This week, shares in CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. surged almost 24% in late trading after the company reported beats in revenue, earnings and outlook and bought security startup Flow Security Inc.

It was another wild week of news for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) to analyze on the latest episode of theCUBE Pod.

“They blew away their quarter — their Q4 [annual recurring revenue] was $3.44 billion,” Vellante said of CrowdStrike’s earnings.

Analysts are very excited about those numbers, including Vellante, who has been watching CrowdStrike ascend since 2019. The company will likely be at $10 billion before the end of the decade.

“What’s exciting to me is Palo Alto Networks … is much closer to $100 billion; they’re like $90 billion. CrowdStrike’s 70, let’s call it,” Vellante said. “But Palo Alto cited consolidation fatigue and spending fatigue. And Palo Alto has a big consolidation play.”

Security is a very bespoke set of tools. Customers might have 30, 40, sometimes hundreds of tools, according to Vellante.

“Palo Alto was benefiting from consolidation,” he said. “They were giving away free trials for six months because people weren’t spending, and so they’re trying to keep them on the hook. CrowdStrike is also a consolidation play. Very clearly, they’re not having that same problem.”

Nvidia’s stock stays high as debate continues over its monopoly

Nvidia Corp.’s stock continued to hit new highs this week. Recently, Vellante and Furrier have been debating whether Nvidia will remain a monopoly or see competition.

“I put out a Twitter poll. Most of the people, but not a majority, not more than 50%, say Nvidia is going to dominate for a decade. About a third say competition is going to level the playing field,” Vellante said. “Then about a quarter say a new leader is going to emerge. I think it’s a much lower probability than that.”

Nonetheless, Vellante has been saying on theCUBE Pod that even if competition comes forth, they’re not going to have a monopoly like Nvidia or Intel Corp. did. But he had been talking about GPU competitors, and a blind spot emerged when it came to Broadcom Inc.

“[Broadcom] has monopoly-like margins. Their strategy really came into focus when we sat down with Charlie Kawwas for a good 35 minutes last week,” Vellante said. “The big takeaway there is, they’re not making GPUs. They’re making all the connections across the XPUs, the GPU, the CPU, the neural processing unit, the language processing unit, the accelerators.”

All of those connections have to communicate with each other. Broadcom makes those components, according to Vellante.

“It’s only two companies that make both connectivity inside the chip — Nvidia with InfiniBand, obviously Broadcom, going open with Ethernet,” Vellante added. “And silicon for the switching capabilities at scale, only two companies do that — Nvidia and Broadcom. It’s, again, a duopoly with monopoly-like margins.”

What’s interesting is there is starting to be visibility on what theCUBE is calling clustered systems, according to Furrier. It’s a new systems revolution.

“We’re getting a lot of people agreeing with that. There’s kind of some consensus around that,” Furrier said.

Supercloud 6 on the way as public trust in AI sinks

On March 12, theCUBE is hosting its next Supercloud event. Supercloud 6 is going to be all about AI innovators.

“The people making that happen in AI, the newsmakers, the entrepreneurs, the big companies, because they’re the ones who’re building the next apps,” Furrier said.

The big thing that came out of the Supercomputing 2023 event and Mobile World Congress on the infrastructure side is that the infrastructure to run AI is changing, according to Furrier. At the July Supercloud event, theCUBE will feature what it calls the sixth data platform.

“Some people say, the next frontier platform, but the modern stack of analytics is changing. And people were taking about that a great length,” Furrier said. “This is the theme this year, Dave, the data equation is changing radically. The infrastructure to run on it is changing. And the apps will adapt to that because the apps are forcing it. You can’t have good AI apps without it.”

Recent data from Edelman suggests that public trust in AI is sinking. People are seeing hallucinations, and so a big inflection point is happening right now, specifically around the confidence of AI, according to Furrier.

“Which could stifle growth, pop the bubble, if you will, or it stays in line and the confidence stays high. Entrepreneurs and the large innovators, or the innovators who are making it happen, change that,” he said. “My personal bet is the bubble will pop but the confidence will stay high. The development and the developer community are going to drive the change.”

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

Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight
Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research
Liz Centoni, EVP and chief customer experience officer at Cisco
Mark Patterson, EVP and CSO of Cisco
Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM for networking at Cisco
Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of the security and collaboration business units at Cisco
Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO at Cisco
Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research

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Photo: SiliconANGLE