December 2025 Tech Upload
| The NEW Digital Alliance would like to thank EDCi, J.J. Keller & Associates, and KI for their support as Executive Level investors! |  |
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NEW Digital News
Season’s Greetings from the NEW Digital Alliance
As 2025 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on an incredible year of innovation, collaboration, and growth. Thanks to the support of our investors, partners, and friends, we’ve been able to advance technology and digital leadership across Northeast Wisconsin in meaningful ways.
2025 Highlights from the NEW Digital Alliance
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Investor Mentorship Program Growth
For the first time, we successfully offered two cohorts in one year, expanding opportunities for mentorship and knowledge-sharing between emerging and seasoned IT leaders. -
Stronger Event Engagement
Attendance increased at our flagship events—the Digital Leaders Conference and Tech Summit—reflecting the growing interest and commitment of our community to learning, networking, and innovation. -
Building IT Talent in Northeast Wisconsin
We continued meaningful engagement with key constituents, fostering conversations and initiatives aimed at attracting, developing, and retaining IT talent in our region.
From all of us at the NEW Digital Alliance, we wish you and your loved ones a joyful holiday season and a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year. We look forward to making 2026 another year of innovation, growth, and meaningful connections.
Happy Holidays!
Jason Mathwig
Industry Alliance Director
NEW Digital Alliance
Upcoming northeast Wisconsin IT events
Artificial Intelligence & MS Copilot
Monday, December 8
1:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Fox Valley Tech | D. J. Bordini Center
Organizer: Fox Valley Tech College Business & Industry Services
TechBloom: Holiday Soiree
Thursday, December 11
4:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Holidays Pub & Grill (Appleton)
Organizer: Women in Technology Wisconsin
Leading from Within | WiT Virtual Series: Fuel Your Friday
Friday, December 12
12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Virtual
Organizer: Women in Technology Wisconsin
Labor Market Insights | November
The latest labor market data paints a mixed picture for IT and tech professionals. While layoffs are rising — particularly in technology — stock markets remain relatively strong, highlighting a growing disconnect between market valuations and workforce demand. For IT leaders, understanding these shifts is key to navigating hiring, workforce planning, and strategic investment in talent.
Key Implications for IT Leaders:
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Plan Hiring Carefully: Even if the company is financially strong, layoffs in tech suggest cautious hiring is prudent. Focus on critical roles and essential skill sets.
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Prioritize In-Demand Skills: AI, automation, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure remain high-value areas. Investing in talent here can yield strong returns even during market uncertainty.
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Use Judgment, Not Just Data: With official labor reports delayed, decisions must rely on private data, market signals, and strategic foresight — not just historical trends.
UW–Oshkosh Launches Small Business AI Clinic to Empower Entrepreneurs
(Photo: Dr. John Muraski with AI Student Consultants Desmond A. Adongo and Jacques Tulowitzky.)
Universities of Wisconsin Office of Business & Entrepreneurship’s Small Business AI Clinic (SBAIC) Launches at UW–Oshkosh — Empowering Founders, Entrepreneurs, and Small Businesses with Applied AI Training and Solutions
In November, Dr. John Muraski officially launched the Small Business AI Clinic (SBAIC) with AI Student Consultants Desmond Adongo and Jacques Tulowitzky at UW–Oshkosh.
Student consultants work directly with clients to address real business challenges using AI—helping organizations learn by doing. Through this hands-on approach, the clinic bridges the gap between AI’s promise and real-world adoption, particularly for microbusinesses with limited technical capacity, time, or resources.
Much of the early work focuses on building confidence and familiarity with generative AI tools and applications. Beyond business process improvement, the SBAIC also seeks to help individuals grow their personal capability in using AI—both to enhance their own productivity and to recognize opportunities to apply AI in solving business problems. This dual focus on individual learning and organizational application creates a lasting impact that extends beyond each project, fostering a stronger, more AI-ready workforce across the region.
Student consultants guide clients through identifying opportunities, developing use cases, and implementing quick-win AI solutions or training in under 20 hours. The clinic’s Client Assessment Tool helps determine each business’s AI readiness and process pain points, ensuring customized, hands-on support.
Cloud Repatriation Trends: Cost, AI and the Push Towards Hybrid
(Photo cred: HBS)
By HBS
After years of “cloud‑first” strategies, many organizations are now rethinking their infrastructure. Cloud repatriation — moving applications, data or services from public cloud providers back to on‑premises infrastructure, private cloud, or colocation facilities — is gaining momentum. The shift is driven by soaring costs (especially related to AI compute and storage), performance and latency concerns, regulatory and compliance requirements, and recent public‑cloud outages that exposed the risks of over‑reliance on a single provider. For most, the result isn’t a full cloud exit, but a more mature “hybrid‑cloud” strategy: public cloud remains for bursty or global workloads, while stable, high‑compute or regulated workloads move on‑prem or to private environments.
3 Key Takeaways for IT Executives
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AI and cost pressures are fueling cloud repatriation.
As enterprises ramp up AI workloads — with intensive GPU, storage, and compute needs — public‑cloud bills are climbing steeply. Many CIOs are seeing better total cost of ownership by running predictable, heavy workloads on‑premises or private clouds instead of continuing to pay premium cloud pricing. -
Hybrid cloud is becoming the default “smart posture,” not a transitional phase.
Rather than an all‑or‑nothing reversion, most organizations are selectively repatriating certain workloads and keeping others in public cloud, creating a blended environment that optimizes for cost, performance, compliance, and flexibility. -
Dependence on a single public‑cloud provider is now viewed as a risk.
Recent outages and service disruptions at major cloud providers — along with rising concerns around vendor lock‑in, data sovereignty, and compliance — are prompting IT leaders to diversify infrastructure. Repatriation helps reduce single‑vendor risk while giving more control over critical, data‑sensitive, or performance‑intensive workloads.
Other IT News
AI Infrastructure for Business Impact: Enabling Agentic Intelligence with Scalable Compute
(Image credit: AMD)
By ITPro
Unlock practical insights into building scalable, secure, and high-performance AI infrastructure with this IDC white paper. It breaks down the real challenges enterprises face today and offers clear guidance on how to prepare for the next wave of agentic AI. Whether you’re planning new AI initiatives or scaling existing ones, this report provides the data, strategies, and frameworks you need to make confident decisions.
How Data Centers Actually Work
(Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images)
By Lauren Goode and Michael Calore
WIRED
In this podcast episode of Uncanny Valley, we discuss the economics and environmental impacts of energy-hungry data centers and whether these facilities are sustainable in the age of AI.
Tech giants have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers just this year alone. But as the deals pile up, so have the concerns around their viability and sustainability. Michael Calore and senior correspondent Lauren Goode sit down with senior writer Molly Taft to discuss how these energy hungry facilities actually work, the different industry interests at stake, and whether it’ll all come crumbling down.
The evolution of neoclouds and their next moves
(Photo cred: McKinsey & Company)
By
A new class of cloud providers — “neoclouds” — has emerged to meet soaring demand for high‑performance GPU compute driven by growth in generative AI, large‑model training and inference. By offering GPU‑as-a-Service (GPUaaS) or bare‑metal‑as‑a‑service (BMaaS), neocloud providers offer flexible, on‑demand access to GPU infrastructure at a fraction of the price and faster provisioning time compared with hyperscaler clouds, making them especially attractive to AI start‑ups, research labs and enterprises needing rapid scaling. However, the economics of simple BMaaS are fragile: margins are thin, hardware depreciates quickly, and competition with hyperscalers is inevitable if neoclouds try to move up the stack. As a result, the long-term survival of neoclouds will likely depend on carving out niche markets — such as sovereign compute, highly specialized workloads or continued serving of AI startups — or risking consolidation or decline.
3 Key Takeaways for IT Executives
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Neoclouds fill critical GPU‑capacity gaps quickly and cost‑effectively.
Because demand for advanced GPUs has surged and supply from hyperscalers is often allocated to their own workloads, neoclouds provide a timely alternative — offering lower-cost, flexible, and fast-provisioned GPU compute that helps organizations accelerate AI model development without investing their own infrastructure. -
But bare‑metal GPU rentals (BMaaS) are economically fragile — long‑term viability hinges on evolving beyond infrastructure rental.
As the article notes, BMaaS margins are tight and vulnerable to utilization dips, price erosion due to hardware depreciation, and ongoing capital expenditure to keep hardware current. If neoclouds remain pure infrastructure rentals, many may struggle financially or be forced to exit. -
The winners will be neoclouds that specialize — in niche markets, regulated workloads, or AI startups — rather than trying to compete head‑to‑head with hyperscalers.
According to the authors, neoclouds with defensible niche positions (sovereign data centers for regulated data, ultra‑low‑latency inference, vertical‑specific stacks) or those that maintain close relationships with AI startups as they scale are most likely to endure. Consolidation (e.g., absorption into larger cloud providers or telcos) is also a likely outcome for weaker players.
The CyberPassport: A Vision for the Future of Product Trust and IoT Security
(Photo cred: IoT for All)
By Red Alert Labs
IoT For All
This article argues that the current model for evaluating IoT security is fragmented and inefficient — companies and buyers often receive a scattershot mix of security declarations, lab reports, and compliance paperwork, each tied to different standards or regions. That makes it difficult to get a holistic, trustworthy view of a device’s security posture. As a solution, the “CyberPassport” concept is proposed: a single, centralized digital “passport” for an IoT product that consolidates all relevant security evidence — lab test results, manufacturer self‑declarations (e.g., for compliance with regulations such as the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act), and core technical/product parameters. Combined with AI enhancements and a “Verified‑by‑Lab” stamp, a true CyberPassport could let vendors and purchasers instantly access, share, and validate a product’s entire security and compliance history — simplifying due diligence, increasing transparency, and raising trust across the ecosystem.
3 Key Takeaways for IT Executives
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IoT security documentation today is fragmented — and insufficient for confident procurement decisions.
Because evidence is often scattered across lab reports, compliance filings, and manufacturer claims — and each only covers a slice of security — vendors and buyers alike struggle to assess whether an IoT device is truly secure. This fragmentation increases due‑diligence burden and risk. -
CyberPassport offers a unified, “single source of truth” for IoT device security.
By collating everything from technical specs to testing results and regulatory attestation into one record, CyberPassport aims to provide a clear, comprehensive, and accessible view of a product’s security — reducing uncertainty and speeding procurement or deployment decisions. -
AI + Verified‑by‑Lab adds scalability and trust — critical as IoT proliferates and regulation tightens.
With built‑in AI tools to search/interpret compliance data and a lab-backed digital stamp to validate authenticity, organizations could more efficiently vet many devices, share security records securely, and adapt rapidly as regulations (like CRA) evolve or vary by region.