ESG Blogs

Google has a vision of offering the most complete and comprehensive data platform in the industry. It wants to provide a true end-to-end data platform across clouds, and the last two words there are key. Customers want an end-to-end multi-cloud data platform and Google is committed to delivering just that. As such, Google continues to invest in areas that enable it to further this goal, and this morning Google announced its intentions to buy Looker for $2.6 billion in an all-cash transaction. It’s a natural acquisition for Google as the companies have worked together for years and share hundreds of the same customers.

Going into Dell Technologies World, my greatest expectation was hearing a more unified message between VMware and the rest of the Dell Technologies family, especially Dell EMC. That expectation was absolutely met. Pat Gelsinger and Jeff Clarke on stage together announcing the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform was very well received and I would argue is the most united front between these two organizations that we've heard to date.

With Google Next 2019 coming up, there are a few items I’m looking forward to hearing about.

First and foremost, I’m excited to hear from the new GCP CEO Thomas Kurian and what his vision and plans are for the organization over the next 12-18 months. I think many in the industry understand some of the steps Google needs to make to become the cloud powerhouse it desires to be, with arguably the largest being a greater focus on hybrid cloud enablement. I think we caught a glimpse of that with the Alooma acquisition. I’m hoping to hear more about the plans for Alooma, where/how it will be integrated and some roadmap details on deeper integrations across GCP services.

Enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) are often deemed the most valuable asset in the data center, serving as the backbone of the business. The ongoing insight gained from these solutions has justified the significant up-front capital investments and ongoing operational costs, but the rigidity of the traditional EDW is forcing organizations to reevaluate their approach to analytics and business intelligence.

2018 was a breakout year for AI and machine learning. Practically every vendor has or is working on an AI story, and businesses are looking for the easiest ways to embrace and benefit from the technology as soon as possible to maintain their competitive edge. There have been some amazing and eye-opening stories throughout the year that hint at the future: Google Duplex and an AI assistant making appointments at local businesses over the phone, NVIDIA AI creating faces of fake humans, AI beating doctors in diagnosing cancer, and facial recognition at concerts to catch stalkers. The good news is that we are nowhere near Skynet, and we won’t be there for quite some time, if ever. But the line between hype and reality is starting to blur and 2019 will be a year of applicability, shifting from hype to real-world usage.

The hyperconverged market continued its meteoric rise and exploded in 2018. Virtually every vendor saw growth in their product offerings. The technology is being embraced across all verticals and use cases, and for customers, its yielding real business benefits. With the expectation that market adoption will continue to rise in 2019, here are a few things I’m expecting to impact the HCI market.

This is exciting stuff, so let’s jump right in.

First on the financials, which are sure to dominate the headlines. It’s a stock merger with Cloudera stockholders getting 60% stake in the new entity and Hortonworks stockholders obviously getting the other 40%. The combined organization is initially being valued at $5.2 billion, with Hortonworks having found positive cash flow by offering robust support services across the data analytics pipeline and Cloudera too relying on incorporating support within its subscription-based pricing model.

With VMworld approaching next week, I thought I would share what I’m expecting to hear and what I’m looking forward to on the HCI front in Vegas.

I’m excited about the shift and spotlight HCI has garnered over the last year. It’s gained traction, it’s gotten more competitive, and it’s being recognized as much more than an x86 server with compute and storage. It’s about incorporating networking, ensuring workload mobility, properly managing distributed clusters, data lifecycle management, and embracing hybrid cloud. And while all of these aspects will be key areas of focus at the show as whole, let’s focus on HCI.

With the growth of data and the focus on becoming more data-driven, many organizations have turned to Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark as their big data and analytics framework to store and process their data. While the solutions are quite powerful, to effectively manage a constantly evolving infrastructure that must continue to meet the demands of a modern business, it can quickly become a logistical and administrative nightmare. With the understanding that organizations have plans to adopt cloud technology and one of the top use cases for existing IaaS and PaaS users is for data analytics, the idea of leveraging an Hadoop- and Spark-based managed service in the cloud is quite appealing.

Going into Google NEXT, I expected announcements across the entire cloud business. Between their recent (positive) financials, customer traction and (more importantly) growth, and a rapidly expanding list of offerings and managed services, I expected announcements to focus on what I view as their areas of differentiation: foundational built-in security by design, commitment to open-source technologies in their own and across clouds, core AI and ML solutions and services that are embedded/ integrated across GCP services, and easy-to-use cloud-native collaboration products in GSuite. While I’ll let my colleagues share their thoughts on security, mobility/devices, and dev/ops, I’ll be focusing my recap on analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.