There’s an 80% chance you may be living under a rock if you haven’t heard of the grand debate on whether or not AI agents will kick the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to the curb.

Late last year, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella shook the industry to its core when he made remarks on tech industry podcast Bg2 forecasting a blunt reality about the future of the SaaS model.

“The business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD, right? So, they’re not going to discriminate between what the back-end is. They are going to update multiple databases and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak,” Nadella said in one portion of the over hour-long podcast episode. “Once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the back ends.”

Nadella added that the tech behemoth will move to “aggressively” collapse its own back-end as consumers seek more AI-native business applications.

Read the rest here.—BM

The wheels on the bus go round and round, but hopefully the data about the kids inside stays right where it is.

As tech becomes further integrated into our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise that there’s an increased reliance on software to manage things like school bus timing and safety. But with the integration of private tech solutions into traditionally municipal responsibilities can come questions about how safe the technology is and how companies can work together with state and local IT teams.

Get right. For Ted Thien, VP and general manager of transportation software at Tyler Technologies, following guidelines and regulations is part of the job. So is ensuring that there’s a basic level of competence with the districts that will be operating the company’s bus tracking software, which lets parents know where their children are.

“If it’s…the local school district policy, we do have certain technical requirements,” Thien said. “There are some standard authentication controls and technologies that are included in our software, but the software does run on the school district network or in their cloud.”

Read more here.—EH

The UK’s cloud market is fundamentally broken, the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found, with businesses lacking the ability to “put pressure on cloud providers to offer better deals.”

According to the results of what the CMA called a provisional investigation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft each control 30% to 40% of the UK’s public cloud infrastructure services market—with Google a distant third—and found “significant barriers to entry and expansion due to the very large capital investment needed for cloud infrastructure.”

In other words, regulators concluded those three cloud providers are among the only companies even able to afford to compete. The CMA also found extensive “technical and commercial barriers” prevent customers from migrating between one service to another, effectively locking them into whichever cloud provider was their initial choice. (The agency specifically called out Microsoft for restrictions on use of rival infrastructure to run Microsoft business software.)

Assuming the three companies’ domination of the UK cloud market has only caused prices to rise “on average 5% above those in a well-functioning market,” the CMA concluded, UK customers are shelling out roughly £430 million ($536 million) extra annually. The regulator noted that it estimates the public cloud infrastructure market to be growing at around 30% each year, meaning that extra cost is bound to rise dramatically as well.

Read more here.—TM

Once a powerhouse behind Fortune 500 IT operations, Boole & Babbage led the charge in enterprise software—until it vanished. From Star Trek ads to mainframe dominance, discover how this trailblazing company shaped IT before being absorbed into tech history.

This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways the industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.