In episode 51 of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates discuss the latest developments in the data infrastructure industry, with a focus on the Future of Memory and Storage Summit (FMS). They highlight the importance of the tech stack for AI, the challenges faced by Intel, and the growing role of companies like Palantir and Cloudera in managing and curating data for AI applications. The episode also touches on Camberley’s involvement in promoting women in the tech industry through the SuperWomen of FMS initiative.
The key talking points include:
- Future of Memory and Storage Summit (FMS): The summit focused on advancements in memory technology, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), CXL, and the latest PCIe standards. AI and data processing were major themes.
- Intel’s Challenges: Discussion on Intel’s 40% stock decline year-to-date and the strategic importance of Intel’s success to U.S. interests. Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround efforts are compared to IBM’s historic recovery.
- Palantir’s Growth: Palantir’s significant growth in the commercial sector, with a 55% increase in commercial business and efforts to move beyond its defense industry roots.
- Cloudera’s Role in Data Management: Cloudera’s work in managing and classifying data for AI, focusing on data governance, curation, and pipeline management.
- SuperWomen of FMS: Camberley Bates’ initiative to attract and retain women in the tech industry, including an annual leadership award recognizing influential women in the memory and storage field.
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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 episode 51 of Infrastructure Matters. I’m joined by my co-host, the superwoman that is Camberley Bates. Show the listeners that picture because that is a hard-
Camberley Bates: Need to show the picture?
Steven Dickens: Look at this. A superwoman of a tech conference. We all knew it to be true, but now it is actually true. Hey, Camberley, how are you?
Camberley Bates: I’m doing great. I just got back late last night from what used to be called the Flash Memory Summit and now is called the Future of Memory and Storage Summit.
Steven Dickens: Did you fly or did you catch a commercial aircraft?
Camberley Bates: I got the commercial aircraft on that one. But yeah, we were flying. We were definitely flying out there.
Steven Dickens: So it’s just us two this week. We’re a bestie down. Krista’s on a plane. A few topics on the docket today, Intel, Cloudera, that FMS conference, Palantir, how you are generally a superwoman. But let’s dive in. We’ve talked about FMS. Maybe just give us a bit of a kind of flavor of that first. We’re joking about you being a superwoman. You do a fantastic job of speaking for that cohort at that event. Tell us a little bit more.
Camberley Bates: Okay, so FMS was this week, it’s a gap. It is a geek fest of people and engineering and everything else. And in our industry, the data infrastructure industry, we’re talking about the solid state drives and now we’re talking about the memory pieces. And some of this stuff was way above my pay grade that I’m actually hosting. So, some really great stuff. I mean as you can imagine, most of the conversation was about AI. The people that were speaking there were everything from SK Hynix, to Micron, to Western Digital, and a whole bunch of other folks that were there. I know IBM was there, Andy Walls, he’s a great CTO and that kind of stuff that I got to spend time with.
Probably one of the biggest themes there that I take away is that, well, it’s actually the speed of how do you feed the GPUs. And we’ve been talking about, we’ve done a lot of talking about the memory wall. So there’s a conversation about HBM, high bandwidth memory. There’s conversation about CXL, where does that fit or does it fit anywhere to address that memory wall problem. And then also how fast can you get the data through. So we’re looking at things like technologies like PCIe 5, and then the next generation of PCIe 6 and those pieces. So there’s a lot of standards conversations as well because these organizations do live on standards and they do adhere to standards and how they bring out products. So, we have those kind of conversations that are going out there.
This picture, actually the picture that I just threw up was not part of the SuperWomen event, but I’ll talk about that in a second, was part of Solidigm event. And Solidigm held an event at Levi’s Stadium, which was right across the street from Santa Clara where we have the Santa Clara Conference Center. And they had a guy there. They were doing pictures, animation pictures. So this was an AI-generated, of course, picture of whatever you could pick what you wanted to be. Do you want to be a rockstar, Superwoman, Avatar, whatever you want to do? So this is what came out and that was kind of a lot of fun. Actually, I will post it on LinkedIn. I will do that.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, we need that one. We need that one in our lives, the actual real Camberley.
Camberley Bates: Yes.
Steven Dickens: What would your superpower be? What would it be?
Camberley Bates: I haven’t figured that out, but yeah.
Steven Dickens: Maybe next week, we’ll give you a week to think about it.
Camberley Bates: I’ll think about it. Solidigm released, used the place to talk more about what their vision is and what they’re doing and their enterprise drives and everything else, but they also released their next generation PCIe Gen 5 drives that are out there. That really address the upfront piece of the training because they’re so fast in addressing that. So that was one of the big things. And Greg Matson was there, and had a really interesting customer come up there, Ocient. Joe Jablonski is his name. He was one of the co-founders of a company called Cleversafe, along with Chris Gladwin that got sold to IBM for, I don’t know, rounding error of about 1.3 billion while-
Steven Dickens: No, it’s more likely right.
Camberley Bates: So they are using their drives to bring this storage offering to the market space and touting that the speed and the capabilities and the large capacity of the 61 terabyte drives has really made their offering sing. So that’s what he was up there doing and talking about the capabilities that they have. But they had a whole lot of other customers that were there that kind of enjoyed the time frame. Sat through had a wonderful dinner with Kove, which is John Overton. And this goes into this discussion about how do we address the memory wall.
Kove has been around for a long time. They’ve got some, and I’ve talked about them before, but I’ll bring them up again. They have some very significant, that what they’re doing is, get your brain around this one, virtualizing memory in a way that can supersede the speed, definitely supersedes the speed of CXL. Addresses a whole lot of problems in terms of being able to consolidate servers usually and use memory much like we did server CPUs when we put virtualized server on there doing the same thing here. And it is as fast as it can be. I haven’t yet plowed into their white papers yet. They haven’t shared those with me on all the gory details, but they are a well-established company. And the person that spoke on the main stage was gentlemen from SWIFT-
Steven Dickens: Oh, okay.
Camberley Bates: … that is SWIFT as in the international transactions. They’ve been installed for a very long time and are able to do what they’re doing because of Kove. They have one of the major, they won’t tell you who they are because they can’t talk about the three letter guys are using them, are well-installed as well as in the labs. We’re going to see more of these people as they are coming out and hopefully you’ll see it published on them. So I will pause there before I go into my next spiel.
Steven Dickens: Well, I mean it’s interesting. We talked about it briefly off camera, this kind of picks and shovels phase of AI. I think the trend of this podcast today, just looking at what we’ve got on the docket is that kind of building of the data stack for AI. Obviously a conference like FMS is kind of deep at the gorpy level of memory and right down into flash memory and all that type of stuff, which I know you do a great job on. But as you come up and we’re going to talk about Intel, we’re going to talk about Palantir, we’re going to talk about Cloudera. I think it’s just everything I see, and Google made some announcements in this space as well that I covered. Everything seems to be coming up into that tech stack for data curation, data movement, data speed, data security. I had a briefing this week from XtremeData. Everything is in that space and it’s that picks and shovels. Was that the big takeaway from FMS of getting ready for all the whiz-bang cool apps that are going to drive it from the top needs this complete new stack?
Camberley Bates: Yeah. And they’re talking about the AI training and all that kind of piece, but they’re also talking about how do you deliver these little pieces, right? These little chips and that kind of stuff. They’re going to go into your automobiles, they’re going to go into all the edge systems that you have. So there was a track on automobiles and how that drives, because definitely those are all custom capabilities. It’s not the stuff that you’re taking off the rack to go and drive on those places. There’s a lot of discussion on fabs and capacity because last year or the last year and a half, the drive people have taken a bath because of supply-demand kind of thing that was happening and they really took a bath. Last year, all of them were reporting really bad earnings. Now they’re back and they’re back in investing and they’re growing and such.
Steven Dickens: That gives us a segue into another one of our topics, intel.
Camberley Bates: Oh yes, taking a bath-
Steven Dickens: Taking a bath. I was listening to a podcast this morning, stocks down 40% year-to-date. I mean Pat Gelsinger is going to go down in history if he pulls this around the other side of being one of the best turnarounds in. I mean, this is almost for me at the Louis Gerstner phase of where IBM was, the existential crisis that IBM faced in what was at the mid-nineties. I think Intel, a couple of chatting to Daniel this week. I also put out probably a controversial take on my social platforms of should IBM buy Intel. That was my weird thought of the week. I don’t think Arvind or Pat are going to have that conversation, but I put zero probability on it.
But I mean that almost where that thought came from for me is Intel, I think I heard 21 times earnings. And this is never stock advice with tech analysts, not equity analysts. If Intel’s down 40% year-to-date, that’s too robust a company to be in that situation is my opinion. They’d take layoffs this week, narrative about being behind the AI curve. Where do you sit on this, Camberley?
Camberley Bates: Well, I honestly haven’t read all the lines about woe, they’re going down for the flood, whatever.
Steven Dickens: Woe is me, is the press coverage.
Camberley Bates: Right. I think part of that is because I feel like we have to get through the hype and then get down to the place that things settle down and say, so that’s kind of a little bit of a trend that I do on most hype things that are going on, whether it’s politics or the tech industry and that kind of thing.
Steven Dickens: We’re not going there. We’re not going there.
Camberley Bates: I’m not going there. It’s a way to see where the truth comes out. And also, I am a little blinded because I have such a deep respect for Pat Gelsinger and what I do not know about the fab business is that I don’t know that business. And I know that the turnaround of fab business is not like an overnight.
Steven Dickens: It’s not going to happen in one or two quarters.
Camberley Bates: And so they’ve made some big investments going back through their earnings release and what they talked about. They made some changes onto where they would do. They pivoted towards providing some resources in order to ship more, and that caused them some big numbers to take down. Whatever other pieces that they’re having to balance here, we’re talking huge capex kind of investments. One of the things that was presenting, I mean this was, Western Digital presented this as well as we heard this from, I believe it was Kioxia at the conference. They talked about investment in fabs, how long it takes you to get there, investment in development, et cetera, and kind of explaining what’s been going on this last two years about what’s been in terms of their world. And also, what does that mean for technology development and what kind of things they have to invest in?
So like Western Digital talks about saying that we are finished with the layer business, meaning that we’ve been adding layer upon layer upon layer upon layer flash in order to get out. Where there he says, well, the return on investment and that return on investment is both the fab and the engineering development has declined. So I get this much performance out of this much investment, whereas before it was equivalent. So when you start playing with these, this is big numbers stuff. This is big billions of dollars that you’re putting into, and that is what Gelsinger has been doing the last three years in terms of the new fabs.
Steven Dickens: I mentioned this in one of my posts. It’s a strategically important company to the US. Where are all the fabs today? They’re in Taiwan. Where do we need them not to be in Taiwan? Who else is going to build out fabs? IBM exited that business in the US. They’re partnering with Samsung for their chip production now. It’s strategically important to the geopolitical interests of the US to have Intel be successful. Against that backdrop, this is a blip for me.
Camberley Bates: And my prayers are with Pat to hope that he’s going to pull this out because as I said on the last podcast, I don’t think there’s another person that can pull that out. But I mean, I don’t know all the… I’m not the C level. So again, it’s above my pay grade.
Steven Dickens: We just get to watch from the sidelines.
Camberley Bates: I’m watching from the sidelines and rooting for him as well as all the other competitors that are going on and hoping to see that they get Gaudi out and Gaudi shipping. We hope to see Grok get out there, we hope to see AMD. So that was another theme that was at the conference, a lot of conversation about are we going to see some of the GPUs coming out and how does that play out?
Steven Dickens: I can’t see Nvidia having 93% market share of GPU and Intel not capturing a significant part of that market over the next five years. I just can’t foresee that the current status quo when we’re doing this podcast in, what would that be, episode 300, maybe go back to episode 51. I just can’t see few years out from now that the status quo is where it is. So, we digress. So onto Palantir, this one’s for me. I jumped on Schwab to talk about Palantir, 27% year-over-year growth.
Camberley Bates: Tell people what Palantir is before you…
Steven Dickens: Well, so Palantir has been in a bit of a darling. They very strongly, with their Gotham offering, been known as working with the three-letter agencies, the US Defense Department, kind of a bit of a secretive AI play. They’ve really come out over the last couple of years with their commercial sector. Strong demand there, starting to shift the mix, 41% year-over-year customer growth, large customer growth at 27 deals greater than 10 million.
One of the things that they’re trying to push is their commercial sector to try and get away from being known as that defense sector’s rotated company growth at 55% in that commercial sector. So really focusing in on the foundry type offering, which is focused on the commercial space. I think this speaks to a wider trend and we’ll cover Cloudera as well. But I think for me it’s that building out of the data tech stack for AI put Palantir in that category. How are they building out? What are they doing to try and get that traction? Those types of commercial growth numbers means that people are looking at data security, data curation, data preparation, data movement, attestation. All the various bits of that data stack, how do they pull all that together, make sure it’s ready. And then Palantir is doing some good work to put up towards some of those use cases for AI. That’s obviously reflecting in their number.
I think the general trend for me is, and Palantir was one of the stocks this week that survived the crash. And I think I looked at it once, stock was up, I think 12% after the close. I think that type of story rather than the hype of AI that we’re seeing with people creating new images is probably where I see the industry going over the next two or three years. We’re still going to have those core use cases and ChatGPT is going to do something cool, or Gemini is going to do something cool or Copilot from Microsoft. But I think it’s lower down that stack that’s going to be more interesting for people like you and me as we see the development.
Camberley Bates: So it’s funny that you talk about the stack, I talk about the pipeline.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Camberley Bates: And the reason why I look at it that way is because I look at it, we’re taking the feed in from all these different kinds of places that we’re storing data. And that was one of the other themes at FMS, the question about how much actually data storage is going to be upticked from this trend, and it is all over the map. I mean, they got Chris Cree over there, he’s a small analyst firm saying maybe 11%, maybe if you’re good, maybe 14%. And then you’ve got somebody else over there saying it’s a 50% growth.
Steven Dickens: So one final topic, SuperWomen of FMS. We touched on your, you were at a Solidigm event, but you do some great work in that community. Tell us a little bit more and sort of cover that for us because I sort of see you posting about this stuff. But we’ve not talked about it, so I’d love to find out a bit.
Camberley Bates: Yeah, so quite a few years ago, I’d say it was eight years ago or more, that the guys at FMS asked me to put a panel together for women. And I said, “Really?” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” And so we did have a panel, a breakout session or whatever for it and it’s like, ah, this is boring. So anyway, so it’s evolved and evolved to saying that. The other thing that I have to say about this Flash Memory Summit, or what’s now is the Future of Memory and Storage, it’s 90% men. It is an old industry. It is 90% men. And to find the women, and the other thing we wanted to do was have engineering women on the panel. And to find where the dead bodies were buried, it took some huge digging to get this. And so we did getting them up on the stage, having them talk about their career or their lives or whatever. And then the second year I think I said, okay, so we have to have a designated male. So we did.
Steven Dickens: That’s a brave guy to come on that panel. Let me just do that one. I’m a girl dad times four with a female dog and my wife as well. I understand that being the only male voice in an environment, believe me.
Camberley Bates: If you have a group of 90% men, how many people are going to show up there if it’s just women-to-women talking to women? So this had to be bigger than that. It had be, and the purpose of the group that we decided, so we had those panels. So then with some of them we formed a group and the group we called SuperWomen of FMS. And what we purpose of it was to see if we could attract more women, and that was the purpose. See if we can attract more women into the industry and keep them into the industry. And we had lots of men there like, “How do I help? How do I help?”
Steven Dickens: You need allies.
Camberley Bates: You’ve got four daughters, three daughters or whatever. How do I help do this? So that turned into, I said, okay, so we need to be more visible. So we ended up hosting our event in a very, very public space. It was right outside the big lobby bar where everybody gathered in this hotel, glass out there, where the pool was and everything else. So we threw this event out there. Of course, alcohol and food and that kind of stuff to bribe people.
Steven Dickens: Always helps. Always helps.
Camberley Bates: It always helps. That was sponsored by, and this year we were sponsored by Kioxia and Samsung. So we had that. And then the next thing we did was we created an award called SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award. And we’ve had people like Amber Huffman, who was an Intel fellow, is now over at Google, first Intel with a female fellow. We’ve had Dr. Yan Li who was out of… I’m going to get that wrong, WDC. Had been very instrumental in developing Flash. And this year, since we’re broader or Memory and Storage, the award went to a woman called Harriet Coverston, who has been in the industry for a very long time. Let’s put it this way. She knew Seymour Cray.
Steven Dickens: Wow. Okay.
Camberley Bates: Her first job back in the ’60s was Lawrence Livermore, encoding a time-sharing operating system for them.
Steven Dickens: Wow.
Camberley Bates: Wow. Exactly. She went on to develop something that we know which is SAM and that was purchased by Sun Microsystem. And the really coolest thing that she talked about is SAM-QFS, I’m getting it all wrong, but was the file system, multi-node file system to address a problem where we had satellite data that needed to come down. And this was being done for the federal government. And if you understand what time of frame this was, this was the ’80s, ’90s timeframe, and it’s the Cold War timeframe, et cetera. So what do you think that satellite data was all about? She Was the backbone to that file system that was created.
Steven Dickens: Wow, that’s fascinating.
Camberley Bates: Amazing woman still doing stuff. She’s now CTO for a company called Versity. But what that first system that has been able to do what I would call tiering, or lifecycle management that can manage today, we think this is no-brainer. But what I’m talking about doing is coming from one device to another device, to another device to another device over to tape. And in that time, what they were doing way back when, that was a big deal. And today it is too because what are we talking about on the data stack, or the data pipeline, is moving data around.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I get older in this industry, what’s old is new and we just come back and start to reapply those same disciplines back to a new technology. Well, on behalf of our listeners, and I’ll say it as well as a girl dad, keep doing what you’re doing. We need people like you in the industry doing what you’re doing. We were joking about it, but this is a very serious topic. We can’t have the mix 90-10. We need super powerful women in this industry doing what they do best and keeping us guys honest, which summarizes kind of how you and I have our conversations on a weekly basis. Well, you’ve been listening to episode 51 of Infrastructure Matters. We’re a person short today, but I hope you enjoyed the show. Please click and subscribe and do all those things and tell your friends about it, and we’ll see you next week. Thank you very much for watching.
Author Information
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.
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.
