 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say with some degree of certainty whether the prediction came true or not with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we aim to do just that with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course super cloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks Snowflake and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend, Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community and thanks for being part of this program again. I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one, Dave. Good to see you. Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the in-bounds that we got from PR firms, starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts and so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide, I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data, if you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps and software, digital transformation got some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it was kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash. So therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask what's your number one spending priority? And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. Going back 10 years ago, that would have been the only thing anyone was talking about. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between 4 and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the Fed is still in control. They're going to ease up. Untightening is the expectation. They're going to shoot for a soft landing, but my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue and it's going to continue to confound whether it's supply chains or spending. The interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this. The largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the U.S. and APEC. Chime in on this, Eric. Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing. We asked 1,525 IT decision makers what their budget growth will be. And they came in at 4.6%. Now, there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500 Global 2000 barely at 2% growth, but small, that's 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a wait and see. And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. Let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. We've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and consolidating redundant vendors, still leads the way. Far behind cloud optimization is second. But cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, the guy's name was Alexander Fiegelstorfer from StoryBlock, sent in a prediction, said all in one becomes extinct. Now generally I would say I disagree with that because as we know over the years, sweets tend to win out over individual point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors. And the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors but also consolidation and functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later. So I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide real quick, if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people right in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes and delaying hardware with three of the top right ends and another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of right in options and I just thought it would be important to state that but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up because I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on? And we don't see it in the numbers. We don't see it even in the other. There was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation even though it might be happening in this mattering. Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you, not one right in. All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, oh, that's a layup but let me set this up, Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid what you've done because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around one trust. But let me just set it up and then have you comment on the slide and give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, 10 to 40%, we saw Sneak do a down round but pretty good actually, only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto networks we think is going to get busy again. They're an acquisitive company. They've been sort of quiet lately. And we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing, we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023. We're probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then your comment to me, Eric, was the RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, crazy this April, but give us your take on this data and why the red circle around one trust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. Sure, there's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the thesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-referenced that with the private tech companies who also are they spending with. So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily gonna go after Sneak, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at one trust with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. Beyond trust as well, authentication, identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now, why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very acquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freezes are gonna last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are gonna open up and some of these private companies are gonna tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not gonna get it. And they're certainly not gonna get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive. And Palo knows this isn't gonna last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to be a really exciting time in security right now. Awesome, thank you, great explanation. All right, let's go on to the next one. Number four relates to security, let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023 now. Again, you might say, oh yeah, that's a layup. A lot of these inbounds that we got are very kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from Eric, your round table, your insights round table, and we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm. Since for me, that's the highest priorities, talking about zero trust, because it's the best ROI. It's the most forward-looking. It enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust because they can accelerate them because they don't have to go through the hurdle of making sure that it's secure. Second comment, it, zero trust, closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? I could be here all day. So I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software defined security with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that. And now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo. This is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software to find aspect. And that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO roundtable, I also had somebody say, listen, Zscaler is incredible. They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, but their pricing's getting a little high. And they actually think Palo Alto is well suited to start taking some of that share if Palo can make one move. Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge to you and me. So I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, did we get it right? Yes or no? If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple of things and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? Luckily that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. Yeah, you know I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about chat GPT. We just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarbjit Johal, our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API, we think going forward you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other foreign language commands. And investors are lining up. All the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to chat GPT. According to Howie's view, $100 million gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from the head of Facebook's AI saying, oh, it's really not that sophisticated chat GPT. It's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, but we've got more advanced technology. We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing, ETR just launched this survey for the February service in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars. We could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of DeepBram. He said, AI is recession proof. I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this to explain this chart for us, if you would. First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one that sentiment and mind share leader in the entire machine learning AI sector within a week. It's beating data. 600 in. It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall already in a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. So one of the reasons I thought Palo might take abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side. And also in the data prep tools, NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is a, to me, this is a no-brainer and we're already seeing it in the data. Yeah, John Furrier called the chat GPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment when we all first saw Netscape navigator and went, wow, it really could be transformative. All right, number six, the cloud expands to super cloud as edge computing accelerates. And Cloudflare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously and cloud, multi-cloud, super cloud and Cloudflare basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. Pulled this quote from Atif Khan, who's the founder and CTO of Alkira. Thanks, one of the in-bounds. Thank you. In 2023, highly distributed IT environments will become more than norm as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge settings. Eric from one of your round tables. If my sources from edge computing are coming from the cloud, that means I have my workloads running in the cloud. There is no one better than Cloudflare. That's a senior director of IT architecture, a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows Cloudflare really growing in pervasion that sort of market presence in the dataset dramatically to near 20% leading. I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January, 2023 thesis which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. Cloudflare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side and also in security. This is the number one leader in SASE, Web Access firewall, DDoS, bot protection. By your definition of super cloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago and I really enjoyed that by the way, Dave, I think Cloudflare is the one that fits your definition best because it's bringing all of these aspects together and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's a, when we look at your definition of super cloud, Cloudflare is the poster child. You know what's interesting about that too is a lot of people are poo-pooing Cloudflare. Ah, it's really kind of not that sophisticated. You don't have as many tools, but to your point, you're going to have those tools in the cloud. Cloudflare is doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And I definitely wanted to watch somebody put them on my radar a while ago and said, Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on Cloudflare. And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them because they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But real quickly, if I can, from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai. And fastly is there really only other direct comp and they're not there. And these guys are in pole position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. I thought one of your comments on your round table I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, Cloudflare from, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant. They said, not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, okay, where would you want to be? Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchain's got a lot of buzz. Obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight round table said, quote, for enterprises to adopt a new technology that have to be proven turnkey solutions. My experience in talking with my peers are, blockchain is still an open source component. We have to build around it. Now, I want to thank Ravi Mehram, who's the CTO of Couchbase, sent in, you know, one of the predictions. He said dev ops will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum, and he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, will be in every dev ops, dev ops pros playbook, mirroring the boom in machine learning. Newer programming languages like Solidity will enter the toolkits of devs, his point there, you know, Solidity for those you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable, Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick and they've been improving that and so forth. But Eric, it's true. It really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts, IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements and others really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to either. So when we did our top trend series, this was basically chosen as an anti prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is. It's a database ledger and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case in a very sophisticated use case and financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft, keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms for analytics, machine learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, they are on a crash course, as you and I have talked about, they're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. There's going to be a big focus, they're already started, it's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats, iceberg, Python, they're all the rage. We heard about iceberg at Snowflake Summit last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT Labs on at SuperCloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, the ETL guys should be shaking their boots with them. Coming back to the slide, Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores it's gone down that right tool for the right job path. David Floyer, two years ago said, AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem. We saw them start to do it at re-invent, bringing together no ETL between Aurora and Redshift and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft is making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take. Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them. And I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually. Azure and AWS are building out functionality or they as good, no, they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of them. So they're basically collecting their toll while these two fight it out with each other and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other a little bit and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot. And now they're really trying to play catch up on that data storage compute spot and inversely for Snowflake. They were killing it with the compute separation from storage. And now they're trying to get into the MLAA spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slutman's been a little bit quiet in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT Labs number one leader in that data integration space. I'm gonna just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing. It's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribble, but DBT Labs is by far the number one player in the space. All right, okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. Automation makes a resurgence in 2023. We're showing again data, the X axis is overlap or presence in the data set and the vertical axis is shared. Net score, net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up into the right. That red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from automation anywhere. They, you know, previous quarters, they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene seen in a big way. They loom large with this good enough approach. I will say this. Somebody sent me results of a Cowan survey which showed UI path actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case. We're seeing ML and AI become embedded and end to end automations. And low code is serving the line of business. And so this we think is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year who want to automate as much as possible. And not necessarily. We've seen a lot of layoffs in tech and people you're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. Yep, agreed. First of that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UI path. That's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers and UI path at around 38%. Now, don't get me wrong, 38% provisions fantastic, but you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UI path looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. And it dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC. Why am I going to pay more for UI path or even take on another separate bill when we know everyone's consolidating vendors if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate. It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough and I really don't want another invoice. Right, so how does UI path in automation anywhere? How do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. They're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost. Microsoft's got that locked up or where the easiest to add. Microsoft basically give it away for free and that's their playbook. So that's up to UI path brought on Rob Enslin. I've interviewed him. A very, very capable individual is now co-CEO. So we kind of bring in that adult supervision in and really tightening up the go-to-market. So we know this company has been a rocket ship and just getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser. Could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. One of the problems if I could real quick, Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, no UI path is going to be great for super powerful projects use cases. That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks. So it's not automating complex things which I think UI path was built for. So if you were going to get UI path and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be because you're doing it for more powerful use case where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks and simply Microsoft Power Automate can do that. Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people in theCUBE that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UI path customers and I've asked them, well, you know, how do you differentiate between the two? And they've said to me, look, our users and personal productivity users, they like Power Automate, they can use it themselves and it doesn't take a lot of support on our end. The flip side is you could do that with UI path, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end to end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here because we're in the events business. But here's the prediction though. And this is a trend we're seeing. The number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with reinvent. I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally most of the big ones are getting smaller and there's going to be many more smaller, intimate regional events and road shows. These micro events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first-class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together. And brands are prioritizing earned media and they're beginning to build their own news networks going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see and we're right in the middle of it, Eric. So you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It shrunk and then it, because last year was kind of, right? It was the last one before the pandemic and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller, but it was very vibrant. And I think this year is going to be huge. Mobile World Congress is another one. We're going to be there. And DeFeb, that's obviously a big, big show. But in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce, we'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions, Quantum and maybe some others. Bring us home. Yeah, sure, I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction. Unfortunately, you know, the talent's informatic is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder. And then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot and TellyUs, both often say that as their selling point. Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot. So you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self query using user search for or even just speaking into what it needs. And these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's an out and left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are gonna break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in provision in MindShare, so more and more people are citing it. AWS Neptune's getting its act together and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. TigerGraph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through. And if I had to do one more, I'd say Real-Time Streaming Analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream to more people are actually gonna be moving towards real-time streaming. Again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use. And I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved and honorable mention. Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction round table, if you will, in a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy because you got your wrapping up, the last quarter's survey. And a nuts three weeks, trust me. I love the fact that you're doing the ETS survey now. I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? So that's phenomenal. Yeah, four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. Unbelievable, there's so much data at ETR. Okay, hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. Take care, Dave. Good seeing you. Thanks to our team here, Alex Meyerson, does production, he manages the podcast, Forrest Kent Schiffman as well, is a critical component of our East Coast studio, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief. He's at SiliconAngle.com. He does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes, they're available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search, breaking analysis podcast. I really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.volante at siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, but I appreciate it. You can DM me at dvolante or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out ETR.ai. It says data is amazing, best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis.