Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

ServiceNow is a company that investors love to love. But there’s caution in the investor community right now as confusion about transitory inflation and higher interest rates looms. ServiceNow also suffers from perfection syndrome. The company has seen that the slightest misstep can cause mini freakouts from the investor community so it has architected a financial and communications model that allows it to beat expectations and raise its outlook on a continuing basis. Regardless, ServiceNow appears to be on a track to vie for what it’s CEO Bill McDermott refers to as the next great enterprise software company. Wait, I thought that Marc Benioff had his hands on that steering wheel!

Despite all the chatter about cloud repatriation and the exorbitant cost of cloud computing, customer spending momentum continues to accelerate in the post isolation economy. If the pandemic was good for the cloud it seems that the benefits of cloud migration remain lasting in the late stages of COVID. And we believe this stickiness will continue. In this Breaking Analysis Dave will share some fresh July survey data that indicates accelerating momentum for the largest cloud computing firms.

A new era of data is upon us. The technology industry generally and the data business specifically are in a state of transition. Even our language reflects that. For example, we rarely use the phrase “Big Data” anymore. Rather we talk about digital transformation or data-driven companies. In this Breaking Analysis we want to share our assessment of the state of the data business. We’ll do so by looking at the data mesh concept and how a division of a leading financial institution, JPMC, is practically applying these relatively new ideas to transform its data architecture for the next decade. 

Chris Lewis from Lewis Insights joins Dave Vellante for Breaking Analysis

AWS is pointing the way to a revolution in system architecture. Much in the same way that AWS defined the cloud operating model last decade, we believe it is once again leading in future systems. The secret sauce underpinning these innovations is specialized designs that break the stranglehold of inefficient and bloated centralized processing, and allow AWS to accommodate a diversity of workloads that span cloud, data center as well as the near and far edge.

As you well know by now, the cloud is about shifting IT labor to more strategic initiatives. Or as Andy Jassy laid out years ago - removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with deploying and managing IT infrastructure. Cloud is also about changing the operating model and rapidly scaling a business or operation. Often overlooked with cloud, however, is the innovation piece of the puzzle. A main source of that innovation is venture funded startup companies with brilliant technologists who have a vision to solve hard problems and enter large markets at scale.

Database is the heart of enterprise computing. The market is both exploding and evolving. Major forces transforming the space include cloud and data - of course - but also new workloads, advanced memory and IO capabilities, new processor types, a massive push toward simplicity, new data sharing and governance models; and a spate of venture investment. Snowflake stands out as the gold standard for operational excellence and go to market execution. The company has attracted the attention of customers, investors and competitors and everyone from entrenched players to upstarts want in on the act.

Nvidia wants to completely transform enterprise computing by making datacenters run 10X faster at 1/10th the cost. Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is crafting a strategy to re-architect today’s on-prem data centers, public clouds and edge computing installations with a vision that leverages the company's strong position in AI architectures. The keys to this end-to-end strategy include a clarity of vision, massive chip design skills, new Arm-based architectures that integrate memory, processors, I/O and networking; and a compelling software consumption model. Even if Nvidia is unsuccessful at acquiring Arm, we believe it will still be able to execute on this strategy by actively participating in the Arm ecosystem. If its attempts to acquire Arm are successful, however, we believe it will transform Nvidia from the world’s most valuable chip company into the world’s most valuable supplier of integrated computing architectures.

The convenience of online access to bank accounts, payment apps, crypto exchanges and other transaction systems has created enormous risks, which the vast majority of individuals either choose to ignore or simply don’t understand. The Internet has become the new private network and unfortunately, it’s not so private. APIs, scripts, spoofing, insider crime, sloppy security hygiene by users and much more, all increase our risks. The convenience of cloud-based services, in many respects, exacerbates the problem. But software built in the cloud is a big part of the solution.

Cloud repatriation is a term often used by technology companies that don’t operate a public cloud. The marketing narrative most typically implies that customers have moved work to the public cloud and for a variety of reasons - expense, performance, security, etc. - are disillusioned with the cloud and as a result are “repatriating” workloads back to their safe, comfy and cost effective on-premises data center. While we have no doubt this does sometimes happen, the data suggests that this is a single digit, de minimis phenomenon.