Runtime: Managing Big Iron in Bayou Country; own, don't rent your code; and UK server surge

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Like a lot of local governments, Louisiana is struggling to modernize its IT, why one Microsoft engineer thinks "radical ownership" is the best way to handle the vibe coding era, and UK infrastructure tech buyers spent a little less in 2025 but splurged on hardware.

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First up: Hard job in the Big Easy

One of the many problems exposed by the pandemic six years ago was the ancient software running many state and local government services, which had a lot of trouble keeping up with a surge in demand. Some states were able to upgrade their infrastructure, but most still find themselves like Louisiana, nursing systems that haven't been updated since the 80s through another decade while eyeing modern technologies that could help — assuming the budget stays level.

“One of the problems we face is that the state owned one of everything in existence," Louisiana's Adrian Erwin told The Stack in a recent interview about the state of the state's IT infrastructure. For example, the Department of Motor Vehicles runs on a mainframe system from the early 1980s, Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 workloads are still in production across government apps, and the Department of Corrections is apparently (hopefully) the last big Lotus Notes shop in the country.

And to top it all off, the state's two main data centers in Baton Rouge sit a little too close for comfort to the Mississippi River, which tends to jump its banks on a regular basis. Erwin is hoping to get more services running on cloud instances and turn off one of those data centers over the next decade, but like a lot of state IT departments, "we have a very small team, so most of our day is firefighting," he said.

That team is finding ways to use AI to make their lives a little easier, such as using agents to reduce errors in processing Medicaid applications and reviewing requests from developers before running them against databases. Still, when you're still relying on an 86-year-old man who goes by Mr. Charlie to maintain the mainframe software stack, there's a lot of room for improvement, and helping states modernize their IT infrastructure should be a bigger federal priority.

The rest of The Stack

Own the code: Principal software engineer on Microsoft’s SQL Server team Raki Rahman shares how he balances AI tooling and code quality as a senior IC working on one of the biggest database products in the world. He calls for tighter ownership over LLM-generated code and evaluations based on system performance.

Is radical ownership the answer to coding’s AI slop problem?

Principal software engineer Raki Rahman says AI has made him 50 times more efficient, but has a zero slop tolerance.

The StackKiera Fields

Ride or die: Porsche is selling its IT business MHP Management to Tata Consultancy Services in exchange for signing a five-year consultancy deal to help Porsche roll out AI across its operations. TCS will pay $373 million for the automakers IT arm, while the multi-year AI contract is worth $1.46 billion.

Served up: The UK Office of National Statistics decided to change the way it evaluated IT spending when putting together its 2025 spending report, released Monday, and the new methodology includes purchases of software and data-center construction. Overall British companies actually spent a little less on IT during the last year compared to 2024, but purchases of servers and networking equipment jumped 54.6%.

Dan's the man: In other government IT news, Dan Rodenhurst is the new chief digital and information officer for the UK's Ministry of Defence, it announced last week. Rodenhurst will manage 3,000 IT workers at MOD and direct £5.5 billion in government spending toward improving the military's "Digital Backbone."

Graphing calculator: One of the biggest reasons why enterprise AI projects stall is a lack of well-organized data that agents struggle to interpret. In this week's STACKUP, Noah Bovenizer talked to Prevalent AI's Paul Stokes and Arun Raj about the company's new $22 million funding round and its data platform, which also helps companies improve data security.

Stacked up: Coming later this week

The Ray Summit kicks off Tuesday in San Francisco with keynotes from Anyscale CEO Keerti Melkote and co-founder Robert Nishihara, one month after the company announced it had agreed to join Nscale.

Zoom reports earnings Tuesday, with analysts expecting the company to report $1.27 billion in revenue, which would be just a slight increase compared to the previous year.

Wednesday is a big enterprise tech earnings day, with Nvidia, Salesforce, and Crowdstrike all scheduled to report.

The Stack Summit: We're convening in London on November 4-5, for a series of exclusive workshops and fireside conversations on the rise of BYOC as a favoured enterprise SaaS deployment model; how many CDOs are consolidating their data estates with Apache Iceberg; how CISOs at FTSE 100 scale are handling supply chain risk (with GSK's CISO) and more.

Ticket applications are subject to pre-vetting. Get in touch with ed@thestack.technology if you want to be in the room.

We're also reading:

Want to Be a Chief AI Officer? That’ll Be $28,000: Bloomberg takes a look at business schools offering "chief AI officer" programs, which ... does not seem like the best use of $28,000.

Are Open Models Catching Up? SemiAnalysis goes deep on the open model phenomenon, pointing out that open-weight models are getting faster at reducing the performance gap with closed models.

Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!