWS service to move. This is a juicy drama and something I can get behind. I’m invested in this hot mess, and I’m ready for the next punch to be thrown between these two, because I’m a suburban working mother over 40 and I need this. 
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is also offering incentives to VMware customers that migrate and run their workloads using the Azure VMware Solutions service. 
• Last quarter, Microsoft brought in $26.7B in revenue (from cloud alone). Microsoft saw a 20% rise in share price…before announcing these figures at the earnings call. When you have that much money, you can afford to build a datacenter out of 50-pound cheese wheels. I’m just saying, you know, ideas. 
• On its quarterly earnings call, Amazon announced 17% revenue growth YoY for its cloud unit. 
• Is there…hope? Microsoft banned US police departments from using its Azure OpenAI Service for facial recognition via its terms of service. As someone who lives in a state where face masks could soon be banned in public FOR ANY REASON without exemption, I appreciate this solid, Microsoft. 👊
• Eight newspaper publishers are suing Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement. The papers, which include the Chicago Tribune and the NY Daily News, claim that the tech companies reuse the papers’ articles without permission and incorrectly attribute inaccurate information to them. 
• The Storytelling team at 2A is growing to love Perplexity AI, a search engine that reduces the work of Googling. But Microsoft has banned its employees from using the platform (which also happens to be a huge Azure OpenAI customer). Here’s why. 

New stuff 

• Microsoft launched Phi-3 Mini, the first of three “lightweight” AI models the company plans to release. What makes it teeny? It’s trained on a comparatively smaller data set than its bigger GPT cousin. In this case, it learned from children’s bedtime stories—but hopefully not that creepy one, Love You Forever, where the elderly mother straps a ladder to her car and drives to her fully adult son’s house in the middle of the night so she can climb through his window to cradle him. Anyway, these models are appealing because they’re cheaper to run and perform better on personal devices. Microsoft also released the new iteration of its ChatGPT offering, GPT-4o. It supports text and image, shifting how the model interacts with multimodal inputs. 
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available. In a jargon-ridden post that would endlessly frustrate Forsyth Alexander, AWS announced this game-changing reimagining of the software development lifecycle. Amazon Q in QuickSight is also available and offers generative business-insight capabilities, such as answering questions the dashboard doesn’t explain and generating reports and executive summaries. 
• Don’t forget Amazon Q Business, which helps employees access company data, view summaries, and gain other business information by connecting to enterprise repositories. 
• Google thinks it can get more customers with honey than vinegar, so it has announced that it will support Azure and AWS clouds, letting businesses manage their security solutions across clouds. 
• After partnering with NVIDIA on integrations, the cloud giant is offering customers an AMD alternative for AI chips. AMD and NVIDIA are competitors, and this contentious move from Microsoft resulted from difficult-to-obtain (and costly) GPUs from NVIDIA. Perhaps this chip polyamory will be short lived once Microsoft starts selling its custom Cobalt 100 chips, which it directly compared to AWS Graviton chips. 
• Users can now import their own custom AI models into Amazon Bedrock. It’s only in preview, but tbh, I don’t know anyone who needs this today, so we’re good. 

Professional pivots 

• For no obvious reason (unless I’m dense), AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is leaving AWS and will be replaced by Matt Garman, SVP of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services. And Baskar Sridharan, formerly an engineering VP at Google Cloud, is now VP of AI/ML services and infrastructure at AWS. 
• Jason Taylor went from Meta to Microsoft. As corporate VP and deputy CTO, Taylor is responsible for pushing forward the next set of AI systems. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Two congressmen on the House Homeland Security Committee have requested Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft, to testify at a public hearing—part of the government’s investigation of historic nation-state attacks. Anyone wanna play a drinking game where you take a shot every time Brad says, “I don’t recall”? (Or do you want to live?) 
• Internally, Microsoft will hold senior leadership accountable for cybersecurity moving forward, tying performance on security milestones to pay. 
• The company just released new Zero Trust guidance for its Department of Defense customers…. Weird, that’s the same amount of trust I have in the DoD! (I was a military wife, so I get a free pass on this statement.) 

Best Friends Forever 

• Siemens has expanded its partnership with Microsoft to make the Siemens Xcelerator as a Service portfolio of industry software available through Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform. 
• Cloud-computing services provider Rackspace Technology’s Foundry for AI has gained several new Microsoft specializations, including Analytics on Azure and AI and Machine Learning. 
• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will work with AWS to offer generative AI solutions to customers. But first, TCS must learn how to do that, LOL. That’s why AWS will help train “25,000 TCS employees [on] the latest cloud and GenAI skills.” 
• Generative AI copilot provider Moveworks has partnered with Microsoft, bringing its copilot to Microsoft Marketplace and integrating with Azure. 
• Platform engineering company Xoriant earned its Analytics on Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization. 
• NVIDIA Healthcare integrated with Amazon SageMaker and AWS ParallelCluster to streamline ML model deployment and management. NVIDIA customers can also access prebuilt pipelines on AWS HealthOmics. (Don’t worry, if you’re a woman, doctors will still just tell you it’s “stress.”😒)