 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Predictions are all the rage at this time of year. Now on December 29th, 2020, in collaboration with Eric Porter Bradley of Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, we put forth our predictions for 2021 and the focus of our prognostications included tech spending, remote work, productivity apps, cybersecurity, IPOs, SPACs, M&A, data architecture, cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, AI, containers, automation and semiconductors. We covered a lot of ground. Now over the past several weeks, we've been inundated with literally thousands of inbound emails pitching us on various predictions and trends in these and other areas. Here's my predictions folder. And this is only a portion of the documents that I've received by email, obviously printed them out, killed a few trees, sorry. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to review briefly each of our predictions for this past year, 2021, and suggest a grade as to how we did. We're going to do this as a little warm up for our 2022 predictions, which we'll be doing over the next couple of weeks. Now, before we dig in, I want to make an observation. Many of the predictions that we received, they were observations of trends and sometimes not really predictions, or not surprising, we got a lot of self-serving marketing statements. Predictions in our view, they should be measurable. So you can look back and say, okay, did they get it right? Now granted, there are gray areas, so that's why we'll use a grading system today. Now, there are also many really well-done and thought-provoking predictions. This is an example of one that we received that is strong. It's from Equinex CIO, Millen Wagley, who said within the decade, data centers will be powered by 100% renewable energy. Okay, so that's clear and we can measure that. But anyway, thanks to all the PR folks who sent along, like I said, literally thousands of predictions. We tried to read them all, but the volume over the past week or so was just so overwhelming, and we'll try to scan them before we do our 2022 predictions. But today, we want to do that warm-up by evaluating how we did in 2021, so let's get started. Our first prediction was that tech spending would increase by 4% this year, coming off of what we had thought was a contraction in 2020. And depending on which data you look at, best case maybe was flat. We definitely correctly called the continuation into 2022 of the remote work trend and the positive impact it would have on PCs and the like, but we underestimated the shape of that rebound, that spendback curve. IDC has tech spending growth this year at 5.5%, so we feel like while we called the bounce back, it was more pronounced than we had thought. In fact, we think that IDC number is probably going to go up even higher and we'll address that in our 2022 predictions. So we'll give ourselves a B minus here. Okay, next prediction was remote worker trends become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year end 2021. So on average, 34% of the workers would be remote by the end of this year. Now, you know, we made the call, but we missed Delta, you know, we missed Omicron. We said 34% remote, which would be 2x the historical norms. Now the ETR data suggests it was 52% in September and it's probably going to be somewhere in the 40 to 45% range by the end of this month and in December. And the thing is 75% of the workforce is probably still working either fully remote or in a hybrid model. And hybrid work is probably going to be the dominant trend and we're going to have to revisit that framework or how we think about this whole structure. And we'll do that again in our 2022 predictions. So we'll give ourselves a C on that one. We'll take some credit for the permanence of the trend, but the percentage was well off the mark, you know, thanks to the variance, as well as some cultural shifts, that whole hybrid notion. Okay, so hey, not really a great start for Eric and me, but we rebound with the next one. The productivity increases we said seen in 2020 will lead organizations to double down on the successes and certain productivity apps will benefit. So to measure this, we said, let's take a look at the most recent quarterly earnings, engage the revenue growth year on year as an indicator. DocuSign was up 42%. Smartsheet we also called up was up 46% in revenue. Twilio up 65%. Zoom growth was 35% down from 325%, confirming our layup call that Zoom growth would moderate it had nowhere to go but down. And Microsoft Teams has never been more ubiquitous, has never seen greater adoption with hundreds of companies having 100,000 or more users and thousands of companies with 10,000 users or more. So we really feel like we nailed this one. So we're going to give ourselves an A plus. Okay, so now on to cyber. It's an area that we've been making calls in for a couple of years now. And we're really pleased looking back here. We said permanent shifts in CISO strategies are going to lead to share shifts in network security. Now we said, to give you more detail, maybe that sounds like an easy one, but we said specifically identity, cloud security and endpoint security would continue to benefit. And we specifically named CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler and a few others sort of targeting their growth rates. Now Gartner has the security market growing at 11%. Okta and Zscaler revenues last quarter grew at 62% year over year, CrowdStrike 63%. Illumio, we also called out, they raised $225 million on a $2.75 billion valuation on the strength of its growth. That was in September. Now Akamai acquired Guardiocore for $600 million, another company we called out that they would do it, they did that as a ransomware protection play and they paid a huge revenue multiple for the company. And it seems the guys listed on the last line are all talking about subscriptions, SAS, ARR, remaining performance obligations or RPO. So we feel very good about this look back. We'll take an A on this one. No, it's not an A plus because we were too conservative on the growth of Okta, CrowdStrike and Zscaler topping at 50%, they blew that away by another 10 points or so, 10 to 15. But look, pretty good call nonetheless. Okay, again, the next one you might feel like is a layup, but not really. So we said the increased tech spend would drive even more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. According to SPAC analytics, IPOs were up 109% this year. The SPAC attack continued up 109% in 2021 on top of a record 2020. And according to KPMG, M&A dollar volume was up 19%. Okay, you might say, that was easy call, but there was much more underneath this prediction. We called out UiPASS IPO, which was a lock, but also said automation anywhere would go public. UiPASS did, AA didn't. We did correctly call the HashiCorp IPO. We said they'd either go IPO or get acquired. And Cloudflare grew revenue 219% last quarter, but Akamai was not acquired. So the degree of difficulty on the overall prediction wasn't high, but the automation anywhere and Akamai events, we made those calls that didn't happen and those were obviously tougher calls. So we think this still deserves a B grade. All right, as you know, data is one of our favorite subjects and we've reported extensively on the successes and failures of so-called big data. We said in the next prediction that in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations will re-architect their big data platforms. And we said this would occur in earnest over the next four to five years. Now again, you may say duh, Dave, but you have to evaluate the prediction based on the underlying comments here. The jury is still out on things like Snowflake's data cloud, but we absolutely believe that it's the right direction. But then you have Databricks coming in taking a different approach. They're coming at the problem from a data science angle, trying to take on traditional BI and then you've got Snowflake coming from the analytic space and moving into AI and data science. And you know, we asked at AWS re-invent, we asked Ben Wadjaville on theCUBE if there needs to be a semantic layer to bring these two worlds together. And he said yes, and that's what he claims Snowflake is building. Meanwhile, you got the big whales like Oracle, they continue to invest in their capabilities to try to eliminate data movement. And then there's AWS taking a totally different approach to data where it gives customers maximum optionality of offerings and database and other services. And you can't forget Microsoft and Google. So many customers might not take the steps that we predicted because they're comfortable where they are. And specifically we're talking about here a shift toward domain ownership and data product thinking and the reorganization of hyper specialized technical teams. Many of the principles put forth by DataMesh. And we've said this change is going to take a number of years to play out four to five years. So we start noticing in 2021 that that's clearly been the case as we reported on parts of JP Morgan Chase rethinking its data architecture, HelloFresh and many others. So this is still in incomplete. The professor will give ourselves an incomplete on this one but we think it's trending in the right direction. Okay, the next one is always a fun discussion. That's the battle to define hybrid and multicloud. We said that's going to escalate in 2021 and we'll create bifurcated CIO strategies. Now, here we go. AWS sees the world as bringing its APIs and primitives and model to the edge. And the data center to AWS is just another edge node. And the company says that it still believes in the fullness of time that all data will be in the cloud. However, that's defined. And AWS say all this talk about hybrid of connecting on-prem to a cloud they would flat out say Adam Salipsky told us this that's not cloud is what he said. Then on the other side of the table at the likes of Cisco, Dell, HPE, et cetera, saying, hold on, cloud is an operating model. It's not a place. And AWS might say, yeah, and AWS along with its customers is defining that operating model. And these other guys would say, no, actually, you're not. We are with our customers. And this battle 100% escalated in 2021 with the launch of Apex by Dell, HPE doubled down on GreenLake. Cisco's as a service models. And then of course, Oracle, which actually announced a true same, same public to on-prem hybrid capability two years before AWS announced outposts. And of course, Oracle's executing on that strategy in earnest in 2021. And the other nuance here is a concept that we introduced called super cloud, which refers to the notion that look something like for example, multi-cloud is not about running within a respective cloud. It's not about cloud compatibility. Rather it's about abstracting the complexity of the underlying cloud primitives and building value on top of those cloud services, on top of the investments in CAPEX that the hyperscalers have made. Now, some people didn't like the term super cloud. Maybe Uber cloud would be a better term. We're going to continue to use it to describe this capability. We think it has meaning. And we're seeing new examples like Goldman Sachs's financial cloud running on top of AWS. So a super cloud is not an application or a suite of applications running on a single cloud. Now, if those applications span multiple clouds like Snowflake is trying to do, okay, that's a service that could span multiple clouds or in the case of Goldman Sachs, it's a portfolio of data, tools and software that's made accessible as a service that floats on top of a single or even multiple clouds regardless. We feel that this was a correct call given the evidence and we'll give ourselves an A minus taking points off for the somewhat anecdotal and observational measurement system that we apply to look back at this prediction. Okay, the next prediction we made was cloud containers, AI and ML automation are going to power that those big four are going to power 2021 spending. Here's a graphic we use to predict that it plots survey data for the various technologies within the ETR taxonomy, net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the data set. It's a pervasive measurement on the horizontal axis. The one that matters here is the vertical, that dotted line of 40%. Anything above that is considered highly elevated and these four areas have held serve this year based on recent ETR survey data that we're not showing here. We'll bring that into our 2022 prediction. So this prediction came in correctly for the most recent survey data and that's our measurement system on this one. So we're going to take an A for this one too. Now on the penultimate prediction, here we came back to automation saying that the automation mandate accelerates in 2021. UI path and automation anywhere we said it would go public but Microsoft remains a threat to these pure play RPA vendors. Well, we gave ourselves a B on this one doubling down on automation anywhere going public. You know, that was wrong but we definitely saw this year companies leaning hard into automation and Microsoft despite the fact that it doesn't have as feature rich a product and offering as UI path and automation anywhere Microsoft remains a very large presence. You know, we spoke to a lot of customers at the UI path forward for event in October in Las Vegas, physical event and they confirmed, you know, this is true but at the same time, so they're using power automate from Microsoft but also using in this case UI path. So they've kind of confirmed that, yeah, it's not the same. We use that for some of our productivity we're an Azure customer, it's easy for us but they're still leaning heavily and investing heavily into UI path and I think the same can be said for automation anywhere but power automate shows up as a big time leader in the magic garden of magic quadrant so it can't be ignored but clearly the two leaders in RPA have a sizable product advantage relative to the legacy software players. Now if you look at the comment on PEGA systems they cold off a bit as measured by their stock price their revenue grew 13% last quarter on a year on a year basis but perhaps we overestimated the tailwind effect and the company's momentum so we'll take a B on this prediction correct call on the automation trend and the big software vendors piling in IBM, et cetera but the chance we took on automation anywhere again was a miss. So we'll ding ourselves on that. And our last prediction for 2021 was 5G rollouts push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. Now much of this prediction you can see in the underlying bullets here really related to the observation that ARM was dominating at the edge it would find its way into the mainstream enterprise workloads and we've been asking a lot of the mainstream companies, the OEMs what do you see with ARM in the enterprise is that we don't see it yet but very clearly this came into focus in 2021 is AWS announced Graviton 3 now and new inference and new training silicon these are different types of workloads that are emerging in the enterprise these are all based on ARM Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Oracle and others are now shipping or readying ARM based systems for the enterprise when you look at new storage network and security appliances and other systems they're very offering often including ARM based processors to assist with the offloads and look Intel is definitely under under pressure as we've predicted many times not just in our predictions posts even Pat Gelsinger has admitted this is a turnaround it's going to take at least five years that's kind of new and recent data that he's made public. So we're going to take an A minus on this one we're going to take off some points of the fact that five G rollouts and edge are evolving and this is a longer term trend but the underlying points that we made on this slide are still pretty solid. Now, if we use the following scale where A plus is 100 out of 100 A minus is a 90 a B is an 85 a B minus is an 80 and a C is a 75 out of 100 and we exclude that incomplete prediction on data architectures we average out to an 87.8 so that's a solid B plus so the professor in us said hey, yellow sticky good effort as most of the predictions could be quantified and or, you know, we tried to objectively score them there were some layups in there so yeah, maybe we'll try to take more risks you know, or not, we'll see we like winning and so, you know, you always have to couch some of these things with some obvious ones but really try to give some detail underneath that's maybe non-obvious and we'll try to keep it down in the legs we did this year to one or two multi-year predictions so what's next? Well, Eric Bradley and I we're working on our 2022 predictions we're going to release those in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for that you know, what do you think? How did we do? You know, we're grading ourselves here love to know you know, if we're off base, on base we're too hard on ourselves, too easy give us your feedback don't forget these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts check out ETR's website at ETR.plus remember we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can always get in touch with email david.volante at siliconangle.com you can DM me at dvolante or comment on our LinkedIn posts this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR have a great week everybody stay safe, be well and see you next time