On October 4, Facebook and its properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, were down for more than five hours due to configuration changes on routers in Facebook’s data centers. A five-hour outage is an eternity in our always-on digital economy, costing the company an estimated $65 million and 4.8% in stock valuation. The high-profile Facebook outage is emblematic of just how digitally intermediated our economy is becoming, and the incident renews C-level focus on preventing similar service failures.

How we communicate with each other has changed, thanks in large part to rapidly evolving technology. Every day, we spend time online and on our smartphones. We’re accustomed to rich messaging with family and friends using images, videos, and emojis to help make our point and highlight our meaning. We also communicate asynchronously, meaning when we have time and it’s convenient for us.

The digital revolution forced every organization to reinvent itself, or at least rethink how it goes about doing business. Most large companies have invested substantial cash in what is generally labelled “digital transformation.” While those investments are projected to top $6.8 trillion by 2023, they’re often made without seeing clear benefits or ROI.

Life for an IT architect in retail would be so much easier if people would just spread their shopping out across the year. Since 1941 American Thanksgiving has been a holiday on the fourth Thursday of November and most American companies and schools take the following day as a holiday too with major retailers offering price reductions on this day to kick start the Christmas shopping season. Since 2005 it has been the busiest shopping day of the year.

The Tanzu RabbitMQ team is excited to announce the general availability of VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.2. This version contains RabbitMQ 3.9, a milestone core broker release that introduces Streams, a new data structure allowing for replay and higher throughput. In addition to Streams, Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.2 has some exciting new capabilities and improvements.

November 2021 is a good month if you’re a Fortune 500 or Global 2000 enterprise. The investments your organization has made in “integration” over the years were necessary as the organization and the IT infrastructure grew, but the Integration Infrastructure (i2) has likely been considered a necessary evil by senior management. That investment can now be leveraged in two important, new ways.

Mattermost has proudly served government and public sector organizations of all types since we got our start in 2016. We have always embraced our role as the open source collaboration platform that can deliver developers and other technical teams the tools needed to accelerate digital operations through better collaboration, in a secure and self-managed environment. Today we emphasize our commitment to these organizations further with the launch of Mattermost Government Solutions.

Mattermost v6.1 is generally available today and includes the following new features (see changelog for more details).