It’s the start of a new year for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, and an opportunity to reinvent coverage plans for an ever-evolving media landscape.

The holidays were a chance to reflect on 13 years of coverage at theCUBE and how artificial intelligence has brought a new inflection point.

“It reminded me of that Andy Grove talk he gave at MIT in 1996: The atoms are not yet clear; they’re going to come together,” Furrier (pictured, left) said on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast.

Furrier’s personal goal this year is to lean into AI heavily, go deeper into that rabbit hole and expand that from a business perspective. But there’s also a goal to doing more, with additional on-the-ground analysis and theCUBE Global coverage, according to Furrier.

“We’re kind of post-COVID, back to 2019. It feels like kind of the things that we were thinking about in 2019 are on the table,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a year of reinvention for theCUBE. I think it’s going to be a year of new things.”

Supercloud and a possible revolution

It was also a time of reflection for Vellante (right), who said he looked back on one of his personal goals of 2023 — to do more non-paid editorial research, such as with his Breaking Analysis series. There were other achievements, such as theCUBE’s five Supercloud events, which will continue this year. The next Supercloud event is set for mid-February, with a focus on data and AI.

“[We also did] three super studios. What I liked about them is even though the super studios were paid, they were industry events, community events, thought leadership with sponsors like IBM, like VAST, like Dell, who weren’t just trying to pimp their products,” Vellante said. “They were really putting forth thought leadership for customers and talking about transformation and disruption.”

Regarding big-picture predictions for the year, Furrier said it involves a cultural and digital revolution. It’s something he refers to as the “digital hippie revolution,” predicting that what happened in the 1960s will happen from a digital perspective.

“You’re already seeing that with AI. It’s a complete generational shift. This is not your father’s internet anymore,” Furrier said. “That’s the rundown; AI everywhere, anywhere, all the time. That’s what’s happening.”

Big data changes on the horizon

Furrier also pointed out something he’s been shouting from the mountaintops about for a long time: The entire data business will be upside down for the next 24 months. Companies cannot operate the data strategies they’ve been doing for decades.

“With the new model, data needs to be available for any app at any time, anywhere. That means either colocating the data because you can’t change the laws of physics — data’s got to move around — or be there when you need it,” Furrier said. “How do you make data available and highly addressable for every application, every inference?”

If that’s a new indexing change with its vector databases or something else, the entire data marketplace and industries will be completely radically changed. It has to happen, according to Furrier.

“It’s not going to happen with data warehouses and just Snowflake and Databricks,” he said. “Data lakes will be around; everyone’s predicting that ‘It’s the year of the data lake.’ It’s been that way for years. The data architecture has to be very agile, very accessible.”

That is complicated with stovepipe data platforms within Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Snowflake Inc. and Databricks Inc., with so much data available. Moving AI to that data is a big theme, according to Vellante.

“But if you’ve got copilots now operating on that data, which data does the copilots operate on that’s coherent and tolerant?” he asked. “How do you know what is the system of truth? This is a real challenge.”

That’s why the industry is currently seeing things such as metadata unification and unity catalogs. It’s an attempt to eliminate data movement and ETL, according to Vellante.

“There’s going to be a burgeoning market around data coherence, and then that brings up the governance issue,” he said. “It’s a very complicated matter, and one that we’re going to pay a lot of attention to this year.”

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

Andy Grove, late former CEO of Intel
Matt Baker, SVP for AI strategy at Dell Technologies
Arun K. Subramaniyan, founder and CEO of Articul8 AI
Justin Hotard, incoming EVP and GM at Intel
Sandra Riviera, CEO of the programmable solutions group and EVP at Intel
Rob Strechay, analyst at SiliconANGLE Media and host of theCUBE
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo
Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight
Carl Olofson, VP at IDC
David Menninger, SVP and research director at Ventana Research
Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research
Adam Selipsky, CEO at AWS
Steve Jobs, late co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
Matthew McConaughey, actor
Anil Dash, head of Glitch and VP for developer experience at Fastly
Brendan McCord, visiting fellow in philosophy at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford
Joe Lieberman, former U.S. senator
Savannah Peterson, founder and chief unicorn at Savvy Millennial and host of theCUBE

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Photo: SiliconANGLE