Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

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in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays and maximizing server utilization have been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros and developers with expertise in microservices, container app development and similar skills. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech, touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. It begs the question: Is hardware going the way of COBOL? Well, not likely — software has to run on something. But the labor and skills needed to deploy, troubleshoot and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting quite dramatically. At the same time we’ve seen the value flow also changing in hardware. Once a world dominated by x86 processors, value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and Arm-based designs. Moreover, other components like NICs, accelerators and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated and increasingly important. The question is: Does it matter? If so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs and the broader society? In this Breaking Analysis we try to answer these questions and to do so we’ve organized a special CUBE Power Panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question: Does Hardware (Still) Matter?

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 others remain oblivious to the momentum building around data mesh. We are in the early days of data mesh adoption. Organizations that have taken the plunge will tell you aligning stakeholders is a non-trivial effort. But one that is necessary to break through the limitations that monolithic data architectures and highly specialized teams have imposed over frustrated business and domain leaders. However, practical data mesh examples often lie in the eyes of the implementer and may not strictly adhere to the principles of data mesh. Part of the problem is the lack of open technologies and standards that can accelerate adoption and reduce friction.This is the topic of today’s Breaking Analysis where we investigate some of the key technology and architectural questions around data mesh. To do so, we welcome back the founder of data mesh and Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks, Zhamak Dehghani. 

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.