>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite fears of inflation, supply chain issues skyrocketing energy and home prices and global instability caused by the Ukraine crisis CIOs and IT buyers continue to expect overall spending to increase more than 6% in 2022. Now, while this is lower than our 8% prediction that we made earlier this year in January, it remains in line with last year's roughly six to 7% growth and is holding firm with the expectations reported by tech executives on the ETR surveys last quarter. Hello and welcome to this week's wiki bond cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis, we'll update you on our latest look at tech spending with a preliminary take from ETR's latest macro drill down survey. We'll share some insights to which vendors have shown the biggest change in spending trajectory. And we'll tap our technical analysts to get a read on what they think it means for technology stocks going forward. The IT spending sentiment among IT buyers remains pretty solid. >> In the past two months, we've had conversations with dozens of CIOs, chief digital officers data executives, IT managers, and application developers, and across the board, they've indicated that for now at least their spending levels remain largely unchanged. The latest ETR drill down data which will share shortly, confirms these anecdotal checks. However, the interpretation of this data it's somewhat nuanced. Part of the reason for the spending levels being you know reasonably strong and holding up is inflation. Stuff costs more so spending levels are higher forcing IT managers to prioritize. Now security remains the number one priority and is less susceptible to cuts, cloud migration, productivity initiatives and other data projects remain top priorities. >> So where are CIO's robbing from Peter to pay Paul to focus on these priorities? Well, we've seen a slight uptick in certain speculative. IT projects being put on hold or frozen for a period of time. And according to ETR survey data we've seen some hiring freezes reported and this is especially notable in the healthcare sector. ETR also surveyed its buyer base to find out where they were adjusting their budgets and the strategies and tactics they were using to do so. Consolidating IT vendors was by far the most cited tactic. Now this makes sense as companies in an effort to negotiate better deals will often forego investments in newer so-called best of breed products and services, and negotiate bundles from larger suppliers. You know, even though they might not be as functional, the buyers >> can get a better deal if they bundle together from one of their larger suppliers. Think Microsoft or a Dell or other, you know, large companies. ETR survey respondents also cited cutting the cloud bill where discretionary spending was in play was another strategy or tactic that they were using. We certainly saw this with some of the largest snowflake customers this past quarter. Where even though they were still growing consumption rapidly certain snowflake customers dialed down their consumption and pushed spending off to future quarters. Now remember in the case of snowflake, anyway, customers negotiate consumption rates and their pricing based on a total commitment over a period of time. So while they may consume less in one quarter, over the lifetime of the contract, snowflake, as do many other cloud companies, have good visibility on the lifetime value of a deal. Now this next chart shows the latest ETR spending expectations among more than 900 respondents. The bars represent spending growth expectations from the periods of December, 2021 that's the gray bars, March of 2022 survey in the blue, and the most recent June data, That's the yellow bar. So you can see spending expectations for the quarter is down slightly in the mid 5% range. But overall for the year expectations remain in the mid 6% range. Now it's down from 8%, 8.3% in December where it looked like 2022 was going to really be a breakout year and have more momentum than even last year. Now, remember this was before Russia invaded Ukraine which occurred in mid-February of this year. So expectations were a little higher. So look, generally speaking CIOs have told us that their CFOs and CEOs have lowered their earnings outlooks and communicated that to Wall Street. They've told us that unless and until these revised forecasts appear at risk, they continue to expect their budget levels to remain pretty constant. Now there's still plenty of momentum and spending velocity on specific vendor platforms. Let's take a look at that. >> This chart shows the companies with the greatest spending momentum as measured by ETRs proprietary net score methodology. Net score essentially measures the net percent of customers spending more on a particular platform. That measurement is shown on the Y axis. The red line there that's inserted that red dotted line at 40%, we consider to be a highly elevated mark. And the green dots are companies in the ETR survey that are near or above that line. The X axis measures the presence in the data set, how much, you know sort of pervasiveness, if you will, is in the data. It's kind of a proxy for market presence. Now, of course we all know Kubernetes is not a company, but it remains an area where organizations are spending lots of resources and time particularly to modernize and mobilize applications. Snowflake remains the company which leads all firms in spending velocity, but as you'll see momentarily, despite its highest position relative to everybody else in the survey, it's still down from its previous levels in the high seventies and low 80% range. AWS is incredibly impressive because it has an elevated level but also a big presence in the data set in the survey. Same with Microsoft, same with ServiceNow which also stands out. And you can see the other smaller vendors like HashiCorp which is increasingly being seen as a strategic cross cloud enabler. They're showing, spending momentum. The RPA vendors you see in there automation anywhere and UI path are in the mix with numerous security companies, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Netskope, Cloudflare, Tenable Okta, Zscaler Palo Alto networks, Sale Point Fortunate. A big number of cybersecurity firms hovering at or above that 40% mark you can see pure storage remains elevated as do PagerDuty and Coupa. So plenty of good news here, despite the recent tech crash. So that was the good, here's the not so good. So >> there is no 40% line on this chart because all these companies are well below that line. Now this doesn't mean these companies are bad companies. They just don't have the spending velocity of the ones we showed earlier. A good example here is Oracle. Look how they stand out on the X axis with a huge market presence. And Oracle remains an incredibly successful company selling to high end customers and really owning that mission critical data and application space. And remember ETR measures spending activity, but not actual spending dollars. So Oracle is skewed as a result because Oracle customers spend big bucks. But the fact is that Oracle has a large legacy install base that pulls down their growth rates. And that does show up in the ETR survey data. Broadcom is another example. They're one of the most successful companies in the industry, and they're not going after growth at all costs at all. They're going after EBITDA and of course ETR doesn't measure EBIT. So just keep that in mind, as you look at this data. Now another way to look at the data and the survey, is exploring the net score movement over the last period amongst companies. So how are they moving? What's happening to the net score over time. And this chart shows the year over year >> net score change for vendors that participate in at least three sectors within the ETR taxonomy. Remember ETR taxonomy has 12, 15 different segments. So the names above or below the gray dotted line are those companies where the net score has increased or decreased meaningfully. So to the earlier chart, it's all relative, right? Look at Oracle. While having lower net scores has also shown a more meaningful improvement in net score than some of the others, as have SAP and Teradata. Now what's impressive to me here is how AWS, Microsoft, and Google are actually holding that dotted line that gray line pretty well despite their size and the other ironically interesting two data points here are Broadcom and Nutanix. Now Broadcom, of course, as we've reported and dug into, is buying VMware and, and of, of course most customers are concerned about getting hit with higher prices. Once Broadcom takes over. Well Nutanix despite its change in net scores, in a good position potentially to capture some of that VMware business. Just yesterday, I talked to a customer who told me he migrated his entire portfolio off VMware using Nutanix AHV, the Acropolis hypervisor. And that was in an effort to avoid the VTEX specifically. Now this was a smaller customer granted and it's not representative of what I feel is Broadcom's ICP the ideal customer profile, but look, Nutanix should benefit from the Broadcom acquisition. If it can position itself to pick up the business that Broadcom really doesn't want. That kind of bottom of the pyramid. One person's trash is another's treasure as they say, okay. And here's that same chart for companies >> that participate in less than three segments. So, two or one of the segments in the ETR taxonomy. Only three names are seeing positive movement year over year in net score. SUSE under the leadership of amazing CEO, Melissa Di Donato. She's making moves. The company went public last year and acquired rancher labs in 2020. Look, we know that red hat is the big dog in Kubernetes but since the IBM acquisition people have looked to SUSE as a possible alternative and it's showing up in the numbers. It's a nice business. It's going to do more than 600 million this year in revenue, SUSE that is. It's got solid double digit growth in kind of the low teens. It's profitability is under pressure but they're definitely a player that is found a niche and is worth watching. The SolarWinds, What can I say there? I mean, maybe it's a dead cat bounce coming off the major breach that we saw a couple years ago. Some of its customers maybe just can't move off the platform. Constant contact we really don't follow and don't really, you know, focus on them. So, not much to say there. Now look at all the high priced earning stocks or infinite PE stocks that have no E and divide by zero or a negative number and boom, you have infinite PE and look at how their net scores have dropped. We've reported extensively on snowflake. They're still number one as we showed you earlier, net score, but big moves off their highs. Okta, Datadog, Zscaler, SentinelOne Dynatrace, big downward moves, and you can see the rest. So this chart really speaks to the change in expectations from the COVID bubble. Despite the fact that many of these companies CFOs would tell you that the pandemic wasn't necessarily a tailwind for them, but it certainly seemed to be the case when you look back in some of the ETR data. But a big question in the community is what's going to happen to these tech stocks, these tech companies in the market? We reached out to both Eric Bradley of ETR who used to be a technical analyst on Wall Street, and the long time trader and breaking analysis contributor, Chip Symington to get a read on what they thought. First, you know the market >> first point of the market has been off 11 out of the past 12 weeks. And bare market rallies like what we're seeing today and yesterday, they happen from time to time and it was kind of expected. Chair Powell's testimony was broadly viewed as a positive by the street because higher interest rates appear to be pushing commodity prices down. And a weaker consumer sentiment may point to a less onerous inflation outlook. That's good for the market. Chip Symington pointed out to breaking analysis a while ago that the NASDAQ has been on a trend line for the past six months where its highs are lower and the lows are lower and that's a bad sign. And we're bumping up against that trend line here. Meaning if it breaks through that trend it could be a buying signal. As he feels that tech stocks are oversold. He pointed to a recent bounce in semiconductors and cited the Qualcomm example. Here's a company trading at 12 times forward earnings with a sustained 14% growth rate over the next couple of years. And their cash flow is able to support their 2.4, 2% annual dividend. So overall Symington feels this rally was absolutely expected. He's cautious because we're still in a bear market but he's beginning to, to turn bullish. And Eric Bradley added that He feels the market is building a base here and he doesn't expect a 1970s or early 1980s year long sideways move because of all the money that's still in the system. You know, but it could bounce around for several months And remember with higher interest rates there are going to be more options other than equities which for many years has not been the case. Obviously inflation and recession. They are like two looming towers that we're all watching closely and will ultimately determine if, when, and how this market turns around. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan, who helps research breaking analysis topics sometimes, and Alex Myerson who is on production in the podcast. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight they help get the word out and do all of our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our Editor in Chief over at siliconangle.com and does some wonderful editing for breaking analysis. Thank you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And of course you can reach me by email at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at DVellante comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella sees a different future for cloud computing over the coming decade. And as Microsoft Ignite keynote, he laid out the five attributes that will define the cloud in the next 10 years. His vision is a cloud platform that is decentralized, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing, and trusted. One that actually tickles the senses and levels the playing field between consumers and creators by placing tools in the hands of more people around the world. Welcome to this week's wiki buns cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll review the highlights of Nadella's Ignite keynote share our thoughts on what it means for the future of cloud specifically, and the tech industry generally. We'll also give you a more tactical view of Microsoft and compare its performance within the ETR's dataset to its peers. Satya Nadella's forward-looking cloud attributes comprised five key vectors that he talked about. The first was ubiquitous and decentralized computing, Nadella made the statement that we've reached peak centralization today that we're witnessing radical changes in computing architecture from the materials used to semiconductors software, and that is going to serve a new frontier that's forming at the edge. Nadella envisions a world where there will be more sovereignty and decentralized control. We couldn't agree more. The cloud universe is expanding and the lines are blurring between what's being done on-prem, across public clouds and the cloud experience which is going to extend everywhere, including the edge. And of course, data is going to be flowing through this hyper decentralized system. Next was sovereign data and ambient intelligence. To us data sovereignty means that whatever the local laws are the system is going to have the intelligence to govern privacy, ensure data provenance, and adhere to corporate edicts. Ambient intelligence is a field of research that leverages pervasive sensor networks and AI to respond to and anticipate humans and machines. Nadella sees the future where a business logic will move from being code that is written to code that is actually learned from data, pretty interesting. He sees this autodidactic system if you will, as fundamental to tackling big problems like personalized medicine or even climate change. Third, he talked about empowered creators and communities everywhere. Nadella said, there'll be increasingly a balance between consumption and creation. His talking about an economic balance essentially he's predicting that creation will be democratized and his vision is to put tools in the hands of people to allow them to tip the scales toward knowledge workers, frontline employees, students, everyone, essentially creating content, applications, code, et cetera power to the people if you will. And underneath this vision is a new form of or emerging new forms of Silicon operating systems and entirely transformative digital experiences. Next was economic opportunity for the global workforce. So picking up on the accelerated themes of remote work that were catalyzed by COVID, Nadella emphasize that the future has to accommodate flexibility in how, when and where people work. He sees a new model of productivity emerging, not necessarily defined by corporate revenue per employee for example, but by the economic advantages that become accessible to everyone through better access to technology, collaboration tools, education, and healthy lifestyles, all enabled by this ubiquitous cloud. Finally, trust by design, Nadella said that ethical principles must govern the design, development and deployment of AI. The system he said must be secure by design with zero trust built in to protect business assets and personal privacy. So this was a big vision that Nadella put forth it, connects the dots between bits and atoms and sets up Microsoft to extend its reach well beyond office productivity tools and cloud infrastructure. He cited the Microsoft cloud as the underpinning of its future and specifically called out Teams, he mentioned 365, HoloLens 2 and the announcement of Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed reality platform. Nadella said Mesh will do for virtual reality what X-Box live did for gaming. Take the experience from single person to multi-person imagine holographic images with no screens, empowering advances in medicine, science, technology, and very importantly social interactions. Now, one of the things that we took away from his talk was this notion of Microsoft as a technology arm's dealer. No, we're not, Nadella avoided slamming the competition directly by name one statement that he made, stood out. He said, " No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other" And to us this was a direct shot at Amazon, Google and Apple. How so you ask? And what does it tell us? In his book "Seeing Digital" author David Moschella said, "that Silicon Valley broadly defined as a duel disruption agenda." What does that mean? Not only are large tech companies disrupting horizontal layers of the tech stack like compute, storage, networking, database, security, applications, and so forth. But they're also disrupting industries Amazon and media, grocery, logistics, for example. Google and Amazon on healthcare, Google and Apple on automobiles, all three in FinTech. And it's likely this is just the beginning but Nadella's posture suggests that Microsoft for now anyway, is content being mostly a horizontal technology provider, aka arms dealer. Now, there are some examples where you could argue that Microsoft sort of crosses the line maybe as a games developer or as a SAS competitor. Do you really want to, if you're a SAS player do you want to run your system on Azure and compete with Microsoft? Well, it depends if you're vertically oriented or maybe horizontal in their swim lanes, but anyway, these are more natural cohorts to technology than say for example, Amazon's retail business. So I thought that was something that was worth taking a look at. All right, let's take a quick look at how Microsoft compares to a couple of the great tech giants of the past several decades. Here's a financial snapshot of Microsoft compared to Oracle a highly profitable software company and IBM an industry legend. The first two things that jumped right out of Microsoft, size and it's growth rate. Microsoft is twice the revenue of IBM and nearly four extent of Oracle. And yet Microsoft is growing in the mid-teens compared to low single digits for Oracle and IBM continues to shrink so extensible you can grow. Microsoft's gross margin model has been pulled down by its hardware business but its operating margins are unbelievable. Meanwhile, the cash on its balance sheet is immense much larger than Oracles, which is very impressive. It's certainly dwarfs that of IBM, a company that had to take on a lot of debt to acquire Red Hat and has a balance sheet, that increasingly looks more like Dell's than it's historical self. And then on the last two rows Oracle and IBM, both owners of their own cloud have been lapped by Microsoft in terms of CapEx and research & development investment. Ironically, as we pointed out, IBM's R & D spend in 2007 the year after AWS launched the modern era of cloud was comparable to that of Microsoft. Let's now pivot it to some of the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft fares. We'll start by sharing a fundamental basis of the ETR methodology, that is the calculation of net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum and here's how it's derived. This chart shows the components of Microsoft's net score. It comprises five parts and represents the percentage of customers within the ETR survey with specific spending profiles. The lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is increased spend of 6% or more for 2021 relative to 2020, the gray is flat spend, the pinkish slice is spend declining by more than 6% or 6% or more relative to last year and the bright red is replacing the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. As you can see, Microsoft's net score is 53% which is very high for $150 billion Company. Now let's put that in context and expand the scope here a little bit. This chart shows how Microsoft fares relative to its peers, the vertical axis shows net score against spending velocity and the horizontal axis shows market share. Market share measures pervasiveness in the survey. In the table insert, you can see the vendors they're sorted by net score and the shared end column is there as well, which represents the number of shared accounts in the dataset. On both accounts bigger is better. Now note the red dotted line, that's the 40% watermark which is my personal indicator of an elevated net score anything above that in our view is really solid. Microsoft is as usual off the charts strong well to the right with it's market presence and then an overall net score of 53% as we showed earlier. And then there's Azure, separate from Microsoft overall. We wanted to plot that specifically which of course it doesn't have the presence of Microsoft overall, no surprise, but it's still prominent on the x-axis and it has a net score approaching 70%, which is quite amazing. AWS not surprisingly is highly elevated with a presence that's even larger than Azure. And you can see Zoom, Salesforce and Google Cloud all above the 40% line. Google as we've reported is well off the pace in the horizontal axis and even though its net score is elevated, we would like to see it even higher, given its smaller size relative to AWS and Azure. You know, SAP always stands out because it's a large company and it's got a net score that's hovering just under 30%. It's not above that 40% line, but it's solid. And you can see IBM and Oracle now we're showing here IBM and Oracle overall so it's the whole kitchen sink comparable to Microsoft that turquoise dot, if you will. So you can see why those two are valued much lower Microsoft. The large base of its business that's declining is much, much larger than the pieces of their business that are growing. Now Oracle has some momentum, the Back Aaron's article on February 19th, which declared Oracle a cloud giant and it declared its stock a buy combined with some earnings upgrades including one today from Ramo Lyncho of Barclays has catapulted the stock to all time highs and a valuation over $200 billion. IBM is a different story as we've discussed frequently Arvind has a lot of work to do to get this national treasure back to what's prominent itself. Okay, let now unpack Microsoft's vast portfolio a bit and see where it's doing well and where it's making moves and maybe where it's struggling, some. This graphic shows Microsoft's net score across its entire product portfolio within the ETR taxonomy. And you can see it's pretty much killing it across the board. Microsoft plays in almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy and you can see the 40% red line and how many of its offerings are above that line. The yellow bar being the most recent survey and while there's quite a bit of gray, i.e. flat spend relative to 2020, we're talking about some very tough compares from last year. And yet there's still a huge chunk of the portfolio in the green meaning spending momentum is actually up from last year and some of Microsoft's most important sectors like Cloud and Teams and Analytics. Look only Skype and Microsoft Dynamics are lagging, so really nice story there in our view. Now let's come back and take a look at Microsoft's cloud business specifically as compared to its peers. So Satya basically said that Microsoft's future will build on top of its cloud and looking at this picture it's pretty encouraging for the company. This chart, again, shows net score or spending momentum inside specifically Fortune 500 customers and it's a key bellwether in the ETR dataset, and you can see Azure and Azure functions well above the 40% red line and extremely well positioned relative to AWS and GCP. Importantly, the yellow bar tells us that compared to previous surveys Microsoft's cloud business is actually gaining momentum in this very important sector. Now, other notable call-outs on this chart VMware Cloud, which, it's on-prem hybrid cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, which is reportedly doing well but off from the momentum of its highs last spring. You can see Oracle jumped up indicating cloud momentum, but still well below the performance of the largest cloud players. The IBM Cloud appears to be a non-factor in the survey and as we previously stated, we'd like to see IBM recalibrate the financials for its cloud business and come up with a reporting framework that better represents the prevailing mental model of cloud computing. We think a cleaner number would allow IBM to build on the Red Hat momentum. I'm not sure what to make of the HPE boost, it looks significant, but in digging into the data it's only 17 data points, but look 17 within the Fortune 500 companies is not terrible. And HPE net score in that sector is more than double its overall cloud net score so that's positive we think. Okay, let's wrap by looking at how customers are thinking about multi-cloud adoption and really this data that we're about to show you simply asking customers about clouds they're using versus any type of long-term vision. So it's a good representation of what's happening today and what CIO is are thinking about in the near future particularly over the next 12 months. The survey asks customers to describe their cloud provider usage and strategy. You can see that only 14% of the survey respondents have exclusively a mono-cloud strategy, but now add in another 22% who were predominantly single cloud and you now have more than a third of the customer base gravitating toward mono-cloud. Another 14% say they're concentrating cloud providers more narrowly. Now on the flip side, you've got a big group, 29% that are moving toward multi-cloud and if you add in the additional 16% who say they are and will continue to be evenly spread, 45% of the survey is solidly headed in that direction so it's a mixed picture. What's the takeaway? Well, we think Andy Jassy is right when he says that while many customers use more than one cloud, they tend to have a primary provider and have something like a 70,30 or even 80,20 split between primary and secondary clouds. Now we think, however that this will change, but only to the extent that the vendor community is adding value on top of the existing hyperscale clouds. What we're saying and have been saying is that there is a real opportunity to create value on top of the cloud infrastructure that's being built out by AWS, Google and Microsoft. Instead of fearing cloud, the vendor community should be embracing it creating a layer on top, abstracting away the underlying complexities associated with cloud native, exploiting cloud native, and then building on top of that. Snowflake's data cloud vision is right on in my view, we can envision virtually every layer of the stack following suit. Even within database there are opportunities to identify more granular segments across clouds. For example, despite Snowflakes early multi-cloud lead you're seeing competitive firms like Teradata begin to architect a system across clouds that can query data warehouses from distributed locations, including on-prem as part of what they refer to as a data fabric, sounds kind of like Snowflakes global data mesh, or maybe better Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh. Yeah, sure but Teradata has capabilities that Snowflake doesn't for example, the ability to do complex joins and we can see plenty of market for both companies to differentiate. And why shouldn't similar vision extend from on-prem, across clouds to the edge for data protection, security, governance, hybrid compute ,analytics, federated applications, its a huge market that the hyperscale providers are likely too busy worrying about their own walled gardens to start building across on top of their competitors clouds. So Dell, HPE, VMware, Cisco, Palo Alto Fortunate, Zscaler or Cohesity, Veeam and hundreds of other tech companies, including by the way IBM and Oracle should be saying thank you to AWS, Google and Microsoft for spending all that money to build out great infrastructure on which they can build value, tap for future growth. And many of you will say, Hey, we're already doing this. Okay, I'll be watching to see the ratio of real versus slideware because generally today, in my opinion the denominator is much larger than the numerator. So when that ratio hits 1X we'll know it started to become real. Okay, that's it for today remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibun.com and siliconangle.com. Please comment on my LinkedIn post or you can tweet me @DVellante or feel free to email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data science action. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> New data suggests the tech spending will be higher than we previously thought for 2021. COVID learnings, a faster than expected vaccine rollout, productivity gains in the last 10 months, and broad-based cloud leverage lead us to raise our outlook for next year. We now expect a three to 5% increase in 2021 technology spending, roughly double our previously forecasted growth rate of 2%. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's we keep on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to share new spending data from ETR partners and take a preliminary look at which sectors and which companies are showing momentum heading into next year. Let's get right into it. The data is pointing to a strong 2021 rebound. A latest survey from ETR and the information from theCube Community suggests that the accelerated pace of the vaccine rollout pent up demand for normalcy and learnings from COVID will boost 2021 tech spending higher than previously anticipated. Now a key factor we've cited is that the forced March to digital transformation due to the pandemic created a massive proof of concept for what works and what doesn't in a digital business. CIOs are planning to bet on those sure things to drive continued productivity improvements and new business opportunities. Now, speaking of productivity, nearly 80% of respondents in the latest ETR survey indicate that productivity either stayed the same or improved over the past three months. Now of those, the vast majority, more than 80% cited improvements in productivity. This has been a common theme throughout the year. As well, the expectation among CIOs is that many workers will return to the office in the second half of the year, which we expect will drive new spending in the infrastructure needs of company HQs, which have been neglected over the past 10 months. Now, despite the expectation that many workers will return to the office, 2020 has shown us that working remotely, hey, it's here to stay, and a much larger number of employees are going to be permanently remote working than pre pandemic. ETR survey data shows that that number is going to be approximately double over the longterm. We'll look at some of that specific data. In addition, cloud computing, it became the staple of business viability in 2020. Those that were up the cloud adoption ramp, well, they benefited greatly, those that weren't well, they had to learn fast. Now, along with remote work cloud necessitated new thinking around network security, and as we've reported identity access management, endpoint security and cloud security with the beneficiaries. Companies like Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, a number of others continue to ride this wave. Larger established security companies like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, F5, Fortunate and others, they have major portions of their business that are benefiting from the tailwinds in the shift and network traffic, as a result of cloud and remote work. Now, despite all the momentum in the market and the expect of improvements in 2021, these tailwinds are not expected to be evenly distributed, far from it. We think Q4 is going to remain soft relative to last year and Q1 2021 is going to be flat, maybe up slightly. Remember the COVID impact was definitely felt in March of this year. So based on the earnings that we saw, there may be some upside in Q1, given that organizations are still being cautious in Q4, and really there's still some uncertainty in Q1. Let's look at some of the survey responses and you'll see why we're more optimistic than we've previously reported. This chart shows the responses to key questions around spending trajectories from the March, June, September, and December surveys of this year. Now it's no surprise that there's been little change in remote workers and limiting business travel. But look at the other categories, seeing a dramatic reduction in hiring freezes. The percentage of companies freezing new IT deployments continues to drop throughout the year. And then conversely, the percentage of companies accelerating new it deployments that's sharply up to 34% from the March low of 12%. And look at the headcount trends. The percentage of companies instituting layoffs. It continues its downward trajectory while accelerated hiring is now up to 17%. So there's a lot to be excited about in these results. Now let's look the remote worker trend. How do CIO see that shift in the near to midterm? This chart shows the work from home data and it's amazingly consistent from the September survey drill down. You can see CIO's is indicate that on average, 15 to 60% of workers were remote prior to the pandemic, and that jumped up to 72 to 73% currently, and is expected to stay in the high fifties until the summer of 2021. Thereafter, organizations expect that the number of employees that work remotely on a permanent basis is going to more than double to 34% long term. By the way, I've talked to a number of executives, CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs that expect that number to be higher than these especially in the technology sector. They expect more than half of their workers to be remote and are looking to consolidate facilities cost to save money. As we've said, cloud computing has been the most significant contributor to business resilience and digital transformation this year. So let's look at cloud strategies and see how CIOs expect those to evolve. This chart shows responses to how organizations see multi-cloud evolving. It's interesting to note the ETR call-out, which concludes that the narrative around multi-cloud multi-cloud is real, and it is. But I want to talk to you about a flip side to this notion in that, as many customers have, or are planning to increasingly concentrate workloads in the cloud. This actually makes some sense. Sure, virtually every major company uses multiple clouds, but more often than not, it concentrate work on a primary cloud. CIO strategies, they're not generally evenly distributed across clouds. The data shows that this is the case for less than 20% of the respondents, rather organizations are typically going to apply an 80, 20 or a 70, 30 rule for their multi-cloud approach. Meaning they pick a primary cloud on which most work is done, and then they use alternative clouds as either a hedge or maybe for specific workloads or maybe even data protection purposes. Now, if you think about it, optimizing on a primary cloud allows organizations to simplify their security and governance and consolidate their skills. At this point in the cloud evolution, it seems CIOs feel there's more value that is going to come from leveraging the cloud to change their operating models, and maybe broadly spreading the wealth to reduce risk or maybe cut costs, or maybe even to tap specialized capabilities. What's more in thinking about AWS and Microsoft respectively. Each can make a very strong case from MANO cloud. AWS has more features than any other cloud, and as such can handle most workloads. Microsoft can make a similar argument for its customers that have an affinity and a largest state of Microsoft software. The key for multi-cloud in our view will be the degree to which technology vendors can abstract the underlying cloud complexity and create a layer that floats above the clouds and adds incremental value. Snowflakes data cloud is one of the best examples of this, and we've covered that pretty extensively. Now, clearly VMware and Red Hat have aspirations at the infrastructure layer in a similar fashion. Pure storage, and NetApp are a couple of the largest storage players with similar visions. And then Qumulo and Clumio are two other examples with promising technologies, but they have a much smaller install base. Take a look at Cisco, Dell, IBM and HPE. They have a lot to gain and a lot to lose in this cloud game. So multi-cloud is an imperative for these leaders, but for them it's much more complicated because of the complexity and vastness of their portfolios. And notably Dell has VMware and IBM of course has Red Hat, which are key assets that can be leveraged for this multi-cloud game. HPE has a channel and a large install base, but all of these firms, they have to spread R&D much more thinly than some of these other companies that we mentioned for example. The bottom line is that multi-cloud has to be more than just plugging into an operating well on any of the clouds. It require... Which is by the way, this is mostly where we are today. It requires an incremental value proposition that solves a clear problem, and at the same time runs efficiently, meaning it takes advantage of cloud native services at scale. What sectors are showing momentum heading into 2021? And who are some of the names that are looking strong? We've reported a lot that cloud containers and container orchestration, machine intelligence and automation are by far the hottest sectors, the biggest areas of investment with the greatest spending momentum. Now we measure this in ETR parlance, remember by net score. But here's the good news, almost every other sector in the ETR taxonomy with the notable exception of IT outsourcing and IT consulting is showing positive spending momentum relative to previous surveys this year. Yeah, maybe not, it's not a shock, but it appears that the tech spending recovery will be broad-based. It's also worth noting that there are several vendors that stand out and we show a number of them here. CrowdStrike, Microsoft has had consistent performance in the dataset throughout this year. Okta, we called out those guys last year and they've clearly performed as you can see in their earnings reports. Pure storage, interestingly, big acceleration and a turnaround from last quarter in the dataset, and of course, snowflake has been off the charts as we reported many times. These guys are all seeing highly accelerated momentum. UiPath just announced its intent to IPO, AWS, Google, Zscaler, SailPoint, ServiceNow, and Elastic, these all continue to trend up. And so, there are some real positives that we're looking for a member of the ETR surveys, they're forward-looking. So we'll see, as we catch up next quarter. Now, before we wrap, I want to say a few words on security, and maybe it's a bit of a non-sequitur here, but I think it's relevant to the trends that we've been discussing, especially as we talk about moving to the cloud. And as you know, we've reported many times on the security space, basically updating you quarterly with our scenarios and the spending and the technology trends and highlighting our four-star companies. Four-star company's insecurity on those with both momentum and significant market presence. And last year we put CrowdStrike, Okta and Zscaler, and some others on the radar. And we've closely track the cyber business of larger companies with a security portfolio like Palo Alto and Cisco, and more recently, VMware has made some acquisitions. Now the government hacked that became news this week. It really underscores the importance of security. It remains the most challenging area for organizations because well, failure's not an option, skills are short, tools are abundant, the adversaries are very well-funded and extremely capable yet failure is common as we saw this week. And there's a misconception that cloud solves the security problem, and it's important to point out that it does not. Cloud is a shared responsibility model, meaning the cloud provider is going to secure the infrastructure for example, but it's up to you as the customer to configure things properly and deal with application security. It's ultimately on you. And the example of S3 is instructive because we've seen a number S3 breaches over the years where the customer didn't properly configure the S3 bucket. We're talking about companies like Honda and Capital One, not just small businesses that don't have the SecOps resources. And generally it was because a non-security person was configuring things. Maybe they were Or developers who are not focused on security, and perhaps permission set too broadly, and access was given to far too many people. Whatever the issue, it took some breaches and subsequent education to increase awareness of this problem and tighten it up. We see some similar trends occurring with new workloads, especially in cloud databases. It's becoming so easy to spin up new data warehouses for example, and we believe that there are exposures out there due the lack of awareness or inconsistent corporate governance being applied to these new data stores. As well, even though important areas like threat intelligence and database security are important, SecOps budgets are stretched thin. And when you ask companies where the priorities are, these fall lower down the list, these areas specifically have taken a back seat, the endpoint, identity and cloud security. And we bring this up because it's a potential blind spot as we saw this week with the US government hack. It was stealthy, it wasn't detected for many, many months. Who knows maybe even years. And not to be a buzzkill, but the point is, cloud enthusiasm has to be concompetent with security vigilant. Enough preaching, let's wrap up here. As we enter 2020, this year, we said the cloud was going to be the force that drove innovation along with data and AI. And as we look in the rear view mirror and put 2020 behind us, I know many of you want to do that, it was the cloud that enabled businesses to not only continue to operate, but to actually increase productivity. Nonetheless, we still see IT spending declines of four to 5% this year with an expectation of a tepid Q4 relative to the last year. We see Q1 slowly rebounding and kind of a swoosh, let me try that again, recovery in the subsequent quarters with tech spending rebounding in 2021 to a positive three to 5%, let's call it 4%. Now supporting us scenario, the pandemic forced a giant Petri dish for digital. And we see some real successes and learnings that organizations will apply in 2021 to bet on sure things. These are cloud, containers, AI, ML, machine intelligence pieces and automation. For sure, along with upticks for virtually every other sector of technology because spending has been so depressed. The two exceptions are outsourcing and IT consulting and related services which continue to be a drag on overall spending. Priorities must be focused on security and governance and further improvements in applying corporate edicts in a cloud world. We also see new data architectures emerging where domain knowledge becomes central to data platforms. We'll be covering this in more detail on top of the work that we've already done in this area. Now, automation is not only an opportunity, it's become a mandate. Yes, RPA, but also broader automation agendas be on point tools. And importantly, we're not talking about paving the cow path here by automating existing processes. Rather we're talking about rethinking processes across the entire organization for a new digital reality where many of these processes are being invented. The work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee on the second machine age. It was pressured back in 2014 and the conclusions they drew, they're becoming increasingly important in the 2020s, meaning that look machines have always replaced humans throughout time. But for the first time in history, it's happening for cognitive functions, and a huge base of workers is going to be, or as being marginalized, unless they're retrained. Education and public policy that supports this transition is critical. And I for one would like to see a much more productive discussion that goes beyond the cult of break up big tech. Rather I'd like to see governments partner with big tech to truly do good and help drive the re-skilling of workers for the digital age. Now cloud remains the underpinning of the digital business mandate, but the path forward isn't really always crystal clear. This is evidenced by the virtual dead heat between those organizations that are consolidating workloads in a cloud workloads versus those that are hedging bets on a multi-cloud strategy. One thing is clear cloud is the linchpin for our growth scenarios and will continue to be the substrate for innovation in the coming decade. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, and please subscribe to the series, appreciate that. Check out ETR's website at ETR.plus. We also publish full report every week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com and get in touch with me at David.vallante, siliconangle.Com, you can DM me at D. Vellante. And please by all means comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody, Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa, or happy, whatever holiday you celebrate. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Orlando, Florida It's the que covering Accelerate nineteen. Brought to you by Fortunate >> Welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin with Peter Burgers. We are coming to you Live from Orlando, Florida We've been at forty nine. Accelerate twenty nineteen all day. Peter, What a day our third year co hosting the Cuba Forty and accelerate. We heard a lot about industry leadership, product, leadership in innovation, partner. Success fourteen and accelerate. What? Some of the things that really stuck with you from the keynote all the way to the end of our interviews. >> Well, I was going to say first put a fork in May. Um, uh, Here's one of the things that I've observed. I've been doing the analyst thing and been a practitioner I t for over thirty years now on DH. Uh, it's amazing the degree to its security. People are often some of the smartest people you meet and some of the most straightforward people you meet, and partly that's because they are paid to ferret out nonsense. It's very, very difficult to fake security on. Uh, it just is, if there's one thing that even more than the last couple of years just struck me today. Perhaps it's because we're coming more familiar. Affording it is how smart these guys are, how smart they are, how informed they are, how well spoken they are. I mean, the interviews have been a breeze. I learned something from every single one of these for Jeanette interviews. So that's probably the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is, um, the Ford. It has taken a different tack. We talked about this in the open, they have acknowledged, or they believe that having a degree of control over the underlying hardware is going to be a source of benefit to the customer on a source of advantage to Ford in it. And they continue to push that, and it appears pretty clear that they made a good bet that regard. We heard a lot about how a lot of new products are being placed on top of that platform and top those appliances a lot of additional functionality. But it also is pretty obvious that the ecosystem is growing faster, even in many respects and fortunate is in terms of the number of the amount of invention and innovation it's happening, and that's in part made possible by having a platform that's just higher performance. Oh, and if there's one last thing that I'd say is the degree to which Fortunate has made talked about this a second ago but made good bets and it appears clear that they're going to continue to make good bets bringing full circle Smart people that get stuff done in a domain that's absolutely essential to business are in a position to really shape the way that all this digital business transformation of digital business evolves. And Ford Net is punching above their weight in terms of how they're influencing the directions of the industry. >> They are punching up that there way. I think you mentioned that during one of our interview segment. I think they're proud of that. I think their confidence in what they're delivering and their history of being able to be pretty good at predicting what's going to happen was evident from the keynote this morning, where they showed a number of times where they are from an industry leadership in a market share perspective, calling out the names of their competitors, showing how much how far they've come, how much their customers are benefiting how much their business is growing as a result. So that confidence on pride was evident from the first time CEO Kinsey stepped on stage this morning. And I think we heard that throughout every interview segment today that you and I did with their leaders and some of their partners as well that there's since there that they know what they're doing. To your point, I agree. There was a lot of clarity of message. It's a very it's Security's a very interesting topic of conversation because it's pervasive across every industry. >> There wasn't the interviews weren't interchangeable. Each of them bought their expertise to bear on DH had something really interesting and useful to say, But it's at the core. You could see that the culture is thriving, that obviously it's a great Tam's great total addressable market that's growing. There's a lot of excitement inside the fortunate employee base about the possibilities and the role that they're likely to play, and I are playing on, you know, they talked a lot about Canada, Dabo's and some of the new. Some of the new alliance isn't even able to put together and influence. I mean, it's just It's a very good story in a market that is increasingly important. That's a potent combination for the Cube and for customers overall. >> And they did a great job on the education piece. Education was you mentioned Davis. That was an interesting kind of nod back to what they talked about last year's Accelerate twenty eighteen Educate education Ecosystem technology knows of the three pillars that were discussed in Davos is being essential components for safe and secure digital transformation, which they even set of Davos. Hey, there's the potential here in the next ten years for digital transformation to unlock. Ten can't be million. Maybe it is a huge value for businesses for society, and they said, Hey, fortunate, we've talked about these three tenants last year. We talked to John both just a little bit ago about how they are actively educating the channel from their bars to help them become msp sto. MSS peas their distributors how they're really educating, helping to mitigate some of the ostensible cybersecurity skills gap that we've talked about a very long time. But that's a a dedicated business model for them that hey, they want to drive preference with their partners. Everybody has. His customers have toys. Partners have choice. They've put a very strategic and evolutionary focus on evolving that. So customers in any industry have the opportunity to leverage security as as a best practice it as a benefit to their business. >> And there's a degree of altruism for why they did it, because they recognize that there's three and a half million open cybersecurity positions in the world. But they also demonstrated how smart and practical it is. Try to take that leadership. They want to become more competency based. How? Okay, great. Now, what does that allow you to do? It allows you to have your partners, your partner, network, connect independent of you to create solutions independent of you still based in your technology and basing your capabilities and services, but to engage customers in faster ways that may not necessarily involve you. Okay, so competency leads to new partner arrangements. Well, that also leads to more complex kinds of customer relations that generate greater value, greater service, all with the certainty of trust behind it, because you've done a better job of articulating what constitutes competency in an extremely complex domain. So it's a It's a It's a really interesting story. They've. They've clearly taken some best practices that we've seen emerge in the industry over the last few years and applied them anew. In a company that's going quite fast and a market that's growing faster than any other in Tech, >> this is largely this event accelerated. Think Derek Banky. I mention this is his seven. So around the seventh or eighth forty nine accelerate event that started its history wise as a partner conference. Obviously, it's grown tremendously, but there's a lot of partners here I would love to hear next year from the voice of the customer, a customer who has faced these challenges. We were speaking with one of their partners. It'LL come to me with Siemens, who was talking about Hey together. Seaman's from an O. T. Challenge and Opportunity, Perspective and Fortunate can help a customer transform and converge, and ot and thirty days in a harsh type of environment that's huge would love to hear more stories like showed the impact that customers can make by addressing these challenges and leveraging these technologies to not just react to threats as they come all the time. But she eventually become proactive and predictive. >> Well, the the the world economic form Dabo's uh, sport that put up a couple charts that showed how the World Economic Forum is basically putting cyber security at the center of a lot of the new economic activity associated with digital business on way would tend to agree with that. That's a very, very important feature, if for no other reason than just this notion of trust becomes so very essential. And so you know, for Net is in a position to make some crucial to really have a strong influence on how this industry plays out to make some pretty decent money. This they're generating more patents, then eighty percent. I mean, I don't know what the number is, but three times as many patents in the segment that they're operating in as anybody else. Lot of innovation, lot of dedication to doing that kind of stuff. But I think it is important for them to take on Maura the customer. You and I were talking about this earlier. They did it, you know, this conference and the keynotes and the conversations spoke to network administrators, network pros, security prose partners. We would weigh. Both believe that digital business outcomes are going to be tied into a CZ moral economic form. Does that core cybersecurity capability of abyss that of his says? And so it would be nice to have them feature more customers, but also to do eh clear job of taking a pull on that thread from outcome all the way to technology because the market needs that. It's not clear to a lot of people what really is the relationship between investment in cyber security and how that translates into new classes of business value that are gonna have a long term implications on how markets operate. >> Yeah, and it's going to be We gotta hear more than scalability, flexibility and speed those air obvious. But how our industry's being and business is being transformed. I know they >> are >> so waken boy, a lot of that down to that, that simple word trust. I mean, we heard a lot here. If there has been an erosion of trust and a lot of the most important institutions that we operate under, and if that continues, that's going to create a whole bunch of problems looking forward and so having a brand have trust associated with it in a physical as well as the digital world is going to be a major determinant of whether or not a company is going to be able to transform and take advantage of some of the new technologies and approaches to doing business in the future. >> That's a great point. Well, Peter, I enjoyed co hosting the Cube with you at our third ported. Accelerate. Appreciate all your insights and your time. >> You too. >> Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching the queue began. We've been live here. Fortinet Accelerate twenty nineteen from Florida, Orlando, Florida for Peter Bourjos. Lisa Martin, You're watching the Cube?