 Welcome to the Cube Pod episode 44. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We are in the Boston studio out in Mobileboro, Massachusetts. Dave, I'm here for two weeks, Boston and going to New York for the 11th annual IPO summit, the New York Stock Exchange. I'm going to do a lot of other meetings in New York with the Cube communities, kind of the Cube on the road. And then we're looking at going to North Carolina, LA, Miami, all kinds of cool things I'm looking at doing, but neither here nor there, Cube Pod. Great to see you in person. Boston to see you in the East Coast. Hope you brought your sweater, your ski jacket. Trying to go to Celtic's Game, UNC's in town, playing Boston College, so my daughter's in town, so we'll have a good time there, but all good. I mean, again, I love coming to Boston even in the winter. It reminds me of how cold it was, and it makes me like California even more. Oh, the taxes are a little high. I love the winter. All your taxes in California. It's got a good snow storm a couple of weeks ago. Got out in the skis. It was good. Well, I mean, it's huge storms in California. The waves have been huge, and there's an avalanche in Squat Valley now called Palisades. I still call it Squat Valley, but it's just a weird weather time, but again, like the weather, tech is weird too. Again, 2024 is getting stronger every minute. We're starting to see the momentum post holidays. Everyone's got their happy new years out of the way. Plans are starting to go on. The sales kickoffs are going on. We're hearing from all the top vendors and practitioners kind of how they lay out their plans for the year. And it's clear to me, Dave, that the events are starting to line up, and there's clearly some patterns emerging. I want to get your thoughts. One is events are back, but they're hybrid and digital. We've been, that's not new. But what's interesting is that everybody's refreshing with a real AI store. They're really going deep into their strategy to unpack what is their best narrative and posture for the future AI waves. So you start to see last year is kind of the setup year for, OK, wake up call. AI is the legit and the tech elite conversation besides the responsibility of AI is, OK, let it rain. Let the chaos rain, rain in the chaos. Julie Sweet was on stage at a big panel. She said, I've been doing this for 15 years. And then it really kicked in in 2015. Every year she's been adding technology and removing jobs and creating more productivity. Gen AI is just more powerful. Well, I gotta say, so during the pandemic, and I've reported on this for years and years, AI was always at the top of the spending momentum. It's not like every company says, we've been doing AI for a long, long time. And actually, it's true from the practitioner standpoint. They weren't doing Gen AI, but they were doing AI. And so I think you're right. I think a lot of these companies are going to be trying to figure out, OK, what's our stack look like? We saw the AWS AI stack. I think when you think about companies like IBM, Oracle, obviously HPEs got a story, Dell's got a story. They've all got to have a story. Going to have a story and has a story. They're putting that together. And so I think a lot of these big companies are going to have a pretty strong message around AI. The big question, John, is 2024 going to be the year of AI ROI? I'm not convinced. It's going to be the AI. I think the 2024 is going to be the year of AI deployment where you're going to see people deploy AI and start to get rationalizing their product portfolios and getting into the unit economics where the economics will kick in for their business. And again, back to Julie's sweet comments, AI is just more powerful. Tech innovation has been going on. The people who have been doing that and have the data architectures will win. We said that on theCUBE. Now, Gen AI is more powerful. As she said, the ball will move down the field faster with AI right now. And Gen AI just moves the ball faster down the field. It's like football, Dave, that invented the forward pass. OK, they can move the things down. But to me, the big aha moment this month for me in all the conversations on AI was that AI literacy and tech literacy is going to increase. You're going to start to see the impact of the average consumer where the apps or whatever they're working on in their jobs or their life, AI will have an impact. And I think that's going to force businesses to make sure that their customers, the people using technology have literacy. And I think that's a great point of where productivity crosses over into full acceptance. And as you see that progression, that's what's going to start to happen. When you start to see digital literacy become the core value proposition, people are just going to be using the tools. Now, the younger generation, they're born digital natives. But as they come into the workforce, they're going to do things completely different than what we did. So I think that's key. And the vendors are all lining up. Even Facebook, big in the news, just recently saying they're going to have Gen AI, I mean, AGI. And they're just buying up all the GPUs. So Facebook is a total dark horse. We've been saying it on the Kube bus. It's not new to us, but I mean, Facebook has got the open vibe. They were open sourcing stuff early with Lama. And I'm telling you, Facebook is going to pivot. And we've said this before, they are doing it. Pivoting to AI, not the metaverse. Metaverse will be a participant and get rewarded for that. But that's not going to be the item that flips the bit. In my mind, Facebook is all about AI right now. Let me share some data with you. I'm going to go back three or four points ago when you were talking about AI and productivity. And we were talking about, all right, if you go back a year from now and you ask those customers that said they were going to decrease their spending for the year, you ask them, how are you decreasing spending? The number one method a year ago was to consolidate redundant vendors. So you had companies like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscaler consolidating security tools. Today, the number one response is no longer consolidating redundant vendors. That's way down the list. I think they've squeezed a lot of the juice out of that limit. The number one response is reducing staff. Now, I don't have data that necessarily suggests it's causing effect, i.e. AI is enabling companies to reduce that staff. So that's either aspirational or they think they're going to be able to reduce staff because of AI or it's actually happening. And I believe it's actually happening. I think people are saying, hey, we can cut whatever, X% of our staff, we've seen that a lot of the big tech companies and we're going to drive AI into our organization to make up for that. So I think to your earlier point, I think there are going to be a lot of deployments this year. I think there have to be a lot of deployments this year and it's going to impact, I hope, IT spending. IT spending forecast are very back loaded this year. And we can talk about that if you have any back load in terms of what they're buying like at GPUs or is it all across the board. If you look at practitioners and what they expect to spend IT decision makers, they're saying last year we came in, let's call it three and a half percent. And they're saying this year we expect to grow, let's call it four and a half percent. But if you look at Q1 and Q2 2024, it's well, well below that. It's like two, three percent. And so the growth, if they're going to hit four and a half percent is going to come in the second half. Alan Cullen came into Palo Alto just a few days ago on theCUBE and he talked about this one point. IT operations may be completely run by machines in the future very quickly. Does that mean you're not going to spend more? I think that means that the spend shifts. So I think the IT spending data, I would just, I'm suspect of not being fully in the weeds on it, but my first reaction to your comment was like, okay, if it drops, where's this rising somewhere else? So take that premise of AI operations. I mean, if you're in IT right now, you're looking down the barrel of a shotgun or you're riding the tailwind. Okay, so the bad scenario for IT right now is, oh my God, my company wants me to do all this AI and cloud native at scale. And I got LLM models, I'm changing everything. And I can't spell platform engineering. Okay, so you got an IQ problem, you got a skills gap problem where you have IT practice who have been racking and stacking, operating infrastructure, whether it's a VMware operation or whatever. Yeah, they're advanced, they're running IT. They're not that sophisticated. Cloud's getting more complex, Dave. So it's an end with the edge around the corner, running operations in production with cloud native is not going to be trivial. Platform engineers level whatever, say level three, it's just called one, two, three levels, level three, the highest. You can't find those people. So machines will have to run that. So whoever can abstract away the complexity of clouds. Okay, and now I know there's some startups we're talking to that are doing this. And that's why I brought this up is that I think you're going to see IT boom. And my prediction is that the IT operation of yesterday and today that were fluent in operating infrastructure going to move from being kind of like beaten down and grinding to actually heroes. And I think what I mean by that is a level one IT guy can be level three with AI. And I think that's going to be the magic whoever comes out with that capability. It's not just co-pilot and running AI like Microsoft saying, it's like we're talking about game changing infrastructure management, like platform engineering being operated by someone who's skilled enough in IT. That's where I think the transfer is going to be. That's going to be key. And someone has to build that technology. I just don't see it yet from the big guys. So we have a lot of history on this. If you think about the whole wrap of cloud was remove undifferentiated heavy lifting. And it really just basically attacked wasted labor like, hey, I'm deploying a server or I'm deploying storage or I'm managing Luns. Did that compress IT spending? No, it was just the opposite. It fueled innovation. And so I think the same thing is going to happen here to your point. History shows that IT is elastic. It's an elastic resource. If it costs less, people are going to spend more. IT is always, technology has always been deflationary. So if you spend more, you're going to lower costs and that's going to open up new innovation. It's IT is never going away. Dave, imagine that someone said IT is crashing. What does that even mean? You can't run a business unless you have technology. So you need information technology. It's just going to look different. That's my point. I think it's going to boom. I think IT is going to shift and grow in an area that's not seen by people today. I think you're going to have the same people evolve their skillset and be more powerful, just like the network guys in the early days of the internet. They had the keys to the kingdom, an IT built around networks, then you had servers, then you have, it's just got bigger and bigger. The sprawl happened and it got more complex. But the productivity of IT, if you say IT has to be more productive, ask that question, you go, okay, it's clearly going to be operational, scalable, and deal with the complexity. How do you take platform engineering, put it into an abstraction layer, and create a new operating system that runs on AI? Every single thing is AI and data. You mentioned industries being impacted. Every industry's impacted. We're going to be at Mobile World Congress next month, okay, in a few weeks. That's not a telecom show anymore. That's a cloud AI show. Everything will turn into a cloud AI show, in my opinion. So I think Mobile World Congress, telecom, it's not a telecom show anymore. Oh, telecom just happens to be the industry. It isn't everything shows here, you're right. It's a cloud AI show. Just like Davos is a cloud AI show, RSA will be a cloud AI show. It's just every vertical is impacted by AI. It's incredible of what's happening. And all the bigger companies are already reorganizing around industry verticals, and that's where the data. And we said that years ago, Dave, horizontally scalable cloud means vertically specialized applications. That's a data problem. That's where the bit will be flipped. We've been saying it for years, and again, WC, oh, happens to be telecom. It's really AI. And what tends to happen, we've actually not tens, it almost always happens when you have a new wave like this. You're seeing it in private markets. Valuations for these private companies that are AI companies go to the roof. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropoc, Vast, these AI companies that get multi-billion dollar valuations, the problem for the market is that the rest of the market is so huge. And the new market's not big enough to offset the shift and the decline. We've seen it time and time and time again. It was somewhat muted in the last cloud wave because we were coming out of the 2007, 2008 downturn. But we definitely always see that. And I think you're seeing the same thing here. AI spend is depressing some of the other areas, and it'll start to slowly build, and then all of a sudden it'll hit them. A steep part of the S-curve and the entire market will just start booming again. Yeah, Dave, you and I have lived through multiple innovation cycles, and what's interesting is that we've seen the landscape of each one. So let's go back in history a little bit. In every single inflection point, the big players, let's say IBM when they're in their A-day, they had to move, they didn't have a lot of agility. And so they don't, and so the startups could disrupt that market. And they did. You saw personal computers coming in and then the internet disruption there, and some big players hung around. This is on theCUBE many times, but I think we've pointed out on theCUBE and theCUBE Pod, this is a different era. You've got multiple cloud players at scale have impact. And so to me, when we're in a cycle like this, couple of things to observe, and I've been in Silicon Valley now 23 years, great to be here in my hometown of Boston back, but Silicon Valley, it's been historically known and true that in every single down cycle is the best time to start a company. And you start to see that chatter on Twitter, which is true by the way, this is the best time to start a company if you're an entrepreneur, and certainly AI is just a gift for any entrepreneur. In every single downturn, okay, pre-bubble popping in 2008 and now were the rise of the next big brands that came out. And that's the tell sign. So to me, what I'm looking at in Silicon Valley and then in the startup ecosystem, which comprises of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial action and the capital markets, the VCs investing. If you look at those areas right now, you'll see the tail of two halves, the haves and the have nots. The haves are the ones that are in cloud scale with data and AI, looking at white space and looking to take down either incumbent markets, big markets, the have nots of the old SaaS vendors who are struggling to get to the market and or pivot and or the ones that are on the right side of the AI wave and they're going through all kinds of problems just seeing that written up in the press. So there's mixed messages there, okay? What's super interesting on the... So that's the startup scene. You have the have and have nots. So I think the startups on the AI side are booming. We're gonna watch that. The other thing that's interesting right now is the venture capital market and there's some commentary going around the internet around this concept of MANG, M-A-N-G, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia and Google. Last year, they invested eight per... Combined those companies called MANG, they invested 8% of the $200 billion plus in investment. What is it again? Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and Google. Not Apple, Apple doesn't do that kind of investment. Those guys are dumping cash and investing in startups. They're throwing money at everything, mainly A's and B's rounds of funding. So they are the number one VC. If you put that into one group, because they're kind of corporations, they're not traditional VC's, but they have VC arms. They're the number one investor, okay? That's new. So the question that I'm looking at is, what's that mean? What is that impact? It means they're seeing everything. They can move faster. The role of the cloud players might actually impact this startup innovation cycle. And again, I think the startups have to create these new solutions, like I mentioned, platform engineering before and others. The startup community is where the action will be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the big players look at that. And if you look at OpenAI, looking at doing another $10 billion financing, just to build chips, you got Anthropic raising zillions of dollars. It's just incredible, the AI startups, the money that they're getting. The question is, what's the intent? Is there reverse incentive? Are they going to be building? Are the acquisition vehicles? Again, I've never seen this before in the history of my life, this cycle. So the startup innovation world of startups and investment is a real interesting dynamic right now. It's hard to tell, but if that doesn't work, then the big guys will mop up. So I want to go back to something you said before. We have seen a lot of waves. And the PC wave, it became pretty obvious to people like us that the PCs, and used to basically, you were selling printers and do other stuff in the field. So you could see, right in front of you, you could see all these people adopting PCs. And then you had all these companies that people in the audience have probably never even heard of. Deck, DG, Prime, Wang, they all poo-pooed it. Remember, they were like, this is nothing. Okay, and then now, however, when you look at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, you know, HPE, you know, HPE, HPE, that was a challenge, but they made it through the novel, SAP, Dell, EMC, it didn't make it through. Okay, but they lasted a long time. What my point is that today's executive is not so dismissive of these new technologies because they lived through that, many of them, lived through that PC disruption. And then you have Google and AWS. And so then you see new companies emerging, like you mentioned, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, Workday, and we're gonna see some new startups. But it's interesting to me, John, that today's executives are definitely much more abrasive, if that's even a word, embracing of these new waves. Now, you take IBM, for example. IBM, they didn't really miss the cloud. They just missed the cloud because they didn't execute. They knew the cloud was coming and they tried, oh, we're gonna buy software. Okay, but they didn't dismiss the cloud. Oracle was jokingly dismissive, but eventually they got around and got there. They missed the real cloud, which is they didn't have IaaS pass. They tried to come up with blue mix after the fact. HPE also missed the cloud. They also tried to do it and during that OpenStack days. So a lot of people just miss fire. They just tried their reverse engineer. It's like they didn't have any cloud capabilities. They tried to build a product. And I guess what I'm saying is that- They remember AWS, they only got the cloud because they needed it internally. Yeah. And so, but it was very disruptive. It was very disruptive to these companies, but unlike the PC wave that killed all these other companies, literally, the microprocessor revolution killed all those companies that I mentioned before, these companies were able to adapt. And it was not always pretty. I mean, look at HP. That was very, very difficult and painful. You always choked Meg Whitman had to take one for the Silicon Valley team. But today's executive, I think, is much more capable because they have more experience. They want to be a much stronger balance sheets. And the industry is more mature as well. Yeah, Dave, the key thing to your point is scale is everything. So if you're an example about HPE, IBM trying to do cloud is a great one. If you look at Amazon, they basically, and I talked to Andy Jassy about this, how they were a Jason story, they had to service their own internal stakeholders. They said, why don't we just do this for other people? That's why I'm intrigued by Facebook. They're going to buy 350,000 GPUs from Nvidia to build AGI. And I think Facebook built their app, the Facebook, and now Instagram and WhatsApp because they bought all that with the billions of dollars. And then Facebook's just a money machine on their quote, retail. They look a lot like eight Amazon. They have all this infrastructure. Why wouldn't Facebook turn around and be the next AWS for AI? And that's clearly what they're doing. They have the scale, they have the infrastructure. All they got to do is get the developers. And what they're doing with the developers, they're giving them the free candy. Hey, it first hits free. It's a drug dealer model. We know it looks like- Great Sam expansion strategy for Facebook. Google's trying to execute on it. I mean, there's still no evidence. Facebook could take the market on the open. If open AI doesn't secure the lead and put through their growth, Facebook could come in and own through open source because everyone is pointing to, when we said on theCUBE, open always wins. And I think even in Davos and the elite circles, open always wins. Of course, now that we're seeing that, but that's Facebook's play. So can Facebook convert their infrastructure advantage? Well, open is in the eye of the beholder, right? You remember the Unix used to be open systems. Unix was synonymous with open systems. Well, Unix drove Linux, which became an appropriate place. So they create verse engineered Unix. And then drove, look at the bottom. Here's my point. A company like Oracle, joke about Oracle in Sikray. Oracle's thriving. And Oracle will say, we're open. Anybody can lose our database. Oracle's in the performance business. And people need that now. So they're going to grow. The question about open is, take the open as systems interconnect, the OSI model. That created the whole open industry. But with open AI, with AI, what does that even mean to be open? It's all about the developers, Dave. It's the developers. It's Ethernet and Infiniband. You're post the screen. Ethernet is going to kill Infiniband because it's open ecosystem. And the performance is saying, well, maybe not so fast. As Trembly was on the cube at HPC and the Cube asked him, he talked about the ecosystem and another broad conference that I talked to him specifically about this said, look at the performance on Ethernet is going up, up and up. So it's not like it's not going to be performant. What Infiniband can do is, what Ethernet can do is they have open ecosystem. People are writing to it. So again, Ethernet will win. Plus everybody wants to attack Nvidia. After the wipe. Look at it. But GPU vendors want to attack them. All the CPU and GPU vendors want to attack them. The Ethernet consortium wants to attack them because they're gouging right now. And because they can. You know, because they got the best product. Proprietary Infiniband solutions work in things like AWS. When AWS cobbles together a bunch of Grace Hoppers, which is GPUs to create a bigger system, leverage the power of constraints, that's good architecture. And I think you'll see a lot of that. That's where Infiniband fits. So if you want to get into that side of it, why wouldn't you? Oracle is the same argument. You know, we're going to have Oracle and would that be great Oracle high performance? High performance will win. People want performance. I think that's the big takeaway. But okay, once you have performance, what's next? Open, scale, cross connects, sharing data. If you can't share data across multiple applications via data plane, you're screwed. And so if you don't have networking under the covers, talking to different computer. This is a big argument that people make about Snowflake and Databricks. Oh, Databricks is open and Snowflake is closed. Well, no, Snowflake does iceberg dibs. Companies evolve, I think is my point. And the definition of open evolves. So it's not so binary. Oh, they're open. They're closed. If you've got a closed proprietary architecture, you can get to market faster. You can add more value faster, but then you have to evolve your platform to be more open and more compatible. That's why I like, a lot of people are throwing shade on Broadcom. But I like Broadcom and I'll tell you why. What's throwing shade on Broadcom? All of you, all Broadcoms could lay off all these people with VMware on there. They're doing exactly what they said they were gonna do. They're so big. Hold on, let me finish my point. Let me finish my point. Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE told us we brought the proprietary open up with Pat. No one cares what's in the Intel chip. And so there's a lot of proprietary code in there, but it runs on a open system, a PC. That's the analogy. Broadcom has a chip business and they have a software business. VMware is a software part of their business. And what I like about Broadcom is they're looking at their system architecture and they're just innovating faster than faster. And so if I'm a competitor to the Broadcom, I gotta meet the speed of technical innovation on the semi side, on the chip side, okay? And that's hard to do because Broadcom changes the game the next quarter or a year with new stuff. And it goes faster and it's less expensive. You add software to the thing, you got chip to app. And what VMware, Symantec, and all those acquisitions on the software side do for Broadcom is it gives them more software in the stack. So I think Broadcom will be a formidable player in that chip to app area. So we talk about SuperCloud all the time, which is horizontal scale, SuperChips, SuperCloud, SuperMiddleware, SuperApps. So let's look at, let's look at, let's talk TAM expansion for a second. And he brought up Pat, Pat was running VMware. VMware was basically virtual servers. What'd they do? They developed VSAN in-house. Our friend, Kumar Srikanti was, you know, led that team actually. Anyway, we got VSAN. We're gonna buy NYSERA because we're gonna get into the networking business. We're gonna buy end user computing. What was the name of the company Sanjay Poonan came from? We're gonna buy Supreme. Air watch, air watch. So he bought all these. We're gonna buy Carbon Black to get, you know, deeper into security or endpoint. So we'd buy all these other sectors. And that was part of the TAM expansion strategy, which a big part of any CEO's job is expand the TAM. What is Hoctan doing? Because I got a different TAM expansion strategy. We're gonna really narrow down the focus on the core. We're gonna put everything in that core. And we're gonna charge you for that core. So use it. We're gonna charge for it. You're basically tied in to VMware. You're running your whole operation on VMware. You're not gonna go anywhere. So you might as well use all this stuff, all this value. And we, for our part, Broadcom, VMware, we're gonna innovate and put engineering in that, but it's gonna be focused engineering. We're not gonna chase all these other markets because from his standpoint, they're not profitable. But that's how he's approaching this. And he's doing exactly what he told Wall Street he was gonna do. It's also different from the semis in the sense of, it's similar and different than the semi-business, which is they just do innovation on the tech side. They don't really do any outbound marketing. Software is different. Obviously you have to have the tech innovation, but VMware is a, I won't say one trick pony because it's not, it has other things, but it's vSphere. And so they have all this other stuff. A lot of people don't understand what's going on there and we've said on theCUBE, I'll just say it again. This is what VMware is doing with Broadcom. But Broadcom is doing it with VMware. They're simplifying everything. You get VCF, okay, VMware Cloud Foundation. That's everything. vSphere, NSX, vSAN, all those goodies are in that SKU. They have Tanzu and Spring. You buy that, Spring's hot. They got a community and then they got Telco, which is the VCF for Telco. It's a little bit of different version. And then they got security. That's it, that's all they're doing. You can buy one thing. So you bundle everything in and you say, if you don't use it, whatever, it's your fault. And what they do is they're going to market to their base, their install base and saying, you get everything, use it. Here's the benefits of it. So I believe VMware is going to streamline and make it simple for customers, just like Steve Jobs did with the Mac when he said, we got too many SKUs and we're speeds and feeds. Hopped hand and team are going to fund marketing to the customers and saying, here's the benefits of turning things on. And they get paid more when they turn stuff on. So I think the days of buying a $1,500 license for vSphere over, you get everything VCF or you're done. So that's what's happening with VMware. And that's the simple answer. Everything else is noise. Yeah, their cutting stuff looks like it looks bad, but for the customer is simplified, but yet they're going to have to pay more if they're using it. If they want to switch, they switch, they go to Nutanix or whatever. So yeah, or Red Hat or Opusac, but to your point about go-to-market, if you're selling chips, if you're selling chips to a storage engineer at HPE or Dell, okay. Eat it. It's techie to techie, right? Think you had it. The engineers kind of understanding the requirements, qualifying the chips, et cetera. When you're selling software, you got to educate, they've got to educate half a million customers as to how to exploit that software, what the prerequisites are, what they need to do to configure it, how they have to secure it. And so that's a different go-to-market. And I think, I do think it's much different than CA. I mean, I think there are some similarities, but CA is a much smaller, more focused asset than is VMware in terms of its footprint. So I mean, look, it's kind of interesting, John, because I was always a fan of Dell doing a spin-in of VMware. Dell actually, I think could have been the Oracle, it's old history now, but they could have been the Oracle of infrastructure and basically dominated that stack. I mean, imagine if Dell chose to do what Hock Tan's doing with VMware and integrate very tightly into Dell hardware, you know, they could have run the table. I think Michael Dell's still a shareholder of Broadcom now. Did he take shares or cash? I don't know actually what happened in that transaction. I got to look into that, but, of course. He certainly made a ton of cash. But that's why he did it. I mean, he got, he, I mean, why wouldn't you sell the asset? Would you say Michael Dell's execution over the past decade has been very successful? Oh my God, it's been, I would use the term remarkable. Of course, yeah, that's why I teed up the question. But I mean, just so forget about the whatever, 30 or 40 billion that he and Silver Lake were able to take off the table or their other partners. Just forget about that for a second. Just talk strategy for a second. If Dell could have taken that VMware asset, rolled it in and just tied their software to VMware hardware or died VMware software to Dell hardware, they would have had even a bigger advantage than they have. And I think they decided, look, obviously it's too lucrative to turn down. But at the same time, we can compete Dell in a relatively low margin business because we got the supply chain and the volume. But just as an analyst, I would have loved to have seen them apply that Oracle like strategy to infrastructure. Because look what's happened with Oracle right now. Oracle with the hardware and software integration is consistently winning in the market. If you look at the opportunity for the hardware manufacturers like Dell, I think hardware matters, just seeing that clearly we've been reporting on that. The AI, the security, the ability to run compute and GPU and others chips around at the hardware level with software is gonna, I think, reboot the entire device market. And what I mean by that is PCs, wearables, everything at the edge will have intelligence. And so as that happens, that's an opportunity I'd be thinking strategy long-term. If you look at the 20 mile stair out in the future valley of innovation, you go, okay, I want every device to speak AI. I want language out. So if I'm Dell, I'm like, okay, I'll start working on that now. And that's why I think some of the Broadcom stuff is about AI. He's got all the chips all about, how do I make a chipset or a combination of pairing chips with other chips like wine and food? I call that pairing, chip pairing. You either see a new architectural thing come out. We'll say, okay, I'm gonna write an app. I need these chips for it. That's gonna be a hardware game. That's a systems architecture problem. And that's gonna be Dell's opportunities, HPE's opportunity. And then you make that a service layer like Apex for Dell, GreenLake for HPE, that's smart because now they can go in and be cloud native without all the CapEx. They can play in that super cloud world because as the network gets rebuilt and the new platform engineering architectures evolve, you're gonna see AI be a key part of that device. Well, here's the interesting thing to me is I've always looked at AI as a sort of a new workload and it has new infrastructure requirements. But to your earlier point at the beginning of this pod, AI is gonna be infused everywhere. So every workload is gonna be an AI workload. And that's what's really interesting, I think about this shift. Unlike previous transitions where it was kind of a dividing line, right? You got the old workloads, the old general purpose workloads and the new workloads, general purpose workloads are gonna be AI infused, right? And they're gonna have new infrastructure requirements to support them. Now, there's gonna be some workloads that are more AI intensive. Obviously, if you're about building large language models, that's gonna be in training and doing HPC. That's gonna be different than if you're infusing AI into CRM like Einstein or into Workday. But still, those infrastructure requirements are gonna evolve and shift and require a fundamental silicon layer to support that. Maybe the title of this pod should be the future of infrastructure and hardware and software. So I think a lot going on, Dave, and I think just in the last few minutes we got, I mean, to me, you look at what we're doing. I'm seeing a lot more interviews come across the transom of theCUBE. Certainly in the Palo Alto studio, what I'm working on is there's a lot more executives coming in that are CEOs and a lot more VCs are coming on. So what that tells me is, not that they're, you know, it's just, we always have VCs on, but more than ever, there's huge discussions. More VCs are publishing on Twitter and LinkedIn. You're seeing a lot of the capital markets being very vocal around trends. And there's a lot more narratives being injected because I think people see a lot of fake information going out there. So I think a lot more reputable people are publishing. So you're seeing the sub-stack movement increasing, a lot more posts on medium, more guest posts on silicon angles. So I see a lot more VCs coming in. And also executives with Howie Shoe coming in and hosting a panel. We had the former Intel executives, now the CEO of the eight day AI spinout came on theCUBE. A lot more people weighing in on analysts like perspectives. It's very interesting market right now. Well, and we're going to continue that. I mean, I want to do more super clouds. We have a sort of, we got to tap that collective knowledge base. We've always done that, but now it's 2024, we're going to accelerate that. We really tested it last year and it's going to go through the roof. I wanted to talk about TSMC because there's some gamesmanship going on. Can we talk about that? Yeah, great, let's do it. So there are the news. We know about the chips act, the $50 billion chips act, all our money is going to the chips act. And they're basically sprinkling around money for a lot of companies. There's like hundreds of companies lining up to get dough. Of course, we know Intel is TSMC because they're so important in strategic Samsung or building factories in Arizona. But the CEO of TSMC, Mark Lew, I think is how you pronounce his name, basically signaling that, hey, we're not going to bring our most cutting edge technology to Arizona for a while. We're going to push that out. It was, I think, 25 or 26. Now it's 26, 27, 28. And I think he's posturing because he's, what's the leverage? The leverage is these choke points that Chip War talked about, that book, that was so well done. And the choke points are you got EUV with ASML, you've got software companies, like Cadence in the United States, you've got obviously Taiwan, TSMC, you've got Samsung, these are all choke points. So the semiconductor industry is actually not a global industry. There's components of the value chain that are global, but they're choke points, whether it's Netherlands, Silicon Valley, Taiwan, Korea, and you can't successfully execute without each one of those. So there's weakest links in the chain. My point is, now you've got the head of TSMC posturing. Why? Because he wants more money. It's a money grab. It's such an expensive industry. And I feel like it's almost like a rant, John. I feel like they should just give it all to Intel. Let's say, go. Now, they can't do that because Intel's process technology is not as cutting edge and they want that cutting edge technology in the United States for military reasons and to reduce some of those choke points. But maybe if you bet on Intel, and I've always been really skeptical that Intel's ever gonna catch up. But if you put enough money in, maybe they could catch up in 10 years. And so maybe that's a better approach. I don't know. I've been looking at this and thinking about it. Pat Gelsinger's got clear vision on this then. I think he sees that national security opportunity. And by the way, speaking of Intel, they have a new CMO, former McAfee Trellis executive, Brett Hapn, Hannaf, he's in this CMO. Great guy. We know him from those days and all the folks that we work with at Trellis all say he's awesome. So looking forward to seeing what he does there. They get a market, they get a market better. And hopefully he'll do that. But Intel has a chance, Dave. They're not dead yet. So again, I think- No, they're not dead, but I think the monopoly's gone, right? That's really what I've always said. They're not dead. They're not careful, they could go bankrupt. I've said that too. Well, I mean, we're gonna see them at Mobile World Congress. They're gonna be heavy activations there. We're gonna see them in the Olympics in Paris. We're gonna see them all over these big shows. And 5G has to be winning hand for these guys. Gotta win on the 5G side. Again, wireless technology has to be killer. We covered that with the Juniper HPE acquisition last podcast around MIST. And MIST AI, that AI piece made that acquisition happen. Juniper, yeah. So I'm big on wireless. Right now, I think the silicon angle on all the industry is pun intended when we go SiliconANGLE.com for all the action. But silicon is where the action is and the combination of chips, it's not yesterday's constraint, the old motherboard concept of constraint. Constraint now is power and what the distributed computing architecture looks like. Are you using edge? And the combination of chips will become a big design piece. And networking is the other choke point, right? I think the networking piece, SuperCloud doesn't exist without networking, right? The data layer, we're gonna try to build this data layer, have that vertical app specialization with the applications and that's why every industry is doing great. But I see this year at 2024 will be the year of AI and cloud where networking will be redefined. So I like the HP move with Juniper. I think they're investing in the right place. I think that was a good move. I give Cisco a leg up even though Cisco's lowered its earnings forecast, et cetera. Cisco's going to be just fine. Arista, you know, Arista's got AI vision because it's got to justify its $70 plus billion market cap. Yeah, I'd like to see Dell do more in networking, you know? But the market's as interesting as it's ever been. I got to say, it's fun. This is a fun time. Everything's evolving so fast. It's great to have the 13 years perspective and just the reputation of the cube and silicon angle and all the work we've done and the people in our network, the data coming in right now is better than anything I've ever seen in our history working together with the cube. Our community is engaging with data and that's so phenomenal for us to get that extra perspective and prism of analysis. And I'm going to be here in Boston talking a lot of entrepreneurs this week. We're going to work on some stuff for our events this year and our editorial and research agenda. And then next week I'll be in New York meeting with some cube alumni and cube community members where we're putting a little kernel, great group of people in New York reached out and we'll start activating a New York community. Yeah, Mongo's got headquarters down there. So we've got a great base just sitting there. I'm going to go down there. They want to have some fun. We'll have a meet up and go into an event at the NY Stock Exchange on the 1st of February. So great time, Dave. I got to say, you know, where it's cube pod 44, you're breaking analysis on what number you on now from there. Well over 200. Yeah, over 200. Yeah, it's awesome. You look great, John, flying in on the red eye. I'd be red eyed by now. He's like a little nap, so. Great to see you, Dave. That's the wrap for 44 pod. Again, go to SiliconANGLE.com. Check it out. The community's got great traffic coming in, Dave. I found out we have over 2.5 million back links to SiliconANGLE, which means that people are linking to our site. So. 2.5 million. 2.5 million links. So that's a lot of links. We appreciate everyone out there support and see you next time.