The explosive rise of generative AI has prompted incredible excitement about its transformative potential, much like the advent of the Internet. But if like me, you’re old enough to remember what that looked like circa 1995, there was a lot we did not know at the time, creating uncertainty in both worlds of work and education on how to best leverage it, and whether providing unlimited access to employees or students was a good idea.

Last week’s announcement of a data fabric approach from Microsoft was interesting to us on a number of levels, most notably for what it confirmed: Data Fabrics are now mainstream. If you’ve not heard why Data Fabrics are the next big thing, then here is a bit of history. Data Fabric is a concept that started to take hold over a decade ago with published research from Forrester.

By now, you would have read the headlines that Qlik's acquisition of Talend is complete, and we're excited to expand our best-in-class capabilities to help you access, transform, trust, analyze, and take action with your data. You might have seen Mike Capone's QlikWorld keynote or the recent "What's Next is Now" webinar and wondered how to leverage these new capabilities in your organization.

For years data and analytics buyers have been managing a difficult set of tradeoffs. They know they need to invest in solutions to drive their businesses and data strategies forward. In fact, every third-party survey shows they plan to do so well into the future. However, customers have struggled in how to balance cost and value, and getting a clear answer isn’t always obvious or easy.

Manufacturing is undergoing a massive transformation. Driven by technological advancements that generate vast amounts of data. The industry is moving towards becoming smarter, more sustainable, and services driven. The fragmented nature of manufacturing’s data architecture however, has created barriers to realizing the full value of data, with many projects stalling at the Proof-of-Concept stage.

The data we generate, store, and share is growing exponentially as the world inexorably digitizes. With the global data sphere expected to double in size by 2026 as organizations and consumers increasingly go online, automate, and digitize processes, the right tools are required to mine this massive trove of valuable data coming from a widening and diverse pool of sources globally. The competitive edge gained by rapidly converting complex data into business insights is a crucial growth driver.

Business priorities, and therefore people priorities, are shifting at a pace like never before thanks to increasing interest rates, energy prices, political uncertainty, global supply constraints, and issues finding and funding expensive talent. People and HR leaders are going to be under considerable pressure to adapt and evolve quickly throughout 2023 in order to support their CEO’s much bigger focus on the workforce.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride for everyone over the last few years, with particular pressure on Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) to support CEOs steering their organizations through things none of us expected to experience in our lifetime. Unfortunately, with the financial markets going into turmoil over the last few months and consumers of all shapes and sizes starting to cut back on spending, the uncertainty isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

This Saturday, January 28th sees Data Privacy Day come round again, an international effort to empower individuals and encourage businesses to respect privacy, safeguard personal data and enable trust. As always this should act as a reminder that every individual within an organization requires a basic understanding of their internal privacy rules and regulations.

Organizations have been focused on enhancing customer experiences to enable quicker responses to services and to provide localized behavior for many years now. However, with the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, Gaming technologies and Self-Driving Cars going more mainstream, there is an even greater need for organizations to react faster to customer behavior and bring solutions closer to the customers.