Moor Insights & Strategy Weekly Update ending December 18, 2020

By Patrick Moorhead - December 19, 2020

A.R. Pros,

I hope you all had a great week! As we head into the U.S. holiday season, the Moor Insights & Strategy team wants to wish you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a blessed, Happy New Year.

Last week, Melody attended Insurance Tech Virtual Conference (ITVC) and The Digital Finance (r)Evolution. Will and Pat attended AWS re:invent. We look forward to virtually attending CES in January 2021.

Our MI&S team published 23 deliverables last week:

The press quoted us with 8 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Covid-19, Gaming, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, Storage, and TSMC.

Quick Insights:

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

I firmly believe cellular networking will shine as it leverages IoT sensors to track shipments of the Covid-19 vaccine through UPS, FedEx, and other logistics companies within the U.S. I expect all of the tier one operators to have announcements in the coming weeks relative to its involvement.

Cloud Services (Rhett Dillingham)

Datacenter:

Storage- (Steve McDowell)
- Intel announced a handful of new Optane-based SSDs at its Intel Storage Moment event, including what looks to be the fastest enterprise SSD yet on the market. Based on second-generation 3D XPOINT technology, the new Intel P5800X SSD delivers up to 1.5M IOPS (random read/write) with reading speeds above 7GB/s across a PCIe 4 bus. Beyond the P5800X, Intel also announced a new client-targeted SSD and new PMEM based on the latest Optane technology. These aren't general-purpose parts, but the glimpse it inspires into the future of storage is inspiring.
- The future of tape is looking good, as IBM and FujiFilm demonstrated a 580TB capacity tape, 32 times greater than current LTO-9 technology. The new technology uses a strontium ferrite media with narrower tracks than current offerings. As impressive as it is, the technology won't show up in products for several years, but it's an impressive generational leap.
Networking- (Will Townsend)
- The DENT project realized its first code release this week. DENT is a Linux Foundation initiative to enable the creation of a Network Operating System (NOS) for Disaggregated Network Switches in campus and remote enterprise locations. It's ideal for retail, and I expect it will help accelerate the adoption of open source networking solutions in general.
Server- (Matt Kimball)
- N/A

FinTech (Melody Brue)

The FinTech space is still very active in funding and M&A for this time of year. Big banks are buying API startups, and Silicon Valley is funding FinTechs at various stages of growth. A challenger bank in Canada, Neo Financial, announced Wednesday its $50M Series A round from Peter Thiel and other Valley mega investors. Austin-based Self announced $40M Series A from Palo Alto VC fund, Meritech. IBM acquired Expertus, enterprise payments solutions. All of this happened just this week and is further evidence of the collaboration happening in the space, which I wrote about Wednesday in Forbes.
InsurTech and Instruction FinTech is positioning to break into the FinTech space, but it has a long way to come. It is still clipboard companies relying on paper transactions, but tech companies like Lemonade are giving them some "street cred" in the space. This is an area that I will be watching (and hoping) for innovation in 2021.

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena)

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Karl Freund)

The year is finally coming to an end, and 2021 just HAS to be a better swing around the sun. The Cambrian-AI Explosion produces interesting chips, massive models, and significant use cases, including aiding the search for Corona Virus Vaccines. In the last few weeks, we heard from AWS, INTEL, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Imagination, Mythic, Tenstorrent, SimpleMachines, and probably a few more that I missed. I've covered all the companies above on Forbes, as well as three new in-depth research papers: Qualcomm AI00, Synopsys, and Tenstorrent. 2021 promises even more innovations for A.I., so stay tuned!

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Anyon Systems is a Canadian quantum computing company with H.Q. in Montreal. It recently announced it is providing a gate-based quantum computer (Canada's first) to the Department of National Defense's Defense Research and Development Canada ("DRDC"). It is a superconducting computer that Anyon has named "Yukon" after Canada's westernmost territory. Canadian DRDC researchers have said it wants to explore quantum computing to solve problems of interest to its mission.
I'm not the only one who believes that finance will likely be the first domain to reach quantum advantage on some applications. However, it still in the distant future. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and even BBVA are all aggressively researching quantum applications useful in its business. IBM and Goldman Sachs recently published a paper on arXiv entitled "A Threshold for Quantum Advantage in Derivative Pricing." It provides the first estimate of resources needed to achieve quantum advantage for derivative pricing. The paper estimates it will take 7.5k logical qubits and 46 million gates to get 1-second pricing. It is understandable why we believe it will take another 10-15 years to reach quantum advantage.
When I spoke to Professor John Martinis of Google quantum supremacy fame a few weeks ago, he mentioned he had figured out solutions to several major superconducting problems. This week he published a paper modeling cosmic ray radiation and the damage it does to qubit states. He also describes a method to channel the radiation away. This will reduce error correction resource requirements and increase qubit fidelity. He still has three more long-standing qubit problems and solutions yet to be published.

Security (Chris Wilder)

Podcasts:

The G2 on 5G by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Anshel Sag and Will Townsend

DataCentric Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

SmartTechCheck Podcast (11-18-20)
- John Clancy, Crestron's V.P. of the company's Residential Business, chats about his take on how the pandemic has influenced the company's smart home strategy, including what we might expect in the future
SmartTechCheck Podcast (11-17-20)
- Dwight Silverman, the Houston Chronicle's longtime tech columnist, chats about the new Apple iPhone Pro 12 Max and the new Apple Macs featuring Apple's first-generation "Apple Silicon" technology

The Six-Five Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy and Futurum Research, with Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman

The Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast, with Moor Insights & Strategy analysts

Honeywell's David Trice talks with Patrick Moorhead about Forge and EPM
- David Trice, Honeywell Forge Chief Product Officer & G.M. Connected Buildings talks:
  - Vision and running a building from a coffee shop
  - Forge and EPM
  - Tesla and Forge
  - Sine acquisition
  - CX and enterprise CRM meets EPM

Press Citations:

Covid-19, virtual roadshows (Mark Vena)/ CFO Dive: https://www.cfodive.com/news/virtual-roadshows-negotiations-coronavirus/592058/
Gaming, Microsoft, Intel, Sony (Mark Vena)/ Tech news World: https://www.technewsworld.com/story/86951.html
Intel, competition/ Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-not-inside-how-mobile-chips-overtook-the-semiconductor-giant-11607749203
Microsoft, Intel, Azure/ Barrons: https://www.barrons.com/articles/intel-stock-sinks-on-report-microsoft-may-build-own-chips-for-azure-servers-51608331195
NVIDIA, AWS storefront/ HPCWire: https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/12/18/nvidia-opens-aws-storefront-with-ngc-software-application-catalog/
Oracle, Austin, HQ/ Austin American-Statesman: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2020/12/11/software-giant-oracle-moving-corporate-hq-austin/6513844002/
Storage, intelligence (Steve McDowell)/I.T. Pro Today: https://www.itprotoday.com/backup/2020-saw-intelligent-data-storage-come-its-own
TSMC, sales allowances/ Hexus: https://hexus.net/business/news/components/147149-tsmc-said-cutting-sales-allowances-major-clients/

New Gear or Software We are Using and Testing that is Public Knowledge

Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1, MacBook Air M1, iPhone 12 mini
Huawei P40 Pro
IBM Qiskit software
Intel ATX12VO motherboard & PSU
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2
TCL 10 5G U.W.
Xbox Series X

Events MI&S Plans on Attending In-Person or Virtually (New)

January 2021
- CES Virtual, Jan 11-14 (Patrick Moorhead, Mark Vena, Anshel Sag)
February 2021
- 24th Annual Conference on Quantum Information Processing, Feb 1-3 (Paul Smith-Goodson)

The Team

Analysts and Analysts In-Residence

Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage and deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, IoT, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive
Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology
Rhett Dillingham, Senior Analyst, Cloud Services
Karl Freund, Senior Analyst, HPC, and Deep Learning
Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI
Melody Brue, Senior Analyst, Financial Tech
Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies
Anshel Sag, Senior Analyst; V.R., P.C. Gaming, Mobile Platforms
Paul Smith-Goodson, Senior Analyst; Quantum Computing
Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Carrier Equipment and Services, DC Networking
Chris Wilder, Senior Analyst, Security
Mark Vena, Senior Analyst, Smart Home, and Home Security

Operations

Dan Pickens, Business Director
Paula Moorhead, Marketing Director, Website, and Social Media
Walker Pickens, Media Relations, and Writer
Zane Pickett, Office Manager, A.P., AR, travel, writer
Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate

Patrick Moorhead

+ posts

Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.