In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Steven Dickens and Krista Macomber provide an earnings and events season recap and discuss various topics related to the IT landscape.
Key highlights include:
- Major announcements and data in the hybrid cloud
- NetApp’s Insight event in Las Vegas and announcements on AI, data security, and modern data architecture
- Lenovo Tech World and the focus on AI and edge devices
- Review of recent earnings reports from AWS, Google, and Microsoft, highlighting the growth in cloud services
- Plus a deep dive into data in a hybrid cloud environment, emphasizing the importance of data preparation and curation for AI applications.
You can watch the video of our conversation below, and be sure to visit our YouTube Channel and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
Listen to the audio here:
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
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 another episode of Infrastructure Matters. My name’s Steven Dickens and I’m joined this week by Krista Macomber, and Camberley Bates. Welcome to the show.
Camberley Bates: Good to be back.
Steven Dickens: It is. We’ve kind of missed you, Camberley. You’ve just not been in the last few, it’s just not been the same without you.
Camberley Bates: I was taking a European vacation. I was gone for almost three weeks, so there you go.
Steven Dickens: You look glowing and refreshed and re-energized.
Camberley Bates: All right.
Krista Macomber: She’s going to tell us all the cycling photos, it looks like you had a wonderful time.
Camberley Bates: Now we’re back in the technology. There we go.
Steven Dickens: Now it’s conference season. We’re all back today after a week on the road. You guys have been out to NetApp. I’ve been to Lenovo Tech world. So let’s dive straight in. NetApp, you were both there, big show, big vendor. Tell us a little bit about what you heard and what the takeaways were.
Camberley Bates: So we had both at the NetApp event, it was not only just the conference, but they also had an AR event that was start before the entire conference did. So we had the opportunity in a small group environment to be with all the executives presenting. Let me give you the big themes with George Kurian brought to, both to the AR and he kind of expanded a bit more than he did on the main stage, but he had big statement disruption. Disruption is an opportunity for all. And that is the kind of a statement they used all the way through. And where that’s referring to is probably the two areas that we are all seeing. One is the disruption of AI, which is opportunity. It’s also disruption. The other one was the data security stuff, which Krista will pick up a little bit later if this is all disruption, the cyber resiliency, cybersecurity, all that kind of stuff, it’s hugely disruptive.
The third area, which is not as much disruptive that he’s bringing third scene that he had that was part of all of that. It’s talking about… He talked about unified storage, but really what he is talking about is another theme that they had, which is intelligent data infrastructure. So you’re having to take the big themes and bringing it down to what is NetApp rolling out, how are they supporting the disruption that we’re feeling across the board? So on the AI and what I really loved about what George had to say was, it’s really clear they understand what’s going on in the data center. I mean, I think they’re very well aligned as executive staff on what’s happening and that’s will trickle down into the organization as well, as well as the deliver of the products, et cetera.
So from an AI standpoint, he cites understanding it is not just about the technology, it’s about the organizational connections between IT data services, the business units that all have to come together to bring out solutions. And of course they’re focusing on the data pipeline. And that’s the second piece that he talks about, which is how do you treat data as a product? Data is a product, and we’ve talked about that a lot for the last 10 years. They have, definitely, because they talked about data fabric and everything stuff, but it’s really dealing with the creation of data, the management of it, the data fragmentation that we’re facing, that we’re hearing pop up from all over the place. And then the overall data strategy and having a core data strategy. This is something, and I know I’m talking a lot here that we saw early on with the CIOs as a priority coming into this year is “I need usable data”. The data, just because the data is there does not mean it’s necessarily usable and I have to address usability of it.
The last piece, so that gets into needing a modern data architecture and what NetApp can do to creating usable data. And that has to do with how do you look at, and we’ll get into the subject later on, this data that’s scattered everywhere, managed in the cloud, on-prem, different geographies, et cetera. How do you manage that? How do you manage different data types, whether it’s block, file, object, and then operationally, because it costs a lot to manage these things. And so those are the big themes coming out of the George stuff that I can get into the technology. We’ll put, we have a note coming out that we’ll talk about the key announcements that they have that you check out, but those are the kind of things that they’re trying to talk about with their clients and then the solutions that they’re bringing in terms of how do you do this from an overall ubiquitous space in managing all those areas. So with that, I will shut up and pass it on to one of my other cohorts here, Krista talking.
Steven Dickens: The heartwarming thing for me was seeing the Kurian brothers on stage together. I don’t know what that was like, in the room.
Camberley Bates: That was fantastic.
Steven Dickens: But having a brother of my own, just that must be so great to have your brother come on and from… so maybe talk about the reaction to that because I imagine that was kind of well done in the room.
Camberley Bates: And the good news is that you can tell them apart.
Steven Dickens: Okay.
Krista Macomber: They are very- differently.
Camberley Bates: You can tell him apart as much because one’s got long hair, that would be Thomas, and George has got his hair shaved down much more short. So you know who… which one he is.
Steven Dickens: Are they twins or are they just brothers?
Camberley Bates: They are twins.
Krista Macomber: They are, yeah, they’re twins.
Steven Dickens: Wow.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. So that’s why I’m saying you can tell them apart a little bit easier than he used to be able to. So the big thing that… the big announcement that was happened earlier in September was the Google announcement for their ONTAP, which is Google Cloud Volumes now. I think it’s what it’s called that’s on Google. And it’s a first party offering, meaning that Google sells this. It’s not part of the marketplace, it’s not part of whatever. What first party really means here. And I don’t think NetApp does the best job of explaining what first party really means. It’s not only that it’s easier to provision and that you’ve got a single bill and that Google is selling it. But the other piece of it is that the development is joint. We have Google developing, you have NetApp developing jointly, and as they roll this out, it’s more available from a worldwide basis. You also have a huge focus on the security on this. So as Google, when Google rolls something that has to do with security, you’re going to know that this is part of Google’s security as well that’s being applied to it. So if they’re doing it I’m saying its- That’s a huge thing, they don’t emphasize it enough either from AWS or Azure or that kind of stuff. That’s a big, big, big issue.
Steven Dickens: That’s probably an area to you and Krista are on, sort of what was your takeaways from the show? I mean the security piece is something where you kind of focus for us, but what were your key takeaways?
Krista Macomber: Yeah, yeah. So we had obviously this NetApp insight event and we also attended back in June their dedicated analyst summit. And at both events I had the pleasure to spend some time with their data services team, which is a new team that NetApp formed. I believe it was earlier this year, if not, it was late last year. So it’s a relatively new team. But effectively what this team is charged with doing is, both driving the development of NetApp’s data services and also kind of better conveying to the market some of these capabilities that are built in intrinsically to ONTAP, which is NetApp’s operating system. And of course security is a very big component of that. So specifically we’ve had conversations with them this week about cyber resiliency and ransomware recovery. So that you have what they call an autonomous ransomware protection capability, which is effectively the ability to identify that an attack has occurred based on either malware signatures or based on the identification of anomalous user activity.
And then be able to, using BlueXP, which is NetApp’s kind of cloud-based control plane, take a snapshot and then automatically kind of identify which might be the best known, the last known good snapshot. So kind of really expedite that ability for customers to be able to respond to attacks and to recover from them. So what I thought was really interesting was the VP of that team, Guy Angelotti, he actually told us in a meeting that this capability was actually the fastest adopted feature within ONTAP that they’ve seen. So I thought that was really telling in terms of, not only the work that NetApp’s doing, but also just the recognition in the market that this is something that really needs to be built in intrinsically into the storage itself. And as someone that typically covers data protection and backup, it’s certainly we need kind of that comprehensive strategy that spans the spectrum. But ideally if we can kind of stop these attacks before they even impact the backup environment, of course that’s only going to be good in terms of reducing the amount of data loss we have and ideally the amount of downtime that a business has coming out of an attack.
Camberley Bates: The demo they did was pretty slick. I mean-
Krista Macomber: It was.
Camberley Bates: It was showing what they showed as an attack happening and the system immediately taking a snapshot and then they showed the recovery of coming back. And when she went back and grabbed another snapshot back and restored that, they had a few files, maybe four files or something that they had to go back even farther to pick up because it got mocked up by the… but this instant system detecting something, snapshotting, et cetera. And they’ve done a lot of training with AI. They made a huge claim, Harv did. I asked him to prove it and that kind of stuff and how he’s going to approve it, but it’s got a 99% detection rate. Now I’m like going, “really?” That’s what he was claiming.
Steven Dickens: Kills 99% of germs. Well, yeah. Well, I mean I think with all those claims, the legal department gets involved. Having made claims as a product manager in the past and knowing the process, interest. There’s probably an asterisk somewhere and a three pages worth of notes in six point font, that says that backs it up. So maybe we need to pour through that and take a look. So my week I was at a Tech World, which was Lenovo’s big… well, not kind of as big as it should be. I was just debriefing with one of their AR team. Lenovo could do a bigger job of this stellar cast on the keynote. YY, their chairman and CEO. We had Lisa Sue from AMD on stage. We had Jensen rocking his leather jacket as always from NVIDIA. I think he’s probably been to every keynote, there’s been maybe, I don’t know, did he jump on a plane and managed to make it to NetApp? But I don’t think he’s missed many. But he did a fantastic job of talking about what they’re doing about AI, and for Lenovo, the whole messaging is what they’re talking about as pocket to cloud. Not a lot of people remember that Lenovo owns Motorola. So it’s everything from your, genuinely your pocket and the device. And they showed some devices on stage powered by AI right through the edge devices, a huge portfolio, kind of edge compute devices, right through to the work they’re doing with hyperscalers in the public cloud.
Yeah. So fantastic overview from Lenovo. As I say, everything from kind of Motorola on device, turning on airplane mode on device, large language models, right through to computer vision use cases for manufacturing in the edge, right through to private large language models in enterprise deployments. Some of the work they’re doing with NVIDIA and AMD in that space. So there’s a research note that Dave Raffo and I have put together that I’ll put in the show notes, but fantastic kind of end to end portfolio from Lenovo. A lot of people have them kind of paint. The other piece that came through, and I’m not a devices guy, was the AI PC. So how are we going to be able to use this technology on our devices? How are they going to optimize devices for AI? It’s going to be pervasive across all of the applications that we use, but how do we build a PC infrastructure that’s built for that.
Camberley Bates: Supporting the entire….
Steven Dickens: So whether that’s collaboration with people like AMD from a processor point of view, fascinating overview from the Lenovo team. Trying to fit, as I say, everything from you ladies would’ve loved the phone that they showed turning your phone into a bracelet, bendable phone. So just literally being able to wrap the phone around everything from that.
Krista Macomber: The smartwatches weren’t enough?
Steven Dickens: I know, right? The lady who did that, did a fantastic demo, literally taking a smartphone and bending it and wrapping it around your wrist, which I thought was kind of cool.
Camberley Bates: Does it have diamonds on it?
Steven Dickens: I’m sure for you, Camberley, they’d do a one of, one you need.
Camberley Bates: as I bring my hand up.
Steven Dickens: Diamante encrusted, I’ll talk to the product manager and get you one. How does that sound?
Camberley Bates: Thank you.
Steven Dickens: As a demo unit, but no, I mean literally trying to fit all of that breadth into two hours. The team did a great job. We had Cristiano Amon from Qualcomm, we had Pat Gelsinger from Intel, Satya Nadella, all record segments for the keynote as well. So it was a pretty stellar lineup. So fantastic event. So you’ll see some coverage from us on that.
Krista Macomber: And Steven, I know we talked a little bit last week about what Lenovo’s doing around storage Now, was there any conversation around data and getting data to these devices, especially if we’re talking about AI and large language models and things like that?
Steven Dickens: It was fascinating. They gave us opportunity to spend some time with YY, who’s their, I’m not going to attempt to pronounce his full name. They all call him YY, the CEO. So he did a briefing for about 40 of us, and I got to ask him the question and his interesting answer. I represented for YouTube from a storage point of view and asked him a question about, how they get up to the tiers into enterprise storage. He brought up the of M&A activity, so obviously didn’t go much further than that, but I think his exact comments were along the lines of, “We’ve done a lot of acquisition activity in the past and it’s something we’d look at proactively”. So interesting to see whether Lenovo, who are now, I think number one in storage price tier 1 through 3.
Camberley Bates: From below $25,000, their entry level.
Steven Dickens: They’re moving up the stack. I think they’re number four in storage or three in storage. Number three.
Camberley Bates: Number three.
Steven Dickens: Number three, this is why we have you on the show, Camberley, to keep me honest, but number three in storage overall, they need to move up the tiers when it was interesting to see what YY’s reaction was to that.
Camberley Bates: So one of the things that I didn’t realize this week that what is all now into the IDCs tracker, which is what you’re citing the number three one in there is not only the storage devices, but it’s also HCI and it’s also software defined numbers are all in there. So they’re pushing a lot of HCI stuff. So I’m assuming that that’s kind of one of the pieces that’s helped them move up the ladder from number four to number three, which is they just jumped up to the next level. So it’s how do they maintain that kind of position?
Steven Dickens: Yeah, they’re high performing in the environment, I’d need to get the exact data, but the 500 largest systems that they lead that market as well. So they’re really investing in some of those enterprise deployments. So I think personally from my two weeks with Lenovo the last two weeks, I’m starting to recalibrate on those guys for sure.
Camberley Bates: So they brainwashed you now? Is that what you said with them?
Steven Dickens: I’ve been brainwashed. I need some perspective. I’m with them again next week getting a deep dive on TruScale. So maybe I need some perspective and some other vendors to brief me. There’s an open invitation if you’re listening GR teams. The other thing, big news for this week was AWS, Google and Microsoft all announcing earnings in the same week. And I love that they all come in the same week. It gives you fantastic comparative. And just to give the numbers before we dive into a discussion, AWS 12% growth for the third quarter, Google and Microsoft respectively, Google was 22.5%. Microsoft Azure, 29% growth. And these are off massive numbers. These aren’t small numbers, they’re off huge numbers. I think AWS has got some work to do from AI, obviously with Anthropic and some of the investments they’re making. But no, I’d love to get your perspective.
Camberley Bates: I believe still, and I have not sat down and gone through the earnings transcripts, but a lot of this is being driven by the AI development that’s going on, we’re expecting from other people and that some of the absorption of the technology has happened over this last nine months. So we’re starting to go back into the cadence of the pieces of it. So it’ll be interesting. And also the IBM had very good earnings this week too.
Steven Dickens: Mainframe is up 9% in a bad part of the cycle was my highlight from that.
Camberley Bates: Which is huge. And then seeing the consulting services and the software elements also picking up. So we’re getting into some more earnings coming out. It’s kind of watching it very carefully because we saw this huge bump last quarter because of AI. Are we going to get another one of that as the market is still hesitant about what is happening? There’s still conservative spending going on, which I think is a good thing because Powell is not necessarily bullish on everything right now. Chairman Powell. So I think that’s all goodness for us as being the, here we go. Sorry guys. I actually have a phone here. I didn’t turn off. Anyway, I’ll stop here.
Steven Dickens: I mean, we didn’t put it in the prep here, but the IBM notes, the IBM earnings was fascinating for me. I think good to see that business overall, returning back to growth and consistent growth. I think they’re a lot slicker, more focused, more on message post Kyndryl, what’s that 15 months ago now? I think that level of focus is starting to come through for me around AI hybrid cloud. They’ve got a very clear mission and Ovin’s doing a great job over there, I think.
Camberley Bates: Right. And their latest announcement this week was the Code Assist, what’s the next Code Assist? Which is huge because that’s one of the biggest areas that we’re seeing the uptick, current uptick in AI. Generative AI is how do you take that to the Code Assist? We heard that from NetApp, what they’re doing with it. I mean, they did talk about some of the areas that they’re investing in. One of them was in testing, taking the code that they had and all the test beds that they had and regenerating it into current code, the Python code and how you can completely, massively streamline your testing. And that means I can get products out faster because that’s usually, that’s one of the biggest polls in the tent, especially the bigger the company, the more they have to test all the corner cases and it’s a very difficult, long, laborious process. So that’s pretty cool to see what’s the next stuff’s on Code Assist.
Steven Dickens: I think IBM’s got the brand permission to be a key player that vendors and enterprise, sorry, enterprises call, as they start to embark on an AI deployment. They’ve been at it for so long with the glue, with the Jeopardy stuff they did. They’ve been at this for a while.
Camberley Bates: So my question is, can I take, and I haven’t read it through enough, can I do the assembler? Can I take assembler, we still have assembler code out there and move that into modern code and will it be as efficient, et cetera? So I’m sure research is working on that.
Steven Dickens: That’s why I spoke to the AR team. They’re setting me up a call with the mainframe team about what’s next.
Camberley Bates: Okay.
Steven Dickens: So I’ll either invite you to that or I’ll ask that question for you. How does that sound?
Camberley Bates: And we’ll talk about it at a later show so our visitors can know it, so.
Steven Dickens: There we go.
Camberley Bates: We’ve only got a little bit left here, so we have another topic?
Steven Dickens: Yeah, so this is the deep dive. This is the deep dive. So obviously with me being out at Lenovo, you ladies being out at NetApp this week, deep dive topic for this week is around data in a hybrid cloud. I’ll maybe go to you, Krista, you’ve not maybe been as vocal this morning. Camberley is been hogging the sort of limelight, but no, I mean, I know, I know. So maybe just get us kicked off. We’re starting to see this whole data layer emerge. It’s getting critical from an AI perspective, what are you seeing and what’s your perspective?
Krista Macomber: Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of what I’ve been kind of focused on lately has obviously been related to protection and security of data, which I think when we think about it in the context of AI, not necessarily anything special there, just that we need to continue to make sure that we’re doing all of our best practices, which is not easy. Considering the fact that data is sprawling across these hybrid cloud environments. Multi-cloud is a real thing. We’re hearing that from a customer perspective and the conversations that we’re having. And we’re also seeing that from a vendor side. So obviously we touched on a few events. One we haven’t yet touched on that also occurred this week was Veeam had a virtual cyber resiliency summit to talk about some new announcements that they have coming out of the 12.1 release of Veeam backup and replication. And I bring that one up because they introduced what they call Veeam Threat Center. And so really what that is looking to do is not only to kind of have some of these ML, AI capabilities that we’ve seen to be able to uncover attacks by looking at entropy changes and things like that, but also give customers a bigger picture context into how their threat landscape works.
We also saw at this summit that Veeam, like a number of their other counterparts in the data protection space, they’re closely integrating with ServiceNow and also from an API perspective, really just any SIEM tool that customers might be using. And so that also kind of gives that bigger picture context across the environment to be able to better identify which is the best restore point to better have forensic analysis post attack and things like that. So I bring this up because it’s a similar message that we saw NetApp have from the standpoint of that common data services layer. And I think the more we can have that layer but also have some of this visibility, is really important when we think about having that resiliency against these cyber attacks. So again, not necessarily specific to AI, but certainly the more important data becomes with use cases like AI, this is going to be, I think a big consideration for customers.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: Well, and Krista, you talked about the NetApp discussion on data services, and that is a common theme for anybody that’s building systems right now is building that platform for data services.
Steven Dickens: I think it’s interesting reflecting back to my attendance at the OpenText event, so coming at it less from the infrastructure point of view, but more from the data curation. It was interesting, it came up again this week from Lenovo about preparation of data and into a vector database to be able to get that. So I think my perspective is the vendors are aware of the challenge from the data preparation, curation, structuring, how they build it ready to be put forward for a large language model. I don’t think any of them have got it nailed 100% yet. I had chance to have a chat to Antonio Neri last Friday, and in a closed sort of room, there was sort of four analysts that we had managed to have chance for breakfast with him. The big thing for me is, you can tell that all the CEOs are chatting to each other. Antonio is the CEO of HPE, if you don’t know, they’re all chatting to each other around this kind of data preparation, curation, structuring, vectorizing your data. That’s the big space that everybody’s talking about, large language models, everybody’s showing the demos. As we look to deploy this at an enterprise layer, it’s going to be absolutely crucial.
Krista Macomber: Well, isn’t the saying the AI is only as good as the data, really at the end of the day is the data that it’s fed.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, exactly. And as these enterprises look to deploy private, large language models at scale based on enterprise data, getting that data ready and presentable and structured is going to be the next big challenge.
Camberley Bates: So one of the demos that we saw at NetApp live demo on stage, most impressive, very, very impressive, was with Google and Vertex, and showing, provisioning a volume to Vertex and executing generative AI against that volume and producing a webpage and the entire process, they went through it in terms of basically everything, graphics and everything. Basically a marketing person doing this. So once the volume’s attached to Vertex, give me this information from this, give me this information. So it was internal data they had as well as website data or whatever, and it’s worth a view.
Steven Dickens: Well, I think that’s a fantastic place to wrap. I mean, it’s crazy conference season. We’re all on the road getting a raft of announcements. I think there’s been a lot of earnings to cover. We could probably go on for an hour on this show today. But we’re trying to keep ourselves disciplined to keep us to half an hour. So you’ve been listening to Infrastructure Matters, please click and subscribe and do all those things that we recommend. Click subscribe, share with your friends. We’re trying to build this show. So thank you very much for listening. We’ll catch you next week.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Technical Insight: Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World
NetApp Gets Insightful on Generative AI, Cyber Recovery
Lenovo Q1FY24: Service-Led Solutions and AI Are Primary Growth Vectors
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
