This week, theCUBE industry analysts were right in the mix of things as a series of exciting tech events kicked into high gear — John Furrier at Red Hat Summit and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World.

The big news emerging out of Dell Tech World was Project Helix, which Vellante discussed with Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies Inc.

“Would you have announced Project Helix if it were not for ChatGPT?” Vellante said on the latest episode of theCUBE podcast. “And [Clarke] said, ‘Yeah, we would’ve. We’ve been working on this for a while.’ So, it wasn’t ChatGPT. At the same time, I don’t think it would have gotten the attention of the audience.”

Over at Red Hat Summit, artificial intelligence was also front-and-center with discussions around Ansible Lightspeed. Red Hat Inc. could be a model to other companies, according to Furrier. People have said that there could never be another Red Hat in open source, but according to Furrier, he thinks there could be — and it’s Red Hat.

“IBM, they’re showing some support. You had Dell, [which] has an appliance now with Red Hat on it … you’re seeing a lot of Red Hat commercial ecosystem, like from a VMware-type of role,” Furrier said. “But at the same time, they’re also in the open-source communities where they’re driving a lot of the projects. I think Red Hat could be a leadership case study.”

The open-source community is likely to be rocked hard by AI, though the full picture still needs to be fully understood, according to Furrier.

“I think AI is going to change the face of open source. I think open-source software is going to change and evolve in a dramatically better way than it is today,” he said.

Upcoming events and the Broadcom deal

In the coming days and weeks, there are several events on the tech calendar to keep an eye on, from the Data + AI Summit to HPE Discover 2023. Bigger events are coming back, and so are big announcements, especially when it comes to AI, as it was in play at AnsibleFest.

“With IBM, I think that Ansible message, the product is going to surge, because those customers are so loyal,” Furrier said. “They love it. They’ve been doing automation for years. Playbooks, automating playbooks, it’s a perfect use case for AI. Low-hanging fruit, totally operationalized already.”

When it comes to the AI gold rush, there are going to be some big questions to ask, according to Furrier. How do you tell a winner from a loser? Are you an AI arms dealer, or an AI consumer?

“I think Amazon will win. Azure will win. A lot of those suppliers; Google will win. OpenAI is going to win,” Furrier said. “And then these new emerging layers are coming out.”

There were other significant developments in the world of tech this week. Meta Platforms Inc. was fined €1.2 billion in the European Union for transferring local users’ information to its U.S. data centers.

VMware Inc., meanwhile, extended its deadline for its takeover by Broadcom Inc.

“In a lot of the hallway conversations about VMware, Broadcom, I think that when you think about the competitive environment, VMware is actually a bulwark against cloud dominance, right?” Vellante said. “Because you’ve got the hybrid cloud thing going on, you’ve got supercloud going on, you’ve got Hock Tan saying cross-cloud. Multicloud is something that he actually wants to bet on.”

That might mean VMware Tanzu might not get killed, which was going to be scrutinized very heavily. VMware customers are looking at alternatives like Red Hat, just to hedge their bets, according to Vellante.

“Even the Dell chief information officer told us a couple of weeks ago on an analyst call that we’re hedging our bets to that. They were like VMware’s cousins for a while,” Vellante said. “So they’re like, yeah, we’re a big VMware shop, but we’re looking at alternatives. You never know. I think the Broadcom VMware deal is going to create more competition.”

In addition to the Broadcom deal, Furrier said he’s working on a story tied to how fast virtual machine conversion from virtual machines to containers and Kubernetes is going.

“Cloud-native has got a really strong momentum with containers and Kubernetes. How fast is the enterprise shifting off VMs to that environment?” Furrier said, adding there is a “number one use case” he’s hearing about from people close to the situation.

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies Inc.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida

Robert Metcalf, a contributor to the development of the internet

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell

John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures

Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM

Matt Hicks, president and CEO of Red Hat

Jim Whitehurst, former president and CEO of Red Hat

Paul Cormier, chairman at Red Hat

Stu Miniman, director of market insights for hybrid platforms at Red Hat

James Cameron, film director

John Favreau, actor and filmmaker

David Floyer, CTO and co-founder of Wikibon

Warren Buffet, chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel

Joe Biden, U.S. president

Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies

Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday

Zane Rowe, chief operating officer at Workday

Ivana Delevska, founder and chief investment officer at Spear Invest

Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom Inc.

Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research

Charles Fitzgerald, author

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Photo: SiliconANGLE