Technology

Kids these days take a greater interest in practical things than we give them credit for. For example, this summer my 12-year-old son Leo was at sleepaway camp in Canada. When we received his first letter home, among camp platitudes, the two notable items reported were that one of his counselors was discharged from the Israeli Army a week before camp, while another was recently &mugged by three guys (one had a gun!) and got stabbed in the arm.& Leo reported the cabin was mesmerized when, as a reward, the counselor showed campers his sweater with a knife hole in it.

Americacolleges and universities could learn a thing or two from Leo, because they continue to resist teaching students the practical things they&ll need to know as soon as they graduate; for instance, to get jobs that will allow them to make student loan payments. Digital skills head this list, specifically experience with the high-powered software they&ll be required to use every day in entry-level positions.

But talk to a college president or provost about the importance of Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot,Tableau, Adobe and Autodeskfor their graduates, and they&re at a loss for how to integratelast-mile traininginto their degree programs in order prepare students to work on these essential software platforms.

Enter a new company,Pathstream, which just announced a partnership with tech leader Unity and previously partnered with Facebook. Pathstream supports thedelivery of career-critical software skill training in VR/AR and digital marketing at colleges and universities.

According to Pathstream co-founder Eleanor Cooper, the company was created from piecing together two insights. First, graduates aren&t getting the digital skills they need to be hired. Employers are so frustrated that they no longer believe that new grads are qualified for digital jobs; according to a recent survey of more than 95,000 job postings by TalentWorks, 61 percent of positions that say they&re seeking entry-level employees now specify at least three years or more of relevant work experience. Second, tech companies are struggling to reach new generations of learners.

While todaycollege graduates are &digital natives,& these natives have been conditioned on Netflix-like interfaces, and aren&t accustomed to laborious software configurations, or the steep learning curves required to master a software platform.

As a result, Cooper says Pathstream makes learning a new software platformlive up to student expectations of receiving &joy before pain,& thereby gently nudging college students down the road to mastery. In addition, rather than traditional classroom-based learning, Pathstreamplatform simulates a work environment, where students complete tasks and projects on the platform, build a portfolio of work and earn a certification from both a higher education institution and the software company.

Facebook is using Pathstream to support training students on its digital marketing platform, includingsocial media marketing using Facebook Ad Manager and Instagram .Parisa Zagat, Policy Programs Manager at Facebook, related the partnership with Pathstream to itspledgein June to train 1 million U.S. small business owners on the digital skills they need to compete in todayworkplace.

Unity is focusing its training on VR/AR courses for industry use cases (construction, manufacturing, automotive, enterprise training). Jessica Lindl, Global Head of Education at Unity, said &in orderto gain employment in todaydigitally focused world, job-seekers are required to rapidly up-level their skills.&

Image: Getty Images/smartboy10/DigitalVision

&The problem is therea significant education gap between those who seek to learn these skills and the programs available to them. With Pathstream, we will be able to provide interactive programs for students of all backgrounds to learn real-world software platforms in their own way, making it easier and more efficient for them to find success in their current career path or a new one.&

While it completes training programs for Facebook and Unity, Pathstream is building out a network of colleges that will offer the curriculum to students. Recently, Facebook announced that Pathstream will be offering digital marketing certificates at Central New Mexico Community College and Des Moines Area Community College. According to Zagat,&By the end of the year, Facebook plans to form a total of 20 partnerships with community colleges across the country, working hand-in-hand with Pathstream and the colleges tobuildout customcurriculums and programsfor thesepartnerships.&

Cooper says that &colleges and universities understand that their students are focused on employment, and specifically on getting a good first job. Todaystudents no longer buy the line that college prepares you for your fifth job, not your first job. They know that if you don&t get a good first job, you&re probably not going to get a good fifth job.& And, as she points out, most good first jobs specifically require one or more technologies like Facebook or Unity — technologies that colleges and universities aren&t teaching.

If Pathstream is able to realize its vision of integrating industry-relevant software training into degree programs in a big way, colleges and universities have a shot at maintaining their stranglehold as the sole pathway to successful careers. If Pathstreamimpact is more limited, watch for millions of students to sidestep traditional colleges, and enroll in emerging faster and cheaper alternative pathways to good first jobs — alternative pathways that will almost certainly integrate the kind of last-mile training being pioneered by Pathstream.

Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. Itsomewhat like Mary MeekerInternet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we&ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later.

While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the companywork with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target.

As they wrote in their Medium post launching the report, &Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.& Whether thatthe case will be in the eye of the reader, but ita comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that.

The big picture

The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players.

As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops.

The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don&t devote quite the level of revenue to M-A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we&ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more.

Itworth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M-A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant. We saw such speculation several years ago and it turned out that Salesforce was too rich for even these companyblood. While they may have more cash to spend, the price has probably only gone up as Salesforce acquires more and more companies andits revenue has surpassed $10 billion.

About those mega trends

The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage, none of which are likely to surprise you if you read about the enterprise regularly in this or other publications:

• Machine Learning
• Cloud
• Security
• SaaS

While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren&t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail.

The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run. Software as a Service grew out of couple of earlier trends, the first being the rise of the Web as a way to deliver software, then the rise of mobile to move it beyond the desktop. The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices.

End of SaaS dominance

But today, Work-Bench is saying that we are seeing some other trends that could be tipping the scales back to infrastructure. That includes containers and microservices, serverless, Database as a Service and React for building front ends. Work-Bench argues that if every company is truly a software company, these tools could make it easier for companies to build these kind of services cheaply and easily, and possibly bypass the SaaS vendors.

Whatmore, they suggest that if these companies are doing mass customization to these services, then it might make more sense to build instead of buy, at least on one level. In the past, we have seen what happens when companies try to take these kinds of massive software projects on themselves and it hardly ever ended well. They were usually bulky, difficult to update and put the companies behind the curve competitively. Whether simplifying the entire developer tool kit would change that remains to be seen.

They don&t necessarily see companies running wholesale away from SaaS just yet to do this, but they do wonder if developers could push this trend inside of organizations as more tools appear on the landscape to make it easier to build your own.

The remainder of the report goes in depth into each of these trends, and this article just has scratched the surface of the information you&ll find there. The entire report is embedded below.

No surprise that smart speaker sales are on the rise. That certainly comports with recent numbers from NPD. The latest report from Canalys, however, pulls the camera back a bit to give a better picture of the global market. Seems that while smart speaker sales continue to be hot here in the States, they&re positively on fire in China.

Global shipments increased by 187 percent year-over-year for a total of 16.8 million units. China accounted for 52-percent of the total growth worldwide, with Alibaba and Xiaomi accounting for 17.7 and 12.2 percent, respectively. The growth is large, in part, due to the fact that the category effectively didn&t exists a year ago.

Canalys& Hattie He notes that a confluence of different elements have potentially put the country on track overtake the U.S.

&Alibaba and Xiaomi have both relied on aggressive price cuts to create demand,& He adds. &Both companies have the financial backing to spend on marketing and hardware subsidies in a bid to quickly build their user bases. Although the real level of user demand for speaker products is currently unproven, China is on its way to overtake the US in the near term. The challenge remains for local vendors to increase user stickiness and generate revenue from the growing installed base of smart speaker users.&

Also interesting is the fact that Google has maintained its top spot ahead of Amazon, with explosive growth year over year. Googleup 449 percent to Amazon-14 — putting the two companies in first and second place, respectively. Of course, Amazon got a significant headset in the market, so Google has some ground to make up. Apple, meanwhile, failed to crack the top four.