 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE pod episode 47. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, where we extract the signals every week we break down what's happening in the enterprise and tech scene. Here I'm in Palo Alto, California. There's in Massachusetts. Dave, great to see you. Hey John. Hey John. Not on news. Getting it done Thursday this week. A lot of plans on Friday, a lot of meetings. You know, real big news going on. We saw Meta added two board members. One of them Haktan from Broadtown. Tons of commentary on that, as well as a lot of AI news. You got open AI, develop a tool to create realistic AI videos. Also, Sam Altman started a little VC fund on his own. A lot of stuff going on around open AI. Just so much stuff to go. He's just out of control. It's all good. But on a Silicon angle, media note as co-founders, I got to tell you I'm pretty proud of this Dave. We just announced the continued growth of our rebranded research team led by you with Wikibon, which we rebranded to theCUBE research. Psyche to announce the appointment of David Lipkin as our principal analyst. A testament to our relentless pursuit of excellence and growth. High integrity individual. Really kind of cements his reputation of being such a great commentator and analyst and consultant at Deloitte. He's seen many ways of innovation. And again, just from a personal standpoint with all the noise out of this analyst relations market these days, where people are questioning integrity, reputation, it just really puts an exclamation point on our trajectory and growth around the trust that we built in the tech community with theCUBE and Silicon angle and Wikibon, now CUBE research. And we continue to redefine and innovate ARPR and media. So big news and there's more coming. I wish I could get more news, but there's more coming. Really excited. There is more coming. Really best is yet to come. Really excited about that, John. I was talking to David the other day and I got to know him a little bit with the whole super cloud mean. He had a term called meta cloud which aligned very well with the super cloud in the abstraction layer. So we were doing a little bit collaboration there. I got to know him. He came on at RSA last year. He knows security. And we were talking the other day and I was like, so what would you say is kind of your top areas of expertise? And I love it because like us, he's been around. He knows a lot of different technologies. Cloud, AI, observability, security. Basically he said anything enterprise tech. He's a five five times CTO, coming out of Deloitte. And so deep and wide expertise and I'm really excited to be working with him. Yeah. I mean, I got a lot of commentary on LinkedIn. Well, perfect fit. Happy. And then Dave is certainly happy to be on the focus. He's, he really admires the work we've done. Just from CMOs that worked over the years. Best team ever. Can't wait to see what you guys do together. Just the consistent commentary of just a good fit. And, you know, the era we're living in is going to be moving to influence is going to come from reputation, not attention and gimmick. So you're going to see that. And again, our audience is up on Silicon Angle. The traffic's growing. So I want to take this moment to thank everyone who's been on this journey with us. If you're listening and are new to Silicon Angle in theCUBE, check out siliconangle.com, thecube.net and thecuberesearch.com. We've been on this for 13 years. Thank you all for being part of that. So we really appreciate it. We love what we do. We love commentating. And also talking about what's the most important stories and sharing our insights. So we'll get it to a date. So the big thing right now to me is you've got Mobile World Congress coming up. We're going to have theCUBE set there. You've got KubeCon happening in Paris coming up. That's another big event. You've got RSA around the corner. So the first half is lining up and you start to see the trajectory. And it's very clear to me that the AI from last year's hype is moving into a discussion of how this is going to impact architecture. Again, this is not new to us. We've been talking about this, but you're starting to see real substantive conversations around where AI is going to fit in. And with all the hubbub and all the hand waving from open AI, which by the way, they're doing really good. They got traction. There's now a shift to the infrastructure side where there's a lot of buildout going on. You're starting to see now tell signs coming into the market where the real work being done is going to be on the infrastructure side. So this is actually right in line with what I think is going to be the big aha moment for the industry. And that is once the infrastructure is enabling this disruption, the app tsunami is coming. You're going to see general purpose apps out there. You're going to see a lot of different things. And so I found that very rewarding because I was nervous. I'm like, where are the workloads? We were squinting through reinvent saying at AWS what's going to happen and it's clear. Now that being said, the enterprise is a different animal than say the consumer, but let's just get into it. So I copied you on this tweet with Naveen Rao who's now at Databricks, CUBE alumni multiple times, multiple ventures. He says the enterprise genitive AI wars are going to be fought on primarily two fronts. The enterprise gen AI wars, two fronts. Number one, office productivity, which is like Google docs, office email, coding in there, co-pilot coding, all that stuff productivity. And two, data platforms, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, et cetera. This will include opinionated platforms like Salesforce. There will be vertical solutions, but that will be a bunch of splintered markets. Interesting commentary day. Very interesting. This is in line with what we've been researching on the sixth data platform is what we've been saying on the app tsunami coming. Again, the interplay with Naveen's insight is this is the two dimensions. Productivity and infrastructure with data. He didn't even mention anything like any scale or companies that are building infrastructure or the cloud players. He said data platforms. No cloud, no Dell, no HPE, no NVIDIA, no chips, data. Your reaction to that is I found that tweet extremely perfect for me this morning. So yeah, perfect, perfect red meat. So I agree with them on the office productivity side. That's right, personal productivity. That's the amazing thing about this AI boom. It's not just one or the other. It's both cloud was really IT productivity and innovation, new apps and PCs were all about personal productivity. This is both. What I take away from his comments really on the latter on the data platforms is what he's essentially saying in my view is that we're moving from a world that is application-centric to a world that is data-centric. And what I mean by that is for years we've really been, applications have been about automating processes. And now, you said it years ago, data is the new development kit. It's really now about building digital representations of your business in real time. So that's gonna take a new type of data platform. The other piece of that is the other subtext here is that data and metadata today are locked inside of applications. And what he's saying is that's splintered. And if we continue to go down that path it's just not gonna deliver the results that we need. What we have to have is a data platforms that span, that transcend all those different applications and provide a unified data layer that all applications can get access to that are both accessible and coherent. Now, here's the problem with what he's not saying is that means all data, including transaction data. And when you think about Snowflake and Databricks and other OLAP and analytic engines they're really all about analytics. They take transactional data from the system of record the transactional system of record then they move it into the analytic system. Snowflake says, bring it into Snowflake. Databricks basically says, hey, we're all open but essentially where's the transaction data here? And that is the really hard part. Doing that in real time and governing it is this holy grail. Now what Databricks announced last year in June was they basically took their biggest weakness which was their database and they turned it into a strength by saying, hey, we'll work with all data. And it was actually a genius leapfrog move. And now you're seeing, they made an AI acquisition Snowflake made an AI acquisition and now everybody's sort of scrambling to be that next data platform. And then we've talked about the sixth data platform which we think is bubbling up with a lot of different startups extensions of guys like Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, Google and Microsoft, the whole gen AI piece. So we think there's this new emergent capability that not only separates compute from storage but separates compute from data meaning all compute can get access to all data across not one vendors compute and data and storage. Sorry, I said separating compute from data. I meant separating compute from storage was the fifth data platform separated compute from data all compute gets access to all data is the vision that we have for the next generation long-winded but hopefully that made sense. Yeah, it did make sense. I mean, this is what we're chronicling on the cube is the data super cloud, what we call super cloud layer is emerging. And again, the stack is evolving back to kind of almost it's root state got infrastructure, middleware and applications that kind of generic three layers stack AWS kind of presented their AI stack essentially in that same format. And if you look at the data part of it all the innovation, the chips, okay? Look at the innovation, the chips, NVIDIA, CPUs, TPUs, all are enabling data. So the data layer will become the most important thing to work on from an architecture standpoint. It's the one that's most impacted by AI. It's also the most important that feeds AI. So data and AI are like go, go hand in hand. If you get it right, it's a great form. And if you get it wrong, you can blow up in your face. It really is. You don't wanna mix those, you know, those ingredients together because it could be a tinder box if done wrong. So, but if you get it right, it's explosive in a good way. So that's really cool. That also ties to the fact that if you look at the news I mentioned at the top which is Meta announced that Hop Tan was one of the new board members of Facebook are now Meta. That's interesting. And I wrote a comment on Hop Tan because we're friends on LinkedIn. And I said, hey, you know, there's a lot of new experiences with Facebook's Meta's new AI, the success with Lama and AI is going great with Facebook. That's gonna create new experiences that's gonna need more chips and more software which is the business he's in. So Zuckerberg then came out and said, I really value Hop Tan because for the reasons I said on the post Hop Tan but he also pointed out that he wanted him on the board because he was one of the leading advisors last year when he went through that year of efficiency which was basically we're gonna cut people and be more profitable. Because you think about Meta, how much they were spending and they were just like drunken sailors just like spending everywhere. So essentially, you know, deep experience in silicon and infrastructure and software Hop Tan is a perfect fit. I'm sure Meta is gonna be a big customer Dave of them. So you could fit. So I mean, Hop Tan knows how to run a tight ship. He's gonna make VMware very profitable with the Broadcom model. I loved watching Meta. It's like they had so much opportunity to cut. And at the same time, by the way they're still spending like tens of billions on Metaverse. So that's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out eventually but they were able to cut, you know, so much and then you've seen what's happened to the stock. It's just, it's shot up. And we were talking, I think we were talking about this last week. Google's the only one who hasn't taken that, you know, page out of that playbook. And so who knows, maybe they're just tripling down on innovation and it's gonna pay off or maybe they're gonna pull that trigger. But interesting, Hop Tan, somebody said to me today, well, Hop Tan is really young. And I'm like, well, he's not that young. He's older than I am. He's like 71 years old. And they were like, wow, that's surprising. He looks really good. And I'm like, yeah, well, maybe he's like Charlie Munger. He's gonna be running the company into his 90s. You got Charlie Quasso over there who's running his right hand man, running the chips division to get the software division. I mean, look at, they've done extremely well. And again, we've said this many times on theCUBE. Broadcom is a rising star in the execution of this modern era. They got the chips to the apps and with VMware, they're gonna get that operating leverage on the software side. They have Symantec, CA and now VMware and they're going to build security in this. No doubt in my mind with Ethernet becoming the open standard for ecosystems, the importance of the network interface card and how architectures are changing with hardware. It's so clear. And again, no one's talking about this in the industry right now. It isn't kind of like a public secret. And we're the only ones continuing to expose it because it's so important. And you're already seeing it happen. The hardware configurations of which was once confined to servers and PCs, the chips, the buses and all the components. That's now the data center, Dave, right? So now the data center is one big PC or server. You got to look at these nicks and these interface points, the switch versus the nick. What's more important? I mean, we're seeing data that says the nicks are more powerful than the switches. So all of this is changing. And again, this is Broadcom's in a good position. We're going to continue to see them at Mobile World Congress. Charlie Coase is going to come on theCUBE and we're going to talk about this. Well, let me just say too, Cisco announced last night. You know, not great. I mean, they hit, they kind of hit but then very weak guidance and they're cutting, I think 5,000 jobs. Security grew 3%, collab grew 3%, networking was down in like low double digits. I want to say 12%. So we're definitely seeing a shift from like traditional legacy switching to this, especially with AI, you've got all these different networks, whether it's InfiniBand or Ethernet, you just pointed out the rise of Ethernet and UltraEthernet, but and this is what struck me was when you're talking about Charlie Coase. I first was introduced to him this online, just searching around, looking for videos. And he was talking about, gave a little tech talk on the shift from a CPU centric world to a connect centric world. I'm like, huh, what does that mean? And he's, this was like years ago. And exactly what he's saying is playing out. It's all the interconnections between the CPU, the NPU, the accelerators, the storage network, all the backend and front end networks, all that traffic moving within that network is really where the action is. And that's where Broadcom has doubled down. They don't make CPUs, they don't make GPUs, they make NICs, they make storage controllers, all those other boring stuff that is very lucrative. Well, boring stuff, boring stuff that's actually in stuff that matters. For instance, sensor interfaces are in cars, Dave. So you've got automotive grade interfaces, those are controllers and NICs as well. You've got hardware security modules for secure data movement. You've got access market, you've got from set top boxes to broadband ethernet, broadband telecom. And then you got obviously all kinds of connectivity at the edge, 5G, Wi-Fi, wireless. I mean, as these become AI models in the future, Broadcom is going to have chip to software integration layers that's going to hopefully be set up for prime time. And that's why, again, this is why I get excited by the Broadcom. We have a huge appetite for this content because it's clearly, it's in the weeds, but it's going to set the agenda for 20 years. And with that in mind, I want to just share quickly the Zuckerberg quote because I want you to get your reaction to this. So Mark's on this is in common to Hop Tan and this other guy, John Arnold from Arnold Ventures, the two new board members of META. Let me read the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. I'm excited to share that Hop Tan and John Arnold will be joining META's Board of Directors, period. This is the next killer sentence. As we focus on building AGI, having directors with deep experience in silicon and energy infrastructure will help us execute our long-term vision. Oxyobroadcast, which is built on the leading semiconductor companies in the world. I got to know him informally as he advised the META team on our year of efficiency. John Arnold, founder of Arnold Ventures brings expertise in finance energy, which will be critical as we build out large-scale infrastructure to train and deploy future AI models before we're gonna move on. All right, Dave. One. So. AGI. Okay. This is Zuckerberg's North Star. So again, back to the scale of Facebook. If you look at Facebook with Facebook, or I would keep a call on Facebook, I'm still not used to META. You look at META, they got Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, a variety of other tentacles out there. Large-scale data centers, they're very Google-esque in their scale, very Amazonian in their scale. This puts them in a position to essentially be a cloud provider for AI and or cloud provider, but a huge provider of infrastructure scale for AI. So to me, I see Zuckerberg clearly going down the road of saying, I'm gonna throw the metaverse of the bus for now, all in on AI, open-source all the models, get the developers completely hooked on the heroine. Lama's kicking ass, open-source is now almost crossing over with the proprietary models in terms of uptake and functionality. So the growth of open-source AI models is absolutely an important milestone in this market. So, you know, in comes Facebook, they could enable a whole generation of startups and ecosystem to build on top of it. So to me, if you're hopped hand, you wanna get in close to the action on that because semi-conductors will be a big part of that. So people, I think, forget sometimes how influential Facebook has been and continues to be in the enterprise. And I'll go back to one of the earliest conferences we did, John. Do you remember we did OCP? Compute. And our friend, George Slesman, you remember we went out to visit George in his data center in Arizona. I think it was in Chandler, Arizona. And he said, Dave, I want you to do one of the keynotes with me up on stage at OCP. And I'm like, cool. And I really wasn't tuned into OCP at the time. So I remember going to that event and I interviewed George, we did a little keynote thing and then met a lot of customers. And one of my contacts was a guy of Fidelity. I started picking his brains about this. So what does this all mean to you? He goes, we love this because it's gonna just commoditize infrastructure. It's gonna create open standards and it's gonna accelerate what we do. We're gonna get the best prices. And that was really, a lot of that was driven by Facebook. And now you're seeing similar influence with generative AI, with Lama. And then you talk about AGI and the semiconductor requirements. And there's rumors that Facebook's gonna actually become the hyperscale cloud for AI, for open source AI and compete with the other big cloud players, the big three U.S. cloud players. So Facebook is exceedingly influential in this and they have great engineering, better than I. I go back to Jeff Hammerbarker, meeting him when he was at Cloudera and all the Facebook stories. So they really have been a mainstream- Open compute was Microsoft and Facebook drove that. If you remember. I do. And Intel showed up, the original CTO of Intel was there. You know, along with the CTO. It's just extremely influential, leading edge. It spawned a lot of startups and a lot of innovation. You know, much in the same way that Google, the Google file system, you know, when that got released, how that changed the world. And, you know, so, you know, I really love their open source. By the way, the cube was at the inaugural open compute. Yes. I'm at, Andy Bechtstein was there with a keynote with Justin, what's his name from Intel was the CTO. Jay Schrie was there. Facebook was there. Jay Schrie from Arista. The person that was presenting from Facebook is now running Lacework. So the CEO of Lacework. So again, the DNA of Facebook, and by the way, Microsoft, Satya Nutella was not CEO then and he made the bold move to essentially open source their entire infrastructure playbook. All their IP, he infrastructure a lot of their IP in the data center side. So that was Satya Nutella's beginning of his run 10 years ago, Dave. Yeah, and so that, again, Facebook has a lot of sway because their engineering is so phenomenal and they are a hyperscaler. They just, people don't, people forget because they don't directly sell to the enterprise, but that may change. Well, a lot of good stuff happened and I'm gonna get into this quick sidebar here from some comment. Oh wait, wait, just one other thing. Yeah. Are you gonna talk about Zuck and Quest? Or no. We can if you want. I mean, while we're on Zuckerberg, I mean, I just wanna say this. I loved how he punched back at all the, like the all-in guys were saying, oh, the Apple Vision Pro is so great compared to Quest. And Zuck's like, wait a minute, we got a better product, it's more comfortable, it's more mainstream and it's funny. I'm not really into the whole headset thing, but the guys, our guys, our production guys, we were talking to them before this program and they're like, yeah, I'm definitely going Quest because it's affordable and it's good. So I don't know, I don't know if you've used any of those. I haven't used it. I was first generation with Google Glass, I'm gonna wait until the first rev, I'll probably buy one. But I did hear that there's a lot of new apps on it and the vice had a story, these even porn's already on it, Dave. So the adult market, when you see adult adoption, gaming and adult content is a true tell sign of uptake. We'll see how that lasts, but... So it's not really my kind of thing, my wheelhouse, but it's a lot of people talking about it. And look, if apps are developed, this could be a whole new, I mean, they're spending what, 10, 12, $15 billion a year of Facebook that is, or Meta, on Metaverse. So wow, I mean, that's gonna pay off. Zuckerberg's main point was, he didn't want to, he had FOMO, obviously Apple got engineered, they're launching it, that's in a very Apple-esque way. Got a lot of people's, Clamory, oh, look how great it is. And everyone went to the store, lined up, all the nerds went out and got their device. That's cool. The price point is pretty high, Dave. The, what Zuckerberg's doing, he's trying to get the price point under a grand, consistently under a thousand, couple hundred dollars per quest versus 3,000, $4,000 from Apple. So I think this market's gonna need to bake a little bit more. I think it needs to stay in the oven a little bit before it goes totally mainstream, but augmented reality will be a big thing. And this idea of actually seeing and computing is cool. I mean, I can see myself driving my Tesla when I get one, I don't have one yet, but I had a self-driving car, commute to San Francisco and put the goggles on and get some work done, watch a video, and watch the traffic or check my email. Oh my God, I mean, we have our faces in our cell phones, mobile phones, we got our faces in social media, but now we're gonna have a ski goggles on, though. People are gonna forget how to interact. I swore at each other. I was so wrong on, I'm right at a lot of things, but I'll admit when I'm wrong, I was so wrong on the ear pods, I'm like, no one will ever wear those toothbrushes hanging from your ears. It's such a, it's so terrible. Yeah, I was totally wrong on that. So I could be wrong on this, but my guess is any new experience that's good and productive might work. So I'm holding judgment on this whole scene. You may have been wrong about the air pods, but the air pods kind of suck. You can't have them in and talk to anybody. Every time you and I are on our air pods with, Dave, I can't hear you, or John, I can't hear you. Oh, sorry, I'm walking with my air pods in. Let me pull about. I actually love mine, so they're awesome. I would never go back. Yeah, they're awesome when you're like listening, but when you're talking, they're terrible. Yeah, but versus the old, you know, stringed ones or any ear pieces are all small or cheaper now, you mean the hardwired ones? Yeah, when that came out, I would have the old, you know, the white string, then you plug it into your iPhone. And then when I went to the ear pods, I didn't think that was going to be a hit if it was. So, you know, I stand corrected. But again, more or faster, cheaper ends of billions. Anyway, so I want to get your reaction to this because I just saw a stat on Facebook. One in three men between the ages of 18 and 34 are using chat GPT for dating advice. So, again, back to the AI piece and the tweet from... Wait, one in three men, what ages? 18 to 34. Wow. Are using chat GPT for dating advice. I mean, they're all on one, they're all on the apps, right? So, I can imagine. I mean, that's actually, why not? For, I'm not saying dating advice, but maybe ideation. I mean, that's what chat GPT is great for ideation. But yeah, you got to make it your own and be authentic. But I don't know. I think it's going to be like, hey, give me some gift ideas as a search, basically. So, it's going to be very interesting to see kind of how that plays out. And again, just, you know, AI is having its moment, you know? And I think this is going to be an interesting year, Dave, to see how the AI impacts the election coming up. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal this week published today, five hours ago, the era of deep fakes and the impact the elections. I have yet to see anything yet, okay? That's going to be game changing on the deep face. But I'm imagining the smear campaigns and the misinformation will be amplified with deep fakes. Well, we've seen a clear escalation, 2012. And then, you know, 2016, from social media to like mega social media, and then to the whole fake news and, you know, all the accusations of Russian hacking and, you know, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on from our adversary. So, 2024 is going to be more escalation. I mean, it's going to be AI fakes. There's going to be misrepresentations. People are going to believe what they see and you shouldn't believe anything. You know, like George Carlin used to say, don't believe anything the government ever tells you. Don't believe anything anybody tells you these days. You have to just go out and do your own research and validate it. And even then, you've got to be careful. But I don't know. I think it's just going to be more escalation and I'm merely not looking forward to it. All right, so you tracked the Cisco earnings. They just had Cisco live in Europe. They came back, filed on Valentine's Day. Some people are calling it terrible earnings. I think I saw one post from Futurum that said it was a horrible earnings. They said, essentially, Cisco drops on uncertainty layoffs to come. Futurum, so that's interesting to see that. What's your channel? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't a good quarter. I mean, look, they've been working through their backlog. They said it's not going to be... I'm sorry, I meant Futurium. Futurium, not Futurum. Futurium, which is the future of our tech. Oh, that's our friend, Scott Reinovich. Scott Reinovich, really good. He's right, he's right. Pretty critical analysis post here. But I mean, look, I mean, Chuck said two quarters ago, look, we're working through our backlog. They didn't have a great quarter. They gave, they gave a quarter, but they gave poor guidance. This time, they basically hit their revised guidance and they gave worse guidance. So their guidance was below consensus guidance. So that's bad. And then they basically, look at Chuck Robbins is honest. You know, he says, look, we got to get through this. It's painful. We're going to cut 5,000 jobs. We're going to, you know, we're going to, we'll get through it and we're going to figure it out. And they will, but I would say this, the legacy networking business, you know this better than I do, is under attack. Now you got, you know, get a Rista with AI Mojo. You got Juniper with Myst and teaming up now with HPE. And supposedly that acquisition is on track. By the way, we have Antonio coming on at Mobile World Congress and we have a CEO of Juniper coming on. Oh, so that's going to be good separately. But anyway, they're attacking. Now you got Juniper, HPE and of course Aruba all going after Cisco. You got all the sort of networking. You just talking about the Nick vendors, all that innovation. So it's like the, you know, you need switches. You're always going to need switches and routers, but that legacy business is transforming. And it's sort of indicated by Cisco's, you know, down 12% year on year. They're still, like you say, we're working through some of their backlog. And then you got Extreme Networks, which has a good end-to-end story. You got some of these, you got some of these startups like AVatrix doing kind of, you know, sort of like an NSX. Actually, we didn't talk about VMware's consolidation of all their platforms, but that could be actually good news for AVatrix because that makes them maybe a more attractive partner. Anyway, it's like Cisco has had the dominant share of networking, you know, 60 plus percent share forever with giant gross margins. The thing I like still about Cisco is this is not a big surprise. They know this is coming and they're transitioning their business. Their SaaS business and their ARR business is doing really well. And so Chuck's done a good job of, through whatever, organic innovation, changing the business model, bringing in acquisitions, you know, G2 with the WebEx business, even though it's not growing super fast, it's low single digits, but driving software revenue. And that's how they're going to preserve their margins. And so, you know, they got some work to do. No question, it was not a good quarter and the guidance was not encouraging. Well, let's talk about the market conditions as we go into Mobile World Congress this month, okay? We're preparing our cube four days on the floor, we're going to be on the show floor. And so, you know, the state of AI in telecom, clearly, I've been pumping this out on social and on all my channels that this is not a telecom show anymore. This is a cloud data show. And telecom will just be just another industry vertical. And that's why they called it MWC because Mobile World Congress is not just mobile, it's all things, connectivity. And data is critical. So you mentioned some of those power dynamics with networking, with Cisco, that flows right into Mobile World Congress, or MWC, I should say, you can't even get that right. So, AI investments are remaining low, suggests is still early stage. So that's clear from our data from the cube research. The cube research is also reporting that the customer experience are attracting the highest level of AI investments ever seen before. So we're seeing for the first time, movement within the telcos and their ecosystem partners, suppliers, that they're really looking at the user experience, customer experience with AI because they have data. So that's the number one investment and that's high. Pilots are going on, tire kicking still, lagging a little bit, David, we're seeing in the research, but clearly the focus on what the architecture will be and what that AI production environment will look like is critically the number one thing going on with the alpha geeks out there. They're like, hey, you know what? Okay, we've got customer experience, check, check, check for some money at AI. Yeah, customer experience is blah, blah, blah, check the box, but the hardcore action in AI and telecom at MWC will be, how do we run these pilots? And what does it mean for my critical infrastructure, AKA the architecture? Where's my data? Do I own it and how do I use it? And how do I use that data for a net new revenue stream? And that's going to be the key that will unlock to me the stagnation of the telecom industry. It's been so slow, it's been like moving glaciers, you know, watching paint dry for a decade. It's been slow as hell. So I think this is the year telecom opens up, wakes up, comes out of the deep freeze and says, let's roll. So I am really bullish MWC and we'll see how the big guys weigh in. What's the implementation plans look like? How are they going to roll this out? What's the ecosystem reconfiguration? Who gets in front of who? It's going to be changing of the guard and changing of positions and leadership in the incumbents. And again, I expect new brands to emerge in all inflection points. So in 2021, you and I did the COVID Mobile World Congress. There was like one-tenth of the normal crowd. And, you know, during COVID, we saw the even the more rapid acceleration of cloud migration and it was really started to begin in coming into focus at that year at 2021 when we were in cloud city with Telco DR and Danielle Royston. And they were like the entire MWC, all seven halls were empty, except for the former Ericsson space which she bought out like 60,000 square feet and the cloud city was rocking. And you can see, you started to see like evidence that the BSS and the OSS systems were going to go to the cloud. And then last year, and then we skipped, that's they had two, right? In 2021, no, they had 2021 and then, which was, I think July, John, right? Yeah, it was July of 2021. And then they did 2022 in February, which we didn't go to. We did 2023 last year that the big themes last year were the disaggregation of the Telco stack. Obviously, open ran was a big theme. Private 5G was another big theme. And of course, the Telcos all chirping, we can't let this happen again, meaning we can't with 5G, we have to figure out the monetization. We can't just let the OTT guys crush us again. And then the flip side of that is, when you talk to guys like Chris Lewis, who's been following Telco since he was three years old, he'll tell you, you know what, Dave, the Telcos are actually really good at connectivity. And they make a lot of money at connectivity. And worst case scenario, they have to just stick to their connectivity knitting. They'll do just fine. And but I don't think that's going to satisfy them. I think they want more. And then the last thing I'll say is, there's also in addition to the disaggregation of the Telco stack, there's the data stack that has got to transform. And so you're seeing AWS, all the cloud guys you've seen Snowflake has a bigger presence there. IBM obviously with Watson X, it's going to have a huge presence at MWC. MWC is an awesome show. I mean, it's just everybody's there. I think the networking data, I mean, Telcos have all the data that in their purview. Okay, and I think they've always used their data. It's not like, I mean, look at the data play that AT&T really pioneered around making data a business model with smartphones, legendary. Making a value proposition out of the exhaust data laying around can be transformed into a foundation model, very quickly from these Telcos and turned into an input into a better application that's net new, okay? This is an opportunity. And for companies that want to own their own foundation model data, which is a big power dynamic in AI today, they're going to want to go to a Telco and say, hey, if I'm going to run on 5G on your network, I'll bring my data to the table, Telco, telecom carrier and I want you to make sure I'm secure. Just like what Amazon is doing with Bedrock that making that customer relationship, one that's going to create data value for both parties. So that's an opportunity for the Telcos to use their data as a way to make a sticky relationship and a value proposition with the enterprises. So I think absolutely this is a net new thing. It's so obvious to me, it's as clear as day that this is definitely a business model opportunity for Telcos and it's going to change the ecosystem partnerships that they have. So the Telcos would rely on certain relationships. I think you're going to see them recast who they work with for things like IoT Edge. We're seeing a lot of startups out there that are growing that have this great AI and automation capability that plug right into the new model beautifully. And I think that's going to be something that's going to point to the data layer and enable the application market to be really robust for Telcom. We're in the past, it was just a heavy lift. All the Telcom companies tried to build out the stuff themselves. And you can't take classic network operators and make them platform engineers. That's a failed strategy. And I think the realization that that's happened is going to be this year where everyone goes, you know what, we gave it the college try, it ain't working. So dump that plan. By the way, the stuff that we built is irrelevant now because it's the market shifted. So again, back to the market transitions, this is an opportunity and we'll see which one of the Telcoms players who moves. And it's going to be pretty obvious by the moves they make in the show. So we'll be watching them, we'll squint through the data, squint all the noise and be watching the moves that they make and we're going to tell who's going to be making the right moves. And to me, it's back to distributed computing and the data value and it's going to get clear. And if they don't do it, we'll see. And then the winners will have more money, they'll have more apps on their network, they'll have more customers and the customer experience then kicks in after that fact. So that's why I think the Cisco thing is really interesting to me. What they do with their networking data, do they own it? And we've discovered some of our research that Cisco has a position in this market, but they might not be well positioned if they don't have the data. This is a question I want to ask them. I wish I was on that earnings call. I would have hit the question on that. We'll see, we'll see what happens. And again, Michael Dell will be coming on theCUBE in Marvel World Congress. We got Antonio Oniri from HPE coming on. We're going to have Chuck Robbins little verbal there. Hopefully he'll come on. We got action there. We got the extreme networks coming on. We've got all the CEOs coming on. We've got the Broadcom president coming on. Love this market from chips to applications, Dave. The full stack is getting back the full stack applications in a whole new cast, in a whole new AI way. So, a couple of things. Couple of things I'm tracking this week, if I may. So, you saw Lyft's Bloop. When they printed their earnings release, they added a zero to their profit number. The stock shot up like freaking 70% for just seconds. So, somebody either got killed or made some money on that. The inflation data came out and it shocked everybody. I'm so surprised that people are so surprised that inflation is sticky. It's like everybody's like, oh yeah, there's going to be a rate cut in the first quarter or May. It's so uncertain right now. And so, inflation continues to rise. It's okay. So, even if it's 3%, prices are up so high from where they were pre-COVID. That's something that I think is gonna weigh on this market. But by the way, I also think interest rates are probably okay where they are, even though the Fed wants to get them down lower. We've lived in this kind of interest rate environment for years and decades prior to ZERP. There was another article that came out in the Wall Street Journal. Yep, that's right, John, about co-pilots and co-pilot testers. This was really interesting. Did you see this? Yeah, I did. So, co-pilot testers basically saying, you know, it's good, but yeah, we're really not seeing a ton of productivity. At that said, there were a couple of use cases where companies were saying, yeah, we're gonna roll this out across half our employee base. I will say this, we talked last week about the year of AI ROI. I made a prediction that 2024 is gonna be a year of AI ROI focus, but it's gonna be really hard to get. And if they don't get it, customers don't get it. Spending, tech spending is not gonna boom. It's not gonna be, there's not gonna be a gain share. I don't think you're gonna see that until 2025. And if you don't see it in 2025, then you're gonna start to see cuts on AI. I do think you're gonna see it. But people are like, these co-pilots, $30 per user per month, it's a little rich. We'd like to lower the denominator a little bit. So, you're getting mixed reports on the co-pilots. What's your take on that? I think people are gonna realize that it's just not worth the squeeze. And it's gonna be same with subscriptions for these newsletters. You know, in the journalism business, you're starting to see people unwind their newsletters because they're like, they're not getting the success they thought, but it sounds good. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna support that person, the producer, but you're gonna pay $30 a month or $5 a month or whatever it is for whatever service. It's fatigue. And as you get so many services, you put your credit card down after a while, like how the hell did I, what I have signed up for? So I think there's gonna be an element of, I'm selling it for too many AI things, number one. Number two, sometimes the value's not there. And they just, okay, I don't really like this. I can just get that for free on ChatGPT. Like I mentioned, from dating advice, ChatGPT's been phenomenal. See how perplexity it does with that in our CUBE AI. So I think, you know, that's why I'm interested to see how these services work. Will there be a long tail and how that's going to work out? So I think the integration of the data also is another factor. The experiences aren't that great. Yeah, the productivities are hit or miss. So I think we're in just an evolutionary phase of embryonic growth of stages of the industry, it's early. Some shit's going to work great. Some of it's not. And if it's, and solution cases come in and day is going to be in there, I think it's going to be up and down. It's going to be a seesaw. And I don't want people to think that we're sort of down on AI. I think we still think it's transformative. We're like, we're from the AI Kool-Aid. Of course, but I think- We're drunk on AI every day here at theCUBE. Right, but the point I want to make about that is, again, you listen to the guys from all in, they're like, oh yeah, this is like great. You're going to be able to do startups and get to a billion dollars with three people. And it's to make it sound so easy. It takes work. We know from our own CUBE AI, which by the way, thecubeai.com, now we've been, have we launched this yet? No, it's still in staging. No, we have launched it. And there you can see some of the version of it. We've now, it's sort of a halfway house right now. We've ingested all of the SiliconANGLE news data, which is a great, very tight corpus of data. There's a little toggle. We're going to blend the two together, but check that out. But my point is, it takes work. It takes engineering to actually get this stuff to work. And I think what I'm really excited about, I think Microsoft's overplayed its hand a little bit with, oh, you can just make Excel sing and you can say, hey, I want a double y-axis and I want to do this, that and the other thing. You try that with co-piles. It's like, yeah, that's not really what I want. And you end up going in and doing it manually. So I think they've overplayed their handle. I don't know, I agree with that, Dave. I think they're making some good bank on it as open AI. I think it's maturity of where users' expectations are. ChatGPT has set the bar so high on expectations that other products just may or may not be worth it. I mean, I don't even notice co-pilot in the Google stuff because I've already got the auto completion going on. I have all the basic stuff in there. I don't see value. I haven't seen the benefit of it. So I think it's just evolution. So I think that the drop off of subscription rates and satisfaction is just good. It's a different, in my opinion, different set. I think it's more like, for instance, just take PowerPoint and Excel to really important personal productivity apps and to your earlier point about the gentleman from Databricks. Who was that? Was it Ravine? Ravine, yeah, yes. Yeah, so. Ravine. Ravine, sorry. Two big personal productivity platforms, PowerPoint and Excel. And if you try to apply co-pilots to really make you more productive, it's still not quite there. It's probably a little bit better for Excel, not great at all for PowerPoint. And so there's upside there. I just, when I say overplayed their hand, when you watch the demos, they're really impressive. When you actually try to use them, it's like, not quite there yet. So I think there's going to be some pushback on that pricing, that co-pilot pricing. I do agree with them, but I think they're groping for where the market is, but clearly the category of productivity software clearly is where the innovation is going to be. A little transformation of that market. What I'm saying is, so I think you're going to, I think you're going to have a very clear combination of we're using AI as co-pilots or embedded into applications. And it's not an or, it's an and. We're going to do a lot of our own AI development in-house for our specific purposes. I think it's going to be a big and, is I guess my point there. The other thing to switch topics is Buffett trimmed, Berkshire trimmed, it's Apple holding somewhat. I think the reasoning was it was just getting such a big portion of their portfolio. But the thing that was always strange to me is, he sold this tech, this TSM, is a Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing, sold the TSM because of the China risk. Well, I would think Apple is facing that same China risk because their vast majority of their chips are coming out of TSMC, if not all of the leading edge chip. So that was kind of interesting news. And the other big news is Bitcoin hit almost 53,000 today, which is only about 20% below its high of a couple of years ago. So that's back. The hype is back into Bitcoin and crypto, which of course I love. Great stuff that you're following there. I've been following all that too and love the commentary. For me, I'm going to go off the board a little bit because obviously we were highly influenced this week by the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl viewership rose to 123 million, new record high, kept a huge rating, well obviously many reasons why San Francisco and KC, big dueling brands and also a table swift factor. Good game. Great game, disappointing from a Niners perspective, obviously I'm a Patriots fan first. You know, people see me with all the Niners stuff on social because I've been living in here 23 years, kind of adopted the Niners as my second team and they was AFC, it's not an AFC team. So Patriots are still there too, but we're all bummed. It was a bummer, they could have won Miss Qs, couple of Miss Qs, but they could have won the game. But a great game, super exciting, disappointing for the Niners fans and Brady-esque for the KC fans. And I think Mahomes put on a Brady clinic and I think he stepped up for sure, you can't deny that. He ran for that first time when the game was on the line. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but as a Patriots fan, like I know I'm like snapping out every Super Bowl because they're all close. How are you, because you're a Patriots fan first but you like live in the Bay Area, so a huge San Francisco fan as well. Were you snapping out at that game? Are you more like? No, I was really into it, it was super exciting. I mean, it was like a game that was really on pins and needles, literally standing up and watching it at the end, it was really that exciting on TV. So I thought that from a football standpoint, it was super awesome, right? But were you like nervous as a fan? No, it was exciting, it was like nervous in the sense of, hey, stop them on fourth down, of course Mahomes just runs for the first down. They get that key first down and then they had that holding penalty and the overtime that put them from first down to second and 20 that killed, that made them force them to take the field goal. And obviously they missed an extra point. So a lot of these little things kind of add up but in the heat of the battle, Christian McCaffrey never fumbles, he put the ball on the ground in the first possession. So, and by the way, the Chiefs weren't moving the ball at all, so it wasn't like it was a blowout, it was just a seesaw, just a great football. I mean, classic great football. So as a football lover, I felt it was good. Oh, okay, but so does it's not. And as a fan, just why I'm like the Niners. In 1985, I went to Super Bowl 19 where the Niners beat the Dolphins. It was a family trip. My father won a church raffle, put the $5 in, wins the big prize, lucky, lucky kind of thing. And so, I'll never forget the Joe Montana experience at Stanford Stadium in 1985. And then so I've always had that little Stanford, I mean, San Francisco vibe. And then moving out here, I'll see they're in the area and that's just a great team and cool. So I saw no conflict with the Patriots love obviously watching them win. I mean, obviously I moved out of the New England area before they won any Super Bowls. So it was fun to watch them as a fan, win it. But I wasn't there. So, you know, it was like different. Yeah, so I'm excited for the Niners and since that they made it their hometown team, but people were bummed. I mean, people were definitely. I can see it. I mean, we were all, I mean, I think I said last week, everybody in New England, not everybody, but vast majority of people in New England are rooting for San Francisco, myself included, because we don't want my homes and Kansas City to break the, you know, the Brady dynasty. And so we just, you know, we're very pro-keel in that regard. But I did do this. I did make a fairly, not a sizable bet, like, you know, but decent, I don't bet a lot in football, but I did an in-game bet when Kansas City was down 10 zip. Because I said, my homes just can't bet against the guy. So, you know how you could do in-game betting? So, and I got a, I got plus 350 on Kansas City. That was my consolation prize, because I still, even though I had a bet on it, I wanted San Francisco to win. Let me ask you a question. You asked me, Brendan, to send me a text, our producer said my homes is unpaced to finish with a better career than Brady. So, let me ask you a question. Oh, please. I know, let's not put him in the hall of fame yet. Don't lead the way, don't go there. He's in the hall of fame already. My question to you is, as a New England fan, are you rooting, actively rooting against my homes? To preserve. You know, I used to, but no, I'm actually, I'm a Mahomes fan. I think he's just amazing to watch. I like San Francisco. Honest, you're being truthful than that. You're being intellectually honest here. No, I am. Most New England fans are like, screw him. I can't beat Brady. He's so awesome though. I mean, I was definitely rooting for San Francisco. I mean, I love McCaffrey and I don't ever root for NFC. I'm an AFC guy, but I was rooting for San Francisco. Even though I had a bet on him, I would have been happy to lose the little money that I bet. By the way, on the betting front, the estimation was the wages were estimated to surpass 23 billion. So how could we not get this thing legal? I'm telling you, the NFL doesn't have, aren't wetting their beak in this deal. So, you know, they collected about 125 billion from selling broadcast rights over the next decade. But NFL is a fucking machine. I'm sorry, I swear, but like they're like out of control. Plus the in-game betting is amazing. Just for, I don't, I never knew much about this. My son was into it. He started telling me about it. I never even knew, this is so embarrassing. I never knew what the money line was. Like when we used to bet with bookies, you get, okay, you get plus two and a half or you get minus two and a half. That was it. And you'd make the bet. Well, the money line, you can bet the team to win outright, no points. And you get whatever, plus 110 or plus 150. So before the game, Kansas City was two and a half point underdogs. And the money line was plus 110. But during the game, when they were down 10 zip, it's the money line went up to plus 350. Meaning bet 100, you win 350. And so there were way better odds. You know, same game, right? And so it's so much fun to bet. And to your point about the NFL, taking a look off the cone, that people stay and watch. I mean, even if there's a blowout, they're gonna stay and watch because they're making in-game bets. So they're making tons of dough off of betting though. They're making it more explosive, you know? When the game was this year, it was in Vegas. Hello. So we interviewed the CIO for the Oakland Raiders. I remember we interviewed that person and the member they said to us, we were the last place in monetization. The bottom of the barrel, Oakland Raiders team was the worst in the league in making money. Okay. Old stadium, decrepit market. They were, you know, it was Oakland, it wasn't San Francisco, city by the Bay, weren't really faithful to the Bay as it turns out. Go to Vegas before the Super Bowl day, before this year, guess what number they were? Fourth. Wow. So I, and again, new stadium, all the amenities, F1's coming to Vegas. Vegas is a sports town. It will be a media town in the future. It's just got all the hotels. I mean, Vegas will continue to thunder away as the destination for marquee events. And so, you know, you're going to see more of that. And again, again, you own the stadium, all the money they're making, and the bedding, all the gambling, all the side activities, activations. It's just a corporate promotional dream. So there it is. Last to first, all in venue. And then the economics going to drive a lot of the sports. It's going to be, you know, you're seeing that with the NCAA. You know, the whole realignment, the Pac-10 going away. It's like, it's a money game now, Dave. Money game. Oh, so money's off the charts, man. But I have to say, it makes it fun. I used to, honestly, it's terrible to say. I've been very parochial here in the mean. Used to never pay attention to other teams other than, you know, during the playoffs. And it just, the bedding makes it fun. And I don't bet a lot, but you know, 10 bucks here, $15 here. But it's fun. It makes it exciting, you know? And also, the thing I love is where's the value? Right? So, I don't know. Well, Dave, we're running over time. It's late there, Thursday night. Here, we're getting this recorded early, normally on our Friday. As we have our travel schedules coming up, you'll see us produce the podcast earlier. Go to SiliconANGLE.com, episode 47 in the books. We'll see you around, Dave. We're going to, next time I'll see you in person, Mobile World Congress. And it's certainly next week, Thursday on the pod. But get ready for Mobile World Congress, Dave. All right, John, we'll see you there. All right, thanks, everybody. Close it out.