from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante earnings season has shown a conflicting mix of signals for software companies well virtually all firms are expressing caution over so-called macro headwinds we're talking about ukraine inflation interest rates europe fx headwinds supply chain just overall i.t spend mongodb along with a few other names appeared more sanguine thanks to a beat in the recent quarter and a cautious but upbeat outlook for the near term hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis ahead of mongodb world 2022 we drill into mongo's business and what etr survey data tells us in the context of overall demand and the patterns that we're seeing from other software companies and we're seeing some distinctly different results from major firms these days we'll talk more about [ __ ] in this session which beat eps by 30 cents in revenue by more than 18 million dollars salesforce had a great quarter and its diversified portfolio is paying off as seen by the stocks noticeable uptick post earnings uipath which had been really beaten down prior to this quarter it's brought in a new co-ceo and it's business is showing a nice rebound with a small three cent eps beat and a nearly 20 million dollar top line beat crowdstrike is showing strength as well meanwhile managements at microsoft workday and snowflake expressed greater caution about the macroeconomic climate and especially on investors minds his concern about consumption pricing models snowflake in particular which had a small top-line beat cited softness and effects from reduced consumption especially from certain consumer-facing customers which has analysts digging more deeply into the predictability of their models in fact barclays analyst ramo lenchow published an especially thoughtful piece on this topic concluding that [ __ ] was less susceptible to consumption headwinds than for example snowflake essentially for a few reasons one because atlas mongo's cloud managed service which is the consumption model comprises only about 60 percent of mongo's revenue second is the premise that [ __ ] is supporting core operational applications that can't be easily dialed down or turned off and three that snowflake customers it sounds like has a more concentrated customer base and due to that fact there's a preponderance of its revenue is consumption driven and would be more sensitive to swings in these consumption patterns now i'll say this first consumption pricing models are here to stay and the much preferred model for customers is consumption the appeal of consumption is i can actually dial down turn off if i need to and stop spending for a while which happened or at least happened to a certain extent this quarter for certain companies but to the point about [ __ ] supporting core applications i do believe that over time you're going to see the increased emergence of data products that will become core monetization drivers in snowflake along with other data platforms is going to feed those data products and services and become over time maybe less susceptible and less sensitive to these consumption patterns it'll always be there but i think increasingly it's going to be tied to operational revenue last two points here in this slide software evaluations have reverted to their historical mean which is a good thing in our view we've taken some air out of the bubble and returned to more normalized valuations was really predicted and looked forward to look we're still in a lousy market for stocks it's really a bear market for tech the market tends to be at least six months ahead of the economy and often not always but often is a good predictor we've had some tough compares relative to the pandemic days in tech and we'll be watching next quarter very closely because the macro headwinds have now been firmly inserted into the guidance of software companies okay let's have a look at how certain names have performed relative to a software index benchmark so far this year here's a year-to-date chart comparing microsoft salesforce [ __ ] and snowflake to the igv software heavy etf which is shown in the darker blue line which by the way it does not own the ctf does not own snowflake or [ __ ] you can see that these big super caps have fared pretty well whereas [ __ ] and especially snowflake those higher growth companies have been much more negatively impacted year to date from a stock price standpoint now let's move on let's take a financial snapshot of [ __ ] and put it next to snowflake so we can compare these two higher growth names what we've done here in this chart has taken the most recent quarters revenue and multiplied it by 4x to get a revenue run rate and we've parenthetically added a projection for the full year revenue [ __ ] as you see will do north of a billion dollars in revenue while snowflake will begin to approach three billion dollars 2.7 and run right through that that four quarter run rate that they just had last quarter and you can see snowflake is growing faster than [ __ ] at 85 percent this past quarter and we took now these most of these profit of these next profitability ratios off the current quarter with one exception both companies have high gross margins of course you'd expect that but as we've discussed not as high as some traditional software companies in part because of their cloud costs but also you know their maturity or lack thereof both [ __ ] and snowflake because they are in high growth mode have thin operating margins they spend nearly half or more than half of their revenue on growth that's the sg a line mostly the s the sales and marketing is really where they're spending money uh and and they're specialists so they spend a fair amount of their revenue on r d but maybe not as high as you might think but a pretty hefty percentage the free cash flow as a percentage of revenue line we calculated off the full year projections because there was a kind of an anomaly this quarter in the in the snowflake numbers and you can see snowflakes free cash flow uh which again was abnormally high this quarter is going to settle in around 16 this year versus mongo's six percent so strong focus by snowflake on free cash flow and its management snowflake is about four billion dollars in cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet with little or no debt whereas [ __ ] has about two billion dollars on its balance sheet with a little bit of longer term debt and you can see snowflakes market cap is about double that of mongos so you're paying for higher growth with snowflake you're paying for the slootman scarpelli execution engine the expectation there a stronger balance sheet etc but snowflake is well off its roughly 100 billion evaluation which it touched during the peak days of tech during the pandemic and just that as an aside [ __ ] has around 33 000 customers about five times the number of customers snowflake has so a bit of a different customer mix and concentration but both companies in our view have no lack of market in terms of tam okay now let's dig a little deeper into mongo's business and bring in some etr data this colorful chart shows the breakdown of mongo's net score net score is etr's proprietary methodology that measures the percent of customers in the etr survey that are adding the platform new that's the lime green at nine percent existing customers that are spending six percent or more on the platform that's the forest green at 37 spending flat that's the gray at 46 percent decreasing spend that's the pinkish at around 5 and churning that's only 3 that's the bright red for [ __ ] subtract the red from the greens and you net out to a 38 which is a very solid net score figure note this is a survey of 1500 or so organizations and it includes 150 mongodb customers which includes by the way 68 global 2000 customers and they show a spending velocity or a net score of 44 so notably higher among the larger clients and while it's a smaller sample only 27 emea's net score for [ __ ] is 33 now that's down from 60 last quarter note that [ __ ] cited softness in its european business on its earning calls so that aligns to the gtr data okay now let's plot [ __ ] relative to some other data platforms these don't all necessarily compete head to head with [ __ ] but they are in data and database platforms in the etr data set and that's what this chart shows it's an xy graph with net score or as we say spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence or pervasiveness in the data set on the horizontal axis see that red dotted line there at 40 that indicates an elevated level of spending anything above that is highly elevated we've highlighted [ __ ] in that red box which is very close to that 40 percent line it has a pretty strong presence on the x-axis right there with gcp snowflake as we've reported has come down to earth but still well elevated again that aligns with the earnings releases uh aws and microsoft they have many data platforms especially aws so their plot position reflects their broad portfolio massive size on the x-axis um that's the presence and and very impressive on the vertical axis so despite that size they have strong spending momentum and you can see the pack of others including cockroach small on the verdict on the horizontal but elevated on the vertical couch base is creeping up since its ipo redis maria db which was launched the day that oracle bought sun and and got my sequel and some legacy platforms including the leader in database oracle as well as ibm and teradata's both cloud and on-prem platforms now one interesting side note here is on mongo's earning call it clearly cited the advantages of its increasingly all-in-one approach relative to others that offer a portfolio of bespoke or what we some sometimes call horses for courses databases [ __ ] cited the advantages of its simplicity and lower costs as it adds more and more functionality this is an argument often made by oracle and they often target aws as the company with too many databases and of course [ __ ] makes that argument uh as well but they also make the argument that oracle they don't necessarily call them out but they talk about traditional relational databases of course they're talking about oracle and others they say that's more complex less flexible and less appealing to developers than is [ __ ] now oracle of course would retur we retort saying hey we now support a mongodb api so why go anywhere else we're the most robust and the best for mission critical but this gives credence to the fact that if oracle is trying to capture business by offering a [ __ ] api for example that [ __ ] must be doing something right okay let's look at why they buy [ __ ] here's an etr chart that addresses that question it's it's mongo's feature breadth is the number one reason lower cost or better roi is number two integrations and stack alignment is third and mongo's technology lead is fourth those four kind of stand out with notice on the right hand side security and vision much lower there in the right that doesn't necessarily mean that [ __ ] doesn't have good security and and good vision although it has been cited uh security concerns um and and so we keep an eye on that but look [ __ ] has a document database it's become a viable alternative to traditional relational databases meaning you have much more flexibility over your schema um and in fact you know it's kind of schema-less you can pretty much put anything into a document database uh developers seem to love it generally it's fair to say mongo's architecture would favor consistency over availability because it uses a single master architecture as a primary and you can create secondary nodes in the event of a primary failure but you got to think about that and how to architect availability into the platform and got to consider recovery more carefully now now no schema means it's not a tables and rows structure and you can again shove anything you want into the database but you got to think about how to optimize performance um on queries now [ __ ] has been hard at work evolving the platform from the early days when you go back and look at its roadmap it's been you know started as a document database purely it added graph processing time series it's made search you know much much easier and more fundamental it's added atlas that fully managed cloud database uh service which we said now comprises 60 of its revenue it's you know kubernetes integrations and kind of the modern microservices stack and dozens and dozens and dozens of other features mongo's done a really fine job we think of creating a leading database platform today that is loved by customers loved by developers and is highly functional and next week the cube will be at mongodb world and we'll be looking for some of these items that we're showing here and this this chart this always going to be main focus on developers [ __ ] prides itself on being a developer friendly platform we're going to look for new features especially around security and governance and simplification of configurations and cluster management [ __ ] is likely going to continue to advance its all-in-one appeal and add more capabilities that reduce the need to to spin up bespoke platforms and we would expect enhance enhancements to atlas further enhancements there is atlas really is the future you know maybe adding you know more cloud native features and integrations and perhaps simplified ways to migrate to the cloud to atlas and improve access to data sources generally making the lives of developers and data analysts easier that's going to be we think a big theme at the event so these are the main things that we'll be scoping out at the event so please stop by if you're in new york city new york city at mongodb world or tune in to thecube.net okay that's it for today thanks to my colleagues stephanie chan who helps research breaking analysis from time to time alex meyerson is on production as today is as is andrew frick sarah kenney steve conte conte anderson hill and the entire team in palo alto thank you kristen martin and cheryl knight helped get the word out and rob hof is our editor-in-chief over there at siliconangle remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcast we do publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com want to reach me email me david.velante siliconangle.com or dm me at divalante or a 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 thanks for watching see you next time [Music] you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante you know we've often said that the next 10 years in cloud computing won't be like the last ten cloud has firmly planted its footprint on the other side of the chasm with the momentum of the entire multi-trillion dollar tech business behind it both sellers and buyers are leaning in by adopting cloud technologies and many are building their own value layers on top of cloud in the coming years we expect innovation will continue to coalesce around the three big u.s clouds plus alibaba in apac with the ecosystem building value on top of the hardware saw tooling provided by the hyperscalers now importantly we don't see this as a race to the bottom rather our expectation is that the large public cloud players will continue to take cost out of their platforms through innovation automation and integration while other cloud providers and the ecosystem including traditional companies that buy it mine opportunities in their respective markets as matt baker of dell is fond of saying this is not a zero sum game welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll update you on our latest projections in the cloud market we'll share some new etr survey data with some surprising nuggets and drill into this the important cloud database landscape first we want to take a look at what people are talking about in cloud and what's been in the recent news with the exception of alibaba all the large cloud players have reported earnings google continues to focus on growth at the expense of its profitability google reported that it's cloud business which includes applications like google workspace grew 45 percent to five and a half billion dollars but it had an operating loss of 890 billion now since thomas curion joined google to run its cloud business google has increased head count in its cloud business from 25 000 25 000 people now it's up to 40 000 in an effort to catch up to the two leaders but playing catch up is expensive now to put this into perspective let's go back to aws's revenue in q1 2018 when the company did 5.4 billion so almost exactly the same size as google's current total cloud business and aws is growing faster at the time at 49 don't forget google includes in its cloud numbers a big chunk of high margin software aws at the time had an operating profit of 1.4 billion that quarter around 26 of its revenues so it was a highly profitable business about as profitable as cisco's overall business which again is a great business this is what happens when you're number three and didn't get your head out of your ads fast enough now in fairness google still gets high marks on the quality of its technology according to corey quinn of the duck bill group amazon and google cloud are what he called neck and neck with regard to reliability with microsoft azure trailing because of significant disruptions in the past these comments were made last week in a bloomberg article despite some recent high-profile outages on aws not surprisingly a microsoft spokesperson said that the company's cloud offers industry-leading reliability and that gives customers payment credits after some outages thank you turning to microsoft and cloud news microsoft's overall cloud business surpassed 22 billion in the december quarter up 32 percent year on year like google microsoft includes application software and sas offerings in its cloud numbers and gives little nuggets of guidance on its azure infrastructure as a service business by the way we estimate that azure comprises about 45 percent of microsoft's overall cloud business which we think hit a 40 billion run rate last quarter microsoft guided in its earning call that recent declines in the azure growth rates will reverse in q1 and that implies sequential growth for azure and finally it was announced that the ftc not the doj will review microsoft's announced 75 billion acquisition of activision blizzard it appears ftc chair lena khan wants to take this one on herself she of course has been very outspoken about the power of big tech companies and in recent a recent cnbc interview suggested that the u.s government's actions were a meaningful contributor back then to curbing microsoft's power in the 90s i personally found that dubious just ask netscape wordperfect novell lotus and spc the maker of harvard presentation graphics how effective the government was in curbing microsoft power generally my take is that the u s government has had a dismal record regulating tech companies most notably ibm and microsoft and it was market forces company hubris complacency and self-inflicted wounds not government intervention these were far more effective than the government now of course if companies are breaking the law they should be punished but the u.s government hasn't been very productive in its actions and the unintended consequences of regulation could be detrimental to the u.s competitiveness in the race with china but i digress lastly in the news amazon announced earnings thursday and the company's value increased by 191 billion dollars on friday that's a record valuation gain for u.s stocks aws amazon's profit engine grew 40 percent year on year for the quarter it closed the year at 62 billion dollars in revenue and at a 71 billion dollar revenue run rate aws is now larger than ibm which without kindrel is at a 67 billion dollar run rate just for context ibm's revenue in 2011 was 107 billion dollars now there's a conversation going on in the media and social that in order to continue this growth and compete with microsoft that aws has to get into the sas business and offer applications we don't think that's the right strategy for amp from for amazon in the near future rather we see them enabling developers to compete in that business finally amazon disclosed that 48 of its top 50 customers are using graviton 2 instances why is this important because aws is well ahead of the competition in custom silicon chips is and is on a price performance curve that is far better than alternatives especially those based on x86 this is one of the reasons why we think this business is not a race to the bottom aws is being followed by google microsoft and alibaba in terms of developing custom silicon and will continue to drive down their internal cost structures and deliver price performance equal to or better than the historical moore's law curves so that's the recent news for the big u.s cloud providers let's now take a look at how the year ended for the big four hyperscalers and look ahead to next year here's a table we've shown this view before it shows the revenue estimates for worldwide is and paths generated by aws microsoft alibaba and google now remember amazon and alibaba they share clean eye ass figures whereas microsoft and alphabet only give us these nuggets that we have to interpret and we correlate those tidbits with other data that we gather we're one of the few outlets that actually attempts to make these apples to apples comparisons there's a company called synergy research there's another firm that does this but i really can't map to their numbers their gcp figures look far too high and azure appears somewhat overestimated and they do include other stuff like hosted private cloud services but it's another data point that you can use okay back to the table we've slightly adjusted our gcp figures down based on interpreting some of alphabet's statements and other survey data only alibaba has yet to announce earnings so we'll stick to a 2021 market size of about 120 billion dollars that's a 41 growth rate relative to 2020 and we expect that figure to increase by 38 percent to 166 billion in 2022 now we'll discuss this a bit later but these four companies have created an opportunity for the ecosystem to build what we're calling super clouds on top of this infrastructure and we're seeing it happen it was increasingly obvious at aws re invent last year and we feel it will pick up momentum in the coming months and years a little bit more on that later now here's a graphical view of the quarterly revenue shares for these four companies notice that aws has reversed its share erosion and is trending up slightly aws has accelerated its growth rate four quarters in a row now it accounted for 52 percent of the big four hyperscaler revenue last year and that figure was nearly 54 in the fourth quarter azure finished the year with 32 percent of the hyper scale revenue in 2021 which dropped to 30 percent in q4 and you can see gcp and alibaba they're neck and neck fighting for the bronze medal by the way in our recent 2022 predictions post we said google cloud platform would surpass alibaba this year but given the recent trimming of our numbers google's got some work to do for that prediction to be correct okay just to put a bow on the wikibon market data let's look at the quarterly growth rates and you'll see the compression trends there this data tracks quarterly revenue growth rates back to 20 q1 2019 and you can see the steady downward trajectory and the reversal that aws experienced in q1 of last year now remember microsoft guided for sequential growth and azure so that orange line should trend back up and given gcp's much smaller and big go to market investments that we talked about we'd like to see an acceleration there as well the thing about aws is just remarkable that it's able to accelerate growth at a 71 billion run rate business and alibaba you know is a bit more opaque and likely still reeling from the crackdown of the chinese government we're admittedly not as close to the china market but we'll continue to watch from afar as that steep decline in growth rate is somewhat of a concern okay let's get into the survey data from etr and to do so we're going to take some time series views on some of the select cloud platforms that are showing spending momentum in the etr data set you know etr uses a metric we talked about this a lot called net score to measure that spending velocity of products and services netscore basically asks customers are you spending more less or the same on a platform and a vendor and then it subtracts the lesses from the moors and that yields a net score this chart shows net score for five cloud platforms going back to january 2020. note in the table that the table we've inserted inside that chart shows the net score and shared n the latter metric indicates the number of mentions in the data set and all the platforms we've listed here show strong presence in the survey that red dotted line at 40 percent that indicates spending is at an elevated level and you can see azure and aws and vmware cloud on aws as well as gcp are all nicely elevated and bounding off their october figures indicating continued cloud momentum overall but the big surprise in these figures is the steady climb and the steep bounce up from oracle which came in just under the 40 mark now one quarter is not necessarily a trend but going back to january 2020 the oracle peaks keep getting higher and higher so we definitely want to keep watching this now here's a look at some of the other cloud platforms in the etr survey the chart here shows the same time series and we've now brought in some of the big hybrid players notably vmware cloud which is vcf and other on-prem solutions red hat openstack which as we've reported in the past is still popular in telcos who want to build their own cloud we're also starting to see hpe with green lake and dell with apex show up more and ibm which years ago acquired soft layer which was really essentially a bare metal hosting company and over the years ibm cobbled together its own public cloud ibm is now racing after hybrid cloud using red hat openshift as the linchpin to that strategy now what this data tells us first of all these platforms they don't have the same presence in the data set as do the previous players vmware is the one possible exception but other than vmware these players don't have the spending velocity shown in the previous chart and most are below the red line hpe and dell are interesting and notable in that they're transitioning their early private cloud businesses to dell gr sorry hpe green lake and dell apex respectively and finally after years of kind of staring at their respective navels in in cloud and milking their legacy on-prem models they're finally building out cloud-like infrastructure for their customers they're leaning into cloud and marketing it in a more sensible and attractive fashion for customers so we would expect these figures are going to bounce around for a little while for those two as they settle into a groove and we'll watch that closely now ibm is in the process of a complete do-over arvin krishna inherited three generations of leadership with a professional services mindset now in the post gerschner gerstner era both sam palmisano and ginny rometty held on far too long to ibm's service heritage and protected the past from the future they missed the cloud opportunity and they forced the acquisition of red hat to position the company for the hybrid cloud remedy tried to shrink to grow but never got there krishna is moving faster and with the kindred spin is promising mid-single-digit growth which would be a welcome change ibm is a lot of work to do and we would expect its net score figures as well to bounce around as customers transition to the future all right let's take a look at all these different players in context these are all the clouds that we just talked about in a two-dimensional view the vertical axis is net score or spending momentum and the horizontal axis is market share or presence or pervasiveness in the data set a couple of call-outs that we'd like to make here first the data confirms what we've been saying what everybody's been saying aws and microsoft stand alone with a huge presence many tens of billions of dollars in revenue yet they are both well above the 40 line and show spending momentum and they're well ahead of gcp on both dimensions second vmware while much smaller is showing legitimate momentum which correlates to its public statements alibaba the alibaba in this survey really doesn't have enough sample to make hardcore conclusions um you can see hpe and dell and ibm you know similarly they got a little bit more presence in the data set but they clearly have some work to do what you're seeing there is their transitioning their legacy install bases oracle's the big surprise look what oracle was in the january survey and how they've shot up recently now we'll see if this this holds up let's posit some possibilities as to why it really starts with the fact that oracle is the king of mission critical apps now if you haven't seen video on twitter you have to check it out it's it's hilarious we're not going to run the video here but the link will be in our post but i'll give you the short version some really creative person they overlaid a data migration narrative on top of this one tooth guy who speaks in spanish gibberish but the setup is he's a pm he's a he's a a project manager at a bank and aws came into the bank this of course all hypothetical and said we can move all your apps to the cloud in 12 months and the guy says but wait we're running mission critical apps on exadata and aws says there's nothing special about exadata and he starts howling and slapping his knee and laughing and giggling and talking about the 23 year old senior engineer who says we're going to do this with microservices and he could tell he was he was 23 because he was wearing expensive sneakers and what a nightmare they encountered migrating their environment very very very funny video and anyone who's ever gone through a major migration of mission critical systems this is gonna hit home it's funny not funny the point is it's really painful to move off of oracle and oracle for all its haters and its faults is really the best environment for mission critical systems and customers know it so what's happening is oracle's building out the best cloud for oracle database and it has a lot of really profitable customers running on-prem that the company is migrating to oracle cloud infrastructure oci it's a safer bet than ripping it and putting it into somebody else's cloud that doesn't have all the specialized hardware and oracle knowledge because you can get the same integrated exadata hardware and software to run your database in the oracle cloud it's frankly an easier and much more logical migration path for a lot of customers and that's possibly what's happening here not to mention oracle jacks up the license price nearly doubles the license price if you run on other clouds so not only is oracle investing to optimize its cloud infrastructure it spends money on r d we've always talked about that really focused on mission critical applications but it's making it more cost effective by penalizing customers that run oracle elsewhere so this possibly explains why when the gartner magic quadrant for cloud databases comes out it's got oracle so well positioned you can see it there for yourself oracle's position is right there with aws and microsoft and ahead of google on the right-hand side is gartner's critical capabilities ratings for dbms and oracle leads in virtually all of the categories gartner track this is for operational dvms so it's kind of a narrow view it's like the red stack sweet spot now this graph it shows traditional transactions but gartner has oracle ahead of all vendors in stream processing operational intelligence real-time augmented transactions now you know gartner they're like old name framers and i say that lovingly so maybe they're a bit biased and they might be missing some of the emerging opportunities that for example like snowflake is pioneering but it's hard to deny that oracle for its business is making the right moves in cloud by optimizing for the red stack there's little question in our view when it comes to mission critical we think gartner's analysis is correct however there's this other really exciting landscape emerging in cloud data and we don't want it to be a blind spot snowflake calls it the data cloud jamactagani calls it data mesh others are using the term data fabric databricks calls it data lake house so so does oracle by the way and look the terminology is going to evolve and most of the action action that's happening is in the cloud quite frankly and this chart shows a select group of database and data warehouse companies and we've filtered the data for aws azure and gcp customers accounts so how are these accounts or companies that were showing how these vendors were showing doing in aws azure and gcp accounts and to make the cut you had to have a minimum of 50 mentions in the etr survey so unfortunately data bricks didn't make it just not enough presence in the data set quite quite yet but just to give you a sense snowflake is represented in this cut with 131 accounts aws 240 google 108 microsoft 407 huge [ __ ] 117 cloudera 52 just made the cut ibm 92 and oracle 208. again these are shared accounts filtered by customers running aws azure or gcp the chart shows a net score lime green is new ads forest green is spending more gray is flat spending the pink is spending less and the bright red is defection again you subtract the red from the green and you get net score and you can see that snowflake as we reported last week is tops in the data set with a net score in the 80s and virtually no red and even by the way single digit flat spend aws google and microsoft are all prominent in the data set as is [ __ ] and snowflake as i just mentioned and they're all elevated over the 40 mark cloudera yeah what can we say once they were a high flyer they're really not in the news anymore with anything compelling other than they just you know took the company private so maybe they can re-emerge at some point with a stronger story i hope so because as you can see they actually have some new additions and spending momentum in the green just a lot of customers holding steady and a bit too much red but they're in the positive territory at least with uh plus 17 percent unlike ibm and oracle and this is the flip side of the coin ibm they're knee-deep really chest deep in the middle of a major transformation we've said before arvind krishna's strategy and vision is at least achievable prune the portfolio i.e spin out kindrel sell watson health hold serve with the mainframe and deal with those product cycles shift the mix to software and use red hat to win the day in hybrid red hat is working for ibm's growing well into the double digits unfortunately it's not showing up in this chart with little database momentum in aws azure and gcp accounts zero new ads not enough acceleration and spending a big gray middle in nearly a quarter of the base in the red ibm's data and ai business only grew three percent this last quarter and the word database wasn't even mentioned once on ibm's earnings call this has to be a concern as you can see how important database is to aws microsoft google and the momentum it's giving companies like snowflake and [ __ ] and others which brings us to oracle with a net score of minus 12. so how do you square the momentum in oracle cloud spending and the strong ratings and databases from gartner with this picture good question and i would say the following first look at the profile people aren't adding oracle new a large portion of the base 25 is reducing spend by 6 or worse and there's a decent percentage of the base migrating off oracle with a big fat middle that's flat and this accounts for the poor net score overall but what etr doesn't track is how much is being spent rather it's an account based model and oracle is heavily weighted toward big spenders running mission critical applications and databases oracle's non-gaap operating margins are comparable to ibm's gross margins on a percentage basis so a very profitable company with a big license and maintenance in stall basin oracle has focused its r d investments into cloud erp database automation they've got vertical sas and they've got this integrated hardware and software story and this drives differentiation for the company but as you can see in this chart it has a legacy install base that is constantly trying to minimize its license costs okay here's a little bit of different view on the same data we expand the picture with the two dimensions of net score on the y-axis and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis and the table insert is how the data gets plotted y and x respectively not much to add here other than to say the picture continues to look strong for those companies above the 40 line that are focused and their focus and have figured out a clear cloud strategy and aren't necessarily dealing with a big install base the exception of course is is microsoft and the ones below the line definitely have parts of their portfolio which have solid momentum but they're fighting the inertia of a large install base that moves very slowly again microsoft had the advantage of really azure and migrating those customers very quickly okay so let's wrap it up starting with the big three cloud players aws is accelerating and innovating great example is custom silicon with nitro and graviton and other chips that will help the company address concerns related to the race to the bottom it's not a race to zero aws we believe will let its developers go after the sas business and for the most part aws will offer solutions that address large vertical markets think call centers the edge remains a wild card for aws and all the cloud players really aws believes that in the fullness of time all workloads will run in the public cloud now it's hard for us to imagine the tesla autonomous vehicles running in the public cloud but maybe aws will redefine what it means by its cloud microsoft well they're everywhere and they're expanding further now into gaming and the metaverse when he became ceo in 2014 many people said that satya should ditch xbox just as an aside the joke among many oracle employees at the time was that safra katz would buy her kids and her nieces and her nephews and her kids friends everybody xbox game consoles for the holidays because microsoft lost money for everyone that they shipped well nadella has stuck with it and he sees an opportunity to expand through online gaming communities one of his first deals as ceo was minecraft now the acquisition of activision will make microsoft the world's number three gaming company by revenue behind only 10 cent and sony all this will be powered by azure and drive more compute storage ai and tooling now google for its part is battling to stay relevant in the conversation luckily it can afford the massive losses it endures in cloud because the company's advertising business is so profitable don't expect as many have speculated that google is going to bail on cloud that would be a huge mistake as the market is more than large enough for three players which brings us to the rest of the pack cloud ecosystems generally and aws specifically are exploding the idea of super cloud that is a layer of value that spans multiple clouds hides the underlying complexity and brings new value that the cloud players aren't delivering that's starting to bubble to the top and legacy players are staying close to their customers and fighting to keep them spending and it's working dell hpe cisco and smaller predominantly on-plan prem players like pure storage they continue to do pretty well they're just not as sexy as the big cloud players the real interesting activity it's really happening in the ecosystem of companies and firms within industries that are transforming to create their own digital businesses virtually all of them are running a portion of their offerings on the public cloud but often connecting to on-premises workloads and data think goldman sachs making that work and creating a great experience across all environments is a big opportunity and we're seeing it form right before our eyes don't miss it okay that's it for now thanks to my colleague stephanie chan who helped research this week's topics remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcast check out etr's website at etr dot ai and also we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can get in touch with me email me at david.velante siliconangle.com you can dm me at divalante or comment on my linkedin post this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week stay safe be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante predictions are all the rage at this time of year now on december 29th 2020 in collaboration with eric porter bradley of enterprise technology research etr we put forth our predictions for 2021 and the focus of our prognostications included tech spending remote work productivity apps cyber security ipos specs m a data architecture cloud hybrid cloud multi-cloud ai containers automation and semiconductors we covered a lot of ground now over the past several weeks we've been inundated with literally thousands of inbound emails pitching us on various predictions and trends in these and other areas here's my predictions folder and this is only a portion of the documents that i've received by email obviously printed them out killed a few trees sorry hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we're going to review briefly each of our predictions for this past year 2021 and suggest a grade as to how we did we're going to do this as a little warm up for our 2022 predictions which we'll be doing in the next over the next couple of weeks now before we dig in i want to make an observation many of the predictions that we received they were observations of trends and sometimes not really predictions or you know or not surprising we got a lot of self-serving marketing statements you know predictions in our view they should be measurable so you can look back and say okay did they get it right now granted there are gray areas so that's why we'll use a grading system today now there are also many really well done and thought-provoking predictions and there's an example of one that we received that is strong it's from equinix cio milan waglay who said within the decade data centers will be powered by a hundred percent renewable energy okay so you know that's clear and we can measure that but anyway thanks to all the pr folks who sent along like i said literally thousands of predictions we tried to read them all but the volume over the past week or so was just so overwhelming and we'll try to scan them before we do our 2022 predictions but today we want to do that warm up by evaluating how we did in 2021 so let's get started our first prediction was that tech spending would increase by four percent this year coming off of what we had thought was a contraction in 2020 and depending on which data you look at you know best case maybe was flat we definitely correctly called the continuation into 2022 of the remote work trend and the positive impact it would have on pcs and the like but we underestimated the shape of that rebound that that spend back curve idc has tech spending wrote this year at five and a half percent so we feel like while we called the bounce back it was more pronounced than we had thought in fact you know we think that idc number is probably going to go up even higher and we'll address that in our 2022 predictions so so we'll give ourselves a b minus here okay next prediction was remote worker trends become fossilized settling in at an average of 34 percent by year end 2021. so on average 34 of the workers would be remote by the end of this year now you know we made the call but we missed delta no we missed omacrom we said 34 remote which would be 2x the historical norms now the etr data suggests it was 52 in september and it's probably going to be somewhere in the 40 to 45 range by by the end of this month into december and the thing is 75 of the workforce is probably still working either fully remote or in a hybrid model and hybrid work is probably going to be the dominant trend and we're going to have to revisit that framework or how we think about this whole structure and we'll do that again in our 2022 predictions so we'll give ourselves a c on that one we'll take some credit for the permanence of the trend but the percentage was well off the mark you know thanks to the variance as well as some cultural shifts that whole hybrid notion okay so hey not really a great start for eric and me but we rebound with the next one the productivity increases we said seen in 2020 will lead organizations to double down on the successes and certain productivity apps will benefit so to measure this we said let's take a look at the most recent quarterly earnings and gauge the revenue growth year on year as an indicator docusign was up 42 smartsheet who we also called up was up 46 in revenue twilio up 65 zoom growth was 35 down from 325 confirming our layup call the zoom growth would moderate it had nowhere to go but down and microsoft teams has never been more ubiquitous has never seen greater adoption with hundreds of companies having a hundred thousand or more users and thousands of companies with ten thousand users or more so we really feel like we nailed this one so we're gonna give us give ourselves an a plus okay so now on to cyber it's an area that we've been making calls in for a couple of years now and we're really pleased looking back here we said permanent shifts in cso strategies are going to lead to share shifts in network security now we said to give you more detail maybe that sounds like an easy one but we said specifically identity cloud security and endpoint security would continue to benefit and we specifically named crowdstrike octa zscaler and a few others that are targeting their growth rates now gartner has the security market growing at 11 percent octa and zscaler revenues last quarter grew at 62 percent year over year crowdstrike 63 illumia we also called out they raised 225 million dollars on a 2.75 billion valuation on the strength of its growth that was in september now akamai acquired guardiocor for 600 million dollars another company we called out that they would do it they did that as a ransomware protection play and they paid a huge revenue multiple for the company and it seems the guys listed on the last line are all talking about subscriptions sas arr remaining performance obligations or rpo so we feel very good about this look back we'll take an a on this one no it's not an a plus because we're too conservative on the growth of octa crowdstrike and zscaler topping at 50 they they blew that away by another 10 points or so 10 to 15. but look pretty good call nonetheless okay again the next one you might feel like is a layup but not really so we said the increased tech spend would drive even more ipos spax and m a according to spac analytics ipos were up 109 this year the spac attack continued up 109 percent in 2021 on top of a record 2020 and according to kpmg m a dollar volume was up 19 okay you might say uh that was easy call but there was much more underneath this prediction we called out uipass ipo which was a lock but also said automation anywhere would go public uipath did aa didn't we did correctly call the hashicorp ipo we said they'd either get go ipo or get acquired and cloud flare grew revenue 219 percent last quarter but akamai was not acquired so the degree of difficulty on the overall prediction wasn't high but the automation anywhere in akamai events we made those calls that didn't happen and those were you know obviously tougher calls so we think this still deserves a b grade all right as you know data is one of our favorite subjects and we've reported extensively in the successes and failures of so-called big data we said next in the next prediction that in the 2020s 75 percent of large organizations will re-architect their big data platforms and we said this would occur you know in earnest over the next four to five years now again you may say duh dave but you have to evaluate the prediction based on the underlying comments here the jury is still out on things like snowflakes data cloud but we absolutely believe that it's the right direction but then you have then you have data bricks coming in taking a different approach they're coming at the problem from a data science angle trying to take on traditional bi and then you get snowflake coming from the analytics space and moving into ai and data science and you know we asked at aws aws re invent we asked benoit dejaville on the cube if there needs to be a semantic layer to bring these two worlds together and he said yes and that's what he claims snowflake is building meanwhile you got the big whales like oracle they continue to invest in their capabilities to try to eliminate data movement and then there's aws taking a totally different approach to data where it gives customers maximum optionality of offerings and database and other services and you can't forget microsoft and google so many customers might not take the steps that we predicted because they're comfortable where they are specifically we're talking about here a shift toward domain ownership and data product thinking and the reorganization of hyper-specialized technical teams many of the principles put forth by data mesh and we've said this change is going to take a number of years to play out four to five years so we start noticing in 2021 that that's clearly been the case as we reported on parts of jpmorgan chase uh rethinking its data architecture hellofresh and many others so this is still an incomplete the professor we'll give ourselves an incomplete on this one but we think it's trending in the right direction okay the next one is always fun discussion that's the battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud we said that's going to escalate in 2021 and we'll create bifurcated cio strategies now here we go aws sees the world as bringing its apis and primitives and model to the edge and the data center to aws is just another edge node and the company says that in still believes in the fullness of time that all data will be in the cloud however that's defined and aws awareness would say all this talk about hybrid of connecting on-prem to a cloud they would flat out say adam silipsky told us this that's not cloud is what he said then on the other side of the table you have the likes of cisco dell hpe etc saying hold on cloud is an operating model it's not a place and aws might say yeah and aws along with its customers is defining that operating model and these other guys would say no actually you're not we are with our customers and this battle 100 percent escalated in 2021 with the launch of apex by dell hp e double down on green lake cisco's as the service models and then of course oracle which actually announced a true same same public to on-prem hybrid capability two years before aws announced outpost and of course oracle's executing on that strategy in earnest in 2021 and the other nuance here is a concept that we introduced called super cloud which refers to the notion that look something like for example multi-cloud is not about running within a respective cloud it's not about cloud compatibility rather it's about abstracting the complexity of the underlying cloud primitives and building value on top of those cloud services on top of the investments in capex that the hyperscalers have made now some people didn't like the term super cloud maybe uber cloud would be a better term we're going to continue to use it to describe this capability we think it has meaning and we're seeing new examples like goldman sachs's financial cloud running on top of aws so a super cloud is not as an application or a suite of applications running on a single cloud now if those applications span multiple clouds like like snowflake is trying to do okay that's a service that could span multiple clouds or in the case of goldman sachs it's a portfolio of data tools and software that's made accessible as a service that floats on top of a single or even multiple clouds regardless we feel that this was a correct call given the evidence and we'll give ourselves an a minus taking points off for the somewhat anecdotal and observational measurement system that we apply to look back at this prediction okay the next prediction was we made was cloud containers ai and ml automation uh are gonna power that those big four are gonna power 2021 spending here's a graphic we use to predict that it plots survey data for the various technologies within the etr taxonomy net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the data set it's a pervasive measurement on the horizontal axis the one that matters here is the vertical that dotted line of 40 percent anything above that is considered highly elevated and these four areas have held served this year based on recent etr survey data that we're not showing here we'll we'll bring that into our 2022 prediction so this prediction came in correctly for the most recent survey data and that's our measurement system on this one so we're going to take an a for this one too now on the penelope ultimate prediction here we came back to automation saying that the automation mandate accelerates in 2021 uipath and automation anywhere we said would go public but microsoft remains a threat to these pure play rpa vendors well we gave ourselves a b on this one doubling down on automation anywhere going public you know that was wrong but we definitely saw this year companies leaning hard into automation and microsoft despite the fact that it doesn't have as feature rich a product and offering as uipath and automation anywhere microsoft remains a very large presence you know we spoke to a lot of customers at the uipath forward four event in october in las vegas physical event and they confirmed you know this is true but at the same time so they're using power automate from microsoft but also using in this case uipath so they've kind of confirmed that yeah it's not the same we use that for some of our productivity we're an azure customer it's easy for us but they're still leaning heavily and investing heavily into uipath and i think the same can be said for automation anywhere but autom but power automate shows up as a big time leader in the magic gartner magic quadrant so it can't be ignored but clearly the two leaders in rpa have a sizable product advantage relative to the legacy software players now if you look at the comment on pega systems they cooled off a bit as measured by their stock price their revenue grew 13 percent last quarter on a year-on-year basis but perhaps we overestimated the tailwind effect and the company's momentum so we'll take a b on this prediction correct call on the automation trend and the big software vendors piling in ibm et cetera but the chance we took on automation anywhere again was a miss so we'll dig ourselves on that and our last prediction for 2021 was 5g rollouts push new edge iot workloads and necessitate new system architectures now much of this prediction you can see in the underlying bullets here really related to the observation that arm was dominating at the edge it would find its way into the mainstream enterprise workloads and we've been asking a lot of the mainstream you know companies the oems you know what do you what do you see with with arm in the enterprise and they say yeah we don't see it yet but very clearly this came into focus in 2021 is aws announced graviton 3 now and new inference and new training silicon these are different types of workloads that are emerging in the enterprise these are all based on arm microsoft google alibaba oracle and others are now shipping or readying arm-based systems for the enterprise when you look at new storage network and security appliances and other systems they're very offering and often including arm-based processors to assist with the offloads and look intel is definitely under product under pressure as we've predicted many times not just in our predictions post even pat gelsinger has admitted this is a turnaround it's going to take at least five years that's kind of new and recent data that he's made public so we're going to take an a minus on this one we're going to take off some points for the fact that you know 5g rollouts in edge are evolving and this is a longer term trend but the underlying points that we made on this slide are still pretty solid now if we use the following scale where a plus is a hundred out of a hundred a minus is a 90 a b is an 85 a b minus is an 80 and a c is a 75 out of 100 and we exclude that incomplete prediction on data architectures we average out to an 87.8 so that's a solid b plus and so the professor in us said hey little yellow sticky good effort as most of the predictions could be quantified and or you know we tried to object objectively score them there were some layups in there so yeah maybe we'll try to take more risks uh you know or not you know we we we'll see we like winning and so you know you always have to couch some of these things with some obvious ones but but really try to give some detail underneath that's maybe non-obvious um and we'll try to keep it down in the legs we did this year to one or two multi-year predictions so what's next well eric bradley and i were working on our 2022 predictions we're going to release those in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for that you know what do you think how did we do you know we're grading ourselves here love to know you know for we're off base on base we're too hard on ourselves too easy give us your feedback don't forget these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search breaking analysis podcast check out etr's website at etr dot plus remember we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can always get in touch with email david.velante at siliconangle.com you can dm me at divalante or comment on our linkedin posts this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week everybody stay safe be well we'll see you next time [Music] you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante full stack observability is the new buzz phrase as businesses go digital customer experience becomes ever more important why because fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse every vendor wants a piece of the action in this market including companies that have provided traditional monitoring log analytics application performance management etc and they're joined by a slew of new entrants claiming end invisibility across the so-called modern tech stack recent survey research from etr however confirms our thesis that no one company has it all new entrants they've got a vision and and they're not encumbered with legacy technical debt however their offerings are immature on the other hand established players with deep feature sets in one segment are pivoting through m a and some organic development to fill gaps meanwhile the cloud players are well positioned and participating through a combination of their own native tooling combined with strong ecosystems in their respective marketplaces to address this opportunity hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we dive into a recent etr drill down study on full stack observability and to do so we once again welcome in our colleague eric bradley chief engagement strategist and director of research at etr eric good to see you my friend thanks for coming on uh always good to be here dave thank you so much for having us we appreciate it all right before we get into the survey eric i i want to talk a little bit about full stack observability define what it is and so let me start and then you can chime in so when people talk about full stack observability they're referring to the need to understand the behavior of all the technology components that support an application i.e the stack right throughout the entire system meaning the full piece of the equation right the entire system so the compute we're talking about the storage the network and of course that's all software defined today the containers that are running the software the database other middleware components the pipeline of data and then of course the client-side code everything the html the css everything down to the mobile device and the idea is to give people who can fix problems full visibility into the system with a dashboard of metrics that can be visualized at a high level and then drilled into to see logs or traces or events all the metrics that could help remediate an issue so a simple way to think about this eric is i like to think of it as the ability to see everything in the tech stack that could impact the customer experience right how do you see it if only we're that simple right it's it's a huge thing that we're trying to encompass there with full stack observability and uh even though the vendors might tell you on the first sales call that they can do it it's really not that simple based on everything you just said um in this particular survey we tried our best to look at it and we'll go into it later but you know we had to survey on the application side infrastructure side database side blog management security network it's a very difficult thing to encompass um the holy grail would be able to do it with one vendor and do it with one dashboard i don't think we're there anytime soon all right so let's get into this drill down survey results and talk about what you've learned first what is explain what a drill down study is how often does etr conduct these types of things you know who responds what can you tell us yeah sure so the drill downs are actually basically think of it as a custom type of survey work and that could be customized from two different ways either our clients will come to us with a particular topic and we will hold their hands and make sure that they get the the responses that they need uh and more often than not it's actually us as a research department uh wanting to dig into trends that our larger data encompasses and then we'll say hey we really need to look into that and we've done it with everything from rpa to identity access to you know hearing observability and also vendor specific and and macro trends as you know david this particular one the genesis was really a large amount of interest not only from our community the end users but clients i i can't tell you how much interest there is in observability right now we're constantly getting questions and demands for more research and deeper research in this space yeah so our audience will be familiar with the concept of net score that's the periodic survey every quarter like clockwork etr does that then in addition as eric was saying hot topics like in this case full stack observability so we're talking about respondents in the etr community in this case who have a deep understanding of observability and related topics and and they had varying degrees of knowledge about each vendor's offering so you asked the respondents to concentrate on the ones that they knew well correct yes that is correct so this was a smaller survey that we did the end was a little under 188 i believe um and essentially what we did was we took people that responded in the bigger study on these observability vendors and then sent this drill down out so they were specifically people that have purview over their spend with observability now some of it might be more database infrastructure application or security but everyone here is already qualified as an expert to answer these questions that's correct dave yeah so the first data point is the one we're showing you right here the respondents were asked who uses observability tools and eric i've highlighted app ops in in the site reliability engineers because given the emphasis on customer centricity that we hear all the time from the vendor community you would think these roles would be more highly represented but it's the folks in the boiler room that are using these tools highly technical and specialized roles what are your thoughts on this data you know i was a little surprised as well i i kind of thought the sres would be a little bit higher on this but it really just comes down to you know it's the infrastructure um devops and secops that seem to be using it the most i thought maybe the application operations teams would be a little bit more involved as well so i agree with you i was a little bit surprised on this but you know they're the experts so we have to take the data at their word for it but i think what's really happening here is you're recognizing that the work is being done across the entire enterprise as you mentioned before about full stack this isn't just one aspect it's touching every aspect of the enterprise and that's including the internal i.t teams well and i think too eric that this what i took away from this drill down and we'll get more into it is that the vendor marketing is not aligned with what's actually happening in the field and so there's these early days we'll talk about that some more okay next question i thought this was very interesting etr asked on the scale of one to three three being most preferred which pricing model host-based user-based or amount of data ingested based pricing that the responders preferred and eric so what are your what are your thoughts on this because just doing a quick scan scan pricing is all over the map yeah it really is all over the map from a vendor perspective right and also from an end user perspective and all the interviews and panels that i host pricing's a real concern but it is always but in this particular field it's a real concern and i actually just did a panel yesterday of four of these 88 survey takers to get a little bit deeper so i'm going to kind of remark on what they taught me a little bit yesterday one of them said ingestion pricing might be preferable but because it's so unpredictable that's why we're seeing the results skew away from it another one went so far that said uh ingestion based pricing is a nightmare that keeps him up at night because he's just so afraid he's gonna wake up the next day and see what the bill is so um really what they're looking for here and the reason the pricing is skewing that way in this survey is because they need predictability it's about their budget and it's about their planning even though they would prefer an ingestion-based model the fact that they have to plan for their budgets and they have to concern themselves with spending it's moving more to host based yeah so i mean it is complicated and because so for example i just took a quick snapshot of some of the pricing models like dynatrace appd datadog aws and others they tout their host-based pricing new relic they have a splash page up around its user-based pricing and the tiers datadog talks about its ingestion-based pricing for security monitoring aws prices by ingestion for cloud watch logs splunk prices on index data and calculates a per gigabyte per day metric so metrics dashboards alarms alerts events it's they could all be priced differently yeah that's true a few that got called out on us and i'm sure we're going to get into them later so i don't want to you know kill all of our fodder right now but when we were talking about this slide one person particularly decided to call out new relic and specif specifically for their flexibility around pricing he said that they have the ability to rapidly scale up but also contract as needed and he actually even though he's a user of splunk he's a user of dyna trees user of elastic um he also just really wanted to call out the flexibility of new relic in this area so to your point there's a lot of different ways to price this it's a complex problem but i think the key takeaway for vendors is flexibility is the key you really need to give people the ability to be flexible in what they want all right let's drill into the functionality and explore the usage and adoption of the different features by the respondents so this next chart shows module adoption for application performance monitoring apm database and digital experience down to the user and eric i underlined apm which is the blue bar because it seems it stands out especially for aws and you can see dynast dyna trace but also azure new relic and splunk and then digital experience which is the gray bar because despite all the chatter in the market and the marketing around digital transformation and customer experience other than a slightly higher response percentage for aws not a lot of adoption on that front so the vendor marketing again doesn't match the user behavior does it eric no it doesn't there's a couple of things to point out here but let's stick with that digital experience i i was surprised that it was so low on this slide and overall in our survey i did expect it to be more and not just from the vendor marketing perspective but you and i both know at the end of the day the whole point of this is to actually get into that 360 view of what your customer's doing so i i was a little bit surprised to see it that low when we spoke to the panel yesterday a couple of people said no listen it's not that we aren't doing that it's just that it's not the vendors that you put on this survey and they called out two particular names one is called catchpoint and the other one is thousand dies and i think you're aware a thousand dice i'm going to transition that off to you there yeah so a thousand eyes is now part of cisco and we're gonna talk about that a little bit later but but essentially like as i was saying up front they've got gaps in their in their product line so they've got to do m a and then package that up so you know we'll we'll get into that a little bit down the road but i want to bring up the next graphic because that looks at incident management infrastructure monitoring and log management and and what i did here is i called out infrastructure monitoring which is the gray bar and log management that light blue because aws and azure they stand out in these categories and splunk of course eric for for log management what what do you take away from this data yeah the previous slide and this slide you really have to call out aws cloudwatch and microsoft is your monitor um they are very pervasive in this survey and we could probably do an entire show on just that on the cloud versus independent but a couple of things i do want to point out even though these numbers are so high for these cloud tools the the panelists and the people i spoke to in more detail all said listen i'm going to look at my cloud tools first i'm on their infrastructure they're handing it to me i'm going to look at it and i'll use it for what it's good for however we're in a multi-cloud world and they're not good at things that aren't in their ecosystem so these are not even though these numbers are high i do not believe that you know aws or azure is going to go and take over all the independents in a multi-cloud world they want an independent vendor whether it's a data dog new relic we could talk about all of those later but um you know really i was surprised that the aws particularly was so high and so pervasive in here across the way a splunk what can you say i mean they are the most pervasive vendor you know they they're everywhere uh we had people in the panel call them a swiss army knife and you know that's a good and a bad that they have a lot of breadth of coverage which is great but because there's a breadth of coverage not all of it is great log management without a doubt is what they are great at they're specialized at it but the panelists were saying listen if you go away from their core and you try to use some of the other things they claim that they can do it requires a lot of heavy lifting and then we can get into a little bit later about their cloud cloud sas integration we had some issues with that in the survey as well and great points about the multi-cloud you're probably not going to trust that to your your cloud your public cloud vendor and so a lot of white space available for the traditional on-prem guys okay next the etr survey drilled into network monitoring and security monitoring and then other security functions and eric there are a couple of things that stood out to me in this chart i highlighted security monitoring which is the blue bar because you can again see the adoption from aws and azure and of course splunk and also we called out solar winds because of the large adoption in network monitoring so let me ask you what are you seeing in the data since the solarwinds breach and is there anything else in this chart that you want to call out i could go on for a while about solarwinds but you know the data since i guess it broke around 12 months ago even though the breach was even prior to that uh the headlines were big i think you remember you and i last year did a quick drill down survey just on solarwinds uh and the impact that we thought we would have it uh there's a very real impact happening uh with that said they're not easy to move away from um we asked about is there any one vendor that could take this entire space and the answer was solar winds was best positioned to do that but it's too late now and then i drilled down a little bit and i asked the panel well what can they do to reinvent themselves what can they do to change the reputational damage from this breach and the panelists all said nothing the reputational damage is done the best way for them to reinvent themselves would be to do an m a consolidate with somebody else change their name they truly believe that right now the only reason that people are still using solarwinds is it's not that easy to lift and shift away from but there will be no new net workloads going to these people at least according to the the ones who took our survey um that's on solar winds and we could get you know in more if you want but i think that's kind of you know giving the the the crux of the matter on splunk again what can you say on the security side on the sim side people don't want to use multiple vendors on the other side we were talking about with full stack some might be better at apm some might be better at infrastructure monitoring when you're talking about security you truly do want one vendor to rule them all and splunk does seem to be the one that's most well entrenched on the security side and as long as the policy is consistent across security you really can't say much about them so what they do well their core their the data shows that you know people still trust them great thank you for that okay now the last set of data we want to show we kind of consolidated some things you want the the detail and the drill down you had several drill down questions and what we try to do is consolidate them into a single chart which we had to stare at for a while so for each of the 11 companies etr asked respondents if the features across the top that you see here were strengths weaknesses or neutral and what we've done is we tried to consolidate the chart showing the strengths in the green which we just subjectively said okay that means more than 40 percent of the respondents identified the feature as a strength the weaknesses in yellow meant that more than 20 percent of the respondents cited the feature as a weakness and the neutrals in the gray where neither of those conditions were met but the gray was you know the neutral was high and what we did is we added four stars for standout features where 60 or more of the respondents cited the feature as a strength and we threw in two stars if they were close to 60 you know high 50s even mid 50s but but not single digit weakness for that feature that was got two stars so it was able to sort of visualize a lot of data so eric just a quick scan of this chart chart shows that the two big cloud players aws in particular but also azure they have a relatively strong showing and i say relatively because as you know eric there wasn't a single category of feature for any vendor where more than 70 percent of the respondents cited the strength for that single feature not one and there was a lot of gray and you can see pricing is a sore point for many customers including those evaluating solarwinds new relic elastic datadog dynatrace appd and splunk only aws and grafana were hit not hit hard on pricing and i guess the other thing that stands out to me here is that new relic eric showed some relative strength so the last thing i'll mention before you dive in look at what cisco is doing we talked about this before a little bit the drill down focused on appd but as i mentioned earlier companies that have mature stacks are filling the gaps so if you look at what cisco's doing this space they've put an interface layer over appd inner site and thousand eyes even though they're separate products they're historically priced separately i think they're still trying to figure out the pricing but they are definitely going to market with a strategy that bolts together these three separate products and that's not necessarily a bad strategy because combined they can claim even more depth and breadth eric what do you make of this data yeah just like this chart there is a lot there right so uh on a macro level let's just the obvious situation here is this is a crowded crowded marketplace and consolidation is needed i had one panelist say to me yesterday i can't wait for this to consolidate like this is just crazy that there needs to be consolidation uh now to your point about cisco cisco's taking the same playbook they did with security right they're going out and they're buying great tools and then now we have to make sure that they figure out a way to integrate these better uh the security side took them a little while to do that but they're getting there hopefully they can do this a little bit quicker here what we did here is that um appd is actually very strong on the application monitoring side for the core apm uh maybe not so much on these others and then that's why they go out and do what you're doing what you're saying about now so hopefully they will get there um kind of talking across the board pricing was a problem for all of them right so it just seems to me that you know the end users the buyers just feel like hey i shouldn't be paying this much for this we've got a lot of choices maybe there's some collusion on the pricing side but we have to figure it out because they do not want to pay this much for it it was the number one concern across almost every single vendor another aspect that i really want to call out on this and is something that our research team found really interesting and it's really about the digital transformation as digital transformation continues the workloads are moving towards the cloud and we're clearly seeing in this data that that's benefiting the newer players the data dogs and the new relics versus some of the others like a dynatrace and a splunk and when you go and actually look at the cloud sas integration answer option specifically it becomes very very obvious um you know splunk had a 38 on that number whereas datadog had 61 new relic at 58. so it's just very clear as a digital transformation increases workloads on observability it is lifting all boats but it's lifting some faster than others great points um all right as we said at the top you've got a set of incumbents they're jockeying for position you've got companies like datadog it's got as eric just mentioned strong cloud model elastic's got got the open source mojo and they're going after splunk's install base as is datadog and then you see startups like chaos search they're out now talking about how to do log analytics they do more than that but that's their sort of starter use case and they're going after the elastic and the elk stack which got dinged a bit in the survey on simplicity uh you know ease of standing it up and and so forth not a weakness if you're comfortable with full open source model but maybe not well understood as some of the other solution oriented plays and then you got other new entrants which are not covered in the drill down they're not as pervasive in the marketplace but guys like honeycomb and observe eric you mentioned some others that came out in the panel vmware even is getting into the act they're positioning tanzu around observability with really a strong kubernetes emphasis and there's dozens of other players in the space which we haven't talked about so eric this is jump ball and i'll give you the final word give us your last thoughts yeah there's a again a lot there it's such an interesting space like even ibm right they go out and buy turbonomics right everyone seems to be playing and not only that the ones that are already playing are expanding data dog comes out and says hey we do security now so i don't really know where this is going to end but there's too much happening there needs to be some sort of you know order out of the chaos uh to your point about some of the emerging names we just launched our emerging technology survey this week david those are the ones where we're going to see data on those names so stay tuned for that we don't track them in the core tsis which are more mature public vendors but we will be getting some data on those uh but to your point i really do believe that this space is rapidly expanding and i just kind of want to leave everyone with this there's a lot of growth still left in the panel yesterday i basically said to people how much of your infrastructure are you monitoring today versus how much you want to and the answer was around 65 to 70 percent being monitored now and without a doubt they all want to get to 100 so there is still a lot of room to grow in this space but i just don't know if there's enough room for all of these people that are basically going after the same percentage points so what we're seeing from a vendor strategy now is bundling they're trying to bundle because that's the way they're gonna actually gain that market share right and uh just one last point to you for elastic a lot of people still view elastic as a search functionality so even though they have use cases and observability i still think there's a lot of people that the elastic got into the elk stack in general got into their enterprise for search so that is still kind of where they are and maybe they're not moving as fast as a data dog or a new relic in pure full stack observability eric so great to have you on you guys cover so much space so we're gonna leave it there for now we really appreciate our friends at etr for the the work that they do and thank you eric for joining us today and sharing your insights great stuff welcome dave i always enjoy talking to you you know that and uh everyone else we'll be back in a couple of months with our predictions as well so yeah that's right yeah look for those all right remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you gotta do is search breaking analysis podcast check out etr's website etr dot plus they've got a whole new packaging and and pricing models so check that out we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can get in touch with me david.velante at siliconangle.com or at divalante on twitter i'm on linkedin all the time this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week everybody stay safe be well and we'll see you next time you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante recent earnings reports from key enterprise software and infrastructure players underscore that tech spending remains robust in the post isolation economy especially for those companies that have figured out a cloud strategy now despite covert variant uncertainties and component shortages and hardware most leading tech names outperformed expectations this past week that said investors were not in the mood to reward all names and any variability in product mix or earnings outlook or other nuances were met with a tepid response from the street hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll provide you with commentary and data points on key tech companies that announced this past week including snowflake salesforce workday splunk elastic palo alto networks vmware dell pure storage hp inc and netapp let's start by rolling back a week or so and look at how stocks that are priced to perfection get impacted by any negative news back on august 20th we saw this headline hit snowflake stock falls as analyst says signings growth has slowed the analyst report was put out by a boutique firm cleveland research the stock took a double-digit hit as you can see here i immediately got several texts from investors who know i follow the company asking me what i thought now as a disclaimer i don't give stock picking advice please do your own research but between the cube wikibon and etr we do see a lot of data and i'm happy to share that which i did with this tweet it said lots of talk ahead of snowflake's earnings some analysts have said their data suggests a slowdown etr data looks pretty encouraging and i tagged merv adrian he's a sharp analyst over at gartner who follows data and database he responded i don't speculate about revenues but there's no discernible shift in our client conversations though interest still seems high okay cool but let's let's dig into the etr data a bit and see why we remained positive this is a larger and more detailed version of the chart in the tweet it's a candlestick that shows a time series of the spending data on snowflake using etr's net score methodology the stacked bars represent the percent of customers in the survey that are newly adding the snowflake platform the forest green indicates the number of customers reporting that their spending is increasing by six percent or more the gray is flat spend that's plus or minus five percent the pinkish stack that's decreasing spend by six percent or more and the bright red is where chucking the platform we're leaving now you subtract the reds from the greens and that yields a net score which for snowflake last survey was a very elevated 81.3 percent we've highlighted the spending velocity line that's net score at the top put a picture of that blue line for snowflake in your mind because we're going to come back to it the yellow line down below is market share which is a measure of the pervasiveness in the survey i.e mention share if you will so looking at this chart one might conclude that the lime green i.e new account acquisition is compressing however in further analyzing the data back in january 2019 snowflake's presence in the survey was much lower only 35 accounts in subsequent quarters that number has jumped to over between 120 and 140 snowflake accounts so big much bigger n so while the percentage of respondents may be shrinking the absolute number of new accounts is growing on the snowflake earnings call snowflake said that new customers increased this past quarter to 458 up from 397 in the same period last year what's also telling is the forest green on its very first earnings call as a public company snowflake cfo mike scarpelli said very clearly the company's revenue growth in the near term will come from existing customers and the forest green i.e existing customers spending more is expanding in the etr survey so very strong confirmation of that trend and note the red is virtually non-existent for snowflake so it's no surprise that snowflake handily beat its earnings on the 25th of august which prompted a flurry of texts to me saying you were right thanks don't thank me do your own research we're just one data source okay so here's a snapshot of some of the major players that announced earnings this past week this chart is our popular xy view with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the survey in the horizontal plane we talked about snowflake already but i'll emphasize they've held that roughly eighty percent net score for ten plus quarterly surveys now and they've continued to move steadily to the right on the horizontal axis let's make some comments on these other names and then dig in a bit more salesforce of course they're the big player amongst these names that we're showing and as we've said in previous breaking analysis segments they have become the next great software company showing 20 plus growth for five consecutive quarters which is quite impressive splunk as we've reported has struggled in the survey but you can see splunk has a great presence in the data set they have an awesome customer base and the acquisition of signal fx plotted on the left with an elevated next net score represents a really good opportunity to enter new markets like observability and pull signalfx to the right to the rest of splunk's customers and that can help accelerate splunk's move toward a subscription model then there's workday we're plotting the company's core hcm business as well as its emerging financial software suite the latter represents workday's tam expansion opportunity and the company appears to be back on track to show sustained growth now let's dig a little deeper into these names and we'll start with salesforce here's the etr spending profile for salesforce salesforce as we showed earlier has a huge and growing presence in the market and a consistently elevated net score in the etr data and while the chart shows much more green than red and a strong uptick in spending momentum from last october survey this doesn't really tell the whole story salesforce's stock price rocketed out of the march 2020 crash and ran up to a peak last august and is on its way back salesforce has made a number of strategic acquisitions including tableau slack mulesoft and several other billion dollar plus buys as well as a number of smaller acquisitions this past quarter saw 23 revenue growth relative to last year with 20 percent plus operating margins that's huge salesforce's acquisition strategy is beginning to demonstrate the company's promised operating leverage and slack in our view will only add to that benefit including continuous improvement and free cash flow sales force revenue will blow through 25 billion dollars this fiscal year it's a company with a 250 billion dollar market cap and appears to be one a name that has meaningful upside opportunity okay let's take a quick look at splunk we're finally seeing an uptick in splunk's spending momentum with within the etr data set eric bradley and i have discussed this in previous breaking analysis segments the key point as we've reported is we see splunk as a company that has been in transition from a traditional license to an arr subscription model and finally the company is showing clarity that there's light at the end of that tunnel investors don't like companies in transition and like salesforce splunk's stock price ran up to an all-time high last august but then came down hard and never fully recovered but it has come off its may lows and there were some real positives this past quarter cloud annual recurring revenue for splunk this past quarter grew 72 percent and its bookings grew 20 29 year on year the company was conservative in its guidance and there still seems to be some uncertainty around cash flow but more clear guidance by splunk on the top line is a welcome sign and now another name that we've been following that announced earnings this week is elastic and as you can see by the etr data that company has an elevated net score with very little red in the bars now note that blue line while it's slowly decelerating it remains very strong and elevated remember the comment earlier i made about freezing that snowflake blue line in your head the reason we said that is because for snowflake to hold its roughly 80 net score position firmly over the past 10 plus quarters is quite astounding and for the most part it's unprecedented in the etr data set in recent memory back to elastic the company grew its top line by 45 which is a healthy beat and that helped operating margins come in above expectations elastic has become the open source poster child for observability but customers often cite challenges related to complexity and scaling with the need often to seek professional services help which sometimes impacts adoption and cost obviously but overall very strong report especially in its cloud business which grew 89 relative to last year all right let's pivot to infrastructure we're going to do that with palo alto networks and then look at a broader more traditional hardware and software players in february of 2020 we reported the valuation of divergence between palo alto networks and fortinet and we cited the challenges that palo alto was having around its shift to cloud that was a clear headwind at the time especially with regard to some of its go to market challenges at the same time we said that we were confident that palo alto would work through these issues and the csos from the etr panels along with other anecdotal information from the cube community suggested that the company would power through these problems well it has palo alto has a huge presence in the market and consistently elevated net scores as you can see here palo alto stock is trading near all-time highs and it reacted very well to its uh to the earnings report this past week where revenue grew nicely at 20 28 year on year the company has consistently impressed despite some hiccups of the past and appears to be well positioned for the emerging hybrid work economy okay now let's take a look at some of the key infrastructure players that announced this past week this chart shows our popular xy view with netscore spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share and or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis we'll start with vmware it has the biggest presence in the market amongst these names vmware's revenue grew nine percent in the quarter which was in line with estimates the company had a solid quarter but only marginally beat expectations and the stock got hit hard it was down 8 percent midday on friday vmware cited stronger than expected perpetual license sales and somewhat softer sas subscription revenue now it's not surprising that we're going to see some lumpiness in those two lines as the company transitions to a subscription model but investors clearly want to see more growth in sas and subscriptions than they do in the traditional perpetual license model vmware cloud on aws grew 80 and that's confirmed in the data here compute was also strong one concern in the etr data is the vmware cloud which is the the core the vm vmr cloud foundation vcf which you can see here is well off its january net score highs now it's possible the etr is picking up some of the conservative clients that don't want to move to an ar or subscription model it's unclear but we'll continue to watch that trend overall vmware's business model is solid in our view and very very strong now let's talk about dell next dell in our view had a great quarter it grew top-line revenues by 15 year-on-year its client business grew 27 percent and you can see the elevated dell laptop net net scores in this chart the isg business was up three percent that comprises service and networking which was up six percent and storage which was off one percent the storage business contin continues to struggle but management reported that its mid-range storage revenue was up 17 now the challenge here is that high-end storage it's cyclical it's exposed sometimes you know somewhat to mainframe cycles but but but but the other thing is that a lot of the mid-range capability is eating away at the high end not the least which by the way is is pure storage competing at the higher end but also dell's own mid-range business so that continues to be a drag on revenue the the size of the traditional high-end business that that v-max power max business still is is is quite large and the the new is not growing fast enough to offset the decline in in the old but i mean i saw these numbers from dell i was surprised to see the stock down nearly five percent at midday on friday and i think what's happening is a couple things one is that hpq hp inc which we show here at a lower net score than dell's laptop business cited supply chain issues and component shortages now dell cited the same but maybe it's off on sympathy it's clear to us that dell is doing a much better job than hp with regard to managing component shortages the frustrating thing for these companies is it might be a 50 part holding up a server or in dell's case or a laptop in dell and hpq's case but demand is good which is a positive but the biggest factor in dell stock price we think is it's getting dragged down with vmware in a way if you think about it with vmware's value comprising so much of dell's market cap being down only four percent while vmware is down eight percent implies that the core dell business is viewed positively by the street but i thought with the vmware spin coming later this year investors might gravitate more aggressively toward dell but that didn't happen maybe over time now you see netapp on the chart netapp beat on top line revenue and earnings this past quarter however the company has not performed well in the etr surveys for several quarters and has a negative net score this is due when you tear apart the the math this is due to a low number of new adoptions and a fat middle very big fat middle of flat spending and a pretty high churn in the data set now the company claims they've picked up 1500 new customers in its cloud business so maybe maybe the etr survey is not picking that up or perhaps it's existing customers that are moving to netapp's cloud service that they're counting as new that's unclear but netapp claims that its public cloud business grew 155 in the quarter regardless the street likes netapp's story the stock has been acting very well this year out passing outpacing the s p 500. now you also see pure on the chart with a nicely elevated net score the company beat top and bottom lines this quarter and its ceo charlie giancarlo promised roughly 20 percent revenue growth going forward the street sure liked that that story and the stock shot up nearly 20 percent on that news and you can see here a little drill down the etr spending data trends in the right direction for pure to support this momentum pure's messaging is all around a modern data platform and it's clear from customer conversations that its storage products are easier to use than traditional storage offerings and it has a leg up on the as a service trend which we've been reporting on which pure has been pursuing for a number of years but it's still a much smaller player a couple billion dollars than the dells and the netapps of the storage world but if it can continue on a strong growth trajectory it will of course become a larger custom company the question will be how to continue to expand its total available market now the obvious path has been share gains which over the years it has accomplished and has served them well but that won't be as easy as it was last decade when pure caught emc and netapp flat-footed without strong flash array strategies pure's port works acquisition is something to watch as well as it tries to transition the market to a true cloud-like program programmable infrastructure model infrastructure as code and we'll leave you with this thought about the infrastructure space generally in storage specifically while cloud storage has exploded over the past several years on-prem storage has been extremely soft this in our view has been due to the double whammy that we've reported the combination of cloud stealing share from on-prem and the big flash injection in other words the latter suppressed the need to buy more spinning spindles and controllers for better performance and it hurt demand you don't need to do that when you have all this flash headroom but as we predicted last year we believe that there's pent up demand as people go back to work and headquarters need refresh there's only so much blood that it managers can squeeze from the stone moving storage around optimizing servers and and improving things like utilization while at the same time maintaining adequate performance and doing so within some kind of reasonable window of a day storage is no longer monolithic there are emerging use cases especially ones that are data intensive different storage types are emerging as satya nadella said recently we've reached peak centralization and as such that will create tailwinds for storage offerings that can accommodate cloud and on-prem because it pros understand that moving data is expensive and risky it's best to keep data where it belongs for reasons of performance and of course compliance so it looks like there's a decent chance that the long storage winter is over and the market could return to solid growth even the face of a continued cloud explosion now to circle back quickly to the enterprise software business there seems to be no end in sight to the shift to cloud-based offerings both sas and snowflake-like consumption models of which we're big believers digital transformation initiatives are real they're meaningful and software spending we believe is going to be robust and power these transformations for quite some time okay that's it for today remember these episodes are all available as podcasts all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcast we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can reach me at divalante on twitter or my linkedin posts or email me at david.vellante siliconangle.com please do check check out the etr website at etr.plus and see their new data packages and offerings for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching everybody be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante as you well know by now the cloud is about shifting i.t labor to more strategic initiatives or as andy jassy laid out years ago removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with deploying and managing i.t infrastructure cloud is also about changing the operating model and rapidly scaling a business operation or a company often overlooked with cloud however is the innovation piece of the puzzle a main source of that innovation is venture funded startup companies that have brilliant technologists who are mission driven and have a vision to solve really hard problems and enter a large market at scale to disrupt it hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we're pleased to welcome a special guest and author of the elite 80. a report that details the hottest privately held cyber security and i.t infrastructure companies in the world eric suppenger is that author and joins us today from jmp securities eric welcome to the cube thanks for being here thank you very much dave i'm uh i'm looking forward to uh to having a discussion here with you yeah me too this is going to be great so let's dive right into the elite 80. first if you could tell us about jmp securities and fill us in on the report its history your approach to picking the 80 companies out of thousands of choices sure so jmp is a middle markets investment bank we're a full full-service investment bank based in san francisco we were founded in 2000 and we focus on technology health care financial services and real estate i've been with jmp since 2011. um i've uh i've i cover uh cyber security companies public companies uh i cover uh it infrastructure companies uh more broadly and um we have having been based here in san francisco i've long kept uh a good dialogue with uh private companies uh that that compete with the public companies that i cover and so um about seven years ago i i started uh developing this uh this report which is really designed to highlight uh emerging uh private companies that uh that i think are are well positioned to be leaders in their respective markets and uh and over time we've um we've built the list up to about 80 companies and uh and we publish this report every year uh it's designed to uh to keep tabs on on the companies that are doing well and uh and we rotate about uh about 15 to 20 to 25 percent of the companies uh out of the report every year either as they get acquired or they do an ipo or um uh they uh they if we think that they are slowing and others are getting a little bit more uh more exciting and you talk directly to the companies that's part of your methodology as well you do a lot of background research digging into funding but you also talk to the executives at these companies correct yes for the most part we uh we try to talk to the ceos at least the cfos the object here is to build a a relationship with these companies so that we have some good insights into uh into how they're doing and and how the market trends are evolving as they relate to those companies in particular some of the some of the dynamics that go into us selecting companies is one we do have to talk to the management teams uh two we uh we we base our decisions on who we include on how the companies are performing on how their competitors are uh are are discussing those companies their performance uh how other industry contacts talk about those companies and then we we track their hiring and uh and and how they've uh you know other metrics that we can uh we can gauge them by got it okay so i dug into the report a little bit and tried to summarize a few key takeaways so let's take a look at those and if if you allow me just set up the points and then and ask you to add some color so the first two things that really you know jumped out i want to comment on are the perspectives of the technology companies and then of course the other side is the buyers so it seems that the pandemic really got startups to sharpen their focus i remember talking to a number of vcs early on in the shutdown and they were all over their portfolio companies to reset their icp their ideal customer profile and sharpen their uvp their unique value proposition and they wanted them to do that specifically in the context of the pandemic and the new reality and then on the buy side let's face it if you weren't a digital business you were out of business so picking up on those two thoughts eric what can you share with us in terms of the findings that you have well that's that's very uh consistent with what we had found uh basically um when the pandemic first when the lockdown came uh in march we reached out to quite a few companies and industry contacts at that time feedback was uh you know it was uh it was a period of great uncertainty and a lot of a lot of budgets were were tightened pretty quickly but it didn't take very long and a lot of these companies uh you know having been uh innovation engines and and emerging players what they found was that uh the broader market quickly adopted uh digital transformation in response to the pandemic basically that was how they they uh facilitated uh keeping their their doors open so to speak and so um the ones that were able to uh to leverage uh need for emerging technologies because of an acceleration in digital transformation uh they they really stepped up and and quite a few of these companies they kept hiring they kept uh their sales uh did very well and uh and ultimately um a lot of the vcs that had been uh putting on the brakes uh they actually stepped up and uh and and continued funding uh pretty generously yeah we've got some data on that that we wanna look into so thank you for that now let's take a look at some of the the specific date of the study just break that down the elite 80 raised more than three billion dollars last year eclipsing the previous highs in your studies of 2019 and then a big portion of that capital went to pretty small number only 10 of the 80 firms and and most of that went to cyber security plays so what do you make of these numbers especially you know given your history with with this group of elite companies and the high concentration this year this past year so one of the trends that we've seen in the public in the public market or the ipo market is um companies are are waiting until they're a little bit more mature than they used to be so what we've seen is um the the funding for companies uh the the larger rounds are far larger than they used to be these companies typically are waiting until they're of size you know maybe now they're waiting to be uh 200 million uh in annual salary in annual revenues versus a 100 million before and so they are consuming quite a bit the larger rounds are are much bigger than they used to be um in the in the most recent uh report that we published we had uh one round that was over half a billion and another one that was over 400 million and if you go back just a couple of few years ago a large round was over 100 million and you didn't get too many that were over 200 million so that's that's been a distinct change and and i think that's not necessarily just a function of the pandemic but i think the pandemic caused caused some companies to kind of step up the size of their rounds uh and so there were a handful of uh very large rounds uh certainly bigger than what we've ever seen before yeah those are great observations i mean you're right it was 100 million used to be the magic number to go public and now you get so much late money coming in locking in maybe smaller gains but giving that company you know a little more time to get their act together pre-ipo let's take a look at where the money went you know talk about follow the money and eric you and your team you segmented that three billion dollars into a number of different categories as i said most of it go into cyber security uh categories like application security is assessment and risk there's endpoint endpoint boomed during the pandemic same with identity and this chart really shows those categories that you created to better understand these dynamics and sort of figure out where the money went how did you come up with these these categories and what does this data tell you so these categories were basically uh homegrown these are how i um i think of these companies um it's a little bit of uh pulling some information out of uh the likes of gartner but uh for the most part this was how i how i conceptualize the landscape uh in my mind um the interesting thing to me is you know so a lot of that data is skewed by a few large transactions so um you know if you if you think about the the the allocation of those uh those different categories and and the uh investments in those categories it's it's skewed by large transactions and what was most interesting to me was one the application security space is a space that had quite a few additional smaller rounds and i think that's one that's pretty interesting going forward and then the one that was a surprise to me more than that was the data management um outside of cyber security uh data management's a space that's getting uh a lot more attention and uh and it's getting um uh some pretty good uh growth so that's a space that we're uh we're paying some good good attention to as well yeah that's interesting i mean of course data management means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and vc's throwing money at it maybe trying to define it and then and then the the the ai ops and and the that data management piece you know took a took a portion of it but wow the the cyber guys really are are killing it and now as we mentioned ten companies sucked up the lion's share of of the funding and this next chart shows that concentration of those 10 investments so eric some big numbers here one trust secured more than a half a billion dollars four others nabbed more than a quarter billion in funding give us your thoughts on this what do you make of that high concentration well um i i think this is a function of companies that are waiting uh longer than they used to um they're these these companies are getting to be of considerable scale i mean titanium would be a good example that's a company that could have gone public years ago and uh and i don't think they're particularly eager to get out the door uh they provide liquidity to their previous investors by raising money and uh and and buying those shares back um and so they uh they basically uh just continue to uh to grow uh without the uh the burden or or the um uh the demands that being a public company create um so there's this that's that's really a function of of companies just waiting longer before they get out the door got it now here's another view of that that data the so the left side of this chart uh that we we want to show you next um gives you a sense of the size of the companies the revenue in the elite 80 and you know most of these companies have broken through the 100 million dollar revenue mark as you say uh and they're they're still private and so you can see the breakdown and then the right-hand side of the chart shows the most active investors we just pulled out those with three or more transactions and it's it's interesting to see the players there and of course you've got some strategics you got city in there you've got cisco along with a little bit of p and e private equity action maybe your thoughts on on on this data so so to give you a little flavor around the uh the size of these companies when we first started publishing this report a little bit of the goal was to try to keep those categories relatively equal and as you can see they've skewed uh far to the left uh towards the uh to the larger revenue stream you know size so that's that just goes to the point that um uh the the companies that uh you know that are getting that a lot of these private companies uh they're they're of saw considerable size before they uh they really go out the door and and i think that's a reflection of um of the caliber of uh of or the quality of investments that uh that are out there today these are companies that have built very mature businesses and they're not going into the market until um until they can demonstrate uh high confidence and uh and consistency in their performance yeah i mean you i remember when when cloudera took that massive i think it was the 750 billion a million dollar investment from uh from intel you know way back when they that bridged them to ipo and that was sort of if i recall started that that trend and then now you get a ipo last year like snowflake which is price to perfection and you got guys that really know how to do this they've done it a number of times and so it really is somewhat changed that that dynamic uh for ipos which of course came booming back it was so quiet there for so many years but let's look into these markets a bit um i want to talk about the security space and the i.t infrastructure space and here's a chart from optiv which is one of the elite 80 ironically and we've shared this with with our audience before and the point of this is that the cyber security spaces it's highly fragmented we've reported on this a lot it's got hundreds and hundreds of companies in there it's just mosaic of solutions so very complicated and bespoke sets of tooling and combine that with a lack of skilled expertise you know csos tell us the lack of talent is their biggest challenge makes it a really dynamic market and eric this is part of the reason why vcs they want in so the takeaway i get from that chart is we have a lot of um we still have a great need for best of breed um digital transformation uh cloud mobile all these trends are creating such a disruption that there's still a great opportunity for somebody that can deliver a uh you know a real best of the best of breed uh solution uh in spite of uh all the challenges that uh id it departments are having with trying to uh to meet you know security requirements and things like that uh the the world has embraced uh you know digital delivery and uh you are your success is oftentimes dependent on your your digital differentiation and if that's the case then there's always going to be opportunity for a better technology out there so that's that in the end is uh is why uh optiv has a uh a line card that's uh as as long as you can read it i'm glad you brought the point about best of breeze it's an age-old debate in the industry it's do we go best of breed or do we go you know integrated suites you know you look at a company like microsoft obviously that that works very well for them uh companies like cisco but so this next uh set of data we're gonna bring in some etr customer spending data and see where the momentum is and i think it'll really underscore the points that you're making there in terms of best of breed this chart shares a popular view that we like to to share with our community on the vertical axis is net score or that's spending velocity and the horizontal axis shows market share or pervasiveness in the data as we've said before anything above 40 percent that red line on the vertical axis is considered elevated and you can see a lot of companies in cyber security are above that mark now a couple points i want to make here before we bring eric back in first is the market it's fragmented but it's pretty large at over 100 billion dollars depending on which research firm you look at it's growing at you know the low double digits so so nice growth is putting on 10 billion dollars a year into that number and there are some big pure plays like palo alto networks and fortinet but the market includes some other large whales like cisco uh they've built up a sizeable security business microsoft microsoft's in most markets and serves its you know software customers so but you can see how crowded this market is now we've superimposed in the red recent valuations for some of the companies and and the other point we want to make is there's some big numbers here and some divergence between us eric was saying the the best of breed and the integrated suites and the pandemic as we've talked about a lot is fueled a shift in cyber strategies toward endpoint identity and cloud and you can see that in crowdstrike's 50 billion plus valuation octa another best of breed 34 billion dollars in identity they just bought off zero and paid four and a half billion dollars for auth0 to get access to the developer community z scaler at 28 billion proof point is going private at a 12 billion dollar number so you can see why vcs are pouring money into this market some really attractive valuations eric what are your thoughts on this data so my interpretation is that's that's just further validation that uh that these security markets are uh are getting disrupted and uh and the truth of the matter is there's only one um really well positioned uh platform player in there uh uh palo alto the rest of them are are platforms within their respective uh security technology space but uh you know there's there's not very many um you know broad security solution providers today and the reason for that is because we've got such a uh transformation going on uh across uh technology that the need for best of breed is uh is is getting recognized uh day in day out yeah you're right palo alto they're they csos love to work with palo alto they're kind of the high-end gold standard but and we reported last year on the divergence in valuations between fortinet and palo alto networks fortinet was doing a better job you know pivoting to the cloud we said palo alto will get its act together it did but then you see these pure play best of breeds really you know doing well so now let's take a look at the it infrastructure space and it's it's quite different in terms of the dynamics of the market so here's that same view of the etr data and we've cut it by uh three categories we cut on networking servers and storage and this is a very large market it's it's it's over 200 billion dollars but it's much more of an oligopoly in that you've got great concentration at the top you've got some really big companies like cisco and dell which is spinning out vmware so we're going to unlock you know more value of the core dell company dell's valuation is 79 billion and that includes its 80 ownership in vmware so you do the math and figure out what core dell is worth hpe is much smaller it's notable that its valuation is comparable to netapp netapp's around you know one-fifth the size of revenue-wise uh hpe now eric arista they stand out as the lone player that's having some success clearly against cisco what are your thoughts on on the infrastructure space so so a couple things i'll take away from that now first off uh you mentioned arista arista is a bit of an anomaly um a switching company you know a networking company that is in that upper echelon like you've pointed out above 40 percent it is it is unique and and basically they kind of cracked the code they figured out how to beat cisco at cisco's core competency which is traditionally switching switching and routing and they they did that by delivering a very differentiated uh uh hardware product um that that they were able to tap into some markets that uh that even cisco hasn't been able to open up and and those would be the hyperscale uh hyperscale you know hosting vendors like uh google and facebook and microsoft but i would i would put i would put arista kind of in a in a unique situation the other thing that i'll just point out that i think is an interesting takeaway from the um from the the the slide that you showed is there are some uh infrastructure or what i would consider is bordering on data management type companies i mean you look at uh rubric you look at cohesity and nutanix veeam they're they're all kind of bubbling up there and pure storage and i think that comes back to what i was mentioning earlier where there is some pretty interesting innovation going on in data management which has traditionally not had a lot of innovation so i would bet you those names would have bubbled up just in the last uh year or two where that's been a market that hasn't had a lot of innovation and and now there's some interesting things coming down the pipe you know that's interesting comments that you make in there because if you think back to sort of last decade arista obviously broke out the only two other companies in the in the core infrastructure space and this was a hardware game historically but it's obviously becoming a software game but take a look at pure storage and nutanix you can see their valuations at five billion and seven point four billion dollars respectively uh and then to your point cohesity you got them at 3.7 billion just did a recent you know round rubric 3.3 billion that's from 2019 and so you know presumably that's a higher valuation now veeam got taken out last january at five billion by uh inside capital uh and so i think they're doing very well and they're probably uh up from that and susa is going public at uh at a reported seven billion dollar valuation so quite a bit different dynamic in the infrastructure space so eric i want to bring it back to the elite 80 in in in in startups in general my first question to you is is what do you look for from successful startups to make this elite 80 list so a few factors first off uh their performance is uh is is one of the primary uh situations if it's a company that's not growing we'll we'll probably pull it from the list um i would say it is also very much a function of my perception of the quality of management uh we we do meet with all these management teams um if we feel like uh they're they're they're putting together a uh you know a um a leadership team that's gonna be around for a long time and they've got a product position that's uh pretty attractive uh those would certainly be two key aspects of what i look for beyond that uh certainly feedback that we get from competitors uh feedback that we get from industry contacts like resellers and then then i'd also just say my enthusiasm for their respective market that they're in if it's a a market that i think is is going to be difficult or flat or not very interesting then then that would certainly be a a reason to to not include them uh conversely even if it's a small company if it's if it's a sector that i think is going to be uh around for quite a while and it's very differentiated uh then we'll include um a lot of the smaller companies too well a good example that's like a weka i mean i don't want to i don't want to go into these companies but two because we believe we 80 companies are going to leave somebody else but that that's a good example of a smaller company that looks to be disruptive um how should enterprise customers the buyers do you think evaluate and filter startups you have any sense of that well um a couple things that i struggle with that that would be uh you know something that's a lot more readily available to them is uh is just the quality of the product i mean that's obviously uh why why they're looking at it but uh if it's a uh if it's a company that's got a a unique product that uh is is built uh you know that that can that can that works that would be the starting point then then beyond that it's also is it a management team is is the behavior of the company something that uh reflects a management team that's uh that's that's you know a high quality management team if they if they you know are responsive if they're following up if they're not trying to pull in business uh quickly if they're priced appropriately uh metrics like that would certainly be um key aspects that would be readily available to uh to the you know to the the buyers of technology beyond that um you know i think the viability of that market is going to be uh a key aspect as to whether or not that company is going to be around even if it's a good company if uh if it's a highly competitive uh market that's going to have some big big players that can kind of integrate it and to make it a feature across other other product lines then that's going to make it a a tough a tough road to to go for a start-up these days you know the other thing i wanted to to talk about was the risks and the rewards of working with with startup companies and i've had i've had cios and and enterprise architects tell me that they'll when when they have to do an rfp they'll pull out the gartner magic quadrant they'll always you know pick a couple in the top right just to cover their butts but they many say you know what we also pick some of those those in the challenger space because because that are that are really interesting to us and and we run them through the paces and we manage those risks we don't we don't run the company on them but it helps us find these diamonds in the rough i mean think about you know in the in this in the second part of last decade if you picked a snowflake you might have been able to get ahead of some of your competition things like data sharing or or maybe you found that that well you know what octa is going to help me with my identity in in a new way and you're going to be better prepared to be a digital business but do you have any thoughts on how uh people should manage those risks and and how they should think about the upside i don't i don't think today um a a you know a company can work today using legacy technologies i i think the risk the greater risk is falling behind from a a digital transformation perspective this this era i think the pandemic is probably the best proof point of this um you can't you can't go with just a uh a traditional legacy architecture in a in in a key aspect of your business and so the startups um i i think you've got to take the quote-unquote risk of working with a startup that's uh you know that's got a viability concern or sustainability concern uh the risk of of having a um uh an i.t infrastructure that's inadequate is uh is a far greater risk from my perspective so i think that the startups right now are are are in a very strong position and they're well funded that's the last question i wanted to talk about is how will startups kind of penetrate the enterprise in this modern era i mean you know this is really a software world and software is this sort of capital efficient business but yet you're seeing companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars i mean that's not even absurd these days you see companies go to ipo that have raised over a billion dollars and much of that if not most of it goes to promotion and go to market uh so so how maybe you could give us your perspectives on how you see startups getting into the enterprise in these sectors so i one of the really interesting things that we've seen in the last couple years is a lot of changes to sales models and and if you look at the mid market the ability to leverage viral sales models uh has been wildly successful for some companies um it's been um you know a great strategy uh there's a public company ubiquity that did a uh has built a multi-billion dollar uh you know business on on without without a sales organization so there's some pretty interesting um directions that i think sales and go to market is going to uh incur over the over the coming years uh traditional enterprise sales i think are still uh pretty standard today but i i think that the efficiency of um of you know social networking and and uh and and what would the the delivery of uh of products on on a digital for in a digital format is going to change the way that we do sales so i think i think there's a lot of efficiencies that are going to come in uh in sales over the coming years that's interesting because then you'll you know i i think you're right and and and instead of just just pouring money at promotion maybe get more efficient there and pour money in into engineering because that really is the long-term sustainable value that these companies are going to create right yeah i i would absolutely agree with that and um again if you look at the you know if you look at the charts of the well-established players that that you had mentioned those companies are where they are that the ones at the top are where they are because of their technology i mean it's it's not because of uh their go to market it's it's it's because they have something that other people can't uh can't replicate right well eric hey it's been great having you on today thanks so much for joining us really appreciate your time well dave i greatly appreciate it uh it's been a lot of fun so uh so thank you all right hey go get the elite 80 report all you got to do is search jmp elite 80 and it'll it'll come up there's a there's a lot of data out there so it's really a worthwhile reference tool and uh so thank you everybody for watching remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen you can check out etr's website at etr dot plus and we also publish weekly a full report on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me david.velante at siliconangle.com or dm me on twitter at divalante hit up hit our linkedin post and really appreciate those comments this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week everybody stay safe and we'll see you next time you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante the pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication collaboration and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet the solar winds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect moreover the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cyber criminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counterattacks designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities the only upshot is the cyber security market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry and share new survey data from etr and thecube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare we'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3d chest that octa ceo todd mckinnon is playing against the market now we all know this market is complicated fragmented and fast moving and this next chart says it all it's an interactive graphic from optiv a denver colorado based si that's focused on cyber security they've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy and mapped vendor names therein and this helps users navigate the complex security landscape and there are over a dozen major sectors high-level sectors within the security taxonomy in nearly 60 sub-sectors from monitoring vulnerability assessment identity asset management firewalls automation cloud data center sim threat detection and intelligent endpoint network and so on and so on and so on but this is a terrific resource and can help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space now let's talk about what's going on in the market the dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes now since the beginning of cyber time we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary and the back and forth escalation between good and evil and unfortunately this trend is unlikely to stop here's some data from carbon black's annual modern bank heist report this is the fourth and of course now vmware's brand highlights the carbon black study since the acquisition and it catalyzed the creation of vmware's cloud security division destructive malware attacks according to the recent study are up 118 percent from last year now one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud they are 57 of the bank surveyed saw an increase in wire fraud but the cyber criminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies this allows the bad guys to front run large block trades and profit it's become very lucrative practice now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38 from already elevated levels this is where a virus enters a company's supply chain via a partner and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream these techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information it's a really complex problem of major concern is that 63 of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate or initiate ransomware attacks to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim notably the study found that 75 percent of csos reported to the cio which many feel is not the right regime the study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the cso has increased responsibility in a direct reporting line to the ceo or perhaps the co with greater exposure to boards of directors so many thanks to vmware and tom kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week great work by your team now some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart cloud of course is the big driver thanks to work from home and the pandemic to pandemic and the interesting corollary of course is we see a rapid rethinking of endpoint and identity access management and the concept of zero trust in a recent esg survey two-thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management now as shown in the chart from optiv the market remains highly fragmented and m a is of course way up now based on our research it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40 percent just in the last five months so let's dig into the m a the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment we took a five month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that time frame those transactions represented more than 20 billion dollars in value some of the larger ones are highlighted here the biggest of course being the toma bravo taking proof point private for a 12 plus billion dollar price tag the stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on 176 dollar per share offer so there's your arbitrage folks go for it perhaps the more interesting acquisition was auth 0 by octa for 6.5 billion which we're going to talk about more in a moment there's more private equity action we saw as insight bought armis and iot security play and cisco shelled out 730 million dollars for imi mobile which is more of an adjacency to cyber but it's going to go under cisco's security and applications business run by g2 patel but these are just the tip of the iceberg some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first sis like accenture atos and wipro are making moves in cyber to go local they're buying secops expertise as i say locally in places like france germany netherlands canada and australia that last mile that belly-to-belly intimate service israel israeli-based startups chalked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months also financial services firms are getting into the act with goldman and mastercard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft and then finally numerous moves to expand markets octa with zero crowdstrike buying a log management company palo alto picking up devops expertise rapid seven shoring up its kubernetes chops tenable expanding beyond insights and going after identity interesting fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering sale point extending to governance risk and compliance grc zscaler picked up an israeli firm to fill gaps in access control and then vmware buying mesh 7 to secure modern app development and distribution services so tons and tons of activity here okay so let's look at some of the etr data to put the cyber market in context etr uses the concept of market share it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set so for each sector it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the cio and i.t buyer communities okay this chart shows the full etr sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods april last year january this year in april this year now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time so it's relatively stable by sector but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent so you see that red line that dotted line imposed at the sixty percent level you can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them okay so we know that security is important in a large market but this puts it in the context of the other sectors however we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic budgets unfortunately are not unlimited and spending is bounded it's not an open checkbook for csos as shown in this chart this is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis or pervasiveness and net score in the vertical axis net score is etr's measurement of spending velocity and we've superimposed a red line at 40 percent because anything over 40 percent we consider extremely elevated we've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic and you can see in the sectors that we've highlighted only the big four four are above that forty percent line ai containers rpa and cloud they exceed that sort of forty percent magic water line information security you can see that is highlighted and it's respectable but it competes for budget with other important sectors so this of course creates challenges for organization because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported they like everyone else in it face ongoing budget pressures research firm cybersecurity ventures estimates that in 2021 6 trillion dollars worldwide will be lost on cyber crime conversely research firm canalis pegs security spending somewhere around 60 billion dollars annually idc has it higher around 100 billion so either way we're talking about spending between one to one point six percent annually of how much the bad guys are taking out that's peanuts really when you consider the consequences so let's double click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies here's that same x y graphic with the company's etr captures from respondents in the cyber security sector that's what's shown on the chart here now the usefulness of the red lines is 20 percent on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey and the magic 40 percent line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum only microsoft and palo alto exceed both high water marks of course splunk and cisco are prominent horizontally and there are numerous companies to the left of the 20 percent line and many above that 40 percent high water mark on the vertical axis now in the bottom left quadrant that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time and there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms i.e above single digits so that picture is like the first one we showed you very very crowded space but so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the etr survey that had at least a hundred responses so an n of a hundred or greater so it's a little easy to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it okay so same graphic and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there so it's net score and shared n including only companies with more than 100 n so what does this data tell us about the market well microsoft is dominant as always it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here first i want to talk about palo alto networks pre-covet as you might recall we highlighted the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet and we said fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy and palo alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go to market and its sales force compensation and really refreshing its portfolio but we told you that we were bullish on palo alto networks at the time because of its track record and the fact that cios consistently told us that they saw palo alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with they said that palo alto was the gold standard the best especially larger company cisos so that gave us confidence that palo alto a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better and palo alto has just done just that as we expected they've done very well and they've been rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms and we're very impressed by the company's execution and the stock has generally reflected that now some other names that hit our radar and the etr data a couple of years ago continue to perform well crowdstrike z-scaler sales sail point and cloudflare a cloudflare just reported and beat earnings but was off the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall the big rotation but the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the etr data and we put that double star around proof point to highlight that it was worthy of fetching 12 and a half billion dollars from private equity firm so nice exit there supporting the continued control consolidation trend that we've predicted in cyber security now let's turn our attention to octa and auth zero this is where it gets interesting and is a clever play for octa we think and we want to drill into it a bit octa is acquiring auth zero for big money why well we think todd mckinnon octa ceo wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand his tam he has to do that to justify his lofty valuation so octa's ascendancy around identity and single sign sign-on is notable the fragmented pictures that we've shown you they scream out for simplification and trust and that's what octa brings but it competes with some major players most notably microsoft with active directory so look of course microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base but the rest of the market that's like jump ball it's wide open and we think mckinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector now octa comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation and throwing a big blanket over all the discrete sas platforms and unifying employee access octa's timing was perfect it was founded in 2009 just as the massive sasification trend was happening around crm and hr and service management and cloud etc but the one thing that octa didn't have that auth 0 does is serious developer chops while octa was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy auth 0 was laser focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity by acquiring auth0 octa can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle so yes it's a pricey acquisition but in our view it's a great move by mckinnon now i don't know mckinnon personally but last week i spoke to arun shrestha who's the ceo of security specialist beyond id they're a platinum services partner of octa and there a zero trust expert he worked for octa for a number of years and shared with me a bit about mckinnon's style and think big approach arun said something that caught my attention he said firewalls used to be the perimeter now people are and while that's self-serving to octa and probably beyond id it's true people apps and data are the new perimeter and they're not in one location and that's the point now unfortunately i had lined up an interview with dia jolly who was the chief product officer at octa in a cube alum for this past week knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel but i want to follow up with her and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with auth 0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there this is a really interesting chess match that's going on let's look a little deeper into that identity space this chart here shows some of the major identity players it has some of the leaders in the identity market and there's a breakdown of etr's net score now net score comprises five elements the lime green is we're adding the platform new the forest green is we're spending six percent or more relative to last year the gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend plus or minus five percent the pinkish is spending less and the bright red is where exiting the platform retiring now you subtract the red from the green and that gets you the result for net score which you can see superimposed on the right hand chart at the bottom that first column there the far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market oh look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum now sales sale point is right there but auth 0 combined with octa's distribution channel will extend octa's lead significantly in our view and then there's microsoft now just a caveat this includes all of microsoft's security offerings not just identity but it's there for context and cyber arc as well includes its acquisition of adaptive but also other parts of cyberarks portfolio so you can see some of the other names that are there many of which you'll find in the gartner magic quadrant for identity and as we said we really like this move by octa it combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning dna and passionate people now to further emphasize emphasize what what's happening here take a look at this this chart shows etr data for octa within sale point and cyber arc accounts out of the 230 cyber and sale point customers in the data set there are 81 octa accounts that's a 35 overlap and the good news for octa is that within that base of sale point in cyber arc accounts octa is shown by the net score line that green line has a very elevated spending and momentum and the kicker is if you read the fine print in the right hand column etr correctly points out that while sailpoint and cyberarc have long been partners with octa at the recent octane 21 event octa's big customer event the company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management pam and identity governance hello and welcome to coopetition in the 2020s now our current thinking is that this bodes very well for octa and cyberark and sailpoint well they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming now let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the etr data set we do this every quarter so here on the left we have the top 20 sorted by net score or spending momentum and on the right we sort by shared n so again top 20 which informs shared end and forms the market share metric or presence in the data set that red horizontal lines those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. in our method what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top ten for both metrics so again you see microsoft palo alto networks octa crowdstrike and fortinet fortinet by the way didn't make it last quarter they've kind of been in and out and on the bubble but you know this company is very strong and doing quite well only the other four did last quarter there was same four last quarter and we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. so cisco splunk which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint and z-scaler which is just on the cusp you know we really like z-scaler and the company has great momentum but that's the methodology it is what it is now you can see we kept carbon black on the rightmost chart it's like kind of cut off it's number 21 only because they're just outside looking in on netscore you see them there they're just below on on netscore number 11. and vmware's presence in the market we think that carbon black is really worth paying attention to okay so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts last quarter we did a deeper dive on the solar winds hack and we think the ramifications are significant it has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication now major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders you'd better think very carefully about your next moves when someone breaks into your house if the dog barks or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon you might think the intruder is going to flee but if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or inside or subterfuge or whatever method and they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so they can you can't find them so easily so instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert they just use what you already have there that's what's called living off the land they'll steal sensitive data for example positive covid test results when that was really really sensitive obviously still is or other medical data and when you retaliate they will double extort you they'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information to crushing your brand in the process so your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan you face serious headwinds not only is this a complicated situation there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time many companies are mired in technical debt that's an additional challenge and then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually affecting a digital transformation that's very very difficult and it's risky because the more digital you become the more exposed you are so this idea of zero trust people used to call it a buzzword it's now a mandate along with automation because you just can't throw labor at the problem this is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and m a activity especially if you know where to look hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit okay that's it for now thanks to the community for your comments and insights remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcast put in the headphones listen when you're in your car out for your walk or run and you can always connect on twitter at divalante or email me at david.valante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments on linkedin and in clubhouse please follow me so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you