On this episode of The Six Five Webcast, leading global tech analysts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead analyze the tech industry’s biggest news each and every week.
On this week’s show, the topics covered are:
- NVIDIA GTC 2022
- Microsoft Windows Update
- DreamForce 2022
- Qualcomm Automotive
- Lenovo ISG Announcement
- Marvell Liquid Security Annc
- NetSuite SuiteWorld
- IntelON Event
- Amazon Devices
- Micron Earnings
For a deeper look into each topic, please click on the links above. Be sure to subscribe to The Six Five Webcast so you never miss an episode.
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the episode on your favorite streaming platform:
Disclaimer: The Six Five Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Six Five Podcast. I am the host today, host with the most, Daniel Newman, principal analyst, founding partner, Futurum Research, joined by my always esteemed, super handsome, back in Austin, co-host, Mr. Patrick Moorhead. Patrick, good morning. We are back after a week away, and I know everybody missed us, but you miss us no longer.
Patrick Moorhead: I know, we’re back. We’ve both been on the road a ton. I have to hand it to you, you beat me in terms of miles and cities, but I did do three cities in three weeks, sorry, three cities in three days this week, not including Austin. So I was pretty busy and rolled in last night about midnight.
Daniel Newman: I saw you at the first and then you jetted off to the second, and I saw you come back for the third. So we got some time together. It was disjointed, but we have our own lives and we have our lives together. We’re kind of like a bit of a thing going on there, but so much going on, so much technology news, and we actually missed last week and we’re really sorry about that everybody. Just know that Patrick and I do not ever want to miss an episode because we love talking about this stuff. Plus so much stuff happens that after a couple of weeks it becomes hard to remember. So we definitely don’t want to miss that. And so, guess what? We’re going to do what we’re going to call the extended play extended edition, episode 140. It’s going to be like the Ten Five Podcast. So I think between last week and this week, there’s about 10 events that we want to cover.
Patrick Moorhead: We have so many things to talk about, it blocks out the logo.
Daniel Newman: It messes up the logo. Let’s flash this up here. Let’s talk about what’s going on. We’re going to talk about GTC, we’re going to talk about Microsoft, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Lenovo, Marvell, NetSuite, Intel, Amazon, and Micron had some earnings. Now, for those of you that might be new to the Six Five Podcast, first of all, why? Where have you been? We’re on episode 140, so-
Patrick Moorhead: What’s wrong with you?
Daniel Newman: Listen, you can go ahead this weekend and binge listen and get up to speed on everything we’ve ever talked about. But in all serious, the theme of the show is six topics, five or so minutes each, usually a little bit longer, and it’s all about the analysis. So news is abound. You don’t need us for the news. You can read that anywhere. But when you want to know what’s going on, the analysis of what’s going on the tech space, Patrick is pretty good and I am awesome. Just kidding. We’re both awesome. As a reminder, this show is for information and entertainment purposes only. And so while we will be talking about publicly traded company here on the Six Five Podcast, please do not take anything we say as investment advice. I always forget, Pat, sometimes people are not watching the video. We are two really handsome guys. I cannot imagine why people wouldn’t want to watch this. Pat didn’t even acknowledge it out loud, he did a head bob.
Patrick Moorhead: I tell you what, if you’re looking for attractive faces, go to YouTube. Shorts or Instagram. Yeah, this is not that.
Daniel Newman: This is not it, but all right buddy. So are you ready to jump in? I think let’s start with-
Patrick Moorhead: 10 topics, baby, let’s do this.
Daniel Newman: NVIDIA GTC. Yeah, we’re going to go fast. So I’ll kick it off first. First and foremost, GTC, a little over a week ago, had the chance to jump on CNBC and talk a little bit about it. So I’ll put that in the show notes. But listen, this is a huge developer conference. It’s a big moment, and if you haven’t been paying attention, NVIDIA’s been under a little bit of pressure over the last few quarters, after a meteoric rise that took it to nearly a trillion dollar market cap, the company has come back to earth, probably after finding out, A lot of its GPU business was more closely tied to crypto than people expected. Two, as the supply chain has somewhat regulated, there’s been an inventory glut, and over the last quarter you might have seen a little revision to NVIDIA’s numbers.
Now we’re not here to talk about numbers, but I thought it was worth pointing out where we are. So the question I was asked is, well, did NVIDIA do enough at GTC to stimulate growth and get it back on its better way? Now the macro environment is crappy. Terrible policy all around. Hopefully some changes in November. But they did announce new platform with Ada Lovelace, which is going to power its new GForce, RTX 4090. It’s got new rate tracing technology. They launched a whole new drive platform, which, if you saw, and we’ll talk about the Qualcomm event later, seems like they need that. Now I want to focus, because there’s too many things to talk about at once. I’m going to dive in and just talk a little bit about what the company announced with the omniverse. Pat, for me, that was the most exciting thing was the company’s migration to cloud.
Now we hear companies like Meta talking about a future in the metaverse. Well, the reality is, is that for us to get to a point where people can consume these immersive experiences, you need to be able to develop the software to do it. There’s a lot of compute that required to do this. There’s a lot of development that’s required to do this, and NVIDIA is very well positioned. So if you’re not familiar with the omniverse, that is the answer that Jensen and the NVIDIA team have been talking about to basically enable developers to build applications for the metaverse. The company took it one step further with this announcement of their cloud services. So basically they’re going to democratize the capabilities, and basically build out more tools that developers can utilize to build for a metaverse in an immersive future. And they’re calling it the Omniverse Cloud.
Now, there’s a bunch of little announcements. They have a nucleus cloud, app streaming, a replicator, a farm, and an Isaac sim, they call it. So they’re focused on, A, with the nucleus to enable 3D designers teams to collaborate anywhere to access scene description, 3D scenes and data. So when you’re developing these ecosystems, you’re going to have developers all over working together, like Figma, Pat, but for development environments. Then you’ve got app streaming, which basically allows for the streaming of omniverse reference apps. You’ve got the replicator, which, as you know, in order to create simulations, you need to basically replicate real world data, that can be then created in this digital environment. So they created a tool for that. They have a farm for using multiple cloud instances on the omniverse, and then they also did a scalable robotics simulation app. Now, try not to read all this.
It’s just so much at one time. So many things happen at once. Yeah, that was, by the way, if I have one complaint, too many things announced and I feel like we’re not going to be able to do it justice because I’m not going to be able to talk about all the things that were announced. Now, the one thing I guess I’ll just say about the metaverse and the omniverse solution as a whole is, I think we tend to think a lot about the applications like Facebook or what’s going to be, but the real opportunity, in my opinion, is much more industrial. I’m thinking the omniverse, the replicator simulation. This is for designing buildings that are going to be able to withstand massive environmental challenges, for instance. This is for the ability to drive vehicles for millions of miles in a real world environment where we can test the stability of a system.
This is for the ability to collaborate on the design of complex products and services with teams around the world. This is where I really see the big opportunity path for the omniverse in the Metaverse. Of course, we’re going to get the applications where we’re going to be able to go into retail stores and be able to tour a new home. But I’m thinking more and more the idea that you can have photorealistic, 3D, synthetic environments created that are going to be utilized. Is the future digital simulation? Think about healthcare applications, Pat, the ability to test surgical procedures. We’ve heard about this a while. Let’s move in this direction. NVIDIA’s building a lot of tools for it. And with the further democratization of omniverse, I think it’s going to be more available and we’re going to see more to come. It’s one of the most exciting areas, in my opinion, for NVIDIA’s future.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, that’s good stuff Daniel. It’s funny, I’m thinking 30 years into the future, and I’m wondering if omniverse and metaverse is just this short stop until we get to full automation. Because if you think about it, we feel good that we’re having a digital twin because we are creating something digitally that is actually controlling something in the real world. And I’m just thinking, hey, if I look in the future, and you look at autonomy, where it’s not the human necessarily pulling the switch in this omniverse, but it’s just happening automagically. So anyways, I’m going to bring us back to ground here and talk about a few things that NVIDIA did on the edge. And it’s interesting, NVIDIA’s one of the few companies that can really lean into the future, and they came out with two entire lines of edge products that cover robotics, all the way from entry level robots, think vacuum cleaners to high-end robots that are in distribution centers, moving carts around and are called AMRs, autonomous robots.
So the first announcement I want to talk about is Jetson or Nano, and think of this as entry level robotics. They increase the performance by eight X, which is just absolutely nuts if you think about it. And that’s really an order of magnitude higher. Essentially what that means is that these little entry level robots have to rely less on the cloud and can make more decisions while being unconnected. Think about drones for a second. You wonder, hey, how big is this market? Well, this Jetson AGX Orin has over a thousand customers and partners. Think of companies like Canon, John Deere, even Azure for the edge. So it truly is incredible how quickly that this market is going in. You had made a comment about the omniverse and medical, and looking at data well, NVIDIA brought out a brand new product called IGX for Medical Edge AI, which is essentially, in my opinion, has the capability to fundamentally change, not only how we figure out what’s wrong with people or the diagnosis, but also preventative care.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but a bunch of startups popping up who are essentially scanning your body, and within a half an hour or an hour are giving you the results of where they potentially found a tumor that’s no bigger than one centimeter. So hats off to NVIDIA. The capabilities for a whole body scan or the ability to speed up time to diagnosis, where you might have to, let’s say, ship it off to an x-ray outsourcer or an image outsourcer, might be an India or something like that. Imagine the ability of having the combined intelligence of a hundred thousand doctors to be able to read that data and get it back to you within five minutes before you leave.
The psychological effects of knowing what’s going on, I’m sure you can empathize with the, hey, you go in, you get something done and hey, come back in a week and we’ll tell you if you have something awful. And then if you’re anything like me, I’m thinking about what’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong. But again, hats off to NVIDIA. They came out with this NVIDIA Clara Holoscan, built on IGX, which is a great example of these new types of platforms.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Pat the medical implications are huge. Love it. It’s a huge market. We saw Oracle buy Cerner, we’re seeing more and more vertical veneer, and then eventually it’s going to be depth and this is going to help provide that depth. All right, let’s keep moving Pat. Let’s talk about Microsoft Windows had an update. This is probably a quicker hit for you.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so Microsoft is back to doing some of its big cadences and while this in yesteryear, Windows eight and before would probably be called a service pack. And that’s a really big difference. So this was a sneak peek at some of the new features that are coming out on this platform. So this wasn’t in gory details, but it’s all about Microsoft desire to do four things. Make the PC easier to use and safer for everybody. Making people more productive. Making windows the best play to connect, create and play. I think arguably you can say that, from a content creation and playing, they’re doing really well. Maybe not so great on the connect unless of course connecting is doing a video call over Windows. And then finally, more security and management and flexibility for the workplace in hybrid. So there were a couple highlights for me that I thought were pretty good on the security side, Smart app control and driver protection really as a way to make sure you don’t get phished.
You click on this link that came from your friend to check out this new application. Smart act Control says nope, you don’t want to down download that. And essentially doesn’t let you do that if you are in IT. From an accessibility point of view, system wide live captions. Essentially what that means is, somebody who might be hard of hearing, essentially every piece of every word that’s spoken through the pc, regardless of what application it is, you get live captions. The other one in that same vein is natural voice narration. I don’t know if you know this Daniel, but Microsoft is actually the first company to do hardcore research on speech to text and text to speech. I know Google and Apple get credit for it, but Microsoft has the most patents and has put the most hours in. Essentially you have natural voice narration, if you’ve ever used it on Windows where it’s talking back. On productivity, you’ve got to improve Snap.
That’s a fancy way of saying multi monitors. Daniel, I’m surrounded by four monitors right now, and the only way I keep it sane is by using Snap, which is essentially to put the windows in the right place and have it remember where it is. Apple totally ripped off this feature from Microsoft, by the way. And I’ll leave it here. Studio effects. What this is, is Microsoft has worked with Qualcomm, Intel and AMD to tap into machine learning to make Teams calls, as one example, to be able to uniformly have a chip basket, sorry, a chip bag, and drown out everything but the voices, the ability to make it look like I’m actually looking at the camera when I’m not. And man, I need that, and I’ll bet you could use that as you look left to your notes. I knew I’d wake you up. No, no, this-
Daniel Newman: That’s the problem, Pat, with the large monitors though, is it’s harder to pretend to be paying attention. The smaller screen you can drift a little bit. I’ve got a 30 plus inch curved screen in front of me and I got another mon… I’m using two monitors, but yeah, we’re doing 10 topics. There’s no way we’re going to have this all memorized. Don’t be fooled for a minute. We’re not that smart, but the-
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, I just put the tab right in front of the camera.
Daniel Newman: I try to do that. I also have a pod partner that likes to yell at me for making clicking noises. And so anyways, he’s super strict about what I’m allowed to do during the show. Don’t worry everybody. Off camera, the abuse is worse. So you hit on most things. So actually I’ll close off the loop. I think A, Windows continues to get better. You mention them off the features that they’ve been stealing from Apple. Don’t be fooled anybody. Apple doesn’t really invent much. They tend to innovate on other people’s ideas and do it better than most. So that’s where they really tend to win. It’s like they didn’t come up with the first touch panel phone either. They did it a lot better. Do you remember those old smartphones with the touch screens on them? And then it was a million times better on Apple.
I like the focus stuff, Pat. So that do not disturb. Listen, I am the most attention deficit person on the planet, I think. Maybe, I don’t know. Some people would argue with me… But wait, what am I talking about again? But no, in all serious, I tend to be really struggle when I’m doing something important, not like this podcast, but say I’m writing something and I’m so easily distracted by notifications. Anything that pops up, any little thing that hits me in Teams or WebEx, it’s like, boom. The ability to understand and learn how to silence and how to get notifications. I thought that was a good little feature, Pat, to give people focus. Because I do think a big problem with us now, is that we have so much signal that even people who are pretty good at focusing struggle to stay focused. Again, I like the security stuff too, but you already hit on that. So sometimes there’s more oxygen, sometimes there’s less oxygen. But let’s move on to the third topic because we still have a lot more to go and let’s talk about-
Patrick Moorhead: This is good. Do you need to get a cup of coffee or anything? Are you good?
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Hold on. Let me take a sip.
Patrick Moorhead: Don’t do this. Don’t show the logo, otherwise they’ll block.
Daniel Newman: Okay. Hold on. All right. So the next one is, last week I headed to San Francisco. I protected my life consistently, but they cleaned it up somewhat decently. You heard the word somewhat, allow me to qualify. I was still scared after I got about two blocks from the hotel. But within about two blocks of the event, they did a good job of getting the area contained. But in San Francisco, for what has to have been the largest event to come back to San Francisco since the pandemic. And that was Dreamforce 2022. It was a splash event like it always is. Red Hot Chili Peppers was the band, which is cool. But even the warmup after the Ohana, the Hawaiian dance, Lenny Kravitz kicked it off. I’m a Lenny fan, I’m not going to lie. He’s a talented guy, good singer, great voice.
And he’s apparently a buddy of Mark, which doesn’t surprise me either. Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce. Listen, lot of announcements. Another event that’s jam packed. But this one I think kind of gave me two things that really caught my attention that are worth knowing. So I’m going to talk a little bit about Genie, which was the biggest announcement that dominated the event, but then the updates to Slack were actually what I thought were potentially the most exciting. So Genie is basically the next iteration of data integration model to work within the Salesforce platform. Remember Einstein? Einstein was about insights. Well, Genie was really about real time. So what they’re doing now is they’re basically working to be able to take all the data in the cloud and be able to provide real time insights. And in a world of less third party tracking, the ability to use first party data effectively is going to be paramount.
The company seems to be really focused on utilizing these catchy market textures to enable customers to do more with their systems. Salesforce is the center of ecosystem for many companies and their sales service marketing operations. So being able to layer in Genie is going to be really, really important to the company in a growing competition space with everything from SAP to Oracle, and we’ll talk about that later, and Microsoft. We’ve seen Salesforce growth get more steady in its Core Cloud sales service marketing over the last several quarters. And while Benioff did announce, Marc Benioff did announce that, I think it’s a 50 billion by 2026 goal, which is huge for a SaaS company. The ability to basically enable this real time capability is going to be huge for the company. So Genie is the, they call it the “magic,” which essentially enables you to use all your data in real time to get insights that you can basically take to customers to deliver that right experience, right sale, right offer, right time.
From a cost standpoint, it’s going to layer right on top of your current offerings. It’s going to be based upon how many records you’re applying it to. And then basically Genie does its magic, “automagically.” So it’s pretty cool. It’s early days. My criticism would be this, Einstein landed with a thud. I see it coming together now. Genie has a lot of potential, but I think there’s a little skepticism in the market. We’ll need to see it work. Based on what they’re saying it’s going to do, super powerful. Does it do it? That’s going to be what the market’s going to wait to see.
Pat, I’m a bit of a sucker for good marketing. So the marketing is good. We’ll see how it goes. I think Jeanie was the main headline, but if you listened to me at all over the last three years, four years, five years, but really since the Slack acquisition, I’ve said Microsoft Teams is going to be a Juggernaut for Salesforce because the way the world is going is that the asynchronous, and real time, and power platform, and citizen developer is going to be the future of how companies communicate.
We want to take meetings from email to chat, chat to video, video to collaboration in groups, and we need to be able to make that happen. But for a long time we saw Salesforce bought Slack, we’re like, eh, what are they doing with it? 27 billion dollars, what’s happening there? So you heard Marc Benioff for a long time talk about a digital HQ. Well the digital HQ started to come to life with the company launching its canvas and of course building on its huddle offering. Basically the canvas gives the ability for ad hoc meetings. The huddle allows multiple faces on video at the same time to be in chat. So you’ve got chat, you’ve got video, you’ve got collaboration, you’ve got a canvas for creating, sharing, you’ve got integration with Quip, which again, maybe this will be the thing that gets someone to use it because no one’s using Quip right now, at least not at any scale.
But of course I think you’re going to see integrations to work with other productivity tools as well. Overall though, as I see it, you’re going to be able to automate processes, you’re going to be able to use Slack the way I’ve envisioned Teams being used to create workflows and automation. And finally I think getting to a point where Slack really does operate as the front end. I think we’re getting closer. Now again, that productivity is going to be a key, Pat. It’s not going to happen on its own. But I do think huddles was impressive to me. The company says they’re not going after Zoom or WebEx or Teams per se, but at the same time I think that it does definitely fulfill some of those needs to do real time collab, but they’re really more focused on that asynchronous and ad hoc. I like the announcements, I like those two specifically. I wrote a long Forbes piece on it. You can read more about what I had to say there on Forbes. I’ll leave a little bit for you.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes, so we’ve talked on a few additions here of this move to full stacks. You have Salesforce, you have Microsoft, you have Google. You even have little micro Stacks being created by companies like Box. So Stacks are what it is, and now where that ends up in 10 years, I’m thinking it’s a walled garden. I would hope not. But as long as we keep APIs and having best of breed, I don’t think we’ll ultimately get there. I was super skeptical in the beginning on what Salesforce was trying to do with this expansion strategy, particularly with Slack. It felt a little bit like me too, the spending that much money to get access to a super popular chat app and integrate it. There were definitely other ways you could do this. And quite frankly, when a customer comes to, let’s say, the customer support line and they’re using chat, they don’t care if it’s Slack, they don’t care if it’s some open source product, they really don’t care.
But what I am impressed with is how quickly they turned around some of these capabilities. And whether that’s Canvas. And I do think Canvas is really interesting in a lot of different ways, particularly in that Salesforce has given employees a place to collaborate. And the big test for me is, can Salesforce get this out of, let’s say, an add-on to its current areas of strength like sales and marketing? Can they move it into other groups like finance or HR? You had a good example in your article about how HR would use this with the onboarding process, be able to quickly automate some of these processes. And it’s interesting, when I looked at Canvas, I couldn’t help to think, Wow, this really goes head to head with Microsoft. In most enterprises, what are the places that we all go to where files are capital?
Daniel Newman: SharePoint-esque.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. And SharePoint is moving to Teams, and the ability to create a Team’s page, which by the way, the backhand at SharePoint. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The technology behind it. But no, listen, I’m impressed with where they’ve come. I’ll be even more impressed when I see some numbers on who’s using it, how they’re using it. I think document management, secure document management would be an interesting place for them to go, which again would go right in the face of Box, who’s number one in secure document management.
I’ll tell you what, when-
Daniel Newman: Been saying that for a while. I think I’ve done 38 quotes in Business Insider where I keep saying Box is the-
Patrick Moorhead: I gave Business Insider Box as well, so you and I are on the same page.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely.
Patrick Moorhead: So I’d love to come to Dreamforce next year. Hopefully that the company can make it happen.
Daniel Newman: Hint, hint. Yeah, it really was a well run event. They’d take care of the analysts, Pat. So credit due where credit’s due. Pat, then I went cross country and I met you in New York City for an absolute… You wrote two Forbes articles about coming out party graduation. My God. And you know what? Sometimes I rag on you a little bit about you being sweet on Forbes and you’re very bullish, as I am, but this was absolutely deserved. Wow, what a day for Qualcomm Automotive.
Patrick Moorhead: Kind of funny. I spent so much time working there. I fib, it was only two days, but it felt like a week. I had to sleep the weekend to get over it. I think I caught something in New York. But listen, no, Qualcomm crushed it, and at a corporate level, Qualcomm has been in a multi-year expansion and diversification strategy to get further outside of modems and more into IOT, automotive and RF. Those businesses are absolutely rocking. Inside of automotive we have come to appreciate that every major time they get up on stage or they do earnings, they are updating this magical backlog number, or order backlog number. The company went to 30 billion and that was an increase of 11 billion from 19 billion in two months. And by the way, that 11 billion number is interesting because it happens to be the number NVIDIA gave for their entire backlog. So you can compare it. Qualcomm has 30 and NVIDIA has 11.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you’re talking about design pipeline, right?
Patrick Moorhead: Design pipeline, yeah. And it’s funny, sometimes a mixed design pipeline backlog has firm orders, design wind pipeline, it’s a little bit soft of that. But that to me was the big announcement there. Mercedes got on and talked about their 2025 models. They won the dash for that. It was a time for the company to reinforce its leverage strategy, which is essentially leveraging each piece, every block, and every piece of IP that it does in smart phones and extending this to the automotive market. I have got to tell you, I was super skeptical that they would be able to do that. There have been companies who’ve tried to extend before, but to their credit, Qualcomm made a ton of investments that put over and above. They spent the money on auto specific types of features like reliability, like failover, and things like this. There was a little hint at the very end where they said, Hey, we think the new architecture in the car is going to be centralized compute.
And oh by the way, we have a new line of products called Snap Drag and Ride Flex SOC. Some people said, Oh, it’s paper. And then Qualcomm turns around and said, Oh, where we have design wins are already designed in it, OEMs. We’ll have more details for you at CES. Now the interesting number, it’s funny, you have a slide with all this information and my eyes just honed in on this number of tops, which is essentially the amount of AI performance, and they hit that 2000 tops, which happens to be the same exact number that NVIDIA brought out for Thor, right? Coincidence? I don’t know. But the game is on at the high end between Qualcomm and NVIDIA. Can’t wait to see details. Qualcomm is not known for the highest performance. They’re known for the best performance per watt, but we will see.
Daniel Newman: Pat, look, the automotive industry’s going to be massive for semiconductor companies. We’re in a bit of a gulley right now for semis. We’ll talk about that when we talk about Micron, which is early earnings in this quarter, we’re going to see some pullback. That’s typical of what we’ve been through in this cycle. By the way, even without the pandemic, semis always have cycles like this, but automotive is a massive opportunity. And look, I want to reiterate what you said, for what? A decade plus and NVIDIA has been working on building ADAS and infotainment systems for automotive. Definitely had some early wins with Tesla. There was a transition there and that shifted the business. But look, 11 billion is their design pipeline, which by the way, that’s a big number. Let’s not mince words here. Qualcomm added 11 billion dollars to its design pipeline in two months. Two months. The number had been growing steadily and had been impressive, but talk about a good day for CEO Cristiano Amon and SVP GM Nakul Duggal.
You wrote a good piece on Forbes. Everybody check it out, about the coming out party. Look, it’s been a bit of a coming out party for a while, but really it’s the list of companies that are employing some of Qualcomm, if not all of Qualcomm’s technology, is unbelievably impressive. You’ve got GM and you’ve got BMW and you’ve got VW and now Mercedes, which again was something that had looked like it had been sort of spoken for over the years. Now the digital chassis, I guess I’ll just make one other point, because we’re just taking two darn long on all these topics. But Pat, I love the building block approach, because the way I see it, and I asked in our Q and A when we had some Face Time with the executive team is, it’s not just about winning at one point, we’ve had a lot of companies with good point solutions.
It’s going to be about winning across the vehicle. To create this really software defined vehicle of the future, it’s going to be about taking all these systems, telematics, infotainment, ADAS, et cetera, building them to all work very ubiquitously together. And as we all know, just ask Apple, when you do a monolithic approach, does tend to create the opportunity to develop a better experience. So Qualcomm is having it both ways. They’re like, well, if you just want to use us for cockpit, fine, we’ll do that. By the way, we’re going to build this new SOC, this super computing SOC that enables you to just add our capabilities as you go. So you could put it in for one thing, right?
The new super compute SOC, which again, I know you had some points about whether that’s an accurate term, super compute versus super computer. But the long game here is put in the core technology and say, okay, now you want to add ADAS, now you want to add telematics, now you want add drive policy. Right? They’re going to basically set themselves up with this monolithic approach that allows you to build out your entire vehicle and make changes faster, which, by the way, if you understand automotive design pipelines, it takes time. This is going to make it more prudent and effective and efficient for people to add more Qualcomm capabilities.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s interesting though, they added the monolithic design, but on the ADAS and FSD they allow the car maker to add their own value and add software. Not everybody does that. There are solutions out there that are 100% a black box that you don’t get to tweak it at all. So somehow they manage to have their cake and eat it too, which is a monolithic design that, like you said, improves the quality of the experience, maybe increases its time to market, but they added the ability for the OEM to pull in their own software.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. You nailed it on the head. All right, so we hit this one good? We did good?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: All right, so let’s talk a little bit about Lenovo. We’ve got a couple of quicker hits here, which is good because we’ve had a couple of really long ones.
Patrick Moorhead: Hey, why do you apologize, man? It’s either good content or it’s not. People can tune in, they can tune out.
Daniel Newman: I look back and I say, why didn’t you call the 620? Because we clearly have no ability to talk about anything in five minutes. This is a quick one. 15 minutes later we’re still rapping about it. Lenovo had a big debut of a huge expansion of its server line, refreshed 50 server storage range, Edge, cloud products all at one time. Now, I think this was about 10 days ago. They announced new Think systems, Think Agile, Think Edge, servers with storage. And they did it, by the way, Pat, interestingly enough, using all three, Intel, AMD and ARM processors. And they even did some integrated offerings with NVIDIA Enterprise software baked in as well. Pat, Lenovo, you and I have worked quite a bit with their leadership team with likes of Kirk Skaugen here in the US who basically leads this business and expand.
The company just keeps doing things that are really interesting, getting it right, winning business, and by the way, doing it in a very humble way, just look at the numbers every quarter and you just keep seeing them grow. They keep gaining market share and they’re doing so, by the way, building all this hardware technology that’s going to be very successfully enterprise, but concurrently doing really good with partnerships and doing really good with building out as a service. So we talk a lot about GreenLake from HPE. We talk a lot about some of the other consumption services. Lenovo’s doing that too. So they’re basically targeting offerings, they’re building new hardware, they’re connecting it to their true scale management and infrastructure as a service offerings. They’re even going down the converged path, building open ecosystem products that work with the likes of Nutanix, VMware and Microsoft.
So I guess overall, Pat, huge ad of line up, very thoughtful, I think, utilization of different core processing capabilities, so they can basically meet all customers where they are. And that’s something I’ve said for a while about Lenovo, I feel like they’ve really taken this somewhat agnostic approach that they’re going to have a flavor for everyone. They’ve done that well. And like I said, they’ve done really well with partnerships, they’re doing well as a service, and this launch really adds to their portfolio. It should be something that enterprise as its current customers and new customers are going to be very positive about.
Patrick Moorhead: When Lenovo bought IBM server business, they lost market share and they lost a ton of money. And you were wondering, Wow, what’s going to happen to this? By the way, at the same time, Motorola was losing a ton of money as well. The company’s credit, they’ve completely turned around both of these businesses. And whether it’s in servers where the company is outpacing the industry at over two X, or in storage where it’s outpacing the industry at three X, and by the way, the company or the division is now profitable under Kirk Skaugen’s leadership. So this was the most infrastructure products I’ve ever seen announced in a long time. What a machine. I think this was three X more products than they had ever announced since they have been the division. So hats off to them. And one of my very valued analyst, Matt Kimble, is about to publish a piece.
It’s going to be published in the next couple hours, where he called X Clarity One, which is their manageability program, A hidden gem. And for him to say that means a lot. Matt’s very mild mannered, doesn’t give compliments away, but he was really impressed at how far X Clarity One had come out and that essentially gives its management as a service, its deployment automation, and it’s much more intelligent support. His big ask is that… The company called it Open, but they didn’t really give details on how necessarily it was open, but I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more as we go through. So hats off to the Lenovo team for absolutely crushing it with the amount of announcements they made and also the progress that they’ve made over the past couple years under Skaugen’s leadership.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. So another really interesting and exciting announcement that hit, wasn’t, like I said, super big or you didn’t see a ton of coverage on it, Pat, but Marvell continues to impress and continues to do breakthrough things. And this with its recent liquid security announcement.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so let me step back. So just real quickly, Marvell brought out an HSM card, and if you don’t know what HSM is, HSM, it’s very hardened, it’s tamper resistant hardware. It essentially serves up keys, decrypts data and verifies digital signatures. And if you’re wondering, well why is that important? Well, pretty much every credit card transaction is taken through a system like this. Marvell through its acquisition of Cavium is the number one leader in security modules like this. And by the way, these modules go, they’re in the tens of thousands of dollars each. And more importantly for this HSM too, the cloud folks are getting in on the action where they have HSM as a service. And so whether it’s AWS Cloud HSM, whether it’s Microsoft with its Azure Keys, whether it’s Alibaba or Oracle, what they call it, OCI vault, these cards essentially make this happen.
And with the what’s called the LS Two Cloud HSM, they increased it by an order of magnitude. So the amount of keys increased by 10. So there’s your order of magnitude, going from a hundred thousand keys to a fricking million keys. They also increased performance by 20%. And the card, with all that capability essentially, pulls in about the same amount of power. And quite frankly, I see no reason why the company can’t continue their number one market share position. This type of capability has gone from a box, a Cavium box to now a PCI card that doesn’t even have a fan on it. So another incredible announcement. Congratulations to Marvell.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat, look, I think it’s pretty straightforward. Companies are under more pressure than ever before to deal with privacy, security and compliance. So these are big risks for companies. Technology is the most capable answer to solving, and utilizing the right technology is the most important thing. So there’s going to be more demand, as I said, in this downturn in the economy, I actually expect cybersecurity to be one of the safe havens for investment. I also think it’s a safe haven for companies, because, again, this is a risk reward and spending money on security is going to be critical. Marvell’s approaching it in a way that’s super intelligent. They’re enabling it to become really more as a service approach with the HSM backed encryption. I need to practice saying that word. And it’s basically, I like the name too, Liquid Security.
I don’t know why it caught my attention, but what they’re basically addressing, and we’ve talked a lot about Marvell, but everything’s about cloud optimized silicon. And this is really about cloud optimized security on a hardware security module. So this is going to be something they’re going to sell into the cloud, it’s something that enterprises will be buying to deploy in their own private clouds. And this is going to be something that I would see Marvell successfully adding to its line up of partners, companies like Cisco and Juniper and others that would look at integration opportunities, as well as all the hyper scale cloud providers.
So again, Marvell’s doing everything right, and we’ve been very bullish on him. This doesn’t change anything, it just adds to the portfolio. So congratulations. I feel like we’ve already said that, but congratulations again. Let’s make a hard flip from integrated hardware security modules being implemented in private and public clouds to ERP for mid-size growing enterprises. So in our whirlwind trip that had me home 12 hours and 13 days, I also made it alongside you to beautiful, sunny, exciting Las Vegas, Nevada to join Oracle NetSuite for their big sweet world, where the event’s theme was all about… What was the theme? Remind me, I want to know. But it was basically about-
Patrick Moorhead: Well, it was modernization, if you think about it. Remember they went from eight bit to 32 bit, right?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, no, I was trying to remember what it said on the ground though. I think the slogan was what I was trying to think of. Full Sweep Ahead instead of full steam ahead, and long and short is, now our event themes are starting to pick up a little bit of that economy sucks vibe and now we’re trying to come up with catchy terms. But with NetSuite it’s all about, well I’ve said for a long time, time to tech our way out of this problem.
Well teching our way out is going to be about implementing data driven systems that speed up our ability to do business, that automate optimizations like when you pay a bill in order to benefit from taking a discount in real time, being able to configure price and quote more quickly for our customers, to be able to offer greater levels of service, optimizing supply chains, improving our labor force and balancing to make sure we’re implementing technology that doesn’t have us, especially if you have hourly workers, if you’re in retail, manufacturing, warehousing, having people working optimized hours to make sure we’re delivering value and profitability to keep companies healthy in this difficult economy.
So there was two keynotes, I’ll talk a little bit about day one maybe because that was the one I attended, or I actually sat on a plane and watched and then I left. Then day two you came. We were like ships in the night. So day one, EVP founder, Evan Goldberg, who we both had some time with, talked about, besides his flashy entrance on his lit up BMX bike, he really did talk about some optimization. One, there was a big focus on automation. So they have what’s called NetSuite AP Automation, and that’s what I was talking about. Easier, faster processes to pay vendors all within NetSuite. Again, things like term driven discounts, automation to say, hey, do we take this discount? How can you automate that process to make sure you pay the minimum amount required based upon cash flow and other rules and restrictions that you can create using automation.
The other was the addition acquisition of a CPQ capability that’s been part of its ecosystem. Configure price quote. Pat, you and I know the drill. Right? Quote fast, quote fast, quote fast. If you can get pricing back to customers, you win business. It’s just the bottom line. So some of the other things that they focused on are shipping tools for supply chain, a people management tool and an analytics warehouse, which is interesting. So you’re seeing the back end of the company to be able to do more third party data integrations using its analytics warehouse, to be able to data management time to value and insight.
And then, like I said, working with third party tools. That was a lot of what was focused on the first day. In my conversation with Evan, I also asked him a lot about the macro with mid-sized businesses. He basically said he feels comfortable that the technology, that the company’s going to do well and that it’s been somewhat recession proof in its earlier existence. He sees it continuing to be that way. The growth has been good, Pat. We talk about every quarter, 25, 30% growth. I also did ask him if he’s going to be out acquiring any companies, more companies, and he said it would have to be very strategic, that it has to be something very deeply integrated into the NetSuite environment.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, this was my first Suite World and I’m relatively new to covering the company. I’m in the second year. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to go to Suite World last year because my wife broke her hip and I was staying home to take care of her. I think you remember that we were going to do a bunch of videos together. But listen, just a fascinating company. This company is on a rocket ship. It’s growing, at least the ERP side of it, 30% year over year. It has 32,000 customers. Think about that. Now, sure the TAM is five to six million. So their market share is low, but they are the number one cloud ERP, which says, essentially they have a ton of growth. I was reminded of their scale when they flashed up in the keynote, that in the past year their customers have done over a billion invoices, 700,000 sales orders.
So the numbers are astounding, the scale that they’re at is incredible. Larry Ellison’s target is to get them to a hundred thousand customers in five years. So that’s tripling of the business in five years. So it’s fun as an analyst to be able to cover that, because you know something is going right there and they are betting big on it. So a few observations, Daniel, that I made. First of all, they talk to the language of their customers. And by the way, you and I are potential customers who they’re looking for. Small companies who want to get big. Right? And they were talking literally like I run my business, which is quote to cash, employees. Right? Actually less supply chain, but supply chain is super important for those customers. Now it is a little bit confusing, and one of the recommendations that I’m making is, hey, you’re Netsuite and you call yourself a suite, but the next thing you do is call yourself the number one cloud ERP.
So are you a suite of ERP, and then you sell some other stuff like CX, CRM and HCM. I think that’s something that they should put their hands around. But it was very clear what I learned is that the land is finance, the expand is ERP, and everything else is gravy at this point. I do think the company, if they want to grow, they need to turn what I consider the gravy, which is the CX, CRM and HCM, into world leading businesses themselves, to be able to compete better with the category killers. One of the things that definitely twisted my brain there was, what is CRM? Right? Because inside of ERP they have the ability to get all this information about customers, about orders, about order matching and configuration. So are they really putting stuff in the ERP that you and I might call CRM?
I’m might write an article about that, Daniel, because I think sometimes, as analysts, we like to put things in these special buckets, but then when we step back and we look at the way we really use stuff and the way we talk about it, it’s definitely more of a soup than an entree of meat on the side. I will hit on one of their biggest announcements. I’ll write this up on Forbes, and that was the AP automation. And whether it’s bill capture, or bill matching and approvals, payment automation, payment reconciliation, and then a connection to an HSBC banking center. Watch this space, Daniel, I think it’s going to be interesting. From my business point of view, I love this. It essentially says, hey, how do we automate getting paid? And by the way, I like AR automation better, because it’s us getting paid quicker, but this is an area that is a human sink. You throw people at all of this stuff, and if the company can view this AP automation as a leadership area and everybody jumps on it, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of upside.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Yep. That’s what I was talking about with the AP automation as well. Streamline it, make it smart, make it so I pay at the right moment and maximize. And of course if I can do so with the minimum amount of human interaction, nothing against humans, just let’s use them for more important things. All right, let’s go on. We got a couple more topics and a couple more minutes to chat. So Intel On, by the way, did I see you there? I did see you there.
Patrick Moorhead: I did see you there, and we were there on the same day and it was so nice.
Daniel Newman: We even took the same selfie with CEO, Pat Gelsinger, Big P, Little P, right?
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. P Square, P two P baby.
Daniel Newman: Your daughter jumped on LinkedIn and picked on me and said it was the second best picture that looked like that.
Patrick Moorhead: I think she teed it up as a question, but I think that was the politically correct way to take a- I mean, who’s she going to support? The guy paying her bills. Some of her bills.
Daniel Newman: The good looking one.
Patrick Moorhead: Hey, so what is Intel On? Years ago there was a staple in the developer community. It was called the Intel Developer Forum or IDF. I think I had personally been to 20 of them before as a vendor and as an analyst. But with Pat Gelsinger coming back on the scene, he thought it was very important to reach out to developers. And these are software developers, these are hardware developers, these are customers. Anybody who builds on the Intel platform. I think what I want to do is hit some of the hard news, but I need some time to look at what they did in software and their for profit cloud services that they brought up. But I will do that later. I’m just not going to do this right now. So first and foremost, Moore’s law, Intel says is alive as well. And Pat Gelsinger, in the keynote, doubled down on five nodes in four, not five, I was mistaken, four years, right?
Thank you Daniel for correcting me on that. And they must feel very, very confident to double down on that. Pat told me some things in our NDA meeting that I can’t share, but he definitely gave me confidence in that. And quite frankly, he’s not in a position right now to say things that don’t come true because of the push out of Sapphire Rapids. And by the way, that was another thing. I got the best explanation of what happened in Sapphire Rapids. And let me just say that it’s a complex design. That design was locked in basically six years ago. So there really isn’t a whole lot that Pat could do and come in and redirect unless you had a massive year push out. So I’m going to give him a mulligan on that one and put it under, not under his watch. I’ve been pretty harsh on the company for that because Pat came in and talked about a culture of accountability and execution, and I did appreciate him telling me the 15 things that he was either ahead of schedule on or meeting schedule.
Big announcement, the Intel ARC a770 consumer gaming GPU. Some people said it was never going to happen. It was going to get canceled. Well guess what? It’s coming out, it’s going to be available on October, and it’s $329, by the way is a head exploder now. It is a hardcore, mid-range, probably aligns more with the NVIDIA 3060, but still, for your first out, top of the Stack graphics card. And I will do a victory lap here. Two and a half years ago in my first article where they announced this, I said it would be a strong midrange and people are like, Pat, you don’t like Intel? I’m like, No, I’m realistic. When have you seen a first out architecture be industry leading? Never. So I also factored in one three month slip, which was there. And I also factored in AMD and NVIDIA’s new architectures.
The final thing, I know I’m sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room, but it was an exciting event. Intel Raptor Lake, it’s so funny, Pat got up and said, Well of course we were going to announce this here. And I was like, I was surprised. I thought it was going to be some sort of a, not a paper launch, but more a press release launch more at the end of October. But they said it’s the best gaming and media desktop processor out there. 24 cores, up to 15% ST, performance improvement, up to 41%, multi thread.
And it’s fun to see how those E-cores are helping it in the multi threaded applications, because when you think of E-core, you think of low performance, but these E-cores, which, by the way, are about 25% of the size of the P-cores, you can put a ton of those on your die and get really good media transcoding performance. Very clever who came up with this, but I’ll leave it at there. It was a good event. Net, net. My confidence on Intel is higher than it was. Much higher than it was when I came in.
Daniel Newman: Like you said, the skeptics are out there. Intel is in a battle with the world right now to make sure that the world believes that it can execute on its vision. Now I tend to believe that the criticism has probably been a little bit overdone at this point, but again, this comes back to the general, more skeptical nature of the market right now. But again, Intel didn’t get any real support, even when the bubble was exploding. I thought, Pat, we had a really great MBA session, so I can’t say much about it, but I feel more informed now after having some time with CEO Pat Gelsinger about some of the things that I was curious about. I feel a little bit more optimistic. In terms of the announcements themselves, you did cover a lot of the ground. First of all, great.
I want to say this on a macro. It’s great that Intel is refocusing on the developer. The fact that it had gone away from its developer forum, I think was a mistake. It was something that enabled companies like NVIDIA that got very focused on developers to actually win. And the AI battle got lost. By getting away from that developer ecosystem in an era where the developer is everything for building AI applications. I like Getty, this computer vision technology is simple coding. They brought a child on stage. Honestly, she’s 18. She’s an adult legally, but child, okay. I have a kid that’s multiple years older, that is at least 50 years educationally behind this girl. She was brilliant, super smart, but they are building tools, technology for the AI developer that has a little bit of a knack to be able to build tools and technologies that work.
Love the Chipotle Dental, the ability to do something just as simple as using a camera to identify how many tomatoes or guacamole needs to be prepared and ready, and how much they’re going through so they can optimize inventory. These are great utilizations of Edge AI applications that can be done right now. And Intel has the technology to do it. And I like that they showed a real pragmatic example. The GPUs, Pat, look, this is a huge opportunity for Intel. Execution, execution, execution. This is going to be, can they execute? You and I always say on the show, three is the best number. Three real competitors in any market. Well, for a long time in the GPU space it’s really been two. So Intel is now entering both at an enterprise or data center and as well in the PC gaming and workstation with a GPU solution.
And they’re going to build it out, if they can gain some market share. This is a growth area. And it would also be, said this in some of the conversations we had, Intel has never shown a lot of chops at market taking. Those have been really well at market taking from Intel, can Intel now come in and be a market taker? Can they go in and get some of this graphics business and actually grab it from the competition? Which maybe has shown some vulnerability, or maybe become a little bit arrogant during a period of time where it’s been somewhat easy.
So those are the big things. The developer cloud is interesting. I need to spend a little more time getting underneath the hood there. Pat’s five and four. Again, all about execution. I’m cheering for them. I’m cheering for Intel to do well. It’s good for the US, it’s good for the world. We need the competition, and we need, by the way, them to succeed in their process so they can succeed in their founder, which are going to be closely tied together, they’re going to be able to do both all the way down to both their own processes, and then of course, building on ARM, Risk Five and other processes down the line. So with that, Pat, let’s move on to Amazon, right? That’s where we’re at now?
Patrick Moorhead: You got it buddy. We’re almost there.
Daniel Newman: We’re almost there. And we’re going to make this. We got two more topics. So Amazon devices, it wasn’t an Alexa. Now I get confused, because Amazon does lots of events, but Amazon had a pretty wildly big launch. I’ve got a list here. I’m not going to read the news. I’m going to focus a little bit on what caught my attention. But basically new Kindles, new sleep technologies, a new TV series of intelligent TVs, super competitive, a new Fire, a new remote, a new Echo, some cool little Echos. They have some automotive technology for intelligence and security. You’ve got SD case for Astro, the robot, that can monitor your pets, Pat. You’re going to love that. Because now you can have your dogs, your robot can follow your dogs around and you can make sure that they’re cozy and comfortable when you’re away from the office. For anyone who doesn’t know, Pat loves his dogs.
I have pictures of Pat making out with his dogs. It’s weird, but whatever makes you happy. And then a whole bunch of other, they have a new Ring security guard, they’ve got, by the way, some new Alexa in techno. We did the car thing with Qualcomm. Well BMW is going to use Alexa in its next generation vehicle. So lots of things going on. Let me talk about a couple that caught my attention and then I’ll leave a couple for you. I thought the Kindle Scribe is super cool. I’m a big reader, but not on digital. I don’t do a lot of books on digital. I still like paper books. But what I will say is that Kindle always was better, in my opinion, for reading, learning than an iPad. First of all, I like the idea of the Kindle Scribe’s super cool for students.
It just immediately caught my attention. The younger generations prefer digital technology, for sure, to paper. Never had it for their whole lives. But the ability to do interaction with your taking notes. I’m a visual learner, so I’ll read, and taking notes as I read, is one of the best ways to make sure that I actually grasp what I’m doing. So the Scribe is a great way to do that. It’s a point solution. Think about adding a textbook on there, being able to go in, in real time, write your notes and engage. Love that. Probably the coolest thing, Pat, that I saw, was the Halo Rise. Now you are a big sleep monitor guy. I’m not. I’m a feel person, so I don’t wear anything to tell me, I know when I feel like crap. I didn’t sleep well. With the Halo.
What I loved about it was, it’s a low power radar.
A lot of these tools by your bedside, they’re using microphones. I don’t want to know what I’m saying when I’m sleeping. And then they use cameras. And so the idea of using this low power radar, and I love the way they’re leveraging AI to basically help people wake up more gracefully. So I do still use an alarm that wakes me up at the same time every day. Having said that, if you can adjust that wake up by five, seven minutes, and wake up at the opportune moment versus being awaken in a deep sleep, that can make a huge difference on how your day starts. So I really like that technology. And by the way, at $140, it’s not very expensive. And then the last thing I’ll just talk to is, I do really think they’re doing great with these QLED TVs.
I’ve been a Samsung user for a long time. Had a chance to talk to the executive team at Amazon ahead of this, talked to David. These new QLEDs with the Fire, these smart TVs, you’re basically taking the Echo show, and what they’re doing on that screen and saying, let’s put it on the TV so if people don’t have the extra show devices, they still have all those tools and capabilities. And let’s be candid what this is all about people, this is about the data. This is about the data of immersing ourselves in our lives with Amazon in our homes.
You can shop in real time, you can pick your favorite music, pick your shows, engage with all the things that a smart TV allows you to, check the weather, see the schedule, the productivity. This is a convenience thing. And this is really about the smarter home of the future, and enabling, not just the wealthy and the lifestyles of the rich and famous, to have nice stuff in their homes. These smart televisions are going to fully integrate our lives, our technologies. With the Amazon, the Alexa, you talk to it, you engage with it, and it’s pretty inexpensive. All things considered, Pat, good launch.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I didn’t have the chance to immerse myself in this yet. I’ll probably do this, this weekend and watch the videos. But what I’m fascinated about is, first of all, the number of products that are coming out is just absolutely inspiring. They went smaller, better, faster with Echo and Ring Spotlight, Fire TV Cube and their Omni QLED series TVs. But I’m most fascinated with Halo Rise, the Sleep Tracker. The Halo Rise and the Kindle scribe. So on the sleep tracker, Amazon really hasn’t hit it out of the park in relation to health wearables. Right? It’s interesting, I don’t make a direct line between Amazon’s potential acquisition in the healthcare space and these devices, but you have to at least look at it from a dotted line, whether that’s wrist wearable, whether that’s Ring, that you wear or something like this sleep tracker. All of it is about health and wellness.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if the back end of the Halo Rise sleep tracker is maybe try a new bed, or maybe you’re too hot, buy a new mattress, or buy a heated blanket, or go to bed early, or take this supplement like melatonin. It’s really the only way that Amazon can keep these types of businesses going. Now that’s very different from the Kindle Scribe, which is not really about advertising. And it’s so funny, I’ve seen people, I forget the name of the competitor off hand, but I’ve been starting to see what essentially looks like an electronic notepad. Ironically enough, I was working on an electronic notepad in 1993 with AT&T Bell Labs, when I was at NCR. And we called it HANK, Handwriting Automated Note Keeper, which I know is a mouthful, but this is definitely an extension of the Kindle reader, and I am absolutely fascinated to see where this goes.
So here’s what happened, we are still using legal pads. And you ask yourself, Well why are we doing that and why aren’t we using a tablet? Well, first of all is battery life. The best that an iPad would do would be 10 hours. And we know that. The other thing is you typically have an iPad in a case and you have to pull it out, so your mind multiplies conveniences and inconveniences, and the inconveniences of having to take out an iPad out of its case because you don’t want to break this thing, versus a Kindle, which people barely ever have in cases is multiplied in your head.
So I’m really interested in using this device, seeing if it’ll change. My writing is terrible, and I’ve been taking type notes for over 20 years. But the question is, will this bring the masses over the hump and replace their legal pads? Because legal pads is still, to this day, maybe the exception is that the engineering book, as we see a lot in our tech journeys, but yeah, I want to use it. I want to use all these devices. Bring it on, and I will be writing my analysis up on Forbes soon.
Daniel Newman: I’ll be interested if it gets used that way. Like I said, I see a lot more book club, students. I don’t know. This is where I do see the large iPads. And by the way, the surfaces with the… I don’t know if people are going to bring this as well in the enterprise, but the Amazon stuff tends to be super consumer, meaning it really does because the price points hit, the Echoes are 30 bucks, 50. You know what I mean? People bring this stuff in for consumers to experience next level technologies. We’ll see how it goes. Pat last one, and it’s a quickie. Micron starts off another earning season with a decent result. But as Charles Barkley would say, the guidance was terrible.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it was pretty bad. I don’t know if you’re going to lead this one, but essentially I was completely expecting this. There were no surprises. And I think Wall Street expected it too, because there was almost no movement in after hours on this. And listen, if you’ve been following semiconductors as long as we have, I’ve been following over 30 years, memory and storage are boom and bust markets. I wouldn’t say we’re going to a bust market, and I’m worried that Micron is overreacting by reducing its CapEx so much, because there will be a boom that will come back, and if we do a quick V-shaped curve out of this, Micron might be cutting off its future supply.
The one thing that makes me feel really good though about Micron is that it’s industry leading in what it does. In memory, it is the leader in DDR five, and all server and all PC designs are going to DDR five. They are, by definition, the number one market share leader in automotive as well. And then on storage, they have the highest density or megabit per bit out there, and highest density storage out there in the market. Those are some things, when in comparison, if you look at maybe a Samsung or a Hynix or somebody like that, while the market might be down Micron’s future, I think, looks bright.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, good hit Pat. Wall Street didn’t expect quite what happened, but I think there’s been so much selling that nobody was super surprised. I think they had a 60 ish cent forecast from Wall Street and they came out with four cents earnings this next quarter. So it was definitely down.
Patrick Moorhead: I wonder why it didn’t move though. Right?
Daniel Newman: Well, it’s already so far down. I think, to some extent it’s-
Patrick Moorhead: That’s what I mean, it was built in.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: People knew it.
Daniel Newman: Bad news for a while now. I think a little bit of good news, we’ll see a lot of upside in the near future. I think semis have booms and busts. I think we are definitely in a bit of a holding pattern right now.
Patrick Moorhead: By the way, Micron’s up 3% this morning.
Daniel Newman: Well, the whole market’s up today. This is why-
Patrick Moorhead: It is. But when I look at the other semis, I mean NVIDIA’s up 3%.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, the whole market, the whole semi market’s up today. This is all related to retracting yields on the bonds and some PCA e-data that came out today. We’re not even trading on individual company performance anymore. The whole markets moving based upon the fed, inflation, bonds, global policy, et cetera. But here’s the thing is tech is going to continue to be critical to our world. Memory, as long as compute scales and grows memory has to scale and grow with it. We know that Micron’s very well positioned. They’ve diversified their business, they’ve gotten into automotive, they’ve gotten into data center. Of course, they’ve got a really strong business in mobile. I just think, like I said, I don’t know if we’ll get a V, Pat, but it may be a U. I like a V personally, but maybe a prolonged U while we sort of wait to figure out what’s going on in the world, in the economy.
But tech is not going to be any less important. All these tasks, AI, automation, all these stuff requires more and more and more and more compute. And with compute, you need memory, you need storage. These are the things that are going to come along with it. So yes, pull back. Yes, not looking great. This next earnings, which should be very interesting. But I’ve said that the last three and they’ve all been a little better than I expected. So crossing my fingers because there is a lot of bad data out there. But you know what, Pat? We’ve been through this before. We’ll get through it again and semis will continue to eat the world.
So with that, we got to wrap up the show. Great chat today. Covered a lot of ground. It was the ten five. Let’s not do that as often as we have to. Next week you and I will be in California, so we’ll have to figure out if we can pod the morning before it starts. Maybe we’ll sit down together and we’ll do it live. But hit that subscribe button. We love everybody out there. Appreciate your support. Check out the show notes, lots of links to our articles, our tweets, our thoughts. Share the pod with your friends, get some more subscriptions in our favor because we love you. And so with that, we got to go. We got to say goodbye. We’ll see you later. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. See you. Out. Bye, bye.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
