Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: why evaluating software developers like salespeople is misguided, IBM promises legal protection for generative AI customers, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: why evaluating software developers like salespeople is misguided, IBM promises legal protection for generative AI customers, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Runtime each week.)
If we assume that every company has become a software company, that means software developers have become some of the most valuable (and expensive) employees on the payroll. How do companies know they're getting the most out of their investment in those employees?
It's an old debate in information technology that took on new life last month after McKinsey (yep, that McKinsey) published an article claiming it had developed a new metrics-based approach to measuring individual developer productivity. It was met with an immediate backlash from several corners of the software world.
Most engineering organizations measure some individual metrics; the number of lines of code written by a developer, the number of times their code is committed to the live production environment, or how long it takes them to resolve issues that are assigned to them, said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean.
DORA focuses on four key team-oriented metrics including deployment frequency — overwhelmingly cited by those interviewed for this article as the most important productivity metric they worry about — and time to resolve issues.
The potential to improve developer productivity has actually been one of the more compelling aspects of the generative AI boom.
McKinsey's system seems to be designed for companies that don't trust their technology leaders, which is, of course, a sign of a much deeper organizational problem. Should it appear at your workplace, it's probably time to test the market.
Read the full story on Runtime.
There's something quite telling about the fact that enterprise tech vendors are lining up to offer legal protection to the early adopters of their newest products.
IBM joined Microsoft Thursday by promising to indemnify customers using its generative AI products against copyright or other lawsuits. IBM said this was part of "its standard intellectual property protection," but it's hard to imagine that most IBM customers are all that worried about legal issues when using its other software and hardware products.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky declined to directly answer a question regarding whether AWS would offer similar protection two weeks ago in Seattle, and it's not clear where Google Cloud stands. If generative AI is really going to transform the enterprise to the degree that all these zillion dollar companies insist it will, the legal issues behind this technology will need to be resolved sooner rather than later.
Prat Moghe is the new CEO of TripleBlind, an AI privacy startup, after a year and a half as executive vice president at Cloudera.
John Rayfield is now corporate vice president of AI silicon at AMD, following almost three years at archrival Intel in a similar role.
Mike Campfield is the new chief revenue officer at Uptycs, a cloud application security startup.
AWS announced that its Bedrock AI marketplace service is now generally available, and unveiled plans to let enterprise customers train its CodeWhisperer coding assistant on their own internal code base.
Mistral AI released a new open-source LLM that it favorably compared to Meta's Llama 2 model, which is kinda-sorta open source.
Did you know Snap had an enterprise division? Anyway, it's gone.
Akamai announced seven new cloud infrastructure computing regions, as it continues to build on its acquisition of Linode last year.
Microsoft is looking into lower-carbon concrete mixes that could help it reduce carbon emissions when constructing new data centers.
Workday introduced new generative AI features, but lowered its revenue guidance for the year and Wall Street freaked out.
Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!