RedMonk

At #IBMThink 2026 in Boston, Stephen O'Grady shares key takeaways about emerging trends in enterprise AI strategy and infrastructure in this Quick Take video. https://lnkd.in/eWP6F2RN

In this quick take from #RedHatSummit 2026 in Atlanta, Kate Holterhoff, Ph.D. shares her key observations from the event. AI and agent orchestration emerged as dominant topics, with particular emphasis on governance, security, and compliance as critical concerns for enterprises. Kate highlights several pressing issues discussed throughout Summit: the anxiety around hardening systems and image security, growing concerns about AI token costs becoming a barrier to adoption. A standout moment was Red Hat’s Day 2 keynote demo featuring a lemonade stand chatbot with built-in safety rules. The interactive component allowed audience members to participate in live red-teaming, testing the chatbot’s guardrails in real time, demonstrating the importance of predictable and secure AI systems. Despite AI dominating conversations, Kate observes that OpenShift Virtualization and the RHEL continue to receive significant attention and investment, reflecting the company’s commitment to balancing innovative AI capabilities with foundational infrastructure that has driven its historical success. https://lnkd.in/eQkpzkeK

At #IBMThink 2026 in Boston, James Governor and Stephen O'Grady discuss the conference's central theme: the shift from AI proof of concepts to real-world implementation and tangible business use cases. Rather than theoretical discussions about AI's potential, attendees are now focused on practical applications across diverse industries. James and Steve highlight several compelling examples, including an eyewear company, bag manufacturer, and an insurance company. A standout moment was tennis legend Andre Agassi presenting his AI-powered coaching application, which allows users to receive personalized tennis coaching through their smartphone camera—a practical demonstration of how AI can democratize expert advice and personalized guidance. Organizations are moving beyond asking "what can AI do?" to asking "what are we actually building with AI?" and finding concrete ways to apply the technology to solve real business problems. This focus on actionable use cases, rather than speculative capabilities, represents a significant maturation in how enterprises are approaching AI adoption and implementation. https://lnkd.in/eKt5wZjD

Hear Seth Webster, Executive Director of the newly launched The React Foundation and Chief Developer Evangelist at Expo, chat with Kate Holterhoff, Ph.D. Seth explains why React has outgrown its origins at Meta and needs an independent foundation to ensure its durability for the next decade. On the Expo side, Seth makes the case that Expo's end-to-end pipeline, from idea through cloud builds to app store submission, is uniquely positioned for the agentic development era. The conversation concludes with Seth reflecting on the rapidly evolving role of the developer and offering guidance for navigating its shifting terrain. https://lnkd.in/e-FSQPFq

Live from #IBMThink 2026 in Boston, RedMonk’s co-founders James Governor and Stephen O'Grady share their key takeaways from the event. They discuss the growing case for matching the right model to the right task, noting that enterprises won’t sustain the “token-maxxing” mentality of spending thousands per day on frontier models. They unpack IBM’s #AI operating model as a useful framework for organizing the sprawl of projects, libraries, and components shaping enterprise AI. They also highlight quantum computing’s emerging real-world impact, including Cleveland Clinic’s work with IBM quantum systems to advance biomedicine. https://lnkd.in/ekgUQm4v

Every time any of us from RedMonk travel and hold our RedMonk beers, we invariably miss someone who didn't know we were going to be in town and/or who we forgot to notify. In an attempt to rectify that, and because James Governor and I will both be in Boston next week for IBM's Think event, we're happy to soft launch monksignal.com, a simple site that lets you sign up to be notified when one of us will be in your city, or a city you might happen to be in. We won't use your emails for any other reason, of course, but in the meantime if you want to be sure to catch us next time we're in town, pop on over here and let us know.

Hear about the features of VKS 3.6 with Audrey (Yun) Bian of Broadcom

Hear James Governor and Kate Holterhoff, Ph.D. share their takeaways from #GoogleCloudNext 2026 in Las Vegas. Their conversation covers the shift from single copilots to multi-agent orchestration, highlighted by Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform announcement. They dig into the security implications of agentic infrastructure, including cryptographic agent identities, and praise the developer keynote's creative demo storyline (port-a-potties and all). James spotlights the data platform story, from "dark data" locked in PDFs to AI-built knowledge catalogs and cross-cloud connectivity via Iceberg. The pair also explores the ephemeral infrastructure challenges agents create and why context remains queen in 2026. https://lnkd.in/erqP4-kc

Over a meal at Sune in London, James Governor and Alois Reitbauer, Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace, use the restaurant menu as a lens to discuss one of the thorniest questions in enterprise software: when to build and when to buy? Oysters, charred flatbreads, and anchovies become stand-ins for open source components—widely available, broadly standardized, but rarely as good when you try to prep them solo. They chat about why packaging and end-user experience have become the decisive battleground in #observability. James shares RedMonk’s long-held view that “the best packager wins and wins big,” and the two discuss how OpenTelemetry’s rise as an industry standard has shifted competition away from data collection and toward opinionated experiences on top of it. Along the way they touch on #AI as a wrapper, the fast-food-versus-fine-dining spectrum of customer needs, and why the job of an enterprise is to use an observability stack, not manage one. https://lnkd.in/eiFzuKVC