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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: Hi, my name is Pat Moorhead. I’m CEO Chief Analyst at More Insights and Strategy and the co-founder of The Six Five.

Daniel Newman: Hi, I am Daniel Newman. I am the CEO of The Futurum Group and Co-founder of The Six Five.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so we’re really wearing two hats here. Both of us are representing our industry analyst companies, and we do that by day and then by night we do Six Five videos talking, having great conversations with executives around the industry.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I mean, we are here to learn and to grow and to become more knowledgeable about all things AWS and its ecosystem. So great week, spending a lot of time with the executives, with the partners, and of course talking to those executives on The Six Five.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, the outside world expects both Dan and our companies to have essentially a verdict on what’s going on at AWS-

Daniel Newman: Guilty.

Patrick Moorhead: -And what the partners are doing.

Daniel Newman: Guilty. So there’s no topic that’s going to drive more conversations at an event in 2023 than AI. And of course generative AI is its own subset and there was no shortage of excitement or announcements here. So we have put a lot of time into AI. But AI isn’t just one thing and it’s not this kind of all encompassing thing either. There’s AI silicon, which is a big thing here at AWS re:Invent, and there’s AI infrastructure and there’s AI platforms, development applications. And so that’s been the big thing. But of course, what’s a lot of fun is all the picks and axes and plumbing and things that need to get put together. At AWS, you have a little bit of all of it. You have the SIs, you have the big OEMs, you have the ISVs that are building unique and important parts of the software stack, and you’ve got this great ecosystem here and all these things are really hot topics this week.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, we saw a lot of conversations coming from specifically AWS on compute, on serverless, on generative AI, but I’m just struck at the partnerships that are going on. I think it just proves that all companies in tech are getting together to do what’s best for the customer. And whether you’re On-Prem, whether you’re born in the Cloud, whether you’re kind of in the middle, all coming together to add value and solve problems for enterprises and big enterprise, big enterprises and big governments.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, we’re going to be spending time with pretty much the whole gambit. We will be talking to AWS leadership, we’ll be talking to a WS business unit heads. We’re going to be talking to some of AWS’s largest partners. We’ll be talking to press and media. We’ll be talking to competitors because of course they’re going to want to know what we’re hearing and what’s going on. This is one of the biggest, busiest weeks of the year. I can say averaging somewhere between 20 and 25 meetings, interactions, small groups, conversations and videos each and every day. Pat, I think the old joke about you know, I only work half days, like which 12 hours. And of course I think it’s been more like 18. These have been 18-hour days.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I mean pretty much my calendar’s booked about 14 hours a day. And to Dan’s point, AWS executives, subject matter experts, partners of all sorts, press, media. I’ve done probably 10 press interviews this week.

Daniel Newman: I did 11.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, no, I know.

Daniel Newman: I did 11.

Patrick Moorhead: I know you one-up me on that one. But no, it’s been a great week and I’m looking forward to even more.

Daniel Newman: It’s 12. I just got off one here. Sorry, I had to talk to the Journal.

Patrick Moorhead: That was good.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, thanks.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So first and foremost, I’m super excited to see HPE here in a much bigger way. It used to be the days when traditional On-Prem vendors and public cloud folks would never get together. But what I really like is that HPE has put together cross-cloud fabrics. And I was really excited that HPE used the same term that I’ve been using for years on this and specifically manageability, observability and now AI. And that’s what I’m most excited about is HPE adding value, quite frankly, regardless of where the compute is.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think HPE understood early about the cloud is more of an experience. It’s an abstraction of compute rather than it being so much-

Patrick Moorhead: A place.

Daniel Newman: Correct. You know, people sometimes want to look up into the sky, but HPE did get it first, did get it right. And I’ve said on the record a lot of times about people want to be able to consume, compute, consume these applications, and they aren’t always looking to do it necessarily in someone else’s data center. And the idea of being able to build on GreenLake and seeing what the company’s done with its GreenLake platform has been something that’s really kept me closely connected in terms of watching the company’s evolution. Also, really like some of the moves the company’s made with acquisitions most recently-

Patrick Moorhead: OpsRamp.

Daniel Newman: OpsRamp, great acquisition, ITOM, these are all things to watch. But I think watching to see its AI story grow and gain momentum and become better understood. Not all AI, it’s not just about NVIDIA, it’s not just about chips. It’s not just about apps. There’s a whole lot of work that goes into making AI real in the enterprise. Pat, I think if you want something that’s really means a lot to the whole world, you’ll probably talk about Q. If you want to talk about what Dan thought was the most interesting. I thought it was AWS’s decision to launch DGX Cloud, which was its NVIDIA supercomputer in the cloud. And it was something that there was just a lot of consternation in the market and questioning of whether or not this would happen. The other clouds all did it. They didn’t. They’ve been building a training chip and competitive products, and of course they’ve always had merchant silicon, but there was really a thinking it wouldn’t happen. And then it happened. And then also Adam Selipsky two slides later launched a new trainium chip. And so you know, you and I are silicon guys. I mean, we do chips to SaaS, but we love the semiconductor industry. Semiconductors eat the world. And so there was so much excitement across the silicon landscape. But it’s really interesting to see how this competition is growing. I mean, look, NVIDIA’s got an amazing following, has been very successful, and AWS needs to meet customers where they are. But AWS is also, we’ve spent time with Annapurna in the lab and they’ve done some really innovative things and their own silicon is becoming incredibly competitive. And so just watching this as an analyst, I mean, it’s really a fascinating story to watch, develop right in front of our eyes.

Patrick Moorhead: As much as, I’d hate to caboose on exactly what you said, but I think the longest lasting, most impactful piece of news is regard to silicon. But if I had to pick a second, it’s the reaffirmation.

Daniel Newman: Yep.

Patrick Moorhead: That the future of the largest IaaS and PaaS company on the planet is committed to open models. They have proprietary models that are going to just increase competition out there. And I think if I look at all the people who are consuming machine learning on AWS and think about how that translates, I think it’s going to make a good translation to generative AI. I think that’s going to be a really big deal. And what that means in the big picture is because AWS supports consumer plays, enterprise plays, IaaS, PaaS, and even layers in some SaaS, we’re going to get this generative AI mojo that’s going to help pretty much everybody out there. Or a lot of people. I mean, there’s a lot of other people doing this, but nobody yet at the scale that AWS does.