Today on the blog, we feature a conversation with Michael Krigsman, an industry analyst and host of CxOTalk. He has been named a top CIO and IT influencer by several industry organizations. Michael writes extensively on the evolution of customer experience, and why technology is more critical to the delivery of competitive, compelling digital experiences than ever before. MK: Customer experience is a significant driver of revenue over time.

The 2019 AWS annual user conference, re:Invent, didn’t disappoint, with several intriguing announcements from the cloud giant. There was ample focus on Compute, with AWS Outposts and the new Graviton computing instances incorporating the ARM processing framework. There was also a renewed focus on AI and machine learning, as one would expect. Here’s my take on what this year’s show means for people working in IT operations and DevOps:

It’s that time of year again. Forget turkey, cranberries and pesky in-laws: it’s time to get your shopping on. For IT organizations at retailers and e-commerce companies, it’s an exciting time and also one where every detail matters. So far, predictions are robust for sales, with eMarketer forecasting that this will be the first-ever trillion-dollar holiday season in the United States. U.S.

Hypervisor-based server virtualization is widely used in hybrid IT environments for better infrastructure utilization, improved disaster recovery, and considerable cost savings. Given the complexities involved in managing virtualized environments, IT teams need the right insights for virtual resource monitoring so that they can address performance issues quickly.

During October and November, OpsRamp unpacked our Fall Release, issued a new report on modern IT operations, sponsored two Gartner conferences, announced a new VP of Worldwide Channel Sales and received recognition from CRN as a technology innovator. We also published plenty of viewpoints on the future of digital and IT operations management. So, take a break from the Impeachment proceedings and read up on what you missed here!

Last week’s container event of the year, KubeCon, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, attracted more than 12,000 attendees to the San Diego convention center. While there, I attended numerous sessions but I also spent a good portion of time chatting with DevOps professionals, Kubernetes practitioners, and vendors to understand the practicalities behind deploying and managing containerized workloads and microservices.

It’s that time of year again. If you work in IT, you might be more excited about the upcoming AWS re: Invent show than attending holiday dinners and parties. The prognosticators are out in full force, foreshadowing what the cloud leader will unveil. The OpsRamp team has a few of our own predictions, as we head to Las Vegas. By the way – did you know that OpsRamp has integrations with AWS for monitoring and management??

While infrastructure and application discovery for datacenter environments is a mature discipline, real-time discovery of public cloud and cloud native services requires an innovative approach. Digital operations teams have to not only onboard invisible and short-lived infrastructure at scale but also ensure visibility, track consumption, and pinpoint service dependencies across dynamic multi-cloud environments.

In enterprise IT, technical debt comes in the form of legacy hardware and software, inefficient maintenance processes, lack of scalability or resiliency, poor user experiences, outdated communications or code that's inadequately maintained.

At its recent conference in Barcelona, the third in its 2019 Symposium series, Gartner analysts spoke of how companies need to win in the turns to survive and thrive in the digital era. That means looking beyond apps and cloud, to disruptive forces in the digital economy as guideposts for IT strategy.