Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

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, based on customer data, we feel Okta has a blind spot. There are customer ripple effects that require clear action, which are missed in Okta’s public statements. Okta’s product portfolio remains solid. It is a clear leader in the identity space. But in our view, one part of the long journey back to credibility requires Okta to fully understand and recognize the true scope of this breach on its customers. In this week’s Breaking Analysis we welcome our ETR colleague Erik Bradley to share new data from the community. In addition, we’ll analyze some of the statements made by Okta CEO Todd McKinnon in an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg to see how they align with what customers tell us.

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 tech spending softness. According to ETR analysis and channel checks in theCUBE community, the real story is these issues are not isolated. Rather we’re seeing signs of caution from buyers across the board in enterprise tech. In this Breaking Analysis we are the bearers of bad news, relatively speaking. We’ll share a first look at new data that suggest a tightening in tech spending, calling for 6% growth this year, which is below our January prediction of 8% for 2022. 

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 market forces, rather than public policy, have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Moreover, the standard for antitrust action has always been demonstrating consumer harm. Many of today’s policy makers are challenging that notion and using market dominance and the potential for consumer harm as the new benchmark for intervention. In this week’s Breaking Analysis we welcome in frequent CUBE contributor David Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. We explore several issues including the efficacy of governments’ antitrust actions against big tech, what types of remedies have been and can be most effective and a first pass assessment of the new rules EU regulators just agreed to try and rein in big tech companies.

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 analyze than Snowflake. In this breaking analysis we take look at the action of Snowflake’s stock since its IPO, why it’s behaved the way it has, how some sharp traders are looking at the stock and most importantly, what customer demand looks like. 

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 several recent moves, including making another go at its foundry business, the company is years away from reversing its lagging position relative to today’s leading foundries and design shops. Intel’s best chance to survive as a leader in our view will come from a combination of a massive market, continued supply constraints, government money and luck – perhaps in the form of a deal with Apple in the mid- to long term. In this Breaking Analysis we’ll update you on our latest assessment of Intel’s competitive position and unpack nuggets from the company’s February investor conference.

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 present our quarterly update of the trends in RPA and share the latest survey data from Enterprise Technology Research. 

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 afterthought, has led to vastly heightened awareness around DevSecOps. Finally, attacking security as a data problem with automation and AI is fueling new innovations in cyber products and services; and is spawning well-funded, disruptive startups. In this Breaking Analysis we present our quarterly findings on the security sector. We’ll share the latest ETR survey data, identify the companies with customer spending momentum and share some of the market movers.

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 change the game on Amazon in the cloud. Factor in Red Hat, which needed a path beyond Linux and was just about to opt for an alternative to Kubernetes to power OpenShift. Finally, figure out a governance structure to herd all the cats in the ecosystem so you can win out over other competition and create a de facto standard. Make all that happen and you get the remarkable ascendancy of Kubernetes. Such was the story unveiled recently in a new two-part documentary series from Honeypot simply titled “Kubernetes.” In this Breaking Analysis we tap the back stories of this documentary, which explains the improbable events leading to the creation of Kubernetes. We’ll share commentary from early Kubernetes committers and key players who came on theCUBE to piece together how it all happened. Finally, we’ll present new survey data from ETR on containers.  

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 expect innovation will continue to coalesce around the big 3 U.S. clouds, plus Alibaba in APAC, with the ecosystem building value on top of the hardware, software and tools provided by the hyperscalers. Importantly, we don’t see this as a race to the bottom. Rather our expectation is that the large public cloud players will continue to take cost out of their platforms through innovation, automation and integration. Other cloud providers and the ecosystem, including traditional IT buyers, will leverage hyperscale clouds and mine opportunities in their respective markets. This is not a zero sum game. In this Breaking Analysis we’ll update you on our latest projections in the cloud market, share some new ETR survey data with some surprising nuggets; and drill into the important cloud database landscape. 

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 infinite, but the ability to separate compute from storage permanently altered the cost, performance, scale and value equation. But as data makes its way into the cloud and is increasingly democratized as a shared resource across clouds – and at the edge – practitioners must bring a SecDevOps mindset to securing their cloud data warehouses. This Breaking Analysis takes a closer look at the fundamentals of securing Snowflake. An important topic as data becomes more accessible and available to a growing ecosystem of users, customers and partners. To do so we welcome two guests to this episode. Ben Herzberg is an experienced hacker, developer and an expert in several aspects of data security. Yoav Cohen is a technology visionary and currently serving as CTO at Satori Cyber.