While a kaleidoscope creates beautiful and colorful patterns, its images are complex, change continuously, and can be often hard to decipher. It therefore makes sense that when four of the technology industry’s leading research analysts decided to form their own firm last year, they chose to name the new venture after the optical instrument.

“We formed the firm because we saw companies pursuing single technologies,” said Jessica Groopman (pictured, right), founder and industry analyst at Kaleido Insights. “What’s your artificial intelligence strategy? What’s your ‘internet of things’ strategy? What’s your augmented reality strategy? In reality, all of these things are impacting each other, so we take a kaleidoscopic converged lens.”

Groopman spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the AWS Summit event in San Francisco. She was joined by Jeremiah Owyang (pictured, left), analyst and founding partner at Kaleido Insights, and they discussed recent trends in cognitive IoT, a future role for the blockchain, enterprise uses for mixed reality, and Amazon’s impact on the technology stack.

This week theCUBE features Jessica Groopman and Jeremiah Owyang as Guests of the Week.

Reports on key enterprise trends

In addition to Groopman and Owyang, the other Kaleido Insights founders include Jaimy Szymanski and Rebecca Lieb. Since the firm’s start in October, Kaleido’s analysts have released a number of reports focused on technology trends impacting the consumer and enterprise ecosystems.

One trend the firm has been tracking is the area of cognitive IoT, the ability for a device to process information and initiate specific actions based on what it has learned. IBM with Watson Assistant, Cortana by Microsoft, and Amazon’s Alexa for Business are just a few of the cognitive IoT products bidding for a greater role in the enterprise.

“Now we’re seeing the shift into cognitive IoT where devices themselves can analyze or process at the edge and send learnings across a whole fleet of vehicles or across a whole array of devices about a given environment,” Groopman said.

Another tech trend that Kaleido has been tracking is the role of the blockchain as a foundation for autonomous products. The research results documented by Owyang and Groopman in a recent report found that as IoT devices continue to expand in gathering vast amounts of data, the blockchain’s distributed ledger platform could be ideal for the numerous identities, authentications and activities generated by IoT technology.

Use cases identified in the report include an IBM/Walmart pilot program to track food safety through supply chain monitoring and a fledgling company that maintains immutable records of fine art, jewelry and wines to combat forgery.

“The frequency of technologies is happening at a faster pace, and that impacts … business models and how companies have to keep up,” Owyang said. “It is really an exciting time.”

Use cases for mixed reality

In addition to IoT and the blockchain, Kaleido’s analysts have been taking a closer look at enterprise applications for mixed reality technologies. A recent report highlighted a number of barriers for adoption of virtual or augmented reality solutions, including budget and user education.

Yet, the report also found viable enterprise use cases, such as integrating VR in a collaborative fashion to design machinery or employing AR wearable devices, which can overlay important information for repair technicians in real time.

One key trend to follow is that while cognitive IoT has largely been driven by personal use, through tools like Alexa and Siri, an increase in consumer use of VR and AR could spur enterprise integration as well.

“It’s the same story and different technologies continuing the cycle,” Groopman said. “We’re really focused on these different technology convergences.”

Machine learning and AWS

A great deal of that convergence is being driven by Amazon Web Services Inc. The company took advantage of its gathering in San Francisco on April 4 to promote new features for its SageMaker platform, designed to make it easier for developers to roll out machine learning applications.

Among the announcements from AWS last week was the general availability of its AI-powered translation and transcription services, along with a “local mode” feature that allows developers to train machine learning models on notebook computers. AWS also open-sourced containers it designed for TensorFlow and MXNet machine learning frameworks.

“It’s fascinating to see how Amazon is effectively taking different strategies at every single part of the stack,” Groopman said. “Competitive landscapes are shifting all of the time with each of these new announcements.”

More significantly, AWS has embarked on an approach where, with each successive wave of announcements, the additional features and services could ultimately reduce the role of the information technology organization to that of simply providing a conduit for getting work done.

“The only thing you need from IT is the bandwidth, the pipe,” Owyang said. “Amazon is promising to do just about all of the rest.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE