Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

The pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital, it highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication, collaboration and chaotic responses by virtually every major company on the planet. The SolarWinds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect. Moreover, the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cyber criminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are met with counter attacks designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities. The only upshot is the cybersecurity market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize.

Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected U.S. GDP growth at 6-7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT project budgets. However, skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies, which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there’s much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays such as video conferencing, VDI and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding HQ investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work ‘right.’ In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers; and transforming culturally.

UiPath has had a long strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005 but its culture is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product/market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior - like when it had very little revenue. Today, more than 60% of UiPath’s business is outside of the United States, despite its New York headquarters. There’s more. According to recent SEC filings, UiPath’s total revenues grew 81% last year...but its free cash flow is modestly positive. There’s more. The company raised $750M in a Series F in early February at a whopping $35B valuation. Yet the implied back of napkin valuation based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share, yields a valuation of just under $26B. And there’s even more to this crazy story. #BreakingAnalysis #theCUBE #UIPath

Moore’s Law is dead right? Think again. Massive improvements in processing power combined with data and AI will completely change the way we think about designing hardware, writing software and applying technology to businesses. Every industry will be disrupted. You hear that all the time. Well it’s absolutely true and we’re going to explain why and what it all means. #BreakingAnalysis #theCUBE #ETR #MooresLaw

Exactly one week after Pat Gelsinger’s announcement of his plans to reinvent Intel, Arm announced version 9 of its architecture and laid out its vision for the next decade. We believe this vision is very strong as it combines an end-to-end capability, from edge to cloud to the datacenter to the home and everything in between. Arm’s aspirations are ambitious and powerful leveraging its business model, ecosystem and software compatibility with previous generations.

Intel’s big announcement this week underscores the threat that the United States faces from China. The U.S. needs to lead in semiconductor design and manufacturing; and that lead is slipping because Intel has been fumbling the ball over the past several years. A mere two months into the job, new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time in setting a new course for perhaps the most strategically important American technology company. We believe that Gelsinger has only shown us part of his plan. This is the beginning of a long and complex journey. Despite Gelisnger’s clear vision, deep understanding of technology and execution ethos, in order to regain its number one position, Intel will need help from partners, competitors and very importantly, the U.S. government. 

In 2020 it was good to be in tech and even better to be in the cloud as organizations had to rely on remote cloud services to keep things running. We believe tech spending will increase 7-8% in 2021 but we don’t expect investments in cloud computing to sharply attenuate as workers head back to the office. This is not a zero sum game and we believe that pent up demand in on-prem data centers will complement those areas of high growth that we saw last year, namely cloud, AI, security, data and automation. #BreakingAnalysis #theCUBE #ETR

On February 19th of this year, Barron’s dropped an article declaring Oracle a cloud giant and explained why the stock was a buy. Investors took notice and the stock ran up 18% over the next 9 trading days and peaked on March 9th, the day before the company announced its latest earnings. The company beat consensus earnings on both top line and EPS last quarter. But Investors didn’t like Oracle’s tepid guidance and the stock pulled back..but is still well above its pre-Barron’s article price. 

When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3M, more than has ever been paid for works by Guaguin or Salvador Dali, making its creator the third most expensive living artist in the world, one can’t help but take notice and ask: “What is going on?” The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it’s yet another sign that the digital age is now fully upon us.