Lilac Schoenbeck returns for a discussion on RPA and the acceleration of SaaS

This week we welcome back friend of the show, Lilac Schoenbeck, VP of Go-To-Market Strategy at Rocket Software. This was very timely, since it gave us a chance to discuss Rocket’s new acquisitions: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/news/rocket-software-acquires-connectiq-and-webconnect-activeops-delivering-rpa-mainframe We were especially interested to talk about the RPA side of things, including what increased automation means for the job market. RPA can be thought of as APIs for humans… Also, it turns out mainframes are still everywhere, mainly because they work, and unless and until the business process that they automate changes, it’s not worth the effort and risk to move automation of that process to a different platform.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud: is this time different?

Cloud computing is always in the news — but the reason we are talking about it on the podcast is that this feels like a tipping point. Famously, Snowflake had a cloud-only strategy from day one, and that seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Now, others are moving in the same direction, with Atlassian planning to end sale and support of their on-premise server product and go cloud-only:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-to-end-sale-and-support-of-on-premise-server-products-by-2024/

This cloud prioritization can lead to concerns about cloud lock-in, but because we are talking about middleware — SaaS or PaaS — that conversation plays out a bit differently than last time, when it was all about IaaS. For instance, MongoDB just launched multi-cloud clusters for the Atlas DBaaS:

https://diginomica.com/mongodb-forges-ahead-multi-cloud-agenda-announces-multi-cloud-clusters-atlas (disclosure: Dominic’s employer)

Recommendations

Dominic

“The Ministry For The Future”, Kim Stanley Robinson — especially for the talk of discounting future values

Zack

IDC FutureScape webinar series

https://www.idc.com/events/futurescape (+1 from Dominic)

Mike

Microsoft Power Automate

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

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