Category: IT Leader

IT Leader provides insight and guidance on issues impacting information technology and telecommunications professionals, focusing on overall market trends, strategic issues, and advice on supplier activities.

I’ve Got a Lot of Problems With You People

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

  • The technology industry can do better.
  • Let’s just hope that the uneasy feeling about the AI bubble everyone is experiencing is just a bit of leftover holiday undigested beef, blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato (with apologies to Dickens).

Festivus took place on December 23, 2025, but despite being late, there are grievances to air in regard to the technology industry as it relates to enterprises in 2025. So, let’s start. “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!”

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Slow Your Roll on AI

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
S. Schuchart

AI has been the rage for at least three years now, first just generative AI (GenAI), and now agentic AI. AI can be pretty useful, at GlobalData we’ve done some very cool things with AI on our site. Strategic things, that serve a defined purpose and add value. The use of AI at GlobalData hasn’t been indiscriminate – it has been thought through with how it could help our customers and ourselves. Even this skeptical author can appreciate what’s been done.

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Is Liquid Cooling the Key Now that AI Pervades Everything?

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• Data center cooling has become an increasingly insurmountable challenge because AI accelerators consume massive amounts of power.

• Liquid cooling adoption is progressively evolving from experimental to mainstream starting with AI labs and hyperscalers, then moving into the colocation space and later enterprises.

As Generative AI (GenAI) takes an ever-stronger hold in our lives, the demands on data centers continue to grow. The heat generated by the high-density computing required to run AI applications that are more resource-intensive than ever is pushing companies to adopt ever more innovative cooling techniques. As a result, liquid cooling, which used to be a fairly experimental technique, is becoming more mainstream.

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Technology Leaders Can Leverage TBM to Play a More Strategic Role in Aligning Tech Spend with Business Values

by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • Organizations are spending more on technology across business functions, and it is imperative for them to understand and optimize their tech spending through technology business management (TBM).
  • IBM is a key TBM vendor helping organizations to drive their IT strategy more effectively; it is making moves to extend the solution to more customers and partners.

Every company is a tech company. While this is a cliché, especially in the tech industry, it is becoming real in the era of data and AI. For some time, businesses have been gathering data and analyzing them for insights to improve processes and develop new business models. By feeding data into AI engines, enterprises accelerate transformation by automating processes and reducing human intervention. The result is less friction in customer engagement, more agile operations, smarter decision-making, and faster time to market. This is, at least on paper, the promises of AI.

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IBM Think on Tour Singapore 2025: An Agentic Enterprise Comes Down to Tech, Infrastructure, Orchestration, and Optionality

by Dustin Kehoe, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
D. Kehoe

Summary Bullets:

• Cloud will have a role in the AI journey, bit no longer the destination. The world will be hybrid, and multi-vendor.

• Agentic AI manifests from this new platform but will be double-edged sword. Autonomy is proportionate to risk. Any solution that goes to production needs governance.

The AI triathlon is underway. A year ago the race was about the size of the GenAI large language model (LLM). Today, it is the number AI agents connecting to internal systems to automate workflows, moving to the overall level of preparedness for the agentic enterprise. The latter seems about giving much higher levels of autonomy to AI agents to set own goals, self-learn and make decisions, possibly manage other agents from other vendors, that impact customers (e.g., approving home loans, dispute resolution, etc.). This, in turn, influences NPS, C-SAT, customer advocacy, compliance, and countless other metrics. It also raises many other legitimate legal, ethical, and regulatory concerns.

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GPT-5 Has Had a Rocky Start but Remains an Extraordinary Achievement

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

  • OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, a multimodal large language model (LLM) with agentic capabilities.
  • This is the latest iteration of the famous chatbot, and the most important upgrade since the release of the previous generation, GPT-4, in 2023.

As it happens sometimes when a product is thrust with such force into the realm of popular culture, the release of GPT-5 sparked a veritable PR crisis, leading CEO Sam Altman to make a public apology and backtrack on the decision to remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT. Unlike enterprise customers, which received advanced warnings of such movements, consumer ChatGPT users did not know their preferred models would disappear so suddenly. The ensuing kerfuffle highlighted the strange co-dependency relationship that some people have developed with the technology, creating no end of background noise surrounding this momentous release.

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The Season of Agentic AI Brings Bold Promises

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
C. Dunlap Research Director

Summary Bullets:

  • Spring/summer platform conferences led with AI agent news and strategies
  • AI agents represent the leading innovation of app modernization, but DevOps should be wary of over-promising

During this season of cloud platform conferences, rivals are vying to own the headlines and do battle in the cloud wars through their latest campaigns and strategies involving AI agents.

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Carriers Grow Traffic Significantly While Also Delivering Energy Efficiency

by Rob Pritchard, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, IT Leader, Mobilize, Network
R. Pritchard

Summary Bullets:

  • Comcast has nearly doubled the energy efficiency of its network ahead of its 2030 target while also carrying 76% more data.
  • Other examples of greater energy efficiency through new technology include BT Global Fabric, where the replacement of legacy platforms will see a 79% energy consumption reduction.

Comcast announced that it is near to reaching its goal of doubling its network energy efficiency ahead of its 2030 target, stating that it is “delivering dramatically more data at faster speeds and greater reliability at the highest quality for our customers, all while conserving the amount of energy needed to power our network.”

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Advancing AI 2025 Event: AMD Heeds the AI Opportunity

by Beatriz Valle, posted in IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• AMD’s “Advancing AI 2025” event, held in San Jose, California (US) in June 2025 helped analysts delve deeper into the company’s strategy for the next few years.

• The chip designer aims to build a fully open ecosystem and stack, supported by a string of acquisitions, including Silo AI and Brium.

AMD continues executing upon its annual roadmap cadence since it launched the AMD Instinct MI300 GPUs in late-2023. The launch of the AMD Instinct MI350 series, with a quadruple jump in performance compared with the previous generation, was a highlight of the conference. As AI agents become conspicuous, compute requirements will grow, driving an exponential demand for infrastructure. AMD also focused on its software roadmap and highlighted the importance of an open ecosystem, something the company has invested in through acquisitions.

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Verizon: Do or DEI Another Day, The Sequel

by Guest Author, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, IT Leader, Mobilize
R. Pritchard

Summary Bullets:

• Any telco in the US making deals must be cognizant of the current administration’s efforts to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments.

• Service providers have traditionally understood benefits of progressive DEI but now need to conceal efforts from a dogmatic set of regulators for long-term strategic benefit.

Verizon has become the latest telecoms service provider to abandon its DEI programs under pressure from the US administration (please also see: T-Mobile USA: Do or DEI to Close Lumos Deal? – IT Connection, April 7, 2025). The move follows alleged demands from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in exchange for its approval of the $20 billion acquisition of fiber broadband provider Frontier Communications and reflects a broader response across US corporations to the policies of the current administration.

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