Tech Field Day News Rundown

The US government is worried there might not be enough trained workers to fill the needs of the CHIPS act. President Biden has announced a Workforce Partner Alliance (WFPA) to ensure the gap for skilled workers will be closed as soon as possible. WFPA is designed to reward providers with grants of between $500,000 and $2 million to provide the training for these new chip facilities. Is this someth...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a private cloud solution leveraging the KVM hypervisor, aiming at customers upset by the Broadcom-VMware merger. This is added to the existing bare-metal and container solutions in HPE's Private Cloud offering. HPE is also the latest major IT vendor to partner with NVIDIA on a suite of private cloud solutions designed to accelerate the deployment o...

Amazon Web Services recently held their re:Inforce conference, as the company attempts to partner with customers to deliver a securre environment. Following the shared responsibility model concept that was the focus last year, it seems that the company is emphasizing that security is a job for everyone in the modern cloud. We also saw product announcements from AWS, including enhancements to Nitro...

The US Justice Department and FCC have announced an agreement that gives them each a role to play in potential antitrust investigations against the biggest players in the AI market. Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI were named in the agreement specifically according to insider reports. This follows reports that antitrust investigators have big concerns about AI and how companies developing it get thei...

At Qlik Connect in Orlando, significant announcements affecting the industry were examined. Key highlights included the integration of Talend Cloud to enhance data pipeline capabilities and the introduction of Qlik Answers, an AI-powered knowledge assistant tailored to enterprise data. The partnership with the United Nations to support climate change initiatives by leveraging data analytics was al...

The world’s leading internet firms are actively collaborating with regulators in the European Union to ensure compliance with the bloc’s stringent data protection rules. According to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which serves as the lead EU regulator for major tech companies including Alphabet’s Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and OpenAI, these firms are taking extensive measures to...

Pat Moorhead and Daniel Newman sat down with Sam Burd to discuss AI PCs at Dell Tech World. These new PCs include significant new AI integrations, and Dell expects these to initiate a "super cycle" of PC upgrades. We discussed the importance of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite earlier in the program, but what should we make of the market for AI PCs? This and more announcements from Dell Tech...

The June 2024 Top500 supercomputer list was released at ISC 2024, and there is a lot to unpack. The latest Top 500 Supercomputers list highlights significant trends in the supercomputing landscape, as NVIDIA takes 7 spots with Grace-based systems, including 3 of the top 20. Although the balance between Intel and AMD remains static, there is a shift towards co-packaged CPUs and accelerators just as...

The annual security party known as RSA kicked off this week and one of the things you can count on is big announcements from companies at the event and we've collected a few of them. Red Hat Summit 2024 is also happening this week. The big news from the event is all about AI. The first big announcement is InstructLab, an open-source project aimed at improving LLM outputs. The other big news is...

You don't need an algorithm to know that AI is the hottest invements right now outside of frozen concentrated orange juice. Investors are seeing the mountain of money that Nvdia is making and giving startups all the funding they could hope for. While massive funding for startups in Silicon Valley is old news this recent wave has seen the huge investments coming in the very early stages instead...

In a landmark ruling from the US Federal Trade Commission, non-compete clauses in employment agreements are no longer valid and all existing non-compete clauses are null and void starting in 120 days. The government argues that non-competes stifle wages and reduce the talent pool for companies to draw from. Businesses counter that argument with the need to protect intellectual property. The ruling...

Our eyes were on Google Cloud Next last week, as the hyperscaler announced new ARM chips, lots of partnerships, and of course wall-to-wall AI. Google's Vertex AI Agent Builder allows no-code deployment of agents, Google Vids targets video editing, and the search giant is leaning into Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:40 - BREAKING: The Futurum...

In a historic move, key federal lawmakers, including Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers unveiled a sweeping proposal aimed at granting consumers extensive rights to manage the use of their personal data by tech giants like Google, Meta, and TikTok. The proposed legislation, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, esta...

The US and the UK have allied to make sure AI is developed safely. A new memorandum of understanding has laid out proposals for testing and information sharing to ensure that AI is being safely written and maintained to prevent harm to anyone using it. The ultimate goal, as stated by representatives from both governments, is harnessing the potential of AI while ensuring the risks are understood an...

NVIDIA GTC event was the big story last week, both on the Rundown and in the tech industry generally. NVIDIA is clearly the company to beat in AI and HPC and this has the entire industry on its toes. Every company in tech is emphasizing their partnership and joint offerings with NVIDIA. But there's a reaction from their competitors, too, with Google, Qualcomm, and Intel announcing their intent...

This week is NVIDIA GTC, or as Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman called it "the Woodstock of AI". There's been a lot of discussion about the ascendant NVIDIA and how they plan on capitalizing on a hot market. NVIDIA unveiled Blackwell, their newest architecture. The chip was named after American mathematician David Blackwell and math is most definitely the strong suit of this product l...

Yesterday VAST Data announced what they are calling the AI Factory, and we got a detailed look at this during a Tech Field Day Showcase. VAST is collaborating with NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Run:ai to demonstrate their ability to operationalize AI at scale. Highlighting their rapid growth and partnerships, VAST Data's architecture supports new capabilities like VAST DataBase and VAST DataEngine....

NetApp is updaing their ransomware protection solutions. They've made some new additions to their Automated Ransomware Protection (ARP) platform to address new attack vectors and improve logic for attack detection, including new methods like partial file encryption. NetApp is claiming a 99% precision in detection of ransomware attacks. They have also announced the availability of their Ransomw...

In a series of bold moves, Broadcom has restructured VMware shifting to subscription-only licenses across all offerings. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan wants VMware to focus on resiliency, developer efficiency, and infrastructure efficiency. Tan outlines three key strategies: radical simplification, substantial R&D investment for on-premises to private cloud solutions, and enhancing the ecosystem. The...

The US Department of Justice is at it again with a new team for Operation Dying Ember. Sounds spooky, right? This time it was to undertake a secret court order to remove malware from Ubiquiti devices infected by Fancy Bear. The devices in question had default administration passwords as well as remote admin access on the public Internet. The DOJ reinfected the routers with the original malware use...

Cohesity is set to acquire the data protection assets of Veritas in a huge deal. Cohesity will be picking up the NetBackup portfolio as well as SaaS offering Alta. The move is seen as a huge bolster to Cohesity both in their cloud offerings as well as traditional on-prem enterrpise back and data protection. The deal will merge the two companies into a $7 billion. The remaining parts of Veritas tha...

Cisco Live EMEA is happening this week and we're here learning all the great things that Cisco is investing in and bringing to the market. We thought it would be great to give you a quick overview of the biggest announcements as well as providing some context around why they're important. This and more on this week’s Rundown. Head to  GestaltIT.com  for show notes. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welc...

Juniper Networks is putting more Marvis in everything. In a major announcement this week they released several new products. One of those was expanding the Mist AI platform into Juniper Apstra to create more integration between the two acquisitions. WIth Apstra you get intent-based networking and with Mist you get access to a virtual network assistant that can answer questions about issues or prov...

According to a recent report from the IEA, data center electricity demands are set to rise over the next three years. The report discusses the CO2 emissions and the potential mitigation that companies have committed to doing to achieve carbon neutrality. Also of note was the assertion that clean energy sources could meet this growing demand to help offset the need to rely on older power systems th...

Two of the biggest players in the networking space are about to become one. Rumors started swirling on Monday evening that HPE was looking to acquire Juniper Networks and those rumors were confirmed yesterday. HPE will be paying $40/share or approximately $14 billion for all of the company. Juniper started off as a huge player in the service provider space before making strategic acquisitions of c...