Author: Brad Shimmin

Cloudera Anywhere Cloud Targets Hybrid AI Complexity With In-Place Execution
August 21, 2026

Cloudera Anywhere Cloud Targets Hybrid AI Complexity With In-Place Execution

Brad Shimmin analyzes Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, examining how modular blueprints, Apache Iceberg, and zero-copy lakehouse architectures resolve data gravity and MLOps bottlenecks across hybrid enterprise AI estates....
AWS and the End of the Naive Agent Collapsing the Semantic Divide
August 19, 2026

AWS and the End of the Naive Agent: Collapsing the Semantic Divide

Brad Shimmin, Vice President and Practice Lead at Futurum, shares his insights on how AWS Context moves beyond basic RAG to deliver a governed, open-format knowledge graph that provides autonomous...
AWS and the End of the Naive Agent- Collapsing the Semantic Divide
August 18, 2026

AWS and the End of the Naive Agent: Collapsing the Semantic Divide

Brad Shimmin, Vice President and Practice Lead at Futurum, shares his insights on how AWS Context moves beyond basic RAG to deliver a governed, open-format knowledge graph that provides autonomous...
Runaway Token Costs Are Killing the Frontier AI Monolith
August 18, 2026

Runaway Token Costs Are Killing the Frontier AI Monolith

Futurum analyst Brad Shimmin breaks down the economic breaking point of cloud APIs and why enterprise AI is shifting to highly quantized, sovereign open-weights models....
From Experimentation to Execution: Platform Engineering for Scalable Generative AI
August 10, 2026

From Experimentation to Execution: Platform Engineering for Scalable Generative AI

In our latest thought leadership report, From Experimentation to Execution: Platform Engineering for GenAI, completed in partnership with Red Hat, Futurum Research covers why enterprise GenAI initiatives stall before reaching...
Charting the Rise of the Revenue-Driven Data Team ‘New Business Opportunities’ Become the Fastest-Growing Priority for 2026
August 10, 2026

Charting the Rise of the Revenue-Driven Data Team: ‘New Business Opportunities’ Become the Fastest-Growing Priority for 2026

Futurum's Brad Shimmin, VP of Data Intelligence, Analytics & Infrastructure, notes a shift in 1H 2026: building AI capabilities (-5.6 pts) and trust in data (-6.5 pts) fell as top...
The End of Token Maxing Why Pragmatic AI Engineering is Replacing Frontier Models
August 10, 2026

The End of Token Maxing: Why Pragmatic AI Engineering is Replacing Frontier Models

Futurum analysts Brad Shimmin and Guy Currier discuss how Tokenomics and AI FinOps are forcing enterprises to abandon massive frontier models in favor of smaller, domain-specific AI endpoints governed by...
Active Storage Takes Over AWS DynamoDB Adds Native Vector Search for Agentic AI
August 7, 2026

Active Storage Takes Over: AWS DynamoDB Adds Native Vector Search for Agentic AI

Brad Shimmin, VP at Futurum, analyzes the launch of native vector search in AWS DynamoDB. By embedding semantic retrieval directly into its serverless operational database, AWS eliminates fragile AI data...
Can Legacy Data Security Survive the Velocity of Autonomous AI Agents?
July 30, 2026

Can Legacy Data Security Survive the Velocity of Autonomous AI Agents?

Brad Shimmin, VP and Practice Lead at Futurum, shares his insights on Bedrock Data's launch of Agent DLP, a runtime data loss prevention tool designed to secure AI agents and...
The Software-Defined Vehicle is Winning the Compute War and Losing the Owner
July 29, 2026

The Software-Defined Vehicle is Winning the Compute War and Losing the Owner

Futurum analysts Olivier Blanchard and Brad Shimmin on the moment the car stopped being a car, and why the sharpest pushback isn’t about EVs, autonomy, or subscriptions at all. From...
WEKA Engineers the AI Chassis to Conquer the Inference Power Paradox
July 24, 2026

WEKA Engineers the AI Chassis to Conquer the Inference Power Paradox

Brad Shimmin, VP and Practice Lead at Futurum, shares his insights on WEKA’s launch of the WEKApod 3 appliances and NeuralMesh 6 software. By taking total control of its hardware...
Solving the Distributed AI Dilemma: Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer Brings OCI Automation to Local Workloads
July 24, 2026

Solving the Distributed AI Dilemma: Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer Brings OCI Automation to Local Workloads

Brad Shimmin at Futurum analyzes Oracle's launch of Base Database Cloud@Customer X11, exploring how converged application VMs and local AI Database 26ai deployments solve data gravity and latency issues....

Welcome

The vision behind everything in Futurum’s Custom Research practice is this: research should show you what is happening, what comes next, and what to do about it. It should be personal to each audience, easy for people to grasp, and structured so LLMs can reason over it accurately. And it should be fast and turnkey; you want answers now, not another project to carry for quarters.

Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.

To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.

And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.

We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.

If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.

Benjamin Brown, VP Custom Research, Futurum Research

Benjamin Brown

VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group

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