Moor Insights & Strategy Weekly Update Ending in December 11, 2020

By Patrick Moorhead - December 15, 2020

I hope you all had a great week!

I am pleased to announce that Moor Insights & Strategy has expanded into FinTech (Financial Technology)! At MI&S, FinTech will span the technologies of payments, lending and crowdfunding, blockchain, FinTech AI, InsurTech, and digital wealth management.

Please join me in welcoming Melody Brue, another MI&S analyst with "actual industry experience." Mel brings 25 years of real, tech industry experience in marketing, business development, and communications across various disciplines, both in-house and at agencies, with companies ranging from start-ups to global brands. She has built a unique specialty working in technology and highly regulated spaces, such as mobile payments and finance, gaming, automotive, wine and spirits, and mobile content, ensuring initiatives address the needs of customers, employees, lobbyists, and legislators, as well as shareholders. Please read here for Mel's full bio.

This week, Mark will be virtually attending IDEX. Last week Will and I attended Marvell's 2020 Industry Analyst Day and Intel 2020 Industry Analyst Summit. Will participated at the 5G A.I. Telco Summit NYC. Anshel and Mark attended Intel Analyst Summit. Karl attended the Neurips conference. Paul attended Q2B Practical Quantum Computing by QC Ware. I joined Cisco WebexONE and SAP TechEd.

Our MI&S team published 18 deliverables last week:

12 Forbes columns
3 MI&S blogs
3 podcasts

The press quoted us with 10 citations and 1 CNBC video. Journalists wanted to hear about Apple, Arm, AWS, Dell Technologies, Huawei, Lattice, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Quick Insights:

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

Oculus Quest got many new AAA titles, including Medal of Honor, built for V.R. from the ground up with mixed reviews.

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

I attended an AWS ReInvent analyst session this week. What differentiates AWS from Google and Azure is its depth and breadth in edge for telco. Wavelength is one of many proof points in supercharging 5G use cases for operators and service providers.

Cloud Services (Rhett Dillingham)

Datacenter:

Storage- (Steve McDowell)
- Nutanix has a new CEO (Dheeraj Pandey announced his retirement earlier this year). The company surprised everyone by bringing in a heavy-weight from its arch-rival VMware, Rajiv Ramaswami. Ramaswami has been VMware's COO for products and services since 2016. A fantastic hire — there aren't many executives who have leadership experience in this growing but competitively tight market.
- Microsoft Azure has been one of the more partner-friendly cloud vendors, working hard to allow the OEM community to deliver value to Azure customers. That was again on display this past week as Dell and Microsoft announced a pay-as-you-go Azure Stack HCI solution. It's called the "Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI" and runs on Dell's PowerEdge servers. An excellent addition for Azure Stack customers.
Networking- (Will Townsend)
- I attended the Intel Analyst Summit this week on Wednesday. I'm impressed with Lisa Spelman that leads Xeon and datacenter. She shared her vision of the data center's future and how Intel is enabling infrastructure to accommodate dynamic environments and workloads. The pandemic has shined a bright light on that need.
Server- (Matt Kimball)
- N/A

FinTech (Melody Brue)

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena)

Apple is ending 2020 with a bang, rolling out its long-anticipated over-the-ear headphones dubbed the AirPods Max. And incredibly, has Apple gone for the big leagues with this one. Available for pre-order now and priced at a whopping $549, the AirPods Max carries a premium price with a capital "P." We're talking nearly twice as much as the competition and more than twice the ASP of the typical over-the-ear headphone at retail.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has always planned to come to Xbox consoles and P.C.s, and now Microsoft has finally given a timeframe for its release. It'll launch at some point in summer 2021 and will be available on Game Pass from day one
Microsoft is adding new screen time and game purchasing controls to its Xbox Family Settings app in anticipation of a gaming-filled holiday at home. Microsoft initially launched the app in preview during the summer, and it released the final version in September. But the company is now adding in more features so parents can better manage its children's playtime on the go.
Over the last couple of years, Samsung has shown off (and sold to a very rich few) its futuristic, modular T.V. dubbed The Wall that uses MicroLED technology. MicroLED shares many of OLED's best traits. Without most of the associated drawbacks, it the next significant upgrade leap for the displays in our lives. Now, Samsung is taking MicroLED and putting it into a more traditional T.V. form factor. Today the company announced the 110-inch MicroLED TV, which goes up for presale today in Korea and will launch globally in the first quarter of 2021.
The software that runs on Amazon's Fire T.V. streaming devices was set to undergo a significant overhaul in the coming weeks. The rollout of the "new Fire T.V. experience" begins today on some devices. After the update installation, a person can access new features like multiuser support (with personalized recommendations and watch lists for each profile) and a streamlined interface that makes it faster to reach your favorite entertainment apps.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Karl Freund)

Many insights were shared at AWS and the Intel Analyst Summit this week. AWS sees A.I. as a strategic growth area. It has created services for just about any hardware one could want: Intel, AMD, Arm, NVIDIA, Habana Labs, and its own A.I. technology with Inferentia and Trainium next year. The investments in SageMaker are paying off as well, with over 200 new features every year for the last three years. Distributed training with SageMaker is simplifying data parallelism for training, with excellent linearity. Note that AWS is also a big supporter of NVIDIA GPU's, having launched the largest GPU "UltraCluster" in the cloud, with over 4000 A100 GPUs available for training the largest models. Finally, AWS now has over 100,000 clients using A.I. That is just huge.

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)

Cyberpunk 2077 came out to much excitement but has been panned for having poor performance on consoles and even on high-end gaming P.C.s.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most fun and best-looking games I have played to date but requires the best gaming P.C. to play with everything turned on at 4K, at 5K ultrawide. It is VERY immersive
Cyberpunk's decision to use an Intel compiler is causing lots of AMD users to have poor CPU performance for no other reason than it doesn't fully take advantage of all the AMD cores. Many users see significant minimum frame rate improvements with a minor hex edit change.
Qualcomm and NTT DoCoMo announced the first deployment of commercial 5G Carrier Aggregation in the world
Reliance Jio announced that the company's 5G network would launch in 2H 2021, partially being held back by delayed spectrum auctions in India.
L.G. Electronics, L.G. U Plus, and Qualcomm announced that it is bringing mmWave to South Korea.

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Cambridge Quantum Computing is doing some fascinating natural language work. Classical computers don't have enough processing capability to understand grammar and word patterns, so it just memorizes and report information. Neither can classical computers decipher complex nuances of human language. By combining linguistic meanings with grammar, CQC has proven that a quantum computer can achieve "meaning aware" NLP. It has also proven that NLP is something that quantum computers can do well and eventually do it much better than classical computers. This will be head-spinning stuff. Combined with quantum, A.I. and meaning aware software, your Alexa might subsequently be able to give you advice, understand how you feel about people, read the inflections in your voice, and "get" your jokes. It is too bad a few years away (2023); otherwise, I would place an order today. The foundational paper is available here.
Suppose the news about natural language and Cambridge Quantum Computing didn't give you a hint that it is doing important leading edge research. In that case, this news about its funding might convince you. I believe this is the most significant private quantum funding of the year - CQC completed $45 million financings from investors that include Honeywell Ventures, IBM Ventures, JSR Corporation, Serendipity Capital, Alvarium Investments, and Talipot Holdings. Two of the biggest quantum computing companies believe CQC is important to its businesses.
PennyLane is open-source software for differentiable quantum computing. It was announced at Q2B that it is now available on Amazon Braket. Braket is a fully managed quantum computing service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The software will allow users to accelerate the development of variational quantum algorithms such as VQE, QAOA, and quantum machine learning (QML) applications for hybrid approaches to quantum computing. On Braket, Pennylane integrates classical machine learning (ML) libraries with quantum hardware and simulators so that quantum algorithms can be trained in the same way as neural networks. This should increase Xanadu/Pennylane subscribers and revenue.

Security (Chris Wilder)

Columns Published (Forbes, UPLOAD VR, and others)

Cisco Reports It Positively Impacted Half A Billion People With CSR, by Patrick Moorhead
Cisco Announces Flurry Of New Webex Experiences At WebexOne Conference, by Patrick Moorhead
The Most Impactful Non-Compute Announcements At Amazon AWS Re:Invent 2020, by Patrick Moorhead
Intel Labs Moving Mountains With Neuromorphic Computing And Photonics Technologies, by Patrick Moorhead
Lattice Semiconductor Launches New FPGA For Cyber-Resilient Systems, by Patrick Moorhead
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Lab Efforts Seek To Enable 5G On A Massive Scale, by Patrick Moorhead
The Upcoming Women In Quantum Summit III And Its Secret 70-Year-Old Legacy, by Patrick Moorhead
Surface Duo Review: Misunderstood And Underappreciated, by Anshel Sag
T-Mobile TVision Review: More Competition In Streaming Services Welcomed, by Zane Picket
5 "Smart" Stocking Stuffers Worth Your Attention This Holiday Season, by Mark Vena
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 Builds On Leadership In 5G, A.I. And Gaming Performance, by Anshel Sag
Pure Storage Beats The Odds, Again, by Steve McDowell

Blogs Published (MI&S)

Oculus Quest got a lot of new AAA titles, including Medal of Honor, which was built for V.R. from the ground up with mixed reviews, by Zane Pickett
5G And A.I.: Complementary Technologies Now And Into The Future, by Anshel Sag
Crestron Offers Its View Of The Smart Office In A Post Covid-19 World, by Mark Vena

Podcasts:

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

Episode 32 - December 11, 2020
- Microsoft Azure and D.T. strike 77-year strategic partnership
- Jio launching 5G network in 2H 2021
- AWS ReInvent 5G takeaways
- Qualcomm and NTT DoCoMo commercially launch first commercial Sub-6 Carrier Aggregation with speeds up to 4.2 Gbps
- Marvell announces end to end 5G OpenRAN portfolio
- 5G mmWave developments - AT&T Falling Behind Verizon and L.G. U+, L.G. Electronics and Qualcomm bring mmWave to South Korea.

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

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

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

“Women In Quantum", its upcoming Summit III w/ founder Denise Ruffner & analyst Paul Smith-Goodson
8x8 Chairman & CTO Bryan Martin talks with MI&S's Patrick Moorhead on open communications platforms

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

Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1, MacBook Air M1, iPhone 12 mini
Brother DS-640 scanner
Cable Matters Dual-Input USB-C Dock
FLIR thermal sensing camera
Huawei P40 Pro
IBM Qiskit software
Intel ATX12VO motherboard & PSU
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2
TCL 10 5G U.W.
T-Mobile TVision
Xbox Series X

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

December 2020
- IDEX, virtual, December 15 (Mark Vena)
January 2020
- CES Virtual, Jan 11-14 (Patrick Moorhead, Mark Vena, Anshel Sag)
February 2020
- 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.