Author: Charlotte Dunlap

Charlotte is a Senior Analyst for Application Platforms at Current Analysis. She covers the technologies that provide the infrastructure necessary to build and run enterprise applications and services. She analyzes the software, services and professional services necessary to integrate disparate systems, create cross-business and cross-technology communications, deliver rich, collaborative applications, and build software that is transparent, optimized and reusable.

FinOps Takes on the AI Explosion, Including Token Management

May 29, 2026May 29, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

A smiling woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a white blouse, against a softly blurred background. — C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

FinOps X conference takes place in San Diego, California (US) June 9-11, 2026.
Key themes will include how enterprises will operationalize AI-driven FinOps across platform engineering.

FinOps X conference in San Diego will take place in one week, and not surprisingly AI will dominate keynotes and discussions among FinOps practitioners. These experts will share insights into best practices for operationalizing AI-driven FinOps across platform engineering, including CICD, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native architectures.

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April Showers Heartache on Developers Using Popular Coding Tools

April 30, 2026May 20, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data

Close-up portrait of a woman with blonde hair and a warm smile. — C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Anthropic backpedals price hikes following outcry

• GitHub makes controversial move from flat-rate to usage-based billing models

April has a been a controversial and even catastrophic month for developers of popular copilots and agents.

Some enterprise and independent developers felt gut-punched following unorthodox activities including significant price increases and major subscription restructuring. Anthropic removed Claude Code from its standard Pro Plan priced at $20, offering it instead as part of its Max plan for $100 per month. Confronted with serious backlash, it was forced to reverse its decision.

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MWC26: Telcos Vie for Limelight in Digitization Space

March 3, 2026March 17, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data

Close-up portrait of a smiling woman with blonde hair and earrings, set against a blurred background. — C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Telcos are increasingly repositioning themselves as cloud and AI providers, targeting the digital transformation opportunity from an infrastructure-led perspective.

• Strategic partnerships between telcos and hyperscalers are likely to drive the most successful business transformations.

Telcos have an important agenda during this week’s high-profile technology conference, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They are going after the digital transformation space from an infrastructure perspective, addressing enterprises’ desperate need for improved operational provisioning, an issue largely ignored by cloud platform providers.

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Cloud Wars Shift to AI Wars: Archaic Code is a New Target of Opportunity

March 2, 2026March 17, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data

Summary Bullets:

• Google will release a broadly backed commerce protocol this quarter that threatens Amazon’s behemoth e-commerce marketplace

• Anthropic Claude Code includes new features that help developers bypass the complexities of COBOL, threatening IBM’s massive mainframe business.

The cloud wars have quickly morphed into the AI wars among leading platform services rivals, which have invested heavily in LLMs in recent years. By leveraging agentic AI, platform services providers are elevating their competitive threat in their quest for dominance in both e-commerce markets and among enterprise developer communities.

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Observability Predictions 2026: Makers of Dev Tools to Disrupt Space

January 29, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

• Innovative dev tools extend capabilities to include observability.

• Operations teams will see a boost in GenAI-injected operational workflows.

According to GlobalData’s latest report on 2026 predictions, observability providers will make a big push into DevOps. The industry’s platform providers will focus greater investment in the coming year in providing operations teams with AI-generated capabilities that streamline the critical application deployment portion of the application lifecycle, known for being the most complex piece of app modernization.

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2026 Enterprise Predictions: Expect New Heights for Vibe Coding and Retaining Tribal Knowledge

January 13, 2026January 14, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Agentic AI will help document dwindling tribal knowledge

• Vibe coding will become mainstream

The industry should expect a lot more formalization of vibe coding capabilities leading to greater opportunities among non-coders across enterprise business units. Interesting applications resulting from agentic AI will help enterprises solve age-old problems such as the loss of institutional knowledge among an aging workforce. Plus, traditional automation platforms will get a major boost from agentic AI advancements. These are among just some of the 2026 GlobalData Predictions within the category of agile automation.

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Fall Conferences Reveal Critical Agentic AI OSS Innovations

December 12, 2025 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

• Cisco AGNTCY will be key for infrastructure multi-agentic AI frameworks leveraging security, identity, and interoperability.

• Solo.io highlighted progress in three high-profile agentic AI projects: Kagent, Agent Gateway, and Agent Registry.

The industry’s fall technology conferences have drawn to a close. Dominant themes included agentic AI integration, ecosystem partnerships to fill AI gaps, observability consolidations, and emerging open-source software (OSS) alternatives for enterprise developers.

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Oracle AI World 2025: Oracle Shifts Thinking from Technology to Outcomes; Plans Updated APEX Low-Code

October 21, 2025October 21, 2025 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

• Oracle shifts pitch from technology to outcomes, driven by AI-injected tools.

• Oracle APEXLang, slated for 2026, to modernize Oracle’s development practices.

Last week’s Oracle AI World couldn’t have been timelier, attended by customers and partners still buzzing from a corporate earnings report, which triggered the tech giant’s stock to soar based on its mounting investments in AI and cloud infrastructure.

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Next-Gen Automation Built on Agentic AI

October 7, 2025 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

Agentic AI streamlines workflow automation and transformations.
Application and automation platforms to integrate agentic AI capabilities in next 12 months.

Digital transformations will receive a major boost over the next 12 months following new platform integrations with agentic AI. The AI-injected solutions will significantly streamline the creation of workflow automation, which are critical to organizations moving to migrate legacy apps to cloud environments in order to realize CICD and improved application lifecycle efficiencies.

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