We hope everyone had a great couple of weeks!  

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend VMware MultiCloud Analyst Event, Will virtually attended HPE Aruba Atmosphere and the RSA Conference.  Matt also attended RSA and Oracle Database Summit in California. 

This week, Melody and I will be attending Zoho Zoholics.  Paul will be attending analyst meetings in Colorado.  Will will be attending the Juniper Summit in Dallas.

Our MI&S team published 36 deliverables:  

• 11 Forbes insight columns  
• 14 MI&S blogs 
• 11 podcasts    
• 0 research papers 

The press quoted us with 7 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about AWS, Intel, Meta, Samsung, Six Five, and TXOne Networks.  

MIS Quick Insights: 

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

• Moderna and IBM use MoLFormer, an AI foundation model, to better understand the characteristics of potential mRNA medicines. MoLFormer can predict a molecule's properties, which can help scientists optimize lipid nanoparticles and mRNA. Lipid nanoparticles encapsulate and protect mRNA as it travels within the body, and mRNA acts as instructions to cells to fight disease. Moderna and IBM combine state-of-the-art formulation discovery with generative AI to design mRNA medicines with optimal safety and performance. AI will help create new mRNA medicines that are more effective and safer.    

AR/VR (Anshel Sag) 

• Pico has announced a new VR headset without any positional tracking, which sounds like a very basic VR headset that goes in the opposite direction of where the industry is moving but may satisfy some very low-end, single-use case applications. 
• Many rumors around the Apple XR headset seem to validate that it will launch with a plethora of content and first-party applications, including sports, fitness productivity, telepresence, and TV and movies from Apple TV. This tracks with what I would have expected Apple’s strategy to be, but I believe the fitness part will be bigger than most people realize. 
• Valve reaffirms that it is indeed working on a new VR headset, which follows the announcement of Counter Strike 2 coming this summer. Valve will again focus on high-end PC users and wants to continue building headsets and content that caters to the PC’s strength. 
• Mojovision, the company initially supposed to bring augmented reality contact lenses, has raised $22 million to complete its pivot towards producing micro-LED displays for XR headsets, hopefully bridging it until there is more demand for AR. 

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend) 

• N/A                      

Datacenter:  

Networking- (Will Townsend)  

• N/A       

Data Compute (Matt Kimball)

• Intel sold off its server business to Tyan's parent company MiTAC. This is the latest in a series of Intel shedding initiatives not critical to its core business. I like these moves as the company demonstrates the seriousness that Gelsinger and the team have to execute its vision of driving toward market leadership through its IDM 2.0 strategy. 
• HPE announced a rebranding strategy that will focus on simplicity. The company, which has about 29 separate brands, looks to consolidate to just a small few, along with exceptions to phase out stronger brands such as Aruba and 3PAR over a more extended period. It makes sense that the company would employ such a strategy. While a broad and deep portfolio is a good thing, navigating and acquiring specific products can be incredibly difficult for an IT purchaser. This rebranding exercise will make positioning HPE’s products, technologies, and services far more effective.  
• TSMC saw a 4.8% decline in revenue YoY. Its Quarter-to-quarter decline was far sharper, at about 16%. The company blames this on the usual suspects – an uncertain global economy and technology market.  

Storage (Matt Kimball)

• Volumez, a composable data infrastructure company, just received $20M in Series A funding to advance its engineering efforts and sales expansion into the US. While it seems there’s a cool new storage and data management company every other week, Volumez is worth watching over time. Its value prop – performance, simplicity, and cross-cloud management. 

ESG (Melody Brue)

• N/A  

Financial Tech (Melody Brue)

• Apple announced a high-yield savings account for Apple Card holders offered through Goldman Sachs. The savings account pays 4.15% APY, ten times the national average, with no fees or minimums. The announcement comes after the company recently announced a dongle-free in-store payment platform, "Tap to Pay on iPhone," and a BNPL offering Apple Pay Later. The "Bank of Apple" is not unthinkable with the company's 2 billion devices and large mobile wallet market share. Like Apple's subscription services, the company's transaction fees are expected to provide incremental recurring revenue, resulting in significant revenue even if they only earn pennies on the dollar.
• Visa has partnered with PayPal and Venmo to launch Visa+, a service that aims to help users move money securely between different person-to-person (P2P) digital payment apps. The service will allow Venmo and PayPal users in the US to move money between the two platforms. Visa+ will enable users to receive and send payments by setting up a personalized payment address linked to their Venmo or PayPal account without having a Visa card or account. The company has also partnered with DailyPay, i2c, TabaPay, and Western Union to integrate Visa+ within their platforms to expand its reach and enable more use cases, including gig, creator, and marketplace payouts. Visa+ is expected to launch for US consumers with select partners in late 2023, with general availability planned for mid-2024. This is a smart move from Visa as many fintechs and payment platforms create their wallets, particularly ones like DailyPay, which are tied to employee wages and direct deposits. Interoperability and speed are crucial in any payment, and Visa is capitalizing on its rails for P2P with Visa+.

IioT and IoT (Bill Curtis) 

• Sidewalk – At CES this year, Amazon promised large-scale developer access to Sidewalk. This low-bandwidth wide-area network uses Alexa Echo and Ring devices as access points and consumer broadband networks for backhaul. Amazon recently fulfilled that promise by announcing development kits, SDKs, and HDKs from Nordic Semiconductor, Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments, and Quectel. Amazon provides back-end support with mobile SDKs, sample code, and tools for IoS and Android devices, freely available from GitHub. Sidewalk integrates natively with AWS IoT Core, so it’s easy for developers to hook into cloud services. Amazon also kicked off Sidewalk360, a developer community that provides information for coverage maps and qualifies new Sidewalk devices and components. Although security concerns remain, Amazon successfully built a new WWAN IoT network that reaches over 90% of the US population without spending anything on network infrastructure – no cables, cell towers, or backhaul costs. This is the first connectivity scheme that provides wide area access at no (zero) cost. We’ll see dozens of new applications, both consumer and industrial. Meanwhile, the debate about the ethics of fractional bandwidth confiscation and opt-out security exposure will intensify. 
• The CSA announced Zigbee Pro 2023, a large and long-anticipated set of updates. Here are the three most impactful features. First, Zigbee can now use the 900 MHz band in the US and the 800 MHz band in Europe. The existing standard uses 2.4 GHz only, which has less range and more interference than Z-Wave and other 900 MHz systems. Second, the new version improves security, closing a gap with Zigbee Smart Energy and Matter over Thread. Third, Zigbee Direct enables Bluetooth Low Energy to connect with smartphones for setup, greatly simplifying device installation and maintenance. Matter uses this same technique for device setup.
• At Hannover Mese, Microsoft and Siemens announced generative AI for industrial application. Later this year, Siemens’ Teamcenter App for Microsoft Trams will use Azure OpenAI services to convert natural language input from engineers and OT personnel into reports that drive decisions and code that runs Programmable Logic Controllers. PLCs are the industrial computers that control machines in most of the world’s factories. Siemens is also using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to analyze video from cameras on factory floors to spot defects earlier and make production adjustments in “real-time.” 
• I attended the John Deere Tech Summit in Austin last week. This 186-year-old company has been working on precision agriculture for over 20 years. After seeing a combine and a tractor/trailer harvest and unload grain continuously, automatically, in perfect sync, including turns at the end of the rows, with no one touching the controls or either machine, I’m no longer impressed with automotive self-drive.
• This week, Qualcomm announced two new families of 4mm SoCs optimized for compute-intensive edge applications – the QCM/QCS8550 and the QCM/QCS4490. QCM versions have on-chip 5G modems, while QCS versions are Wi-Fi only. - Targeting compute-intensive edge applications, the 8550 family has eight Kryo cores (1XA78@3.2GHz, 4XA78@2.8GHz, and 3XA55@2.0GHz), an Adreno 740 GPU, an 8th generation AI engine, and an 18-bit AI-powered multi-pipeline vision processor. Use cases include robotics, drones, smart cameras, industrial controls, retail, and other AI and video-intensive applications. - The 4490 chips have a lower performance profile for industrial applications such as handheld, retail POS, and automation. These SoCs have a smaller 8-core processor (2XA78@2.4GHz, 6XA55@2.0GHz), an Adreno 613 GPU, a Spectra image processor, and a Hexagon Tensor Processor NPU. For these parts, Qualcomm plans extended-life hardware and software support through Android version 18, which should extend product design life beyond 2030.

Modern Work (Melody Brue)

• Microsoft made several announcements this week incorporating AI into Microsoft Viva, the company's employee experience platform. Copilot for Viva will be introduced across several Viva apps to help engage the workforce, set OKRs, and simplify goal management. Also announced was the upcoming integration of Glint to measure and improve employee engagement. Prioritizing organizational health is a key theme for companies navigating hybrid work. My concern is that there is much more to organizations' health than productivity and engagement, which currently seem to be the measurement priorities. However, the Copilot features were very slick in demos and produced actionable data.
• Zoom announced the acquisition of Workvivo employee experience platform that combines advanced internal communication and engagement tools, a social intranet, and an employee app into one central hub. Workvivo will be integrated into the Zoom platform and will help drive its employee experience innovation strategy. Workvivo has hundreds of customers worldwide, from SMBs to large well-known brands. Employee engagement is increasingly measured and considered crucial in the hybrid workplace, so this is a smart acquisition for Zoom.
• Google Meet lets you hide other people’s video feed from your view during a meeting without notifying them. This may seem like an odd feature to worry enough about prioritizing on a roadmap, but I think it serves some key purposes. The most obvious use case is to allow people to focus on the presenter or what’s being presented - but presenter mode isn’t always appropriate for meetings. I like this feature to hide someone with a distracting video background, like a nausea-inducing green screen blur but still be able to hear their voice. 
• Katmai, a virtual communications platform, is creating digital twins of the office to bring compromise to the return-to-office (RTO) debate by trying to create an authentic office experience within a browser. I’m not sure why people would want to mimic a workspace within a web browser, but the virtual office platform market is expected to be worth $137 billion by 2029. The company recently raised $22M in Series A and has been in development since the early days of the Covid lockdown. Katmai focuses on younger and smaller companies, particularly millennials and Gen Z, but will have to compete with more economical solutions like Zoom Huddles that allow people to gather spontaneously on video “water cooler” style. While I think Katmai has an interesting concept, I don’t know if the platform will be compelling enough for continual use and whether it can maintain a healthy enough work environment beyond what modern work collaboration tools can achieve. 
• Vodafone Business UC and RingCentral have expanded their global strategic partnership in Italy. The newly announced solution provides a unified experience across desktop and mobile for instant messaging, group collaboration, file sharing, task management, and HD video conferencing. The capabilities of RingCentral work with the existing services of Vodafone Business UC, which include call queueing and holding, call transfer, time frame setting, and customized voicemail. The dual solution enables business phone numbers on any smartphone, computer, or tablet. It gives businesses of all sizes an agile, affordable, cloud-based offering for collaboration and communication among their employees, customers, and suppliers–on any device, anywhere, at any time. 

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)  

• AT&T's earnings show the company is consistently profitable and continues to show growth within its core businesses, especially now that it no longer has any content ambitions. Its 5G network rollout is also going very smoothly. 
• EdgeQ has closed in on $75 million in funding to continue its 5G edge silicon space aspirations. 
• AT&T is now using Standalone 5G in its uplink to enable 2x CA in the uplink to improve coverage, performance, and battery life. This is necessary to improve the 5G user experience and ensure it can aggregate low and mid-band spectrum together. 
• Nokia is seeing growth in India while North America’s 5G growth slows, especially when you think about the maturity of the two networks and how much more buildout needs to be done in India. 

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson) 

• The Indian government has approved a new National Quantum Mission (NQM) to scale up scientific and industrial research and development (R&D) in quantum technologies. The NQM aims to make India a leading nation in quantum technologies by developing intermediate-scale quantum computers, secure quantum communications, and other quantum technologies.
  • The NQM aims to develop intermediate-scale quantum computers with 50-1000 physical qubits in 8 years. Intermediate-scale quantum computers can perform some quantum algorithms that can be used for various applications, including drug discovery, materials design, and financial modeling.
  • The NQM also aims to develop secure quantum communications. Quantum communications use quantum mechanics to protect information from eavesdroppers. This is because quantum mechanics makes it impossible to copy or measure a quantum state without disturbing it. Secure quantum communications could be used for military communications and financial transactions.
• Quantum Source, an Israel-based company, raised $12M to develop photonic quantum computers. The company aims to build fault-tolerant quantum systems that scale to millions of qubits.
  • Dell Technologies Capital led the round with participation from 10D and existing investors Eclipse VC, Grove Ventures, and Pitango First. The extension brings Quantum Source’s seed round total to $27M, one of the largest total seed financings in Quantum Computing.   

Retail Tech (Melody Brue) 

• N/A

Security (Will Townsend) 

• N/A    

Space (Paul Smith-Goodson) 

• N/A    

Columns Published  

1. Infoblox: Networking And Security Teams Must Unite To Combat Cybercrime, by Patrick Moorhead
2. OpenText Innovations Accelerate Cloud Adoption, by Patrick Moorhead
3. AWS Builds Generative AI For B2B From The Bedrock Up, by Patrick MoorheadNew Desk, Who Dis? Hot Desking And The Hybrid Workplace, by Melody Brue
4. RSA Conference 2023 Ushers In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, by Will Townsend
5. Enterprise Earbuds That Go From Boardroom To Ballpark: A Poly Voyager Free 60+ UC Review, by Melody Brue
6. Qualcomm Snapdragon Game Super Resolution Brings Another Desktop Gaming Feature To Mobile, by Anshel Sag
7. Tom Gillis And Cisco’s Vision For Security, by Will Townsend
8. Apple Makes More Fintech Moves With High-Yield Savings Account From Goldman Sachs, by Melody Brue
9. IBM Makes Its Strongest Cloud-Native Case With LinuxONE Rockhopper, by Matt Kimball
10. Unlocking Quantum Potential With High-Quality Qubits: How Quantinuum Achieved A Three-Year String Of Record-Breaking Quantum Measurements, by Paul Smith-Goodson

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                               

1. Luminar Proves The Pundits Wrong With Successful Bring Up Of Mexico Plant, by Patrick Moorhead
2. Google Wants To Help Customers Innovate Faster On The Data Cloud, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Lenovo Announces New Yoga And Slim Notebooks Alongside New Budget Gaming Brand, by Patrick Moorhead
4. HP Focuses On Modernizing Its Core Business At HP Amplify 2023, by Patrick Moorhead
5. Cohesity Partners With Microsoft And Announces Vision For AI, by Patrick Moorhead
6. Zoom’s Virtual Agent Brings AI-Powered Resolutions To Contact Centers, by Melody Brue
7. Greece Aims For Olympian Heights With 5G And Beyond, by Will Townsend
8. HPE GreenLake Storage Makes VAST Improvements, by Matt Kimball
9. The Collaboration Technology Making Meetings More Equitable, by Melody Brue
10. Fortinet Accelerates Past The Firewall, by Will Townsend
11. Google's Bold Move: How The Tech Giant Used Generative AI To Revise Its Product Roadmap And Do It Safely, by Paul Smith-Goodson
12. Leia Lume Pad 2 Review: The Definitive 3-D Content Creation And Consumption Tablet, by Anshel Sag
13. Unlocking Quantum Potential With High-Quality Qubits: How Quantinuum Achieved A Three-Year String Of Record-Breaking Quantum Measurements, by Paul Smith-Goodson
14. RingCentral Goes Back To The Future With Push-To-Talk And AI At Enterprise Connect, by Melody Brue

Research Paper(s): 

• N/A

Podcasts: 

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

• N/A

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

1. Ep 166: Talking Earningspalooza Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel, T-Mobile, and Activision
2. The Six Five In the Booth: Securing Data with IBM's Quantum-safe Crytopgraphy Algorithms
3. The Six Five Insider with Alan Trefler Pega Founder & CEO
4. The Six Five In the Booth with IBM Security VP Chris Meenan at RSA 2023
5. Ep 165: We are Live! Talking IBM, Broadcom, SAP, Samsung, Oracle, and Infoblox
6. The Six Five On the Road at the Cloudera SKO with Carolyn Duby & Santiago Giraldo

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast 

1. HPE Rebranding - Episode 3 - DataCenter Podcast
2. Volumez Secures $20M Round A Funding - Episode 3 - DataCenter Podcast
3. Intel Sells Server Business to Tyan/Mitac - Episode 3 - DataCenter Podcast
4. Infoblox Combines DNS Networking and Security - Episode 3 - DataCenter Podcast
5. HPE Releases its Annual Cybersecurity Report - Episode 3 - DataCenter Podcast

Press Citations:  

1. AWS / Siliverlingingsinfo https://www.silverliningsinfo.com/cloud/machine-learning-heart-aws-specialized-services-push (Will Townsend)
2. Intel / Siliconangle https://siliconangle.com/2023/04/27/intel-posts-biggest-ever-loss-stock-rises-signs-turnaround/
3. Meta / Beststocks https://beststocks.com/meta-offers-exceptional-salaries-to-virtual-r/ (Anshel Sag)  /
4. Networkworld https://www.networkworld.com/article/3694508/who-is-selling-naas-and-what-do-you-get.html (Will Townsend)
5. Samsung / XDA-Developers https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-testing-waters-bing-diversification/ (Anshel Sag) 
6. Six Five / Yahoo Finance https://finance.yahoo.com/news/six-five-media-introduces-connected-130000271.html
7. TXOne Networks / Businesswire https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230424005803/en/TXOne-Networks-to-Showcase-New-Portable-Inspector-Tool-and-Five-Coveted-Global-InfoSec-Awards-at-RSA-Conference

Company: 

• N/A

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

• HP Poly Voyager Free 60+
• HTC Vive XR Elite headset 
• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 
• Oppo Find N2 Flip 
• Poly Voyager Free 60+ UC
• Red Magic 8 Pro Titanium

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

• April
  • HPE Aruba Atmosphere – Las Vegas, April 23-28 (virtual) (Will Townsend)
  • RSA Conference – San Francisco, April 24-27 (virtual) (Matt Kimball, Will Townsend)
  • Oracle Database Summit, Redwood City 26-27 April (Matt Kimball)
  • VMware MultiCloud Analyst Event, San Jose, April 26-27 (Patrick Moorhead)
• May 
  • Juniper Summit, Dallas. May 1-3 (Will Townsend)
  • Analyst Meetings, Colorado, May 3-4 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Zoho Zoholics, Austin, May 3-4 (Melody Brue, Patrick Moorhead)
  • New Orleans, May 8-10 (Will Townsend)
  • Nutanix. NEXT, Chicago, May 8 (Matt Kimball)
  • Intel Vision, Orlando, May 8-10 (Anshel Sag, Matt Kimball, Pat Moorhead)
  • IBM Think, Orlando, May 9-11 (Pat Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • IBM Quantum Event, Paris, May 15-17 (Pat Moorhead)
  • Analyst Event, Cambridge UK, May 17-18 (Pat Moorhead
  • Dell Tech World, Las Vegas, May 22-25 (Matt Kimball, Pat Moorhead)
  • NI Connect (virtual) May 24-25 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Red Hat Analyst Summit, Boston/Virtual, May 23-24 (Matt Kimball)
  • AWE 2023, Santa Clara, May 31-June 2 (Anshel Sag)
• June
  • Cisco Live – Las Vegas, June 4-8 (Will Townsend, Matt Kimball)
  • The Six Five Summit, Online, June 6-8 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Amazon Re:Inforce, Anaheim, June 13-14 (virtual) (Will Townsend)
  • Zscaler Zenith Live – Las Vegas, June 13-15 (Will Townsend)
  • Pure Accelerate, Las Vegas, June 14-16 (Matt Kimball)
  • HPE Discover – Las Vegas, June 20-21 (Will Townsend, Patrick Moorhead)
  • Samsara Analyst Day, Austin, June 21 (Melody Brue)
  • MongoDB World, New York, June 22 (Pat Moorhead)
  • Samsara Analyst Day, Austin, June 21 (Melody Brue)
  • Cisco Devices Analyst Tour - Oslo, Norway June 26-27 (Melody Brue)
• July
  • Lenovo Industry Analyst Conference, July 24-27 (Pat Moorhead)
• August
  • HPE Discover – Las Vegas, June 20-23 (in person) (Will Townsend)
  • VMware Explore – Las Vegas, August 21-24 (virtual) (Will Townsend)
  • T-Mobile Industry Analyst Event, August 23-24 (Patrick Moorhead, Anshel Sag, Will Townsend)
  • Google Cloud Next, San Francisco, August 29-31 (Pat Moorhead)
• August
  • Oracle Cloud World, September 18-20 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • T-Mobile Analyst Event – Bellevue, August 23-24 (Will Townsend)
• September
  •  Intel Innovation 2023, September 19-20 (Anshel Sag)
  • Connected Britain – London, September 20-21 (Will Townsend)
  • MWC Las Vegas – September 26-28 (Will Townsend)
• October
  • Money 20/20, October 23-26 (Melody Brue)
  • Event, TBD, October 24-26 (Patrick Moorhead, Anshel Sag)
• November
  • UCX USA, Austin, November 13-14 (Melody Brue)
• December

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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 Devices, Semiconductors, & Automotive  
2. Melody Brue, Principal Analyst, Modern Work and ESG 
3. Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology  
4. Matt Kimball, Principal Analyst, Datacenter Servers, Storage CI, and HCI  
5. Anshel Sag, Principal Analyst; VR, PC Gaming, Mobile Platforms  
6. Paul Smith-Goodson, Principal Analyst; Machine Learning, A.I. and Quantum Computing  
7. Will Townsend, Principal Analyst; Security, Carrier Services, Networking  
8. Chris Wilder, Contributor, Security  
9. Jacob Freyman, Junior Analyst 

Operations  

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