By Jane Dornemann

Image by Alejandra Maria Photography

Feedback is the cornerstone of the creative process at 2A, whether it’s an internal discussion on the best way to revise an introduction or debating how to integrate client feedback about a design. That’s why we asked Michaela Ayers of Nourish to lead a workshop on navigating “creative conflict” and constructive feedback at our company retreat this year. Here’s what we learned.

The Thomas-Kilmann Model is a great way to understand conflict management styles. Have you ever had someone steamroll your idea, and you stayed quiet? Or have you and a colleague experienced tension over opposing ideas you were championing, but tried to find a happy medium?  

We all have certain habits when it comes to navigating sticky situations based on our personality and preferences.  Understanding how you and your collaborators instinctively respond to conflict can help you be more efficient in your approach to delivering constructive feedback. (This writer NEEDS the compliment sandwich.)

The Thomas-Kilmann model below states that the way we work with others tends to fall into different behavioral patterns: competing (high in assertiveness, low in cooperativeness); compromising (high in both assertiveness and compromising); accommodating (low in assertiveness, high in cooperativeness); and avoidance (low in both assertiveness and cooperativeness). At the center of this graph is the golden ticket, collaboration. Often, our management styles will shift depending on the context of whom we are working with and what we are working on.  

Image adapted from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict model

Each of these styles has pros and cons. None of these styles is better than the other, they are simply different, encompassing various “light” and “shadow” traits. For example, an accommodating team member may be able to resolve conflict faster and keep the peace but can later harbor resentment over their unheard opinions. A competing team member is a decisive, efficient problem-solver—but they can be ego-driven and dominating. (Hey, stop thinking of that person. Stick with us for the rest of this.)

What does collaboration look like? True collaboration is about working toward a win-win in which everyone feels heard, valued, and uses creative problem-solving. But even collaboration has a downside: it’s time intensive. And effective collaboration requires something that research has shown to be highly important in the workplace, which is psychological safety. Aligned with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, achieving psychological safety builds upon itself through stages—so fostering growth of these elements at work is crucial to effective collaboration based on well-delivered (and well-received) feedback.  

So…how do you build psychological safety? It’s not simple or overly prescriptive, but the overarching idea is to connect with the people you’re providing feedback to; observe their work and feelings; communicate the impact of the recommendations; listen to their thoughts, and then iron out a mutually beneficial solution. In our open discussion, we found that the collegial relationships we’ve nurtured with each other have laid a strong foundation for mutual respect and safety in expressing ideas (which might be why we have five stars on Glassdoor). 

After another successful retreat on the books, we’ve noticed that we’re already putting what we’ve learned into practice. And we bet our clients will notice, too. 

If you’re interested in hosting a workshop like this for your teams, reach out to Michaela. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Wheelin’ and dealin’

• Multinational IT company Capgemini is collaborating with Microsoft to build an Azure Intelligent App Factory. It will help businesses develop responsible and sustainable generative AI capabilities that will generate “tangible outcomes.” Do they know what “tangible” means? Is the office building going to be smoother? Will the CEO’s skin get softer?
• Occidental, an international energy company, is migrating to AWS. One of the things it plans to do is develop a system for its large-scale carbon dioxide capture plants…HURRY IT UP WE’RE ROASTING/DROWNING/STARVING OUT HERE!!!
• Tackle.io, an end-to-end solution for B2B software companies, is co-selling a solution with AWS that will help ISVs accelerate their move to the cloud. It includes everything from training to system integration.
• “Nonprofit” insurance provider Blue Shield of California has partnered with Microsoft to build a new data hub on Azure. It’s called the Experience Cube (sounds like a weird secret medical experimentation thing). It will bring together provider, patient, and payer data in real time so that services are more personalized. “In the Experience Cube, we want to see how many medical procedures people can withstand without anesthesia, while also remaining alive, so we can personalize approvals and billing,” one Blue Cross employee said, citing pain control for invasive surgeries as a “largely unnecessary” practice.
• Trend Micro has seen sales soar since entering AWS Marketplace. Good for them I guess.
• In a mutually beneficial arrangement, professional services firm Genpact will use Azure OpenAI to offer new capabilities to clients. This includes applications such as “transition management” in which an AI-generated likeness of Gary Busey tells you you’re fired. Anyway, I went through the release to see where Microsoft wins in this, but no dice.
• Observability platform LogicMonitor has expanded its monitoring coverage across AWS services.
• Caylent, a cloud services company, signed a strategic agreement with AWS to expand data and generative AI solutions for its customers. Caylent plans to use this collaboration to scale its Canadian presence, which will include requiring all employees to constantly say thank you, please, and sorry, as well as consume at least 5 pounds of maple syrup and Canadian Bacon (known as “bacon” in Canada) daily until they’re in good with our northerly neighbors.
• Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi, released its Unified Compute Platform for Azure Stack HCI. It helps businesses manage different environments and hybrid cloud setups.
• The federal government has approved the use of Azure OpenAI service for projects involving highly sensitive data. LOL see you in the security section of this newsletter next week.

World domination

• AWS launched a Local Zone Edge location in Phoenix. It has already melted.
• And then it launched a new infrastructure Region in Tel Aviv, Israel. But that also melted!!
• Brazil’s B3 stock exchange, one of the world’s leading financial markets, is migrating to AWS. AWS is one of the exchange’s three cloud providers (the others being Microsoft and Oracle).
• Feel-good story time! An amazing 13-year-old in Nigeria just wowed the tech world by becoming Africa’s youngest Certified AWS Developer. He studied up to five hours every day for six weeks to pass the certification test. The youngest person in the world to achieve this designation to date is Karthick Arun, a ten-year-old based out of Arizona. Who has his own LinkedIn profile. Sorry about your melted Local Zone, Karthick.
• UK-based Telecom giant Vodafone is expanding its work with AWS (primarily using AWS Wavelength) to bring low-latency services to several locations in Spain.

Gossip (for nerds)

• Google is doing more poaching than a restaurant kitchen at brunch. It has recently hired a total of five big execs away from AWS and Microsoft. See who they are here.
• European Commission has opened a formal investigation into claims that Microsoft breached EU competition rules by bundling together Teams to suites such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365. It’s not so much a bundling as it is more of a…hugging. They’re hugging each other. Don’t be a patriarchal Ken.
• The former Enterprise Executive Strategic Advisor at AWS has jumped to digital transformation services firm GFT, where she’ll be SVP, Global Head AWS Sales and Strategy.
• Amazon’s earnings saw 12% growth YoY in Q2—beyond what analysts expected—largely driven by its AWS division. CEO Andy Jassy said the revenue is coming less from cloud migrations, which many companies have already done, and more from those looking to innovate in the cloud. The other money maker was the release of Amazon Bedrock, which simplifies AI model deployment.
• Meanwhile, Microsoft saw 8% growth in Q2 and a 20% rise in profit. However, it’s never enough for some people, so shares fell 2.1% after investors expressed disappointment about Azure’s slower than desired growth. (Wow this takes me back to 12-year-old Jane at the pediatrician’s office.)
  • Even still, Microsoft says it’s proud of the growth its Salesforce rival, Dynamics, has seen. Dynamics is growing faster than any of the company’s other major product categories. To drive even more sales, it is offering subsidies to potential customers.
• In response to government concerns, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other large tech firms made a commitment to meet a set of AI safeguards. If this promise to the White House is anything like the promises coming out of the White House, we are in trouble.

New stuff

• Do hyper-productive Oompa Loompas work at Microsoft? Because the company has announced a bunch of new products, short of a chocolate river flowing through Redmond:
  • Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Application Gateway for Containers and the public preview of Azure Deployment Stacks.
  • It’s also previewing Microsoft Azure Boost, which will improve the performance of virtual machines.
  • Microsoft introduced TypeChat, a library that enables large language model development.
  • It announced a more secure version of its AI-powered Bing chat. “We really need to protect the 17 people who use Bing chat worldwide,” a spokesperson said.
• The “we can do it better than Google Maps” triad of Microsoft, AWS, and Meta has released its first “open map” dataset, which includes four layers: transportation networks, geopolitical boundaries (can’t WAIT to see what they put for Taiwan), buildings, and places of interest.
• In the last cloud cover, I mentioned that Microsoft was partnering with Teladoc to do transcription things. Well, looks like AWS is doing it, too, with the announcement of HealthScribe.
• While AWS and Microsoft have both opened education centers around AI for IT and developers, there is still more ground to cover. Which is why AWS has unveiled its free Skill Builder program for executives on its YouTube channel. Since it’s for executives the first step they cover is how to turn on your computer.
• AWS has unveiled AWS Entity Resolution, which sounds like it’s an exorcist. But it just matches and links disparate records to create a 360-view of customers. This can be used for industries from finance to travel.
• Amazon EC2 P5 instances for AI/ML and HPC workloads is now generally available. A result of the company’s collab with NVIDIA, the solution reduces latency and makes scale-out performance more efficient.

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

• Zenbleed, which sounds like a Buddhist monk with a papercut, is a new vulnerability that could touch 62% of AWS environments. AWS is working on fixing it, but in the meantime, Google has released patches.
• Tenable’s CEO is calling attention to Microsoft’s four-month-long process of releasing a still-nowhere-to-be-found patch for a vulnerability in Azure. He had some choice words for Microsoft, which you can find here. Cage fight!
• Bad people have been controlling AWS System Manager agents by using a separate, maliciously owned AWS account. I feel like I maliciously own things, like my Brita that always, always needs to be refilled. Forever, until I die.
• Check Point Research says Microsoft is THE most imitated brand used for phishing attacks (we’ve all danced with Microloft, haven’t we?). In a highly American move, Microsoft said it’s Russia’s fault, as it crushed a Bud Light can against its forehead while riding a tractor that mows down poor people. But one Senator disagrees, and is calling for a Justice Department investigation into Microsoft’s “negligent cybersecurity practices”—citing the company’s role in a recent disastrous attack by Chinese hackers.
• Hacker group TeamTNT started targeting AWS environments before it expanded to Azure and Google Cloud. The TeamTNT has been improving their attack scripts over time to do everything from mining crypto to conducting straight up data theft. There are suspicions that the hackers are preparing to release an “aggressive cloud worm.” I WANT AN AGGRESSIVE CLOUD WORM. I’d dress him up in a little scarf and coat and he could sleep on a flower and maybe then he’ll turn nice.

Best Friends Forever

• AWS has named CrowdStrike the 2023 US ISV Partner of the Year.
• AWS needed more Cowbell and that’s what it got. SMB cyber insurance provider Cowbell (they HAD to know what they were doing) is now part of the AWS Cyber Insurance Partner Initiative.
• ML tooling company Edge Impulse has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program while data protection and management solutions vendor Commvault has joined the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program.
• Aquia, a SaaS company headquartered in the well-known and often-talked-about city of Millsboro, Delaware, has achieved Advanced Tier Services Partner status within the AWS Partner Network.
• Skyflow, a data privacy vault company, has joined the AWS Partner Network and is now in AWS Marketplace.
• Digital transformation firm Grid Dynamics has become a member of Microsoft’s Azure Migration and Modernization Program.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Tax, audit, and advisory firm KPMG has made a multi-billion-dollar commitment to Microsoft (OMG who got that sales comish?! Maybe that person can just buy Florida and put us all out of our misery already). The company will use the Microsoft Cloud and AI services to do things like run smart auditing, get more integrated access to data, and create specialized client solutions. 
• Teladoc Health plans to integrate Microsoft’s AI-enabled notetaking tools for clinical documentation so physicians can auto-transcribe things like patient visits. OH NO, what if someone comes into the ER and says on arrival, “I’ve got a high temperature!” and the transcription doesn’t work so when the doctor says, “Patient said on arrival they were hot” turns into “Patient dead on arrival, they were hot.” Then someone goes out to tell the family the terrible news except the patient isn’t actually dead, it’s just a fever, and then in the courtroom during the ensuing lawsuit, the doctor is accused of sick thoughts for thinking a dead person was sexually attractive. Maybe we should hit the brakes on this one. 
• Lacework, which always makes me think of grandma’s doilies, is expanding its partnership with AWS to offer anomaly detection with composite alerts linked to Amazon GuardDuty findings. It also includes integrations with Amazon Security Hub. 
• In its “growing partnership with Meta…as a preferred partner,” Microsoft and Snowflake announced their support for the Llama 2 family of large language learning models (LLMs). Available on Azure and Windows, this will help developers build generative AI-powered tools. (Not to be confused with AI power tools, which don’t exist but should.) 
• Snowflake and Microsoft are also working together to simplify their joint customers’ AI projects. The two are working on integrations with Microsoft products like Power Apps and Azure ML. A bigger deal is that joint customers will be able to use Azure OpenAI Service with records stored in Snowflake.  
• Dell thinks Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365 are too complicated to use together, so it’s offering professional services to show businesses how to do so successfully.  
• Data development platform provider MongoDB is expanding its global efforts with Microsoft to include integrations, service options, and joint marketing initiatives. 
• Splunk announced it will build its new cloud solutions natively on Azure. Splunk is also previewing its AI Assistant, a generative AI chat interface that is an improved version of the former SPL Copilot. 
• Global banking firm BBVA will use AWS to deliver advanced analytics and data services in the cloud as part of its data and AI transformation process. Automated insights! Unified data! I can hardly contain myself over this new look. I LOVE makeovers and think this should be a reality show. It would be a Queer Eye meets The Office meets Billions meets Silicon Valley.  
• In a new collab with Microsoft, Teradata is bringing its VantageCloud Lake to Azure, which will broaden Teradata’s generative AI use cases. 
• French company Teleperformance, which provides digital communications services to businesses, is using Azure OpenAI in a $185M deal to improve its business communication services. 

World domination 

• The ability to leave Ohio is no longer the best thing about it—AWS is investing $7.8B to expand its central Ohio data center.   
• AWS has launched a CloudFront edge location in Lagos, Nigeria. It’s the first one in the country. 
• In a pioneering act for Japan, banking firm Mizuho is rolling out Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service to 45,000 employees. Staff are pitching ideas on how to use it, but some have already been using it for things like scanning wealthy client portfolios. I wanna scan wealthy client portfolios!!  
• Leading African payments technology company Flutterwave is working with Microsoft to build its next-gen platform on Azure. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Just as Microsoft dropped a hefty price tag for its corporate AI tools, AWS says it’s focusing on lowering the computing costs customers will need to implement AI, including the price performance of its chips. 
• It’s a LinkedIn key party! Raejeanne Skillern is now AWS VP and CMO; former AWS data center exec Chris Vonderhaar is now VP of demand and supply management at Google; and once-AWS CMO Rachel Thornton is CMO at Fivetran. 
• Analysts have no doubt that AI will be Microsoft’s cash cow, driving a potential $100B in revenue by 2027. That is like, 100 Kardashians. In turn, expect the stock price to jump about 25%. Within this broader AI push are six money-making strategies, which include AI APIs, telecom, “bringing Copilot to the masses,” and generative AI for government. (In fact, the company did just add AI tools for Azure Government.) Bing was also cited as a driver but hey, analysts can’t get it right all the time. 

New stuff  

• Time to learn good! AWS is investing $100M in a generative AI center that will teach businesses how to create and deploy AI projects. The center is already working with companies like Ryan Air and Lonely Planet. 
• At Inspire, Microsoft said some AI features are headed to Azure, most notably Vector Search, which uses ML to understand the meaning and context of unstructured data.  
• AWS announced the General Availability of AppFabric, a no-code service that stitches together SaaS applications and security tools. Eventually, AppFabric will get AI capabilities powered by Amazon Bedrock, where The Flintstones live. 
• Microsoft thinks people are a bunch of AI dumb-dumbs and that we need to get smart on the technology, so to motivate our lazy asses the company is doling out grants, courses, and toolkits for teachers.  
• Laminar, which sounds like a cheap finishing that goes on my kitchen cabinets but is actually an agile data security platform, co-built a security solution with AWS. It automatically installs, configures, and integrates with native AWS Cloud Foundational Services across multiple domains. 

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

• It was not a great month for Microsoft security. Orca Security, forever the Microsoft tattletale, disclosed two vulnerabilities in Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry. 
• An Azure Portal outage affected 77% of users due to a DDoS attack led by the hacker Anonymous Sudan. But before you’re all like, stop being a jerk Sudan, it was actually Russia. ::Feigns shock:: 
• Then, a Chinese cyber-espionage group known as Storm-0558 breached the emails of 25 organizations, INCLUDING the US State and Commerce Department. And Microsoft still doesn’t know how they got a hold of the keys they used to access an inactive Microsoft account. 
• THEN, Microsoft admitted that a Russian cybercrime group called RomCom exploited a vulnerability that is YET TO BE PATCHED in a phishing attack against organizations attending the NATO Summit. The phishing attack “deployed payloads called RomCom Backdoor” which just…takes on a whole different vibe.  

Best Friends Forever 

• AWS  
  • Multimodal synthetic data generation platform Gretel is now on AWS Marketplace. Can you imagine how boring a marriage to someone would be who works at a multimodal synthetic data generation platform company? I would DREAD the obligatory “what happened at work today?” question. Ugh, prepare my gallows. 
  • Planetscale, a serverless database management company, has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate program. 
  • Digital product engineering company Simform has achieved SaaS competency status with AWS. 
  • Snowflake achieved the US Department of Defense Impact Level 4 Authorization on AWS GovCloud. Sounds scary! Do they get to see Area 51, or what? If not, then ignore this news because it doesn’t matter.  

• Microsoft 
  • Vector database company Pinecone is now available on Microsoft Azure.  
  • UK-based Sandbox provider NayaOne has arrived on Azure. It helps banks to accelerate solution discovery, prototyping, and scaling. 
  • Whatfix, a digital adoptions platform, is now listed on Azure Marketplace. 
  • Mobile app defense company Appdome has integrated its Cyber Defense Automation Platform with Microsoft Azure DevOps. 

Miscellany 

• TCS is training 25,000 of its engineers to certify them in Azure OpenAI.  

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS is bleeding dudes!!! The dude that oversees AWS data centers globally peaced out abruptly—with no public explanation—after 13 years at the company. This comes at the same time as Puneet Chandok’s resignation; he was the head of AWS in India and South Asia. No update as to where these dudes are going, if anywhere. 
• Investors expressed concern over Microsoft’s (and Apple’s) unprecedented influence over the S&P 500—ya see, the two added $1T to their market value this year. This comes just after Microsoft announced it didn’t have the budget to give raises in 2023. Microsoft is practically cutting bologna slices in half to survive over there, huh. 
• Microsoft is calling upon the government to establish a regulatory body for AI, including licensing requirements for operating the most powerful AI technology. I’m sorry, you want the GOVERNMENT to oversee AI? Is this the same government that asked Mark Zuckerberg questions like “When I use the Google, can Facebook hear my advertisements on Alexa?”  
• The company will watermark AI-generated images and videos, so we’re saved! (Check out our blog on 2A’s experience with AI-generated images.) 
• The FTC says Microsoft violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act when it collected personal information about children who signed up for its Xbox gaming system. The cloud giant will pay $20M to settle the claim. So, it looks like this Activision acquisition is off to a great start.  
• PSYCH no it’s not. The FTC requested a temporary block on the deal and a judge granted it. This is huge because if this deal does not go through by July 18, Microsoft would have to pay Activision $3B dollars. Do you know how many violations of the Children’s Protection Act that would be? 150 violations. 

World domination 

• Oh no, we lost the data center dude and the head of India dude, which is bad timing for the land purchase for this new AWS data center in India. Mumbai, look out, there’s nobody at this wheel!!! 
• AWS is Hungary for some European real estate and has opened an office in Budapest ::overly aggressive elbow nudge to make sure you acknowledge my word play:: 
• For its first-ever fintech accelerator based in Africa, AWS has selected 25 startups in pre-seed and seed stage. Fun fact: of the seven unicorn startups to emerge from Africa, six are fintechs. 
• Japan’s NEC Corporation has expanded its strategic collaboration with AWS to include solution development, AWS training for NEC employees, and usage of AWS Direct Connect for hybrid environments. 
• What do you get when you combine an espresso with a data center? Microsoft’s first cloud region in Italy! 
• Asia-Pacific BetterPlace is collaborating with Microsoft to “transform the employee experience” for frontline workers. It will use Microsoft’s enterprise Cloud and AI platform to assist with onboarding, compliance, payroll, and vendor management.  

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Cantaloupe, everyone’s least favorite in a fruit salad but also a publicly traded software company, has moved to AWS. “We’ve experienced nearly zero downtime since moving to AWS,” their spokesperson said, inviting hackers everywhere. 
• A few months ago, search and analytics engine company Elastic was all like “Get off my lawn!” when it won a heated legal dispute against AWS. But that’s in the past now. They did some Ayahuasca together and decided to strategically collaborate to advance customers’ cloud journeys and do GTM stuff. Elastic also achieved its AWS Security Competency. 
• Microsoft is bringing AI to federal agencies that are Azure Government cloud. 
• To accelerate healthcare IT, AWS is working with the Interoperability Institute to launch Interop.WORLD, a virtual innovation center, to “address the most pressing healthcare challenges of our time.” So…is this virtual innovation center going to rein in health insurance lobbying and big pharma, or pay nursing school tuition? No? Just information technology? Great. Can’t wait. 
• Legal, media, and accounting conglomerate Thomson Reuters is investing $100 million a year into AI, starting with integrating Microsoft 365, Copilot, and other AI tools into its legal products and productivity suite.   
• Multinational mining company BHP is improving “copper recovery” (do pickpockets “recover my wallet”?) in Chile using AI-based recommendations from the Azure platform.  

New stuff  

• While voicing that we need to stem the tide of AI-driven human destruction, Microsoft’s Build event was full of AI tools for developers to “accelerate AI breakthroughs.” A reporter covering Build says Microsoft is “sprinkling OpenAI everywhere” to keep software engineers engaged.   
• You may be familiar with the AWS Snowball device, but there’s a new member in the Snow family. (Not you, JOHN, who just WALKED AWAY FROM YOUR RIGHTFUL THRONE.) Only available to the US military, “Snowblade” is a dense device that has all the mega compute power and storage that AWS loves to brag about PLUS it can withstand extreme temperatures, vibrations, and shocks. 
• Microsoft has released Microsoft Fabric, “an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need.” 
• Another new product announced at Build is Microsoft Mesh, a mixed reality communication and collaboration platform. It’s in private preview. Is anybody actually asking for this stuff? Like, I don’t need to give status updates in a 3D environment. Enough already.   
• Amazon Security Lake, which helps customers centralize security data and simplify its management, is now available. Kyndryl and AWS have already collaborated on a threat intelligence platform that is powered by Amazon Security Lake. 
• Palantir, the lovechild of the CIA and some billionaires, has released its Foundry for Manufacturing on AWS. Panasonic is already using it.  

Best Friends Forever 

• No surprise here, but AWS is “very focused” on getting partners to do generative AI stuff so it doesn’t have to. The plan is to continue to release relevant offerings, such as Amazon Bedrock and EC Inf2 instances, to help partners build generative AI thingamabobs.  
• But not everyone is buying this strategy. And I’d love to tell you more, but I am too cheap to bypass this paywall.  
• But for every naysayer there seems to be three yea-sayers, starting with our friends at CrowdStrike and Automation Anywhere, which are all building generative AI solutions for cybersecurity and deployments, respectively. 
  Microsoft Partner news: 
• Fraud detection company BioCatch has made its biometric intelligence solutions available for Mcirosoft’s Cloud for Financial Services. 
• Options Technology, which provides cloud-enabled managed services, achieved a Microsoft Solutions Partner Security designation.  
• Tech company Lumen is preparing to launch its Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams Phone.   
  AWS Partner news:
• Coveo is now available in Canadian AWS Regions. 
• IT product distributor Ingram Micro is now an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner 
• New to AWS Marketplace: True Elements’ water intelligence software; Sonatype’s Application Security Platform; and Factorial AI, which helps HR departments. 
• Uptycs has achieved AWS Security Competency status as has Salt Security. 
• Newcomers to the AWS ISV program: SaaS security platform DoControl and composable commerce solution Kibo Commerce 
• anecdotes, a security compliance technology firm, has completed the AWS Foundational Technical Review for its Compliance OS. 

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

• Microsoft sounded the alarm that a Chinese hacking group has compromised critical US cyber infrastructure to gather intelligence. The group is named “Volt Tycoon”—cool name, NOT cool purpose. In response, China said, um, actually, YOU GUYS are the “champion of hacking”…and all of a sudden, this tension has turned into us throwing each other a bunch of compliments and kudos about how good we all are at being bad. I kinda like it. No, YOU have the most talented, strategic tech minds on Earth! NO, YOU DO! 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

World domination 

• AWS plans to invest nearly $13B in its presence in India, a key overseas market for the cloud provider, by 2030. It will create jobs in engineering, construction, and telecom.  
• Next door, Southeast Asia is seeing a surge in public cloud adoption. Get ready for those 1 a.m. meetings, Seattle. I’m gonna have to take my mouthguard out and everything.
• Latin America is also on the AWS radar. While Brazil is its biggest market, the company is driving digital transformation through channel partners in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. 
• Now let’s travel to the crumbling late-stage capitalist house of cards known as the United States. Originally, Oregon wanted to stick to its sustainable ways and was mulling whether or not to approve some more AWS carbon-spewing, energy-sucking data centers. Not only did Oregon approve five of them, but it also threw in $1B in tax breaks. ‘Cause it’s too late anyway, guys. It’s too late. 
• Microsoft has made concessions to appease EU regulators following complaints from Slack. The cloud giant will now charge different prices for Office with Teams and without Teams. 
• Good lord, the EU is on Microsoft like white on rice because all their competitors are tattling. Next target is Microsoft Azure, which has received a variety of complaints that include price gouging and restrictive licensing terms.  

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft announced that “due to tough economic conditions” (which somehow include surpassing analyst expectations on the most recent earnings??) there will be no raises this year. But there will be bonuses, stock awards, and promotions.  
• These tough economic conditions for Microsoft must also include the $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition, which was FINALLY approved. The green light came after Microsoft agreed to some notable concessions. 
• Google doesn’t want to feel left behind following Microsoft’s Chat GPT/Bing integration. After the little (and by little I mean outrageously expensive) snafu with its AI, Google is now rolling out its AI to its core search engine, making this writer wonder how much meth the Google chef is sprinkling on all that free food. It’s like Salt Bae, but with meth. 
• If Google won’t be responsible then Microsoft will, surely. After gutting what was essentially its responsible AI team, the company wants to…hire a responsible AI team? I’m serious.  

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Scepter—a self-proclaimed air monitoring entity—and ExxonMobil are working with AWS to develop a data analytics platform for measuring methane emissions in the United States. Since an oil company is involved, I feel completely confident that these measurements will be honest and exact. Because really, isn’t that what Exxon is known for? Honesty?  
• Enterprise cloud data management company Informatica is expanding its partnership with AWS to include GTM efforts, vertical solutions, and more integrations across data, analytics, and AI. 
• Microsoft is making like Amazon and doling out cloud credits to startups. “Pegasus” is an extension of Microsoft’s Startup Founders Hub and is a two-year program that goes beyond credits and into advice and stuff. Lots of advice. And sales help.  
• NVIDIA’s hardware has powered the rise of generative AI, including for Microsoft, but now the cloud giant is looking to get cozy with AMD to improve GPU capability. The details are scant but I SHALL keep an eye on this. 
• Time for a four-way starring Microsoft, Dell, VMware, and Red Hat. The foursome wants to help improve multi-cloud management and mobility of distributing apps and data via Dell’s Apex multi-cloud services portfolio. 

New stuff  

• AWS has improved the price performance of its Amazon Aurora relational database and increased cost predictability by optimizing its data input and output operations.  
• Private access to the AWS management console is now in general preview. It’s a security feature that lets users limit access to the console from their VPC. Basically, the bouncer won’t let you into the club without the right IP address.  
• Getting into da club takes me to: IDs may be headed for the circular file. Since we all want to live in Blade Runner 2049, Amazon is preparing to launch a touchless payment device that lets you scan your palm and sign over your soul and alter your DNA for a beer.  
• Small businesses can now use a payment app in Teams. Microsoft says it lets SMBs “collect payments from within Teams on your desktop or mobile device during a meeting.” Uh…what kind of meetings are these? Am I the only one that sees the possibilities or…? I mean…have we all known people who “run small businesses” where they “collect payment” during a “meeting”?  
• Also coming to a Microsoft Teams channel near you is Collaborative Stageview. You’ll be able to open app content in a new window that participants can engage with.  
• Azure Container Storage is now in public preview. Organizations can use this cloud-based service to create and manage block storage volumes for container applications and workloads (how was that not a thing already?). 

Miscellany 

• Antimetal, which is not an indie band but a startup, is going to reduce cloud wastefulness—starting with AWS users. Using a proprietary AI- and ML-based model, it’s promising customers they’ll save on their AWS bills by rooting out inefficiencies. Normally, companies sign yearslong contracts with AWS to bring cloud costs down…but now they won’t have to. In response, Jeff Bezos is currently charting a course to run over the founder of Antimetal with his yacht—the one parked inside the bigger yacht. If he used the bigger yacht, it would be too obvious. He has to use the smaller yacht. Which, again, is inside the bigger yacht. Little known fact: The smaller yacht is enjoyed by a miniature Jeff Bezos that lives inside the Jeff Bezos we all know and love. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Fintech and security were the big winners in this round’s AWS Partner activities: 
  • Global consulting firm Credera has achieved AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status. It can definitely cut the line at the hottest hand-scanning clubs. 
  • Swiss financial software provider Temenos has integrated its core banking solutions with AWS. 
  • FinTech company and SoFi subsidiary Galileo Technologies has added its solutions to the AWS Marketplace. And security and IT solutions provider Claro has put its Enterprise Cloud Connect solution on AWS Marketplace. 
  • New Relic has a new AWS integration that will let users automatically deploy its monitoring infrastructure agent through some AWS…stuff. Benefit: one-time setup with automatic instrumentation.  
  • “Cyber deception technology leader” Acalvio has successfully completed the AWS Foundational Technical Review and joined the AWS Partner Network, so it can unleash its deception in the cloud. 
  • SAP and Microsoft are taking the next step in their relationship to collaborate on generative AI. What that really means is that SAP is integrating its SuccessFactors solutions with Copilot in Viva Learning and Microsoft 365 Copilot. 
• It’s not Suntory time, it’s Microsoft Partners time: 
  • Enterprise AI SaaS company SymphonyAI has launched Sensa Copilot and integrated it with Azure Cognitive Search and Azure OpenAI services. The solution offers sophisticated AI assistance to financial crime investigators. Oof, better stay away from Congress amiright. 
  • Palo Alto Networks unveiled its Next Gen Firewall for Azure as a fully managed service. Only a measly year and three months after it did so for AWS.  
  • Orca Security is the inaugural cloud-native protection platform to be fully integrated with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Chat GPT-4.  
  • Break out the breakfast pastry, because Danish master data management solutions provider Stibo Systems has joined the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program as an ISV. 

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

• Microsoft wants you to know about some stuff TrendMicro found Iranian hackers doing but more importantly, THESE NAMES! Lace Tempest (ooooh!), Mango Sandstorm (ahhhh!), and Evil Corp—leave some cool hacking names for me and Forsyth already. Then there’s the Azure-targeting group, UNC3944, which just sounds like someone who had the last pick of whatever AOL screen names were left over in 1999. 

By Emily Zheng, Jane Dornemann

Image by Emily Zheng and DALL-E 2

When we shared what our writers learned from using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, our design team naturally decided to use generative AI to create the blog image. That led us down another rabbit hole around the pros and cons of integrating smart platforms into our design process—from choosing amongst the latest offerings, like Midjourney and DALL-E 2, to wrestling with the ethics of them.

As of now, here’s what we know about generative AI for image creation:

These things are freaking fast. When we say we’re wowed by the speed of generative AI, we don’t just mean it can whip up an image in mere seconds—we’re thinking about how quickly it gets our minds going. Working with technology companies means we need to generate images for a lot of abstract concepts versus physical items. How does one depict the Internet of Things (IoT) or access management?

Typically, if we’re really stuck, we might run a Google image search on these terms to get some inspiration. But now, we can just enter those terms into tools like DALL-E and it spits out visual representations. These get us thinking of more original design concepts in a fraction of the time—making it ideal for brainstorming sessions and mood board creation. Kind of like Google…but on steroids.

They ignore a crucial part of our process. One thing the 2A design team treasures and sees as essential to producing a stellar product that aligns with a client’s ask is the feedback loop. No first-crack design, whether human-created or AI-generated, is going to be the final product. Design is a process—and this is where generative AI is of no help.

You can ask the AI to change a shade of blue to be darker or lighter, but that leaves a lot of room for the AI—not you—to choose. Sometimes you ask it to change just a few pixels and it ends up changing other aspects of the design you didn’t want. To really address feedback with our signature eagle-eye attention to detail, we would’ve had to import and manually edit our AI-generated works in more traditional design software. Since DALL-E 2 only lets users download non-editable PNGs, it becomes challenging to think of effective ways to manipulate these flat images. Not only does this defeat the purpose of a fast and at-the-ready product that AI seems to promise, but it ultimately can take up more time. The limited 1:1 aspect ratio of DALL-E 2’s images also required us to continue our work in Outpainting, which extends the borders of artwork beyond its original frames. It also ate up all our credits.

We must find the words. Having design vocabulary and training is extremely helpful in crafting prompts, because how you word a request will entirely determine what you get in return. Not only will infusing design concepts in your prompt help you get something closer to what you want, but it will help to create a visual that is more distinct from what everyone else is getting.

For example, we found that Midjourney tends to generate images that have a similar underlying style. (To see for yourself, check out this Instagram account that generates AI images based solely on headlines from The New York Times.) The ones that felt unique included requests to take inspiration from particular artists or included design terminology. For our ChatGPT blog image, we asked DALL-E 2 to create an image of “women looking at computer” in Corporate Memphis style, but the results didn’t quite hit the mark. So we asked it to mimic the works of Magdalena Koźlicka, a Polish digital artist. While the result was neither Corporate Memphis nor that of our chosen artist, we like what it gave us. Getting to the final product took more than 30 iterations.

Here’s a peak at what we got throughout the process:

How we issue credit? After all is said and done, who deserves the credit? As creatives, we want to honor the rights that other artists have to their own creations. But generative AI has resulted in a grey area where images have more than one creator. For the blog visual we published, we decided to credit both our designer and DALL-E to show that our designer used AI in her creative process. While DALL-E did most of the work, the final product would not exist without the designer’s carefully crafted prompts, edits in Outpainting, and overall creative direction (and none of it can be copyrighted).

But with AI clearly pulling inspiration from existing art—and likely influenced by all the prompts that others submit—it’s clear this is an ethical question that doesn’t have an answer yet. And while this question may be new to AI-generated art, there are plenty of notable visual artists who conceive of a piece but don’t create it themselves, such as Sol Lewitt and Ai Weiwei, yet the credit is theirs alone. To sum it up, generative AI can speed up the creative process, but that involves an element of luck in how on-point its image generation is. And sometimes that saved time is spent editing files that are challenging to manipulate. We see generative AI in design today much like what the introduction of the calculator must have been like: did mathematicians feel like they were cheating? Was it still their work if they had assistance from a machine? It’s true that generative AI has helped us do our jobs—but is it doing our jobs? That’s one question we can answer—and the answer is no. For now, at least.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Wheelin’ and dealin’

• HSBC, the only ethical bank on the planet that has absolutely never moved nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels, is using machine learning powered by AWS for its new AI Global Tactical Index. “This means we can execute criminal acts and simply blame AI,” one exec said. “AWS is the best thing to happen to us since Pablo Escobar. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt.”
• Ball Aerospace is working with Microsoft and Loft Federal (Ann Taylor for public servants?) on a mission to carry 10 satellites with “experimental payloads” (drugs?) to space (aliens on drugs?). Microsoft is providing productivity solutions, as well as cloud and ground station infrastructure. Interesting that Loft Federal’s website looks like a middle schooler did the bare minimum for a computer class 101.
• Media giant Sinclair Broadcasting Group has announced its selection of AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Sinclair will use AWS to create more compelling local news (MY FAVORITE) and sports content. The company also said it would be using the new (take a big breath:) AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway.
• Looks like Microsoft has a fever and the only prescription is more…healthcare software. Microsoft and EPIC, a leading EHR platform, are going to develop and integrate generative AI solutions. Microsoft launched a similar collaboration with healthcare personalization engine CueZen.
• Fever is still high: “health enablement solutions” provider Lightbeam is adopting Azure SQL Database.
• Bloomberg announced that customers can access real-time trading and other high-performance data using a private connection in the Azure Virtual Network.
• Cognizant is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to build an integration roadmap between the two companies’ healthcare solutions. Cognizant will run its SaaS healthcare solutions on Azure and migrate clients there, too.

Gossip (for nerds)

• Amazon’s CEO warned shareholders that the short-term is going to be rough (read: falling profits and projection shortfalls) because companies are putting their wallets away. Or as the CEO puts it, they are “cost-optimizing” 🤮 But not to worry, he says, because the new customer pipeline is robust—90% of global IT spending is still on premises and yet to migrate to the cloud.
  • The good news is that the government is still spending all your tax money like there’s not a care in the world (except if you need it for healthcare or children or education). Public cloud spending is up 22% from last year, according to Gartner.
• Microsoft shares rose 9% after its third-quarter earnings call, surpassing expectations. Its foray into AI is the reason, analysts speculate.
  • Coincidentally, Microsoft is allegedly working on an AI chip, codenamed “Athena,” to support large language models.
  • Which is interesting considering the person who was responsible for that at Microsoft just left to go help Meta do its own AI chip thing.
• He’s like the Voldemort of tech so I won’t even say his name, but he wants to launch a rival to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT. Hopefully it won’t catch on fire and crash itself like his other products. Not sure why this headline says he is doing it quietly, this man has never done anything quietly since that would require self-control. Anyway, in line with being the prince of petty, he’s also thinking about suing Microsoft because it’s pulling data from Twitter to train its AI.
• Microsoft and Google have been the main cloud contributors to open-source projects, but AWS may be pivoting its strategy around customer obsession to include open-source efforts. Read the speculation here. Or read this one instead, which was written first. By a woman. And it’s better.
• Generative AI-ish company SambaNova Systems has hired an ex-AWS managing director and an ex-VP of Google Cloud. I hope you’re sitting down for this shocking news, but they are both white dudes.

World domination

• Oil-rich Bahrain made a slick move by transferring 85% of its government data to AWS. If gas prices go up maybe there can be a lil’ outage or somethin’, I dunno…just spit-balling scenarios and whatnot.
• Who knew there was a UK wing of an Italian defense company? Leonardo will be the first major defense company in the UK to move to Azure. It will take longer than normal once you factor in two-hour lunch breaks/siesta hybrids, and then a three-month vacation.
• AWS put its kilt on to sign a memorandum of understanding with The National Quantum Computing Centre in Edinburgh and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. AWS will provide hardware to help establish a proof of concept that we can, in fact, bring Sean Connery forward through time.
• Microsoft is going to stop bundling Teams with Office to appease EU regulators.
• Brazilian telecom group Vivo is working with Microsoft Azure OpenAI service to develop solutions in a lab of sorts that could apply to different use cases, such as helping agents understand customer queries faster.

New stuff

• Big news for the AWS Well-Architected Framework!!! (Just as I wrote that I realized that this isn’t how I imagined my life, but I like it OK). A new version is out, and the same PR person who said budget cutting was “cost optimization” also came out with the term “enhanced prescriptive guidance” which makes it sound like the Well-Architected Framework is seeing a therapist. But no—it has just folded in some of the newer AWS services with 127 new or updated best practices, including implementation steps.
• Amazon GuardDuty, the favorite child of AWS security offerings, has three new capabilities. After crawling through the vast desert of despair that was this press release, I got to the updates: new container runtime protection for Amazon EKS, extended coverage for data stored in Amazon Aurora, and support for serverless applications in AWS Lambda.
• AWS announced the startups in its third cohort of its Space Accelerator program, and there’s a Seattle-based company in there. You can see the list here.

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

• Phishing is so yesterday. It’s smishing now. Smishing steals the credentials of administrators using mobile devices to remotely log into accounts.
• Microsoft is offering millions to any tech nerd who can find bugs in the new Bing chat. “Go get an English degree,” they said. “It’ll be great,” they said.
• To address security concerns first discovered by Orca Security, Microsoft will tighten how Azure Functions works with Azure Storage.

Best Friends Forever

• InfoSys is now a launch partner for AWS Cloud Operations Specialization.
• Torch.AI, which provides data infrastructure for AI, is now an Advanced Tier Partner and AWS Public Sector partner.
• Trend Micro achieved AWS Level 1 Managed Security Service Provider Competency.
• Seeq, which offers IoT analytics software, has earned its AWS Manufacturing and Industrial Competency.
• New to Azure Marketplace: Information risk management company HITRUST’s MyCSF subscriptions and connected healthcare cybersecurity platform, Cynerio.
• Federal tech consulting firm Acuity has acquired its Microsoft Solutions Partner status in Digital & App Innovation. And Xoriant earned a designation as a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security.
• Elevate Security is co-selling with Microsoft.
• Semiconductor company AMD joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program to co-sell integrated solutions.
• Merkle, the customer experience company and not the much-missed German PM, achieved AWS Digital Customer Experience and Data and Analytics Competency statuses. Caylent also achieved a D&A Competency.
• Arc XP, a digital experience platform, has earned its AWS Media & Entertainment Competency.
• New on AWS Marketplace: Conversational AI and automation provider Uniphore; SAS’ Customer Intelligence 360; monitoring and observability stack Grafana Labs; physician consultation service Atropos Health; and SecureFrame’s security and compliance automation platform.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Wheelin’ and dealin’

• Is AWS a cloud company or a VC firm? Instead of building its own generative AI, Amazon launched an accelerator for startups that will do it on AWS. In the same week, the cloud company announced that it has selected a new cohort of startups for its healthcare workforce accelerator and opened applications for fintechs in Africa.
• Even soap has moved to the cloud. Now you can experience digital transformation in the shower with Unilever’s shmancy new cloud-only infrastructure, of which Azure is the primary provider. Accenture helped the company make the move in exchange for a lifetime of lavender-scented bodywash.
• NVIDIA and Microsoft are up to more partner-y stuff again, this time it’s to host the “industrial metaverse” which just makes me think of a Mad Max world where people f*ck each other up with excavators and metal pipes. But really Microsoft is just gonna host NVIDIA’s Ominiverse, where industrial companies can develop applications. That sounds so painfully boring it’s almost more punishing than excavator fight-to-the-death battles.
• Experian has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider as part of its multi-year digital transformation initiative.
• Enterprise IT solution provider Denali Advanced Integration has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to deliver end-to-end automation capabilities. Specifically, the company will implement Computer Vision using AWS services that can be deployed on premises.
• Electronic corporate bond trading platform LTX (which makes me think of a stuffy old banker absolutely shredding a light-up Casio) has migrated its platform to AWS. The primary goal is to “optimize its data science processes” so it can analyze information faster for its AI-driven e-trading.

World domination

• Just when you thought a queer pirate comedy was the best thing to come out of New Zealand (wake me up when Season 2 releases), you can think again! Amazon is going to buy half the output of the country’s Turitea South wind farm to power its regional data centers next year. I hope their set up is… a breeze.
• Paradise Mobile will bring 5G to Bermuda on the AWS Cloud. In this report, Paradise isn’t trying to win market share for the 20-square-mile island, it just wants to test 5G on rich people (seriously, that’s what the article says).
• Palantir, which is home to the baby-eating illuminati OR a technology company run by Peter Thiel that was neck-deep in the Cambridge Analytica scandal—either one, really—is going to support the DoD’s contract with Azure.
• Microsoft finally learned what it’s like to realize you don’t have enough for all the groceries that were just rung up and now you have to put the bananas back. And the peanut butter. But not the soda, because you’re a growing boy. It’s pulling out of its new London office plans.
  • But it’s still pursuing plans for a new data center in Wisconsin.

Gossip (for nerds)

• To cut cloud costs, startups are renegotiating with service providers. “Pretty please?” they say. “We’ll think about,” the cloud providers say, then they cover the phone receiver and snicker because they know they won’t. But actually, shit is getting real down in cloud town. AWS is approaching startups offering lower prices if they switch from Google or Azure. Startups that are already on AWS are getting lower quotes from Microsoft and then coming back to AWS asking the company to match. I like to call this “when capitalism come backs to haunt you.”
• Amazon’s slower entry into AI may be its competitive advantage, after all. Echoing journalists with less exposure who have already said this, The NY Times reports that Microsoft and Google are each rushing to be the AI company, regardless of whether AI is ready for prime time or not (spoiler: it’s not). The two are “taking greater risks with their ethical guidelines,” as shown, for example, in a leaked internal email from Microsoft where an exec is basically like “We can fix it later.” EXCEPT YOU CAN’T, SAM.
• AWS just lost its UK and Ireland lead to Microsoft; the exec is now an EMEA president. But he won’t be able to escape Bri’ish problems, since a UK regulator is saying that AWS and Microsoft won’t make room for competition.
• Microsoft employees aren’t the only ones rationing access to server power. AI developers at AWS and Google can’t find enough specialized computers to make their software, thanks to a shortage of server chips. This is also limiting customer access to AI software.

New stuff

• AWS updated its Amazon Chime SDK with ML-powered voice analytics capabilities. With voice tone analysis, developers will now have a better sense of sentiment. For example, when I get on a Chime call and say, “How is this platform still so awful, I’m signed into this call three times somehow,” developers will now realize I am not being sarcastic.
• The free version of Teams got some new features that are nowhere near as fun as the ones they’ve rolled out recently. Now you can invite people to meetings via SMS. NEXT.
• It’s preview madness! Microsoft announced the public preview of a new Azure Active Directory feature, something about APIs and tokens. Microsoft is previewing Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore, which lets devs run their data workloads between two architectures. The thrills never end. And, Azure API Management for Workspaces is in preview. It allows devs to manage multiple API services from a single location, rather than jump from coffee shop to coffee shop for each API. Finally, after laying off security and identity staff at Azure, Microsoft released Security Copilot, powered by none other than ChatGPT-4, in private preview. It accelerates incident investigation and response.
• Do you like to learn? Are you a needer of knowledge, a freak for facts? Well congratulations because you’ll love the new Microsoft Learning Rooms, a free online space that connects technical experts with students preparing for the Microsoft Certification Exams.
• Amazon VPC Lattice is now generally available. Companies can use it to manage network traffic in their cloud environments.

Best Friends Forever

• AWS named its top partner projects at the Cloud Innovation Awards, which included VoiceFoundry, Cognizant, and Zscaler, among others.
• AttackIQ, which sells breach and attack simulation solutions, has made its Security Optimization Platform available on Azure Marketplace.
• Red Hat’s OpenShift service is now on AWS. It lets customers build and manage containerized apps through the AWS Console.
• Snorkel AI has integrated with Azure to help mutual customers speed AI development. It also joined the Microsoft for Startups program.
• Moneyhub’s Open Banking APIs (and other services) are now available on AWS Marketplace.
• A cloud platform for frontend developers, Vercel, has joined the AWS ISV Program and made its offerings available on AWS Marketplace.
• Digital product engineering firm Xoriant has made its X-CELERATE Insights (you don’t have to yell!), which is built on Azure, available on Marketplace. It helps contextualize organizational data.
• KloudGin, which provides AI-powered field service management solutions, has earned its AWS Energy Competency status. And digital strategy and IT solutions provider Virtusa, which sounds like a Disney villain, achieved its AWS Managed Service Provider designation.
• ESW has made its e-retail solutions available on Azure Marketplace to help sellers expand their global presence while remaining compliant. More e-retail: you can get Cybertech’s point-of-sale billing software on Azure Marketplace.
• Cloud and cybersecurity professional services firm Aquia has joined the AWS Partner Network and the AWS Public Sector Partner Program.

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

• Say BingBang bug five times fast. Good. Anyway, that’s the name of the vulnerability on Azure that allowed hackers to search, steal, and leak private data from Outlook, Office 365, and Teams. It’s fixed now.

By Jane Dornemann

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Now boarding Premium Ultra Sky Club Plus members, followed by Premiere Diamond Blue Rewards travelers! Then veterans and then babies, then trash—I mean group 20. Southwest Airlines, which has been plagued with serious issues they’ve blamed on legacy systems, is now boarding AWS as its cloud provider. But will it stop the Sky Karens? Likely not. 
• “You shouldn’t let Microsoft tell you what to do!” said Sony, as it told the UK government what to do. Sony wants Microsoft to sell Call of Duty or else be forced to cancel its Activision deal.
  • Microsoft couldn’t hear Sony’s whining over its dealmaking with Boosteroid, a cloud gaming provider.  
  • Microsoft is also preparing to launch its new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones next year, which will come with a free box of tissues that hyper-absorb Sony tears. 
  • Sony is gonna need those—in yet another deal with NVIDIA, Microsoft is bringing its Xbox games to NVIDIA’s cloud gaming service, GeForce NOW. 
• UK broadcaster ITN is moving to AWS, so now it can air all its AMAZING content more reliably—cliffhangers like Sainsbury’s Christmas Food Secrets and Castle Howard: Through the Seasons are not to be missed, I’m sure. 

New stuff  

• Hold the telephone, it’s all about telcos this month! AWS made it easier for network operators to move everything to the cloud and get 5G support with its AWS Telco Network Builder. The angle is cost effectiveness and easy integration with AWS services for faster launches.  
• Last month, Microsoft announced its own set of services geared at telcos, making the mad grab for mobile between Azure and AWS super spicy. (Not like a pretend-I-can-handle-spice spicy, but a I-want-to-bleed-from-my-eyes spicy.) 
• This comes just as 21 telco carriers announced Open Gateway, a framework for universal, open source APIs that network developers can use to build…whatever telecoms build. AT&T is involved so maybe that can build internet that doesn’t fail at least twice a week.  
• Microsoft has announced Copilot for Microsoft 365. Powered by ChatGPT-4 it will “work alongside you” which really means “work for you”—writing emails, creating PowerPoints, summarizing and analyzing documents, buying your kid’s birthday present, etc. etc. Why even be alive anymore, really? Let’s just sit here until our brains atrophy into oblivion and rats start gnawing at us and we don’t even feel it. ChatGPT-4 has us covered. Here’s the demo video if you feel like shitting your pants. 
• Developers and artists will not be left out. Devs can now integrate ChatGPT into applications they design for Azure, and the three users who chat with Bing are now able to generate images using DALL-E. 
• But hold up—if you actually work for Microsoft you might have to wait in line for all this. A server hardware shortage is forcing the company to ration access amongst internal teams. 
• In a pretty rad flex, AWS has integrated AWS Chatbot into Microsoft Teams. The integration lets AWS users interact with their AWS stuff…IN TEAMS. 
• Now that ChatGPT is living life for us, we have more time to mess around with our Teams backgrounds—soon you’ll be able to add animation to your screen, change hues, and have an avatar. The Teams product marketing manager had the GALL to say that this can “remove unwanted distraction” and is a way for employees to express their personalities. I can’t tell you how many things I have planned in my head already. What? I’m CONCENTRATING and I need to express my personality by having an elephant trunk for a nose and an animated mariachi band behind me. Don’t be a Judgy McJudgerton. 
• Also, Teams 2.0 is in the works and it will be faster. 
• When they’re not growing an excessive amount of corn crops that they’ll be paid to burn, farmers can turn to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture for precision farming. Integrating data around things like weather and ground sensors will help them predict what to do next. I would love to write a case study on this just because I want to video chat with a farmer. But a nice one with a straw hat and overalls, not one of those rough and tumble ones that chews tobacco in church. 
• Other new stuff from Microsoft: Azure confidential containers are open for public preview; new virtual machines for Azure will help devs build generative AI apps; Azure Firewall Basic has been commercially released; Azure Kubernetes can now run multi-tenant workloads more securely; serverless for Hyperscale in the Azure SQL Database is in preview; Microsoft launched Cognitive Speech Services for translation, text to speech, speech to text, and other things I can see my teenage self using for the sole purpose of harassing my father. 
• Looks like AWS wasn’t fudging the price/performance advantage on the Graviton3, which is seeing 25% better performance than previous generations. Move faster for less money? Wait—is this a processor or an Amazon warehouse? 
• AWS has opened an accelerator for B2B SaaS startups in the UK and Ireland. It comes with free shepherd’s pie and sad stories. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Twitter owes AWS $70M because Elon Musk.  
• But AWS won’t even notice, what with Snowflake’s commitment to spend $2.5B with AWS in the next five years, which includes joint GTM efforts.  
• And AWS client Goldman Sachs is joining the party! GS is signing on with Snowflake so it can share data with its clients, though how they will monetize the data is “unclear.” I’m sure, whatever it is they’re cooking up, it’s a HIGHLY ETHICAL, RISK-FREE PLAN that prioritizes the greater good. 
• Fivetran has extended its data integration platform to AWS GovCloud and other private clouds.  
• RingCentral is collaborating with AWS to help customers advance their migrations to the cloud.  
• New to the AWS marketplace: relational database provider Fauna, and secure enterprise browser hawker Talon Cyber Security (which also joined the Azure Marketplace). Health data services company Smile Digital Health has hit the AWS GovCloud.  
• Limeade integrates with Microsoft Teams. But TBH, nothing is gonna make me feel well like a mariachi band playing in my Teams background. 
• In AWS Partner news: DeepBrainAI has completed its Foundational Technical Review with AWS; software and services company Clovertex is now an AWS Advanced Tier Partner (do they board first?)—as is Tech Data and Intetics; bespoke solution provider SourceFuse has earned AWS Migration Competency Partner status; and conversational AI company Cognigy has entered the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.  
• In Microsoft Partner news, operational data science company Striveworks developed Chariot on Azure, an MLOps  platform. And communications technology companies Comviva, Amdocs, and Inventec have developed solutions for Azure customers, supporting Microsoft’s push to dominate the telco market. 

World domination 

• Malaysia gave us Michelle Yeoh so we’re gonna give Malaysia…reduced latency, thanks to a new AWS Region.  
• Not long after AWS told the world that ChatGPT is full of crap, the cloud provider extended its partnership with French company Hugging Face to make it easier for developers to build generative AI applications on AWS.  
• Australian bank Westpac has signed a five-year deal with AWS to use the cloud provider’s ML, compute, and data analytics capabilities. Interestingly, the bank isn’t jumping into conversational AI just yet, as the CTO says there’s no way in hell he trusts generative AI convo bots with customers because AI “has the potential to hallucinate.” I, for one, would love to have a conversation with a hallucinating AI. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS is having a hard time sustaining its sustainability team. Several senior team members have departed, and a hiring freeze has prevented their replacement—slowing the company’s movement toward its emissions goals. Without leadership, that team must be coooooasting, I’m talking 11 a.m. dry martinis AT the desk, not even at a bar, and inter-cubicle napping. But you know what they’re not doing while they are doing those things? Driving gas cars. So, there you go. 
• Microsoft allegedly illegally fired construction workers for protesting wage theft. The union is called The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and I just want to turn that into a musical. Curtain rises, people are sawing away at some boards, cue music, and carpenters are just skipping around the stage singing about nails and wood and life and whatnot. Then Bill Gates walks in and he holds out their paychecks but then SNAPS THEM BACK before they can get them, and says YOU’RE FIRED. Scary music as curtain closes.  
• In updates to its Solution Partners program, Microsoft has made it harder to join their club. One company said there was “concern in the industry that changes to the Microsoft criteria may make the accreditation unachievable for some firms.” I never would have guessed that from a program where the “qualifications” paragraph has an asterisk that leads to ten pages of must-haves. 
• The CEO of Tackle.io, who looks like he just had a refreshing shower and took this interview barefoot in his backyard (I’m just a regular guy like you!!!!), said that if he “puts his ISV hat on” (AWWW, that’s cute, I like him now!!), it’s clear that cloud marketplaces will be the default driver for ISV revenue over the next five years.  
• Microsoft took a direct shot at AWS (respect) with its claim that the company’s SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is up to 57% faster than EC2 and 54% cheaper.   

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

• A military email server—and its terabyte of emails—was exposed to the internet. The emails included conversations among officials, and if I had to guess, the prevailing topic was something like “these army goggles suck, wtf dudes.”  
• Even though the government can’t keep its info safe, it feels that Twitter and Microsoft need to do a better job with cybersecurity—and suggested Apple as a role model. 

Miscellany 

• Amazon will lay off more than 9,000 employees in the coming weeks. Hardest hit will be AWS, advertising, HR, and Twitch livestreaming teams. 
• In a hold- my- beer moment, Microsoft laid off its entire AI ethics and society team—specifically, the team that taught employees how to use AI responsibly.  
• Former AWS VP Dave McCann joined Cloudsoft’s board of directors. He’s Scottish and so is Cloudsoft, which means they don’t have to worry about competitors eavesdropping on meetings because nobody will understand them. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Emily Zheng and DALL-E 2

As an agency that works with companies at the forefront of technology, we endeavor to do the same. When generative AI gained more steam (and headlines) in the last couple of months, we didn’t shy away from it. Instead, we invited ChatGPT to play—and learned some pretty surprising things.

1. It can deny your request! (And we got scolded, too) 

When my sister, an academic, joined me in working from home one day, we jokingly asked ChatGPT to write a sarcastic thank you note for receipt of a (very small) grant. ChatGPT was not pleased—not only did it deny our request due to its inappropriate nature, but we got a mini lecture about how we should be grateful for funding. Lesson learned: aspiring comics can forget AI. Turns out we aren’t alone in our experience—there are several Reddit threads (like this one and this one) that recount ChatGPT’s dismissal of ridiculous but largely harmless queries, followed by a brief morality lesson. 

Additional bummer: even if ChatGPT is cool with your query, you can’t rely on its availability. The free version is increasingly unavailable due to high demand, so we suggest saving your burning questions for a Saturday night.  

2. It can’t create a poem that doesn’t rhyme—even when you specify that 

We tried so many times, but alas, ChatGPT simply can’t conceive of a poem without rhymes (hey, that rhymed)—even when explicitly asked. This was perhaps the biggest sign that generative AI still has a way to go in bending to our wills.

3. It can offer a quick explanation, but you still need to do some work 

We love ChatGPT for its quick overviews and definitions. Instead of spending 20 minutes sifting through Google search results to learn what referential integrity means in the database world, ChatGPT breaks it down in an understandable way—in less than a minute. However, the AI can’t discern between a reliable and an unreliable source and can supply incorrect or inaccurate information. A great example is when ChatGPT was asked to review Conan O’Brien’s podcast; the AI reviewed it as a memoir and said it included topics such as O’Brien’s divorce (he has never been divorced). Not catching these things can be a huge risk for brands, and in the case of Google, it was a $100B risk. 

4. Input and output are limited 

What you give will determine what you get, so practice strategically worded queries. Because we can’t feed ChatGPT all the sources we’d use to inform new content, we end up getting only a few paragraphs that sound good when you read them, but ultimately, say nothing of consequence. This input limitation often results in copy that omits the “but how/but why” aspect, which is crucial for effective marketing content.

At 2A, we comb through a wealth of materials—such as research reports, press releases, blogs, and interviews—to build out content. We absorb them like pieces of a puzzle and put them together as a strong piece of content that helps our clients meet a specific goal. An additional input limitation is that the platform can only draw information from 2021 and earlier, so it knows nothing of what’s happened since 2022.

5. It’s a great starting point, but won’t get you to the finish line  

ChatGPT is valuable for high-level brainstorms, general outlines, and inspiration for social media copy. But to create a stellar product, it’s best to limit ChatGPT to the role of springboard and then dive in with human talent and experience. This is especially true for marketing assets such as case studies, which are about highly unique experiences that integrate effective ingredients like real-life quotes.

Want to pen a personal essay, reflective blog post, or investigative report? ChatGPT can’t help you there. Everything we asked ChatGPT to produce required a fair amount of tweaking and additions, so use it for its bits and pieces but not as something that will give you a final product. Keep an eye out for embedded bias and other gaffs that could ruin your reputation—something this creator experienced at the height of popularity. In short, think of generative AI like a 5-year-old: it can say insightful things, but don’t leave it home alone. 

TL;DR

We are embracing ChatGPT for what it is currently good at, which is its ability to assist and accelerate our own creative process. As content creators, we were admittedly not crazy about the idea at the start—but we know things change and we plan to be along for the ride.