Tech Field Day News Rundown

At CES 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang introduced Cosmos, a new AI model trained on 20 million hours of video to help machines better understand and interact with the physical world, available via Hugging Face and NVIDIA’s GPU Cloud. He also urged businesses to adopt a three-computer AI system, featuring tools like Project DIGITS for AI development and the Llama Nemotron models for autonomous agents...

We're looking back at our reporting on the biggest enterprise IT stories of 2024 and telling you the trends that will be discussion points well into 2025. We're reconsidering Broadcom's moves with VMware, the fall of Intel, HPE's acquisition of Juniper, that fab CHIPS act, the evolution of data protection companies to security, power-hungry GPUs, Co-Pilot PCs, lots of AI infrastructure, a whole lo...

The big story this week is the continued fallout from Salt Typhoon. The US government is feeling the heat from the exposure of so many telecom companies and they want answers. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has announced a proposed set of rules that would require companies that participate in the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to have a yearly requirement to certify...

The biggest news of the holiday weekend dropped on Monday. Pat Gelsinger has retired from Intel, effective immediately. David Zinsner, CFO, and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, newly named CEO of the Intel Product subunit, have been named as Co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent member. Gelsinger has been the CEO since 2021. He has been focused on returning Intel to dominance in the chip mar...

The week before Thanksgiving is always busy and this year was packed with great conferences. Super Computing 24 took place in Atlanta and there was plenty to discuss with over 17,000 attendees learning about the latest technology. Let's dive in to a few key announcements. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:29 - Clumio Backtrack Announced by Commvault 7:11 - Aryaka Unveils New Survey Repo...

The US Department of Justice is looking at two big IT companies, potentially making waves in the enterprise IT space. They are asking a federal judge to force Google to sell or spin off its Chrome browser, arguing that integration with Google's other products, particularly Android, Search, and the Play store, is anti-competitive. At the same time, the DOJ is also looking at the proposed acquisitio...

Pay rates for IT security professionals are rising faster than inflation, but burnout and stress are growing faster. A survey of UK security professionals revealed the fast pace of modern security and the risk of unknown failure is causing skilled practitioners to leave the field. Would yet more pay fix the problem, or is there another way to address IT security staff retention? This and more on t...

Another Trump presidency could bring significant implications for enterprise tech, particularly through a focus on deregulation, increased M&A, and expanded Big Tech investments. this also extends to advancements in military technology, Israel’s influence on cybersecurity, the impact of initiatives like StarLink and rural broadband on connectivity, nuclear energy, AI, the CHIPS Act, and the ex...

Hatfields and McCoys. Lakers and Celtics. GIF versus GIF. The rivalries of our time are always storied. One of the biggest seems to be cooling, however. AMD and Intel have announced a new partnership aimed at countering the surge of ARM-based designs. The companies are trying to standardize aspects of the x86 instruction set in order to make it easier for ISVs to write code that runs on both Intel...

At Open Compute Summit this past week, key trends shaping the future of computing and infrastructure were discussed. One major concern is the global data center energy consumption, which is projected to triple by 2030, highlighting the urgent need for more efficient energy solutions. As technology advances, the shift from a 3nm process to a 2nm process is proving costly, with design costs estimate...

At Commvault SHIFT 2024, The Futurum Group's Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead sat with CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, who discussed Commvault's strategic pivot towards a cloud-first approach in cyber resilience. This shift involves key acquisitions, such as Appranix and Clumio, and new partnerships with AWS and Google, aimed at enhancing cloud data protection and recovery. Mirchandani also introduced t...

A big cyberattack attributed to groups backed by the Chinese government has telecom providers worried. In this new report, investigators have determined that the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has had months-long access into the network infrastructures of companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies. That access includes visibility over the infrastructure used for lawful intercept, whic...

Microsoft has revamped its AI-powered Recall feature, shifting from automatic to opt-in use with enhanced security measures like full encryption and Windows Hello authentication, addressing privacy concerns. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB-1047, which aimed to regulate AI models, citing concerns that smaller models outside the regulation's scope might pose greater risks. Meanwhile, Open...

We're happy to have Dr. Bob Sutor joining us this week on the Rundown, since he covers quantum and advanced computing for The Futurum Group. IBM made two important announcements in the quantum space this week. The first announcement was Qiskit, a quantum SDK that runs on Python for quantum computers. This promises to bring quantum compute to a more mainstream audience and converting the underl...

We have talked at length this year about Intel's efforts to turn the ship and add more profitability to the ledger. One of the crown jewels in that portfolio is the foundry business. It has been the recipient of a large amount of government funding through the CHIPS Act. But it is also playing catch up with TSMC and others. New broke yesterday that Intel has announced that the foundry business...

AT&T has decided enough is enough. They have filed a lawsuit over the tactics they claim are putting first responders and critical government services at risk. AT&T is claiming breach of contract because of the new support policy enacted by Broadcom after the VMware acquisition. The key point comes in an amendment in their support agreement that says that AT&T can renew their current s...

This year, at the smallest VMware conference in many years, Broadcom made some important announcements. As we've previously discussed, VMware Cloud Foundation 9 was detailed, along with Tanzu Platform 10, an enhanced Edge Orchestrator platform, VeloCloud Software-Defined Edge, and more. Although we miss the community coming together at VMworld every year, this smaller VMware Explore conference...

This week kicked off the annual Hot Chips conference and AI has once again dominated the conversation. There were a lot of stories to talk about, from wafer scale chips to silicon photonics, Cerebras' giant leap into AI Inferencing, Microsoft Azure's MAIA 100 AI Accelerator, IBM's On-Chip DPU, Broadcom's AI Compute ASIC, Intel's Guadi 3, and more. Let's dive in on this epis...

Our big story this week is from AMD. They're opening up their wallet to the tune of nearly $5 billion to buy ZT Systems. The two companies have had a preexisting partnership, with ZT having collaborated on the EPYC processor lines. ZT's biggest customers are AWS and Azure, as ZT specializes in hyperscale AI systems that are bought by the rack. This move follows a very recent acquisition of...

Black Hat was last week and Hacker Summer Camp never fails to disappoint. There were some big takeaways from the show, such as Moxie Marlinspike telling DevOps they're the problem with security as well as a whole host of exploits, like the ones we've covered above. However, AI is king in 2024 and we knew everyone was going to be talking about it. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to The Rundown...

It's not a great day for Intel and some 15,000 workers. In the earning call last week the CPU giant revealed that while they hit their revenue target numbers this past quarter there are storm clouds on the horizon. Challenges from AI companies as well as issues with some of their most recent chip designs has Pat Gelsinger looking to cut costs. The way that was expressed to the industry was thr...

Microsoft has released an accountability notice after the big Crowdstrike outage. According to the release, Microsoft is going to change and innovate in the area of end-to-end resilience. This includes things like VBS enclaves, which require no kernel mode drivers, as well as Azure Attestation, which determines secure boot posture. The messaging indicates that Microsoft sees kernel access is their...

Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:03 - NVIDIA's B20 AI Chip 5:35 - Wiz Denies Google's $23 Billion 9:15 - AMD Acquires Silo AI 14:07 - BMC Announces Mainframe AI Integration 18:04 - Einstein Service Agent Released by Salesforce 22:18 - Swiss Government Mandates Open Source 26:58 - Crowdstrike Update Strikes Microsoft's Cloud Services 43:46 - The Weeks Ahead 46:11 - Thanks fo...

Google is looking to make their biggest acquisition ever. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Alphabet will be making a bid to purchase Wiz for $23 billion. Wiz has spent the past four years developing a cloud security platform that has detected some big problems in a number of providers, including one in Microsoft Bing. Google is finding itself increasingly under fire from...

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a comprehensive guide to bolster operational security (OPSEC) for election officials. This guide aims to enhance the security of election infrastructure by offering detailed strategies for identifying and mitigating potential risks within the election context. This and more on The Rundown. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the R...