>>Hello everyone and welcome back to The Cube's Continuing coverage of AWS Reinvent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco App Dynamics, as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're gonna dig in, but first of all, please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco App, app Dynamics to the show. Hey friends. >>Hi. How are you doing? >>I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >>I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade, so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >>You know, it's, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high and then I don't think any other industry experience what we did in Covid, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a, it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with Covid, then we have what we called our healthy and return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's, it's really been a challenge, but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >>I, I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you, you nailed that for a segment. Alice, I'm, I'm, I'm so, I'm so here for it. I, I, I wanna talk about how you've worked together, but I wanna give Greg a second to chime in here. So Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco App Dynamics. How, how have you and the team, whether the last two and a half years? >>Well, you, you know, it's interesting, the, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on, on one hand, you had, you know, the, the, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were, were really instrumental for them to, to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blame the brand if the, if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the, it's in the back end, right? So when you look at, yeah, you look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and, and quickly innovate, quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a, a sprawl in their technology stack. So when you're adding to it, you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that that, that the problems or the, the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from an app, Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know, we're one of the leading observability and app application performance monitoring tools. So we help customers like Ro Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. It's, >>It's, it's, I I'm smiling as someone who was a, a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control and the complex layers of the kitchen. And I think that, that anyone who's, who's had a, a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentional, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean. Alice, how, how has Full Stack Observability played a role in your, in your team's ability to, to serve the customers and your, and keep your community engaged during this, this very kind of wobbly time? >>Yeah, you know, we have, have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we wanna keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use App AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect, you know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, Hey, I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with App Dynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >>Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco App Dynamics and across functions over the last few years without this crunch, was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >>You know, I don't, I don't think that the Crunch brought it on cuz we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017 and we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we wanna go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, we, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit, but we were able to use the app dynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation, >>And that's a more, with more, more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And, and it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and, and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >>Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic and especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the, the, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them, and I, I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that they, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the, the, the user experience is topnotch, the availability is there, the, the, the, the resiliency of their platform is there. So by, by working with customers like Royal CRI and is really one of the, the, the shining stars that we can talk about that really help make a big difference in, you know, that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >>How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >>Oh, personally, I, I'm, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis and I see it fr across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the, the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when you, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that they, their customers were interacting with, with them. So, you know, when you, when you're looking at a, at a bank or you're looking at a, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know, like rural Caribbean as well, that, that really had that opportunity to, to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them, which is user experience. It's a very, very common common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of, of, of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and, and many others across different industries to make sure that that, that the, the business outcomes were being driven towards the, the proper direction. As well as that, you know, the, the user experience, and I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important anymore than I've already have, but it's really the, one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >>I, one of my favorite lines is, is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, I, you can, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here. At the end of the day, if people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we won't have to go down that rabbit hole today, >>Especially if I can add there's a lot of competition there. Course, right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform, or your digital services do not perform, the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And, and the same thing with, with what Alice sees in the, in the cruise industry, you know, you have an opportunity to rise to the top and I, I really applaud them for taking advantage of that, that opportunity. Community. >>Community. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on certainly the, the water level rises together. That's >>Right. Alice, >>What sort of, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What, what sort of leaps do you think, or doesn't have to be leaps, but what, what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >>So I think, you know, one of our big challenges that we've, you know, we've announced that we do have a relationship with starlink, so that's going to improve our satellite connectivity, and it really is a game changer for our industry. It's very exciting and, and, but it puts the, it puts the user back in the forefront once again. You know, right now, you know, with our current connectivity, it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost, so now we're gonna be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore, you know, and you're, and you're, we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world, so that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth now I need to see how that, how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality, it's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is gonna play a role in that. >>I, I I, I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a, what a nice spot. I, I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is, is glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at super computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself in the team and, and Cisco app Dynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >>You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after is traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know, network and infrastructure security app dev. So ensuring that we can get our customers to, to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are that people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. >>So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it, how do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the, the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made that you can show to your business leaders is showing an uptick and the business outcomes you're, you're going after, it's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers, but also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >>I love that Greg and I love that customer first. That community first attitude, it's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you, and I'm gonna start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined, though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >>You know, I just got off the cruise, so next up I wanna revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go, and if you haven't done it, that's absolutely where you should go. >>Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that gonna be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >>I have never done the Galapagos, but I may just have made it to my list. >>Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I, I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature, much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack absorbability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience, and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami Greg to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly sees soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS reinvent coverage. This is the cube. My name's Savannah Peterson, and we look forward to seeing you for our next segment.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Now, regardless of the chosen approach, which is going to vary, technology executives, they understand they have to accelerate their digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. Now, this is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments. And at the macro level, we expect total spending to increase at as much as 8% or even more in 2021, compared to last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud collaboration that are enabling hybrid work as well as data, including analytics, AI, and automation are at the top of the spending priorities for CXOs. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're pleased to welcome back Erik Bradley, who is the chief engagement strategist at our partner, ETR. Now in this segment, we're going to share some of the latest findings from ETR's surveys and provide our commentary on what it means for the markets, for sellers, and for buyers. Erik, great to see you, my friend. Welcome back to Breaking Analysis. >> Thank you for having me, always enjoy it. We've got some fresh data to talk about on this beautiful summer Friday, so I'm ready to go. >> All right. I'm excited too. Okay, last year we saw a contraction in IT spending by at least 5%. And now we're seeing a snapback to, as I said, at least 8% growth relative to last year. You got to go back to 2007 just before the financial crisis to see this type of top line growth. The shift to hybrid work, it's exposed us to new insidious security threats. And we're going to discuss that in a lot more detail. Cloud migration of course picked up dramatically last year, and based on the recent earnings results of the big cloud players, for now we got two quarters of data, that trend continues as organizations are accelerating their digital platform build-outs, and this is bringing a lot of complexity and a greater need for so-called observability solutions, which Erik is going to talk about extensively later on in this segment. Data, we think is entering a new era of de-centralization. We see organizations not only focused on analytics and insights, but actually creating data products. Leading technology organizations like JP Morgan, they're heavily leaning into this trend toward packaging and monetizing data products. And finally, as part of the digital transformation trend, we see no slow down in spending momentum for AI and automation, generally in RPA specifically. Erik, anything you want to add to that top level narrative? >> Yeah, there's a lot to take on the macro takeaways. The first thing I want to state is that that 8, 8.5% number that started off at just 3 to 4% beginning of the year. So as the year has continued, we are just seeing this trend in budgets continue to accelerate, and we don't have any reason to believe that's going to stop. So I think we're going to just keep moving on heading into 2021. And we're going to see a banner year of spend this year and probably next as well. >> All right, now we're going to bring up a chart that shows kind of that progression here of spending momentum. So Erik, I'm going to let you comment on this chart that tracks those projections over time. >> Erik: Yeah. Great. So thank you very much for pulling this up. As you can see in the beginning part of the year, when we asked people, "What do you plan to spend throughout 2021?" They were saying it would be about a 4% increase. Which we were happy with because as you said last year, it was all negative. That continues to accelerate and is only hyper accelerating now as we head into the back half of the year. In addition, after we do this data, I always host a panel of IT end users to kind of get their feedback on what we collected, to a man, every one of them expects continued increase throughout next year. There are some concerns and uncertainty about what we're seeing right now with COVID, but even with that, they're planning their budgets now for 2022 and they're planning for even further increases going forward. >> Dave: Great, thank you. So we circled that 8%. That's really kind of where we thought it was going to land. And so we're happy with that number, but let's take a look at where the action is by technology sector. This chart that we're showing you here, it tracks spending priorities back to last September. When I believe that was the point, Erik, that cyber became the top priority in the survey, ahead of cloud collaboration, analytics, and data, and the other sectors that you see there. Now, Erik, we should explain. These areas, they're the top seven, and they outrank all the other sectors. ETR tracks many, many other sectors, but please weigh in here and share your thoughts on this data. >> Erik: Yeah. Security, security, security. It hasn't changed. It had really hasn't. The hybrid work. The fact that you're behind the firewall one day and then you're outside working from home the next, switching in and out of networks. This is just a field day for bad actors. And we have no choice right now, but to continue to spend, because as you're going to talk about in a minute, hybrid's here to stay. So we have to figure out a way to secure behind the firewall on-prem. We also have to secure our employees and our assets that are not in the office. So it is a main priority. One of the things that point out on this chart, I had a couple of ITN users talk to me about customer experience and automation really need to move from the right part of that chart to the left. So they're seeing more in what you were talking about in RPA and automation, starting to creep up heading into next year. As cloud migration matures, as you know, cybersecurity spending has been ramping up. People are going to see a little bit more on the analytics and a little bit more on the automation side going forward. >> Dave: Great. Now, this next data view- well, first of all, one of the great things about the ETR dataset is that you can ask key questions and get a time series. And I will tell you again, I go back to last March, ETR hit it. They were the first on the work from home trend. And so if you were on that trend, you were able to anticipate it. And a lot of investors I think took advantage of that. Now, but we've shown this before, but there's new data points that we want to introduce. So the data tracks how CIOs and IT buyers have responded to the pandemic since last March. Still 70% of the organizations have employees working remotely, but 39% now have employees fully returning to the office and Erik, the rest of the metrics all point toward positives for IT spending, although accelerating IT deployments there at the right peaked last year, as people realized they had to invest in the future. Your thoughts? >> Erik: Yeah, this is the slide for optimism, without a doubt. Of the entire macro survey we did, this is the most optimistic slide. It's great for overall business. It's great for business travel. This is well beyond just IT. Hiring is up. I've had some people tell me that they possibly can't hire enough people right now. They had to furlough employees, they had to stop projects, and they want to re accelerate those now. But talent is very hard to find. Another point to you about your automation and RPA, another underlying trend for there. The one thing I did want to talk about here is the hybrid workplace, but I believe there's another slide on it. So just to recap on this extremely optimistic, we're seeing a lot of hiring. We're seeing increased spending, and I do believe that that's going to continue. >> Yeah I'm glad you brought that up because a session that you and I did a while ago, we pointed out, it was earlier this year, that the skill shortage is one potential risk to our positive scenario. We'll keep an eye on that, but so I want to show another set of data that we've showed previously, but ETR again, has added some new questions in here. So note here that 60% of employees still work remotely with 33% in a hybrid model currently, and the CIO's expect that to land on about 42% hybrid workforce with around 30% working remotely, which is around, it's been consistent by the way on your surveys, but that's about double the historic norm, Eric. >> Erik: Yeah, and even further to your point Dave, recently I did a panel asking people to give me some feedback on this. And three of those four experts basically said to me, if we had greed run this survey right now, that even more people would be saying remote. That they believe that that number, that's saying they're expecting that number of people to be back in office, is actually too optimistic. They're actually saying that maybe if we had- cause as a survey launched about six, seven weeks ago before this little blip on the radar, before the little COVID hiccup we're seeing now, and they're telling me that they believe if we reran this now that it would be even more remote work, even more hybrid and less returned to the office. So that's just an update I wanted to offer on this slide. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, we're still in this kind of day to day, week to week, month to month mode, but I want to do a little double click on this. We're not going to share this data, but there was so much ETR data. We got to be selective. But if you double click on the hybrid models, you'll see that 50% of organizations plan to have time roughly equally split between onsite and remote with again around 30 or 31% mostly remote, with onsite space available if they need it. And Erik, very few don't plan to have some type of hybrid model, at least. >> Yeah, I think it was less than 10% that said it was going to be exclusively onsite. And again, that was a more optimistic scenario six, seven weeks ago than we're seeing right now throughout the country. So I agree with you, hybrid is here to stay. There really is no doubt about it. from everyone I speak to when, you know, I basically make a living talking to IT end users. Hybrid is here to stay. They're planning for it. And that's really the drive behind the spending because you have to support both. You have to give people the option. You have to, from an IT perspective, you also have to support both, right? So if somebody is in office, I need the support staff to be in office. Plus I need them to be able to remote in and fix something from home. So they're spending on both fronts right now. >> Okay. Let's get into some of the vendor performance data. And I want to start with the cloud hyperscalers. It's something that we followed pretty closely. I got some Wiki bond data, that we just had earnings released. So here's data that shows the Q2 revenue shares on the left-hand side in the pie and the growth rates for the big four cloud players on the right hand side. It goes back to Q1 2019. Now the first thing I want to say is these players generated just under $39 billion in the quarter with AWS capturing 50% of that number. I said 39, it was 29 billion, sorry, with AWS capturing 50% of that in the quarter. As you're still tracking around a third in Alibaba and GCP in the, you know, eight or 9% range. But what's most interesting to me, Erik, is that AWS, which generated almost 15 billion in the quarter, was the only player to grow its revenue, both sequentially and year over year. And Erik, I think the street is missing the real story here on Amazon. Amazon announced earnings on Thursday night. The company had a 2% miss on the top line revenues and a meaningful 22% beat on earnings per share. So the retail side of the business missed its revenue targets, so that's why everybody's freaked out. But AWS, the cloud side, saw a 4% revenue beat. So the stock was off more than 70% after hours and into Friday. Now to me, a mix shift toward AWS, that's great news for investors. Now, tepid guidance is a negative, but the shift to a more profitable cloud business is a huge positive. >> Yeah, there's a lot that goes into stock price, right? I remember I was a director of research back in the day. One of my analysts said to me, "Am I crazy for putting a $1,000 target on Amazon?" And I laughed and I said, "No, you're crazy if you don't make it $2,000." (both chuckling) So, you know, at that time it was basically the mix shift towards AWS. You're a thousand percent right. I think the tough year over year comps had something to do with that reaction. That, you know, it's just getting really hard. What's that? The law of large numbers, right? It's really hard to grow at that percentage rate when you're getting this big. But from our data perspective, we're seeing no slowdown in AWS, in cloud, none whatsoever. The only slowdown we're seeing in cloud is GCP. But to, you know, to focus on AWS, extremely strong across the board and not only just in cloud, but in all their data products as well, data and analytics. >> Yeah and I think that the AWS, don't forget folks, that funds Amazon's TAM expansion into so many different places. Okay. As we said at the top, the world of digital and hybrid work, and multi-cloud, it's more complicated than it used to be. And that means if you need to resolve issues, which everybody does, like poor application performance, et cetera, what's happening at the user level, you have to have a better way to sort of see what's going on. And that's what the emergence of the observability space is all about. So Erik, let me set this up and you have a lot of comments here because you've recently had some, and you always have had a lot of round table discussions with CXOs on this topic. So this chart plots net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And we inserted a table that shows the data points in detail. Now that red dotted line is just sort of Dave Vellante's subjective mark in the sand for elevated spending levels. And there are three other points here. One is Splunk as well off is two-year peak, as highlighted in the red, but Signal FX, which Splunk acquired, has made a big move northward this last quarter. As has Datadog. So Erik, what can you share with us on this hot, but increasingly crowded space? >> Yeah. I could talk about the space for a long time. As you know, I've gotten some flack over the last year and a half about, you know, kind of pointing out this trend, this negative trend in Splunk. So I do want to be the first one to say that this data set is rebounding. Splunk has been horrific in our data for going back almost two years now, straight downward trend. This is the first time we're seeing any increase, any positivity there. So I do want to be fair and state that because I've been accused of being a little too negative on Splunk in the past. But I would basically say for observability right now, it's a rising tide lifts all boats, if I can use a New England phrase. The data across the board in analytics for these observability players is up, is accelerating. None more so than Datadog. And it's exactly your point, David. The complexity, the increased cloud migration is a perfect setup for Datadog, which is a cloud native. It focuses on microservices. It focuses on cloud observability. Old Splunk was just application monitoring. Don't get me wrong, they're changing, but they were on-prem application monitoring, first and foremost. Datadog came out as cloud native. They, you know, do microservices. This is just a perfect setup for them. And not only is Datadog leading the observability, it's leading the entire analytics sector, all of it. Not just the observability niche. So without a doubt, that is the strongest that we're seeing. It's leading Dynatrace new Relic. The only one that really isn't rebounding is Cisco App Dynamics. That's getting the dreaded legacy word really attached to it. But this space is really on fire, elastic as well, really doing well in this space. New Relic has shown a little bit of improvement as well. And what I heard when I asked my panelists about this, is that because of the maturity of cloud migration, that this observability has to grow. Spending on this has to happen. So they all say the chart looks right. And it's really just about the digital transformation maturity. So that's largely what they think is happening here. And they don't really see it getting, you know, changing anytime soon. >> Yeah, and I would add, and you see that it's getting crowded. You saw a service now acquired LightStep, and they want to get into the game. You mentioned, you know, last deck of the elk stack is, you know, the open source alternative, but then we see a company who's raised a fair amount of money, startup, chaos search, coming in, going after kind of the complexity of the elk stack. You've got honeycomb, which has got a really innovative approach, Jeremy Burton's company observes. So you have venture capital coming in. So we'll see if those guys could be disruptive enough or are they, you know, candidates to get acquired? We'll see how that all- you know that well. The M and A space. You think this space is ripe for M and A? >> I think it's ripe for consolidation, M and A. Something has to shake out. There's no doubt. I do believe that all of these can be standalone. So we shall see what's happened to, you mentioned the Splunk acquisition of Signal FX, just a house cleaning point. That was really nice acceleration by Signal FX, but it was only 20 citations. We'd looked into this a little bit deeper. Our data scientists did. It appears as if the majority of people are just signaling spunk and not FX separately. So moving forward for our data set, we're going to combine those two, so we don't have those anomalies going forward. But that type of acquisition does show what we should expect to see more of in this group going forward. >> Well that's I want to mention. That's one of the challenges that any data company has, and you guys do a great job of it. You're constantly having to reevaluate. There's so much M and A going on in the industry. You've got to pick the right spots in terms of when to consolidate. There's some big, you know, Dell and EMC, for example. You know, you've beautifully worked through that transition. You're seeing, you know, open shift and red hat with IBM. You just got to be flexible. And that's where it's valuable to be able to have a pipeline to guys like Erik, to sort of squint through that. So thank you for that clarification. >> Thank you too, because having a resource like you with industry knowledge really helps us navigate some of those as well for everyone out there. So that's a lot to do with you do Dave, >> Thank you. It's going to be interesting to watch Splunk. Doug Merritt's made some, you know, management changes, not the least of which is bringing in Teresa Carlson to run go to market. So if you know, I'd be interested if they are hitting, bouncing off the bottom and rising up again. They have a great customer base. Okay. Let's look at some of the same dimensions. Go ahead. You got a comment? >> A few of ETR's clients looked at our data and then put a billion dollar investment into it too. So obviously I agree. (Dave laughing) Splunk is looking like it's set for a rebound, and it's definitely something to watch, I agree. >> Not to rat hole in this, but I got to say. When I look back, cause theCUBE gives us kind of early visibility. So companies with momentum and you talk to the customers that all these shows that we go to. I will tell you that three companies stood out last decade. It was Splunk. It was Service Now and Tableau. And you could tell just from just discussions with their customers, the enthusiasm in that customer base. And so that's a real asset, and that helps them build them a moat. So we'll see. All right, let's take a look at the same dimensions now for cyber. This is cybersecurity net score in the vertical, and market share in the horizontal. And I filtered by in greater than a hundred shared in because just gets so crowded. Erik, the only things I would point out here is CrowdStrike and Zscaler continue to shine, CyberArk also showing momentum over that 40% line. Very impressively, Palo Alto networks, which has a big presence in the market. They've bounced back. We predicted that a while back. Your round table suggested people like working with Palo Alto. They're a gold standard. You know, we had reported earlier on that divergence with four to net in terms of valuation and some of the challenges they had in cloud, clearly, you know, back with the momentum. And of course, Microsoft in the upper, right. It's just, they're literally off the charts and obviously a major player here, but your thoughts on cyber? >> Erik: Yeah. Going back to the backdrop. Security, security, security. It has been the number one priority going back to last September. No one sees it changing. It has to happen. The threat vectors are actually expanding and we have no choice but to spend here. So it is not surprising to see. You did name our three favorite names. So as you know, we look at the dataset, we see which ones have the most positive inflections, and we put outlooks on those. And you did mention Zscaler, Okta and CrowdStrike, by far the three standouts that we're seeing. I just recently did a huge panel on Okta talking about their acquisition of Auth Zero. They're pushed into Sale Point space, trying to move just from single sign on and MFA to going to really privileged account management. There is some hurdles there. Really Okta's ability to do this on-prem is something that a little bit of the IT end users are concerned about. But what we're seeing right now, both Okta and Auth Zero are two of the main adopted names in security. They look incredibly well set up. Zscaler as well. With the ZTNA push more towards zero trust, Zscaler came out so hot in their IPO. And everyone was wondering if it was going to trail off just like Snowflake. It's not trailing off. This thing just keeps going up into the right, up into the right. The data supports a lot of tremendous growth for the three names that you just mentioned. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Auth Zero. We had reported on that earlier. I just feel like that was a great acquisition. You had Okta doing the belly to belly enterprise, you know, selling. And the one thing that they really lacked was that developer momentum. And that's what Auth Zero brings. Just a smart move by Todd McKinnon and company. And I mean, so this, you know, I want to, I want to pull up another chart show a quick snapshot of some of the players in the survey who show momentum and have you comment on this. We haven't mentioned Snowflake so far, but they remain again with like this gold standard of net score, they've consistently had those high marks with regard to spending velocity. But here's some other data. Erik, how should we interpret this? >> Erik: Yeah, just to harp on Snowflake for a second. Right, I mean the rich get richer. They came out- IPO was so hyped, so it was hard for us as a research company to say, "Oh, you know, well, you know, we agree." But we did. The data is incredible. You can't beat the management team. You can't beat what they're doing. They've got so much cash. I can't wait to see what they do with it. And meanwhile, you would expect something that debuted with that high of a net score, that high of spending velocity to trail off. It would be natural. It's not Dave, it's still accelerating. It's gone even higher. It's at all time highs. And we just don't see it stopping anytime soon. It's a really interesting space right now. Maybe another name to look at on here that I think is pretty interesting, kind of a play on return to business is Kupa. It's a great project expense management tool that got hit really hard. Listen, traveling stopped, business expense stopped, and I did a panel on it. And a lot of our guys basically said, "Yeah, it was the first thing I cut." But we're seeing a huge rebound in spending there in that space. So that's a name that I think might be worth being called out on a positive side. Negative, If you look down to the bottom right of that chart, unfortunately we're seeing some issues in RingCentral and Zoom. Anything that's sort of playing in this next, you know, video conferencing, IP telephony space, they seem to be having really decelerating spending. Also now with Zoom's acquisition of five nine. I'm not really sure how RingCentral's going to compete on that. But yeah, that's one where we debuted for the first time with a negative outlook on that name. And looking and asking to some of the people in our community, a lot of them say externally, you still need IP telepany, but internally you don't. Because the You Cast communication systems are getting so sophisticated, that if I have Teams, if I have Slack, I don't need phones anymore. (chuckling) That you and I can just do a Slack call. We can do a Teams call. And many of them are saying I'm truly ripping out my IP Telepany internally as soon as possible because we just don't need it. So this whole collaboration, productivity space is here to stay. And it's got wide ranging implications to some of these more legacy type of tools. >> You know, one of the other things I'd call out on this chart is Accenture. You and I had a session earlier this year, and we had predicted that that skill shortage was going to lead to an uptick in traditional services. We've certainly seen that. I mean, IBM beat its quarter on the strength of services largely. And seeing Accenture on that is I think confirmation. >> Yeah that was our New Year prediction show, right Dave? When we made top 10 predictions? >> That's right. That was part of our predictions show. Exactly, good memory. >> The data is really showing that continue. People want the projects, they need to do the projects, but hiring is very difficult. So obviously the number one beneficiary there are going to be the Accentures of the world. >> All right. So let's do a quick wrap. I'm going to make a few comments and then have you bring us home, Erik. So we laid out our scenario for the tech spending rebound. We definitely believe last year tracked downward, along with GDP contraction. It was interesting. Gardner doesn't believe, at least factions of Gardner don't believe there's a correlation between GDP and tech spending. But, you know, I personally think there generally is some kind of relatively proportional pattern there. And I think we saw contraction last year. People are concerned about inflation. Of course, that adds some uncertainty. And as well, as you mentioned around the Delta variant. But I feel as though that the boards of directors and CEOs, they've mandated that tech execs have to build out digital platforms for the future. They're data centric. They're highly automated, to your earlier points. They're intelligent with AI infused, and that's going to take investment. I feel like the tech community has said, "Look, we know what to do here. We're dealing with hybrid work. We can't just stop doing what we're doing. Let's move forward." You know, and as you say, we're flying again and so forth. You know, getting hybrid right is a major priority that directly impacts strategies. Technology strategies, particularly around security, cloud, the productivity of remote workers with collaboration. And as we've said many times, we are entering a new era of data that's going to focus on decentralized data, building data products, and Erik let's keep an eye on this observability space. Lot of interest there, and buyers have a number of choices. You know, do they go with a specialist, as we saw recently, we've seen in the past, or did they go with the generalist like Service Now with the acquisition of LightStep? You know, it's going to be interesting. A lot of people are going to get into this space, start bundling into larger platforms. And so as you said, there's probably not enough room for all the players. We're going to see some consolidation there. But anyway, let me give you the final word here. >> Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of it. And I think your earlier points are spot on, that analytics and automation are certainly going to be moving more and more to that left of that chart we had of priorities. I think as we continue that survey heading into 2022, we'll have some fresh data for you again in a few months, that's going to start looking at 2022 priorities and overall spend. And the one other area that I keep hearing about over and over and over again is customer experience. There's a transition from good old CRM to CXM. Right now, everything is digital. It is not going away. So you need an omni-channel support to not only track your customer experience, but improve it. Make sure there's a two way communication. And it's a really interesting space. Salesforce is going to migrate into it. We've got Qualtrics out there. You've got Medallia. You've got FreshWorks, you've got Sprinkler. You got some names out there. And everyone I keep talking to on the IT end user side keeps bringing up customer experience. So let's keep an eye on that as well. >> That's a great point. And again, it brings me back to Service Now. We wrote a piece last week that's sort of, Service Now and Salesforce are on a collision course. We've said that for many, many years. And you've got this platform of platforms. They're just kind of sucking in different functions saying, "Hey, we're friends with everybody." But as you know Erik, software companies, they want to own it all. (both chuckling) All right. Hey Erik, thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming back on. It's always a pleasure to have you on Breaking Analysis. Great to see you. >> Love the partnership. Love the collaboration. Let's go enjoy this summer Friday. >> All right. Let's do. Okay, remember everybody, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, click subscribe to the series. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. They've just launched a new website. They've got a whole new pricing model. It's great to see that innovation going on. Now remember we also publish a full report every week on WikiBond.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can always email me, appreciate the back channel comments, the metadata insights. David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. DM me on Twitter @DVellante or comment on the LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, a good rest of summer, be well. And we'll see you next time. (inspiring music)