Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

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 w...

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 ar...

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...

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...

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 p...

Databricks faces strategic decisions…here’s why https://wikibon.com/breaking-analysis-databricks-faces-critical-strategic-decisionsheres-why/

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...

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 dri...

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 oth...

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...

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 AI raises some interesting questions about where infrastructure should be physically located and ca...

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;...

RSA Conference takes place in the last week of April this year at a time when the industry is at a crossroads. Once hopeful that the security industry would be shielded from macroeconomic conditions, the past year has been painful for many investors with some exceptions – most notably those investors who stuck with Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. That said, Q1 saw a rebound in tech but for the mo...

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 takeawa...

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 softwa...

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...

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...

With George Gilbert 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. Howev...

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...

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...

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 s...

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...

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...