WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

A lot has changed since most brands first “hired” their DMP—GDPR, the rise of Walled Gardens, browser tracking preventions. Has your data strategy kept up?

Although writing code once sounds like a great bargain, the associated overhead made the cost of this approach outweigh the benefits (which turned out to be smaller than expected anyway). In the end we no longer share mobile code via C++ (or any other non-standard way) and instead write code in the platform native languages.
In addition we want our engineers to have a delightful experience and to be able to contribute back to the community. This is why we made the decision to align our practices with industry standards.

The WSE (pronounced “wise”) is the largest commercial chip ever manufactured, built to solve the problem of deep learning compute. The WSE is 1.2 trillion transistors, packed onto a single 215mm x 215mm chip with 400,000 AI-optimized cores, connected by a 100Pbit/s interconnect. The cores are fed by 18 GB of super-fast, on-chip memory, with an unprecedented 9 PB/s of memory bandwidth.

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy.

AWS offers the only cloud born from retail and built for retailers. We share Amazon’s own tested, proven innovation to help retailers reinvent their legacy applications for new value, complete their view of customers for relevant insight, and transform their engagement for increased sales velocity – a head start 20 years in the making to lead their customer’s journey.

Global companies, like Amazon, Coca Cola or Zalando are transforming their IT infrastructures into a microservice architecture. In addition to this, they are rebuilding their internal organizational structures and pushing their businesses ahead of the competition. We take a closer look at examples of microservice architecture in eCommerce.

Digital business transformation trailblazers who are actively promoting the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) clearly need to be better at communicating, separating fact from science fiction. AI business champions must keep it real and stay focused on tangible business value. A data analytics, big data and AI pioneer shares how business leaders can effectively advocate for AI.

Inovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Succeeding is no longer just about who’s able to build the technology, or who’s first to market. It’s about who’s got the best experience.

In this article, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coupled, decoupled, headless, and hybrid CMS architecture.

One of the many challenges with building or refreshing a website is the selection of a Content Management System (CMS). Despite our best efforts the CMS can often be a source of difficulty in a project, but there are alternatives. Read about the approach we took on www.thoughtworks.com to developing functionality to support content management in an incremental fashion.

CONCLUSION

This article has detailed an incremental approach to developing a content managed web application, in contrast to the adoption of a CMS at the outset. While there are the costs associated with developing functionality which you could get “off the shelf,” these are offset by some of the advantage of this approach – flexibility, simplicity, control, obviating the need to learn a bespoke framework and above all being able to move in small steps from a simple static web site to a managed one.

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)

Gartner has recently started talking about a new integration technology called the “event broker”.  As you may have guessed from the name ;), it’s a category of brokers and streaming technologies that move and govern events across applications, devices and processes.

Want to learn more? Check out this video. It explains what an event broker is, how they are categorized and why you might need one.

In our 35-criterion evaluation of enterprise architecture management suites (EAMS) providers, we identified the 12 most significant ones — Ardoq, Atoll Technologies, Avolution, BiZZdesign, BOC Group, LeanIX, MEGA International, Orbus Software, Planview, QPR Software, Software AG, and UNICOM Systems — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps enterprise architecture (EA) professionals select the right one for their needs.

Computer vision turns imaging into a universal input - it lets computer see. So what kinds of things will become vision problems, and how does that change Google or Instagram?

Learn to maximize your use of Google Cloud by adopting a cloud-native architecture.

For the 5th year, we've run The Stackies Awards, where marketers send in a single slide that illustrates their 'stack' — the collection of marketing technology tools they use and how they conceptualize them together. We received 48 entries this year, and some truly incredible ones. Airstack graciously sponsored the awards this time. And, as promised, we've gladly made a donation of $4,800 to Girls Who Code on behalf of the 48 entrants ABinBev, Airstream, Alliant Credit Union, Artemis Health, BraunAbility, Esri, G Adventures, Juniper Networks, Lola, Nationwide Advisory Solutions, Paychex, Racing Post, Sargento Foods, The Telegraph, Tennant, and the

This report presents LibraBFT, a robust and efficient state machine replication system designed for the Libra Blockchain. LibraBFT is based on HotStuff, a recent protocol that leverages several decades of scientific advances in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and achieves the strong scalability and security properties required by internet settings. LibraBFT further refines the HotStuff protocol to introduce explicit liveness mechanisms and provides a concrete latency analysis. To drive the integration with the Libra Blockchain, this document provides specifications extracted from a fully-functional simulator. These specifications include state replication interfaces and a communication framework for data transfer and state synchronization among participants. Finally, this report provides a formal safety proof that induces criteria to detect misbehavior of BFT nodes, coupled with a simple reward and punishment mechanism.

We present Move, a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain. Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic: a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations. These safety guarantees are enforced statically by Move’s type system. Despite these special protections, resources are ordinary program values — they can be stored in data structures, passed as arguments to procedures, and so on. First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies. The safety and expressivity of Move have enabled us to implement significant parts of the Libra protocol in Move, including Libra coin, transaction processing, and validator management.

The Libra Blockchain is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world. We present a proposal for the Libra protocol, which implements the Libra Blockchain and aims to create a financial infrastructure that can foster innovation, lower barriers to entry, and improve access to financial services. To validate the design of the Libra protocol, we have built an open-source prototype implementation — Libra Core — in anticipation of a global collaborative effort to advance this new ecosystem.

To get a deeper understanding of the lifecycle of a Libra transaction, we will follow a transaction on its journey from being submitted to a Libra validator to being committed to the Libra Blockchain. We will then “zoom-in” on each logical component of a validator and take a look at its interactions with other components.

The Libra Blockchain is a cryptographically authenticated distributed database, and it is based on the Libra protocol. This document briefly describes the key concepts of the Libra protocol. For a detailed description of all the elements of the Libra protocol, refer to the Libra Blockchain technical paper

Open source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly popular, but gaining insight into its structural quality and understanding post-integration implications remain major challenges. This research digs deeper into these issues and aims to provide Software Intelligence on the structural quality of OSS commonly used by businesses or embedded as part of bespoke systems.