 Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the pod cubepod 23. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. It's Friday we're recording this in California and in Boston, Massachusetts area. Dave, good to see you. Big week, you know, in the news. Elon's still in the news, X'd out going after, you know, anti-hate speech organization where baseless claims still going on the saga of Twitter. A lot of debate there, but the big story this week obviously is the continuing of the in studio events in our office. So excellent work there, but earnings. AWS still doing well. Amazon had their earnings. This is Andy Jassy second year at the helm. And so you're seeing his, his fingerprints are starting to get on things. He's cutting like the, to the bone in some areas, killing projects. The numbers came out great. I want to get your opinion. I know you've been all over it and got the exact number right by the way. Congratulations. Apple earnings are out there down on revenue. New iPhone 15 expected to come out. Just a lot of great stuff, you know, I mean, with, with, with this so-called tailwind in AI and these other headwinds, apparently the Amazon announcement talked about the fact that the cost optimization or right sizing is slowing down while new workloads are, are coming online. I don't know that he's there talking about new workloads being generative AI since they mentioned it in every other sentence in the, in the announcement, but great results by AWS AMD, strong progress on their AI chips, Nvidia doing well, cyber roundup, Microsoft still licking their wounds from, from some bad results there. But, you know, overall the cloud player is doing well. And I think it just overall, just great kind of signaling, our risk to networks jumped huge, Jay Shree and the team, they're doing great. So, so some signals, Dave, that the soft landing is here. Obviously, with the Amazon earnings, their stocks up and Amazon numbers still 12% good, lowest they've had since reporting. But remember, that's 12% growth on a bigger number every time. So, how you doing? You've been in the weeds on this. Oh my God. Well, so first of all, I feel like I, I was in Palo Alto for a month and we had three, three super studio events in a row. So it was great to be out there. But I want to, I think on a cube pod, I don't know, a few months ago, we were talking about how everybody was calling for Jassy's head, right? Get rid of Andy. I see he doesn't know what he's doing. He's fumbling at him. Is it like, are you kidding me? This is the guy who built AWS, he conceived it, did the working back in the backwards document, trusted advisor to, to Bezos. And obviously knows what he's doing. So, yes, a lot of it was cost cutting, but that's the thing about these big companies. They can dial down the costs and it drops right to the bottom line. The second thing is, these CEOs are not dumb, and they got good data. And so, okay, they were aggressive during the pandemic, hiring like crazy. But now they're like, Hey, you know what, let's, let's set expectations that we know we can meet. Okay. And which, I thought they were going to beat AWS by even more. I, they came in right at my number, which was two percentage points higher than what Wall Street was expecting for AWS. I thought they could have come in even higher. I think they're sandbagging for next quarter even maybe tucking a little away, John, like, you know, like we all used to do when we were managing budgets at big companies. Well, the earnings, I mean, they didn't actually give any guidance and kind of pissed off Wall Street apparently on the, on the earnings call. But I think there's definitely some sandbagging going on to use your term. But you know, sandbagging basically means they want to set expectations. Because remember, the whole market will just flip upside down if they see any flinch of a negative trend. I think Amazon has a bellwether and Andy Jassy at the helm. He's no stranger to that. I think he's probably more a little conservative than Bezos. Bezos is a freewheeler. He'd be like, okay, invest in the phone. This is a zillion projects. So Amazon has a history of experimentation. We know that. That's their culture. That's why they're so successful. You know what? So they're also successful at picking up on a wave that they missed and or a trend that their customers want and moving fast to get a product out there. So, you know, I've always said, you know, and Jassy is going to tighten the ship, probably kill a bunch of projects that have no, no, no hope at all. Tighten up R&D. But really, it's all going to come down to, you know, how fast can customers get what they want. And they're much bigger now on AWS specifically around having Enterprise. We talked about that last week. So, you know, Amazon always plays the long game. And even though they had a little turnover in the staff, they still got, you know, younger executives coming up through the ranks that might not have been there during the growth years. So I think, you know, the combination of cost optimization and the AI wave. Amazon, I think, got lucky with the AI way. I know people could criticize, we've been critical of them, not moving fast enough on that hype, but this actually could be a godsend for them because the AI will lift up this next generation of growth. So if Jassy's right that the right sizing and cost optimization is slowing down, which I think he's a little bit aggressive on that, I still think there's still more cost optimization going on. But the key thing, as we pointed out last week when we were in New York is what the Amazon show was, that investment that they're saving is being reinvested in AI. And that is a huge factor that people aren't paying attention to in the news is that that savings isn't just going in their pockets. They're reinvesting it. And the winners are doing that. The losers are just trying to stay alive. So, you know, you have the kind of walking dead companies and the ones who might not make it or make it, they're on the bubble. And then you have the ones that are already winning. They just reinvesting. So those three categories are out there. You're seeing acquisitions, hop in the famous event company that was worth billions of dollars is basically dead now. Run the world in Horowitz company. Wait, wait, don't, don't, don't leave Amazon yet. I want to, I want to make a comment. If I can, the most interesting thing about the Amazon earnings call was how much time Jassy spent up front. You know, Jeff used to never even go on the calls. He was just like being his yacht or whatever, whatever he was doing. You know, I'm just not kidding. But so, but Jassy, see, I think, so first of all, you know, but people forget that Amazon has always been the enterprise leader in AI with SageMaker and Trania and Inferentia. I mean, they were way ahead of the game. They just got out marketed by Microsoft. I think Jassy was pissed because you saw the narrative. I remember reading, I think it was a Reuters article was like, you know, because Amazon, when they announced Bedrock and, you know, all the other, you know, capabilities, the headline was like, oh, Amazon's AI announcements leave people wanting more. It's like, okay, Amazon's been a leader there and people misunderstood. Amazon's behind in AI. They're behind in the marketing. So I think Jassy was pissed and he said, I'm going to spend some time here. He not only talked about Amazon retail, spent a lot of time layering, you know, laying out the three layers of generative AI that they have from the foundation and all the way up to the apps and their code whisperer, blah, blah, blah. And so he really was emphasized that. And I think as far as the optimization goes, here's what I think, here's what I'm thinking. And I think people forget a lot of the optimization was getting people to sign up for multi-year deals and commit to a certain number of credits. And when you have those credits, you can dial them down, you can spend money, you can kick the can down the road. But ultimately, over that term, you have to spend those credits. And so that area under the curve is going to benefit Amazon in terms of revenue that they have committed. And so I think what I think is going to happen is I think we've bottomed the deceleration of cloud growth. I get a flat-ish next quarter, same around 12, 12.5%. I think you could up-tech in Q4 with a generative AI tailwind of as much as two points. So I'm projecting 14% growth in Q4. And I think that's where the optimization, maybe there's a little bit left, but I think it's worth the tail end of it. Well, your point about them being able to turn the knobs on Amazon and they have the data, because they remember they have a lot of customers in their cloud, so they can anonymize it and look at the holistic big picture trend and say, okay, here's what's going on. And then adjust accordingly. To your point about Jassy, we know Andy very well, so we interviewed him many times. He's one of those CEOs. We keep on the direct dial as with other CEOs. And the key to Andy is that he likes to control the narrative. He likes to set the records straight. Even from the beginning when we started covering them, he always had this perspective on the media where if they didn't get the story right, it would really bother him. And so that was because it's a hard story to tell, even in the early days. It's even more complicated now. And remember, he wanted to be a sports announcer. Remember that came out in his interviews. He loves media. He loves sports and other things like that. But the thing about Jassy is that I think he was pissed and I would be pissed too, because literally they were asleep at the switch on the PR side, missed the whole Genevieve and let Microsoft change the narrative on them, which put them in a defensive posture, which is now clearly documented. People are talking about, but that's all people are talking about. To your point, they have been doing machine learning for a very, very long time. Some companies have not been and are faking it till they make it. Amazon is going to be doing that. So with Jassy on the earnings call, I think he likes those earnings calls because it's his opportunity to do kind of a keynote and set the record straight. So I'm expecting more Jassy grabbing the microphone and going direct. And I'm going to predict that. You're going to see Jassy get in the weeds a little bit with Adam Sileski because they're, again, they've been partnered in the past, so they know each other well. I think they're going to actually look at the Amazon AI story and product and solutions and nail it. You got Matt Garmin, who runs sales and marketing. Remember, he was the lieutenant who ran EC2. He's not a dummy. He knows his stuff too. So they got advantages up and down the stack, the silicon layer, you mentioned that. And so I think Amazon is perfectly positioned for what the build out production workloads look like in generative AI. Yeah, sure. Tell the whole world, we're going to have AI everywhere. Okay, that's more posturing in my opinion, but I think they will. I mean, that's natural, but I think it's going to come down to who's building and deploying generative AI solutions and what that looks like. And in his script, he talked exactly what we released with Matt Garmin's story of last month. It's the data that matters. Move the AI to your data, not the other way around. And I think they're clearly focused on that value proposition. And that's a bet, Dave. I mean, they're betting the ranch on the fact that the large, large language models aren't a big deal. Okay, they're betting the ranch that those large language models will be a big deal, but moving to data, not the other way around. So putting data into the large language models, that's not their play here. And that's clear. Well, this is where it gets interesting, because the data, as we know, is everywhere. There's a lot of data in the cloud. I think there's way more than Jassy implies. I think it's more like 40 to 50% of the data is in the cloud, maybe not 50, but it's in the above 30% is in the cloud. So a lot of the AI is going to be done in the cloud. But that means there's a lot of data outside of the cloud at the near edge. By near edge, I'm talking about like retail stores, like a Home Depot or something like that. And the far edge, like an autonomous vehicle. And those autonomous vehicles, they need like instantaneous real time, no latency. And then you got, remember, we interviewed Matthew Prince at SuperCloud 3. I thought what he was saying was really interesting. Hey, look, you're not going to train your models inside a cloud flare. And Cloud Flare is not going to run your Tesla. But he goes, there's that sort of lowish latency. You don't want it in the cloud, but you want it at the edge of the network. You didn't use the term edge. He doesn't use that term. He prefers the term super cloud. But you get my point. That's where a company like Cloud Flare, there's going to be AI done in the network. And when you look at the survey data from ETR, it's like, companies are saying, we're going to do public. We're going to do private. We're going to do edge that we're going to do a mix. It's kind of all of the above. Yeah. Well, you got the numbers right on AWS. And I think that's a great accomplishment to your research. I think you're the only one that got this right. And looking forward to seeing if you get the 14% gross rate. And I think, I think that if I'm chassis, I'm saying I'll sandbag it too. Cause he wants to control the market. And again, Amazon's got to get back out in front. If you look at the numbers, okay, it depends whose numbers you look at, you know, they're like a close to a $90 billion runway, give or take a few billion here, Microsoft's in the sixties, right? So, and then Google's up there. So the big three are not hurting right now. Google's making a charge. So that's a very interesting piece there. So it's not like, it's not like the cloud growth rates are plummeting, although they are falling compared to their other norms of 80% on the high end. When you look at azures and Amazon as 40, going back to 2019, but the numbers are getting bigger, Dave. So you know, the classic growth there. Now the capex numbers being reported is Amazon's down 30% this quarter. That's not, whether it's, it's cloud capex or retail cutbacks, but Amazon is reporting by the capex index, according to Charles Fitzgerald, our friend Fitsie, Amazon's to minus 30% Google plus 1% Microsoft up 23%. So Amazon spent 11.8 billion, Google 6.9, Microsoft 10.7. So Microsoft spending as much as AWS now are Amazon on their capex. But again, you go back, Amazon was pounding the capex over the last several years when interest rates were low, Amazon was, they were going crazy. So I think that the cost of capital is free money. And that's, I think those, I think those, those investments are going to pay dividends. And there's an article in my dead tree here, the Wall Street Journal this week, today actually data centers built for AI takeoff. And the point, I mean touches upon what I was just saying, where it's not only going to be the public cloud buildouts, but the equinex data centers and digital realty and other sort of regional data centers. Remember, they have, they're, they have tons of x86 servers and kind of older storage in there. And they need refresh. And you're going to see a ton of data center spend, and it's going to benefit Nvidia, it's going to benefit AMD, it's going to, it's going to benefit the infrastructure players, the server guys like HPE and Dell, the storage guys, we had vast in studio this week, they're there, they've got some big visions. I know it's, you know, what smaller company, but they're trying to disrupt. And I think it's going to be a tide that lifts all ships that lean into AI. Well, I think, I think the AI way is going to come. I think, I think one of the things that we saw that in this week was a big data week. We saw a year, a bunch of stories that we posted, George Gilbert had an emerging category. What is a data platform, the discussion that we're putting out there, that's a killer post, you know, it's an emerging new category, right? Also have vast data had their big announcement in here in our studio. And then Rob Stretcher wrote, what is a data product? Okay, so what's interesting is that this week, the first time in the history of this market trend is that someone is actually using the term data developer. We've been seeing it on the queue for a long time, that this new rise of a data developer is coming, maybe some coding developer coding in with data. Okay, so this data platform trend that, and you started with your Uber post, your deep dive on their platform is interesting. It's almost like platform engineering meets data. So that's an interesting thing. And then, you know, more data management systems, more, more neon lands, 46 million in funding for serverless, Postgres database, Monte Carlo, Dave was a new tool for monitoring, more and more stuff. And again, with the Amazon stock, everything's up. Interesting market Dave, right? Because you have, you know, three sets of companies, the walking dead, the ones on the bubble, and the ones that are winning with a tailwind, they're reinvesting in AI. So it's interesting to see you're seeing a lot of companies fall under as the pandemics kill in the virtual events platforms, hop in the one storied company. I think the founder did take a bunch of cash off the table. So he's pretty much rich, hop in, dying or dead around the world in ancient Horowitz is folded and sold to another company. Those pull forward COVID markets, as we pointed out, are not sustainable. So, you know, what's coming out of COVID is more digital, but less of the pure remote work kind of thing. So, you know, I think this whole remote work is going to go back to normal. I think you're going to see hybrid for sure. But it's not going to be like everyone thought it would be. It's starting to see some, some, some dead companies falling out of the sky as we predicted. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, you're either going to make it or not. The bubble companies are the ones to watch. Do they actually have the room to pivot? Because there's really no excuse. You got the cloud. You got data. You can pivot into this market. If you, if you can't, then that's going to be structural issues. So it's an interesting, interesting time, Dave. So, you know, I want to pick on some of you said, you know, data is code. So cloud is code. Amazon turned the data center into an API and programmable infrastructure became the norm. And now code is data. And what do you mean by, what do we mean by that? So, you're increasingly coding by talking to systems, you know, human language is generating like a ton of code now. And that code, which is data, is now coming into data, coming into organizations on what's happening in the supply chain, what's happening. This is where the Uber example comes in, people, places and things, the digital representation of your business, that data comes in and informs the state of your business, it predicts the future state of your business. And it's increasingly taking actions on your business, you know, with human involvement sometimes quite often, but also increasingly without human involvement. So that's what, and you've been talking about this for years. I mean, I first heard you talk about this, you know, last decade, early last decade, actually, and it's coming true. Now, there's another article in the journal yesterday, after pandemic, work has less appeal. It's about, you know, young people basically saying, you know, I kind of don't want to go back to the office. And you got, you know, executives who work like dogs. And the employees are saying, yeah, I don't kind of don't want to work that hard. You know, maybe, maybe money is not that important. But I think it's mixed. I think you have a portion of the young culture that cries. And I think, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, represents that culture. And then I think you got other people who want more of a work life balance. But I think, I think there's still a big section of the United States innovators that are working hard. They want to be collaborative. They're going to be in the office. And, you know, I think, yes, the work is hybrid. It would be even support. Yeah, but Dave, Dave, the thing is, the thing is, I mean, you know, think about like, if you're in your 20s, some companies, I mean, we're a little different. We're a medium. We are a lot of face to face. We do a lot of interaction with each other in our office and our teams. Some companies, if people are just working remote, they're on Zooms all day, literally back to back to back Zooms and, and, and WebEx is, I mean, that's got to be bad for your brain. Who can handle that? I mean, that's just like, it's hard. I mean, I just find that depressing. I don't know. I don't know. It's going to sustain. Maybe I'm old school and the young guns can do it that way. But like, you know, I was talking with my daughter last night. She's up in the city. She works for UCSF and, you know, she works remotely or is flexible. They're cool with it. So it's like, oh, no big deal. But they're on Zooms all the time. Calendar, like back, back, you know, meeting after meeting after meeting, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, you know, video conferencing. It's got to get old. I mean, don't, people want to see each other and have human interaction. I think that's going to be a big factor. It's a wild card in my opinion. I mean, think about it. If you're on Zooms, Zoom all day and you're at your home, okay, great. You can take some time off. You can walk the dog, take out the trip, whatever, whatever you're going to do, but you just can't replace the dynamic of walking, knocking on somebody's door or walking over to somebody's desk and saying, hey, you got a second? I want to show you something. Or just hanging out and meeting people. It's like socializing. Shooting the shit, as we say. Come on, what's going on? How's things going? You know, just better face-to-face and just little things like that. I think people are going to go to the office for that, not for the meetings. Yeah, I'll do some Zooms and be productive. I get the productivity, but there's got to be some sort of socialization interaction. You know, talking about music, talking about what you did on the weekend, what you're going to do after work, meet people and develop relationships. I think that's going to be huge for this next generation. And I'm not sure productivity. I mean, it certainly was up during the pandemic, but I'm not sure it's been sustained. I think a lot of people have side gigs, we know that. So they're working on their side gigs during the day. During the pandemic, I think a lot of people work nights and weekends, and I think that's sort of dialing down a little bit. But I think it's bifurcated. I think it depends on the individual. I see a lot of young people that really, they want to grind, they want to be in the mix. They got a lot of aspirations and money is important to them. And I see a lot of young people who say, you know what, I want to balance in life. I don't want to grind. I don't really care that much about money. Yeah. And Brandon, our producer is texting me. He's like, happy hour, culture's up in the air too. I think, I mean, I think it's like, you know, it's like, we got to get back to the pre-pandemic where people were actually meeting people. Otherwise, people are going to go insane. I mean, if you're out there right now and you're working for a company, the companies have to be mindful of the video conference hell that if you're going to go back to back, you got to get people to break. So, you know, I think that's going to be the future of work conversation. It's not going to be about productivity. It's going to be about mental health and quality of life. Not just, you know, having the freedom to do stuff, but more of like, you know, what are people getting out of it? And I think there can be a backlash. You know, I'm all for virtual companies and all, and I think that's great, but I think there's an element for that. I think that might be the big thing. But anyway, I think two, I think the last thing to say that for the ranch section, people want flexible time. You know, they do, and I think happy employees just stay longer. So, and less turnover is better for companies in general, right? So, Dave, some big news are also happening. Enterprise moves. New Relic got bought out by Francisco Partners for 6.5 billion, private equity company. Sumo Logic was already acquired by them. So, they're bringing those two assets together, right? Sumo Logic and New Relic is sort of adjacencies. Yeah, and yeah, and yeah, well, everyone's crowded market. Everyone's like, price is going to go up. Well, so yeah, exactly. So, New Relic members, New Relic built a purpose-built database to do application performance management, aka, now they call it observability. The observability market gets really, really crowded. You get new guys coming in like Datadog and Elastic, you know, Splunk's doing the big pivot. And so, you know, it's hard for a company like New Relic, which was once, you know, the bell of the ball. And then all of a sudden, you got all these other, you know, companies coming in, they had, you know, sort of an expensive infrastructure living off the install base. And you're right, now they bring it in, they make some cuts, they try to find some synergies, prices go up a little bit, and they just, you know, drive cash flow. Yeah, and some other moves in the enterprise, obviously, Rowan Prasad, leading their AI team at Amazon, Del C, co-CEO, co-CEO Chuck Witton, leaving the company. That's an interesting move. Cube alumni, he's been with Michael Delfer almost two decades. He was at Bain, came in. Interesting take on that move. I didn't see that coming. Maybe it was a redundant position or it didn't work out. I don't know what the thing is. I thought he was a very strong executive. And Cloudera is a new CEO, you know, on, I guess, you know, on that one. Cloudera has kind of been invisible lately, Dave, you know, they're not really making any noise. I haven't really heard much going on, but since Databricks has been so successful, it's not almost like Cloudera's in the shadows. So, Cloudera, you know, we know what happened with Cloudera, right? They had no Cloudera, the only cloud they had was in the name. And then what happened was they had to spend so much money, you know, supporting open source projects, and then things would change so quickly. And then Spark came and basically took over a dupe. And then you had Hortonworks and Cloudera merged. They had two separate, you know, roadmaps. They killed both individual roadmaps and then created a new road map. And that just caused more customer confusion, you know, but they went private equity. And, you know, so they got, they got bought, I mean, they got it all started to the credit. And some of the best minds, you know, started that company. Guys like Jeff Hammabarker, Amar Awadala, we've had them in the cube many times. I mean, they were the original, you know, early thinkers, thought leaders in so-called big data. And really, and made a huge contribution to the industry. It's just unfortunate that it couldn't be, you know, sustained. It's interesting, big data. They were the pioneers. And we were talking to Armagan, who's the new CEO of Apppen now. We just on a call with them and his team, which are powering a lot of LLMs. We talked about the old bunch of EMC guys getting together. But remember, Jeremy Burton had the positioning of cloud meets big data. And it was kind of the street signs, you know, and Steve Jobs had, you know, social science, computer science. No, that's our tech line, liberal arts and technology. We were computer science and social science and the street signs. That was ahead of his time. That was in 2011, Dave. Jeremy Burton had big data meets cloud. It's here now. Over 12 years later, big data meets cloud is here. And if you look at the generative AI and what we're doing with super cloud, the narrative around super cloud, by the way, super cloud four is coming up in October, market calendars. Last week of October, doing super cloud four is all about AI, that generative AI. The generative AI movement is all about because of cloud. And the generative AI momentum around open source is all about cloud. Cloud has fueled a massive surge in software development, open source, SaaS, and now super cloud, building a platform on top of clouds, and then cross connecting the clouds. So that is a huge power dynamic right now. And I think if you look at the generative AI technology wave, I predict it's going to be a few more months to people just building out. There'll be a breakout period quickly, where you're going to have to see new things emerge, new companies, not just of the fancy and hyped up LLMs from the open AI's of the world. But I think you're going to see some really interesting new things that no one's seen before that pop out, new use cases, because the value at scale has never been realized or seen before of data. So like the data business of big data is finally here. It's Databricks and Snowflake and MongoDB. And a bunch of other companies that are filling in big white spaces that are going to take territory, while the clouds will reap all the benefits. So Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud will reap the rewards. I mean, this is a party of epic proportions from a business perspective. Think about the growth. I mean, I think this is going to be a surge of growth that'll hit all parts of the ecosystem, not just one category. That's why I say there's the walking dead who will never make it. They're not compatible with the new model. The people on the bubble will either pivot to the new next-gen cloud model with Genevieve AI or the ones who are already in position to just get into that slipstream and ride that wave and capture that major growth wind coming up. It's going to be interesting. And the signs are all coming in there. We reported on Silicon Angle Arm could go public in September at a $60 billion valuation. Obviously, processors, you see Amazon's growth in processors and Graviton chips. Andy Chasi said they have 50,000 people who've moved workloads to Graviton just during their resizing. So, okay, Apple is still doing extremely well. Just the new surge is here. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Actually, Apple was way down today because they're just like the third quarter in a row, they didn't grow. Except China, I think it was almost 8% year over year to $15 billion in China. iPhones up double digits. But I think it's in China. But I think what people seem to be missing is that the install base is such that services grew nicely. And so, I mean, Apple's not my wheelhouse, but I mean, when you have that much of an install base and you have that many services that people can just tap, you know, with your Apple pay, that is to me a buying opportunity. That's why their whole announcement with the whole glasses and the metaverse thing was such a bummer because it was as if they had nothing else to do as they had to throw something over the transom and waiting for the lull between iPhone launches and then ultimately how do they milk the services. So like AWS, Amazon, I mean, like AWS and Amazon, Apple's got a lot of knobs to turn to, Dave. They have huge workflow extensions into their marketplace. So iPhone, new iPhones coming out, so they manage the inventory turns there, but they're making money 10 ways from Sunday on everything else. They have platform, now services are growing. So yeah, I think they're just like bunkering down saying, hey, we're not going to make a lot of cash. Let's get these other areas up and running like services. And the China thing puzzles me. I don't really understand that market, but Reuters is reporting that they're up to 15 billion. So interesting that they're up there, but down overall in the quarter, 1.4% to 81 billion. So 81 billion. So big numbers. It's like crazy. It's unbelievable. Yeah, just a fun time, Dave. I mean, I got to say we did three weeks in a row of studio live events in Palo Alto. I was in New York last week for AWS Summit in New York, met with a lot of customers over there, some practitioners on financial services and other verticals. We talked a lot about the repatriation or the refactoring and investment in AI, but yeah, just a lot of other stuff too. Donald Trump's back on the radar with his politics. He's got indicted and he's running for president. He's got the lead by like 50 something percent of Republican votes. Can you imagine a president elect running for president in jail? It's unbelievable. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's just a bipartisan, I said it on one of the coup pods, and again, you know where I stand on Trump. I'm definitely not a fan. But I wish Joe Biden would just pardon him and end it. I mean, when I say that to... No, he should pardon him and say, don't run for president. I'll pardon you. Yes, exactly. Quit pro quo. I will pardon you if you just like step aside. Of course, Trump wouldn't do it. But it's just like, it's got to stop all this bipartisan. Somebody's got to come out in 2024 that has just some sense of just down the middle. You know what I mean? It's like... Well, you know what would be great if both Biden and Trump didn't run. Well, yeah. And so somebody's got to come out. So that happens. If there's just somebody who is fiscally responsible and socially empathic and has a message around that, I think they'll... The electoral will pay attention to it. It's just that they're so entrenched in each party. It's just so annoying. I'm so sick of it. What's your rank going to be this week? My rant? Yeah. What's your rant going to be this week? I know. Lena Kahn was kind of not really prominent this week. Here's my rant. I'll give you my rant. So I was talking last night to Bob O'Donnell. And he's coming out east this week. So I'll probably see him at a socks game. And he spent his own time, his own money. He did like, I want to say, a thousand user survey on Gen AI. It was... I don't believe it was sponsored. I don't think it was. So it's not sponsored content. He just did it. So it's independent, completely independent. And he put it out there. He put it up on his website and for all to see, no gate, no pay wall, no bullshitty, give me your email, your phone number, your home address, your kid's names, all your PII, none of that. For free. I love that. For free. I love that. And so he's basically giving to me back to the audience. Bob's a very successful guy. He was at IDC. He and I both worked at IDC. We didn't really work that closely together, but he was... What happens is the top analysts, like the really, the best analysts at these firms, they leave the firms and then they come on and they do really well and they make a million bucks a year. I mean, the best analysts can do that. And he was one of them. I don't know how much he makes. I'm just sort of making up that number, but he does very well. He's extremely successful. And so, but what he's doing still, despite his success, he's giving back to the audience. He's giving more than he's taking. And I love that. And so I really applaud him. I've just seen so many times that you've got to put in your data just to read something. And then when you read that something, you're like, oh, I just gave up my data for that. It was crap. It wasn't real research. It was just a bunch of bromide, some bullshitty analyst opinion, or maybe it was some pay-to-play nonsense. And so that's why I always resisted doing anything with breaking analysis that's not open and free. I don't want any sponsorships or any of that nonsense. So good for Bob O'Donnell at TechNalysis. Go to TechNalysis.com or I think that's his website. And it's just free. It's a Gen AI, a thousand users, and he summarized that it's all out there for everybody to see. Awesome job. Well, you know me about my rant on this is that I've said it before in the pod. The events teams are trying to gouge the cash out of the users rather than the companies. The analyst market, we're seeing analysts out there basically faking influence by saying that they are doing research. And they are research analysts, but that doesn't do any research. So to me, if you got work, put it out there for the world to see. If you don't, then you're just talking. So people talk. And the problem I had with some of these other analysts is that what they do is they take research like Bob's and they turn it into like their original content. So it's not their original content. So there is not yet an attribution like Creative Commons in the analyst community. I think it's going to come. I think it's going to be one of these things because you have to share, right? We're in a market where there's two analysts. There's open share, publicly share original content and ones that are going to do deep research, hold it back and make money for the access. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a model. So there's either one or the other. But for the folks that did between running around saying, I'm an analyst, they don't do any research, that's probably right. You're right. I mean, look at Gartner and IDC. They put a lot of money and time and they built it up over years and years and years and it's expensive and they charge for it. I get that. But I want to shout out to somebody else. Dion Hinchcliffe, a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, put out a framework for understanding, to helping customers understand how to make decisions around where to put specific workloads, cloud or on-prem, what the characteristics are, some different industry considerations. Again, free research. Put it out on Twitter, click this link. There it is. I actually used his data in his report in one of my breaking analysis. It was, I thought, so well done. And so again, Constellation does some good work, Holger, Mueller, Andy Terai, obviously Ray Wong is a sharp analyst. So I just, I appreciate birds of a feather like us that put that free content out there and serve the audience first and make money at the back end. Good job. I mean, I think at the end of the day, all media, whether it's analysts, influence, journalism, it's a service business, right? So you serve audiences and you serve the marketers. That's how media works. However, in the analyst business, if you got to service the customer, so you can't service the customer if you're running around saying great things about companies but doing no research. So to me, I think that's going to be a 2024 issue for the analyst relations departments to figure out like, okay, Gartner IDC and the big guys go in there, but then you start thinking about there's are real influences out there that have expertise and they need to be identified and rewarded for that. So I think that's going to be a big thing we're going to see, Dave, the reputation quality, right? Not just how many briefings you do or how many videos you do or it just doesn't have, that's the impact and the reputation over time, as we know, 13 years doing the Q and silicon angle, we've never charged content and we want to make it free. So I like the Bob O'Donnell model and I think that's a long game approach rather than a short fake it till you make it approach. And the super cloud is a great example, another great example that the industry leaders coming together on the verge of on the week before Black Hat, we have so much content. Super Cloud 4 was security conference. We had the CEOs of the best companies on talking about security. Well, guess what? Next week, Black Hat's there and that content's out there. I was talking to someone last week and then earlier this week to say, hey, I've been really watching all the videos on Super Cloud 4 to prep for Black Hat in Vegas. Again, it's all free. I think open source is coming to content in a big way in the next 24 months or so, you're going to start to see some change over and it's going to impact how companies engage with their customers. So yeah, I'm excited by that. That's my rant. My rant is the confusion between what's real and what's not. And I think ultimately there needs to be some new metrics around that. I think too, doing cube interviews, we invite all the analysts. We've had analysts from every firm on Gartner, IDC, Forrester, ESG, Naima, an analyst firm and almost all of them have been on and if they haven't been on it's just because it's just been bad luck. I mean, we don't really try to block anybody. Zia's Caravala is another one. My point is you can tell who's got the analyst chops when you have them on. But I'll tell you, a lot of these guys, I love having IDC and Gartner analysts on because they're good. So for us, it's like your point about we've always believed in open source. That's what we started, Wikibon was open source research. And so way back when the day, I remember my wife Deb asked me, how are you going to make money? I said, I don't know. We'll figure it out. The cube is a research machine. Your breaking analysis is amazing. But again, research is going to have a production system that's going to involve crowd, crowd intelligence, wisdom of the crowd will be a factor. But again, back to my thing is that if you're a research analyst, the question is, are you doing any research? And the body of work is important, not just flying around, attending, collecting retainers that a lot of people do. They don't do any, you got to do the research, you got to do the service. The service is develop research for the audience and help companies with their objectives. So what about disclosures? What about disclosures, John? Because, you know, and this, this is one of the things that Rob Holt has brought to Silicon Angles, when we do a cube gig, we have to just anything we write, we, we, I guess we don't have to, but we do, we disclose that this company is paying us to be here. Now, you know, we don't, you know, pee where we eat. So when the CEO of the company comes on, you know, we'll ask some tough questions. We don't necessarily, we're not like attack dogs with the tone. But when we're doing the analyst round table, even last week at Vast, all the Vast guys sitting in the studio, we had you, me, Sanjeev, and Rob Streche. And we were like, yeah, this is the good, the bad, the unknown, the ugly. And, you know, those guys were sitting right there. But again, anything we write, we disclose. I think a lot of times it's not clear, you know, IDC, for instance, disclosures. That's something that we, when I was there, we resolved years and years ago. And so, but sometimes it's fuzzy. It's like, hmm, was this paid for or not? Some people disclose it. Some people don't. You know, the analysts are paid to play business, you know, for the most part. People got to eat. I get that. But, you know, I think, you know, disclosure is critical. Well, I mean, look, at the end of the day, the research analysts are there to provide a service to audiences and marketers and custom companies, right? So you're really a partner to the industry. It's an industry game. And, you know, the ultimate compliment is when someone says you're an important partner to the industry and that, you know, people appreciate the work and they appreciate the content you create. And that's ultimately the test. You know, that's a direct quote from Andy Jassy about some of the work we've done. So, you know, when you're part of the industry and you're helping people, right? It's good. And also, if you're also gouging customers and not delivering what you say you're going to deliver, you know, that's a problem. And consistently, that's, you know, people make mistakes here and there. But for the most part, if you're out there and you're just not delivering, okay, on the promise and you don't have the value, you're just stealing from the customer. Or if you're double charging or triple charging them, I've seen that instance all the time. So, there's some bad behavior going on. It's got to be rectified. So that's my rant. And back to our programming. Real time. So we got big events coming up. I want to get your thoughts on this because, you know, the big one that I'm watching closely is VMware Explorer. This could be the last event for VMware as an independent company. I'm even thinking that Broadcom could make moves at Invegas, certainly before Barcelona, VMware Barcelona, of which Haktan and the Broadcom executive said they would have the accident closed before their fiscal year, which I think ends at the end of October. So, and I was hoping that it would close before VMware Explorer later on this month, but it's getting getting close, isn't it? That's a big event, Dave. VMware really kind of interesting position there on the eve of the being swallowed up by Broadcom, which everyone's speculating on the moves they're going to make. Are they going to gut VMware or will they keep it the way it is? Well, you know, I mean, you saw, I go back to my post the day they announced it and I was pretty, you know, vocal about what I thought they were going to do. I do think that basically it's just reading what Haktan has written and talking to people that, you know, that thinking has evolved, but I still think a lot of that is still true. A lot of what I wrote way back when. I think that I do think that he believes in cross-cloud services, aka multicloud or supercloud. And I think that bodes well for Tanzu. I also haven't heard anything about Project Monterey in forever, right? That was something that even, you know, last year they were talking about and that seems to have died. I hope it's not because that's how VMware, so one of the premise of VMware getting through the sort of FTC knothole is that that creates competition for the public clouds. And by the way, I believe that VMware cloud foundation, even VMware cloud on AWS is complimentary slash, you know, quasi competitive to some of the other public clouds, obviously AWS benefits, but on-prem clouds are a legitimate contender. And so if VMware doesn't have Project Monterey, how are they going to keep pace with Nitron and Graviton and Tranium and Inferentia? We know that Google is doing what Amazon has done. They're copying those moves. We know the same thing is true with Microsoft. How are the on-prem guys going to compete? They've been relying on VMware to provide that platform. So that's something that I'll be looking for at VMware. I've said, well, we predicted that they're going to gut sales and marketing. So I think clearly VMware is at risk on the marketing side. So if you're brought homes very much straight up about this, they're going to make efficiencies work. The question is, do they take the strategic crown jewel of this kind of next chapter with microservices and containers? Because virtual machines are going to move into that new world. The VMs won't go away completely, but you're going to see that trend. So yeah, they will gut sales and marketing. The question is, does the CMO move over or does the Broadcom CMO stay? That's going to be a tell sign. What happens to Raghu? Is he going to be Jenison too? We don't know. All I know is this. The user base for VMware is huge, and that user base has been relevant for decades. For the past 15 years, if you are a VMware user, a VMware member or a customer, you are basically running some cool stuff in IT. You are doing great. There's an extinction factor going on in the VMware ecosystem with respect to the professionals. And we saw that with our SuperCloud 3 event, where we got over 1,000 nominations from the VMware ecosystem practitioners who wanted to do talks for when we put nominate speaker. Over 1,500 VMware ecosystem participants. That means that SuperCloud is resonating with the professional that's looking at their next career. And we talked about it in SuperCloud 3. And that is, is that that IT person will be running IT at scale. And Vittorio Vierringo mentioned this on his LinkedIn post, which is going viral right now, which is the future of IT is going to be to reign in that chaos and complexity that's come from the sprawl of the new next-gen cloud. That's the IT department now. The IT department is like the old IT department, except they're pushing different buttons and turning different knobs. And I think that is what SuperCloud is appealing to people, because it's not just Amazon certification or knowing AWS or knowing Azure or Google. You got to know everything. So in the department of an IT department, the future, the former VMware world, that's the perfect career landing spot, managing the multiple vendors, multiple technologies, multiple data sources, multiple security paradigms, and postures inside a company. This is going to be a revolution in the position. And it's going to be something that's, that's already, we already got badges printed out for SuperCloud. So SuperCloud is a career path now. I think that's going to be very interesting to see because VMs aren't going away, they never will, but they'll combine with microservices, containers, Kubernetes, cloud native applications that are all going to be part of this next fabric of generative AI and new data sources, data platforms. So this is here. I mean, this is, this is now a declaration of a new paradigm. Yeah. And you know, remember the early days of VMware, when something went wrong, like, it was like, you'd have to bring in guys with lab coats to figure out what was going on, right? I mean, and then through all the various APIs and the vases and the storage integration and all that stuff. I mean, VMware did a really good job of working with the industry and the ecosystem to, to, to clean that up and simplify it. You're seeing, you know, similar complexity now with, with cloud and cross-cloud and who better than the VMware practitioners to address that and to sort of identify the gaps, help the technology industry fill those gaps, you know, identify sort of the API integration that's needed, maybe new startups. I mean, there's a real opportunity to your point about career paths or I guess, Vittorio point, original point. That's a great career path for people to go beyond, you know, VMware admin, right? Check out SuperCloud World. It's our website, supercloud.world. We may pick that URL because it sounded like a cool, cool name to have for a virtual event and ultimately an event for the industry, independent event. Check out our great names up there and Security Plus AI was a great episode. That's going to be great videos. If you're going to Black Hat, you listen to this in Vegas, so some good videos from CEOs, leading companies from Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Uname and all the best companies were in there. The other event I'm looking forward to, Dave, is Google Next. Google Next is having an event. They took the Moscone slot from VMware. VMware's moving to Vegas for VMware Explorer, formerly VMworld, but Google's cloud is doing well. There was just announced, I saw, I met Zavery and Bruno Azia who is now at Google Capital. Bruno, there's two mentions in a row week to week. If you're listening, good shout out. But I met Zavery was talking about, they're getting all the Gen AI workloads on Google. Their earnings growth came in at 28%, which is the same as Q1, but their annual recurring revenue is up to the levels where the high watermark about 2.3 billion. And so there's a potential opportunity with Google, with AI. And again, we've always said that Google had a nice developer cloud model going on. And they seem to slip a little bit on that, but AI could be a renaissance for them with this. So I think I'm going to watch that very closely. The Cube will be at Google Next this year. They're back at the physical events. And it's going to be sold out. I think it's going to be packed. And so that's going to be interesting to see. I think Google's clearly in the game. I used to be very critical of Google, like, well, way, they're way back. Not anymore. Well, Google Next, Google Next is always a good show. There's always a lot of innovation. But I think I'm going to tap out, John. I didn't get the invite to the analyst event. Evidently, it's oversold. But, you know, I don't know. I mean, they must have not seen my Uber post. But because I write about Google a lot, but I guess I just out of sight out of mind. I really haven't worked it. But I think I'm going to tap out. I think you might have been invited. I think they probably just thought you were a Cube host. Maybe I missed the email. I don't know. It happens sometimes. I do. Well, you go on vacation anyway that week. Well, I wouldn't say vacation. I am going to probably go to Saratoga for a couple of days. Have you ever taken a vacation? I know, right? No, yes. But I always worked during the vacation. No, but I think that's not a vacation. I think I'm going to tap out and go to Saratoga for a night or two that week. But I'll be watching remotely. Good luck on your races. All right. Well, Dave, let's get our rant. Any other final thoughts for this week? I mean, it's been kind of crazy. I'm kind of burnt out. This was a great run in June and July. I think, well, so SuperCloud was great. We had three events in a row, SuperCloud, and then we had the SuperStudio events with IBM and Vast. I was impressed with the IBM content. I mean, I'm not saying that because they sponsored us. I mean, I think that what was missing was some new announcements, but they actually dusted off a lot of the stuff that they had like Watson X, which I sort of underappreciated. I had a great conversation with Vincent's shoe about what they had and Andy Walls about some of the stuff they're doing, looking for anomalies in data that can help with malware and doing some cool detection. So IBM's finally applying its AI in a practical way. Instead of trying to solve cancer, they're doing things that are practical. So I was kind of happy about that. And then the Vast data was mind-bending. I closed with this. The future of data management is going to be about building data apps that represent the real world, people, places, and things. And you've got companies like Snowflake coming at it from the world of database, the historical ground of Oracle. You've got the data science crew coming in. We're talking about companies like Databricks. And you should have storage companies because that's where all the data is on storage. But really, Dell's not doing it. NetApp's not doing it. HPE is really not doing it. IBM, we talked about a little bit, but Vast data has this giant vision to really be a data platform, which is unique coming at it from a storage angle. So they're all converging on this future of data platforms, which George and Rob Stretchade just wrote about. And by the way, MongoDB, similar approach, and their stock's at over 400 and growing. They got a bump with the Amazon news. I totally agree. I think the data movement, data developers, the rise of the data developer, data applications, super apps, super cloud, super computing, super computing, super cloud, and super apps. It's interesting. We've been hearing people on theCUBE talk about the OSI model, Open Systems Interconnect was the standards model back in the 80s that created the computer industry that it is today. Well-known, very historic moment in time. That's been referenced. Not really. We referenced it once in a while, but it's been referenced multiple times. And so you have this focus now, industry focus around the three layers of the cake. Physical layer, abstraction layer, which is middleware, oversimplifying it, and then the top of the stack, which is applications. In the context of cloud computing going next generation, meaning more performance, more services built in, more ways to build applications. So you have more higher level services, more physical capability and performance with chips and hardware, and now more abstraction layers in this middle layer happening at scale. So it's not like just a simple myth saying, oh, it's middleware. That was an easy thing to say back in the 80s and 90s. No, it's hardware and you get software, middleware, and then the applications. It's complicated. You have an operating system basically happening at the cloud. The cloud is creating a distributed computing paradigm at global scale that looks more like an operating system that can be tailored to anything, to anyone, to any app, if harness properly. So I think we're entering an era where this data wave is pointing out the fact that if you code and architect something properly, or architect and code something properly, you can create great value. And I think the value is the scale. And no one's ever seen that yet because we've never had the level of scale that we have today in the industry. So I think the VCs on all the industry participants and pundits can talk about stuff, but they don't understand what's happening because they've never seen it before. So there's no historical reference other than metaphors and mental models around what happened to figure out what's happening. So I think we are living in an age of scale and data that is going to set up an entrepreneurial surge that's going to be massive. Great opportunities to create. And I'm glad you mentioned that. So we use Mongo because it's developer friendly and it's simple. We use it for the Cube AI. You actually go to the cubeai.com. We use Milvis, which is a vector database, which is a competitor of Pinecone. We have actually real AI. A lot of people say, oh, we got AI, but we have real AI. Go to the cubeai.com and sign up for the private beta and you'll see it. It's still not perfect, but it's very cool. It can ask it a question, it gives you an answer, and it gives you related clips. And if the clips aren't there, we have the capability to auto make clips now, which is an amazing capability, like instantaneous. It's very cool and it's real, not like some of the pretenders that we've seen out there. We're not AI washing, but so yeah, check that out. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Yeah, the Cube AI. We've also got the video first, video plus AI, video data lake going on. A lot of fun. Again, media is data and we're having a good time. Go check out the Cube AI. Go to siliconangle.com. That's where all the content is. That's where we put all of our videos. That's where we stream our content. The cube.net is our catalog. Go check it out there. That's where the Cube alumni database is. Check that out. Of course, if you like this podcast, let us know. Share it with a friend. We're on episode 23 and getting in the 20s now. And we're getting some good network effect days, some word of mouth getting around. So if you're listening, drop us a note. I'm happy to hear from you. And if you have any ideas on what we should riff on, let us know. Starting to grow, John. I mean, you look at breaking analysis now is over 15,000, 16,000 a week. And I went back and I looked at the early days of breaking analysis. The first, I don't know, 70 episodes were kind of similar as to where we are now. We're getting some downloads are growing. And so please check it out. It's thecubeai.com. Check that out. It's a weird kind of URL for, but I want you to, we want your feedback. So let us know what you think. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.