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Dave Vellante’s Breaking Analysis: The complete collection
Breaking Analysis is a weekly editorial program combining knowledge from SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE with spending data from Enterprise Technology Research.
Branded as theCUBE Insights, Powered by ETR, the program is our opportunity to share independent, unfiltered editorial with SiliconANGLE, theCUBE and Wikibon communities. The program and conclusions we produce are data-driven, tapping ETR’s proprietary spending data set.
Episode 221 – NVIDIA, Broadcom and the expanding breadth of AI – We attended both Nvidia Corp.’s GTC conference and Broadcom Inc.’s investor day this week where the artificial intelligence platform shift was on full display.
In our view, GTC24 was the most important event in the history of the technology industry, surpassing Steve Jobs’ iPod and iPhone launches. The event was not the largest but, in our opinion, it was the most significant in terms of its reach, vision, ecosystem impact and broad-based recognition that the AI era will permanently change the world.
Meanwhile, Broadcom’s first investor day underscored both the importance of the AI era and the highly differentiated strategies and paths that Nvidia and Broadcom are each taking. We believe Nvidia and Broadcom are currently the two best-positioned companies to capitalize on the AI wave and will each dominate their respective markets for the better part of a decade. But importantly, we see them each as enablers of a broader ecosystem that collectively will create more value than either of these firms will in and of themselves.
In this Breaking Analysis, we will share our perspectives on the state of AI and how Nvidia and Broadcom are each leading the way with dramatically different but overlapping strategies that may be headed for an eventual collision course.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 220 – Navigating NVIDIA & the AI Trade – Sell, hold or double down? – Heading into the second half of 2023, some investors felt that the semiconductor run up last summer was a harbinger for a broader tech rally. That thesis proved prescient and rewarded managers who took on risk at the time with leading firms in semiconductors, security and enterprise software. The question is, where do we go from here?
In this Breaking Analysis we welcome back Ivana Delevska, the founder and chief investment officer at Spear Invest, Nasdaq SPRX. Some have compared SPRX to a miniature version of Cathie Wood’s ARKK fund. However SPRX is more sector agnostic where Delevska focuses more broadly on growth themes such as her current emphasis on cybersecurity, semiconductors, and enterprise software.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 219 – Why CrowdStrike is separating from the cybersecurity pack – It’s been an interesting month in the cybersecurity space. The sector has been somewhat less affected by budget tightening these past twenty-four months and at the same time has benefitted from AI tailwinds. But in the past several weeks we’ve seen some separation in key highflying cybersecurity names. Specifically, Palo Alto shocked the street last month with a $600M billings forecast surprise and sounded the alarm that there were cracks in its consolidation execution. This dragged down other consolidation players in sympathy, namely CrowdStrike and Zscaler. But our research shows that the dynamics facing these three companies are quite different. Of particular note, CrowdStrike’s earnings print highlights the company’s impressive momentum while recent negativity around Zscaler is a bit of a head scratcher for us, which we’ll try to explain.
In this Breaking Analysis we take a more narrow look at the information security space and dig deeper into the continued success of CrowdStrike. With recent survey data from ETR, we continue to advance our premise that platforms beat products and we identify several levers that are powering CrowdStrike’s path to $5B by FY 2026 and to $10B by the end of the decade.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 218 – The unplanned genius of Broadcom’s route to AI dominance – Broadcom is perhaps the most unique company in the technology business. It doesn’t simply chase markets that are on steep growth curves and can deliver short term ROI. Rather it goes after established markets with durable franchises. Broadcom focuses its R&D on serving customers in these markets with major engineering investments to achieve a dominant position in each of its target sectors. And sometimes, the company lucks out with this strategy and catches a wave accidentally by design.
In this Breaking Analysis we extract key nuggets from our sit down at MWC this week with Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s Semiconductor Solutions Group, and we unpack the contrarian business technology model of Broadcom.
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Episode 217 – Cloud optimization wanes as AI slowly lifts off – The past twenty-four months have seen cloud spending face dual headwinds of macroeconomics and the ability to dial down resources as needed – i.e. cloud optimization. Nonetheless, the big four hyperscalers clocked in between $170 – $190B in IaaS and PaaS revenue last year depending on how you factor the leaked court documents suggesting Azure is much smaller than previously believed. Regardless, hyperscaler growth continued to outpace almost all markets, accelerating between 18-19% in revenue terms last year, despite their enormous size.
As we progress into 2024, IT decision makers are cautiously optimistic about spending levels, especially for the second half. All hyperscalers report that cloud optimization is slowing although pockets of cloud cost cutting remain. While AI gets all the headlines, its contribution to revenue is still a small fraction of the overall spending pie. For example, we estimate that Microsoft’s AI services accounted for around $800M this past quarter. But the trajectory for AI services and the potential uplift looks promising for all four hyperscalers. We think collectively the generative AI uplift in cloud will surpass $10B this year.
In this Breaking Analysis we update you on our latest hyperscale cloud spending and market share data. We’ll analyze the ETR survey data on cloud optimization, assess the Gen AI updraft for the big 3 US cloud players and look at some of the industry trend data on cloud spend by platform.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 216 – Intel Foundry is a bold bet filled with uncertainty – As an American, you can’t help but root for Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to succeed. His vision to bring semiconductor manufacturing leadership back to the United States is more than just a quaint nationalistic sentiment. Rather it’s a strategic imperative for the country, its military, global competitiveness and access to future technological innovations in the AI era. But his strategy is dependent upon the success of Intel both as a designer and a leading manufacturer of advanced chips.
As such this choice puts Intel in a multi-front war with highly capable leaders in several markets, including names like AMD, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and other chip designers…even perhaps OpenAI. As well Intel competes with with established manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung. Moreover, Intel’s business model has been disrupted by Arm which has created a volume standard powered by the iPhone and mobile technologies. Finally, China, Inc. looms as a long-term competitor further underscoring the imperative.
But the trillion dollar questions are: 1) What are the odds that Intel’s strategy succeeds; and 2) Are there more viable alternative strategies for both Intel and the United States?
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 215 – Slicing the Gordian Knot – A leap to real time systems of truth – In order to support the vision of the sixth data platform, that is, a capability that allows a globally consistent, real-time, intelligent digital representation of a business, we believe the industry must rethink the single system of truth.
Specifically, we envision a new data platform that marries the best of relational and nonrelational capabilities and breaks the multi-decades tradeoffs between data consistency, availability and global scale. Further, we see the emergence of a modular data platform that automates decision-making by combining historical analytic systems with transactions to enable artificial intelligence to take action.
In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome two innovators, Eric Berg, chief executive of Fauna Inc., and S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Ventures.
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Episode 214 – Enterprise Technology Predictions 2024 – Predictions about enterprise tech have never been more uncertain. They become even more challenging when you try to make forecasts that are measurable. Generally, our belief is we should be able to look back a year later and say with some degree of certainty whether the prediction came true – ideally with some quantifiable evidence to back that up.
In this Breaking Analysis and for the third year in a row, we collaborate with Erik Bradley of Enterprise Technology Research and to share our annual enterprise technology predictions.
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Episode 213 – 2024 IT spending outlook shows cautious start with optimistic finish – According to recent spending intentions data from over 1,700 information technology decision-makers, executives anticipate a 4.3% growth in technology budgets for the year, which is an improvement from the 3.5% growth seen in 2023 and higher than the 3.8% expectation from October. However, the forecasts for 2024 are back-loaded, with Q1 2024 forecasts at 2.4%, indicating that the optimism is concentrated in the second half of the year.
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Episode 212 – Unifying intelligence in the age of data apps – We believe the future of intelligent data apps will enable virtually all organizations to operate a platform that orchestrates an ecosystem similar to that of Amazon.com. By this we mean dynamically connecting and digitally representing an enterprise’s operations including its customers, partners, suppliers and even competitors. This vision includes the ability to rationalize top down plans with bottom up activities across the many dimensions of a business – e.g. demand, product availability, production capacity, geographies, etc. Unlike today’s data platforms, which generally are based on historical systems of truth, we envision a prescriptive model of a business’ operations enabled by an emerging layer that unifies the intelligence trapped within today’s application silos.
In this Breaking Analysis, we explore in depth, the semantic layer we’ve been discussing since early last year. To do so we welcome Molham Aref, the CEO of RelationalAI.
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Episode 211 – Grading Our 2023 Enterprise Technology Predictions – Predictions about the future of enterprise tech are streaming to our inboxes, literally by the thousands. Most are thoughtful and we will review those prior to publishing our 2024 predictions later in January. As is our tradition, we try to make our own predictions more challenging by citing forecasts that are measurable and have either a numeric tied to them or a binary outcome. Our belief is if we make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say with some degree of certainty whether the prediction came true or not. With some empirical evidence to back that up.
In this Breaking Analysis we grade the 2023 predictions we made with ETR’s Erik Bradley. We look back at what we said in January about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, generative AI, cloud, blockchain, data platforms, automation and tech events.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 210 – David vs Goliath reimagined – OpenAI’s approach to AI supervision – Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has people both intrigued and fearful. As a leading researcher in the field, last July, OpenAI introduced the concept of superalignment via a team created to study scientific and technical breakthroughs to guide and ultimately control AI systems that are much more capable than humans. OpenAI refers to this level of AI as superintelligence. Last week, this team unveiled the first results of an effort to supervise more powerful AI with less powerful models. While promising, the effort showed mixed results and brings to light several more questions about the future of AI and the ability of humans to actually control such advanced machine intelligence.
In this Breaking Analysis we share the results of OpenAI’s superalignment research and what it means for the future of AI. We further probe ongoing questions about OpenAI’s unconventional structure which we continue to believe is misaligned with its conflicting objectives of both protecting humanity and making money. We’ll also poke at a nuanced change in OpenAI’s characterization of its relationship with Microsoft. Finally we’ll share some data that shows the magnitude of OpenAI’s lead in the market and propose some possible solutions to the structural problem faced by the industry.
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Episode 209 – Moving beyond separation of compute & storage…Journey to the 6th data platform – We believe today’s so-called modern data stack, as currently envisioned, will be challenged by emerging use cases and AI-infused apps that begin to represent the real world, in real time, at massive data scale. To support these new applications, a change in underlying data and data center architectures will be necessary, particularly for exabyte scale workloads. Today’s generally accepted state of the art of separating compute from storage, must evolve in our view to separate compute from data and further enable compute to operate on a unified view of coherent and composable data elements. Moreover, our opinion is that AI will be used to enrich metadata to turn strings (i.e. ASCII code, files, objects, etc.) into things that represent real world capabilities of a business.
In this Breaking Analysis we continue our quest to more deeply understand the emergence of a sixth data platform that can support intelligent applications in real time. To do so we are pleased to welcome two founders of VAST Data, CEO Renen Hallak and Jeff Denworth. VAST just closed a modest $118M financing round that included Fidelity at a valuation of ~$9B, which implies a quite minor change to the cap table.
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Episode 208 – re:Invent ’23 underscores a new simplicity mandate for AWS – Generative AI has created a new mandate in enterprise tech with significant implications for all companies generally and AWS specifically. Amazon’s powerful playbook based on agility, developer choice, power, scale, reliability and security must now evolve to accommodate simplicity and coherence for mainstream customers. This imperative came into clear focus at AWS re:Invent ’23. AWS continues to innovate at a fast pace, but must now do so in a changing customer environment that increasingly values direct user productivity gains through software.
In this Breaking Analysis we share our take on how AWS is navigating this challenge. We’ll review Amazon’s strategy to compete in the nascent Gen AI era and we’ll provide commentary on the chess moves it’s making with Anthropic, Nvidia and other partners to maintain its leadership position. We’ll also discuss the challenges of doing so as a $90+B giant in a fast-moving market.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 207 – The OpenAI meltdown…Winners and losers in the battle for AI supremacy – Conventional wisdom says Microsoft is the big winner in the recent OpenAI saga. We don’t quite see it that way. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are in a worse position today than they were last Thursday, prior to the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the ongoing public drama that ensues. Microsoft and OpenAI had a huge lead in market momentum, AI adoption and feature acceleration and were setting the narrative in AI.
Our discussions with customers and industry insiders leads us to conclude that the duo has put its substantial lead at risk. While Satya Nadella is making lemonade from lemons, the window was just cracked open for the competition and it’s more clear than ever that one large language model will not rule them all.
In this Breaking Analysis we weigh in on the impacts of the OpenAI meltdown with a deeper look at the customer perspective and how it alters the competitive landscape in the battle for AI supremacy. As well, the amazing data team at ETR has run a quick survey of OpenAI Microsoft customers to gauge reactions and we’ll share that fresh data.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 206 – The copilot era takes flight at Microsoft Ignite 2023 – Microsoft Ignite 2023 was one part a celebration of yearlong technological innovations, one part announcing the general availability of previously announced products, one part vision, one part ecosystem and four parts copilots everywhere. Copilots promise an historic software-led productivity increase. Perhaps for the first time in industry history we’re seeing huge demand for software coincide with the ability to make it easier to write software. Just as AWS turned the data center into an API, copilots are turning software development into natural language, enabling many more people to create. The implications on productivity are massive and we believe will kick off a new wave of growth that will become increasingly noticeable throughout 2024.
In this Breaking Analysis we give you our impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2023. theCUBE Research Analyst George Gilbert and CUBE Collective contributor Sarbjeet Johal both weighed in for this episode and we’ll also share some recent ETR data that shows the progression of some of the major AI players in the past twelve months and the the relative impact Gen AI has had on each of their businesses.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 205 – IBM turns the corner with Watson, why 2.0 is a breakthrough opportunity – With Watson 1.0, IBM deviated from the silicon valley mantra, fail fast, as it took nearly a decade for the company to pivot off of its original vision. In our view, a different dynamic is in play today with Watson 2.0 – i.e. watsonx. IBM’s deep research in AI and learnings from its previous mistakes, have positioned the company to be a major player in the Generative AI era. Specifically, in our opinion, IBM has a leading technological foundation, a robust and rapidly advancing AI stack, a strong hybrid cloud position (thanks to Red Hat), an expanding ecosystem and a consulting organization with deep domain expertise to apply AI in industry-specific use cases.
In this Breaking Analysis we share our takeaways and perspectives from a recent trip to IBM’s research headquarters. To do so we collaborate with analyst friends in theCUBE Collective, Sanjeev Mohan, Tony Baer and Merv Adrian. We’ll also share some relevant ETR spending data to frame the conversation.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 204 – The Gen AI power law – How data diversity influences adoption – Our research indicates that the adoption of generative AI is occurring across a variety of frameworks with diverse deployment models, data sets and domain specificities. The transformative power of generative AI for industries is colossal, and we are convinced that AI will gravitate to where data lives. The power law of Gen AI, developed by theCUBE Research team, describes the adoption patterns we see emerging in the cloud, on-premises and at the edge with a long tail of highly specific domain models across every industry.
In this Breaking Analysis we revisit the Gen AI power law which informs how we see adoption happening within industries and organizations globally. We introduce new survey data from ETR that looks at some of the vendors being adopted or considered with a special peek into the emerging technology sector with data on Hugging Face, Anthropic, Cohere and Jasper. We also comment on the adoption of Meta’s Llama 2 and the potential impact of open source and other third parties on the shape of the curve. We share our estimates of Microsoft Azure’s AI revenue impact, which we see approaching a $2B run rate exiting 2023. Finally, we dig into the impact of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) using real world examples with some caveats of RAG implementations that practitioners should consider.
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Episode 203 – AI revenue riddle – Azure sees gains, when will other cloud titans see the surge? – In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Bob Solow famously observed, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This proclamation became known as the productivity paradox. Ironically, Solow’s statement preceded the greatest productivity boom since the dawn of the computer age which subsequently came to fruition in the 1990’s. It can be argued that a similar pattern is being seen today where AI is everywhere but generally not showing up in earnings numbers or productivity statistics…yet.
In this Breaking Analysis we squint through the latest earnings reports from Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon to understand what’s happening in cloud, evaluate the impact or lack thereof of AI on cloud earnings momentum and explain how we think about the future impact of generative AI and cloud.
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Episode 202 – From hype to reality, the true state of AI adoption – MIT professor and economist Erik Brynjolfsson said recently that he’d be disappointed if AI didn’t lift the current anemic 1.2% productivity growth rate to 3% or even 4%. This would be a good thing for business and government as it could potentially help with the labor shortage, drive earnings growth and increase tax revenues, which would ostensibly help address current debt levels. This is one of the promised impacts of AI. While the hype surrounding Gen AI has narrowly propped up certain sectors of the market, like AI startups and the magnificent seven, the macro effects have not been felt thus far as adoption remains largely experimental.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Supercloud 4, ETR’s Erik Bradley and Daren Brabham join the program to share the latest trends on AI adoption, how Gen AI is being used, some of the deployment models and the AI leaderboard based on spending momentum and presence in the market.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 201 – Get Ready for the Sixth Data Platform – In the next 3-5 years, we believe a set of intelligent data apps will emerge requiring a new type of modern data platform to support them. We refer to this as a sixth data platform. In our previous research we’ve used the metaphor “Uber for everyone” to describe this vision; meaning software-based systems that enable a digital representation of a business.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 200 – Lower for longer…Tech spending remains tepid – We’re getting used to the phrase, “higher for longer,” referring to the realization that interest rates are expected to remain elevated for a period of time. This trend is having an inverse effect on enterprise tech spending growth rates. Prior to the Fed’s tightening binge for example, IT decision makers (ITDMs) in aggregate expected annual technology spending to increase by 7.5%. Eleven fed interest rate hikes later, ITDMs estimate that their 2023 budgets will be up only 2.9%, with an expectation, or perhaps it’s a wishful hope, that their budgets will increase 3.8% in 2024.
In this our 200th Breaking Analysis, we preview the current spending climate and where AI fits in relation to other sectors. We’ll also share with you a snapshot of the leaders in terms of spending velocity for their platforms; and how their performance compares to peers relative to earlier survey periods.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 199 – Cisco Splunk under the microscope, joint customers weigh in – In this special Breaking Analysis, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante talks with Enterprise Technology Research’s Erik Bradley as he shares the results of ETR’s recent flash survey assessing joint customer perceptions and likely spending actions as a result of the Cisco acquisition of Splunk.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 198 – Bob Muglia on Uber for everyone…how the future of data apps will evolve – The future of intelligent data applications: Uber for everyone.
In June, we put forth our scenario about “Uber for all.” We believe a new breed of data apps is emerging and we used Uber as an example where data about people, places and things is brought together in a data-coherent, real-time system.
In this special Breaking Analysis, analysts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert sat down with friend of theCUBE, entrepreneur, investor and software executive, Bob Muglia. Bob formerly worked at Microsoft, was the CEO of Snowflake and is a visionary trend spotter.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 197 – Cloud security powers CrowdStrike momentum, Gen AI is next – George Kurtz is pumped up…and why not? CrowdStrike’s business appears to be on a fast track and entering a new phase of growth, despite the difficult macro and elongated sales cycles. The company’s products are considered best in class, its business is growing steadily and an improved profitability and cash flow outlook had investors excited, at least up until this week. A still challenging environment and a rich 13X revenue multiple perhaps led to some profit taking, but Gen AI could be the next catalyst for the company. In the race to close the SecOps staffing gap, CrowdStrike has what appears to be a strong play with a natural language-based intelligent assistant known as Charlotte AI.
In this Breaking Analysis we update our scenario on security leader CrowdStrike. We’ll review the company’s recent progress, share survey data that shows where it is strong and where there may be icebergs ahead. And we’ll preview Fal.Con 2023 which takes place next week in Las Vegas.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 196 – Copilot or competitor – How gen AI bolsters and buffets UiPath’s Northstar – UiPath’s recent earnings beat and raise provides some evidence that thus far, Gen AI has not been dilutive for the company. As an early leader that is transforming beyond RPA toward end-to-end enterprise automation, UiPath, like all automation providers, has always faced adoption headwinds beyond isolated deployments. In this sense, Gen AI should bolster adoption and be a positive force. The flip side is that widely available tools like chatbots and generalized foundation models could eat away at the low end of the automation TAM, highlighting the urgency for companies like UiPath to move up market and accelerate innovation that brings differentiation from commoditized tools; and, importantly, create distance from embedded AI within mainstream enterprise SaaS platforms like Slack GPT and Salesforce Einstein.
In this Breaking Analysis we briefly review the recent earnings print from UiPath. We’ll look at ETR survey data that shows Microsoft Power Automate’s impact on the automation market and how it is forcing UiPath to target larger accounts with a more functional product set. As well we’ll look at the impact that AI is having in these larger accounts and test UiPath management assertions that Gen AI will be a tailwind for the company.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 195 – Google goes all in on the AI cloud – At Cloud Next, Google showcased its strong leadership position in data and AI. In our view, Google’s messaging, demos and tech-centric narrative have broad appeal for developers and next generation startups. As well, the company’s focus on solutions, contrasts its strategy to the typically disjointed services we’ve seen from AWS over the past decade. Google also showed off an expanded ecosystem of GSIs and smaller CSPs, encouraging the broad use of Google’s kit globally. While Google remains a distant third in the Iaas/PaaS race, with revenue one-fifth the size of AWS, it is playing the long game and betting the house on AI as a catalyst to its cloud future.
In this Breaking Analysis we unpack the key takeaways from Google Cloud Next with Rob Strechay and George Gilbert. We’ll share ETR data that positions Google’s AI relative to other leaders and we’ll contrast Google’s data-centric strategy with traditional architectural models.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 194 – Snowflake has Momentum with AWS & Microsoft…Why Google may not be Next – Recent earnings prints from Amazon and Snowflake, along with new survey data, have provided additional context on top of the two events that Snowflake and Databricks each hosted last June. Specifically, we believe that the effects of cloud optimization are still being felt but are nearing the end of peak negative impact on cloud companies.
Snowflake’s recent renewal with Microsoft better aligns sales incentives and should improve the company’s traction with Microsoft Azure, a platform that has long favored Databricks. Google however remains a different story as its agenda is to build out its own data cloud stack, rather than supporting Snowflake’s aspirations.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 193 – VMware’s Future – Navigating Multi cloud Complexity & GenAI Under Broadcom’s Wing – The FTC continues to drag its feet on approving Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Ironically, in our view, these delays only hurt the very competitive environment the FTC claims to be protecting. The AI era is accelerating at a breakneck pace and the big 3 hyperscale cloud vendors already have a sizable lead on legacy incumbents. If preserving competition is truly the agenda of the U.S. government, it should recognize that VMware, its enterprise ecosystem and market forces have the potential to neutralize cross cloud complexity and give customers a viable alternative to increasingly powerful public cloud players.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of VMWare Explore 2023, we revisit our views on Broadcom’s rationale and likely actions post acquisition. We’ll share current ETR survey data to place VMware’s position in context to the major cloud players, speculate on its AI agenda and give a preview of next week’s VMware Explore. To do so we welcome CUBE analyst Rob Strechay and friend of theCUBE, Zeus Kerravala, principal of ZK Research.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 192 – Cloud vs. On-Prem Showdown: The Future Battlefield for Generative AI Dominance – The data from enterprise customers is clear but conflicted. While 94% of customers say they’re spending more on AI this year, they’re doing so with budget constraints that will steal from other initiatives. As well, the choice of where customers plan to run generative AI is split almost exactly down the middle in terms of public cloud vs. on-premises/edge. Further complicating matters, developers report the experiences in the public cloud with respect to feature richness and velocity of innovation has been outstanding. At the same time, organizations express valid concerns about IP leakage, compliance, legal risks and cost that will limit their use of the public cloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll share the most recent data and thinking around the adoption of large language models and address the factors to consider when thinking about how the market will evolve. As always, we’ll share the latest ETR data to shed new light on key issues customers face balancing risk with time to value.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 191 – Tech Stocks Beyond the Magnificent Seven – After a tough 2022, the first half of 2023 has shown impressive strength paying off earlier technology bets. For sure investors in the so-called Magnificent Seven, i.e. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla have been rewarded. But sharp investors have sought alpha beyond these names, riding the wave of secular trends in AI, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and software as well as other emerging spaces like cleantech and robotics. As we enter the second half of 2023, the run up in tech combined with macro uncertainty has many investors taking a cautious posture. But prudent earnings guidance sets up for a positive outlook in the mid-term, especially for those companies that can capitalize on the AI wave.
In this Breaking Analysis we’re pleased to have back, founder and Chief Investment Officer of Spear Invest, Ivana Delevska to assess the current state of the market and explore how this investor is playing AI’s rising tide. We’ll also analyze ETR data to drill deeper into semis, cloud infrastructure, generative AI, cybersecurity and Snowflake.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 190 – What Leaked Court Docs Tell us About AWS, Azure & Google Cloud Market Shares – Recently leaked court documents during the Microsoft Activision hearing require us to revisit our cloud forecasts and market share data. The poorly redacted docs, which have since been removed from public viewing, suggest that Microsoft’s Azure revenue is at least 25% lower than our previous estimates. As a result, we’ve cut and revised our Azure revenue figures which in turn increases AWS’ big 4 hyperscale cloud market share. Our new estimates show that AWS maintains a greater than 50% share of revenue through 2023. While the change also helps Google Cloud, its market share is only modestly affected.
In this Breaking Analysis we update our hyperscaler cloud revenue estimates and market share data. We’ll also explain how the ETR data on cloud should be interpreted in this context and look forward to potential catalysts for cloud growth, including acceleration in Q4 attributable to generative AI.
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Episode 189 – AI gives cyber attackers the advantage…for now – Cloud complexity, tools sprawl and the AI awakening further tip the balance in favor of cyber attackers. Combined with corporate inertia, AI-washing, LLM inconsistency and the pace of change, we believe for now anyway, adversaries have the advantage over defenders. Moreover, macro spending headwinds continue to force organizations to make budget tradeoffs, not the least of which is how to fund AI experiments and deployments. Notably, however, 45% of organizations are using LLMs in production for use cases that may very well improve the productivity of SecOps teams in the long run and accelerate the cat and mouse game back to a state of quasi-equilibrium.
In this Breaking Analysis we share key takeaways from Supercloud 3 – AI meets cloud security – and put forth new spending data from the latest ETR survey that shows which security firms are best positioned in the AI race to capitalize on the wave.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 188 – AI won’t be a winner takes all market – The AI heard ’round the world has put the machine intelligence sector back in the spotlight. But when you squint beyond the press hype, the data shows that artificial intelligence is now the number one sector in terms of relative spending velocity in the ETR taxonomy. Normally market hype leads deployments, but the data suggests that spending activity and market penetration for AI are coinciding with the hype. While hyperscale cloud players are reaping the rewards, we think this is a rising tide that’s going to lift all AI ships, those both plainly in sight and others that may not be so visible.
In this Breaking Analysis we dig deeper into the AI space with spending data from ETR and one of the best minds in tech generally, and AI specifically, Jeff Jonas, CEO, founder, and chief scientist at Senzing.
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Episode 187 – Connecting the dots on the emerging Databricks tech stack – The recent Databricks Data+AI Summit attracted a large audience and, like Snowflake Summit, featured a strong focus on large language models, unification and bringing AI to the data. While customers demand a unified platform to access all their data, Databricks and Snowflake are attacking the problem from different perspectives. In our view, the market size justifies the current enthusiasm seen around both platforms but it’s unlikely that either company has a knockout blow for the other. This is not a head on collision. Rather Snowflake is likely years ahead in terms of operationalizing data. Developers can build applications on one platform, like Oracle when it won the market, that perform analysis and take action. Databricks likely has a similar lead in terms of unifying all types of analytic data – e.g. BI, predictive analytics & generative AI. Developers can build analytic applications across heterogeneous data, like Palantir today. But they have to access external operational applications to take action.
In this Breaking Analysis we follow up last week’s research by connecting the dots on the emerging tech stack we see forming from Databricks. With an emphasis on how the company is approaching generative AI, unification and governance…and what it means for customers. To do so we tap the knowledge of three experts who attended the event, CUBE analysts Rob Strechay and George Gilbert and AI market maven Andy Thurai of Constellation Research.
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Episode 186 – Connecting the Dots on Snowflake’s Data Cloud Ambitions – Over the past several months we’ve produced a number of in-depth analyses laying out our mental model for the future of data platforms. There are two core themes: 1) Data from people, places, things, and activities in the real world drives applications, not people typing into a UI; and 2) Informing and automating decisions means all data must be accessible. That drives a change from data locked in application silos to application logic being embedded in a platform that manages an end-to-end representation of an enterprise in its data.
This week’s Snowflake Summit further confirmed our expectations with a strong top line message of “All Data / All Workloads” and a technical foundation that supports an expanded number of ways to access data. Squinting through the messaging and firehose of product announcements, we believe Snowflake’s core differentiation is its emerging ability to be a complete platform for data applications. Just about all competitors either analyze data or manage data. But no one vendor truly does both. To be precise, managing data doesn’t mean running pipelines or serving analytic queries or AI/ML models. It means managing operational data so that analytics can inform or automate operational activities captured in transactions. With data as the application foundation, the platform needs robust governance.
In this week’s Breaking Analysis, we try to connect the dots between Snowflake’s high level messaging and its technical foundation to better understand the core value it brings to customers and partners. As well, we’ll explore the ETR data with some initial input from the Databricks Data + AI Summit to assess the position and prospects of these two leaders along with the key public cloud players.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 185 – HPE wants to turn supercomputing leadership into gen AI profits – HPE’s announcement of an AI cloud for large language models highlights a differentiated strategy that the company hopes will lead to sustained momentum in its high performance computing business. While we think HPE has some distinct advantages with respect to its supercomputing IP, the public cloud players have a substantial lead in AI with a point of view that generative AI is fully dependent on the cloud and its massive compute capabilities. The question is can HPE bring unique capabilities and a focus to the table that will yield competitive advantage and ultimately, profits in the space?
In this Breaking Analysis we unpack HPE’s LLM-as-a-service announcements from the company’s recent Discover conference and we’ll try to answer the question: Is HPEs strategy a viable alternative to today’s public and private cloud gen AI deployment models, or is it ultimately destined to be a niche player in the market? To do so we welcome to the program CUBE analyst Rob Strechay and Vice President / principal analyst from Constellation Research, Andy Thurai.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 184 – Uber’s architecture represents the future of data apps…meet its architects – Uber has one of the most amazing business models ever created. The company’s mission is underpinned by technology that helps people go anywhere and get anything. The results have been stunning. In just over a decade, Uber has become a firm with more than $30 billion in annual revenue, an annual bookings run rate of $126B and a market capitalization near $90 billion today.
Moreover, the company’s productivity metrics are 3-5 times greater than what you’d find at a typical technology company when, for example, measured by revenue per employee. In our view, Uber’s technology stack represents the future of enterprise data apps where organizations will essentially create real time digital twins of their businesses and in doing so, deliver enormous customer value.
In this Breaking Analysis, we introduce you to one of the architects behind Uber’s groundbreaking fulfillment platform. We’ll explore their objectives, the challenges they had to overcome, how Uber has done it and why we believe their platform is a harbinger for the future.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 183 – Snowflake Summit will reveal the future of data apps…here’s our take – Our research and analysis points to a new modern data stack that is emerging where apps will be built from a coherent set of data elements that can be composed at scale. Demand for these apps will come from organizations that wish to create a digital twin of their business to represent people, places, things, and the activities that connect them, to drive new levels of productivity and monetization. Further, we expect Snowflake, at its upcoming conference, will expose its vision to be the best platform on which to develop this new breed of data apps. In our view, Snowflake is significantly ahead of the pack but faces key decision points along the way to its future to protect this lead.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Snowflake Summit later this month, we lay out a likely path for Snowflake to execute on this vision; and we address the milestones and challenges of getting there. As always, we’ll look at what the ETR data tells us about the current state of the market. To do all this we welcome back CUBE contributor, George Gilbert.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 182 – Cisco needs to simplify…Here’s how – With a nearly $60B revenue run rate, growing at 14% and throwing off over $5B in operating cash last quarter, Cisco has an awesome business. But customers are vocal about the complexity of Cisco’s portfolio and if not addressed head on, the company risks encountering friction beyond just economic headwinds. We believe Cisco’s challenges are most decidedly not product breadth and depth, rather the company’s mandate is to integrate the piece parts of its intricate offerings to create more facile and seamless experiences for customers.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Cisco Live US, we dig deeper into Cisco’s business and double click on three key areas of its portfolio including: 1) Security; 2) Networking; and 3) Observability. With spending data from ETR and a guest appearance from SiliconANGLE contributor and market watcher Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 181 – The future of AI is real time data…Meantime GPUs are making all the headlines – The era of AI everything continues to excite. But unlike the Internet era, where any company announcing a dotcom anything immediately rose in value, the AI gods appear to be more selective. Nvidia beat its top line whisper number by more than $300M and the company’s value is rapidly approaching one trillion dollars. Marvell narrowly beat expectations this week but cited future bandwidth demand driven by AI and the stock was up more than 20% on Friday. Broadcom was up nearly 10% on sympathy with the realization that connect-centricity beyond the CPU is what the company does really well. Meanwhile, other players like Snowflake, which also narrowly beat earnings Wednesday and touted AI as a future tailwind, got hammered as customers dial down cloud consumption.
In this Breaking Analysis we look at the infrastructure of AI examining the action at the silicon layer specifically around Nvidia’s momentum. Since much of AI is about data, we’ll also look at the spending data on two top data platforms, Snowflake and Databricks to see what the survey data says and examine the future of real time data and automation as a catalyst for massive productivity growth in the economy.
To do so we have a special Breaking Analysis panel with John Furrier and David Floyer.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 180 – The AI powered hybrid multi super cloud – AI will now add superpowers to every triggering buzzword, hence the title of this week’s post. Look past the buzz and you’ll find substance somewhere. The spring conference season is kicking into high gear, so it’s a time to get serious and extract the signal from the event noise. This week we’ll see Microsoft Build, which will no doubt volley shots back from the messaging at Google I/O. Two other big events will take place this week, Red Hat Summit / Ansible Fest in Boston and the annual Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. theCUBE will be covering both of these shows and we want to take this opportunity to update you on the state of hybrid multi-cloud…what we call supercloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we examine some of the key infrastructure players in hybrid multi-cloud with a focus on Red Hat and Dell Technologies, two firms that increasingly are partnering with each other as VMware’s future evolves. We’ll share recent ETR survey data on the position of several other hybrid/cross-cloud players including Cloudflare, Equinix, HPE, IBM, Oracle, VMware and others. We’ll also share what we expect to hear at Red Hat Summit and Dell Technologies World this year.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 179 – Searching for gold in enterprise AI – The AI gold rush is on. The paths to monetization are seemingly endless but the most obvious converge on making humans more productive or supercharging existing business models like search advertising or subscription licenses. Much of AI adoption in enterprise IT is hidden. Our research shows a very high overlap (around 40-60%) between AI adoption in enterprise tech and embedded AI inside software from the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, Oracle and other major players. But the rapid advancements of tools from AI leaders and an emerging group of independent firms is causing customers to think differently. Catalyzed by the OpenAI Microsoft partnership, organizations are rapidly trying to figure out how to apply these tools to create competitive advantage. Every firm on the planet wants to ride the AI wave. Virtually overnight, investment capital has shifted to fund early stage AI startups with much less funding required relative to previous boom cycles.
In this Breaking Analysis we review ETR data to quantify the state of AI spending in the enterprise and look at the positions of several key players in the space that offer AI tools and platforms. To do so we invite Andy Thurai, CUBE contributor, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. Andy will help us unpack the hits and misses from this past week’s Google IO conference and give us his perspectives on what it takes to catch the AI wave and avoid becoming driftwood.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 178 – Desperately Seeking Cloud Repatriation – While we’ve been skeptical about repatriation as a notable movement, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is happening in certain pockets. Even though we still don’t see cloud repatriation broadly showing in the numbers, certain examples have caught our attention. In addition, the potential impact of artificial intelligence raises some interesting questions about where infrastructure should be physically located and causes us to revisit our premise that repatriation is an isolated and negligible trend.
In this Breaking Analysis we look at a number of sources, including the experiences of 37signals, which has documented its departure from public clouds. We’ll also examine the relationship between repatriation and SRE Ops skill sets. As always we’ll look at survey data from our partners at ETR, a recent FinOps study published by Vega Cloud and revisit the Cloud Repatriation Index, which we believe is breaking a three-year trend.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 177 – Don’t be fooled by slowing cloud growth…cost optimization is a feature not a bug – The big three US cloud players all announced earnings this past week and, as expected, cloud growth is slowing. But don’t kid yourselves. Hyperscale clouds remain the epicenter of innovation in tech and foundation models like GPT will only serve to harden this fundamental fact. Our data suggests the deceleration in cloud spend is a function of two related factors: 1) Cautious consumption patterns; and 2) Aggressive cloud optimization, which is being promoted by the big three cloud vendors in an attempt to lock in customers to longer term commitments. There is still no clear evidence in the numbers that repatriation is a factor. Rather, the ability to quickly dial down spending and pause projects is an attractive feature of cloud computing and one that, until now, has never really been seen on a broad market basis.
In this Breaking Analysis we try to explain the implications of this seemingly simple but nuanced dynamic. We’ll review the latest hyperscale cloud data for the big three players, share our analysis of certain comments made by cloud executives and show you the latest ETR data on spending and market presence in the cloud,
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 176 – RSA 2023 Security Identity Crisis Part 2 – The narrative from security vendors is organizations don’t spend enough money on cyber defense. Maybe…but will spending more actually address the problems organizations face? The conventional wisdom is it will help; or at least it can’t hurt, but as we and others have pointed out over the years, a crowded market and mega VC funding have created more tools, more complexity and more billionaires…but are we safer?
In this Breaking analysis we follow up last week’s episode and continue with Part 2. In an homage to the keynote from RSA CEO Rohit Ghai, we ask, is there a looming identity crisis in the security industry? This week we’re excited to introduce the newest member of the SiliconANGLE editorial team, long time journalist, David Strom. With David, we’ll unpack the data and bring additional context to the ETR body of work. We’ll also look at some recent data from Unit 42, Palo Alto’s threat intelligence and response division. As well, we’ll dig into the anatomy of a recent double supply chain hack.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 175 – RSA 2023 highlights an identity crisis in the age of AI – In this Breaking Analysis, theCUBE host Dave Vellante updates on the latest trends in the cybersecurity market and what to expect at the RSA Conference 2023.
Join our real-time analysis coverage from #RSAC here: https://www.thecube.net/rsa-conference-2023
We’ll also share the latest Enterprise Technology Research spending data and drill into the areas of cybersecurity that are seeing the most action. As always, we’ll highlight those companies with the strongest (and weakest) momentum and close with a look at some of the emerging technology players in security that might be ripe for acquisition.
To do all this, we once again welcome in our colleague Erik Bradley from ETR.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 174 – Hidden Gems from HPE GreenLake Storage Day – On Tuesday, April 4, HPE invited a number of industry analysts to participate in HPE GreenLake Storage Day. Notably, HPE declared 2023 the year of storage. While the company made several storage-related announcements, perhaps even more interesting was what the event tells us about HPE’s culture, its strategy and the future direction of the company.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll share our takeaways from HPE’s event, held in Houston, Texas, which included attendance at Antonio Neri’s quarterly all-hands meeting. We’ll try to emphasize areas that have not necessarily been the focus of most press and industry analyst write ups to date. We’ll also take a look at the latest ETR survey data to put HPE’s market position in context across several of its major segments.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 173 – Semis rebound but enterprise tech spending remains soft – A rebound in semiconductor stocks has many investors asking if this is a harbinger of good news for the broader enterprise tech sector. Indeed the SOXX semiconductor ETF is up nearly 30% year to date as of this posting, as are bellwether fab suppliers like Applied Materials and Lam Research. Nvidia is up over 90% YTD and AMD over 50%. Even the beleaguered Intel is up 22%. But key enterprise software names have not yet rebounded and according to this week’s guest, the divergence between semis and B2B software is getting hard to ignore.
In this Breaking analysis we examine the the bifurcation between the performance of semis and broader enterprise tech. And we’ll try to answer the question: Is the uptick in semiconductors an early indicator of a broader enterprise tech recovery, or is this a false signal that warrants continued caution? To examine these issues we welcome back Ivana Delevska, the founder and chief investment officer of SPEAR Invest.
All statements made regarding companies or securities are strictly beliefs, points of view and opinions held by SiliconANGLE Media, Enterprise Technology Research, other guests on theCUBE and guest writers. Such statements are not recommendations by these individuals to buy, sell or hold any security. The content presented does not constitute investment advice and should not be used as the basis for any investment decision. You and only you are responsible for your investment decisions.
Disclosure: Many of the companies cited in Breaking Analysis are sponsors of theCUBE and/or clients of Wikibon. None of these firms or other companies have any editorial control over or advanced viewing of what’s published in Breaking Analysis.
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Episode 172 – Which tech firms are most exposed to the banking crisis? – The viral awareness and adoption of foundation models like ChatGPT have created both an opportunity and threat to automation platforms generally and RPA point tools specifically. On the one hand, large language models can reduce complexity and accelerate the adoption of enterprise automation platforms. The flip side is software robots are designed to improve human productivity through intelligent automation and GPT models could cannibalize some, if not many use cases initially targeted by RPA vendors. This reality is causing customers to rethink their automation strategies and vendors to rapidly evolve their messaging to position foundation models as an accelerant to their platforms.
In this Breaking Analysis we provide you with a perspective on how foundation models could impact automation platforms. We review ETR data that quantifies the ascendency of OpenAI. We also show survey data that measures the overlap between ML/AI systems and automation platforms. Then we review the recent quarterly performance of UiPath and share how we think the company must position itself with respect to the onslaught of noise and potential disruption from GPT models.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 171 – GPT models are a two edged sword for automation platforms – The viral awareness and adoption of foundation models like ChatGPT have created both an opportunity and threat to automation platforms generally and RPA point tools specifically. On the one hand, large language models can reduce complexity and accelerate the adoption of enterprise automation platforms. The flip side is software robots are designed to improve human productivity through intelligent automation and GPT models could cannibalize some, if not many use cases initially targeted by RPA vendors. This reality is causing customers to rethink their automation strategies and vendors to rapidly evolve their messaging to position foundation models as an accelerant to their platforms.
In this Breaking Analysis we provide you with a perspective on how foundation models could impact automation platforms. We review ETR data that quantifies the ascendency of OpenAI. We also show survey data that measures the overlap between ML/AI systems and automation platforms. Then we review the recent quarterly performance of UiPath and share how we think the company must position itself with respect to the onslaught of noise and potential disruption from GPT models.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 170 – Databricks faces critical strategic decisions…here’s why – When Apache Spark became a top level project in 2014, and shortly thereafter burst onto the big data scene, it along with the public cloud disrupted the big data market. Databricks cleverly optimized its tech stack for Spark and took advantage of the cloud to deliver a managed service that has become a leading AI and data platform among data scientists and data engineers. However, emerging customer data requirements and market forces are conspiring in a way that we believe will cause modern data platform players generally and Databricks specifically to make some key directional decisions and perhaps even reinvent themselves.
In this Breaking Analysis we do a deeper dive into Databricks. We explore its current impressive market momentum using ETR survey data. We’ll also lay out how customer data requirements are changing and what we think the ideal data platform will look like in the mid-term. We’ll then evaluate core elements of the Databricks portfolio against that future vision and close with some strategic decisions we believe the company and its customers face.
To do so we welcome in our good friend George Gilbert, former equities analyst, market analyst and principal at Tech Alpha Partners.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 169 – MWC 2023 goes beyond consumer & deep into enterprise tech – While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, over time, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones captured much of the agenda at Mobile World Congress, now MWC. And while device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer lifecycles and the disaggregation of the network stack have created more interest in enterprise-class technologies than ever before. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus telecommunications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade.
In this Breaking Analysis we bring you part 2 of our ongoing coverage of MWC 2023. With some new data on enterprise players specifically within large telco environments. We’ll also take a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news from the show and corresponding themes ahead of MWC. We’ll close with the key innovation areas we’ll be covering at the show on theCUBE.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 168 – MWC 2023 highlights telco transformation & the future of business – The world’s leading telcos are often branded as monopolies that lack innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency, connectivity and living off of transmission services. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless services, how will telcos modernize, become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G, private wireless and a spate of new innovations in infrastructure, cloud, data, AI and apps? It’s become table stakes for carriers to evolve their hardened, proprietary infrastructure stacks to more open, flexible, cloud-like models. But doing so brings risks that telcos must carefully balance as they strive to deliver consistent quality of service while at the same time moving faster and avoiding disruption.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking a transformation that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We’ll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they’re faring in the telecomms vertical. And we’ll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade.
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Episode 167 – Google’s Point of View on Confidential Computing – Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data in use and isolating data from apps and other host resources in fenced off enclaves. The concept of confidential computing is gaining popularity, especially in the cloud computing space where sensitive data is commonly stored and processed. However, there are some who view confidential computing as an unnecessary technology and a marketing ploy by cloud providers, aimed at calming customers who are cloud-phobic.
In this Breaking Analysis we revisit the notion of confidential computing and explore whether it’s just marketing or a key part of a trusted security strategy. To do so we’ll invite two Google experts to the show. But before we get there let’s summarize the overall market climate briefly with some ETR data.
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Episode 166 – Cloud players sound a cautious tone for 2023 – The unraveling of market enthusiasm continued in Q4 of 2022 with the earnings reports from the U.S. hyperscalers now all in. As we said earlier this year, even the cloud is not immune from the macro headwinds and the cracks in the armor we saw from the data we shared last summer are playing out into 2023. For the most part, actuals are disappointing beyond expectations, including our own. It turns out that our estimates for the big 3 hyperscale revenue missed by $1.2 billion or 2.7% lower than we had forecast from our most recent November estimates. We expect decelerating growth rates for the hyperscalers will continue through the summer of 2023 and won’t abate until comparisons get easier.
In this Breaking Analysis we share our view of what’s happening in cloud markets – not just for the hyperscalers but other firms that have hitched a ride on the cloud. And we’ll share new ETR data that shows why these trends are playing out, tactics customers are employing to deal with their cost challenges and how long the pain is likely to last.
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Episode 165 – Enterprise Technology Predictions 2023 – Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say with some degree of certainty whether the prediction came true or not. With evidence to back that up.
In this Breaking Analysis we aim to do just that with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security – lots to talk about there – generative AI, cloud and supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, Snowflake and other key players, automation, events and we may even have some bonus predictions.
To make all this happen we welcome back for the third year in a row, Erik Bradley our colleague from ETR. As well, you can check out how we did with our 2022 predictions.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 164 – ChatGPT Won’t Give OpenAI First Mover Advantage – OpenAI, the company, and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Microsoft reportedly is investing an additional $10B in the startup. But in our view, while the hype around ChatGPT is justified, we don’t believe OpenAI will lock up the market with its first mover advantage. Rather we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal, and the compute power it has to run the system. This market is unlikely to display winner take all dynamics and will probably evolve in a more fragmented fashion than cloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we unpack the excitement around ChatGPT and debate the premise that the company’s early entry into the space may not confer “game over” advantage to OpenAI. To do so we welcome CUBE collaborator Sarbjeet Johal & John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE.
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Episode 163 – Supercloud2 Explores Cloud Practitioner Realities & the Future of Data Apps – Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us, want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their business. They want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud and at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing tradeoffs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures and visions of what we call Supercloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud2, share key findings leading up to the event and highlight some of the areas we’ll be probing in the live program.
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Episode 162 – CIOs in a holding pattern but ready to strike at monetization – Recent conversations with IT decision makers show a stark contrast between the period exiting 2023 versus the mindset leaving 2022. CIOs are generally funding new initiatives by pushing off or cutting lower-priority items. While security efforts are still being funded, those that enable business initiatives that generate revenue take priority over cleaning up legacy technical debt. The bottom line is, for the moment at least, the mindset is not to cut everything, rather it’s to put a pause on cleaning up legacy hairballs and continue to fund initiatives to drive monetization. Cloud has become fundamental and getting data “right” is a consistent theme that appears to be an underpinning of initiatives getting funded today.
In this Breaking Analysis we tap recent discussions from two primary sources: year-end ETR roundtables with IT decision makers and conversations on theCUBE with data, cloud and IT architecture practitioners.
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Episode 161 – AI goes mainstream but ROI remains elusive – A decade of big data investments combined with cloud scalability, the rise of more cost effective processing and the introduction of advanced tooling has catapulted machine intelligence to the forefront of technology investments. No matter what job you have, your operation will be AI powered within five years and machines may be doing your job in the future.
Artificial intelligence is being infused into applications, infrastructure, equipment and virtually every aspect of our lives. AI is proving to be extremely helpful at controlling vehicles, speeding medical diagnoses, processing language, advancing science and generally raising the stakes on what it means to apply technology for business advantage.
But business value realization has been a challenge for most organizations due to lack of skills, complexity of programming models, immature technology integration, sizable up front investments, ethical concerns and lack of business alignment. Mastering AI technology and a focus on features will not be a requirement for success in our view. Rather figuring out how and where to apply AI to your business will be the crucial gate. That means understanding the business case, picking the right technology partner, experimenting in bite sized chunks and quickly identifying winners to double down on from an investment standpoint.
In this Breaking Analysis we update you on the state of AI with a focus on interpreting the latest ETR survey data around ML/AI and data. We’ll explore what it means for the competitive environment and what to look for in the future. To do so we invite into our studios Andy Thurai of Constellation Research. Andy covers AI deeply, he knows the players and the pitfalls of AI investment.
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Episode 160 – Grading our 2022 enterprise technology predictions – Nailing technology predictions in 2022 was tricky business. Projections on the performance of markets, identifying IPO prospects and making binary forecasts on data, AI, the macro spending climate, along with other related topics in enterprise tech, carried much uncertainty. 2022 was characterized by a seesaw economy where central banks were restructuring their balance sheets, the war in Ukraine fueled inflation, supply chains were a mess and the unintended consequences of digital acceleration are still being sorted.
In this Breaking Analysis we continue our annual tradition of openly grading our previous year’s enterprise tech predictions. You may or may not agree with our self-grading system but we give you the data to draw your own conclusions.
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Episode 159 – How Palo Alto Networks Became the Gold Standard of Cybersecurity – Palo Alto Networks has earned a reputation as the leader in security. You can measure this in revenue, market cap, execution and, most importantly, conversations with CISOs. The company is on track to double its revenues to nearly $7B in FY23 from FY20. This despite macro headwinds which will likely continue through next year. Palo Alto owes its position to a clarity of vision and strong execution of a TAM expansion strategy bolstered by key acquisitions and integrations into its cloud & SaaS offerings.
In this Breaking Analysis, and ahead of Palo Alto Ignite, we bring you the next chapter on top of last week’s cybersecurity update. We’ll dig into the ETR spending data on Palo Alto Networks, provide a glimpse of what to look for at Ignite and posit what Palo Alto needs to do to stay on top of the hill.
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Episode 158 – Cyber Firms Revert to the Mean – While by no means a safe haven, the cybersecurity sector has outpaced the broader tech market by a meaningful margin. That is up until very recently. Cyber security remains the number one technology priority for the c-suite but as we’ve previously reported, the CISO’s budget has constraints; just like other technology investments. Recent trends show that economic headwinds have elongated sales cycles, pushed deals into future quarters and, just like other tech initiatives, are pacing cybersecurity investments and breaking them into smaller chunks.
In this Breaking Analysis we explain how cybersecurity trends are reverting to the mean and tracking more closely with other technology investments. We’ll make a couple of valuation comparisons to show the magnitude of the challenge and which cyber firms are feeling the heat, and which aren’t as much. We’ll then show the latest survey data from ETR to quantify the contraction in spending momentum and close with a glimpse at the landscape of emerging cybersecurity companies that could be ripe for acquisition, consolidation or disruptive to the broader market.
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Episode 157 – re:Invent 2022 marks the next chapter in data & cloud – The ascendency of AWS under the leadership of Andy Jassy was marked by a tsunami of data and corresponding cloud services to leverage data. Those services mainly came in the form of primitives – i.e. basic building blocks that were used by developers to create more sophisticated capabilities.
AWS in the 2020s, led by CEO Adam Selipsky, will be marked by four high level trends in our view: 1) A rush of data that will dwarf anything previously seen; 2) Doubling down on investments in the basic elements of cloud – compute, storage, database, security, etc; 3) Greater emphasis on end-to-end integration of AWS services to make data accessible to more professionals and further accelerate cloud adoption; and 4) Significantly deeper business integration of cloud, beyond IT, as an underlying element of organizational transformation.
In this Breaking Analysis we extract and analyze nuggets from John Furrier’s annual sit down with the CEO of AWS. We’ll share data from ETR and other sources to set the context for the market and competition in cloud and we’ll give you our glimpse of what to expect at re:Invent 2022.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 156 – Snowflake caught in the storm clouds – A better than expected earnings report in late August got people excited about Snowflake again but the negative sentiment in the market has weighed heavily on virtually all growth tech stocks. Snowflake is no exception. As we’ve stressed many times, the company’s management is on a long term mission to simplify the way organizations use data. Snowflake is tapping into a multi-hundred billion dollar total available market and continues to grow at a rapid pace. In our view the company is embarking on its third major wave of innovation, data apps, while its first and second waves are still bearing significant fruit. For short term traders focused on the next 90 or 180 days, that probably doesn’t matter much. But those taking a longer view are asking, should we still be optimistic about the future of this high flier or is it just another over-hyped tech play?
In this Breaking Analysis we take a look at the most recent survey data from ETR to see what clues and nuggets we can extract to predict the near future and the long term outlook for Snowflake.
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Episode 155 – Cloudflare’s Supercloud…What Multi Cloud Could Have Been – Over the past decade, Cloudflare has built a global network that has the potential to become the fourth U.S.-based hyperscale-class cloud. In our view, the company is building a durable revenue model with hooks into many important markets. These include the more mature DDoS protection space, but also extend to growth sectors such as zero trust, a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage.
In essence, Cloudflare can be thought of as a giant, distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine– allocating and optimizing resources at scale. Its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established global firms looking for a reliable, secure, high performance, low latency and more cost effective alternative to AWS and legacy infrastructure solutions.
In this Breaking Analysis we initiate deeper coverage of Cloudflare. While the stock got hammered this past week on tepid guidance, we are optimistic about the company’s future. In this post, we’ll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model. We’ll then share some peer comparisons with both a financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data. Finally we’ll show some examples of how we think Cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a supercloud-like offering that, in many respects, is what multi-cloud should have been.
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Episode 154 – Even the Cloud Is Not Immune to the Seesaw Economy – Have you ever driven on the highway and traffic suddenly slows way down? And then after a little while it picks up again and you’re cruising along thinking…ok that was weird but it’s clear sailing now…only to find out in a bit that that traffic is building up again, forcing you to pump the brakes as the traffic patterns ebb and flow? Well welcome to the seesaw economy. The Fed induced fire that prompted a rally in tech is being purposely extinguished by that same Fed and virtually every sector of the tech industry is having to reset its expectations – including the cloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll review the implications of this week’s earnings announcements from the big 3 cloud players. The growth of AWS and Azure slowed while Google Cloud Platform’s growth accelerated. We’ll explain why GCP’s growth is still not fast enough. We’ll update you on our quarterly IaaS forecasts and share the latest cloud survey data from ETR.
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Episode 153 – Survey Says! Takeaways from the latest CIO spending data – The overall technology spending outlook is deteriorating. And yet there are positive signs making things unpredictable. The negative sentiment is of course being driven by macroeconomic factors and earnings forecasts that have been coming down all year while interest rates keep rising. Making matters worse is many people think earnings estimates are still too high. It’s understandable why there’s so much uncertainty. Technology continues to boom. Digital transformations are happening in earnest. Leading companies have momentum and long cash runways. Moreover, the CEOs of these leading companies are still really optimistic. But strong guidance in an environment of uncertainty is risky and makes navigation more challenging.
In this Breaking Analysis we try to put some guardrails on the market by sharing takeaways from from ETRs latest spending survey, which was released to their private clients on the 21st of October. Today we’re going to review the macro spending data, convey where CIOs think their cloud spend is headed, look at the actions organizations are taking to manage uncertainty and then review some of the technology companies that have the most positive and negative outlooks in the ETR data set.
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Episode 152 – CEO Nuggets from Microsoft Ignite & Google Cloud Next – This past week, we saw two of the “Big 3” cloud providers present an update of their respective cloud visions, business progress, announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, end-to-end data platforms, the future of work, automation and a taste of the metaverse/Web 3.0. And more.
Despite the striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms, and that of AWS, remain significant with Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets; AndGoogle doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today’s cloud innovation which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS.
In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We’ll also quantify with ETR survey data, the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors – Cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software.
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Episode 151 – Analyst Take on Dell – Dave Vellante provides his take on the transformation of Dell to Dell EMC to Dell Technologies, the impact of the VMware spin out and what the future holds for this bellwether infrastructure player.
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Episode 150 – Latest CIO Survey Shows Steady Deceleration in IT Spend – Is the glass half full or half empty? Well, it depends on how you want to look at it. CIOs are tapping the brakes on spending that’s clear. The latest macro survey from ETR quantifies what we already know to be true, that IT spend is decelerating. CIOs and IT buyers forecast that their tech spend will grow by 5.5% this year, a meaningful deceleration from their year end 2021 expectations…but these levels are still well above historical norms – so while the feel good factor may be in some jeopardy, overall things are pretty good – at least for now.
In this Breaking Analysis, we update you on the latest macro tech spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, including strategies organizations are employing to cut costs…and which project categories continue to see the most traction.
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Episode 149 – As the tech tide recedes, all sectors feel the pinch – Virtually all tech companies have expressed caution on their respective earnings calls. And why not… the macroeconomic environment is full of uncertainties and there’s no upside to providing aggressive guidance when sellers punish even the slightest miss. Moreover, the spending data confirms the market is softening across the board, so it’s becoming expected that CFOs will guide cautiously. But companies facing execution challenges can’t hide behind the macro. Which is why it’s important to understand which firms are best positioned to maintain momentum through the headwinds and come out the other side stronger.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll do three things: 1) Share a high-level view of the spending squeeze almost all sectors are experiencing; 2) Highlight some of those companies that continue to show notably strong momentum – and relative high spending velocity on their platforms – albeit less robust than last year; and 3) give you a peek at how one senior technology leader in the financial sector sees the competitive dynamic between AWS, Snowflake and Databricks.
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Episode 148 – UiPath is a Rocket Ship Resetting its Course – Like a marathon runner pumped up on adrenaline, UiPath sprinted to the lead in what is surely going to be a long journey toward enabling the modern automated enterprise. In doing so, the company has established itself as a leader in enterprise automation, while at the same time getting out over its skis on critical execution items and disappointing investors along the way. In our view, the company has plenty of upside potential but will have to slog through its current challenges including restructuring its go to market, prioritizing investments, balancing growth with profitability and dealing with a difficult macro environment.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Forward5, UiPath’s customer conference, we once again dig into RPA and automation leader UiPath, to share our most current data and view of the company’s prospects, its performance relative to the competition and market overall.
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Episode 147 – How CrowdStrike Plans to Become a Generational Platform – In just over ten years, CrowdStrike has become a leading independent security firm. It has more than $2B in annual recurring revenue, nearly 60% ARR growth, a roughly $40B market capitalization, very high retention and a path to $5B in revenue by mid-decade. The company has joined Palo Alto Networks as a gold standard pure play cyber firm.
It has achieved this lofty status with an architecture that enables it to go beyond point product. Combine this with outstanding go to market, solid financial execution, some sharp acquisitions and an ever-increasing total available market and you have the formula for a great company.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Fal.Con, CrowdStrike’s user conference, we take a deeper look into the company, its performance, its platform and customer survey data from our partner ETR.
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Episode 146 – We Have the Data…What Private Tech Companies Don’t Tell you About Their Business – The negative sentiment in tech stocks, caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models and more tepid forward guidance, is easily measured by public market valuations. And while there’s lots of talk about the impact on private companies, their cash runways and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn’t as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies accentuate the good and hide the bad. Real data, unless you’re an insider, is hard to find.
In this Breaking Analysis we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. We do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we’ve not previously exposed in Breaking Analysis. It’s called the ETR Emerging Technology Survey and is packed with sentiment and performance data based on surveys of more than 1,000 CIOs & IT buyers covering more than 400 private companies. The survey will highlight metrics on the evaluation, adoption and churn rates for private companies and the mindshare they’re able to capture.
We’ve invited back our colleague Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data we’re going to cover in this post.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 145 – VMware Explore 2022 will mark the start of a Supercloud journey – While the precise direction of VMware’s future is unknown, given the planned Broadcom acquisition, one thing is clear; the subject of what Hock E. Tan plans will not be the main focus of the agenda at the upcoming VMware Explore event next week in San Francisco. We believe that despite any uncertainty, VMware will lay out for its customers what it sees as its future. And that future is multi-cloud or cross cloud services; what we would call supercloud.
In this Breaking Analysis we drill into the latest ETR survey data on VMware. We’ll share with you the next iteration of the supercloud definition based on feedback from dozens of contributors. And we’ll give you our take on what to expect at VMware Explore next week.
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Episode 144 – What Black Hat ’22 tells us about securing the Supercloud – Black Hat 2022 was held in Las Vegas last week, at the same time as theCUBE’s supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce, where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cybersecurity and openly discusses its hard truths. It’s a conference attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they’ve discovered and of course by numerous vendors marketing their products and services.
In this Breaking Analysis we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, videos, session talks, Dark Reading interviews and data from a recent Black Hat attendees survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa. We’ll also share data from ETR in a recent post discussing how Zscaler became the last line of defense for a manufacturing firm.
We’ll end with a discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud.
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Episode 143 – Further defining Supercloud With tech leaders VMware, Snowflake, Databricks & others – At our inaugural Supercloud22 event we sought community input to evolve the concept of a supercloud by iterating on the definition, the salient attributes and examples of what is and is not a supercloud. We asked several technologists including experts from VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, Confluent, Intuit, Cohesity and others to help test the supercloud definition, operational models, service models and principles.
In this Breaking Analysis we unpack our discussions with these technology leaders and apply their input to iterate the definition of supercloud. We then go in-depth to examine Snowflake’s Data Cloud architecture as a leading example of supercloud.
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Episode 142 – What we hope to learn at Supercloud22 – The term supercloud is relatively new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years. Early last decade when NIST put forth its original definition of cloud computing, it said services had to be accessible over a public network…essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the conversation. A guy named Chuck Hollis, a CTO at EMC and prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. In that post he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud, sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner – what later became more broadly known as hybrid cloud.
That vision, as we now know, really never materialized and we were left with multi-cloud…sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is, what Hollis put forth – i.e. the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience – is what supercloud is all about.
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Episode 141 – How the cloud is changing security defenses in the 2020s – AThe rapid pace of cloud adoption has changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Specifically, the cloud is increasingly becoming the first line of cyber defense. As such, along with communicating to the board and creating a security-aware culture, the CISO must ensure that the shared responsibility model is being applied properly. The DevSecOps team has emerged as the critical link between strategy and execution, while audit becomes the “free safety” in the equation – i.e. the last line of defense.
In this Breaking Analysis we share our puts and takes from AWS re:Inforce with an update on the latest hyperscale IaaS market shares; and insights from ETR survey data. We’ll also dig deeper into some technical aspects of AWS Nitro, a system we believe is one of AWS’ secret weapons, with a focus on confidential computing and what it means for the future of systems architecture.
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Episode 140 – AWS re:Inforce marks a summer checkpoint on cybersecurity – After a two year hiatus, AWS re:Inforce is back on as an in-person event in Boston next week. Like the all-star break in baseball, re:Inforce gives us an opportunity to evaluate the cybersecurity market overall, the state of cloud security and what AWS is up to in the sector.
In this Breaking Analysis, we’ll share our view of what’s changed since our last cyber update in May, we’ll look at the macro environment, how it’s impacting cybersecurity plays in the market, what the ETR data tells us and what to expect at next week’s AWS re:Inforce.
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Episode 139 – Amping it up with Frank Slootman – Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure or fundamental business model. You don’t need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency and intensity. Fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow.
This is the fundamental premise of a hard hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It’s called, Amp it Up, Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency and Elevating Intensity.
At Snowflake Summit last month, I was invited to interview Frank on stage about his book. I’ve read it several times and if you haven’t picked it up, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis we’ll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and unpublished nuances of Frank’s philosophy. You’ll hear directly from Slootman himself with excerpts from my one on one conversation with him.
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Episode 138 – Answering the top 10 questions about SuperCloud – As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis we address the ten most frequently asked questions we get on supercloud.
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Episode 137 – H1 of ‘22 was ugly…H2 could be worse…Here’s why we’re still optimistic – After a two year epic run in tech, 2022 has been an epically bad year in the market. Through yesterday, the Nasdaq composite is down 30%, the S&P 500 is off 21%, the DJIA down 16% and the poor HODLers of BTC have had to endure a nearly 60% decline year to date.
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Episode 136 – Tech Spending Intentions are Holding Despite Macro Concerns – Much of the energy around data innovation that dispersed with the decline of Hadoop’s relevance is coalescing in a new ecosystem spawned by the ascendency of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. What was once seen as a simpler cloud data warehouse and good marketing with Data Cloud, is evolving rapidly with new workloads, a vertical industry focus, data applications, monetization and more. The question is will the promises of data be fulfilled this time around or is it same wine, new bottle?
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Episode 135 – Snowflake Summit 2022…All About Apps & Monetization – Much of the energy around data innovation that dispersed with the decline of Hadoop’s relevance is coalescing in a new ecosystem spawned by the ascendency of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. What was once seen as a simpler cloud data warehouse and good marketing with Data Cloud, is evolving rapidly with new workloads, a vertical industry focus, data applications, monetization and more. The question is will the promises of data be fulfilled this time around or is it same wine, new bottle?
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Episode 134 – How Snowflake Plans to Make Data Cloud a De Facto Standard – When Frank Slootman took ServiceNow public, many people undervalued the company, positioning it as just a better help desk tool. It turns out the firm actually had a massive TAM expansion opportunity in ITSM, HR, logistics, security, marketing and customer service management. NOW’s stock price followed the stellar execution under Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli’s leadership. When they took the reins at Snowflake, expectations were already set that they’d repeat the feat but this time, if anything, the company was overvalued out of the gate.
It can be argued that most people didn’t really understand the market opportunity any better this time around. Other than that it was a bet on Slootman’s track record of execution…and data. Good bets; but folks really didn’t appreciate that Snowflake wasn’t just a better data warehouse. That it was building what the company calls a data cloud…and we’ve termed a data supercloud.
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Snowflake Summit, we’ll do four things: 1) Review the recent narrative and concerns about Snowflake and its value; 2) Share survey data from ETR that will confirm almost precisely what the company’s CFO has been telling anyone who will listen; 3) Share our view of what Snowflake is building – i.e. trying to become the de facto standard data platform; and 4) Convey our expectations for the upcoming Snowflake Summit next week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
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Episode 133 – MongoDB Sends Strong Signals Despite Cautious Macro Tones – Earnings season has shown a conflicting mix of signals for software companies. Most firms are expressing caution over macro headwinds citing a combination of Ukraine, inflation, interest rates, EMEA softness, currency, supply chain and general demand for technology. But MongoDB, along with a few other names appeared more sanguine, thanks to a beat in the recent quarter and a cautious but upbeat outlook for the near term.
In this Breaking Analysis, ahead of MongoDB World 2022, we drill into the company’s business and what ETR survey data tells us in the context of overall demand and the patterns from other software companies.
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Episode 132 – Broadcom, Taming the VMware Beast – In the words of CUBE analyst and former CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars. Not to restore them to their original beauty…nope…they buy classic cars to extract the platinum that’s inside the catalytic converter. Broadcom’s planned $61B acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era for the virtualization leader, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as a fully independent company by Dell. For VMware this means a dramatically different operating model, with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps sole agenda. For customers it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches and most certainly higher prices.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem.
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Episode 131 – Supercloud is becoming a thing – Last year we noted in a Breaking Analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the notion of multicloud. We’ve said for years that multicloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multivendor. We used the term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that resides above and across hyperscale infrastructure, connects on premises workloads and eventually stretches to the edge. Our premise is that supercloud goes beyond running services in native mode on each individual cloud. Rather supercloud hides the underlying primitives and APIs of the respective cloud vendors and creates a new connection layer across locations.
Since our initial post, we’ve found many examples within the ecosystem of technology companies working on so-called supercloud in various forms. Including some examples that actually do not try to hide cloud primitives but rather are focused on creating a consistent experience for developers across the devsecops tool chain, while preserving access to low level cloud services.
In this Breaking Analysis we share some recent examples of supercloud that we’ve uncovered. We also tap theCUBE network to access direct quotes about supercloud from the many CUBE guests we’ve recently had on the program. Here we test the concept’s technical and business feasibility. We’ll also post some recent ETR data to put into context some of the players we think are going after this opportunity and where they’re at in their supercloud buildout.
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Episode 130 – Are Cyber Stocks Oversold or Still too Pricey? – Cybersecurity stocks have been sending mixed signals as of late…Mostly negative like much of tech. But some, such as Palo Alto Networks, despite a tough go of it recently, have held up better than most tech names. Others like CrowdStrike had been outperforming broader tech in March but then flipped in May. Okta’s performance was somewhat tracking along with CrowdStrike for most of the past several months but then the Okta hack changed the trajectory of that name. Zscaler has crossed the critical $1B ARR revenue milestone and sees a path to $5B, but the company’s stock fell sharply after its last earnings report and has been on a downtrend since last November…Meanwhile CyberArk’s recent beat and raise was encouraging and the stock acted well after its last report.
Security remains the #1 initiative priority amongst IT organizations and the spending momentum for many high flying cyber names remains strong. So what gives in cybersecurity? In this Breaking Analysis we focus on security and will update you on the latest data from ETR to try and make sense out of the market and read into what this all means in both the near and long term for some of our favorite names in the sector.
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Episode 129- What you May not Know About the Dell Snowflake Deal – In the pre-cloud era, hardware companies would run benchmarks showing how database and application performance ran best on their systems relative to competitors and previous generation boxes. They would make a big deal out of it and the independent software vendors would do a “golf clap” in the form of a joint press release. It was a game of leapfrog amongst hardware competitors that became pretty commonplace over the years. The Dell-Snowflake deal underscores that the value prop between hardware companies and ISVs is changing and has much more to do with distribution channels and the amount of data that lives on-prem in various storage platforms. For cloud-native ISVs like Snowflake, they are realizing that despite their cloud-only dogma, they have to grit their teeth and deal with on-premises data or risk getting shut out of evolving data architectures.
In this Breaking Analysis we unpack what little is known about the Snowflake announcement from Dell Technologies World… and discuss the implications of a changing cloud ecosystem landscape. We’ll also share some new ETR data for cloud and database platforms that shows Snowflake has actually entered the earth’s orbit when it comes to spending momentum on its platform.
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Episode 128- The Ever expanding Cloud Continues to Storm the IT Universe – Despite a mixed bag of earnings reports from tech companies, negative GDP growth this past quarter and rising inflation…the cloud continues its relentless expansion on the IT landscape. AWS, Microsoft and Alphabet have all reported earnings and, when you include Alibaba’s cloud in the mix, the big 4 hyperscalers are on track to generate $167B in revenue this year based on our projections. But as we’ve said many times the definition of cloud is expanding. And hybrid environments are becoming the norm at major organizations. We’re seeing the largest enterprise tech companies focus on solving for hybrid and every public cloud company now has a strategy to bring their environments closer to where customers’ workloads live – in data centers and the edge.
Hello and welcome to this week’s Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we’ll update you on our latest cloud projections and outlook. We’ll share the latest ETR data and some commentary on what’s happening in the “hybrid zone” of cloud.
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Episode 127- Does Hardware Still Matter – The ascendancy of cloud and SaaS has shone new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once-sought-after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays and maximizing server utilization have been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros and developers with expertise in microservices, container app development and similar skills. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech, touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. It begs the question: Is hardware going the way of COBOL? Well, not likely — software has to run on something. But the labor and skills needed to deploy, troubleshoot and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting quite dramatically.
At the same time we’ve seen the value flow also changing in hardware. Once a world dominated by x86 processors, value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and Arm-based designs. Moreover, other components like NICs, accelerators and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated and increasingly important.
The question is: Does it matter? If so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs and the broader society?
In this Breaking Analysis we try to answer these questions and to do so we’ve organized a special CUBE Power Panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question: Does Hardware (Still) Matter?
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Episode 126 – Technology & Architectural Considerations for Data Mesh – The introduction and socialization of data mesh has caused practitioners, business technology executives and technologists to pause and ask some probing questions about the organization of their data teams, their data strategies, future investments and their current architectural approaches. Some in the technology community have embraced the concept, others have twisted the definition while still others remain oblivious to the momentum building around data mesh.
We are in the early days of data mesh adoption. Organizations that have taken the plunge will tell you aligning stakeholders is a non-trivial effort. But one that is necessary to break through the limitations that monolithic data architectures and highly specialized teams have imposed over frustrated business and domain leaders. However, practical data mesh examples often lie in the eyes of the implementer and may not strictly adhere to the principles of data mesh. Part of the problem is the lack of open technologies and standards that can accelerate adoption and reduce friction.
This is the topic of today’s Breaking Analysis where we investigate some of the key technology and architectural questions around data mesh. To do so, we welcome back the founder of data mesh and Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks, Zhamak Dehghani.
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Episode 125 – Customer ripple effects from the Okta breach are worse than you think – The recent security breach of an Okta third party supplier has been widely reported. The criticisms of Okta’s response have been harsh and the impact on Okta’s value has been obvious. Investors shaved about $6B off the company’s market cap during the week the hack was made public. We believe Okta’s claim that the customer technical impact was “near zero,” may be semantically correct. However, based on customer data, we feel Okta has a blind spot. There are customer ripple effects that require clear action, which are missed in Okta’s public statements. Okta’s product portfolio remains solid. It is a clear leader in the identity space. But in our view, one part of the long journey back to credibility requires Okta to fully understand and recognize the true scope of this breach on its customers.
In this week’s Breaking Analysis we welcome our ETR colleague Erik Bradley to share new data from the community. In addition, we’ll analyze some of the statements made by Okta CEO Todd McKinnon in an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg to see how they align with what customers tell us.
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Episode 124 – New Data Signals C Suite Taps the Brakes on Tech Spending – Fresh survey data from ETR shows a clear deceleration in spending and a more cautious posture from technology buyers. Just this week we saw sell side downgrades in hardware companies like Dell and HP; and revised guidance from high flier UiPath, citing exposure to Russia, Europe and certain sales execution challenges. But these headlines we think are a canary in the coal mine pointing to broader tech spending softness. According to ETR analysis and channel checks in theCUBE community, the real story is these issues are not isolated. Rather we’re seeing signs of caution from buyers across the board in enterprise tech.
In this Breaking Analysis we are the bearers of bad news, relatively speaking. We’ll share a first look at new data that suggest a tightening in tech spending, calling for 6% growth this year, which is below our January prediction of 8% for 2022.
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Episode 123 – Governments Should Heed the History of Tech Antitrust Policy – There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, never mind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we’re talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. However the government’s track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at tech is mixed, at best. History shows that market forces, rather than public policy, have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Moreover, the standard for antitrust action has always been demonstrating consumer harm. Many of today’s policy makers are challenging that notion and using market dominance and the potential for consumer harm as the new benchmark for intervention.
In this week’s Breaking Analysis we welcome in frequent CUBE contributor David Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. We explore several issues including the efficacy of governments’ antitrust actions against big tech, what types of remedies have been and can be most effective and a first pass assessment of the new rules EU regulators just agreed to try and rein in big tech companies.
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Episode 122 – Snowflake’s Wild Ride – Snowflake…they love the stock at 400 and hate it at 165. That’s the nature of the business isn’t it? Especially in this crazy cycle over the last two years of lockdowns, free money, exploding demand and now rising inflation and rates. But with the Fed providing some clarity on its actions, the time has come to really look at the fundamentals of companies and there’s no tech company more fun to analyze than Snowflake.
In this breaking analysis we take look at the action of Snowflake’s stock since its IPO, why it’s behaved the way it has, how some sharp traders are looking at the stock and most importantly, what customer demand looks like.
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Episode 121 – Pat Gelsinger has the Vision Intel Just Needs Time, Cash & a Miracle – Intel’s future would be a disaster without Pat Gelsinger. Even with his clear vision, fantastic leadership, deep technical and business acumen and amazing positivity, the company’s future is in serious jeopardy. It’s the same story we’ve been telling for years. Volume is king in the semiconductor industry and Intel no longer is the volume leader. Despite Intel’s efforts to change that dynamic with several recent moves, including making another go at its foundry business, the company is years away from reversing its lagging position relative to today’s leading foundries and design shops. Intel’s best chance to survive as a leader in our view will come from a combination of a massive market, continued supply constraints, government money and luck – perhaps in the form of a deal with Apple in the mid- to long term.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll update you on our latest assessment of Intel’s competitive position and unpack nuggets from the company’s February investor conference.
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Episode 120 – RPA has Become a Transformation Catalyst, Here’s What’s New – In its early days, robotic process automation emerged from rudimentary screen scraping, macros and workflow automation software. Once a script-heavy and limited tool that was almost exclusively used to perform mundane tasks for individual users, RPA has evolved into an enterprise-wide megatrend that puts automation at the center of digital business initiatives.
In this Breaking Analysis we present our quarterly update of the trends in RPA and share the latest survey data from Enterprise Technology Research.
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Episode 119 – Cyber Stocks Caught in the Storm While Private Firms Keep Rising – The pandemic precipitated what is shaping up to be a permanent shift in cyber security spending patterns. As a direct result of hybrid work, CISOs have invested heavily in endpoint security, identity access management, cloud security and further hardening the network beyond the HQ. Moreover, the need to build security into applications from the start, rather than bolting protection on as an afterthought, has led to vastly heightened awareness around DevSecOps. Finally, attacking security as a data problem with automation and AI is fueling new innovations in cyber products and services; and is spawning well-funded, disruptive startups.
In this Breaking Analysis we present our quarterly findings on the security sector. We’ll share the latest ETR survey data, identify the companies with customer spending momentum and share some of the market movers.
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Episode 118 – The Improbable Rise of Kubernetes – The rise of Kubernetes came about through a combination of forces that were in hindsight, quite a long shot. AWS’ dominance created momentum for cloud native application development and the need for simpler experiences beyond easily spinning up compute as a service. This wave crashed into innovations from a startup named Docker and a reluctant open source benefactor in Google that needed a way to change the game on Amazon in the cloud. Factor in Red Hat, which needed a path beyond Linux and was just about to opt for an alternative to Kubernetes to power OpenShift. Finally, figure out a governance structure to herd all the cats in the ecosystem so you can win out over other competition and create a de facto standard. Make all that happen and you get the remarkable ascendancy of Kubernetes.
Such was the story unveiled recently in a new two-part documentary series from Honeypot simply titled “Kubernetes.” In this Breaking Analysis we tap the back stories of this documentary, which explains the improbable events leading to the creation of Kubernetes. We’ll share commentary from early Kubernetes committers and key players who came on theCUBE to piece together how it all happened. Finally, we’ll present new survey data from ETR on containers.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 117 – What to Expect in Cloud 2022 & Beyond – We’ve often said that the next ten years in cloud computing won’t be like the last ten. Cloud has firmly planted its footprint on the other side of the chasm with the momentum of the entire multi-trillion dollar technology business behind it. Both sellers and buyers are leaning in by adopting cloud technologies and many are building their own value layers on top of cloud. In the coming years we expect innovation will continue to coalesce around the big 3 U.S. clouds, plus Alibaba in APAC, with the ecosystem building value on top of the hardware, software and tools provided by the hyperscalers. Importantly, we don’t see this as a race to the bottom. Rather our expectation is that the large public cloud players will continue to take cost out of their platforms through innovation, automation and integration. Other cloud providers and the ecosystem, including traditional IT buyers, will leverage hyperscale clouds and mine opportunities in their respective markets. This is not a zero sum game.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll update you on our latest projections in the cloud market, share some new ETR survey data with some surprising nuggets; and drill into the important cloud database landscape.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 116 – Securing Snowflake – The amount of data ingested into a data warehouse overwhelmed the system. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor, practitioners would “chase the chips” in an effort to try and compress the overly restrictive elapsed time to insights. This cycle repeated itself for decades.
Cloud data warehouses generally and Snowflake specifically changed all this. Not only were resources virtually infinite, but the ability to separate compute from storage permanently altered the cost, performance, scale and value equation. But as data makes its way into the cloud and is increasingly democratized as a shared resource across clouds – and at the edge – practitioners must bring a SecDevOps mindset to securing their cloud data warehouses.
This Breaking Analysis takes a closer look at the fundamentals of securing Snowflake. An important topic as data becomes more accessible and available to a growing ecosystem of users, customers and partners. To do so we welcome two guests to this episode. Ben Herzberg is an experienced hacker, developer and an expert in several aspects of data security. Yoav Cohen is a technology visionary and currently serving as CTO at Satori Cyber.
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Episode 115 – Enterprise Technology Predictions 2022 – The pandemic has changed the way we think about, and predict the future. As we enter the third year of COVID, we see the significant impact it’s had on technology strategies, spending patterns and company fortunes. Much has changed and while many of these changes were forced reactions to a new abnormal, the trends we’ve seen over the past twenty-four months have become more entrenched and point the way to what’s ahead in the technology business.
In this Breaking Analysis we welcome our data partner and colleague Erik Porter Bradley from ETR and we put forth our annual predictions for enterprise technology in 2022 and beyond. We’ll do our best to backup our predictions specific supporting data and more granular detail that can be measured as accurate or not. Please refer to the grading of our 2021 predictions to judge for yourself how we did last year.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 114 – Cyber, Blockchain & NFTs Meet the Metaverse – When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers and others have joined in the hype machine. It’s easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, staring at a screen or two dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play and communicate? As the Internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it’s very possible that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR/VR, brain interfaces and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences; and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse.
In this Breaking Analysis we explore the intersection of cybersecurity, blockchain, crypto currency, NFTs and the emerging metaverse. To do so we welcome in cyber expert, hacker, gamer, NFT expert and founder of Ore System, Nick Donarski.
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Episode 113 – Analyst Predictions 2022: The Future of Data Management – In the 2010’s, organizations became keenly aware that data would become the critical ingredient in driving competitive advantage, differentiation and growth. But to this day, putting data to work remains a difficult challenge for many if not most organizations. As the cloud matures it has become a game changer for data practitioners by making cheap storage and massive processing power readily accessible. We’ve also seen better tooling in the form of data workflows, streaming, machine intelligence/AI, developer tools, security, observability, automation, new databases and the like. These innovations accelerate data proficiency but at the same time add complexity for practitioners. Data lakes, data hubs, data warehouses, data marts, data fabrics, data meshes, data catalogs and data oceans are forming, evolving and exploding onto the scene.
In an effort to bring perspective to this sea of optionality, we’ve brought together some of the brightest minds in the data analyst community to discuss how data management is morphing and what practitioners should expect in 2022 and beyond.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 112 – Grading our 2021 Predictions – Predictions are all the rage this time of year. On December 29th, 2020, in collaboration with Erik Porter Bradley of Enterprise Technology Research, we put forth our predictions for 2021. The focus of our prognostications included tech spending, remote work, productivity apps, cyber, IPOs, SPACs, M&A, data architecture, cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, AI, containers, automation and semiconductors. We covered a lot of ground!
In this Breaking Analysis, as a warmup for our 2022 predictions post, we’ll review each of our predictions for this past year and grade the accuracy of our forecasts
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 111 – Why Oracle’s Stock is Surging to an All time High – On Friday, Oracle announced a meaningful earnings beat and strong forward guidance on the strength of its license business; and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock rose sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing $280B in market value. Oracle’s success is due largely to its execution of a highly differentiated strategy that has evolved over the past decade or more; deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogenous experience across its application portfolio and becoming the number one platform for the world’s most mission critical applications. While investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being tilted toward license revenue and investors will likely keep one finger on the sell button until they’re convinced Oracle’s cloud momentum is more consistent and predictable.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll review Oracle’s most recent quarter and pull in some ETR survey data to frame the company’s cloud business, the momentum of Fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps/opportunities we see that can be addressed in the coming quarters.
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Episode 110 – Rise of the Supercloud – Last week’s AWS re:Invent underscored the degree to which cloud computing generally and AWS specifically have impacted the technology landscape. From making infrastructure deployment simpler, to accelerating the pace of innovation, to the formation of the world’s most active and vibrant technology ecosystem; it’s clear that AWS has been the number one force for industry change in the last decade. Going forward we see three high level contributors from AWS that will drive the next 10 years of innovation, including: 1) the degree to which data will play a defining role in determining winners and losers; 2) the knowledge assimilation effect of AWS’ cultural processes such as two pizza teams, customer obsession and working backwards; and 3) the rise of superclouds– that is clouds built on top of hyperscale infrastructure that focus not only on IT transformation, but deeper business integration and digital transformation of entire industries.
In this Breaking Analysis we’ll review some of the takeaways from the 10th annual AWS re:Invent conference and focus on how we see the rise of superclouds impacting the future of virtually all industries.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 109 – Break up Amazon? Survey Suggests it May Not be Necessary – Despite the posture that big tech generally and Amazo.com Inc.specifically should be regulated and/or broken apart, recent survey research suggests that Amazon faces many disruption challenges, independent of any government intervention. Specifically, respondents to our survey believe that history will repeat itself in that there’s a 60% probability that Amazon will be disrupted by market forces, including self-inflicted wounds. Amazon faces at least seven significant disruption scenarios of varying likelihood and impact, perhaps leading to the conclusion that the government should let the market adjudicate Amazon’s ultimate destiny.
In this Breaking Analysis, and ahead of AWS re:Invent, we share the results of our survey designed to asses what, if anything, could disrupt Amazon. We’ll also show you some data from ETR that indicates the strong momentum of AWS is likely to continue, which could be a factor in any government intervention.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 108 – AWS & Azure Accelerate Cloud Momentum – Despite all the talk about repatriation, hybrid and multi-cloud opportunities and cloud as an increasingly expensive option for customers…the data continues to show the importance of public cloud to the digital economy. Moreover, the two leaders, AWS and Azure are showing signs of accelerated momentum that point to those two giants pulling away from the pack in the years ahead. Each of these companies is demonstrating broad-based momentum across their respective product lines. It’s unclear if anything other than government intervention or self-inflicted wounds will slow these two companies down this decade. Despite the commanding lead of the two leaders, a winning strategy for companies that don’t run their own cloud continues to be innovating on top of their massive CAPEX investments. The most notable example of this approach in our view continues to be Snowflake.
In this Breaking Analysis, Dave will provide our quarterly market share update of the big four hyperscale cloud providers. We’ll share some new data from ETR based on the most recent survey, drill into some of the reasons for the momentum of AWS and Azure; and drill further into the database and data warehouse sector to see what if anything has changed in that space.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 107 – Cutting Through the Noise of Full Stack Observability – Full stack observability is the new buzz phrase. As businesses go digital, customer experience becomes ever more important. Why? Because fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye – or the click of a mouse. Every vendor wants a piece of the action in this market including companies that have provided traditional monitoring, log analytics, application performance management, and related services. These companies are joined by a slew of new entrants claiming end-to-end visibility across the so-called “modern tech stack.” Recent survey research however confirms our thesis that no one company has it all. New entrants have a vision and are not encumbered by legacy technical debt. However their offerings are immature. Established players with deep feature sets in one segment are pivoting through M&A and organic development to fill gaps. Meanwhile, cloud players are gaining traction and participating through a combination of native tooling combined with strong ecosystems to address this opportunity.
In this Breaking Analysis we dive into a recent ETR drill down study on full stack observability. And to do so we once again welcome in our colleague Erik Bradley, Chief Engagement Strategist at ETR.
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Episode 106 – What Could Disrupt Amazon? – Five publicly traded, US-based companies have market valuations over or just near one trillion dollars. As of Oct. 29th, Apple and Microsoft top the list, each at $2.5T, followed by Alphabet at $2T, Amazon at $1.7T and Facebook (now Meta) at just under $1T – off from its high of $1.1T prior to its recent troubles. These companies have reached extraordinary levels of success and power. What, if anything could disrupt their market dominance?
In his book Seeing Digital, Author David Moschella made three key points that are relevant:
In the technology industry, disruptions are the norm – The waves of mainframes, Minis, PCs, Mobile and the Internet all saw new companies emerge and power structures that dwarfed previous eras of innovation. Is that dynamic changing?
Every industry has a disruption scenario.
Silicon Valley – broadly defined to include Seattle, or at least Amazon – has a dual disruption agenda. The first being horizontally targeting the technology industry and the second as digital disruptors in virtually any industry. How relevant is that to the future power structure of the technology business?
In this Breaking Analysis we welcome in author, speaker, researcher, thought leader and senior fellow at ITIF, David Moschella to assess what could possibly disrupt today’s trillionaire companies. And we’ll start with Amazon.
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Episode 105 – Data Mesh…A New Paradigm for Data Management – Data mesh is a new way of thinking about how to use data to create organizational value. Leading edge practitioners are beginning to implement data mesh in earnest. Importantly, data mesh is not a single tool or a rigid reference architecture. Rather it’s an architectural and organizational model that is designed to address the shortcomings of decades of data challenges and failures. As importantly, it’s a new way to think about how to leverage and share data at scale across an organization and ecosystems. Data mesh in our view will become the defining paradigm for the next generation of data excellence.
In this Breaking Analysis we welcome the founder and creator of data mesh, author, thought leader, technologist Zhamak Dehghani, who will help us better understand some of core principles of data mesh and the future of decentralized data management. With practical advice for data pros who want to create the next generation of data-driven organizations.
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Episode 104 – The Hybrid Cloud Tug of War Gets Real – It looks like Hybrid cloud is finally here. We’ve seen a decade of posturing, marketecture, slideware and narrow examples but there’s little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud accounts for less than 5% of the total pie. As such there’s a huge opportunity in hybrid, outside of the pure public cloud; and everyone wants a piece of the action.
The big question is how will this now evolve? Customers want control, governance, security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It’s unlikely they can buy all that – so they’re going to have to build it with partners. Specifically vendors, SIs, consultancies, and their own developers. The tug-of-war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest – between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 103 – The Future of the Semiconductor Industry – Semiconductors are at the heart of technology innovation. For decades, technology improvements have marched to the cadence of silicon advancements in performance, cost, power and packaging. In the past ten years, the dynamics of the semiconductor industry have changed dramatically. Soaring factory costs, device volume explosions, fabless chip companies, greater programmability, compressed time to tape out, more software content, the looming Chinese presence…these and other factors have permanently changed the power structure of the semiconductor business.
We rely on chips for every aspect of our lives, which has led to a global semiconductor shortage that has impacted more industries than we’ve ever seen. Our premise is that silicon success in the next twenty years will be determined by volume manufacturing expertise, design innovation, public policy, geopolitical dynamics, visionary leadership and innovative business models that can survive the intense competition in one of the most challenging businesses in the world.
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Episode 102 – UiPath Fast Forward to Enterprise Automation | UiPath FORWARD IV – UiPath has always been an unconventional company. It started with humble beginnings as essentially a software development shop. It then caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology and simplification mantra…creating easy to deploy software robots for bespoke departments to automate mundane tasks. The story is well known…the company grew rapidly and was able to go public earlier this year. Consistent with its out of the ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, its annual user conference next week…with a live audience at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It’s also “Fast Forwarding” as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA point tools and execute on a more all-encompassing enterprise automation agenda.
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Episode 101 – CIOs Signal Hybrid Work Will Power Spending Through 2022 – Throughout the pre-vaccine COVID era, IT buyers indicated budget constraints would squeeze 2020 spending by roughly 5% relative to 2019 levels. But the forced March to digital combined with increased cyber threats for remote workers, created a modernization mandate that powered Q4 spending last year. This momentum has carried through to 2021. While COVID variants have delayed return to work and business travel plans, our current forecast for global IT spending remains strong at 6-7%, slightly down from previous estimates. But the real story is CIOs and IT buyers expect a 7-8% increase in 2022 spending, reflecting investments in hybrid work strategies and a continued belief that technology remains the underpinning of competitive advantage in the coming decade.
In this Breaking Analysis, Dave will share the latest results of ETR’s macro spending survey and update you on industry and sector investment patterns.
Watch the full video analysis.
Following is the complete collection to date, crystallizing the key topics of the past year or so. We hope you enjoy these episodes and, as always, welcome your feedback.
Episode 100 – How Cisco can win cloud’s ‘Game of Thrones’ – Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It is transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It’s doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital and the cloud. We believe Cisco’s dominant position in networking, combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. But there are clear challenges ahead, not the least of which is the growing complexity of Cisco’s portfolio, transitioning a large legacy business and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it moves to a new business model.
In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research and long time Cisco watcher who collaborated with us to craft the premise of this session.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 99 – The Case for Buy the Dip on Coupa, Snowflake & Zscaler – Buy the dip has been an effective strategy since the market bottomed in early March last year. The approach has been especially successful in tech and even more so for those tech names that: 1) were well-positioned for the forced march to digital – i.e. remote work, online commerce, data-centric platforms and certain cybersecurity plays; and 2) already had the cloud figured out. The question on investors’ minds is where to go from here. Should you avoid some of the high flyers that are richly valued with eye-popping multiples? Or should you continue to buy the dip? And if so, which companies that capitalized on the trends from last year will see permanent shifts in spending patterns that make them a solid long term play.
In this Breaking Analysis we shine the spotlight on three companies that may be candidates for a buy the dip strategy over the next 3-5 years. To do so it’s our pleasure to welcome Ivana Delevska, the Chief Investment Officer and founder of SPEAR Alpha, a new, research-centric ETF focused on industrial technology.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 98 – Thinking Outside the Box…AWS Signals a New Era for Storage – By our estimates, AWS will generate around $9B in storage revenue this year and is now the second largest supplier of enterprise storage behind Dell. We believe AWS storage revenue will surpass $11B in 2022 and continue to outpace on-prem storage growth by more than 1,000 basis points for the next three to four years. At its third annual Storage Day event, AWS signaled a continued drive to think differently about data storage and transform the way customers migrate, manage and add value to their data over the next decade.
In this Breaking Analysis Dave will give a brief overview of what we learned at AWS’ Storage Day, share our assessment of the big announcement of the day – a deal with NetApp to run the full ONTAP stack natively in the cloud as a managed service – and share some new data on how we see the market evolving.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 97 – Tech Earnings Signal a Continued Booming Market – Tech earnings reports from key enterprise software and infrastructure players this week, underscore that IT spending remains robust in the post isolation economy. This is especially true for those companies that have figured out a coherent and compelling cloud strategy. Despite COVID variant uncertainties and hardware component shortages, most leading tech names outperformed expectations. That said, investors weren’t in the mood to reward all stocks and any variability in product mix, earnings outlook or bookings/billings nuances were met with a tepid response from the street.
In this Breaking Analysis Dave will provide our commentary and new data points on key technology companies including Snowflake, Salesforce, Workday, Splunk, Elastic, Palo Alto Networks, VMware, Dell, Pure Storage, HP Inc. and NetApp.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 96 – Can anyone tame the identity access beast? Okta aims to try… – Chief information security officers cite trust as the most important value attribute they can deliver to their organizations. And when it comes to security, identity is the new attack surface. As such, identity and access management continue to be the top priority among technology decision makers. It also happens to be one of the most challenging and complicated areas of the cyber security landscape. Okta, a leader in the identity space, has announced its intent to converge privilege access and identity governance in an effort to simplify the landscape and reimagine identity. Our research shows that interest in this type of consolidation is high, but organizations believe technical debt, compatibility issues, expense and lack of talent are barriers to reaching cyber nirvana with their evolving zero trust networks.
In this Breaking Analysis, Dave will explore the complex and evolving world of identity access and privileged account management. With an assessment of Okta’s market expansion aspirations and fresh data from ETR and input from Erik Bradley.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 95 – Rethinking Data Protection in the 2020s – Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years, literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud, combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts and ever-expanding edge use cases should put CxOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies.
In this Breaking Analysis, Dave is going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some data on how we see the market evolving and the competitive landscape for some of the top players.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 94 – Cyber, Cloud, Hybrid Work & Data Drive 8% IT Spending Growth in 2021 – Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Regardless of the chosen approach, which will vary, technology executives understand they must accelerate digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. This is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments at the macro level as we expect total spending to increase at 8% in 2021, compared to last year’s contraction. Investments in cyber security, cloud, collaboration to enable hybrid work and data, including analytics, AI and automation are the top spending priorities for CxOs.
In this Breaking Analysis Dave welcomes back Erik Bradley, Chief Engagement Strategist at our partner ETR. In this post we’ll share some takeaways from ETR’s latest survey and provide our commentary on what it means for markets, sellers and buyers. We’ll also explain what we think Wall Street is missing about Amazon’s latest earnings.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 93 – ServiceNow’s Collision Course with Salesforce.com – ServiceNow is a company that investors love to love. But there’s caution in the investor community right now as confusion about transitory inflation and higher interest rates looms. ServiceNow also suffers from perfection syndrome and elevated expectations. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will dig into ServiceNow, one of the companies we began following almost ten years ago, and provide some thoughts on ServiceNow’s march to $15B by 2026.
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Episode 92 – Survey Data Shows no Slowdown in AWS & Cloud Momentum – Despite all the chatter about cloud repatriation and the exorbitant cost of cloud computing, customer spending momentum continues to accelerate in the post isolation economy. If the pandemic was good for the cloud it seems that the benefits of cloud migration remain lasting in the late stages of COVID. And we believe this stickiness will continue. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will share some fresh July survey data that indicates accelerating momentum for the largest cloud computing firms.
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Episode 91 – How JPMC is Implementing a Data Mesh Architecture on the AWS Cloud – A new era of data is upon us. The technology industry generally and the data business specifically are in a state of transition. Even our language reflects that. For example, we rarely use the phrase “Big Data” anymore. Rather we talk about digital transformation or data-driven companies. In this Breaking Analysis we want to share our assessment of the state of the data business. We’ll do so by looking at the data mesh concept and how a division of a leading financial institution, JPMC, is practically applying these relatively new ideas to transform its data architecture for the next decade.
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Episode 90 – Mobile World Congress Highlights Telco Transformation – AMobile World Congress is on for 2021. theCUBE will be there and we’ll let you know if it’s alive and well. As we approach a delayed MWC it’s appropriate to reflect on the state of the telecoms industry. Let’s face it – the telcos have done a great job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic. In this Breaking Analysis we welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and the Founding Director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis.
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Episode 89 – How AWS is Revolutionizing Systems Architecture – AWS is pointing the way to a revolution in system architecture. Much in the same way that AWS defined the cloud operating model last decade, we believe it is once again leading in future systems. In this Breaking Analysis we’ll dig into the moves that AWS has been making, explain how they got here, why we think this is transformational for the industry and what this means for customers, partners and AWS’ many competitors.
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Episode 88 – Learnings from the hottest startups in cyber & IT infrastructure – As you well know by now, the cloud is about shifting IT labor to more strategic initiatives. Or as Andy Jassy posited at the first AWS re:Invent conference in 2012, removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with deploying and managing IT infrastructure. In this Breaking Analysis Dave is pleased to welcome a special guest, Erik Suppiger, author of the Elite 80 – a report that details the hottest privately held cybersecurity and IT infrastructure companies in the world. Erik is a senior analyst at JMP Securities and will share insights from this report.
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Episode 87 – Chasing Snowflake in Database Boomtown – Database is the heart of enterprise computing. The market is both growing rapidly and evolving. Major forces transforming the space include cloud and data – of course – but also new workloads, advanced memory and IO capabilities, new processor types, a massive push toward simplicity, new data sharing and governance models; and a spate of venture investment. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will share our most current thinking on the database marketplace and dig into Snowflake’s execution, some of its challenges and we’ll take a look at how others are making moves to solve customer challenges; and angling to get their piece of the growing database pie.
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Episode 86 – How Nvidia plans to own the data center with AI – Nvidia wants to completely transform enterprise computing by making datacenters run 10X faster at 1/10th the cost. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will explain why we believe Nvidia is in a strong position to power the world’s computing centers and how it plans to disrupt the grip that x86 architectures have had on the datacenter market for decades.
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Episode 85 – Your Online Assets Aren’t Safe – Is Cloud the Problem or the Solution? – The convenience of online access to bank accounts, payment apps, crypto exchanges and other transaction systems has created enormous risks, which the vast majority of individuals either choose to ignore or simply don’t understand. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will try to raise awareness about a growing threat to your liquid assets and hopefully inspire you to do some research and take actions to lower the probability of you losing thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
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Episode 84 – Debunking the Cloud Repatriation Myth – Cloud repatriation is a term often used by technology companies that don’t operate a public cloud. The marketing narrative most typically implies that customers have moved work to the public cloud and, for a variety of reasons – expense, performance, security, etc. Some have written about the repatriation myth, but in this Breaking Analysis, Dave will share hard data from ETR and other sources that we feel debunks the repatriation narrative as it’s currently being promoted.
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Episode 83 – Chaos Creates Cash for Criminals & Cyber Companies – The pandemic not only accelerated a shift to digital, it highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication, collaboration and chaotic responses from virtually every major company on the planet. The SolarWinds hack exposed digital supply chain weaknesses and appears to have accelerated so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will provide our quarterly update on the security industry and share new survey data from ETR and theCUBE community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare.
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Episode 82 – Why Apple Could be the Key to Intel’s Future – The latest Arm Neoverse announcement further cements our opinion that its architecture, business model and ecosystem execution are defining a new era of computing; and leaving Intel in its dust. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave will explain why and how Apple could hold a key to saving Intel’s (and America’s) semiconductor industry leadership position.
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Episode 81 – A Digital Skills Gap Signals Rebound in IT Services Spend – Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected U.S. GDP growth at 6% to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT project budgets. In this Breaking Analysis Dave welcomes back Erik Bradley, Chief Engagement Strategist at ETR, who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data.
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Episode 80 – UiPath’s Unconventional $PATH to IPO – UiPath is going public this coming week and will be the next hot software company to IPO. It has had a long strange trip to IPO. In this week’s Breaking Analysis, Dave shares our learnings from sifting through hundreds of pages of UiPath’s S1 and convey our thoughts on its market, competitive position and outlook
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Episode 79 – Moore’s Law is Accelerating and AI is Ready to Explode – Moore’s Law is dead right? Think again. While the historical annual CPU performance improvement of ~40% is slowing, the combination of CPUs packaged with alternative processors is improving at a rate of more than 100% per annum. In this Breaking Analysis Dave is going to unveil some data that suggests we’re entering a new era of innovation where inexpensive processing capabilities will power an explosion of machine intelligence applications.
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Episode 78 – Arm Lays Down the Gauntlet at Intel’s Feet – Exactly one week after Pat Gelsinger unveiled plans to reinvent Intel, Arm announced version 9 of its architecture and put forth its vision for the next decade. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will explain why we think this announcement is so important and what it means for Intel and the broader technology landscape.
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Episode 77 – Intel… Too Strategic to Fail – Intel’s big announcement this week underscores the threat that the United States faces from China. The U.S. needs to lead in semiconductor design and manufacturing; and that lead is slipping because Intel has been fumbling the ball over the past several years. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will peel the onion of Intel’s announcement, explain why we’re not as sanguine as was Wall Street on Intel’s prospects and lay out what we think needs to take place for Intel to once again become top gun; and for us to gain more confidence.
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Episode 76 – Tech Spending Powers the Roaring 2020s as Cloud Remains a Staple of Growth – In the year 2020, it was good to be in tech. It was even better to be in the cloud as organizations had to rely on remote cloud services to keep things running. In this Breaking analysis Dave will provide our take on the latest ETR COVID survey and share why we think the tech boom will continue well into the future.
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Episode 75 – Breaking Analysis: Unpacking Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse Announcement – On February 19th of this year, Barron’s dropped an article declaring Oracle a cloud giant and explained why the stock was a buy. Investors took notice and the stock ran up 18% over the next 9 trading days and peaked on March 9th, the day before the company announced its latest earnings. The company beat consensus earnings on both top line and EPS last quarter. But Investors didn’t like Oracle’s tepid guidance and the stock pulled back..but is still well above its pre-Barron’s article price.
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Episode 74 – Breaking Analysis: NFTs, Crypto Madness & Enterprise Blockchain – When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3M, more than has ever been paid for works by Paul Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making its creator the third most expensive living artist in the world, one can’t help but take notice and ask: “What is going on?” The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit “bubblicious,” but it’s yet another sign that the digital age is now fully upon us. In this Breaking Analysis Dave wants to take a look at some of the trends that may have observers and investors scratching their heads, but we think still offer insight to the future — and possibly some opportunities for young investors. And we’ll briefly touch on how these trends may relate to enterprise tech.
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Episode 73 – Breaking Analysis: Satya Nadella Lays out a Vision for Microsoft at Ignite 2021 – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sees a different future for cloud computing over the coming decade. In this Breaking Analysis Dave Vellante will review the highlights of Nadella’s Ignite keynote, share our thoughts on what it means for the future of cloud specifically and tech generally.
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Episode 72 – Breaking Analysis: SaaS Attack, On Prem Survival & What’s a Cloud Company Look Like SaaS companies have been some of the strongest performers during this COVID era. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante picks out a few of the more recent themes from this month and share our thoughts on some major enterprise software players, the future of on-prem and a review of our take on cloud, what cloud will look like in the 2020s.
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Episode 71 – Breaking Analysis: RPA Remains on a Hot Streak as UiPath Blazes the Trail – UiPath’s recent $750M raise at a $35B valuation underscores investor enthusiasm for robotic process automation. In this Breaking Analysis Dave Vellante explores the current trends in the RPA market and try to address the question– is UiPath’s value supported by the ETR spending data, how will the RPA market evolve from a total available market (TAM) perspective and where do some of the other players like Automation Anywhere, Pegasystems and Blue Prism fit?
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Episode 70 – Breaking Analysis: How the SolarWinds Hack & COVID are Changing CISO Spending Patterns – The SolarWinds hack along with the pandemic are the two most visible catalysts for change in cybersecurity spending patterns. In addition to securing a more distributed workforce, CISOs have to now worry about protecting against the very software updates and patches designed to keep them safe against cyber attacks. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares data from a recent CISO roundtable hosted by ETR’s Erik Bradley and provides updates on the cybersecurity sector overall.
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Episode 69 – Breaking Analysis: Big 4 Cloud Revenue Poised to Surpass $115B in 2021 –There are four players in the IaaS/PaaS hyperscale cloud services space which have the ability to outperform all competitors. Combined in 2021, they will generate more than $115 billion dollars in revenue. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante initiates coverage of Alibaba, one of the Big Four in this massive market segment.
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Episode 68 – Breaking Analysis: Tech Spending Roars Back in 2021 –There is an expected six to seven percent increase in 2021 technology spending following the five percent decline over the past year. Many factors are contributing to this growth, and in this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares some of those reasons as well as the latest macro view of the market.
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Episode 67 – Breaking Analysis: Best of theCUBE on Cloud –The coming decade of cloud will be dramatically different from the last. There will be a shift toward a more data centric, hyper decentralized cloud that is far more complex than anything seen previously. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante summarizes exclusive content gathered from the recent theCUBE on cloud event.
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Episode 66 – Breaking Analysis: Pat Gelsinger Must Channel Andy Grove and Recreate Intel –Intel is fighting a war on two fronts: 1) Arm volumes have far surpassed those of Intel’s x86, conferring major cost advantages to leading fabs like TSMC and Samsung and 2) AMD continues to chip away at Intel’s dominance in its core markets. But the biggest challenge for incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger is perhaps to reinvent Intel by splitting manufacturing from design to make the company more agile and cost competitive. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante speculates about Intel’s future, and explains why Wikibon believes Intel has no choice but to shed its vertically integrated heritage.
Episode 65 – Breaking Analysis: Breaking Analysis: 2021 Enterprise Technology Predictions –COVID-19 created a disruption in virtually all our expectations for 2020. In some regards, predictions for the past year played out very well, thanks to the pandemic. And in others, the complete opposite occurred. That being said, there is a lot to talk about heading into 2021. In this week’s Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Erik Bradley of ETR to share their top predictions for the upcoming year.
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Episode 64 – Breaking Analysis: Cloud Momentum & CIO Optimism Point to a 4% Rise in 2021 Tech Spending –Developments with COVID such as education, rapid vaccine rollout, productivity gains, and broad based cloud coverage suggest higher tech spending than previously forecasted for the upcoming year. Now, we can expect a 3-5 percent increase in 2021 spending. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares the data to support these predictions, and predicts which sectors are to gain momentum.
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Episode 63 – Breaking Analysis: Legacy Players Feel the Heat as AWS Storage Revenue Approaches $10B –Once an untapped bastion of innovation, storage in the data center now exists as a shell of what it used to be, and will remain as such. Specifically, AWS’ storage business is projected to hit between $6.5 – $7B this year and hit $10B within the next 18 – 24 months. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante lays out what this might mean for the industry, as well as the impact of AWS.
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Episode 62 – Breaking Analysis: Cloud 2030…From IT, to Business Transformation – Breaking Analysis: Cloud, Containers, AI & RPA Support Strong Rebound in 2021.
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Episode 61 – Breaking Analysis: Cloud 2030…From IT, to Business Transformation – Over the past decade, cloud computing has undoubtedly been the most pivotal force in IT. This brings the question as to what the next ten years will hold for cloud and the tech world. Perhaps, it will lay the foundations for a complete transformation of nearly every company worldwide. In this Breaking Analysis, as part of his coverage off AWS re:Invent 2020, Dave Vellante provides insights and predictions about the next breakthroughs in cloud.
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Episode 60 – Breaking Analysis: Sparked by COVID, CISOs see Permanent Shift in Cyber Strategies – CISOs report a forced shift to remote work has actually led to meaningful productivity improvements. This reality is causing security pros to rethink how they’ll approach security in the coming decade, informed by learnings during the pandemic.
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Episode 59 – Breaking Analysis: How Snowflake Plans to Change a Flawed Data Warehouse Model – Snowflake will not grow into its valuation by simply stealing share from the on-prem data warehouse vendors. Rather Snowflake must create an entirely new market based on completely changing the way organizations think about monetizing data. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante suggests a new data architecture that places domain knowledge at the core.
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Episode 58 – Breaking Analysis: Cloud Revenue Accelerates in the COVID Era – Over the past decade, cloud computing has undoubtedly been at the forefront of the innovation engine. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud and AI by at least two years, establishing a new era that will impact not only the technology industry, but all organizations. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante gives updates about the latest cloud market trends.
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Episode 57 – Breaking Analysis: Azure Cloud Powers microsoft’s Future – Big tech is once again under fire as CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google face backlash from several US senators. Microsoft is not among these companies, as it relies on Azure cloud to build momentum, which now accounts for nineteen percent of its overall revenues. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante dives into the business of Microsoft and the data of its projected progress.
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Episode 56 – Breaking Analysis: Google’s Antitrust Play… Get Your Head out of Your Ads – The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the corporation of being a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares data, covers the history of monopolistic power in the computer industry, and suggests future moves for Google to diversify its business.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 55 – Breaking Analysis: 2H 2020 Tech Spending: Headwinds into 2021 – Relative to 2019, tech spending has been hit hard, with a projected 5% decrease projected for 2020. Still, there seem to be bright spots within the market that show a slight increase in 2021 spending data. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by ETR’s Erik Bradley to provide the latest data supporting these trends.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 54 – CIOs Report Slow Thaw of Spending Freezes – Expect 2% Growth in 2021 – Recent Data provided by ETR suggests CIOs expect slight improvements in Q4 spending. Although these numbers are still down four percent from last year, this is a step in the right direction going into 2021. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante analyzes some of this data and provides his outlook for Q4 as well as the coming months.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 53 – Application Performance Management…From Tribal Knowledge to Digital Dashboard – Application Performance management has been around for a while, but it has had to evolve to accommodate for more complex operations, such as cloud-based systems. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is teamed with Erik Bradley to offer the newest data to come out of the growing market.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 52 – Snowflake’s IPO… Here’s What’s Next – There is a lot of talk going on within the tech industry surrounding Snowflake’s recent IPO. In this week’s Breaking, Analysis, Dave Vellante shares his insights, investment strategies, and dives into some of the questions that have come out of the buzz from the hottest IPO in software history.
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Episode 51 – Market Recoil Puts Tech Investors at a Fork in the Road – Recently, the stock market experienced its most significant drop since early June. Tech companies were among several corporations involved in this decline, sending investors into a panic. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante answers questions and provides some perspective about what’s happening within the technology space and how it will continue to affect the rest of 2020.
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Episode 50 – Enterprise Software Download in the Summer of COVID – Enterprise applications are an enormous market, and organizations across the globe essentially rely on these applications to operate. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante unpacks new data surrounding the Enterprise software space, focusing on the core enterprise apps that companies rely on to keep their businesses running.
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Episode 49 – Tectonic Shifts Power Cloud, IAM and Endpoint Security – Although time has seemed to stop since the beginning of quarantine, COVID-19 has caused acceleration within the technology industry, causing some trends to speed up by about two years. The cybersecurity sector is one of the best examples of this change. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante discusses this sector, and provides updates on why key areas of the market that are exploding.
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Episode 48 – Cloud Remains Strong but not Immune to COVID – Although Cloud is among the most successful industries in tech spending, even it is not protected against COVID-19. Recent data shows a newly shaped recovery pattern suggesting this negative impact. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante dives into this data surrounding the cloud market and provides prospective updates about the big three.
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Episode 47 – RPA Competitors Eye Deeper Business Integration Agenda – Although the projected spending outlook for 2020 looks moderate, Robotic process automation solutions are still seeing the highest investment momentum for IT buyers. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante summarizes the latest RPA spending trends using data provided by ETR.
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Episode 46 – Five Questions Investors are Asking about Snowflake’s IPO – Snowflake recently filed a confidential document suggesting an IPO is imminent. Many within the community are responding positively to this news, causing a lot of discussion and inquiry. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante and Erik Bradley unpack five critical questions surrounding this pending IPO.
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Episode 45 – Google Cloud Rides the Wave but Remains a Distant Third Place – Despite its faster growth and infrastructure as a service, Google Cloud platform remains a third wheel behind AWS and Azure in the race for cloud dominance. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante reviews the current state of cloud and drills into the spending data to provide new insights about Google’s position in the market.
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Episode 44 – Living Digital: New Rules for Technology Events – Although there is push for a more digital world, in person interactions seem to be equally as important. Every year, large corporations throw massive events for this exact reason. However, coronavirus canceled most of these events for 2020, forcing a virtual replacement. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante covers the virtual event landscape and shares some takeaways from this new dynamic.
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Episode 43 – Assessing Dell’s Strategic Options with VMware – Dell is exploring options for its roughly 81 percent share in VMware. It is predicted that Dell wants to gauge investor, consumer, and partner sentiment. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante unpacks the complex angles as well as some possible scenarios of this situation.
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Episode 42 – Cyber Security Tailwinds in the Post Isolation Economy – The isolation economy has created substantial momentum for some cybersecurity companies. However, several others have tracked or not performed as well as more successful companies, despite still exhibiting strength and momentum. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante gives updates and answers questions about cybersecurity.
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Episode 41 – Competition Heats up for Cloud Analytic Databases – A new class of workloads are emerging in the cloud which are mainly focused on combining data using machine intelligence. At the center of this trend is a new class of data stores and analytic databases. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante updates his view on the subject while looking into the basics of the market, the competition, as well as spending data.
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Episode 40 – Most CIOs Expect a U Shaped COVID Recovery – It has been reported COVID-19 created a bifurcated IT spending picture, but what will the aftermath of the virus look like? In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Sagar Kadakia to look into the recovery patterns of different industries following the effects of the pandemic, and discuss the supporting data.
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Episode 39 – RPA Gains Momentum in the Post COVID Era – Legacy on-premises infrastructure are now allowing for more flexible approaches to business agility that reduce human labor, and the pandemic has accelerated this focus on such efforts. Robotic Process Automation has been a large beneficiary in this process. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante gives the rundown of RPA, including updates on the RPA sector, spending data, and the impact of COVID-19 on the market.
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Episode 38 – Cloud Momentum Building for the Post COVID Era – Cloud is in the stronghold of on-premise computing, and coronavirus has helped to strengthen this position. Analysis of company earnings reports and customer survey data shows that Microsoft Azure and GCP are closing the gap on AWS’ cloud dominance. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante takes a closer look at the big three cloud players, and provides a brief investigation of AWS individually.
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Episode 37 – IBM’s Future Rests on its Innovation Agenda – For decades, IBM has unfortunately missed opportunities to invest in the waves that now power the tech economy. The hiring of a new CEO provides the chance to redirect the company, and come back on top. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante digs into the past and the future of IBM.
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Episode 36 – COVID-19 Takeaways & Sector Drilldowns Part II – Industries such as retail, consumer, telco and IT services are seeing the largest pullbacks in spend from consumers and business since the beginning of COVID-19. On the other hand, corporations capable of digital transformation are seeing the most success. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante and Sagar Kadakia share the most updated spending data and information about the effects of the pandemic.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 35 – CIOs & CISOs Discuss COVID 19 Budget Impact – CEOs and CISOs of industries that have been hard-hit see significant and many permanent shifts to their IT and security strategies. Because of severe budget impacts, certain initiatives have been prioritized. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Erik Bradley, managing director of ETR’S VENN program, to provide research and discuss the areas emphasized by these executives.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 34 – How Tech Execs are Responding to COVID 19 – COVID-19 demanded several and somewhat immediate changes within the tech industry. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares commentary and responses from various tech execs, recaps the current IT spending outlook, and dives into what’s really going on in the marketplace.
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Episode 33 – CIOs Plan on 4% Budget Declines for 2020 – At the start of 2020, the IT spend forecast was plus 4 percent. Following Coronavirus, those numbers declined significantly. In this breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante and Sagar Kadada breakdown the latest spending data from ETR.
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Episode 32 – VMware Announces vSphere 7 – VMware released the vSphere 7, which is being called the biggest change to vSphere within the last decade, enabling 90 percent of the data centers around the world that have VMware. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Stu Miniman to discuss the vSphere 7 announcement.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 31 – Coronavirus – Pivoting From Physical to Digital Events – Coronavirus and the recent quarantine has put the world more or less on pause. For many industries, this means switching to a largely digital-based platform for events. In light of the pandemic, Dave Vellante shares advice on the best tools and practices to navigate the current crisis.
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Episode 30 – Multi-Cloud…A Symptom Or Cure? – The third wave of cloud is stirring up a lot of discussion about its necessity and effectiveness. In this breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante digs into the multicloud arena while answering some frequently asked questions about the benefits and possible implications of this new technology.
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Episode 29 – Cyber Security Update: What to Expect at RSA 2020 – Robert Gates, Former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, warns that the risks of Cyber security and IT should be a regular part of every board’s agenda. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante provides updates about the cyber security sector ahead of the RSA conference.
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Episode 28 – RPA: Over-Hyped or the Next Big Thing? – Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is one of the hottest sectors in software today with a small but rapidly growing market. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante dives deeper into the world of RPA and talks about the value, size, and competitors in the market space.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 27 – Gearing up for Cloud 2020 – The new era of cloud brings significant change to the industry as well as new opportunities for the three major cloud players in the U.S. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante looks deeper into the cloud market and the momentum of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
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Episode 26 – Storage…Continued Softness with Some Bright Spots – The storage industry is a bifurcated market: Secondary storage is gaining momentum while the primary slide falls behind. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante looks into the spending data and discusses his thoughts and predictions about storage live from Barcelona.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 25 – Cisco: Navigating Cloud, Software & Workforce Change – At the end of the dot com bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world. It remains a leader in key segments, but is refocusing its business for the next decade. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante covers Cisco’s rise as well as projections for the future.
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Episode 24 – The Trillionaires Club: Powering the Tech Economy – Big tech companies have changed the recipe for innovation in the Enterprise, and as we enter the next decade, it is important to reevaluate how that will determine the level of success in the industry. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante discusses this “cocktail” of innovation and how it came into play.
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Episode 23 – Veeam’s $5B Exit: Clarity & Questions Around “Act II” – Veeam is a data protection company that has seen a slight performance drop since 2018. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante provides details about its $5 billion deal with Insight Partners and how this new chapter will affect the industry moving forward.
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Episode 22 – Predictions 2020: Cloud, Kubernetes & Cyber Continue to Power the Tech Economy – Tech projects have historically been very risky investments, but changes with cloud are allowing for more flexibility in the coming year. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante talks about Predictions for 2020 using spending data and insight from the thousands of interviews conducted on theCUBE.
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Episode 21 – Re:Invent 2019…of Transformation & NextGen Cloud – During the most recent AWS re:invent, the company proves it continues to strive on raising the bar. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Stu Miniman to unpack the event, and talk about what’s happening from a buyer’s perspective, as well as AWS’ hybrid strategy
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Episode 20 – Unpacking Cisco’s Prospects Q4 2019 and Beyond – AWS strongly emphasizes the idea of transformation, and warns industries like Cisco not to do so incrementally. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante covers six different topics related to the future of Cisco, and its prospects in this era of next generation cloud
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Episode 19 – Examining IT Spending Data Q4 ‘19 – Enterprise Research Technology is a company who uses primary market research and first party data to look into spending patterns within the tech industry. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante explains the ins and outs of ETR, as well as its current relationship with theCUBE.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 18 – Re:Invent 2019: AWS Gears up for Cloud 2.0 – AWS Reinvent has become the Super Bowl for enterprise tech innovation. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante discusses the impact of the revolution of cloud on the industry in light of the upcoming event.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 17 – The Transformation of Dell Technologies – Dell continues to make changes to remain a predominant company in the tech industry. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante breaks down the major takeaways of the Dell Technologies’ industry analyst event and discusses some of the possible implications that the company may face.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 16 – The State of Cybersecurity Q4 2019 – The cyber security market is fragmented, challenging and many feel broken. Cloud security promises to simplify the maze for security practitioners but there are nuances with the shared responsibility model that often cause confusion. In this Breaking Analysis we look at the lates ETR data and hear from CISOs and executives in the field with an outlook and prognosis going forward.
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Episode 15 – The state of data protection, Q4 2019 – While demand for primary storage remains soft, the bright spot in the sector is data protection. Well funded new entrants are disrupting the space which is shaping up as a battleground for 2020.
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Episode 14 – AWS growth slows but remains the profit engine of Amazon – While AWS’ growth rate slowed this past quarter, its revenue is still substantially larger than its nearest competitors in the IaaS space. Moreover AWS is still the profit engine that funds Amazon’s vast and growing empire.
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Episode 13 – Q4 Spending Outlook – 10/18/19 – TheCUBE host Dave Vellante shares his analysis on recent spending trends backed by ETR Data. Spending is reverting to pre-2019 levels but the outlook still points to a strong 2020, barring any unforeseen global surprises.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 12 – Bill McDermott steps down from SAP – Commentary and Outlook. SAP pre-announced earnings with a beat and a raise, which acted as a heat shield for the surprise news that long-time CEO Bill McDermott is not renewing his contract. SAP is moving back to a dual-CEO model with a separate customer-facing and product/ops focus for each exec. SAP is strong financially but we believe faces significant technical integration challenges over the next decade, which may have played into McDermott’s and SAP’s decisions. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante shares recent spending data from ETR and lays out some of the challenges SAP faces going forward.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 11 – Spending in Q4 2019 is reverting back to pre-2018 levels – The spending outlook for the balance of 2019, into 2020 is softening, but not falling off a cliff. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante presents the latest ETR spending data and shares the latest thinking on which segments will continue to do well for the balance of 2019 into next year.
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Episode 10 – Takeaways from Dell’s 2019 financial analysts event. – Dell Technologies executives gathered in New York to update financial analysts and present the company’s mid-to-long term plans for growth, share gains, profitability and paying down its substantial debt. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante unpacks Dell’s massive business and provides clarity on the profitability levers Dell is turning to continue its transformation.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 9 – Spotlight on IBM’s Systems Business – IBM’s mainframe business continues to be the linchpin of much of the company’s profit and free cash flow. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante explains the importance of product cycles to the success of not only IBM’s Systems and Storage division, but IBM’s financial performance overall.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 8 – Nutanix and VMware battle for HCI leadership – Hyperconverged infrastructure was popularized by leader Nutanix. Many others have joined the party including VMware, Dell, HPE and others. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante is joined by Stuart Miniman, an expert in the HCI market, to unpack what’s really happening in the marketplace.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 7 – Oracle earnings analysis – September 2019 – Oracle, like many legacy enterprise software companies, is seeing a slowdown in growth for on-prem licenses. Oracle’s cloud is being re-factored in a next generation offering that comprises IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Oracle’s applications business remains strong and is a driver of profits. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante digs into Oracle’s business and lays out his expectation for the coming quarters.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 6 – Spending data from ETR shows that robotic process automation is gaining steam in mid-to-large enterprises – A race to improve productivity is driving companies to implement automation in the form of software robots. UiPath and Automation Anywhere show strong customer spending momentum. Blue Prism and other major players, while not showing the same growth, appear to be well-positioned. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante explains how this market is beginning to re-shape automation for the future.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 5 – Spending data shows that cloud native databases are disrupting traditional analytic data stores. Snowflake and AWS RedShift stand out as having spending momentum based on ETR survey data – Some cloud native databases have been architected to enable storage and compute resources to be scaled independently. This not only improves economics but also drives increased agility and flexibility for many use cases. In this Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante explains how this dynamic is eating into traditional enterprise data warehouse markets.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 4 – Storage Spending Outlook 2H ’19 – Pure Leads the Pack – The on-prem storage business has been hurt by: 1) the cloud siphoning away demand; and 2) a massive injection of flash storage that has given data center managers enough performance headroom to minimize the need to buy for performance reasons. Pure Storage is growing faster than the marketshare leaders but from a much smaller installed base.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 3 – VMworld 2019 – Containers won’t Kill VMware – As a preview to VMworld 2019, Dave Vellante shares his opinions along with ETR spending data that shows containers, to date, are not hurting VMware’s business.
Watch the full video analysis.
Episode 2 – IBM Completes Acquisition of Red Hat – Dave Vellante shares his opinions along with ETR spending data on this giant move by IBM. Positioned by IBM as all about cloud, Vellante says it’s also a professional services play.
Episode 1 – Hello World – This is a podcast only version explaining what this series is all about and its objectives for the community.
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