Good Reads on Silicon Valley, IBM, D.E.I., and AI's Burgeoning Impact
Alternative voices on everything from 70's counterculture to what could be (maybe, possibly, potentially) the most important discovery in human history?
Hello and welcome to the Cloud Database Report. I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist, including 18 years at InformationWeek, who then worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. I invite you to subscribe, share, comment, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Spring is trying to break through in the New York area, but we still have a few weeks to go. Yesterday I went for a 5-mile hike in 60-degree (Fahrenheit) weather, but not today. As I write this, the “feels like” temp outside is 8 degrees. So today will be a treadmill day.
In the week ahead, I will be traveling to San Francisco for Salesforce’s TDX 2025 developer conference, to hear about tools and strategies for building AI agents. Keep an eye on my X account and LinkedIn page for updates, and I will have full analysis here in the Cloud Database Report.
Meantime, I thought I would share some of what I’ve been reading and hearing. Below are links to sources and headlines that caught my attention recently.
I enjoyed Ashlee Vance’s wide-ranging Core Memory podcast with John Markoff. The conversation, between two former New York Times tech reporters, is rich in anecdotes, from the early days of Silicon Valley, where Markoff grew up and continues to be deeply immersed, to Elon Musk, GenAI, and much more. You can listen to the Vance-Markoff audio here, “On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic of Silicon Valley”
IBM on Feb. 25 announced plans to acquire DataStax, best known for its implementation of Apache Cassandra, a NoSQL database used for big-scale, high-throughput data workloads. Frankly, I have been unimpressed with IBM’s database strategy for some time — not enough innovation — but I’m interested again now that IBM has rehired Ritika Gunnar, who took over in January as GM of Data & AI. I worked with Ritika during my two years at IBM (2018-2020), then she jumped ship to Google Cloud. IBM was smart to bring her back, as Ritika has both the technical know-how and marketing savvy to make IBM databases relevant again. Here’s her blog post on the DataStax deal: “IBM to acquire DataStax, helping clients bring the power of unstructured data to enterprise AI applications”
At 80 years old and still with a firm grip on the wheel at Oracle, Larry Ellison has few peers in terms of his industry experience and vision for the future. He recently opined that AI is shaping up to be bigger than the industrial revolution, bigger than electricity, and possibly “the most important discovery in human history.” Cloud Wars’ Bob Evans provides his usual probing analysis of Ellison’s commentary, made in conversation with Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister and now exec chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. See the Cloud Wars article, “Oracle’s Larry Ellison on AI: ‘Most Important Discovery in Human History’ ”
Mike Olson, former CEO of Cloudera (a Hadoop-based data platform provider) and, before that, a technologist with Oracle and Informix, has launched a social- and politically-oriented blog site with the non-subtle title: Not a Tech Bro. Over the past few weeks, Olson — who embraces the “woke” label — has tackled a handful of thorny topics from his left-leaning POV, including DEI programs, illegal immigration, and last week’s showdown at the Oval Office. A good place to start is Olson’s debut blog post, which provides context: “The genesis post”
More non-traditional sources
I work as a writer/editor for a leading PR & marketing agency, Method Communications, and I’ve been hearing a lot of interest in non-traditional media. They want to know and engage independent bloggers, journalists, and podcasters — people like Ashlee Vance, Alex Kantrowitz, Charlie Guo, Eric Newcomer.
There’s recognition that these self-sufficient publishers have growing influence, from specialized channels like the Cloud Database Report (my audience is in the single-digit thousands) to those like The Pragmatic Engineer with nearly 1 million readers on Substack.
If you’re interested in exploring, see my blog post below for some suggestions.
