00:00 - Navigating the AI Frontier: Insights into Breaking Analysis, Linguistic Conflicts, and Software Evolution
05:06 - From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 3.0
15:12 - Harmonized Source of Truth
22:41 - Microsoft's Agentic Ambitions
31:23 - Salesforce's Hyperscaler Journey
35:14 - The Road Ahead for Enterprise Platforms
38:52 - Industry Evolution: Overcoming Challenges and Future Outlook

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. 

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.

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. 

With Andy Thurai, VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

The 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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Despite fears of inflation, supply chain issues, skyrocketing energy and home prices and global instability caused by the Ukraine crisis, CIOs and IT buyers continue to expect overall spending to increase more than 6% in 2022. While this is lower than our 8% prediction made in January of this year, it remains in line with last year’s roughly 6-7% growth and is holding firm with the expectations reported by tech executives last quarter. 

In this Breaking Analysis we update you on our latest look at tech spending with a preliminary take from ETR’s latest macro drill down survey. We’ll share some insights as to which vendors have shown the biggest change in spending trajectory and ask the technical analysts in our community to give us a read on what they think it means for technology stocks going forward. 

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? 

Originally published on May 21, 2022
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. 

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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. 

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.