I hope you all had a wonderful couple of weeks! 

Last week, Will, Anshel and I attended Mobile World Congress. I attended a few SXSW meetings. Melody attended VentureBeat Data Summit.  

Paul will be attending American Physical Society, Will will be attending the HPE CTG Event, and Matt will be attending Nutanix Database Summit. I will be visiting HPE’s HQ in Houston, TX.

Our MI&S team published 24 deliverables: 

• 4 (Forbes or eWEEK) columns 
• 7 MI&S blogs
• 12 podcasts   
• 1 research papers

The press quoted us with 23 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Apple, Broadcom, Fintech, Google, Intel, Micron, Microsoft, Nutanix, Polaris, Qualcomm, Samsung, Smart Phones, TikTok, Mandiant, Micron, and Vast Data. 

Quick Insights:

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

• Funding for AI is still a very deep well. JIFFY.ai is a startup with an app-based low-code/no-code intelligent automation platform. It raised $53 million in Series B funding led by Eight Roads Ventures, with participation from Iron Pillar, R-Squared, and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Reaction Capital, and Rebright Partners. The platform allows companies to compose, configure, monitor, and maintain autonomous enterprises. The platform builds automated business capabilities that can learn and adapt to changing needs with little or no additional resources and operational expenditure.

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• N/A

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

• I attended Mobile World Congress Barcelona and found it delivered in three key areas – private cellular networking, vRAN, and Open RAN, and carrier services and enablement. Cisco and HPE announced a similar private 5G as a service offering with Open RAN vendors, including Airspan Networks and JMA Wireless. I give Cisco a slight edge in enabling IoT use cases for factory automation, but HPE offers a very mature 5G core stack, orchestration, and automation platform. Samsung Networks continues to lead its incumbent competitors in vRAN, signified by several recent network design wins that leverage its vRAN portfolio. AT&T announced a capability for dynamic pooling that should bring greater efficiency and elasticity to its cloud RAN deployment. T-Mobile also provided more details on its T IoT offering that, in concert with its parent Deutsche Telekom could simplify the procurement, deployment, and operation of IoT networks globally.    

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • This past week, NVIDIA made a bold move as it bought the Israeli storage company Excelero for an undisclosed amount. Excelero is one of the leaders in the increasingly interesting, disaggregated storage space, which relies on NVMe-over-TCP to create what is essentially a virtual storage array from SSDs that might be scattered across a rack or datacenter. This is a natural complement to NVIDIA’s Mellanox products, and we expect it to slot into NVIDIA’s system-level DGX offerings. NVIDIA has a history of aggressively engaging partners for its AI/ML solutions, and it remains to be seen how this move may impact those relationships. It’s also undetermined whether NVIDIA will continue to sell Excelero as a stand-alone offering, notably increasing NVIDIA’s scope into new territories for the company. 
  • Storage watchers (including me) have long been questioned by Intel’s long-term plans for Optane. No executive has publicly talked about the technology in almost two years, Micron has shut down the major fab for 3D XPOINT, and Optane was absent from Intel’s fab plans. This week Intel’s VP for Optane, Kristie Mann, said publicly at the most recent Storage Field Day event that Intel is “about to announce” its third-generation technology, which will work with CXL memory tiering. Micron is also rumored to be working on a CXL-attached persistent memory, but not one directly based on 3D XPOINT. We’ll be watching this space to see what’s announced. 
  • Dell is making an out-of-character move with its new Dell ObjectScale software, which leverages its Dell ECS enterprise object storage appliance to provide a software-only object storage solution designed for Kubernetes. Dell is integrating ObjectScale with both VMware’s cloud-native Tanzu and HCI-focused vSAN offerings. Dell has also announced support for ObjectScale on Red Hat OpenShift. It’s available as both a paid offering and a free community edition. Dell has some of the most solid storage technology in the industry, but it has long kept it mostly tied to its hardware offerings. This is a solid move by Dell into a very software-centric space.
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • Juniper Networks recently acquired WiteSand, which provides a cloud-native security platform that should complement the infrastructure provider's AI-based Mist and SASE platforms. Juniper has used key acquisitions to shore up its roadmap, most notable its Paragon automation platform. On the surface, the purchase seems logical, especially given the rapid adoption of SD-WAN platforms that integrate security within the overall connectivity stack.    
• Server- (Matt Kimball)   
  • I’m impressed with Lenovo’s launch of its server, storage, and services aimed at the mid-market and small enterprise segments. While it seems every conversation had with IT solutions providers revolve around the cloud, cloud migrations, and cloud-native – Lenovo is quietly servicing the customer that has rationalized its cloud operations and still has an on-site presence to support. While the servers appear to be very good fits for what we used to call ROBO or distributed environments, the availability of storage and VDI “as-a-service” via TruScale tells me the company sees where consumption-based computing has the strongest gravitational field today.  
  • Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner is an interesting move for the company. It has clear ambitions in owning the healthcare industry and patient care experience – and it has the pieces to this puzzle. Along with its plays in life sciences and manufacturing (pharma, bio, devices), the company can bridge the life sciences – health care industries to enable levels of automation that I believe are unrivaled. 
  • Speaking of Oracle – the company released its earnings this week. Here are a couple of my takeaways – 
    • Good growth in cloud - cloud services and licensing, cloud infrastructure, and cloud applications (SaaS).  
    • Announcement that MySQL HeatWave, the company’s query acceleration engine for MySQL instances, will expand from Oracle cloud to AWS and Azure.  
  • The FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) issued a private advisory to state governments, warning of potential attacks from Chinese state actors. In the last few months, many federal agencies have been breached, with data being siphoned. With anticipated attacks from Russian state actors, it is clear that we are engaged in daily cyberwarfare. And I fear our government and business leaders – from healthcare to utilities to every industry – are woefully unprepared. The message for IT solutions providers – your job is not to simply use security as a differentiator in messaging – it is to build multi-vector security solutions and address the entire DiD strategy and model.    

FinTech (Melody Brue)

• Cryptocurrency donations are again this week’s hot and political topic. The last update was the Canadian trucker convoy, and this past week cryptocurrency donations came flooding Ukraine for humanitarian and military support. At the beginning of the conflict, the Ukrainian government was not accepting cryptocurrency donations. Instead, they had to be directed to NGOs such as Come Back Alive. The Ukrainian government then opened up direct donations to the cause. The public and private sector parties used the money to buy critical supplies. Living up to crypto's utility value of moving money across international borders more smoothly, Ukrainian sympathizers have donated $54M to the cause. However, on the Russian side, that same utility of the borderless form of money has raised the questions of crypto market players skirting international sanctions, fueling a war of aggression, or helping Russian oligarchs preserve their wealth – all moral and regulatory issues not yet tackled in the cryptoverse.
• Fintechs like Wise, Revolut, and Remitely blocked wire transfers to Russia after the attack on Ukraine. Many of these banks did so before adhering to any sanctions, although some wire transfers would be affected by SWIFT sanctions in cross-border transactions. The move followed several big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Spotify, who have clamped down or halted business in Russia. While it is understandable that the companies are under pressure to take a particular moral high ground, there is a significant fallout for ordinary good Russian citizens and could lead to predatory black-market loans in the country. The economic ripple effect is substantial, politics aside, and fintechs are navigating the measures they can take to impact the war while providing services to people in need.
• Atomic, a payroll data company, based out of Salt Lake City, raised $40M in an unsolicited Series B financing round. The company primarily focuses on payroll data uses APIs to power banks, credit unions, and fintechs to connect consumers with their financial data. Atomic’s customers include over 70 banks, credit unions, and fintech companies like Coinbase, Dave, and Propel. Whoever owns direct deposit keeps the customer. When banks deliver customized, applicable, and actionable offers to that customer using their financial data through these APIs, conversion rates are higher, customer satisfaction is higher, and digital channels are optimized, making them less costly for the financial institution.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• The LP-WAN space is in flux as Sigfox went up for sale, and Objenious (the IoT subsidiary of Bouygues Telecom) announced its intention to shut down its LoRaWAN network in 2024, seven years after launch. Although LP-WAN still makes sense in some verticals (i.e., Amazon Sidewalk for consumers), carriers are highly motivated to focus exclusively on NB-IoT and LTE-M for IoT applications.
• On the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon X70 at MWC, the first AI-powered modem-RF system. With complete mmWave-sub6 coverage, a dedicated mmWave RF module, and multi-SIM support, the X70 is ideal for bandwidth-hungry applications in industrial, automotive, VR, and other verticals – not just phones.

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• N/A

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• IonQ and Quantinuum both announced significant reductions in state preparation errors. Although advancements in error correction have been coming in increments, we still have a long way to go to have very large numbers of logical qubits. 
• Rigetti Computing closed its SPAC with Supernova partners this month and announced its financial results for the eleven months ended December 31, 2021. The revenue for 2021 was $8.2 million, a 48% increase from $5.5 million for 2020. The growth was mainly from $2.6 million in revenue from contracts with the U.S. and U.K. governments.   
• Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed an interesting technology using two species for qubit arrays rather than one. Having alternate qubits of rubidium and cesium allows a qubit of one species to be measured without disturbing its neighbor. They have developed a prototype with 512 qubits.  

Security (Will Townsend)

• Google recently announced its intent to acquire Mandiant for $5B+. It is a strategy to harden its Google Cloud Platform from a security perspective. GCP remains in last place behind AWS and Microsoft Azure. Still, the acquisition may force GCP's rivals to seek similar investments to stay competitive, especially in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the aggressor’s use of cyberwarfare to target critical infrastructure.      

Space (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• N/A   

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

1. Intel Foundry Services Going Big On RISC-V ‘Brawny Cores’ With Ventana Micro Systems Compute Tiles, by Patrick Moorhead
2. Oracle Forms Formula 1 Team In Partnership With Red Bull Racing, by Patrick Moorhead
3. The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra Is Not For Everyone And That’s OK, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Qualcomm Showing It Is Very Much Still In The 5G Leadership Position, by Patrick Moorhead

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. Renesas Rising Beyond Automotive Into IoT And Infrastructure, by Patrick Moorhead
2. The Ways The Surface Laptop Studio Is Better Than The MacBook Pro For Creators, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Image Signal Processor Like Arm’s Is Critical To ADAS Success, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Inmarsat’s Cloud Migration Journey With Infosys And AWS, by Patrick Moorhead
5. NVIDIA Announces New Partnership With Jaguar Land Rover For NVIDIA Driver Hyperion 8 Platform, by Patrick Moorhead
6. Intel Becomes An End To End Foundry With Tower Semi Acquisition: Will It Spin IFS And More? By Patrick Moorhead
7. It’s Day One For The Combined AMD And Xilinx And CEO Lisa Su Is Energized, by Patrick Moorhead

Research Paper(s):

• RESEARCH PAPER: VAST Data Set To Become The Foundation Of An AI-Powered World, by Steve McDowell

Podcasts:

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

• The G2 on 5G Podcast - MWC 2022 Wrap up - Ep 90 March 12, 2022

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

• A Look Inside VAST Data's Growing Momentum

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

• Ep113: We are LIVE! for a SpeedLoader Edition for 12 Topics: MWC, Apple, Google, NVIDIA, and more
• The Six Five In the Booth with Cisco at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with Accenture's Syed Alam at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with IBM and Dish at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with IBM and AT&T at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with Nokia's Daniel Derksen at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with IBM's Rob Thomas at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with Movandi Corporation at Mobile World Congress 2022
• The Six Five In the Booth with IBM and Boston Dynamics at Mobile World Congress 2022

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

• Fintech Friday Ep. 13

Press Citations: 

1. Apple / CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/apples-decision-to-halt-russia-sales-puts-pressure-on-samsung-google.html (Anshel Sag)
2. Apple / Mi-Token https://mi-token.com/blog/apple-is-inadvertently-putting-pressure-on-other-smartphone-makers (Anshel Sag)
3. Apple / Losangelesweeklytimes https://losangelesweeklytimes.com/2022/03/04/folding-phones-could-soon-be-mainstream-with-apple-thought-to-have-one-in-the-works/ (Anshel Sag)
4. Apple / Fiercewireless https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/apples-new-iphone-se-offers-5g-sans-mmwave (Anshel Sag)
5. Broadcom, Chips / Fiercelectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/broadcom-sees-more-chip-backlog-amid-record-revenues-77b
6. Fintech / Protocol https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-fintech/wise-revolut-russia-send-money?rebelltitem=10 (Melody Brue)
7. Fintech / CryptoNews https://cryptonewsbtc.org/2022/03/02/wise-remitly-revolut-can-you-still-transfer-money-to-russia-and-ukraine/(Melody Brue)
8. Google, Mandiant / TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/08/google-is-acquiring-security-intelligence-firm-mandiant-for-5-4b/
9. Google, Mandiant / Fiercetelecom https://www.fiercetelecom.com/cloud/google-bolsters-cloud-security-54b-mandiant-acquisition
10. Intel / FierceElectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/intel-ceo-and-chair-buy-shares-amid-24-drop-over-past-year
11. Micron / TechTarget https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/news/252514021/Micron-releases-first-176-layer-NAND-data-center-SSD
12. Microsoft / Windowscentral https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-or-meta-whos-best-positioned-win-metaverse (Anshel Sag)
13. Nutanix, Pure Storage / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2022/03/02/data-center-infrastructure-firms-nutanix-pure-storage-deliver-strong-earnings/ (Steve McDowell)
14. Polaris, Cloud / TechTarget https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/news/252514043/Imply-Polaris-brings-Apache-Druid-database-to-the-cloud (Steve McDowell)
15. Qualcomm, Chips / XRToday https://www.xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/qualcomm-bytedance-partner-to-build-xr-ecosystem/ (Anshel Sag)
16. Samsung, Apple / CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/apple-folding-phone-could-come-soon-after-samsung-galaxy-z-fold.html(Anshel Sag)
17. Samsung, Apple / The Korea Times https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=324943 (Anshel Sag0
18. Smart Phones / Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/4/new-folding-phones-jockey-for-a-share-of-the-smart/ (Anshel Sag)
19. Tiktok, Youtube / AndroidCentral https://www.androidcentral.com/google-youtube-shorts-tiktok-competition (Anshel Sag)
20. Mandiant, Google / Startupstoremedia https://startupstorymedia.com/mandiant-a-security-intelligence-firm-is-being-purchased-by-google-for-5-4-billion/ ‘
21. Micron / Computerweekly https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252514246/Micron-7450-aims-its-176-TLC-layers-at-QLC-flash-use-cases
22. Vast Data / Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-03-02/vast-data-cements-status-as-one-of-the-most-successful-enterprise-software-companies-in-modern-history-after-third-consecutive

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
• Microsoft Surface Go 3 with LTE
• Samsung S22 Ultra and S22.

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

• March
  • VentureBeat Data Summit Mar 9 (Melody Brue)
  • SXSW, Austin, March 11-13 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • HPE CTG Event (Telco), Boston, March 14-15 (Will Townsend)
  • American Physical Society, March 14-18 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Nutanix Database Summit, 16 & 26 March (virtual presenter) (Matt Kimball)
  • NVIDIA GTC, March 21-24 (Anshel Sag, Steve McDowell, Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson, virtual)
  • Aruba Atmosphere, March 27- April 1 (Will Townsend)
  • Datacenter World, Austin, March 28-31 (Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell)
• April
  • Advisories, Seattle, April 5-7 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • IBM Quantum Open House, April 12 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, April 12-14, virtual
  • NetApp Investment Analyst Day, April 22 (Steve McDowell)
  • NVIDIA Investment Analyst Day, April 22 (Steve McDowell)
  • 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 (Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
  • MediaTek Analysts Day, Scottsdale, May 9-11 (Anshel Sag, Will Townsend)
  • IBM Think, May 9-13 (Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead)
  • Red Hat Analyst Summit, May 10-11 (Matt Kimball)
  • Intel Vision, May 10-11 (Steve McDowell)
  • Big 5G Event – Austin, May 16-17 (Will Townsend)
  • Computex, May 24-27, (Patrick Moorhead –tentative)
  • Dell Tech World, Las Vegas, May 25 (Matt Kimball)
• June
  • RSA – San Francisco, June 6-9  (Will Townsend)
  • Six Five Summit 2022, Virtual, June 7-9 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Google Applied ML Conference, June 9 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Lenovo Analyst Summit, June 13-15, (Matt Kimball)
  • Cisco Live, June 13-16 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
  • Zscaler Cloud Summit – Las Vegas, June 21-23 (Will Townsend)
  • HPE Discover, June 28-30, Las Vegas (Matt Kimball, Paul Smith-Goodson, Steve McDowell, Will Townsend)
• July
• August
  • Flash Memory Summit, Aug 2-4, Santa Clara (Steve McDowell)
• September
  •  
  • SNIA Storage Developer Conference, San Jose, Sept 28-29 (Steve McDowell)
• October
  • Open Compute Global Summit, October 18-19 (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