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Volume 342, Issue 2 · 2026-09-07 – 2026-09-13 · Popular →

Thursday’s Briefing · September 17

OrionX.net, Monday, September 7th, 2026

HPC News Bytes - 20260907

OrionX's HPC News Bytes podcast covers IBM Nighthawk r2, Diraq at Equinix, agentic AI for science, AI and jobs, and technopolitics. more →

HPC News Bytes - 20260907

Stack Overflow, Wednesday, September 9th, 2026

Java's Age Is Its AI Superpower

Markus Eisele argues coding agents should favour Java because decades of consistent idiom make output more reliable. more →

Java's Age Is Its AI Superpower

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Never Send Another 'Just Checking In' Email

Every sales professional has done it, and every sales professional secretly hates doing it. The deal has gone quiet. You need to re-engage. You have nothing new to say. So you type the four most defeated words in sales - "just checking in" - dress them up with a little padding, and hit send, knowing the prospect will see straight through it. These messages rarely work, because they broadcast the truth: you're reaching out for your benefit, not theirs, and you have no real reason to be in their inbox. more →

Never Send Another 'Just Checking In' Email

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Your Best Pipeline Is the Customers You Already Have

Sales culture is obsessed with the new. New logos, new prospects, net-new pipeline. And that hunt matters. But it quietly overshadows a truth every experienced IT seller eventually learns: the richest, most efficient pipeline you have is sitting inside your existing customer base. These are people who already trust you, already pay you, and already know your solution works. Expanding and renewing them is dramatically easier than winning a stranger - and yet most reps put almost no deliberate effort into staying meaningfully present with the customers they already have. more →

Your Best Pipeline Is the Customers You Already Have

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Stop Collecting Business Cards. Build an Audience

Every seasoned IT sales professional has a drawer, a spreadsheet, or a CRM full of contacts collected over years - business cards from conferences, badge scans from trade shows, connections from a dozen jobs and campaigns. It feels like an asset. It mostly isn't. Those contacts decay quietly the moment you file them away: people change roles, switch companies, and forget who you are. A name in a database you never touch is not a relationship. It's a fossil. more →

Stop Collecting Business Cards. Build an Audience

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

The Warmest Cold Open in Sales

Cold outreach has a fundamental problem, and it isn't your subject line, your opener, or your call-to-action. It's that the person on the other end has no reason to believe you're worth their time. You're a stranger asking for something. Every optimization tactic in the world - personalization tokens, pattern interrupts, clever hooks - is really just an attempt to compensate for that one deficit: the absence of any prior relationship or credibility. more →

The Warmest Cold Open in Sales

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Everyone Shows Up to Pitch. Almost No One Shows Up to Help

There are two ways to fill a pipeline. You can hunt - cold calls, cold emails, list-buying, sequences, and the grinding math of low reply rates. Or you can build something that attracts buyers to you, so that some meaningful share of your pipeline arrives already interested. Most IT sales professionals live almost entirely in the first world. The second world feels like it belongs to marketing, or to influencers, or to somebody with more time. It doesn't. A LinkedIn newsletter puts it within reach of any individual rep. more →

Everyone Shows Up to Pitch. Almost No One Shows Up to Help

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

The Inbound Lead You Never Had to Chase

There are two ways to fill a pipeline. You can hunt - cold calls, cold emails, list-buying, sequences, and the grinding math of low reply rates. Or you can build something that attracts buyers to you, so that some meaningful share of your pipeline arrives already interested. Most IT sales professionals live almost entirely in the first world. The second world feels like it belongs to marketing, or to influencers, or to somebody with more time. It doesn't. A LinkedIn newsletter puts it within reach of any individual rep. more →

The Inbound Lead You Never Had to Chase

Upcoming Event · Thu, Sep 24 · 1:00pm

Continuous modernization: why modernization never really finishes

In this webinar, Join the discussion with AWS and trace the arc and look at what changes when modernization stops being a project with a finish line and becomes something that runs continuously across your estate. Technical debt, security gaps, and agent-readiness get measured on an ongoing basis. Validated change land as pull requests, not recommendations. more →

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Continuous modernization: why modernization never really finishes (Sept. 24th)

Upcoming Event · Wed, Sep 30 · 11:00am

AI Is Ready. Is Your Data?

Justin Yan will bring a customer-inspired scenario to life through a demonstration - covering ETL pipeline construction, large-scale pipeline operations, and automated governance enforcement using AI agents. Participants are encouraged to question the approach and compare it against their own data challenges. This is not a conversation about doing the same work a little faster. It is a conversation about how the way enterprises deliver data is about to fundamentally change. more →

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AI Is Ready. Is Your Data? (Sept. 30th)

SAP, Thursday, September 10th, 2026

When a Store Starts Thinking

An intelligent retail installation at New York Fashion Week demonstrates real-time operations from a command center. more →

When a Store Starts Thinking