My top blog picks from February 2018
Your shortcut to my favorite blogs and articles of the month
Analyzing the future at IDC Directions
International Data Corporation (IDC) has a neat, paradoxical tagline: “Analyze the Future.” Their Directions conference (held annually in Santa Clara, CA) is a tradition of future forecasting and market influence that goes back over 50 years. Read the full article from my colleague, Carsten Puls, who shared some forecasts from the conference including this one:
“By the end of 2019, Digital Transformation spending will reach $1.7 trillion worldwide, a 42% increase from 2017.”
State of the End User Computing Union survey — 2018
Last year, nearly 1,000 respondents participated in the “State of the End User Computing Union” survey, making it one of the largest research initiatives on the EUC market. Topics in the 2018 survey will cover Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Desktop as a Service, public cloud, security, Server Based Computing (SBC), storage, hypervisors, GPUs, and key initiatives for 2019. Want access to some of these quality insights? Join the survey for a comprehensive forecast on how the industry is changing — based on valuable, independent, and unbiased research results from objective customer data.
Welcome to the world of Frame: a customer’s story
George de Vries at Centric writes: “A few months ago, I heard about a new solution that lets you run any application you want in a web browser. Frame puts it like this: ‘Run any software in a browser. Secure, software-defined workspaces. Any cloud. One seamless experience on all your devices.’ This statement grabbed my attention, so I delved into the world of Frame (and also had a Skype meeting with Ruben Spruijt, the company’s CTO) to find out what it can do for companies nowadays.” Read George’s blog here.
What I wish I knew when I became CTO
In a stellar article by David Mack, the CTO and co-founder of SketchDeck writes: “Founding a startup is an upside-down version of traditional employment: initially you’ve no idea if the company will take off nor if it’ll ever turn into a full-time job, then as it grows you keep on being thrust into new and different jobs. It’s reasonably common to end up doing jobs you’ve never done before. You can accumulate responsibility faster than you can learn how to harness it. Startups are agile boats, but the decisions you make on day one do have rippling consequences over time.” Read more lessons and wisdom from David in his blog article.
Autodesk University: The path to virtualization with Frame and Azure
Justin Boitano writes about the evolution of Autodesk University over the past several years in this recent blog article. Autodesk’s annual user conference draws 10,000+ attendees for three days of talks, demos, and hands-on classes. It used to take the Autodesk event team a week and thousands of hours of labor to set up hundreds of high-powered workstations for the training part of the event. Joel St-Pierre, event systems and support manager for Autodesk University, knew there had to be a better way — and he found it, by streaming apps from the cloud using Frame and Azure instead. Joel discusses Frame’s role in the expansion of Autodesk University in this awesome article. Check out other Frame Customer Stories here.
Technology predictions and the impact on your workspace
Check out my video below to see some of my predictions about technology and some possible future implications.
The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students
In 2013, Google decided to launch “Project Oxygen” which tested their hiring hypothesis by analyzing every piece of firing, hiring, and promotion data they’ve accumulated since their incorporation in 1998. The conclusion was shocking — among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise was dead last. The top seven characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach, communicating and listening well, possessing insights into others (including others’ different values and points of view), having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues, being a good critical thinker and problem solver, and being able to make connections across complex ideas. Read more about what Google learned from this analysis and what it could mean for students across the country in this article by Valerie Strauss.
Thanks!
Thanks for reading! If you liked it, please share — much appreciated! If you have any great articles for me to read, please share them so I can consider them for next month’s volume. Please don’t hesitate with any questions, feedback, or suggestions. You can contact me at ruben@fra.me or follow me on Twitter: @rspruijt
