Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

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 re...

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...

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...

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 ou...

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 rei...

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 independen...

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...

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...

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 w...

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...

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...

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, base...

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 t...

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 ma...

Snowflake…they love the stock at 400 and hate it at 165. That’s the nature of the business isn’t it? Especially in this crazy cycle over the last two years of lockdowns, free money, exploding demand and now rising inflation and rates. But with the Fed providing some clarity on its actions, the time has come to really look at the fundamentals of companies and there’s no tech company more fun to ana...

Intel’s future would be a disaster without Pat Gelsinger. Even with his clear vision, fantastic leadership, deep technical and business acumen and amazing positivity, the company’s future is in serious jeopardy. It’s the same story we’ve been telling for years. Volume is king in the semiconductor industry and Intel no longer is the volume leader. Despite Intel’s efforts to change that dynamic with...

In its early days, robotic process automation emerged from rudimentary screen scraping, macros and workflow automation software. Once a script-heavy and limited tool that was almost exclusively used to perform mundane tasks for individual users, RPA has evolved into an enterprise-wide megatrend that puts automation at the center of digital business initiatives.  In this Breaking Analysis we presen...

The pandemic precipitated what is shaping up to be a permanent shift in cyber security spending patterns. As a direct result of hybrid work, CISOs have invested heavily in endpoint security, identity access management, cloud security and further hardening the network beyond the HQ. Moreover, the need to build security into applications from the start, rather than bolting protection on as an aftert...

The rise of Kubernetes came about through a combination of forces that were in hindsight, quite a long shot. AWS’ dominance created momentum for cloud native application development and the need for simpler experiences beyond easily spinning up compute as a service. This wave crashed into innovations from a startup named Docker and a reluctant open source benefactor in Google that needed a way to...

We’ve often said that the next ten years in cloud computing won’t be like the last ten. Cloud has firmly planted its footprint on the other side of the chasm with the momentum of the entire multi-trillion dollar technology business behind it. Both sellers and buyers are leaning in by adopting cloud technologies and many are building their own value layers on top of cloud. In the coming years we ex...

The amount of data ingested into a data warehouse overwhelmed the system. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor, practitioners would “chase the chips” in an effort to try and compress the overly restrictive elapsed time to insights. This cycle repeated itself for decades. Cloud data warehouses generally and Snowflake specifically changed all this. Not only were resources virtually in...

The pandemic has changed the way we think about, and predict the future. As we enter the third year of COVID, we see the significant impact it’s had on technology strategies, spending patterns and company fortunes. Much has changed and while many of these changes were forced reactions to a new abnormal, the trends we’ve seen over the past twenty-four months have become more entrenched and point th...

When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers and others have joined in the hype machine. It’s easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, staring at a screen or two dimensional Zoom meetings are the fut...