It’s Episode 39 of the Moor Insights & Strategy Hot Desk Podcast — Join Robert Kramer and Melody Brue as they talk about key developments from Microsoft Ignite, Solidigm, AWS, Canva, Zoom, and a company to watch: Panzura.
Watch the full episode here:
Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, its contents should not be taken as investment advice.
Transcript:
Melody Brue: Hi, welcome to this week’s edition of Moor Insights & Strategy Hot Desk Podcast. I am Melody Brue and I’m joined by Robert Kramer. We are both VP and Principal Analysts at Moor Insights and Robert covers ERP and Enterprise Data. I cover modern work, HCM, CX, and a bunch of other things. Both of us cover enterprise apps and the thing that holds it all together, which is data. That’s becoming more and more intertwined with everything that we do. This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. So while we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, and actually today we’ll be discussing that quite a bit, its contents should not be taken as investment advice. So we’re going to get started. We’ve got a couple of big things for you today. So Robert, how are you?
Robert Kramer: I’m good. We’re having a good week. I think we’re getting ready for Thanksgiving at the household here. We’re seeing the holiday spirit kind of go around, but all good so far. How about yourself?
Melody Brue: Great. It’s been a busy couple weeks. This week we’ve had several of the team at Microsoft Ignite.
Robert Kramer: Yep.
Melody Brue: Which is great. I think covering our various swim lanes, there’s been a ton of different announcements. Patrick Moorhead is there. There’s a lot of video coming out of that with The Six Five. I think just sort of focusing on our swim lanes, let’s just kind of quick rapid fire on it. What are you seeing coming out of Ignite from a data perspective that is important for you?
Robert Kramer: Their data platform, which is Microsoft Fabric, introduced Fabric databases, which allows you to have more of a SQL database inside of it that offers transactional capabilities with security and vector searches, RAG support. I’m also seeing a lot of things, as we know, centered around data management and AI, AI agents, which allow these systems to be more functional from an analytical standpoint to bring in unstructured and structured data. They released OneLake, which allows some of these things where I’m talking about, where you’re able to bring data in and use it from a transactional perspective. Some of those key things that are allowing these users to have more of a simplified data management structure, more productive. Also, the application performance, cost is a big deal, but also more of a modern approach to Microsoft’s products.
Melody Brue: I’ve seen that across a lot of different companies. Box just had their BoxWorks and there was so much around managing the massive amount of data, and AI having the capability to really help do that. At Ignite, for me, kind of in my swim lanes, some of the big things was around Copilot. So really there’s a big transition from prompt-driven AI to autonomous AI agents, which means the focus is shifting from that traditional generative AI chatbots to more autonomous agents that are capable of performing actions without prompting. And Microsoft has said that they’ve talked about productivity for a long time, but now they’re actually showing some really good use cases with customers and actually internally how they’ve seen, they’ve realized some really important gains from this, some really practical use cases. They showed some use cases for AI agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, where it can act as a meeting facilitator for live translations in Teams. So this is actually a really cool thing where you can have a meeting within Microsoft Teams in multiple languages and taking a snippet of your voice, it will translate live. So you can be having a conversation across a different language with somebody. Say I’m having a conversation with somebody in China, it will translate my voice, not just a translation, but it will actually translate my voice as if I’m speaking another language. And that’s live translation within Microsoft Teams. That’s super cool. I can’t wait to try it. So I’m saying it’s cool from the idea of it.
And then Copilot Actions, which is really automation tools like tasking for organizing project, update emails, summarizing inputs. The things you would sort of expect. Some challenges I’m seeing is naming and usability confusion. This is something I think it’s not just a Microsoft problem, it’s a Copilot and an Agent problem. Everybody has a Copilot now. Microsoft started this with Copilot. It just makes sense. It’s like it’s sitting next to you. But then Agent, one of the biggest use cases for Agent is in the contact center, but contact center agents are also called agents. Contact center employees are also called agents. So I think that there’s just some kind of usability and naming confusion around that that needs to be cleared up. The other thing that I’m slightly concerned about is that these agents are essentially becoming a secondary workforce that needs to be managed. And that’s a big burden that’s put on IT to manage this and sort of prevent this sprawl, especially when you see things like all of these developer tools where people can just create their own agents. Who’s going to manage these agents? Where is the platform to manage that? And when you look at something like Salesforce, where it’s a use-based pricing model, how is that sprawl controlled? So those are my big takeaways from Ignite, but some of those concerned are industry-wide, some of those are Microsoft.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, there’s a data governance problem then that does affect what you’re talking about, which is the AI component. One of the things I wanted to mention, I did talk about the platform of OneLake. Microsoft is taking more of an approach on unstructured and structured data, but on-prem and prem and cloud. So this is giving more of a unified view of data where it sits versus just having to be in the cloud only. And then one of the things I did want to mention is their sustainability data solutions that they’re embarking on, some of those that they released that we could talk about later, but not in this show. But as we go forward, when we talk about sustainability a little bit more and how it’s a big component I think for 2025 for enterprise, is to make sure they have a practice that takes care of that or utilizes the features that some of these vendors have. As we move on, you were on stage at this great show, I think. You want to tell us a little bit about that? The event?
Melody Brue: Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like we just always sort of fall into these really great transitions because as you were talking about sustainability, I was in New York last week for Solidigm’s launch of their 122 terabyte solid state drive. That’s a huge amount. To put it in perspective, I don’t have these things right in front of me, but it was like you could store every movie from the nineties like a thousand times over. I mean, it’s just the amount of storage that is in this drive is quite impressive. But what really stood out to me from a sustainability standpoint, and I published a Forbes article on this yesterday and we can link that in-
Robert Kramer: Fantastic, by the way.
Melody Brue: … the show notes. Thank you. But it really has a significant amount of power savings compared to traditional solutions. So from a cost reduction, environmental impact is super important. From an edge computing standpoint, the capacity and low power consumptions are really, really well suited for edge environments where resources are limited. And from a design standpoint, it was designed for a longer lifespan, drive life is what they call it, and minimizing e-waste. So you can read more about that in the Forbes article, but it was super great. It was a really nice event. There were partners from Arm, VAST, Ocient, PEAK, CoreWeave.
Robert Kramer: Wow.
Melody Brue: A representative from Dell who gave their take on this, and Dell is obviously huge in sustainability. And the data center sustainability is going to be something I think we’re going to see way more of in 2025, and something that I have, definitely have my eye on for next year in terms of coverage and research. So it was a great event, really cool to be part of, and we’ll definitely see more on that.
Robert Kramer: Do you think that companies are… You saw the ones that are really high on sustainability, it’s super important, they have a lot of opinions, but is that the minority or the majority?
Melody Brue: So I’m going to limit this to data center just because the sustainability is such a massive subject.
Robert Kramer: That’s right. That’s good point.
Melody Brue: And I think eventually everybody’s going to have to get on board with this. And for some period it was sort of politicized and so people kind of were pulling back from talking about it. They probably were still doing it. From a data center perspective, it has to be done because there are just limited resources. AI has put such pressure on data centers that it just has to be done. It’s become a business imperative that nobody can overlook it as this is a green thing. It no longer is a matter of opinion. It just has to be done. There’s not enough power and there’s not enough space. So Solidigm is really trying to help solve this by having these more significant power savings and resource space savings. And that’s a huge step in making this just say it’s just a thing that has to be done. So yes, it has to be something everybody pays attention to and the regulations are just going in that direction. That’s a bigger topic I think we can opine on down the road. Let’s get on to some major moves because I think we’ve both kind of called this out on social media. There’s been some surprises and some real big, what I would call snags in the industry where people have companies. I said this on LinkedIn the other day. Normally you would congratulate a new hire. In some cases we’re like, “Wow, good for you, Canva. You got this rock star from somewhere else.” What’s going on here?
Robert Kramer: I mean, I think you’re right. Is it AI? Is it change? Is it companies are growing and they need a specific person that maybe they were better fit with the new company? Maybe all the above? It’s Julia White from SAP who was the Chief Marketing Solutions officer there. She was also at Microsoft before that, so she has two decades more between those two, is now leaving to go to AWS and she’ll be a CMO and VP there. What’s also interesting is AWS is looking to strengthen against their competition, Microsoft and Google. And I think this really gives them a little bit more of a focus with her, with her AI experience and their innovation that she’s done at SAP. But the one that was surprising to me, and I don’t know if you caught wind of this, maybe it was a little quiet, was Dr. Matt Wood, who was the VP of AI for AWS. He led many of these events I was at and he was really the keynote there of… Not Reinvent, but he was one of them. But some of the past ones that were not Reinvent, he was the lead person. And for him to leave and he’s going to Pricewaterhouse to be a Chief Technology Innovation Officer or Commercial Technology Innovation Officer, that’s a surprise to me. And also our CEO, Patrick Moorhead interviewed him this year as well. So that’s a shocker. I know that you’ve been covering a few as well. Tell us about what you feel and maybe we can tie it back to is there some synergy here?
Melody Brue: Yeah, I’m going to say one, I agree with you on Matt Wood. I feel like he is sort of almost the poster, I’m not going to call him a child, but the poster exec for AWS. And I would love Pat to do a follow-up with him on what’s the draw to PwC. And I have to say I like the energy that Julia brings to AWS.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, I agree.
Melody Brue: To me, she’s super dynamic. She’s a very forward facing CMO, where a lot of CMOs are kind of in the background. At SAP, she was always on stage. She’s very forward. She’s a kind of face-of-the-company type of leader.
Robert Kramer: I agree.
Melody Brue: And so I like that hire for them a lot. Another hire I like a lot, and this is like a, “Whoa, good for you, Canva,” Canva just hired Kelly Steckelberg from Zoom. Zoom announced Kelly leaving as CFO a couple months back and they announced the new CFO, which I’ll get to in a second. And we talked about this actually, I think a couple months back that I thought this was a somewhat sad day for Zoom, although I did since then have a chat with Kelly about her successor. And she has huge confidence in her, and so that I think is a really good thing. But at the time, I did not know where Kelly was going. Kelly is going to Canva. And Canva has made some just huge strides recently. Recently just had a massive bump in their valuation, now valued at 32 billion with more than two, probably closer to two and a half billion in ARR. They just this past year went into the enterprise market with 95% of Fortune 500 companies as users. This isn’t across the board users. This is, say, maybe a department uses them. I wouldn’t say they’ve conquered the enterprise, but what I would say is I think this signals… I’ve said IPO watch is on. Everybody has kind of hinted at this recently with Canva. They had a little bit of a setback. Some of this is market conditions, some of this is their previous CFO left under some not great conditions. Kelly Steckelberg led Zoom through its IPO, led them through their massive, just huge trajectory during COVID and then to profitability when things kind of settled. COVID was just this massive, huge amount of growth, but then everything has to settle down after that. She’s not just a number CFO. She understands product, she understands people. She’s just a really, really great leader, so congrats to Canva on that one.
Robert Kramer: Just to interrupt for a second. When a CFO understands product, I think it makes things a little bit easier on the finance portion because it’s not split and the product is the deliverable for the success. And if she understands that and is able to bring that to Canva, I think that’s a big hire, like you just said.
Melody Brue: A hundred percent. And that’s going to be really important for Canva as they grow and they try to compete with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. They have big ambitions and they’re going to need somebody like Kelly to carry them out. Zoom is filling that position with Michelle Chang. Michelle comes from Microsoft. She was Corporate VP and CFO of their Commercial Sales & Partner Organization. So let that sink in. Commercial Sales & Partner Organization, that’s a really important place for Zoom to be right now. I think that she will be a critical part of their next growth phase as they move from just a video conferencing company to an AI driven collaboration and productivity platform. Zoom is releasing their next quarter, which is I believe Q3 2025 financial results on Monday. And they are expected to deliver BB, so I’m assuming probably a raise on that as well. So big moves there. Zoom, and I say this is not… I’m going to say yes, this is a little bit of a loss for Zoom, but Zoom has an incredible AI team. This is more of a gain for Grammarly. Eileen Gann, who was the Lead Product on AI at Zoom, just went to Grammarly and now is their Director of Product. So I point this out not because this is a major C-suite move, but just because you wouldn’t expect Grammarly to go this big on AI, but they have to. They have to to keep up. And Eileen is a rock star and she built a lot of great products at Zoom. For one, for Grammarly to get her is amazing. For her to be willing to go to Grammarly shows that they have a strategy that she believes in and she’s ready to get behind. And I’m excited to see what she has to do there. So big moves happening.
Robert Kramer: Big moves.
Melody Brue: This is exciting. It shows that there’s just a lot of stuff happening in the industry and that AI is actually changing the way that organizations are moving people around and people are making changes, people changes, based on needs within an organization. And I’m excited to see how this stuff is kind of playing out. It’s kind of fun.
Robert Kramer: It is fun. And I think some of it is when some of these people, like we mentioned Julia, from going from SAP to AWS, she’s a head of marketing who knows product, which is not necessarily the criteria, but it’s needed to understand how to market better. And it goes back to understanding the innovations, and hence AI, and then getting that data management in place to capitalize on it. And you’re seeing companies like Zoom and Grammarly, how important that is for their success. And I think Grammarly is in a situation where they’re going to need to take advantage of this innovation, not necessarily right now, but will need it to be in place to compete at the level that they want to compete. They have an innovation, but there’s more that has come aboard with AI that they’re going to need capitalize on, like you’re saying.
Melody Brue: Absolutely, they do. Grammarly had an advantage for a really long time where their AI followed you where you went. You could be in email, you could be in a doc anywhere and Grammarly would show up. Now a lot of these tools have done that, and so people will make the decision, do I need Copilot or Perplexity or whatever, and Grammarly? So Grammarly has stepped it up. They have some really good things that they’ve added to their product, including integrations with JIRA and other collaboration tools. I don’t know that they’ve done the best job at communicating that. They’re somewhat hidden within the product, but they’re going to need to have bigger and better features than what they led with, which I thought it was great, which is that it’s where you are. You don’t have to leave anything and toggle back and forth to use it. So I’m excited to see what they have to do.
Robert Kramer: Sounds great.
Melody Brue: So this is a little bit of a teaser of what’s to come after the holidays for our watchers and listeners. We are going to be kind of changing up the format here and highlighting some smaller companies. So at Moor Insights & Strategy, we really look after and work with some of the biggest companies in the world, but we recognize that with AI there are some really important up-and-coming companies. And so as we change, we’re going to do a little bit of a refresh, probably a rebrand, a rename. Watch out for it. It’s coming. But we’re going to be highlighting some smaller companies and some solutions that we think that you should keep your eye on, that we’re keeping our eyes on. So Robert, you’re up with a small cap company to keep an eye on-
Robert Kramer: Yeah, this company is called Panzura, and it’s a privately held company out of California. They focus on hybrid cloud data management solutions, and that means on-premise cloud solutions for managing large files. So companies that could be in the healthcare, architecture, engineering, construction, media and entertainment, how do you get these files from one place to another without waiting for 30 minutes? So they’re able to allow you to move unstructured or structured data for team members to be able to collaborate. They have a very strong mobile and cloud solution as well. They were formed in 2008. They had an infusion in 2020. They have a high growth potential currently right now. At the same time, they hired a new CEO about a year ago, and they’ve been just lights out since that she’s joined.
At the same time, what I really like about them is when you look at file structures, it’s hard to move, and they have an innovation around it. They have a market that isn’t really focused. Their market is focused, but the market isn’t really looking at something like this in the radar that they are from the product development and the way that they’re expanding, and the technology from a security perspective and scalability. So I really like what they’re doing. And from their standpoint, they do have competition. Who doesn’t? But at the same time, their performance and their security, their flexibility, a lot of people are having their eyes on them, specifically in those industries that I was talking about because of the ability to collaborate at a cost effective way. This information, if you look at the healthcare business, how do you get these files across if you have 60 hospitals in an operation, in a HIPAA-compliant data management format that offers the privacy in a way you don’t have to wait a period of time? So that’s what they’re bringing and I really like what they have, and their funding as well. So it’s exciting to see them. We’ll be watching them from afar. And hopefully in 2025, they’ll be at a level where we can really admire them.
Melody Brue: So one, I just was looking at Crunchbase. It’s a female led company, yeah?
Robert Kramer: Yep.
Melody Brue: Love that. We could talk about this another time, but I’ll just throw this out there, that there are a lot of signals that are showing that AI is actually really favorable towards bridging the gender gap in leadership. Because women have the skills that are needed, the more soft skills that when AI produces all of the promised productivity and workflow gains, it’s the soft skills that are really going to be needed in leadership, and that women possess those. So, love that they are female led.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, her name is Jill Stelfox and she been our board, I believe it was February of last year. And they’ve really gone in a positive direction. Like you said, those soft skills focused on what the business impact is for the company and then the deliverables for the customers, kind of finding where that revenue growth can be found. And I think that their initiatives have been strategic. They got funding, I believe in 2020. It says that they’ve had a 485% increase in ARR over the past three years, and they rank 1,343 of the 5,000 top fastest-growing private companies.
Melody Brue: Wow.
Robert Kramer: So just something to keep on our radar.
Melody Brue: Definitely. Before we wrap up, I have a question, because I just saw this. So they have machine learning and AI for early ransomware detection and expert-guided recovery. I keep seeing this. Box actually announced a similar solution, and I actually came to you because you are the expert on this, not I. How much overlap is needed in the enterprise for something like that? Say Box, that’s within the Box environment, so it totally makes sense to me that Box would offer that to their customers. But then there’s the big ones, right? All the companies that you cover that have this throughout the enterprise, is that redundancy necessary for companies? And we’ve seen obviously that the ransomware, it has reduced slightly in incidence, but the cost of it has increased over the last year. How important is that redundancy across an organization?
Robert Kramer: Well, I’m not sure it’s redundant. So the enterprise applications have security within them. Once that data leaves there and goes to another application, is it covered between the ERP company and the SaaS company or the data management company where it’s at? Who’s covering that? So it depends what network coverage you have. I’d say more is better than less. And a lot of these companies are on the resiliency path where they’re trying to find the best way to get back up and running because they know at any given time they could be breached. I would say more is better, like I said. And depending what solutions they have, it’s hard to say if there’s an overlap. But I think inherent in those solutions like Panzura, it’s really important to have another security measure. And they have that. They have biometric, they have advanced security encryption. And I think that’s critical like it is for Box.
Melody Brue: I knew you’d know.
Robert Kramer: It’s just always complicated. And these companies with the data management, we’re going to see this being even more relevant next year is we spent all year talking about data and AI. I think a lot of the companies have got in the spirit of finding a way to say, “This needs to be a strategy for us.” The next thing is going back and now looking at their security. Is everything covered in that data management that they’re putting their laurels on for their company to actually expand and use AI in full force?
Melody Brue: All right. Well, this has been a great show, everybody. Just a little over 30 minutes, but we had a lot to talk about. So you want to wrap us up?
Robert Kramer: Yeah, let’s wrap it up. Thank you all for joining this week of Hot Desk. We had a great time. I think we’re ready to launch our new episodes coming forth the first week of December. We’re going to take off next week, and we’ll be coming up with our new format, which we kind of highlighted this week. But please, put in any requests that you have. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and be sure to stay tuned for more to come as we head to the new year. Thank you. Robert Kramer, Melody Brue, look forward to see you soon.
Melody Brue: Thanks.
