2024 Outlook – Infrastructure Matters, Episode 26

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Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

Transcript:

Steven Dickens: Hello, and welcome to the next episode of Infrastructure Matters. This is Episode 26. I’m your host, Steven Dickens, and I’m joined as always by Camberely Bates and Krista Macomber. Hello, ladies. Welcome to the show.

Camberely Bates: And Happy New Year.

Steven Dickens: Happy New Year.

Krista Macomber: Happy 2024.

Steven Dickens: This is our first time together in 2024.

Krista Macomber: It is. I haven’t talked to

Steven Dickens: I know. It actually is my first time chatting to Krista. I’ve obviously had the pleasure of chatting to you over the last few days, Camberely, but good to get the gang back together.

Camberely Bates: It is.

Steven Dickens: So today we’re doing our 2024 predictions. It’s still the middle of January here, so it still feels like the statute of limitations is going to enable us to do some predictions. We’ve probably all written prediction pieces, so we’ll share those in the show notes. But this episode, we’re going to dive in and predict what we think are going to be the big trends hitting the infrastructure space in 2024. So I’ve got two people to go to. I’m trying to pick who’s first. I’ll pick you, Camberely, just purely because your first name starts with C in alphabetic order.

Camberely Bates: So before we dive into that, there was one flash across the screen announcement yesterday, and that… Google is dropping the cost for data transfer egress fees. It’s like, whoa. Whoa.

Steven Dickens: I’ve already been hit up by a reporter wanting a quote on that one, so that one’s going to get some traction.

Camberely Bates: Just send it to me, I’ll quote. I said, “This is whoa!” Whoa!

Steven Dickens: My friend, Camberely, says, “Whoa!” That’s all you need to know.

Camberely Bates: Anyway, it is very, very big. As you may or may not, Wasabi has always been that way. I think Seagate Live has been that way. These are smaller offerings that are out there, and they differentiate. That’s one of the things that Wasabi used to differentiate their offering. But this was big. Google is the first one to drop, and so the question is, are the rest of these guys going to stop playing the roach motel, which is kind of what I consider this to be.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, I’m with you there. I’m with you there.

Camberely Bates: Now there’s a bunch of parameters.

Steven Dickens: I’m with you there.

Camberely Bates: There’s a bunch of parameters there. You need to be a premium customer, and it is only for their data storage offerings. It’s not for everybody, and however that plays out. And there’s some things that you’ve got to read the print. But overall, it looks like when I looked at it last night, it looked like it was well-thought-out of and saying, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” If we’re really into this world of open systems or whatever, what Kubernetes is. If I can move a Kubernetes, why can’t I move my data? Well, that’s because originally Kubernetes didn’t use data or something like that. So anyway. So I’ll stop there and say-

Steven Dickens: No, I think it’s been-

Camberely Bates: Flash, flash.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think if we’re looking at it from a trend point of view, and I’m going to talk about this as one of my trends, so this is maybe a great segue, I think Google’s getting ahead of regulatory oversight. This is an obvious roach motel, I love your phrase for it, obvious thing that’s not great and that regulators should start to focus on. Holding customers’ data capture and forcing them to pay big fees to move it just isn’t the right thing structurally in a market. So I think this is probably Google horse-trading with the EU, is the way I… We’ll never know that for sure.

Camberely Bates: That’s the other one, yeah.

Steven Dickens: We’ll never know that for sure, but they’ve probably got a bunch of conversations going with the regulator around various things, trying to maybe get ahead. They’ve got the Google app store discussion that keeps rolling on, and that’s probably a bit of horse-trading in a darkened room with some regulators and some senior Google execs. Regardless of that, it’s a good thing for the industry, and I think AWS and Azure and others will follow suit.

The interesting piece for me, and you ladies are better at this than I am from a backup point of view. Maybe Krista, sort of get your perspective. I think the long-term, archival market, that sort of glacier type stuff is probably the one bit of all of this where I do see people hunting for the best price now. Am I thinking about it the right way?

Krista Macomber: Absolutely. We actually just… The end of last year we did a big TCO analysis for a customer that did include looking at cloud storage, and the data egress component is important. And I think, Steven, you bring up an important point. Looking at the regulatory compliance, the discovery, certainly this is going to make those types of use cases a lot more accessible for customers. And then also just generally when we think about the need to be able to recover data and have that cyber resiliency as well, I think it’s going to factor in in a huge way too. So I think it’s, in one hand, catering to those market trends, but I think also it can make Google look a lot more attractive as well. If customers have been typically more kind of on the AWS side, for example, I think this is certainly something that will change the game from a cost economics perspective.

Steven Dickens: If you’re going to be forced to do it by regulators anyway at some point, why not be first?

Krista Macomber: Get ahead of it, right? Exactly.

Steven Dickens: The way I look at it. That leads into one of my other key trends, and Camberely, you and I have been talking about this in the background, repatriation, moving workloads from the public cloud back on-prem. One of the big barriers to doing that was egress fees. If egress fees goes away, does that speed the trend to repatriation? You and I both were really interested to see what 37 Signals have done. They’ve decided to be vocal about their cloud migration off of AWS on to Dell on-premise service and have documented it, then gone on to all the social platforms and talked about it and really decided to lean into being counterculture and saying, “This didn’t make sense for us.” Now that’s a specific use case. That’s a specific workload, and their economics aren’t everybody else’s economics, but they’ve leant into that. I think…

I see a move to hybrid where people will be more intentional. We went through a period probably for 10 years where the answer is cloud. What’s the question, from a workload placement point of view? I think that time is over. That doesn’t mean that cloud providers won’t see a lot of revenue still and won’t see a lot of growth, won’t see new applications born on the cloud. I think enterprise architects are going to be more intentional and look at options more than maybe they have over the last decade. Camberely, you’ve been tracking this space carefully. What’s your thought?

Camberely Bates: We actually just finished recording a half an hour with Steven Foskett, a new guy that’s part of our team, the Tech Field Day folks from Gestalt IT, yesterday. He popped me an email, “Can you pop onto our podcast,” and with two others of the delegates from his Tech Field Day folks, and that’s what we were talking about the entire time, was repatriation. And so it’s exactly as you said, and this gets back to the big trends. If I was to talk through, and I put down in my bullets here, the third one on the list that I look at for the CIOs is the cost management process that they’re going through. It’s not as big as an issue that it was in 2023 when we started because everybody was going, “Oh my God, we’re going to get into a recession maybe.” And inflation was winging all over the place.

So there’s a big difference now in that. But they are doing very, very, what I, looking at very precision based cost management, and part of that is going into what you’re talking about, is workload placement. It’s not a cloud versus prem. It’s a workload placement. What makes the most sense based upon the cost? And now as you were saying, egress fees make a whole lot of sense. And as Ms. Krista was talking about, the data protection stuff now becomes a really, really… Opens doors. It opens doors, especially if we see the rest of these guys fall, and hopefully the pressure on the EU may make it happen, so thank you very much.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, it certainly… I think the egress fees was always a big barrier to repatriation. If that’s going away… There’s lots of technical reasons why you’re going to want to be on the public cloud. Maybe you’re consuming some AWS services. Maybe there’s a bigger data application, AI story. Maybe you’re starting to use Inferentia, Trainium, maybe using a TPU, maybe using Meyer. There’s lots of reasons why you might be on the public cloud, and egress fees going away doesn’t mean you instantly jump to an on-prem server, but it’s certainly part of the equation.

Camberely Bates: So going back to the big trends here, and I’m going to punt it over to Krista here in a second. I’ve been doing some research, and I’ll be publishing on this as the CIO key initiation initiatives… Spit out the words, Camberely.

Steven Dickens: For you to say.

Camberely Bates: Yeah, something like that. So the top of the list, as we all know, is the GenAI and digital transformation initiatives. So I’m not going to go through that. We’ll talk about that in a bit. Number two is cybersecurity, and this will continue unabated, and I will let Ms. Krista wax on about that. Three, we’re seeing is this cost management. That’s a very precision based cost management about how I’m looking at it. It’s not an overall, “Let me over keel everything.” Number four is talent remains critical and constrained, but it’s also what we’re seeing is that talent fight is really for that higher skilled, that analyst type person, the PE analyst, the data analyst, the AI person, the security analyst, but that higher level kind of effort, and that from a data infrastructure we are going to see, getting back to infrastructure matters.

We are going to see this AI, AIOps, impact this area, and not only AIOps but also the developers, DevOps space. So those are the areas I am looking at. There’s a couple of other ones that I’ll talk about. Where are we going with sustainability and that kind of thing, which is lower on the totem pole for us this year in the US, still very big in Europe. But anyway, I know that Krista wants to talk about cybersecurity as the big one. I really do consider that still as the number two.

Steven Dickens: I think that’s how I see it too. AI is going to be the big theme for the year, but cybersecurity is not going away. I still see that as front and center. Krista, that’s probably your big trend for this year, so turn it over to you.

Krista Macomber: It is. It is. And we’re probably all sick of talking about it.

Camberely Bates: Is it getting boring yet?

Krista Macomber: Right? Exactly.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, and there you go. For the next ten minutes, the floor is yours.

Krista Macomber: The rest of our podcast is done, right?

Steven Dickens: Yeah, have at it. We’re just going to sit back and let you go for it now.

Krista Macomber: Exactly, right? And I think we made some great headway in 2023. And I know the focus is to look ahead, but just to give a sense of where we’re at, I think we’ve made a lot of headway from a couple of perspectives. And I think one of the big perspectives is really the fact that this has been instilled as a board level priority in the fact that your C-suite understands the role that data protection and security play in the cybersecurity, cyber-resiliency equations. I think we really made some big headway there in 2023, and we did see some of the seeds being planted for data protection and security teams to start collaborating together to be able to just be more effective from the standpoint of cyber resiliency.

That being said, I think we do still have plenty of work to go. We talked about AI, so I’ll pull on that thread for just a quick minute. But the attackers are going to be using AI for more sophisticated attacks, for… Really just for more sophisticated attacks, and so really that means that IT operations and security teams need to have tools in their arsenal to be able to fight back. And in turn, AI is going to be one of those tools. So using AI, for example, for more sophisticated detection of attacks, also more sophisticated response to attacks. So maybe doing things like being able to automatically take some snapshots or backups when some of this anomalous activity, potentially malicious activity, is uncovered, maybe be able to start automatically triggering some recovery capabilities as well. So really from the AI standpoint, taking that next step from what machine learning gave us and being able to really be more responsive so that-

Steven Dickens: Interesting thing for me that I heard, and I’d love to get your take on it. I heard it on a podcast the other day that if a developer is 30 to 50% more efficient with AI, then the people developing cyber attacks are also 30 to 50% more efficient.

Krista Macomber: Yep.

Steven Dickens: It was a throwaway comment in this podcast that they didn’t go back to, but do you see that the same way? Am I thinking about that the right way, Krista?

Krista Macomber: We kind of need to not flip it on its head, but I think for all the great things that AI is bringing to businesses, cyber attacks are a business, and they’re a big business and they’re a very profitable business, and they’re going to be using AI to also be more efficient and to be more creative. So the efficiency component I think is certainly an aspect of it, but also for example, to do things like craft phishing emails that are more tailored to the particular organization or even that particular user to try to make sure that that user is going to click on them. So even beyond the efficiency, it’s about being even more effective and more sophisticated with the attack itself.

Camberely Bates: It’s kind of like I just-

Steven Dickens: I hadn’t thought about phishing emails, but now you’ve got me all scared.

Camberely Bates: Well, no. They-

Steven Dickens: That worries me. Worries me.

Camberely Bates: So I just had… My notice that I get from CISA was showing a couple of new emails that came through that were quite frightening. I actually sent it to our CFO. One of them was the classic email that you get as an accounting group, saying, “Would you please verify that these are the outstanding invoices with your company?” So they’ve written it up, and it’s like, okay, so this is what this is looking at. So it’s very much tailored to the kind of things that we’re used to, and it’s coming from your vendor, one of your vendors that are asking you to do that.

And then the other one was this very sophisticated email, and as we get into this first quarter and people are changing over insurance companies, is they asked about, “This is your new insurance company. Click on this for your benefits and register your benefits.” And so you’re just told the company just changed over, just like we did from one company to another company, blast out to the end users, and then you get another email that basically says, “We didn’t quite get all this. Please take care of this.” And you’re going, okay. Let me… And all it takes is one of those people to click on those things and get it through, so very sophisticated.

Krista Macomber: Yep, yep. Those are all great examples, factoring in at the time of the year, factoring in an understanding of where is that business at. And who is Camberely Bates as a user? And understanding, what types of emails do you typically engage with? What are you more likely to click on? It’s scary, but we all need to stay on our toes. And I think the good news is we can use AI. So I’ve heard examples of AI being used for training purposes, for employee training, so to create better and more sophisticated training programs, the flip side of that coin, being able to factor in, in more real time, maybe new types of attacks that are cropping up and things like that.

So I think there’s some hope, but I think we’ll definitely see more progress in this year of using AI in a more material way for those purposes. We heard a lot coming out of the vendor side, especially call it maybe the second half of this past year, with a lot of the data protection vendors that we work with. And so I think in terms of adoption, really becoming a little bit more material, I think we’ll begin to see some of that this year.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, that’s a good summary of that trend. So I’ll go next. One of my big trends is merger and acquisitions starting to either get more announced or impact. So we’ve had obviously HPE and Juniper this week announce that they’re getting together, and I think this is fantastic. Makes perfect sense to me at least. Ron and I put a research note together that went through it. Ron’s certainly better on it from a networking point of view than I am, but the way I look at this from my view of HPE is this probably shifts the balance of them from being a compute and storage and networking company to being a networking, compute and storage company. So subtle… I spent 10 years at HP, before it was HPE, in their enterprise server storage and networking division, and it was that order for a reason. I think if I was at HPE now and they had the same division, they’ve changed things around and the structure’s different, I think the N would be at the beginning of that acronym.

Camberely Bates: I don’t know, because the margins are still there in the storage.

Steven Dickens: Margins are there in storage, but the volume-

Camberely Bates: Margins are a huge contributor to their profitability…

Steven Dickens: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. But it’s going to be-

Camberely Bates: Don’t deprecate us storage people. There you go.

Steven Dickens: No, no. No. Oh God, I’m not that brave, Camberely. I’m not that brave. You guys are scrappy, and I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you. But no, I think it’s going to be interesting once this closes. Obviously they announced it this week. It’s got regulatory approvals to go through. I think it’s probably going to be September, October before this finalizes. Then you’ve obviously got a bunch of integration work to do. So if we wind forward… What are we, September plus six months? The first full earnings from HPE post acquisition and integration costs, it’s going to be really interesting to look at the balance of their earnings and see how much of it is the Aruba Juniper business and how much is the traditional business that, Camberely, you and I are more engaged with than Ron. So it’s going to be fascinating for me.

Camberely Bates: So I’m assuming that, and since I’m not tracking this area, that the big step here is the ethernet data center environment, and that that is the basis for the AI technologies, which gets us back to the trends, the number one trend being the AI stuff and that implementation and that is where they’re going. In terms of understanding how significant that’s going to be over the long haul, we’re just in the early stages of that on-premise development. And then that bet, that it’s going to be, some of this environment is going to be on premise? Maybe it doesn’t matter where it goes anymore if we get it rid of all the egress fees. Amazing.

But when we go back to the big trends, it’s that they are, from the CEO down to the BUs to the CIOs, looking at and have got their lists, priorities, probably most of them have got their priorities by now. They’re working through all the governance issues. And so now the hard work really starts in terms of the training and implementation. And as I said before, where I think we’re going to see the first applications coming out are going to be customer service-based facing, automating those bots, systems, and significantly improving them. And then we’ll move on to the other ones. You may want to talk about the technology as well.

Steven Dickens: Well, from an HPE point of view this makes perfect sense. The Aruba acquisition has been a fantastic move by Antonio Neri and the team over there. It’s been a shining light in their business, fueling a lot of the overall top line growth for the business. So I think Aruba plus Juniper, what does that mean for Cisco? Have they now got a true global competitor at scale with a holistic offering? So that’s going to be the battleground. Cisco’s pivot- Well, yeah. And the channel. Cisco’s pivoting more to be a software company because it’s going to close… Going back to my original top of this trend, they’d closed the Splunk acquisition this year, so acquisitions are going to start to play. We’re starting to see the Broadcom and VMware acquisition start to be meaningful now in the market, huge impact on the channel structure. I was chatting to some of the channel partners when I was back in the UK. That’s going to have a huge impact, particularly on the smaller channel partners. I think there’s a lot of heat and noise in the system for me that I think is a good move to have less, but bigger and more strategic partners.

Obviously that’s a hard pill to swallow if you are a small, non-strategic partner who’s been selling VMware licenses. Yes, you’re going to be impacted by that. But I think VMware managing a smaller number of more strategic partners makes sense to me in the long term. So I think M and A is going to be big. We’ve got Splunk and Cisco. We’ve got HP and Juniper. We’ve got VMware and Broadcom. I think there’s going to be more this year.

Camberely Bates: We’re hearing again. They every year come up for being in play.

Steven Dickens: I think one of the observability vendors is probably going to get picked up, the Dynatrace or the Datadog would be my gamble bet. So it’s interesting times from an M and A perspective. So Camberely, what’s your next prediction? What’s your next trend for 2024?

Camberely Bates: Well, I already said the GenAI piece of it and the investments in that area. So if I look at where the money is going, the money by the end of this year in terms of the space, some of the spaces I look at, is we will start seeing the uptick of data storage in there as we are using larger datasets, et cetera, that are going to go on-prem. Right now, that’s not being impacted. We’ve had many people ask us about, “Where do you see this going? Why is this not… Is data protection going to show up in this space?” And it’s like, not yet. This is a ways away. This is nine months away.

Steven Dickens: You think it’ll kick in back end of the year? Is that when you start that bit?

Camberely Bates: As the datasets get bigger, they get their feet under themselves in terms of how they’re training, what they’re doing with the data. But they’ve got to get some confidence level in rolling the stuff out.

Steven Dickens: That makes sense.

Camberely Bates: The IT guys.

Krista Macomber: That was actually one of my trends too, was just looking at the ramifications of generative AI on data protection, data security. I completely agree. It’s, I think, not really on the radar yet, but I think this year we’ll maybe see a theme of it becoming more on the radar and start thinking about developing best practices and processes between the business and IT operations in terms of really what that should look like.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. We’re starting to get towards the end here. My only other trend for this year is it’s going to be the 60th anniversary of the mainframe in April.

Camberely Bates: You had to bring that one in.

Steven Dickens: Dear to my heart, as everyone knows. So I don’t think we’re getting a new box this year. I don’t think we’re getting z17 from all the rumblings I’m hearing. IBM’s starting to tell people, but they’ve not been declarative. They don’t have to tell people that they’re not launching a new box this year, but… They only have to tell people when they’re planning to launch a new box, but I think that’s going to be early 2025. So I think you’re going to see a flurry of activity. The mainframe space has been more active in the last six months, and it’s been… We’ve seen OpenText divest of the assets that they just bought to Rocket, BMC buying model nine back end of last year as well.

There’s a bit more M and A activities. It’s a bit more vibrant, this space. There was a bunch of stuff that Kengel and AWS announced at Reinvent. The space is a bit more active. I think Mainframe 60 probably shines a light on it from the press point of view. There’s a moment on April 7th. Falls on a Sunday, so that’s interesting. But I still think there’ll be a flurry of activity and we’ll see a lot of people. I’m already starting to chat to vendors as they get their plans together for this event. So I think that’ll be early in the year, an inflection point for mainframe. You know me. I can’t escape a call without talking about the mainframe.

Camberely Bates: Well, there’s a bunch of other predictions that are on the data infrastructure piece that Mitch Lewis on the data infrastructure team put up. So we’ll put a link to that into here so you can, guys, go through that. But he’s talking about, where is AI going to be used? How is security getting built into the primary storage? Sustainability QLC, which is probably the biggest one. We’re going to see the QLC technology, that very dense SSD, being highly adopted and being a primary pusher of new acquisitions this year. And possibly eking out HTDs finally, or starting to eke them out a little bit more. So anyway, those are the other pieces on the storage side of the house, and we’ll put a link on there, and you can read the details from that.

Steven Dickens: Krista, anything from your side before we wrap up?

Krista Macomber: No. To Camberely’s point, we also have a piece looking at data protection, data security in particular. So there’s certainly some other topics that we explore in there, the quantum resistant encryption, for example, being one of them. We look in more detail at cyber resiliency and things of that nature. So we’ll make sure that those are linked in the comments. But I think we’ve hit on a couple of the big things that are top of mind for me at least heading into this year.

Steven Dickens: Fantastic. Well, we’ll wrap it there. You’ve been listening to another episode of the Infrastructure Matters podcast. Please click and subscribe and do all those things to help the algorithm and make the show grow. We got an award at the end of last year. Apparently we’re in somebody’s top 10 list as number two podcast for cloud. Hopefully we’ll get some more awards. So please check out our other episodes, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching and listening.

Other Insights from The Futurum Group:

HPE’s Game-Changing $14 Billion Acquisition of Juniper – The Futurum Group

From Breach Recovery to AI-Powered Resilience – The Futurum Group

2024 Trends and Predictions for Data Storage – The Futurum Group