Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

Power Play in Hybrid AI - IBM and Dell on Display

RSA 2024 goes beyond AI-powered security to securing AI itself

Supply Chain Planning as an Intelligent Data App

Security budgets are growing but so is vendor sprawl

It’s estimated that firms on average have between 60 and 75 security tools installed. Although leading vendors logically market the benefits of addressing tools sprawl and complexity through consolidation, the data suggests that more than half the firms are increasing the number of security vendors installed, with a very small percentage able to effect vendor consolidation. Adding to the challenge is an environment where security operations pros have too many priorities to manage, including...

How the AI awakening is changing tech spending patterns

Enterprises seek deeper AI value beyond chat

AWS' AI blueprint emphasizes optionality, trust and scalable industry solutions

Adobe Summit highlights personalization at scale with Gen AI

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 ...

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 ...

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 oth...

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...

Dissecting the AI boom through the dotcom lens

Many people question whether the current artificial intelligence boom will end in the same way that the dotcom bubble burst. It’s understandable, as there are many similarities, especially with the exuberance seen this past week in the stock market following Nvidia Corp.’s earnings print. Although it’s easy to dismiss AI as a completely different era, there are some stark similarities that are worth remembering. Like all waves, there are also major differences. Two of the most evident are ...

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 revenu...

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 suc...

Slicing the Gordian Knot - A leap to real-time systems of truth

Enterprise Technology Predictions 2024

2024 IT spending outlook shows cautious start with optimistic finish

In this Breaking Analysis, theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante unpacks the Enterprise Technology Research January spending data and digs into those areas that are expected to show above average performance and those that are likely to lag. Follow theCUBE's live event coverage https://www.thecube.net/

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...

Predictions 2024 - Deciphering Gen AI’s Effect on Sata, Governance & Skills

In this special Breaking Analysis we're pleased to host our third annual data predictions power panel with some of our collaborators in theCUBE Collective and members of the data gang. With us today are five of the top industry analysts focused on data platforms. Sanjeev Mohan of Sanjmo, Tony Baer of dbInsight, IDC's Carl Olofson, Dave Menninger who is with Ventana Research, now part of ISG and Doug Henschen with Constellation Research.

Grading Our 2023 Enterprise Technology Predictions

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.

The rise of observability and why it matters to your business

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 mod...

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 da...

re:Invent ‘23 Underscores a New Simplicity Mandate for AWS

In this episode of Breaking Analysis, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante focuses on the evolving landscape of enterprise tech, driven by generative AI, and its implications for AWS. The discussion emphasizes how AWS must adapt its powerful playbook, known for agility, developer choice, power, scale, reliability and security, to accommodate the growing demand for simplicity and coherence among mainstream customers. Follow theCUBE's live event coverage https://www.thecube.net/ Vellante discusses ...

Breaking Analysis: re:Invent ‘23 Underscores a New Simplicity Mandate for AWS

In this episode of Breaking Analysis, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante focuses on the evolving landscape of enterprise tech, driven by generative AI, and its implications for AWS. The discussion emphasizes how AWS must adapt its powerful playbook, known for agility, developer choice, power, scale, reliability and security, to accommodate the growing demand for simplicity and coherence among mainstream customers. Follow theCUBE's live event coverage https://www.thecube.net/ Vellante discusses ...

The OpenAI meltdown…Winners & losers in the battle for AI supremacy

Conventional wisdom says Microsoft Corp. 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 last Thursday, prior to the firing of OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and the ongoing public drama that ensued. Microsoft and OpenAI had a huge lead in market momentum, artificial intelligence adoption and feature acceleration, and were setting the narrative in AI. Our discussions with customers and industry ins...

The copilot era takes flight at Microsoft Ignite 2023

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 s...

The Gen AI power law How data diversity influences adoption

Power Law Explained Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law Heavy tailed power laws: Why are Power Law distributions called 'Heavy-tailed'? Explainer video for power laws in statistics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC71ZazlMR0 Power law in economics: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34651705/68262294.pdf What is retrieval augmented generation (IBM Research) https://research.ibm.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-RAG Llama2 technical paper from Meta: h...

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...

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 ...

Get Ready for the Sixth Data Platform

In this week’s CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. George Gilbert and I welcome Ryan Blue to this, our 201st episode. Ryan is the co-creator and PMC chair of Apache Iceberg and a co-founder & the CEO of Tabular, a universal open table store that connects to any compute layer built by the creators of Iceberg.

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 exp...

Cisco Splunk under the microscope, joint customers weigh in

Bob Muglia on Uber for everyone…how the future of data apps will evolve

theCUBE host Dave Vellante is joined by George Gilbert and Bob Muglia for this weeks Breaking Analysis

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...

Copilot or competitor - How Gen AI bolsters & buffets UiPath’s Northstar

UiPath’s recent earnings beat and raise provides some evidence that thus far, Gen AI has not been diluitive 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 a...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 inno...

Spearing Tech Stocks Beyond the Magnificent Seven

After a tough 2022, the first half of 2023 has shown impressive strength and many technology bets have paid off. For sure investors in the so-called Magnificent Seven, i.e. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla have been rewarded. But sharp investors have sought alpha beyond these issues, 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...

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% shar...

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...

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 ...

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. Thi...

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 ...

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 capabilitie...

Uber’s real-time architecture represents the future of data apps…meet the architects who built it

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 ...