Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IBM Think 2026 made one thing clear: infrastructure leaders are being asked to support more AI, more automation, and faster decision-making without adding unnecessary complexity or risk. Held earlier this month in Boston, IBM Think 2026 focused heavily on enterprise AI, hybrid cloud, automation, governance, and operational transformation.

Two days in Minneapolis with the OpenTelemetry community, talking about where telemetry pipelines are headed and what the AI wave is doing to them. Two topics dominated everything: AI and cost reduction. Not as separate conversations, either. The more the community talked about AI telemetry, the more the cost question followed right behind it. I joined Diana Todea from VictoriaMetrics and Antonio Jimenez Martinez from Cisco ThousandEyes on the Telemetry That Matters panel.

We just wrapped O11yCon 2026, and this year's conversations hit differently. Agent-based software development is here, now. It's no longer an optional choice, and everybody is struggling to understand what their agents are doing and how to make them cost less and perform better. Over the course of fifteen talks, we saw clearly that the old assumptions on how and who (or what) writes our software has been upended. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.

Las Vegas, May 2026 — Almaden took part in the 2026 edition of HDI Service & Support World, held May 3–7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. From Booth 109, the company had a clear mission: to show how Collective IQ, its Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform, amplifies the value of IT service management without added complexity, disruption, or wasted time. Visitors to the booth had the opportunity to speak directly with experts, Dave Wagner and Bob Kruger (Chief Product Officer).

‍Summary: Google Cloud Next ’26 focused on the future of software delivery, emphasizing that AI, platform consolidation, and an urgent push toward efficiency are reshaping the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The key takeaway from the event was that organizations are moving from AI experimentation to operationalization, actively consolidating fragmented tools onto end-to-end platforms that embed AI for control, intelligence, and speed. ‍

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam brought together about 13,500 attendees this year, the largest turnout yet. The size of the event showed just how much the cloud-native space has grown, and how central observability, platform engineering, and cost control have become. For VictoriaMetrics, this year’s event was a mix of talks, booth conversations, and a lot of direct feedback from users.