I hope you all had a wonderful couple of weeks!

Last week, many on the team attended Intel Investor Day. This week, we will be getting ready for MWC. Will, Anshel and myself will be attending. Please let us know if you would like to meet up or help support your activities with sponsored videos under the Moor Insights & Strategy or Six Five brands. 

Our MI&S team published 23 deliverables: 

• 12 (Forbes or eWEEK) columns 
• 6 MI&S blogs
• 5 podcasts   
• 0 research papers

Over the last two weeks, the press quoted us with 22 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Amazon, AMD, Arm, Cisco, D-Wave, Intel, Meta, NFT, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Ventana Micro Systems. 

Quick Insights:

A.I./Machine Learning (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• Odd but true - Amazon Fresh Stores was named the No. 1 overall grocery retailer for 2021 by The Retailer Preference Index. This is the second year it has captured the title by using innovation, Artificial intelligence, and good service. It's not a large chain and only has 23 stores, but Amazon plans to double that number next year. This should give hope to companies and franchise entrepreneurs. You do not have to be big to be good.
• NVIDIA may not acquire Arm, but it still has long-term plans for Arm-based CPUs. In its earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the Grace CPU will be released in 2023. No one should forget that NVIDIA has a 20-year license for the architecture.
• MIT researchers have developed a helpful tool for neural networks. Because neutral networks can outperform humans on some tasks and work so well, researchers don't understand how or why they work. That knowledge would help predict model performance. MIT's procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. The descriptions closely agree with feature descriptions by humans across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models.

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• Microsoft’s Alex Kipman pours water on Hololens 3’s cancellation, saying that ‘Hololen is doing great and if you search the internet they also said we had canceled Hololens2.’
• Foo Fighters play a concert in VR for free after the Superbowl
• Tobii announces that it is in negotiations to be the eye-tracking provider for the Sony PlayStation VR2. I recently spoke with Tobii’s head of XR about consumer eye-tracking technologies on the Moor XR podcast
• Comcast and NBC have launched the Winter Olympics VR app, and it provides an elevated Olympics experience. However, it still needs some work in terms of frame rates and stream consistency; the inability to locally download content makes the experience worse, in my opinion
• PC VR continues to grow with more than 3 million headsets connected to Steam. However, this also translated to the Oculus Quest market share growing even further
• Firefox Reality is shutting down and being transferred to a 3rd party group that will manage the codebase and browser under a new brand
• Apple’s realityOS appears to be the potential name for the company’s operating system for XR headsets which have been rumored to be delayed until next year

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

• Inseego announced an impressive win this week to support the largest 5G smart campus at Deutsche Messe (DM) with its fixed wireless access solution. DM is one of Germany's largest trade show operators and organizes the Hanover Messe event annually. The campus will also support a testbed for proof of concept and trial activities tied to enterprise and industrial uses cases. From my perspective, this is an impressive showcase for Inseego to demonstrate its capability to expand beyond its traditional service provider business into the enterprise.  

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • N/A
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • Will Cisco acquire Splunk? Inquiring minds want to know! The networking infrastructure giant has been unusually coy about its intentions. Splunk could extend Cisco's capabilities with full-stack observability if a deal happens. $20B represents the most significant acquisition target in the company's history, and it will be interesting to see what unfolds over the next few weeks.   
• Server- (Matt Kimball)   
  • N/A  

FinTech (Melody Brue)

• N/A

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• EdgeX is an open-source edge gateway platform from the Linux Foundation. EdgeX released version 2.1 (Jakarta) in December after four years of intense development. The new release includes improved APIs, improved security, new device services (CoAP, GPIO, LLRP, UART), and a new GUI (Angular JS). There’s also a long-term support pledge. This week, IOTech Systems announced Edge Xpert 2.1, based on EdgeX Jakarta. Edge Xpert is a packaged and supported distribution of EdgeX. I remain bullish on EdgeX because it’s the only thing on the horizon that can defragment industrial gateways and enable off-the-shelf products from multiple vendors. I think Jakarta is good enough to get more OEMs on board.
• Arm’s Project Cassini added Advantech and NXP as members. Cassini aims to reduce development and deployment complexity for Cortex-A based devices by requiring System Ready certification, PSA certification, and Parsec security platform abstraction. Cassini is another step towards a future where OSes can plug and play on SoCs from multiple chip companies.

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• Samsung launched the Galaxy S22, with the S22 Ultra effectively replacing the Note series with a very note-like design and the integration of the S-Pen
• GSMA expects 40-60K attendees for MWC22, which I will be attending, possibly being the biggest show during the pandemic

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• Atom Computing, ColdQuanta, Meadowlark Optics, and SPIE become partners in the University of Colorado Boulder CUbit Quantum Initiative. The CUbit Innovation Partners program was established to cultivate mutually beneficial collaborations with quantum-intensive enterprises. These strategic partnerships are expected to provide insights related to research and training and collaborating on workforce development programs. The program will also offer CU Boulder students, postdocs, and researchers learning opportunities. 
• Rigetti announced Aspen-M, its 80-qubit quantum system, will be available through Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) and Amazon Braket. The Aspen-M system is being used in several collaborations, including Nasdaq, Deloitte, DARPA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Rigetti eventually expects the 80-qubit system will soon be available through Azure Quantum, Strangeworks QC, and Zapata’s Orquestra platform.
• IBM has established a partnership with the government of Quebec, Canada, in the form of an IBM Discovery Accelerator. Accelerator programs have an objective to "Accelerate scientific discovery and societal impact with a convergence of AI, quantum, and hybrid cloud in a community of discovery with research, academic, industry, startup, and government organizations working together.” IBM also has accelerator partnerships with Cleveland Clinic, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council Hartree Centre.
• Last week IonQ announced it had developed a new gate family that allows the simultaneous quantum states of multiple qubits to determine the state of another gate. This will enable increased efficiency and faster processing speed. Entangling multiple gates is a significant achievement. However, the N-qubit gate has yet to be implemented, and the fidelity was not stated in the research paper. It requires using a multi-qubit gate bus which is currently only part of the IonQ architecture.
• D-Wave quantum announced a $1.6B SPAC with DPCM Capital. It is expected to get $340M from the deal plus another $40M private placement in equity. It will trade with the ticker symbol of QBTS. D-Wave plans an international expansion. It also plans on building a superconducting gate-based quantum computer in the future. However, other gate-based quantum computer companies such as IBM, IonQ, Quantinuum, and Atom Computing will be years ahead.  

Security (Will Townsend)

• Microsoft is considering the acquisition of Mandiant. Given Microsoft’s acquisition activities over the last several months, it is apparent that the software giant is seeking to bolster its roadmap in incident response and cyber-intelligence. On the surface, a marriage seems compelling, and adding Mandiant capabilities within Azure would likely force AWS and Google Cloud platform to do the same.         

Space (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• China is currently orbiting a spacecraft around the moon. It is not a new launch, but it is the rocket used in China's 2020 mission to gather lunar samples. There have been no updates on the craft since May last year. This is a new and unique orbit; however, NASA plans to use the orbit for Artimis mission. China plans on 50-60 launches this year.  

Columns Published (Forbes, eWEEK, UPLOAD VR, and others

1. Inmarsat’s Cloud Migration Journey With Infosys And AWS, by Patrick Moorhead
2. NVIDIA Announces New Partnership With Jaguar Land Rover For NVIDIA Driver Hyperion 8 Platform, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Intel Becomes An End To End Foundry With Tower Semi Acquisition: Will It Spin IFS And More? By Patrick Moorhead
4. It’s Day One For The Combined AMD And Xilinx And CEO Lisa Su Is Energized, by Patrick Moorhead
5. Samsung Could Take The Galaxy S21 FE In Many Directions, by Patrick Moorhead
6. Galaxy Unpacked: Everyone Take Note, The King Of Smartphones Is Back, by Patrick Moorhead
7. Oracle Cloud Had A Banner 2021 And Is Very Credible, by Patrick Moorhead
8. Surprise! NVIDIA Deal Off, Arm Is Very Profitable, Has A New CEO, And Rene Haas Is Looking Forward To Its IPO, by Patrick Moorhead
9. Qualcomm And HPE Team Up For 5G Infrastructure Collaboration, by Will Townsend
10. How CyberArk Manages Privileged Access, by Matt Kimball
11. Oracle Announces Support For MongoDB – This Is Bigger Than Just An API, by Matt Kimball
12. Can Quantum Battery Research Extend Electric Vehicle Range? IonQ And Hyundai Intend To Find Out, by Paul Smith-Goodson

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. South Florida Water Management District Upgrades Business Plumbing With SAP S/4HANA, by Patrick Moorhead
2. XR And The Metaverse At CES 2022: Wading Through The Hype, by Anshel Sag
3. Zapata Computing’s Global Survey Reveals Surprising Enterprise Plans And Expectations For Quantum Computing, by Paul Smith-Goodson
4. IBM Adds LG Electronics To Its Massive 170+ Member IBM Quantum Network, by Paul Smith-Goodson
5. Atom Computing Plans To Build A Bigger And Better High-Tech Quantum Computer With Its Latest $60 Million Series B Funding, by Paul Smith-Goodson
6. Analyst Take: The Most Exciting Gaming Products At CES 2022, by Anshel Sag

Research Paper(s):

• N/A

Podcasts:

The G2 on 5G by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Anshel Sag and Will Townsend

• The G2 on 5G Podcast - Ep 87 - MWC 22 Preview and more with Mike Dano from Light Reading
  • Will MWC22 be the big coming-out party for private 5G? Who are the front runners?
  • Cloud rules everything
  • Ericsson did what with ISIS?!
  • Infrastructure provider announcement expectations - Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, others
  • Open RAN stumbles. I expect a ton of discussion around open RAN at this year’s MWC, but I doubt we’re going to see any significant operator deployment plans. This technology remains a vendor sales story and not an operator deployment story.
  • Motorola creates a 5G XR neckband with Verizon and XR at MWC
• The G2 on 5G Podcast - Ep 86 – Oracle & Telefonica Partnership, NextG 6G Roadmap, Samsung S22 Launch
  • Oracle and Telefonica expand partnership for cloud service delivery - is OCI the best-kept telco cloud secret relative to AWS and Azure for Operators?  
  • ATIS Next G Alliance 6G roadmap
  • Samsung Announces Galaxy S22 Line and Tab S8 - Carrier Deal Parity
  • U.S. rural carriers ask the FCC for nearly 3x the approved budget for “rip and replace” of Chinese infrastructure - what’s the impact for 5G deployments and bridging the digital divide?
  • EXFO Red Hat 5G service assurance in the cloud.
  • NVIDIA acquisition of Arm is officially not happening, new CEO in place

DataCentric Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell

• Inside PCIe 6.0 with PCI SIG president Al Yanes + Inside AMD & Intel Earnings
  • AMD & Intel Earnings Discussion
  • Al Yanes walks us through PCIe 6.0
  • Who is the PCI SIG, anyway? And how do they operate? 
  • PCIe and Automotive
  • How will enterprise IT benefit from PCIe 6.0? 
  • When will we see PCIe 6.0 in the data center?

The Six-Five Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy and Futurum Research, with Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman

• Ep111: Intel Investor Day & Tower, Alphabet-IDFA, Cisco-NVIDIA-Lattice Earnings, AMD Closes Xilinx
  • Intel Investor Day and Tower Semi Acquisition
  • Alphabet Set to Follow Apple IDFA - META?
  • Cisco Earnings
  • NVIDIA Earnings
  • AMD Closes Xilinx
  • Lattice Earnings

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

• Talking #multicloud with Varun Chhabra, SVP of Cloud and Edge Product Marketing, Dell Technologies
  • Current Experience with Businesses Building a Multi-Cloud Environment 
  • In-Depth Multi-Cloud By Default vs. Multi-Cloud By Design
  • Data Growth & Gravity Impacting Organizations
  • Business Obstacles Across Multiple Environments and Applications to Help Manage Them
  • Increasing and Impending Developer Velocity and the Importance of it

Press Citations: 

1. Amazon / Fiercetelecom https://www.fiercetelecom.com/cloud/amazon-plots-cloud-expansion-aws-hits-71b-run-rate
2. AMD, Xilinx / SDXCentral https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/regulators-greenlight-amds-35b-xilinx-buy/2022/02/
3. AMD / Channelfutures https://www.channelfutures.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/amd-acquisition-of-xilinx-largest-ever-semiconductor-deal-now-complete
4. AMD, Xilinx /Austin American-Statesman https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2022/02/14/amd-monster-chip-deal-amd-keeps-growing-49-billion-acxquisition-xilinx/6787824001/
5. AMD, Xilinx / WCCFTech https://wccftech.com/amd-acquires-xilinx-to-address-approximately-135-billion-market-opportunity/
6. AMD, Xilinx / PCPer https://pcper.com/2022/02/amd-just-completed-the-biggest-acquisition-ever-in-their-industry/
7. AMD, Xilinx / The Register https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/amd_xilinx_merger/
8. Arm / Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/arm-s-ipo-won-t-be-as-lucrative-for-softbank-as-nvidia-deal (Anshel Sag)
9. AWS / FierceTelecom https://www.fiercetelecom.com/cloud/aws-aims-triple-local-zone-footprint-global-expansion
10. Cisco / Popularmechanics https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a39094612/tcl-6-series-affordable-8k-tv/ (Will Townsend)
11. D-Wave / HPCWire https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/02/08/d-wave-to-go-public-with-spac-deal-expects-1-6b-market-valuation/ (Paul Smith-Goodson)
12. Intel / Bizjournals https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/inno/stories/news/2022/02/07/intel-launches-1b-foundry-fund.html
13. Intel, Tower Semiconductor / Techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/15/intel-to-acquire-tower-semiconductor-for-5-4b-to-build-on-custom-foundry-strategy/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALLqMP1L70TgrUjXy3cpcFz65Mpr5ZNTpOCE2vA45Yu0CAKNKePyGweeSdPaDG20Acklg2zEJe9-mlu27-_pX3_tBYEEgjMcPF1cZcYu5VeNlW3CfS7g5UgMLZPzc2BL-5aSqgJRg4t7Qn2uysr9djqgWvqgrO9fI67bh8oAzwQo
14. Meta / AndroidCentral https://www.androidcentral.com/metas-10-billion-vr-losses-are-reasonable-came-worst-time (Anshel Sag)
15. NFT / Windowscentral https://www.windowscentral.com/heres-why-nfts-may-be-next-era-licensing-technology (Anshel Sag)
16. Nutanix, Cloud / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/15/nutanix-delivers-consistent-cloud-operating-model-enterprises/ (Steve McDowell)
17. Nvidia, Arm / FierceElectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/end-road-nvidias-acquisition-arm-blaber
18. Qualcomm, earnings / Fiercelectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/iot-wireless/qualcomm-marks-huge-quarter-based-revenue-diversification
19. Samsung / AndroidCentral https://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-apple-camera-galaxy-s22 (Anshel Sag)
20. Samsung / AndroidPolice https://www.androidpolice.com/galaxy-s22-ultra-note-decline-editorial-foldables/ (Anshel Sag)
21. Ventana Micro Systems / Bakersfield https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/news/ventana-micro-systems-inc-announces-strategic-partnership-with-intel-for-broader-commercialization-of-its-high/article_c41aeb80-09a3-56f2-b2e2-ff3019f66c48.html
22. Worlds, Activion, Zynga / Yahoo Finance https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wordle-activision-zynga-ride-a-tide-of-fomo-driving-big-video-game-deals-155733417.html
23. Zapata, Quantum Computing / IQT News https://www.insidequantumtechnology.com/news-archive/zapata-computings-global-survey-reveals-surprising-enterprise-plans-expectations-for-quantum-computing/ (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Company:

• N/A

New Gear or Software We are Using and Testing that is Public Knowledge 

• HP Omen 45L Desktop 
• HP Omen 27c Gaming Monitor 
• Lumina webcam
• MSI Creator 15 OLED Laptop

Events MI&S Plans on Attending In-Person or Virtually (New) 

• February
  • Intel Investor Day, virtual, February 17 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Zoholics, virtual, February 22 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Oracle Database Analyst Summit, virtual, February 23 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Mobile World Congress Barcelona, February 28 – March 3 (Anshel Sag, Will Townsend, Patrick Moorhead)
• March
  • SXSW, Austin, March 11-13 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • NVIDIA GTC, San Jose, March 21-24 (Anshel Sag, Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead., Paul Smith-Goodson, virtual)
  • Aruba Atmosphere, March 27- April 1 (Will Townsend)
  • Data Center World, Austin, March 28-31 (Steve McDowell)
• April
  • NAB Show, Las Vegas, April 24-27 (Steve McDowell)
  • Zoho Day ‘22, Austin, April 25-27 (Patrick Moorhead)
• May
  • Dell Tech World, Las Vegas, May 2-5 (Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead)
  • MediaTek Analysts Day, Scottsdale, May 9-11 (Anshel Sag)
  • IBM Think, May 9-13 (Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead)
  • Intel Vision, May 10-11 (Steve McDowell)
  • Computex, May 24-27, (Patrick Moorhead –tentative)
• June
  • Six Five Summit 2022, Virtual, June 7-9 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Cisco Live, June 13-16 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • HPE Discover, June 28-30, Las Vegas (Steve McDowell)
• July
• August
  • Flash Memory Summit, Aug 2-4, Santa Clara (Steve McDowell)
• September
  • SNIA Storage Developer Conference, San Jose, Sept 28-29 (Steve McDowell)

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The Team 

Analysts, Analysts In-Residence, Contributors

1. Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO, Chief Analyst; Broad technology coverage plus deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive 
2. Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology 
3. Matt Kimball, Principal Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI 
4. Melody Brue, Principal Analyst, Financial Tech
5. Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies 
6. Anshel Sag, Principal Analyst; V.R., P.C. Gaming, Mobile Platforms 
7. Paul Smith-Goodson, Principal Analyst; Machine Learning, A.I. and Quantum Computing 
8. Will Townsend, Principal Analyst; Security, Carrier Services, Networking 
9. Chris Wilder, Contributor, Security 

Operations 

1. Dan Pickens, Business Director 
2. Paula Moorhead, Marketing Director, Website, and Social Media 
3. Walker Pickens, Media Relations, and Writer 
4. Zane Pickett, Office Manager, AP., AR, travel, writer 
5. Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate 
6. Jacob Freyman, Writer, and Researcher 
7. Connor Kenyon, Six Five Sales & Business Development