I hope you had a great couple of weeks. 

Last week, I attended All In Summit and spoke at GlobalFoundries GTS.  Will attended Big 5G Event.  Steve traveled to Atlanta to attend AWS Summit, and Melody attended Plaid Forum. 

This week, Steve will be attending Stripe Sessions and I will be tuning into Microsoft BUILD.

Our MI&S team published 25 deliverables: 

• 6 (Forbes or eWEEK) insight columns 
• 11 MI&S blogs
• 8 podcasts   
• 0 research papers

The press quoted us with 9 citations.  Journalists wanted to hear about Dell, Google, Meta, Oracle, Pure Storage, and Zayo. 

Quick Insights:

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

• Many IT managers and executives have expressed a need for guidance on developing an AI-optimized infrastructure. NVidia just published a helpful Moor Insights & Strategy white paper with the title: Hybrid Cloud is the Right Infrastructure for Scaling Enterprise AI. It can be read here. 
• China vs. USA AI update: China recently launched a drone ship that can operate completely autonomously, free from human control. It has a powerful AI system that includes many autonomous drones, ships, and submersibles vehicles. According to the Chinese government, the ship's purpose is marine research. The drone ship is about as long as three football fields and about 50 feet wide. It can be remotely controlled or navigated autonomously. It has a speed of about 20 miles per hour.
• Intel Corp has launched Gaudi2 and Greco, processors for AI deep learning applications. The new processors use 7 nm technology. According to Habana Labs, Gaudi2 training throughput using ResNet-50 computer vision model and BERT delivers 2x training throughput compared to the NVIDIA A100-80GB GPU. Even with its performance, it will be difficult going head to head with NVIDIA. Habana was a $2 billion Intel acquisition in 2019.

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• N/A

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

• I recently attended the Big 5G Event in Austin, Texas. My most significant observation is the momentum behind 5G Standalone deployments. One of the keynote sessions revealed that nearly 100 operators in 50 countries are trialing, planning, or having deployed 5G Standalone. This momentum is exciting given Standalone will unlock the true promise of 5G from device support, latency, and performance perspectives. 
• I recently spent time with MediaTek for the first time at its first in-person analyst day event in Scottsdale, AZ. My biggest takeaway is that it is not just a value play to rival Qualcomm in the 5G ecosystem. Instead, it delivers significant value to its OEM partners in consumer devices and powers the next generation of 5G fixed wireless access platforms.        

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • Hard drives continue to gain density, with Western Digital announcing that its sampling new 10-platter drives. WD’s new Ultrastar drives come in 22TB and 26TB sizes.  It’s not all spinning platters behind the new enterprise drives. WD’s OptiNAND technology for SSD acceleration. These drives should be widely available throughout Western Digital’s channel by the end of summer.
  • Snowflake is becoming indefensible to many enterprises, raising concerns about data sovereignty with its cloud-hosted model. Pure Storage announced a collaboration with Snowflake to allow the SaaS analytics database to access data stored in on-prem Pure Storage arrays as if it were in the cloud. This is a big win for enterprise Snowflake users.
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • Cisco announced 3Q earnings recently. Despite challenges related to the ongoing supply chain and inflationary pressures, the company posted a modest gain in top-line revenue with a record backlog of $15B. I believe the latter bodes well for future quarterly financial performance significantly as supply chain pressures ease over time.  
  • Juniper Networks recently held its Global Summit, and I attended virtually. What stands out for me is the company's relentless pursuit of ensuring the best customer experience. From my perspective, its Paragon automation platform stands out relative to its competition. It should be a critical component to future inroads within a crowded enterprise networking space.  
• Server- (Matt Kimball)   
  • Looking for a case study in digital transformation? Check out Santander Bank.  $21B digital transformation project kicked off in 2020—a total of 16,500 software developers. Cloud utilization at 80%, with just business-critical core functions, left on-prem.  Time to value metric reduced from days & weeks to hours.  The goal of the company? To become an open financial services platform.  Not a bank.  A platform.  To be successful in this age of digital transformation, IT Solutions providers must understand the real transformation taking place with customers. This isn’t just about selling more infrastructure, software, and services to automate a few business functions.  This is helping businesses fundamentally change who they are. Efforts to influence these customers align with this reality, as do enable technologies.  
  • Azure standing up Arm-based instances may seem like old news, but a few announcements this week were very interesting to me.   The first was the announcement of Microsoft’s Ampere-based servers achieving Arm SystemReady certification.  I find this interesting as Azure is somewhat late to the Arm game. While AWS announced Graviton way back in 2018, the company has yet to go down this SystemReady path.  SystemReady is important as it delivers standards that ensure compatibility of software stacks (firmware, OS, application) across generations of Arm architectures. This is a big deal for enterprise support. AWS not having it is not necessarily shocking to me as the company owns its Arm IP. However, given MSFT’s strong on-prem presence – this sends a signal to enterprise customers that they should have full confidence in deploying to these Arm-based instances.    
  • The second announcement that caught my eye was tied directly to the above – and that is that Azure VMs are SystemReady Virtual Environment (VE) compliant. Again, this is a big deal in assuring customers that their virtual environments will run in the Azure D-Series and E-Series VMs. I find it a little odd that some in the industry don’t see the potential for Arm as a significant disruptor in the data center. Maybe there is a little context lacking; however, if one could travel back in time to when Intel became the dominant force in client computing with support for lighter workloads in the server room, they would see interesting parallels. The significant difference is the openness of Arm that enables finer optimization for workload tuning by silicon vendors with an assurance of interoperability through SystemReady.  It’s going to be a fun few years. 
  • AMD - the company has achieved a new record for market penetration, with 27.7% in x86.  Server coming in at 11.6%, and laptop coming in at 22.5% (desktop is down 1% YoY). I like to see this as I believe it is driving the folks at Intel to dig deeper into their innovative wells to deliver differentiated solutions. I see Sapphire Rapids as a good first step for the company to re-establish footing with customers (outside of using pricing levers). But, I am interested to see what the company is looking to do long term.  
  • With the surge of Non-SQL data repositories (BigData, NoSQL, etc.) – what is the future of SQL-based environments?  Does SQL draw a parallel to the mainframe? Becoming a legacy data repository that eventually loses out to the database architectures that are more tailored for modern applications? Or do SQL-based database environments continue to be the mainstay for the enterprise, with NoSQL finding niche and edge (figurative, not literal) uses within business units? It’s an interesting question to ponder as we see the rise of Snowflake, Databricks, and RedShift (and Cloudera from an enterprise data management perspective).  Further, the speed at which an application developer can design on deploy on MongoDB and Couchbase is also quite compelling – and telling. With this said, I am a huge fan of how Oracle is approaching the data management market. It is evolving its offerings to drive support for any data type, with open and simple integration with enterprise data (i.e., SQL) both on and off-prem.

FinTech (Melody Brue)

• Robinhood has enabled stock lending on its platform to allow investors to earn income on shares they own when Robinhood finds a borrower of the stock. Stock borrowing, usually a process used by short-sellers, is a risky move for the startup brokerage that caters to retail investors who may be less sophisticated. Investors should also be wary, given Robinhood’s blog-posted disclaimer: "There is a risk that Robinhood Securities could default on its obligations to you under the Stock Lending Program and fail to return the securities it has borrowed. If Robinhood Securities defaults and is unable to return loaned securities, you will not be able to trade such securities as usual. "
• HODLers can also become homeowners - some without any downpayment at all. Miami-based Milo has issued over $10 million in crypto mortgage loans. The company’s target is the crypto-rich: those who bought crypto at a low and have accumulated much digital wealth that would require liquidation to buy a home otherwise if not for this option. Liquidating crypto not only is a taxable event, but HODLers also fear the opportunity cost of what many believe arises from missing out on the eventual gains of said crypto holdings. Since a recent Redfin report found that 12% of first-time homebuyers in Q4 of 2021 sold crypto for some part of their down payment, it appears there is a market for this service. This new category of mortgages allows buyers to put crypto as collateral for their homes rather than cash typically used to secure the loan. The crypto is held in an escrow account that backs the mortgage and can be liquidated if the owner falls behind on mortgage payments. This seems to be a safety net for the lender with tangible assets on hand and for the homeowner to avoid foreclosure. Other elements go into the loan structure if the value of crypto falls lower than the value of the home (or the ratio of collateral to value as agreed to), such as margin calls. Other companies such as Ledn and Figure Technologies offer bitcoin and/or Ethereum mortgages. Startups in the space have already received more than a billion dollars in funding, so crypto-backed mortgages will be something to watch. While I see this as bringing crypto further into mainstream financing with the American Dream, it is still early in the lifecycle. It will likely face some regulatory scrutiny as market dynamics change. But for now, consumers can HODL their crypto and home and realize the gains (or losses) on both.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• N/A

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• N/A

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• Error correction is a major area of research for quantum computing. It should be helpful that Xanadu has released a unique free and open-source new Python Library called FlamingPy for simulating error correction codes. FlamingPy is a cross-platform Python library with a variety of backends for efficient simulations of error correction in fault-tolerant quantum computers. Xanadu provided the documentation needed to understand the theoretical concepts behind FlamingPy. 
• Atom Computing announced it has created a coherence time of 40 +/- 7 seconds using the nuclear spin states of a single, uncharged strontium atom. This is longer than any demonstrated coherence time on a commercial platform. This was demonstrated on its first-generation "Phoenix" quantum computer.    
• IBM announced plans to deliver a 4000+ qubit system in 2025. Its current roadmap features four new quantum processors plus quantum and classical couplers that enable processors to be scaled up by using the couplers to link multiple chips together. Its goal is to create a quantum-centric supercomputer sometime after 2026. According to the announcement, the new technology will allow quantum processors with hundreds of thousands of qubits to be built.
• Scorpion Capital, in support of its significant short position on IonQ stock, issued a 183 negative report about IonQ, its technology, and its management. IonQ founders Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim gave a response to the report that appears on IonQ.com

Retail Tech (Melody Brue)

• Uber Eats announced two autonomous food delivery pilots in Los Angeles with a select small group of merchants. Serve Robotics will handle short-distance trips in the West Hollywood area, and Motional will make long-distance deliveries in Santa Monica. The pilot will be a choice made in the app, and the customer will use the app to open the robot and retrieve their order. In the explanation video, the “autonomous car” features a driver who appears to be a safety driver with the goal of the process being entirely automated and autonomous.

Security (Will Townsend)

• A recent report from the University of Cambridge concludes that smart farm machinery or “AgTech” could be vulnerable to bad actors. These farming implements include crop sprayers, drones, robotic harvesters, etc. The threats are likely nation-state sponsored, given food stores could be considered vital as critical infrastructure within telecommunications and energy grid management. Much of the mentioned equipment is also autonomous and headless, like IoT sensors and devices. This architecture increases the likelihood that compromise could occur; Consequently, I expect companies such as John Deere and Caterpillar will bolster its software control tools to mitigate the risk of malicious activity.     
• A joint cybersecurity advisory was recently issued by the U.S., U.K, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, warning that managed service providers (MSPs) could be targeted in the coming months. Many MSPs manage critical enterprise networking and IT infrastructure, and compromise could result in denial of service and ransomware attacks. I expect MSPs to adopt an application-centric cybersecurity layered approach to thwart bad actors. This incremental infrastructure may impact customers through higher service costs, but it is a prudent move.         

Space (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• N/A   

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

1. Netskope – Security Transformation For Digital Transformation, by Patrick Moorhead
2. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna On The Future Of Big Blue, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Zoho Continues To Unify Its Operating System With Zoho Marketing Plus, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Pure Storage Releases First Annual Sustainability Report With Some Evergreen Surprises, by Patrick Moorhead
5. IBM’s Newest Quantum Computing Roadmap Unveils Four New Quantum Processors And Future Plans For A Quantum Supercomputer, by Paul Smith-Goodson
6. A Lack Of Consumer Portability And Choice Are Negatively Affecting The Mobile Experience, by Anshel Sag

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. Synaptics Introduces Its FlexSense Integrated Sensor Processors, Integrating Four Chips Into One, by Patrick Moorhead
2. Box Adds New Collaboration Tools Including Box Canvas, And Box Insights, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Tech Industry Celebrates Earth Day 2022, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Google's Data Cloud Summit Serves Up Incremental New Capabilities, by Patrick Moorhead
5. Hillstone Networks Expands Its Security Portfolio With CloudArmour, by Matt Kimball
6. Multi-Cloud Storage Center Stage At Dell Technologies World, by Steve McDowell
7. IBM’s AutoAI Has The Smarts To Make Data Scientists A Lot More Productive – But What’s Scary Is That It’s Getting A Whole Lot Smarter, by Paul Smith-Goodson
8. IBM Creates Significant Competitive Advantages With Qiskit Runtime Updates, by Paul Smith-Goodson
9. Varjo Brings High-Fidelity XR Streaming To The Cloud With Varjo Reality Cloud, by Anshel Sag
10. IonQ And Hyundai Steer Its Partnership Toward Quantum Machine Learning To Recognize Traffic Signs And 3D Objects, by Paul Smith-Goodson
11. Ray-Ban Stories Review: Comfortable But Limited, by Anshel Sag

Research Paper(s):

• N/A

Podcasts:

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

• Big 5G Event, India’s 5G Auction, BT Quantum Radio, Rakuten 5G FWA, Ericsson Private 5G BG, and more!
  • Big 5G Event recap 
  • India’s 5G spectrum auction is finally set to happen next month after many delays, operators expect rollouts to begin in October with limited coverage in 30-50 metros by March 2023
  • BT Group tests quantum radio technology- what’s the impact for future 5G deployments?
  • Rakuten Mobile expects to rollout 5G FWA services by the end of the year
  • Ericsson officially forms a new private 5G business group with Cradlepoint launching in June to go direct to enterprise - can it compete with a more established Nokia Enterprise?
  • Canada officially gives Huawei and ZTE the boot, telling operators they need to remove equipment by mid-2024 and stop buying products from this later this year
• The G2 on 5G Podcast – Vodafone and 3 Merger, Qualcomm 5G Summit, Meta Platforms & AMD, MediaTek
  • Vodafone and 3 UK talk merger - what could it mean for 5G in the UK?
  • Qualcomm 5G Summit – New RB5 Robotics and Drone Platform, X70 Modem Features, and mmWave SA trial hitting 8.3 Gbps (8x CA)
  • Meta Platforms teams up with AMD for Open RAN - will it help or hinder 5G deployment with another solution path?
  • MediaTek Analyst Summit – AioT launch and More to Come
  • Is ZTE on a slippery slope with respect to cellular infrastructure sales to Russia?
  • OpenSignal Report says 5G beats public Wi-Fi for gaming as well as speed

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

• Modern Data Architecture: A Look at NoSQL & Couchbase
  • Let's Talk about NoSQL
  • Introduce CouchBase VP Solutions & Product Marketing, Jeff Morris
  • How has data management evolved over the past decade?
  • Is there a performance hit when moving away from traditional RDMS?
  • Optimal use-cases for NoSQL databases
  • CouchBase Mobile & Devices
  • Is NoSQL a 'big lift' for IT practitioners?
  • Capella: CouchBase-as-a-Service
  • SQL & NoSQL, a Peaceful Co-Existence?
  • Where is CouchBase Focused over the next 12-18 months?

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

• Ep123: Cisco Q3 FY 2022 Earnings Results Special Edition
• Six Five Insider SAP Sapphire Edition with Julia White, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP
• The Road to PegaWorld. A Conversation with Pega CEO Alan Trefler
• We are LIVE! Talking with Lattice CEO Jim Anderson - Six Five Insider
• Ep 122: Talking SAP Sapphire, Marvell Acquires Tanzanite, Micron Investor Day, Zoho Marketing Plus
  • IBM Think - AWS with IBM Apps
  • IBM Think - Quantum
  • SAP Sapphire
  • Marvell Acquires Tanzanite
  • Zoho Marketing Plus
  • Micron Investor Day

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

• N/A

Press Citations: 

1. Dell / ChannelFutures https://www.channelfutures.com/cloud-2/dell-technologies-world-gives-ecosystem-a-broad-view-of-multicloud-strategy (Steve McDowell)
2. Google / Exbulletin https://exbulletin.com/tech/1622353/ (Anshel Sag)
3. Meta, Intel / Theregister https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/16/meta_intel_jon_dama/
4. Oracle / Securityboulevard https://securityboulevard.com/2022/05/5-benefits-of-upgrading-from-oracle-ebs-to-oracle-cloud-infrastructure/
5. Pure Storage / Globalcirculate https://globalcirculate.com/pure-storage-releases-first-annual-sustainability-report-with-some-evergreen-surprises/ (Steve McDowell)
6.  Zayo / ChannelFutures https://www.channelfutures.com/fiber-ethernet/zayo-expands-fiber-network-reduces-install-time (Will Townsend)
7. Zayo / Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-05-10/zayo-announces-unprecedented-network-expansion-and-400g-upgrade-enabling-network-diversity-resiliency-and-future-readiness (Will Townsend)
8. Zayo / Hostingjournalist https://hostingjournalist.com/zayo-announces-400gbps-upgrade-and-significant-network-expansion/ (Will Townsend)
9. Zayo / Lightreading https://www.lightreading.com/opticalip-networks/zayo-touts-400g-investments/d/d-id/777440 (Will Townsend)

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) 

• May
  • Stripe Sessions, May 24 (Steve McDowell)
• June
  • LogicMonitor Elevate speaking engagement, NYC, June 1-2 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • RSA – San Francisco, June 6-9 (Will Townsend)
  • Pure//Accelerate TechFest, L.A., June 7-9 (Steve McDowell)
  • Six Five Summit 2022, Virtual, June 6-9 (Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Microsoft Industry Clouds Tour for Analysts, Boston, June 8 (Melody Brue)
  • Google Applied ML Conference, June 9 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Cisco Live!, Las Vegas, June 12-16 (Matt Kimball, Will Townsend)
  • Lenovo Analyst Summit, Raleigh, June 15-17, (Matt Kimball, Pat Moorhead)
  • Zscaler Cloud Summit – Las Vegas, June 21-23 (Will Townsend)
  • Amazon re:MARS, Las Vegas, June 21-23 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Advisory Day, Santa Clara, June 27 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • HPE Discover, June 28-30, Las Vegas (Matt Kimball, Paul Smith-Goodson, Steve McDowell, Will Townsend, Patrick Moorhead)
• July
  •  LoRaWAN World Expo, Paris, July 5-7 (Will Townsend)
  • Samsung Networks Analyst Event, Dallas, July 14 (Will Townsend)
  • Zoho Days, Austin, July 25-27 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • AWS Re:Inforce, Boston, July 26-27 (Will Townsend)
• August
  • Flash Memory Summit, Aug 2-4, Santa Clara (Steve McDowell)
  • Advisory, Seattle, August 16-17 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • VMware Explore, San Francisco, Aug 29-Sept 1 (Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead)
• September
  • Quantum Open House Event, TBD (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Intel InnovatiON, San Jose, Sept 27-28 (Steve McDowell)
  • SNIA Storage Developer Conference, San Jose, Sept 28-29 (Steve McDowell)
• October
  • Google Cloud Next, October 11-13 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Oracle CloudWorld, Las Vegas, October 16 (Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead)
  • Open Compute Global Summit, October 18-19 (Steve McDowell)
  • Austin GP, Austin, October 21 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Advisory, NYC, October 24-27 (Patrick Moorhead)
• November
  • Micron Insights 2022, San Francisco (Patrick Moorhead)
  • AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas (Patrick Moorhead)
• January
  • CES 2022, Las Vegas, January 5-7 (Patrick Moorhad)

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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. Nigel Church, Business Associate, Writer, Editor
7. Jacob Freyman, Writer, and Researcher 
8. Connor Kenyon, Six Five Sales & Business Development