Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group summer newsletter.
Gartner just released their Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure Services and it is available for free from AWS. There are no surprises in the report, AWS, Microsoft and Google continue to be the leaders, but it is worth reading the report to understand Gartner's perspective on each of the vendors.
Artificial Intelligence is expected to have a significant impact on software development including software development for SaaS providers. Neil Barton, a Gartner analyst, provides some perspectives of how to deal with the changes for both internal software teams and outside software development services.
Paul Ressler
The Cirrostratus Group
AI For Marketing
This HBR article, How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy, is directed at CMOs and marketing leaders and is an excellent overview of how AI can be used in marketing. The authors take a broad view of marketing so it touches on sales and support also. If you provide SaaS solutions to marketing, the article provides an excellent overview of the areas where your application(s) could be using AI.
reviews some of the typical problems and what to do about them. The authors make an excellent point about making sure that you're asking the right questions, this is where a lot of the problems occur.
There is also an increasing emphasis in the industry on the strategic importance of MLOps as demonstrated by this article from NASDAQ which talks about the importance of the CEO understanding the process and major issues associated with deploying an AI application. Andrew Ng, a well-known AI expert, also highlights the importance of MLOPS in a recent Harvard Business Review article.
If you are using AI in your SaaS application it's important to have an appropriate level of MLOps.
