 Hi, this is your host, Vikram Parthian. We are back with our yearly prediction series. And today we have with us, Michael Cliff, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai. Michael, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Of course, I'm going to ask you to pick up your crystal ball and share your predictions with us. But before that, just quickly tell our viewers what is Akamai all about. Akamai is all about, you know, I think a platform for delivering compute security, content delivery, you know, obviously we've been well known for content delivery over 25 years, but, you know, we've added security to that portfolio and now computing all underpinned by, you know, arguably the world's largest network, private network. So, yeah, we're looking to continue in all those areas. Excellent. Now it's time for you to grab your crystal ball and share your predictions with us. The cloud's going to end up looking more like the original engineette, you know, kind of returning to its open and distributed kind of roots, you know? And I think it's interesting that over the, you know, every 20 years or so, you tend to have this shift from distributed to centralized, distributed to centralized. And when you look at where we're at now with the cloud, we've essentially gone back to a centralized kind of model, you know? And I think that move forward from here, we're going to start to go back towards more of a distributed model. And we're already starting to see shifts in the market around that. And that's where I think, you know, Akamai's pretty well positioned because we've always been distributed. That's always been a core tenant of who we are and what we are. And we're starting to see that with the hyperscalers also starting to move in that direction as well. So I think that's an area we'll continue to see shifts in. And then related to that, you know, I think the network will start to become, you know, more of an important thing again, you know, that return to the network fundamentals of how we connect things. And as workloads move out to the edge, the importance of the network that that underpinning factor, I think will become, you know, more important also, you know, even in AWS's recent re-invent conference they talked about, you know, them starting to invest in a network. We know that very, very well here at Akamai because that's again something we've built over 25 years. You know, one of the world's largest private networks in the world where we run, you know, a lot of traffic across that, you know, whether that's, you know, the high profile events and, you know, a lot of different services run across that network. You know, that connection from the edge through to core compute regions, you know, you can really only enable a distributed cloud with a distributed network. And I think that point on the network, I think is going to become important as we move forward from here. Lastly, I think AI, I mean, what would be a conversation without talking about AI, right? You know, everyone's excited about the potential for it, but I think it's going to follow the same path as the cloud, you know, and frankly with every technology that is, everyone's going to be excited about it. And then they're going to question, well, what can I actually do with this thing? You know, and then there's going to be scrutiny on the cost of it, the ROI of it. And I think that last piece is very important because while everyone's excited about using GPUs to build models, the challenge is going to be on how you execute on it. And that's where I think we're starting to already see the industry go, well, how am I going to execute that? You know, GPU is very expensive to run on. So, you know, what other chipsets can actually run the models on, you know, when you think of inferencing, you know, how do I execute on that? So, different chipsets I think will be explored, even CPU running those models, even on CPU will be explored just to get the cost down. Like, you know, contrasting a model development, which obviously sits on GPU and, you know, is best placed on GPU, the execution of it, I think is going to be the interesting factor of how do you drive that cost down? And that's something I think companies are going to look to producing the cost down. Thanks for sharing those predictions. What challenges do you see are going to be there, not just for the larger ecosystem, for users, and even from the perspective of Akamai to kind of address and deal with? I think customers keep telling us that, you know, just cost is still going to be an issue for them through 2024, like how they continue to contain their costs, you know, and that's something that we've continued to help provide customers solutions on, you know, that's what we're doing. We're certainly with our computing platform as we offer customers that ability to cut those costs with the power of the network that we have, you know, we're well placed to do that, you know, cutting the egress costs, cutting the compute costs quite significantly. And that's, you know, something that customers are coming to us looking for solutions on. So expect, I think expect focus there that companies are going to continue to cut those costs. I think just from a security lens also, you know, computing aside, you know, a lot of businesses are protecting the front door of their, you know, applications and APIs from, you know, bots, abuse and fraud, you know, malicious actors, or wasp top 10 type of attacks. But what do you do when someone gets behind the front door? And that's something I think customers are struggling to, you know, protect themselves from, you know, when you think of ransomware, you know, what happens when the ransomware gets inside your environment then just starts to spread. And so, you know, firstly, just looking behaviorally what's happening with that connection into the API. That's the solutions I think, you know, the market's starting to look towards like, you know, what happens when someone gets in behind my front door? And then how do I segment my network in a way that prevents the spread of things like malware, you know, prevents malicious actors traversing the network. You know, whether that's your enterprise network or even with inside a cloud environment, inside a, you know, a cloud platform, how do you prevent the spread with inside that network? And how do you make sure that you're understanding it? Is someone accessing an API in a way that they're getting behind that front door but then still doing bad things? And so those are solutions I think customers are starting to look towards and that's their areas that Akamai is definitely invested in to solve, so. What is going to be the focus of the company in 24? Yeah, I think, you know, all of those areas that I talked about are especially relevant areas, you know, from a computing point of view, you know, yeah, look, obviously cost is an area that companies are looking to tighten belts on, but customer experiences is an area that still is going to be an area that the companies invest in, you know. How do I reduce the latency of my experiences that I'm delivering to customers, whether that's in gaming technology, you know, like gamers want much better experiences, they hate latency, so, you know, online gaming is a great example of that e-commerce and shopping experiences, you know, do you know that if a person experiences more than six seconds of latency, they'll abandon the app or the website, so, you know, e-commerce in particular is looking for solutions that help make sure that their applications stay responsive and so that's an area that I think even in e-commerce is still a pain point, media and entertainment still streaming, you know, jitters and has latency problems and, you know, so I think those are all areas that Akamai's helping with and security still top of mind still such a big issue for organizations mitigating risk, making sure that their customers stay protected, making sure that their businesses, you know, stay up, you know, all of those areas I think in 2024 all still be top of mind areas. AI, the use of AI is going to be something that customers take a good hard look at and then just identify what use cases that they're looking to solve in those environments, you know, aside from just gen AI and some of the hot topic areas, like what else can I use AI for that could help accelerate my business or deliver better customer experiences also? I think those will be hot areas in 2024 for sure. Michael, thank you so much for setting your prediction with us. Of course, I would love to have you next year, not only to check how many of your predictions turn out to be true and also get next set of predictions. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time.