 Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 17 of the Cube Pod. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're breaking down the stories of the week. We've been traveling, it's Cube Month Day. We had a lot of events that just flew in from New York. You were in Vegas, came in on the red eye. I mean, look at so much going on in tech. This is our weekly podcast where we break down what we're covering, in the news at large, that we think is interesting, stuff we were looking at, and that our audience is interested in, but also enterprise tech as well. HPE had their event, MongoDB had their event in New York City, I saw all the analysts. We saw the Wall Street analysts. Zuck and Elon want to do a cage match. Cyber security and super cloud news is out there. AWS announced $100 million innovation fund for AI. HPE's got traction, Amazon on stage with HPE. Mongo stock popped huge. They got this developer data platform, wrote a post about that, that went viral. They have a position that looks like it's unique and looks like they got a really strong presence, and I just read all the Wall Street analysts there are bullish on this stock. They think it's going to be a $5 billion revenue number in five years. They're at like one point and changing that 1.6 or something. And then Intel made a fab deal, FTC going after AWS. I know this is going to be your rank as you telegraphed it on Twitter. It is such a bogus thing. The cloud wars continues. Google's making moves, okay? And you've got some real traction going on in super cloud and the whole multi-cloud fabric thing I want to get into. I learned a lot at HPE Discover and I learned a lot in New York City with MongoDB because you have the tail of developers and you have the tail of the large big enterprise with HPE and Mongo. They own the developer market and their document database is perfectly poised for AI. It's just more AI, big week coming up. We've got Snowflake and Databricks and a slew of interviews. I think we're going to be talking to at least a hundred companies in the next week. And last week felt like a hundred as well, Dave. It's just been an incredible week. I obviously wasn't at MongoDB.local because I was at HPE Discover and you were there but I was watching a ton of the coverage this morning. I got in like, I think I landed at five o'clock so I got in really early. And I really liked the Atlas vector search. I just wrote a post while I was waiting for you I'm in here. That Atlas vector search is really interesting because it's an alternative to having a separate standalone vector database. And obviously it's something that is going to be interesting for generative AI. And then they surprised a lot of people with stream processing for Atlas. I thought that was kind of cool. And they made the general availability of the relational migrator. I remember a couple of years ago, maybe it was last year, two years ago. Oracle did a MongoDB sort of compatibility mode and this is sort of the reverse of that. We can take the relational data in. So you're seeing Mongo just extend the different data types and that's what platforms do. I think I- It's all my thunder, Dave. I was going to write a post but I guess I had to get off that plane. Yeah. Sorry. By the way, you nailed the post on your conclusion. You pretty much nailed what I just went through. I just read eight of the Wall Street houses that had comments. A couple of people didn't publish anything today but major bullish sentiment on MongoDB. And again, category creation opportunity for them. Clear headroom in the TAM of a database market that they only have 2% of and the database market's changing and growing. So as you have a huge TAM in databases and a changing market in how the developers are setting the agenda for buying decisions. So you have the dorm room into the boardroom and I heard some other analysts quote in my boardroom comment. It was great to see yesterday. I think Daniel Newman was brought that up as well. That's the theme. They own the dorm room hackathons and they now go into the boardroom where executives are writing checks. So they're targeting, as Maribel Lopez points out, the check writers, okay? That's the buyers. MongoDB doesn't usually sell to that market, Dave. They're targeting as well. So you're seeing again, the developer first, we've been talking about this dynamic in the open source community for years. That's playing out. We talked about this in the SuperCloud One event we had in San Francisco. And we were right again and our research and our analysis was right early and often on this topic, you know, we've been in open source from day one and it's just continues to surprise and delight in terms of what's happening in the marketplace again. Developers and software is killing it. I think we might have talked about this last week. Essentially what Mongo did is they pulled forward like by a year, it's numbers and it's expectations. So of course, Wall Street salivating and this thing was a screaming buy before they announced. I mean, it's the end of last year we were talking about how Mongo was being beat up and like all tech stocks, but you know, look, and I had Ivana Dilevska on and she's like a mini Kathy Woods, like our investments. And, you know, she buys the dip on Snowflake, on NVIDIA, on Mongo, because these are platform plays that have sustainable competitive advantage. And so Mongo was, you know, they're getting it done. I mean, the event looked great, looked intimate, smaller than last year. Last year was actually pretty big, but I thought they got a lot of content out in one day. Yeah, they totally did. I talked to the CTO and what really is happening is that even Mongo's kind of scratching themselves going, wow, pinch me moment. Because, you know, their whole business is about developers and they got lightning in a bottle as a commercial entity and you love the term operating leverage. You use that all the time when you're breaking analysis. They have operating leverage in their model because they have a platform now and they have the developers. So they're growing with their developers because what's happening is anyone can use MongoDB. Again, it's open source, okay? And so you can grab it, you can use it. So it is the dorm room and then now you get to the board room dynamic which is the companies are making a decision to stay with Mongo as a platform. So having these new native services built in, like streaming, like Vector Search, by the way, there's other solutions out there with Vector Search and streaming, Confluent, Kafka and other open source, Vector Davis like Milvus which we use and others, Weave.io, I think it was one another one. Pinecone. So yeah, Pinecone and so what you're having is that you can snap things together where you can build them natively, right? So this is kind of a nuanced tech talk point but the winners are building things natively into a platform, okay? And that's where you start to see the big breakout stock. So if I'm a stock buyer, I'm an investor, I'm looking for two things, the platform, mindset where it's native services and primitives and data, okay? You can't get better data than developers having their code and everything comes together. You get observability goes into place, you got container security falls into place, software supply chain and then document database is actually perfectly positioned because you think of a document, I think of like a word doc or a Google doc, it's text, right? And so it's unstructured data. So NoSQL actually has a nice win into creating new kinds of insights that have never been garnered before. Okay, that's where the killer apps are. So that means the applications are going to sing cool things from that because then the apps could take advantage of that data, get those new insights, whether it's some operational insight or some insight for a user, their customer. So again, this is net new, Dave. You know, AI's been around for a while, you know, I heard that rant before, right? But yeah, it has, but not this kind of way. So look at the people with the data, we talked about this last week, if you got the data, you are in the driver's seat. Now you got to have the developers. So developers, developer market, data market are going to explode, and then everything else is going to be about efficiency and transit, latency, performance, availability, distributed failover. I mean, it's going to be, I think in science, so I think Mongo is a tell sign to me of what's going to come in at reinvent. It's going to be very interesting what AWS does, Dave, at reinvent because last year they were kind of scratching the surface of the top of the stack and Adam Sileski had a great vision that he actually brought up LLMs and went on one with him. So he actually is on point on this. Amazon is not behind on this at all. But it's going to be interesting how their posture is at reinvent. Well, did you see him on Bloomberg this week? Did you watch that interview? No, I did not. I saw the announcement, we covered on SiliconANGLE, a hundred million dollar innovation fund. But yeah, but so he came on Bloomberg and they were pressing them basically saying, hey, well, you guys are behind, right? And he said, well, no, we've been doing LLMs for a million. You know, I would agree that, I mean, they have been doing, I mean, Adam, when we did our sit down with Adam last year, you know, prior to reinvent, prior to chat GPT being announced, he said, remember, he said, you know, we're doing a lot in large language models and this is going to be huge. And so it's not like they weren't signaling even back then. I'll say this though, I got a glimpse at the latest ETR data for July. The July surveys in the field is like 1300 responses already. They'll probably get up to 17 or 1800. Open AI, like shot to the top, it's unbelievable in that whole space. So you have the big three cloud providers, Microsoft, they're always, you know, up and to the right. AWS, this is, we're talking about the ML AI space. And then Google, of course, is there. They're all above the 40% highly elevated spending momentum line. And then Databricks is up there as well. The chat GPT or open AI rather just rocketed to the top of the momentum, almost as pervasive already as Microsoft. And I did see John, Amazon's still prominent, but they did move a little bit to the left, meaning they weren't cited as much as a percentage of the overall survey. And it's probably a function of open AI just rocketing to the top. Now, I think that's going to be, you know, short-lived. I think open AI is getting all the attention and Microsoft right now, but I think Amazon strategy is a winning strategy. Oh, of course. And I don't know what you need to finish. I like where you went there because this is what our research is showing. And my research in particular in the field comes out this way. And this has not been reported yet. So it's kind of original content. So the team should write this up as a key point. The reason why Amazon's getting bashed right now is because their business model is to stand up and run apps, okay? So they're infrastructure and that's always been great. I as pass their services like bedrock are emerging. So that's just packaging what they've already had. So they announced that. Again, I had an exclusive with Matt Garmin a couple of weeks ago. My story is about to hit on his view of Amazon. Here's where things are landing. Hugging face, open AI, data bricks, Snowflake, MongoDB, the big data titans now. I call them the big data titans. Snowflake, data bricks and Mongo. They're now the big three titans in my opinion. And then you got the infrastructure. And the cloud guys. So you keep right the cloud guys. Where the market is right now is, is that certainly it's hype. And, you know, so O'Malek had a tweet today when Salesforce jumps on AI, you know it's hyped. Actually, we mentioned them in our podcast last week. So we kind of were early on that. But on this whole Amazon doing well or not, it's, they're waiting for the storm to come, the big surge. Cause what's all the actions with open AI and the developer side right now. Cause all the, all the work's being done is, how do I build? So developers are trying to figure out what are apps looking like? How do I code them? And Jason Horowitz had an architecture stack that came out and my drone has the same thing. It's changing rapidly, Dave. The workflows and the pipelining of how developers are building big data. Now AI apps is changing every single day. So until that settles, there's no market yet for the scaling up side. So we saw this movie before, and let me give you an example. In the early cloud days, okay, the target developer was the person who would have to provision a data center, an entrepreneur, buy a machine, put it on the network, right? Dave, that's the, and then Amazon came around, swept the credit card. Okay, you remember those days? Of course. It was basic stuff, EC2, S3 and Q. Now I'm over simple, it was good stuff, but it was not a lot of complex stuff. So it was good enough to run my app versus the alternative of buying a server, go into a data center. And so the dynamic of cloud computing started with basic building blocks that targeted the developer alternative cost and pain. Boom, cloud's born. The exact same things happening in AI right now. All the actors on the developer of apps and AI and data, which combines analytic tools, old school data people, new school data people like Mongo and the developers, they're all trying to figure out how to do that, do it. Now, Amazon's got good enough and there's new software coming out, but that won't pop until the developers get their shit together. You know what I'm saying? So that's where it's at, Dave, and it's clear. And I think Amazon's in a great position as people roll into town looking for picks and shovels, you know, that's going to hit them. So I am not concerned about Amazon Azure and Google not being, quote, ready booking massive revenue. Hype something, it's open AI for sure, but the developers, and that's why Mongo's doing so well. They hit the developer, Gold Rush. I think, I mean, you're right on developers. Did you see that, and recent put on a post this week on, it's called the emerging architectures for LLM applications that's going all over Twitter. And right in there, it basically laid out the emerging LLM stack. And it's developer, developers are going to be all over this. I mean, it's not as simple as, you know, you might think with listening to the all in podcast guys, like, oh yeah, you just push a button and everything happens. It's not that simple. Okay, and so it is all about the developers. The other thing that was really interesting about that when you look in there, first of all, Databricks is all over the place. They're everywhere in that stack. So it was open AI though, and ChatGPT as an orchestrator. You can actually use, people are using ChatGPT as the orchestrator and feeding the prompts in so they can do really get better data, use few shot versus no shot prompts. In other words, prompting the model. Many LLMs today use no prompts. Okay, so it's sort of just guessing if you can use ChatGPT to actually create prompts and give it a few shot. And the other thing is the importance of GPT-4 is really a big deal. And you can't get access to GPT-4 unless you're a developer and you're a developer of status. So but you see the public cloud guys are all over that. And you're also seeing guys like Huggingface all over that stack. You didn't see a lot of Snowflake, a little bit of Streamlit, but not a lot of Snowflake. Okay, Databricks is all over that as any scales on there too, by the way. Oh, both portfolio companies of Andreessen and Horowitz. Of course, they're pimping their companies. I know that, but it's obviously, it's not a leadership slide. It's just a stack slide. And so they represent their companies in there appropriately. So you can't, I mean, they missed all, they missed a bunch of vector databases. They missed the Linux foundations to work in there. So again, this was a post by Andreessen and Horowitz. Wasn't far from the definitive answer, but it is actually- Well, but they even said that. They said, look, this is not a definitive, but it was, I mean, I've seen other ones, but I thought this one was a little bit more comprehensive. Oh, it was. The other ones that I've seen. It's just not, you can't just say because Databricks was mentioned multiple times. I'm just saying, of course. I mean, I like Databricks. We'll govern them next week, but- No, my point is that Databricks is in different parts of the stack. It's not just in one place. Like Streamlit was there for app hosting, but Databricks is in multiple layers of that stack. And I think it's worth noting. I mean, I think next week you're gonna see, first of all, I think next week you're gonna see Databricks put forth a really strong story, but I also think Snowflake is as well. I think you're gonna see Snowflake, just like you saw with Mongo, I think it's gonna be even more dramatic with Snowflake where they're gonna expand the number or the types of workloads and data types that they can extend to. They're gonna stretch their fabric, if you will. They're mesh out to many more data types. And so they're really, Snowflake's really not in that conversation in a big way. Like you said, it's the Andres and Mafia. Okay, fine, but I think next week you're gonna see Snowflake make some serious moves, really attracting data application builders. They're gonna be all over that. They wanna be number one in data apps. And we just wrote the Uber post last week, George and I, you saw that, it went friggin nuts, it went viral, it was all over the place. And it got a lot of really good traction. And it basically, I think lays out the future of data apps, except not everybody's Uber, right? Not everybody has guys like Uday and a fricking team of a thousand people that can do this stuff. So that's where the future is, is being able to build these horizontal data apps and it's gonna take a while, because it's complicated. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And again, not everyone is Uber. And if you look at the numbers and you look at the research that we've done, okay? Specifically, the reporting that we've done on Mongo. Okay, if you look at Mongo, and I posted this in my post, not everyone's Uber, and that's the opportunity. That's a feature, not a bug. So managed services have been dominating. You look at Mongo's numbers pre Atlas as a managed service, it was nothing, okay? They surged on the managed services revenue. That is how people are getting in the game right now as a managed service. And all the smart money right now is looking at these VCs saying, you got to be in managed service in here and you got to have an open source implementation. So I think you're gonna see some refactoring of these pivots or pivots and refactoring going on with startups. And the big companies also have the ability to pivot. Again, agility in this new world is not just for startups and small companies. Big companies can pivot too. And I think Amazon did that with packaging their AI stuff to be the infrastructure for the developers as they get rolling into town with their apps. So, the only issue I have a concern around the data definition of data apps is not so much the direction of it. It's more of how it plays out. I'll give you an example. If you look at the database market right now, you look at like we just came to HPE and Mongo were gonna be at Databricks and Snowflake next week. Those are the big data titans, those three at least. And then you got big HPE and got Amazon out there. The big trend is you got two markets. You got the old school database people, the analytics, they think differently. They're critical, they get old school thinking. And then you got the new school data analysts and the data people. They're much more like iterate fast, move fast, try this, pull back, horizontal layer, no problem, I love doing that. Let's get vertical and get some domain data in there. They're looking at data architects really like a cloud architect. Not a data architect, they're thinking of it like a cloud architect. So, you're starting to see maybe a cultural shift in the data industry, Dave. I'm an analytics person, where's my dashboard? Well, in the future model, data will be invisible and it'll be operational, it'll be historical, all working together with developers. So, you start to see the signs of, hey, you're around the old days. You're an analytics person. Yeah, they look at it from that lens. So again, the lens you look through defines what you're staring at in the data business. And I think that's something to take pause in and I think that's going to impact what enterprises do. Because, oh yeah, this is the way we've only done it. Well, not really. The developers are going to start getting in charge and as an idea of developer first, could change a lot of those workflows, those cultural dynamics, the culture of building and the culture of how to store and manage data. So, I'm looking at that very closely this week. I'm going to look at some of the signals and put the AI washing aside, look at who's the persona that they're targeting? Who's the customer? You just laid out like 15 topics. I want to pick on one that you mentioned about five minutes ago, which was your point about managed services is so important. And remember when Databricks first came out and Spark sort of first hit the market? Everybody thought, like their pattern match, they said, oh, Databricks is going to do what Cloudera did. And they didn't. They said, no, we're going to do managed service in the cloud. They did exactly the opposite, really, of what Cloudera did. And that put them on a really successful track. And again, you can't help but be impressed with what Databricks is doing. I can't be at the conference next week. You're going to be out there. I'm excited about that. You're broadcasting there as well. We're going to be at the, you're going to be at the international? We're going to be at Moscone. We're going to be broadcasting. theCUBE is doing an appearance for an hour and a half each day, Wednesday and Thursday in the Lakehouse Studio. It's called the Live at the Lakehouse because they have to have the Lakehouse product. So do you also have a room at the intercontinental or am I mistaken about that? Yeah, we have a room at the press room in Moscone, not the press event. They're doing a press event Tuesday for press and analysts that's the thing that's off the record or pre-brief. And you can broadcast there too? Or are you just broadcasting in the Lakehouse? I could, I don't think we're going to bring cameras. I want to focus on the content and get the interviews and start winding people up for camera. But yeah, we're video first and the continental is tight. Dave, you know how tight it is, it's always there and then they get the ballroom. So it's tight. It would be a run and gun and a lot of logistics. So we're going to pass on that for now. We've got plenty of content going to, believe me, Rob Stretcher and I are going to be in the Lakehouse and we're also going to pop in to the press room, Gabe on our team is leading that effort and it's going to be, you know, all gravy, you know, the Lakehouse is primary and gravy is going to be in the press room. We get interviews, people. So we're going to get other analysts on. So Sanjeev Mohan, okay. And Mirabelle Lopez at the MalgoDB event. No, Sanjeev is going to be there for sure. Doug Henshin from Constellation is going to be there. So there'll be a lot of... They're going to be at Snowflake too. They're going to bounce. They're going to bounce from one to the other. That's the, they were all pitching in a moment, all the, I'm not, this is getting inside baseball now. The industry analysts, they go, all the events, they get, they come in, they get wind and dine and they get briefed and they're all pissed off because they have to flat out both events. And so they, they sneak out of one to go to the other because they don't look like they're favoring one and the other, but they don't do a good job because they can't get the coverage. But this is, this is why I think it's interesting to see the vendors and Databricks. It's kind of a sub-subplot story, the overall big whales fighting it out. But Databricks counter-programming directly head-to-head against Snowflake, forcing people to make a decision. That's interesting. And you're going to see the people to make a decision and play it down the middle. Now good news, you and I are both data analysts. So we're going to be at both. You can cover Snowflake, I'll cover Databricks. And we'll meet after and roll out probably what, 100 videos? Yeah, we will. And what I want to do, I mean, we've been on this, I mean, almost we've been on big data since, you know, 2010 that we're the Q, one of the domains it started in. What I want to do, and we've been leading up to, I mean, it's post Snowflake and Databricks last year. We crushed it, I think post AWS re-invent and then leading up to Snowflake and Databricks this year, we've been really hitting hard. Starting with March or the Databricks post, we did a Snowflake post, we did the Uber post, we're going to unpack what we do next week. And then, what I'd love to do, John, is have like a little future of data, like take everything we learned this past year and take a checkpoint, like in July checkpoint and say, okay, where are we? And what does the future of data apps look like? And then let's come up with, you know, sort of our model for that. I mean, we've basically got the framework there and let's run these companies through that framework and try to project how it's going to shape. Let's do it. That sounds like a research product right there. I'm so glad we got so much research, Dave. So much research. It's unbelievable, John. Yeah. You know, it's weird. It just came up at Snowflake, came up at HP and also came up at Amazon Reinforce and it came up at MongoDB, the role of the analyst. And because we're so different, the cube with Silicon Angle and Wikibon, we're open source. And I think people are now starting to get this, but they're still banging their head against, well, give it your press, give it your analyst. Like, no, John's an analyst. Some people think I'm an analyst. Some people think you're a reporter and vice versa. And we're all analysts. We all getting the data. That's our job. We are with the cube is, the cube is the data gatherer, all these interviews. Well, you know that site. And we report and we analyze it, but it's all open. It's free. And so people go, we are like, I don't get it. You're not charging. We make money on sponsorships. And, you know, the smart analyst relations teams are getting it. They go, I get it. You're better. You're better and faster and more on point. So this open source content model is going to be booming. I'm going to predict that that's going to be copied by pretty much everyone in the next couple of years. You know that site, AR Insights, which I didn't really know what they were. I mean, it's every now and then you'd see them. I never knew what it was. Well, I looked at their algorithm. Basically, they have a waiting system and they count blogs as 10%. They count research as 60% weight. So I reached out to them and they're like, we publish every week like detailed research. They're like, oh, you know us. So I showed them what a breaking analysis looks like. They go, yeah, yeah, this is research. So we're going to, we're going to recategorize your, your, your blogs. Shoot to number one. And then all of a sudden it's like, I cracked the top 50. I'm like, okay, well, we got to get a, we got to get a, we got to get them to go back in time and count those too. So yeah, I'll be number one. I was advising a CMO the other day about social media and how we're, the digital media model we're doing. And, you know, it's interesting. There's so much change going on in the industry. Even our own industry's impacted the public relations departments and analyst relations departments. They're affected by the new model because an influence is now out there that have such domain expertise, but they're not an analyst or they're people like me that's reporting but free. It doesn't look like an analyst on paper, but moving the market with the analyst kind of picture. So they want to put you in a bucket. But the problem is that analysts get the data and the press people give stories. So for us, we're story centric. We want more stories. So we don't really want to take sides. We want the stories from the public relations team and we want the analyst places data and access to the executives. And it's always been this world of separation. Okay. And I think that's, that's the wrong approach. I think, you know, you start to see unification on platforms. We talk about that with data. The same is happening inside companies where CMOs are merging analyst relations and public relations under one umbrella and letting that leader make these calls on getting the stories to the storytellers that happen to be analysts. So analysts don't do what we do, right? So like we're like the black sheep right now. Well, you know, the inside baseball on this and you know this well is that when you have AR, a lot of companies, AR and PR and they're just two stovepipes. And if you're a journalist, you're an AR and if you're an analyst, you're in PR but they don't know what to do with guys like us and others, but as you know, that 70% of the AR team's time is spent trying to get in the upper right of the magic quadrant, right? They spend all the time with Gartner and the other 30% of that, they spend half their time dealing with IDC numbers because they gotta show the numbers and IDC does a good job there. A little bit of Forrester or maybe some of the other, you know, tier two firms. And then everybody else is left fighting for that 15%. So the way you have to participate in that is you have to do more than just conventional research. If you're trying to just copy Gartner and do your own version of a magic quadrant or a Forrester wave or IDC market scape you can do that, but you're not gonna get their attention. You have to get their attention in other ways. And the way you do that is through social media, you do videos and the like. And so that makes people's head explode because they don't know what to do with you. Well, are you PR, are you AR and they just go, oh, forget it. It's worse than that too when you add in the event teams. And the other thing that's going on, that's the negative trend. I'm seeing some companies revert to this is the events have lost their focus. They become money-making profit centers. And the goal of an event is about the content and the people who drive the content. That's the comms team, the analysts, and the executives who put the content together to communicate to their customers on what their value is. It's a developer conference, it's a user conference, it's a customer conference. The goal is to get the product of content into the people who show up, which are customers to help the business move forward, not to make money. And so you're seeing event teams like get so focused on monetization that they're actually taking their eye off the ball and screwing their own customers over and partners. So that's another one. And I've seen events where PR people are completely blocked by the events team. And oh, you're just a stakeholder and that's bad. And you see, so when you start to see that trend, you know the wheels are going to come off the bus with those companies. That's a tell sign of post COVID desperation around money making around events. And events were never totally to be a profit center and they'd become them for the big companies. You know, VMware, AWS, IBM, Google, they make money from their events. And if they take that over and make them too profligate at the expense of the customer, then that's not the purpose of the event. The best events started for the practitioners, for the practitioners and by the practitioners. When you think about the original VM worlds, remember those? And it was just all the VMware geeks would get together and they'd share best practice. EMC world was the same way. Service now, the early service now is the first one was actually down in San Diego. And, you know, it was very small and intimate. And then it grows, they grow, they grow, they grow. And you're right, people start making money at these things and the objective of the event shifts. You know, still there's some events, even reinvent, when you think about reinvent John, the original reinvents were, it was really very developer centric. It was a learning conference. It was learning conference. It's kind of become an ecosystem event, which is good in a way, because the ecosystem is so vibrant, but it's sort of lost that core in a way, because it's like the Yogi bearer, nobody goes anymore, it's too crowded. Yeah, or if they don't take care of their customers who are the main players that go to the event to learn and to do business or partners who are jointly partnering with Amazon, it's about the content and the experience, not a gouging situation, right? So, you know, this is where I think events are going to go. And again, this is more of a microcosm of how structural things are changing with cloud and data. Again, media is just like another application, right? So, and we, and that's our little lens here. But speaking of services, by the way, Dave, you mentioned as a service managed service, HPE Discover was very illuminating. Antonio Neary made a bet six years ago, everything as a service. Everyone was laughing at him, not laughing, like metaphorically speaking, they were kind of like, ah, come on, really? We even were somewhat critical, although we thought I had legs, but we didn't think he could pull it off, at least I didn't think, I had to eat my words on that, but HPE definitely succeeded. He never wavered, okay? And the momentum they have is amazing. Amazon, Matt Wood was on stage, AWS, Matt Wood, senior person, was on stage at Antonio Neary. That to me was a very tell sign that HPE has made a good move here. They're partnering with the public cloud to operationalize hybrid cloud as a service. And, you know, you can throw darts at the product evolution, because it's still early days, they're making some moves and they're getting better and better, but directionally, this is a moneymaker. Yeah, so I think- The company's behind it. I mean, this is like amazing. This is- I think that last thing you said is key, the company's behind it because Antonio Neary had to get- And I've talked to him about this, many people have. You know, you have product groups and they want to optimize for the product group and optimize either because they got P&Ls and they got objectives to hit, but doing what's best for that individual P&L might not be what's best for the overall company. So Antonio has had to like get people in a little bit of a headlock and the key has been Aruba. That acquisition, we talked about this on the cube the other day, I said it's a home run, you said, no, Dave, it's like a double grand slam. So they use Aruba Central for- You say grand slam, I said multiple times. Yeah, you say, right, I mean, it was pretty amazing. So, but they use Aruba Central for the console, for Green Lake. They're bringing Aruba IP into the storage business, which I've always said has got to be more profitable. They put Tom Black in charge of the storage business who's an Aruba guy, great guy actually is really interesting getting to know him a little bit. You know, he used to work for Jay Shree. I had dinner with him down in Houston in April and he was telling me, I said, oh, he used to work for Arista. I said, Jay Shree is like a business hero of mine. I love Jay Shree, wow, she's amazing. And he goes, I used to meet at her house every Friday. They would go over, I think he said every Friday and they would, all the engineers would meet and they'd geek out and have a few beers or whatever. And yeah, so he's got that DNA. But it's interesting to see the networking DNA, John. We saw this at Cisco as well with Jonathan Davidson bringing together the cloud platform at Cisco and networking and security coming together. You know, we heard that from HPE Phil Matrim this week. We're going to be talking about that at SuperCloud 3 in July. So yeah, and then the other big news that HPE discovered was LLMs as a service. We just had Rob Streche and Andy Turai in here. We were unpacking that. I think there was a little skepticism there, but I like the play. I mean, they're basically saying, Antonio Neary, he's ballsy. He's saying, I'm not putting my supercomputing IP in the cloud, in the public cloud. I'm going to build my own cloud. I'm going to take a shot. I like that, I like that differentiable strategy. It's a little Oracle-like. Unfortunately, they don't have the software stack and the application stack that Oracle and the database that Oracle has. But for an infrastructure company, they've got to do things to differentiate because unlike Dell, they can't just go volume and just have mega supply chain, right? They've got to have- Just on that point, I talked to, in Mongo I learned, I learned from a source. I won't say their name, but according to sources, there's a development of long tail of power law developing a long tail of clouds. There's now 19 clouds outside the big three emerging. Okay, and I heard this from some of the developers out there saying, hey, you know, I just partnered with Amazon, Google, because, you know, Mongo had partnered with Google. It was a big deal. And I had Google, I had AWS, Google and Microsoft all on theCUBE this week at MongoDB. That's a first, okay, at an event. Okay, Steve Orban, former of AWS, now runs Google migrations. And we had someone from Microsoft on all three hyperscalers. But I learned that there's 19 other clouds. So specialty clouds are emerging. These are super clouds, Dave. This is what we're talking about. And they're super clouds on a standalone category basis, as well as specialty cloud. Well, let's take, let's give some examples. I mean, there's, you've got another hyperscaler in Alibaba, okay, fine, put that China cloud. Oracle's got a legit cloud. And it's kind of the database cloud. You know, IBM is the remnants of IBM. They get like the financial cloud, but to your point, Mongo is building out sort of a super cloud like capability that Snowflake clearly is doing so. You've got the security companies, like a Zscaler. All the S&A. Or, yep, yep, absolutely. And so, and of course, the SaaS players now, are they building their own clouds? I'm not sure. I talk to an insurance company because Mongo does really well insurance companies. You get the travels out there and some other folks who also worked at companies like that were also around. There's kind of a little huddle there. It was kind of like a bunch of about 10 people I was hanging out with, and I asked the question. If you become big in the vertical, don't you think you can service the other, other providers that aren't as good? They're like, absolutely, they talk about that. They actually have conversations that say, if we build on top of AWS, for instance, and become an amazing with MongoDB in insurance, they can then become a service provider to the people who don't make those investments. And the investment isn't in CapEx. It's in OpEx. It's in operating expenses and building that data layer. Okay, because as they get bigger, they get more data, they're driving the value. They see themselves as being a service provider, not as the cloud for all insurance companies, but as it's become a specialty cloud. And we talked about that two reinvents ago, and it's playing out now in AI where it's you have the data, you win. And that's where I think we're starting to see some visibility into the functionality and now the unit economics are starting to roll in. Well, to your point, so Antonio, when I was interviewing him on theCUBE this week, he said, I'd like to think that we're going to be the fourth cloud. And I said, well, of course, Larry Ellis has got something to say to that. But to your point, he basically wants to be the supercomputing cloud. And we were just sort of debating this today, whether their strategy, HPE strategy as merit, I'm sort of more positive on it. I think Andy and Rob were a little bit negative, but for the reasons that you just mentioned, because the data they're saying is, and I agree is all in the cloud, but I'm okay if there's a niche that can be profitable, because the supercomputer data, HPE obviously has access to that. And they could tuck in and get a little niche going there and make money. This is where the big three could compete with each other. I'll give you an example. I should do a post on this or a report, but the power law then a long tail, you remember during the record industry when they started losing, it was like only three providers, it was like a big long straight down there and a long tail in the power line, like straight down, almost a cliff, only a few people at the top. Now you're going to start to see that curve pull out. You're going to start to see the neck and torso develop in that head, neck, torso and tail versus straight down, no neck, no torso, and then just the tail. You saw that in the record industry and then in comes Apple and they blew that up and Spotify and Napster, right? So that the music industry was basically anemic. They had no neck, no tail, only tail, right? Evergreen. So I think in the cloud business, if you start to see these specialty clouds come in, Amazon, if Amazon doesn't go after it, Google will. If I was advising them, they'd be like, I would be watching that space because that's what I think Amazon's actually doing is they're creating this second tier or neck and torso in the power law that's under the hyperscalers functionality and scale, but big enough to be a provider of something. And that's where I think data is going to come in. That's why managed services are so popular because that piece is developing. We'll see. We're watching it. We're starting to see the signs of it, but have not seen anyone pop out of that yet. And I think the Andrew Easton thing pointed at that. Yeah. And I want to. Hugging face. In another good VC post going back to just before we came up with SuperCloud was Jerry Chen's castles in the cloud. And he used the term sub-cloud and that's kind of what you're talking about here as well. We thought super because of above, super Latin for super, Latin for above, not the superlative of super, but there's all these other clouds forming, whether they're sub-clouds or super-clouds or both actually, I think it's a real trend that we identified a couple of years ago actually. And then again, SuperCloud was kind of inspired by Jerry's post. We really started thinking about it. And then of course Fitzy and we had some fun with it. So let's change the subject to, I want to save time for the rant section on Amazon getting sued by the Alina Khan. Intel's in the news, Dave, okay? Just did an announcement to plan 25 billion in Israeli chip manufacturing plan. Some say it's 10 billion on the surface, but up to 25 billion. Two chip fabs in Germany is part of an expanded, you know, Euro, 30 billion Euro investment, okay? Then you got, they sold, or they sold 20% stake in the chip manufacturing technology supply that they had. They got four billion in sales of that. And then the stock dropped, okay? So, you know, you've written, you've talked about it with David Floyer and many other analysts in our team about rebuilding Intel, Foundry versus IDM, Decades of Inefficiencies Unraveled as opposed we did. I think that was something that you guys did a while back. Yeah, so what's the strategy, do you like their moves? I mean, Pat's taking selfies all over the world. Here's the thing, I mean, Intel, they know how to spend money and I guess they have to, do I like their moves? Pat is doing everything possible. If you had said, okay, you, I want you to save Intel and I don't want you to give up Foundry. And so, I think, go back before he made his big announcement that they're sticking with integrated manufacturing but they're also going to make another run at Foundry. What he could have done at that time is said, and he could have said, we're going to spin out Foundry as a separate company and we're going to get that CapEx weight off our shoulders and we're just going to focus on design and we're going to outsource our manufacturing to Intel to help them get going with Foundry and we're going to outsource the TSM and Samsung, et cetera. Rather than do that, he said, no, we're going to go, we're going to stay with the vertically integrated approach but we're going to manufacture other people's designs and that's been, you know, slowly get off the ground and the problem is that, you know, SarbG tweeted about this is investors don't like uncertainty. They also don't like when you're spending a ton of cash and you could go bankrupt, I mean, that's not good. So I think Pat's doing everything humanly possible and it's good for the country if we can pull it off but I still think their problem remains, they don't have the economies of the other Foundries, Samsung in particular, TSM in particular, but also Samsung. So I think their best hope is to be a distant third in terms of Foundry. So I'm not optimistic in the near term. I mean, I think it's going to take a long, long, long, long time. Crawford, did you see the tweet that SarbG did? Crawford, he's so creative, SarbG. He took a conversation in Twitter and then he applied it in a graphic of Crawford giving a speech. Crawford DelPret, the president of IDC should really be called the CEO because that's what he does, but basically saying don't confuse basically clear vision with a short-term path, something along those lines. And I think that was a really good impression quote because basically Pat is absolutely right on. He sees the vision clearly, but the path to get there is a long, long ways off. So, have you seen the Arnold special on Netflix? I haven't seen it, but I saw little highlights of it where he visualizes becoming the weightlifting or the bodybuilding champions. Or he visualizes becoming a star actor. He visualizes becoming a governor. So maybe Pat's just going to manifest it with his vision, but it's a long ways off. I mean, you've got to make moves. That's a good sign, but it goes to show you that a lot of things we were reporting and others were that they have a lot of troubles and they're flat-footed. And this is what happens when you have shifts in markets, right? So, Intel should take its own advice. The paranoid, only the paranoid survive. And I think you're right, Gelsinger's got a will that's got an Andy Grove style. I've always said it, but Intel has this machinery that's built out over the past two decades of just, I won't say mediocrity, but like just chugging along. Same old, same old, Groundhog's Day. Same, wake up, do the same thing over again. So, I like the bold move. I like to shake things up. And I think, you know, what past the challenges are internal and people in the Intel, half of people want them to shake things up and the other half don't want to rock the boat. Okay, we know what that means. That means there's a lot of dead wood floating around. But he may have to spin off Foundry at some point. They may have to do that because it's just, it's such a capital intensive business and one that it's going to be really hard for Intel to fund and, you know. E-sicitals too, right, operating cycles. Alright Kal, let's get into the ramp. FTC looks for a win in small places. That's the headline topic. What a joke. FTC sees Amazon over primes, sign up and cancellation interfaces. Okay, Amazon has been up front about everything. I've talked to Jassy about it. I've talked to other people about it in policy world. Amazon's saying, hey, you know, we're simple. We encourage competition, just want to make things go faster and cost less and help consumers, but every FTC wants to go after them. My big issue is this is what they're doing, and I know you have some data on this, so on cancellation. So the so-called alleges, they're hurting people because they lock you into prime and it's hard to unwind or cancel, okay? So that's their credibility on the line. And I think it's a major black eye for her, Lena Kahn and the FTC, that this is all they got. It's terrible, it's an embarrassment. You want to talk about like hiding the ball. Google does this all the time, other services. I've seen 10 million, like how do I get out of this? Or, you know, like service, I put my credit card down. This is just BS and it's just terrible. I mean, by the way, as a consumer, you know, I don't like that either, but to your point, this is what you got. This is it. This is what you're going after. First of all, prime is awesome, okay? And I was at a conference maybe five or six years ago and the speaker, it was like a TED Talk class talk. The guy was great. And he said, hands up if they have Amazon Prime. Everybody put their hands up. He said, do you know that Amazon's algorithms know that you're willing to spend more? So they'll put offers in front of you and you'll end up, because you're a prime account, you'll end up spending more. And because you have a higher taste, whatever. And he said, now knowing that, who wants to cancel their prime account? Nobody, every where your hand went down. Because prime is great. It's a huge consumer benefit. You have same day shipping now. You order at like 7 a.m. And you get the thing in the evening. It's unbelievable. I mean, Amazon has changed our lives in a good way for consumers. And yet the FTC, they want to go after them and shut them down. It's just so stupid. Did you do a little spot check on the cancellation legitimacy? Yeah, it took me six clicks. Six clicks. Take us through that. I mean, assume you're a Luddite. Assume you're someone like, okay. Okay, so what you do? Go to your Amazon account. And they were saying, oh, it's really hard to do on mobile. And I'm like, well, okay, well, let's see. I'm gonna go to my account. So I go to my account and then I go down and I go, oh, manage prime membership. Okay, so I go manage my prime membership. Manage that and scroll down. And there it is. And it's like cancel my membership. Okay, I mean, it's like six clicks. And then yeah, there's some choices there. You sure you want to go? On my account, I scroll down, Mike, I hit your account. There it is, one click. Yeah, I mean, it's like, manage your membership, end your membership, end the membership. And it's like, it's like, okay, done. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. You do gotta hunt and peck for it, but it's a menu, it's not hiding the ball. Well, but they're basically saying you, okay, end the membership. And what the FTC is objecting is they're saying, wait, you know, hey, before you go, you got all this time, because you pay to use your benefit, do you still want to cancel? Yeah, I still want to cancel. Are you sure you want to cancel? Yes, I'm sure I want to cancel. I mean, it's not that difficult to cancel. Maybe it's a little bit annoying. If you really want to cancel. I mean, I'm in on three clicks. Yeah, right. I mean, it's- Fourth click is check a box, and no, not even, end membership. That's four clicks. Yeah, and they just want to make sure that's how I went through it. I don't want to cancel it. And then they do have a little remind me later. You sure you want it? Well, you want some time to think about it? What's wrong with that? You know, it's like, actually, I mean, I don't know, like I said, like you said, this is the best they got going after Amazon really? Yeah. I mean, it's dumb. And then the point I'm, Alina Khan has completely changed the mindset. It's like her dogma injected into how she wants to see these companies run, not whether or not it really hurts consumers. Does that really hurt consumers? Has Prime hurt consumers? No! Free shipping, two-day shipping, free two-day shipping. Has that hurt consumers? It creates barriers to entry. My argument, again, first of all, I agree, I like Prime. My argument would be, if I was going to put my intellectual hat on, would be that there is an argument from one side of the coin that says Amazon's continued growth becomes a monster, okay? Becomes so hard to compete against that that the barriers to entry that market is too high because of their success. Okay, so this is again, we've ranted about that you become too successful they want to take you down. That's what's happening here. And, you know, that's a function of capitalism. And I think this is an interesting point because, you know, as they get bigger, okay, it's harder to get in. Okay, let's leave it there. Let's assume that that's the argument, which I don't agree with, by the way. Look at what we were just talking about with Intel. They were a company that was untouchable two decades ago, Dave. Yeah. Okay, untouchable. Market share, great processors, industry standards. Look at them now. They're flat footed on their heels. Okay. Restructuring. So, big can be toppled. More rants. So, the history of antitrust in this country with tech has been a joke. Okay, I'm just going to say it. And again, Lena Kahn, she gets up, she does her revisionist history and talks about how it was they who moderated Microsoft. No, it wasn't. I mean, yeah, they were there and IBM and how they affected IBM and so that others could build applications. Okay, you know, some of that is true. I don't want to legally dismiss that. But the real factor in moderating these companies was self-inflicted wounds crossing the chasm issues. And so in the case of Amazon, they've got way more challenges than in my opinion, than the FTC. I think the FTC is just, if they break the law, you got to go after them. I totally agree with that. But they will figure out a way like every company always does to miss something. You have a blind spot. You and I disagree on this. Again, it's the end of the podcast, we're going to go for another. What do we disagree on? The self-inflicted wounds. Microsoft in particular, they had self-inflicted wounds because of the FTC. Okay, so let me explain. I disagree. Let me explain. I do disagree. Yeah, you're right, we disagree. We disagree. Well, you're just making all these assumptions and hand waving. But let me just go, I do agree with you. There, it's a joke. But here's the problem with the joke. It's just, it's like pulling you over every single time you just go over 55 miles an hour and everyone's going 80, okay? You get to get dragged down and you're distracted. So these companies definitely were affected. I remember when Bill Gates got the news, I was at a conference when they did it and his minions went there. He never did a public appearance after that for a long, long time. I can't recall after 1997 when they filed that, Janet Reno, I remember that vividly. Bill Gates used to be out in the public all the time doing talks. He didn't do it anymore. And then search came. Yeah, they had MSN, they had some search and other things. They missed it because they were distracted. I'm not saying, you call that self-inflicted. That's just, you get pulled over too many times. You're on the side of the road, everyone's passing you. And I think that's the effect that this is. It's got no teeth. And so what they do is they make it inconvenience. They create a drag on the company so that those wounds that are inflicted are inflicted because they're handcuffed. There's a lot more distractions, a lot more focus on it. You better just pay in the pen it's up front and then it's taking the medicine and moving on. You know, so that's the angle because they don't, this is just another joke, right? So again, what's it going to do? Andy's got to deal with it. Andy Jackson, the CEO's got to get briefings. He's got to defend it. I guess I would say there's, one of the unintended consequences. So, I don't disagree with you. You're right that there is a distraction there and it certainly doesn't help the company's focus. But we know IBM lost its monopoly because it handed it over to Microsoft and Intel. That was by far the bigger factor rather than- That was self-inflicted. And that was self-inflicted. They were past the FTC there in the DOJ, right? They were already- Right, but you could, but Lena Kahn would argue that they moderated IBM back in the day and that was true. They did to a certain extent. The DOJ actually wasn't the FTC, I don't think. But then the AT&T, the breakup of AT&T, what did that do? It made the US telecommunications business less competitive for a long, long time. Most of some people argue it's still less competitive. And Bell Labs was sold. Bell Labs is owned by Nokia now, okay? It installs a landline right now. Do you know anyone that still has a landline? I think half the population doesn't even know the word landline means. Well, but during the pandemic, a lot of people were using landlines though. Were they? Yeah, they were. For what? Fax machines? Fax machines. But Microsoft, I would argue that Bomber was a Windows hugger that he wanted to put Windows. I remember Microsoft wanted to put Windows on their phone, right? And the thing was bloated. The Windows was bloated. And it wasn't until Sacha came in, Microsoft was largely irrelevant for 10 years. Nobody cared what they did or said. Now look at them. We have a legit rant and it comes up all the time. It's a pattern. We need better leadership in government around tech for sure. There needs to be a coalition of some sort of Koretsu, some sort of group that gets together should talk about this to have a doctrine that's real, have some real understanding of a systems thinking mindset impact to the ecosystem, understand how tech works because it does affect all people now. It's not like the industry. And we usually talk about this at MongoDB. We did it on our last podcast too. Open source is now an industry. It's not like just an area, a community. So same with tech, it affects everyone in the world. The standards to me should be, is the company breaking the law, okay? Versus, like you say, driving 70 and a 55, like what Amazon is being accused of doing. So are they breaking the law and are consumers being hurt? You know, is there price fixing? Is there bundling? Are consumers being hurt? The new standard is, well, Lina Khan doesn't like it. Consumers might potentially, Microsoft Activision, well, consumers might be possibly potentially hurt by this. Anything Facebook wants to do or Meta wants to do, shut it right down because they're too powerful. Power in and of itself. I mean, look at monopoly power does corrupt. I don't know, I'd say it doesn't. I had a conversation with some people about this one point and you nailed it, which is Amazon is not hurting anyone, but you remember they have a lot of power as a company and people who can wield that power could go down to someone like in the sales organization. As you start getting motivated for money, whether it's chasing an event number or chasing a sales number, you might do things differently or hey, I'm the product manager in e-commerce and I want to sell more at the expense, but no one's looking them and look the other way. So if culture deteriorates where they can't police this, that's when you got to look at the cultures and saying, and there's scuttlebutt around that, especially around cloud. Multi-clouds got traction, mainly because people want to negotiate deals, better deals with Amazon, right? So that's the number one reason when I ask people, why would you go to another cloud? It's because they want to do a licensed negotiation with AWS. But if I zoom out and I look at these big companies, even the social media companies, even Google, right? Which is sucking all our dollars advertising and search. The big picture to me is they've added far more value, far more value for consumers than life without them. I would not want to be without a lot of the tools that we have today, whether it's what Apple invented, being able to use Google Maps or Apple Maps or Waze to get around, it's made things a lot more convenient and I'll, I'm aware, I think I'm aware of the privacy concerns but I make that trade off as a consumer. I feel like I'm smart enough to make that. I don't need the government protecting me in that realm. That's how I feel about it. Well, let's move on. We're going to close this down. Dave, it's been a long week. I know you're super tired of the red eye. I just got in from New York. We got the time zone on the other side. Dave's sleeping on the plane a little bit, but yeah, weekend's here. Let's recharge. Next week is massive. We got the data titans going at it. Databricks and Snowflake, that's going to be fun to watch. We comment at the top of the pod about that. You get MongoDB now rising quickly, as that third data platform player, a little bit different than the others, but definitely nailing developers. And it's open source. I like those three, and you got everybody else in the hyperscale is with it. So we got that. And then we got SuperCloud on the 18th. We got people putting in sessions, requests to do sessions, Dave. And we're going to come out with a new logo that people want to put on a badge on their site. So let's keep our eye on the ball there. We got a lot going on. We're going to be burnt out. Let's get our pod next week. Don't blow that one. You're going to be tired. I know. I blew this one. Well, we just, we got to reschedule it, right? We got to do it earlier. So it's cool. I'll be ready. We're going to get together. Maybe you want to join us. I think George is going to join us. Stretch A, maybe Andy. Just to do a data week, Databricks, Snowflake, eBrief, Friday. Next Friday. Let's do a little, we should do a Twitter Spaces. Yeah, well, I want to do a breaking analysis. All right, Dave, signing off, Episode 17. If you like the pods, share it with your friends. Again, we're just getting our group swing and bringing a lot of more cube into the conversation because that's what we're doing a lot of these days. But the stories are hitting in the industry. Enterprise Tech is hot, AI is booming. We're going to continue to look at the stories, share that with you what we're thinking about and lay down the commentary and opinion. Of course, unfiltered here in the cube pod. So thanks for listening.