It’s perhaps not surprising that the alliance initially formed between Cloudflare Inc. and Kyndryl Holdings Inc. in spring 2023 is geared toward speeding information technology modernization and driving transformation, multicloud innovation and zero-trust security. But there’s more to it than that, and the latest episode of the AnalystANGLE series examined it.

Shelly Kramer (pictured, left), managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, noted that the alliance isn’t a new partnership and, in fact, functions more as an extension of a minority existing partnership. Along with fellow analyst Bob Laliberte (right), Kramer recently spent some time with the Kyndryl team talking about how the industry is seeing a movement of enterprise networks away from dedicated backbones to different types of clouds.

“That’s becoming very common,” Kramer said. “We’re seeing a move toward SaaS applications, and there’s a very real need to transfer data between locations. Building competencies around these things has been a major focus for Kyndryl.”

Kramer and Laliberte discussed the alliance in an episode of the AnalystANGLE series for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They also discussed Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of Nefeli Networks Inc. and key AI infrastructure findings from Nvidia Corp.’s GTC 2024 event.

Cloudflare’s ecosystem continues to grow

In the Kyndryl briefing, Kramer and Laliberte discussed the fact that data center networking is starting to resurge, as not everything is moving from the cloud. There was a time when everything was moving to the cloud, according to Kramer.

“That was what everyone’s focus was,” she said. “Then as people started to move to the cloud, cost became an issue. With the advent of AI and generative AI, and concerns about data privacy and data security, all of a sudden on-prem is not all that unattractive either.”

As things start to settle out now, many companies are keeping their data centers, but they need to refresh those. There’s no doubt that organizations are becoming far more distributed than they ever were, according to Laliberte.

“Applications, as you’ve mentioned, are in private data centers, multiple public clouds, SaaS environments and also at the edge, when you start and you think about AI being able to collect that data, analyze that data in real time,” he said. “There’s a real need as these organizations are trying to accelerate that transformation to have the expertise available to them to be able to accelerate it.”

It’s a multicloud world where there may be no concern more pressing than security, according to Kramer. Everyone may be rushing to embrace AI, but security also plays a huge role.

“Customers really want simplicity,” Kramer said. “They want vendor partners who are going to meet them where they are and who are going to be able to bring the expertise that they have working with other customers and solving for some of the same challenges. All of that helps shorten time to ROI; it helps minimize costs.”

Cloudflare’s ecosystem had grown earlier in March after acquiring Nefeli Networks Inc. and by launching a new service, Magic Cloud Networking, intended to help organizations link together workloads on different cloud platforms. Such services help to drive operational efficiency across one’s environment, according to Laliberte.

“It enables and empowers the network to be able to say yes when the business comes to it and says, ‘We want to connect to this cloud; now we want to connect to this other cloud,’” he said. “That really helps to accelerate that time to value for those organizations and being able to connect to those clouds so much greater agility, much greater operational efficiency and ultimately delivering a better experience for those users in the enterprise and their customers.”

GTC 2024 brings big announcements and reveals broader goal

Finally, Kramer and Laliberte shifted to discuss Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event, a huge event that has been dubbed the “Woodstock of AI.” It’s safe to say that Nvidia rarely disappoints, with co-founder Chief Executive Jensen Huang being incredibly strategic, according to Kramer.

“Every time you think that you’ve seen the most innovation that you can possibly see, I think they come along with something else,” she said. 

News out of GTC 2024 included the release of the company’s long-awaited Blackwell platform. The company isn’t fooling around, according to Kramer.

“They’re not wasting any time, and they’re working with pretty much all the key layers in the technology ecosystem,” she said.

The goal of the company is to get AI out everywhere — into every industry, according to Laliberte. As such, Nvidia is doing its best to drive adoption, which brings with it business benefits as well.

“They’ve got their inference software …  that can go on top of all those GPUs that they’ve now sold,” Laliberte said. “They’re starting to expand. That land-and-expand strategy: ‘You love our GPUs, that’s great. We can also help you with the inferencing side as well.’”

Here’s the complete AnalystANGLE segment:

Photo: SiliconANGLE