Artificial intelligence. Blockchain. 5G networks. Virtualreality. Business executives have no doubt been inundated withmarketing materials and sales pitches proclaiming that these buzzy technologieswill give them the edge over their competitors. But oftentimes, big techinitiatives fail, leading to disappointed management teams disillusioned byvendor promises. Executives gathered Wednesday at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo. to discuss these dilemmas during a panel...

Amazon’s cloud chief Andy Jassy spent nearly three hours on Wednesday talking everything from competitors like Oracle to the company’s new artificial intelligence-powered toy race cars for developers. As what’s become typical in recent years, the Amazon Web Services CEO used his keynote session at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to highlight numerous new enterprise services intended for coders and IT managers to build and manage apps using Amazon’s cloud computing...

Despite the perception that high-flying startup Ripple is either a blockchain or cryptocurrency company, CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes it’s something simpler and not merely a business trying to latch onto the latest tech buzzwords. “We are a payments company,” Garlinghouse said on stage Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs (gs, +0.92%) technology conference in San Francisco. He explained that Ripple uses blockchain technology—one of the underlying accounting technologies used for Bitcoin—to record...

Apple and Cisco are now selling insurance policies to companies to protect them financially against cyber attacks. The insurance policies are part of a broader package that also includes corporate security reviews. As part of the package, professional services firm Aon will perform security consulting for companies, while insurance firm Allianz will provide discounted cyber security insurance coverage as long as the customers use certain Apple and Cisco security products. “We’re thrilled that...