Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante – Details, episodes & analysis

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.