The News: Over the past few days and heading into the weekend there were several interesting stories that broke. Over the next week we may add further coverage with additional in depth research notes, but wanted to put some initial thoughts out for consideration.
Here are the stories.
AWS and Salesforce announce an expansion to their strategic partnership
Microsoft rolls out Windows 11
Lattice Semi announces big updates to its FPGA lineup
Analyst Takes: Here are some quick hit insights on these three stories making headlines this week.
AWS and Salesforce announce an expansion to their strategic partnership
This week, AWS and Salesforce announced a significant expansion of their global strategic partnership that will make it easy for customers to use the full set of Salesforce and AWS capabilities together to quickly build and deploy powerful new business applications in what is clearly an effort of the global leader in IaaS and the global leader in SaaS (by market share) to be more competitive with Microsoft and Google, which are gaining momentum on full vertical integration.
The two companies are positioning the partnership as a key unifier of AWS and Salesforce products enabling developers to build and launch custom applications that extend to both platforms by connecting Salesforce data and workflows natively into their solutions running on AWS, and make it easy for Salesforce developers to integrate AWS data and workflows into their Salesforce applications. The partnership’s success will hinge on deep unification of the platforms to create an experience equal or better than the fully integrated competitors. It appears from the announcement that this is part of the plans for this partnership going forward.
Salesforce, as part of the announcement also noted that it will embed AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) directly in new applications for sales, service, and industry vertical use cases. With these new offerings, customers can purchase out-of-the-box solutions directly from Salesforce and then consume the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis. This level of integration provides an indicator of the importance of this partnership and sets the right direction to allow Salesforce users to consume greater volume of AWS services.
All in all, this announcement clearly indicates Salesforce’s long-term intention to stay out of the IaaS space, and AWS to steer clear of business applications. I do see the impending Slack acquisition accelerating the value of the deal as we see collaboration, productivity, data, and development continue to converge.
Microsoft rolls out Windows 11
Microsoft launched its long awaited next generation OS, Windows 11, after a nearly 6 year run with Windows 10, which was a big positive turn for Microsoft after a few shaky iterations including Windows 7, and Windows 8, which welcomed a new era of mobility but caused equally as many problems for users.
With Windows 11, the company is focusing on Touch, Speed, Security, Privacy, Collaboration, AI, and evolving silicon support including greater focus on Arm’s rising profile.
Lattice Semi announces big updates to its FPGA lineup
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: LSCC) launched the Lattice CertusPro™-NX general purpose FPGA family, which represents its fourth device family based on the Lattice Nexus™ platform to be launched in the past 18 months. Over the past few quarters, we have zeroed in on Lattice Semiconductor for its strong execution across the FPGA landscape. Most recently, its investor day announcements that expanded the company’s market strategy to address a growing mid-market for FPGA technology.
With CertusPro-NX, Lattice’s commitment to FPGA innovation deepens and the company showed effectively that it is continuing to lead in small form-factor, high bandwidth, power efficient FPGAs. The new CertusPro-NX FPGAs provide further advancement in key performance capabilities and offer the highest logic density currently available on a Nexus-based device. This new FPGA offering is hitting the market at the right time and further positions Lattice and reiterates its strategy. Coupled with its software and framework capabilities, the CertusPro-NX launch appears to position Lattice to support its customers in accelerating application development in key verticals/segments including Communications, Compute, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice. Neither the Author or Futurum Research holds any positions in any companies mentioned in this article.
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Image Credit: Microsoft
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
