Moor Insights & Strategy Weekly Update Ending April 16, 2021

By Patrick Moorhead - April 21, 2021

I hope you all had a great week!

Last week, Moor Insights & Strategy analysts attended NVIDIA GTC (myself, Anshel, Steve, and Paul), Quantum Tech (Paul), Huawei Analyst Summit (Anshel and Will), Aruba Atmosphere (Will), and Noopl event (Mark).

This week, Mark and I will be attending Apple "Spring Forward" Launch Event. Steve will be attending RedisConf 2021 and SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit. Mark and I will be attending HP Wolf Security Event. Will will be attending Juniper Networks Global Summit. I will be also be attending HPE’s Compute Day.

Our MI&S team published 29 deliverables last week:

The press quoted us with 17 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about AT&T, Dell – VMware, Groq, HMD Mobile, NVIDIA, Intel, Microsoft, and SambaNova.

Quick Insights:

President's Corner (Patrick Moorhead)

Earth Day: If we were truly "all-in" on environment, wouldn't we create modular computer & phone designs that last a decade? I was on the Device Bay Consortium w/ Compaq, Intel, & Microsoft in the mid-90s. Went nowhere. Seen a few other attempts recently and those went or are going nowhere. Consumers voting thin, cheap & polluting.
Apple iPad Pro: The “pro” moniker finally makes sense to me. CPU, GPU, I/O, display, camera, connectivity could make for some interesting creative workflow experiences.
Smartphones: Software OS and app updates are starting to get boring. This doesn’t bode well the smartphone as a category. I remember when we hit this point on PCs.
Multi-cloud: Seeing some very interesting things from cloud vendors and multi-cloud. If we can get to interoperable or at least universal plugs for network, data and security fabric, MC becomes a lot more real.
Semiconductors: The next big play will be in semi-custom SoCs build from technology like Intel’s Foveros.

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

AT&T announced a commitment to bridging the digital divide in the United States with a $2B commitment this week. In providing my insights in their press release, I spoke to the pandemic's negative impact as individuals scrambled to find Wi-Fi hotspots in retail store parking lots and other public venues to conduct Covid-19 related telemedicine sessions and distance learning. AT&T's plan involves subscriber subsidies, incremental investments in deploying cellular coverage in areas with lower population densities, and no-cost educational content through its WarnerMedia division. I applaud their efforts as a follow-up to what T-Mobile announced just a week ago with its Hometown Experts and fixed wireless access service that T-Mobile claims will serve nearly 10M rural subscribers immediately.

Datacenter:

Storage- (Steve McDowell)
- N/A
Networking- (Will Townsend)
- HPE Aruba held its signature Atmosphere event this week. The infrastructure provider announced its Silver Peak acquisition into the Aruba Edge Services (ESP) platform. From my perspective, Silver Peak EdgeConnect will extend the robustness of the platform with zero-trust dynamic segmentation, unified branch security, and an expanded partner ecosystem. I also believe this positions Aruba's SD-WAN platform as one of only a handful of end-to-end solutions that will scale and provide the security needed post-pandemic to support hybrid work spanning campus to work from home.
Server- (Matt Kimball)
- Another GTC came and went, and NVIDIA dropped another bombshell. This time? Grace. An Arm-based CPU to drive the most performance-hungry workloads with an eye toward A.I. Interestingly, as both AMD and Intel both had significant launches over the last few weeks, this may be the most significant to the datacenter. Just as AWS "mainstreamed" use of ARM-based instances in the cloud, NVIDIA will mainstream the deployment of Arm in the on prem datacenter.
- Additionally, given the tech gold rush known as A.I., this could be the killer app that leads to mainstream adoption of Arm-based servers. That is a move to Arm for cloud-native and other workloads that don't have an underlying architectural dependency. Yes, while the market has been watching Intel and AMD battle for the hearts and minds of enterprise, Arm has emerged as player #3.
- What to make of Dell spinning out VMware? While I'm sure there are many financial reasons (and implications), I believe this is good for VMware in particular. The company needs to drive its cloud strategy with focus, ensuring its partners build solutions around products like VCF and Tanzu. I.T. wants choice. Many I.T. professionals I speak with have expressed concern in the past about this alliance and whether their (insert server vendor here) installs would be fully supported in the future. While we know this is a somewhat irrational concern, that bit of doubt opens the doors for Nutanix, Red Hat, and other competitors. So, in the end, I believe this bodes well for VMware. For Dell Technologies? I can see where the market would think this is a tougher pill to swallow – they lose the contributions of a high margin organization that continues to show strong growth despite its core business (virt) plateauing. However, Again I believe this can be good in the end as the company can have greater flexibility in its partnerships with ISVs in this ever-competitive space.
- AMD got shareholder approval for its Xilinx acquisition, which should be celebrated for its huge deal. While EPYC is a strong play in the enterprise CPU space, the company lacked the adjacent technologies that enable it to compete with Intel in a complete fashion. Specifically in the area of high-performance computing. Under Lisa Su and Victor Peng's (Xilinx CEO) guidance, the company will find itself well-positioned strategically.
- Did you read that the Vietnamese government has launched its B2B e-commerce site to compete with the likes of Alibaba and Amazon? While this may sound crazy, the country targets country acquisition and the E.U., with whom it signed a free trade agreement in 2020. The goal seems to be keeping Vietnamese purchases and spending in Vietnam (makes sense) and offering a lower-cost alternative to the E.U. due to eliminating tariffs.

FinTech (Melody Brue)

Amazon may not be building the next-generation bank, but it has been steadily building a product line that supports its goal of increased participation in the Amazon ecosystem. The company has built, bought, partnered, and launched tools that increase merchant participation and activity, number of customers and increase their cart/checkout size, and reduce friction on both the buy and sell-side – all much faster than going to a store.
Amazon has made several international fintech investments to support its core strategic goals as well. All of this points to the conclusion that the company isn't likely to build a traditional deposit-holding bank. Instead, it is focused on taking the core components of banking and using them to best support its merchants and customers. A CB Insights study summarized it as "In a sense, Amazon is building a bank for itself — and that may be an even more compelling development than the company launching a deposit-holding bank."
But the company remains very focused on building financial services products that support its core strategic goal: increasing participation in the Amazon ecosystem. Just Walk Out, a biometrics payments technology pilot program with Amazon Go stores, allows customers to purchase items from the store without checking out. The company is likely to push the technology out to other Amazon brands such as Whole Foods as soon as Q2. Still, it could also be expanding outside of the Amazon lair to other grocery and retail chains.
The company has also started testing Amazon One, eliminating the need for any physical payment method using palm-scanning technology. Consumers can also use voice commands or tell Alexa to Pay for gas, movie tickets, and utility bills through partnerships with fintechs and other companies. According to C.B. Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus, the global voice shopping market is poised to grow from $2B to $40B by 2022.
The company has had numerous product pivots and failures along the way, but it isn't afraid to iterate as it moves from e-commerce to omnichannel enablement.

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena)

According to news reports, Amazon tried to use its power to coerce Ecobee into using its smart home products to collect user data by threatening Ecobee's ability to sell its products on Amazon. Ecobee's products can still be purchased on Amazon. However, negotiations between Ecobee and Amazon are ongoing. According to news reports, the online retail giant asked Ecobee to share data from its Alexa-enabled smart thermostats, even when the customer wasn't actively using the voice assistant. Ecobee reportedly refused to have its devices constantly report back to Amazon about the state of the user's home, including data on which doors were locked or unlocked and the set temperature. The reasoning is that enabling its devices to report this data to Amazon would violate its customer's trust.
Apple is working on a Tile-like Bluetooth tracking device that's designed to be attached to items like keys and wallets for tracking purposes, letting you find them right in the Find My app. Based on assets found in various versions of iOS and trademarking details dug up by the media. Apple is planning to call its tracking accessory the "AirTag."
The growing rift between Apple and Peleton begins to grow. One of the newer, upgraded, and more expensive Peloton Bike+ selling points was the inclusion of the Apple GymKit. This Apple platform makes it very easy to pair the bike with your Apple Watch to see your heart rate and have your workouts directly imported into Apple Fitness and Apple Health. But Apple's relationship with Peloton has always been a dicey one, and a move this week by the rising star of connected fitness might disappoint users of both platforms. With one of Peloton's latest updates, the company has disabled the direct pairing of the Apple Watch to the Bike+ Bootcamp Classes (in addition to it being already disabled for Strength and Yoga Classes).
Users now have a reliable and quick way to run Windows 10 on an M1-based Mac — provided they're willing to make some tradeoffs. Parallels have released Desktop 16.5 for Mac with full support for M1 Macs, promising "native speeds" for the virtual machine when you're running Windows 10 Arm Insider Preview. Users can run Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, too. In some cases, the M1 could perform better than a theoretically more powerful Intel-native setup. Parallels claim you'll get up to 60 percent better DirectX 11 performance on an M1 Mac than you would an Intel-based MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 555X GPU and 30 percent better virtual machine performance compared to an even higher-speed Intel MacBook Pro. The company even says power consumption on an M1 MacBook Air should improve by 250 percent, although it's comparing that to a 2019 MacBook Air (as its footnotes indicate) and not the last Intel model. But you'll have to make some compromises. An Insider Preview, by its nature, isn't stable. You might run into crashes or glitches. And while Windows 10 for Arm does emulate 64-bit x86 apps, you'll only get that vaunted performance with the smaller number of ARM-native Windows programs. Don't expect a favorite game or a must-run productivity tool to perform as well as it would on a comparable x86 P.C.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

This week, the Zigbee Alliance hosted a webinar on the Connected Home over I.P. (CHIP) initiative. CHIP aims to unify IoT devices from many suppliers around I.P. network protocols. Webinar speakers from Google, Apple, Samsung, Comcast, and Infineon updated us on recent progress. In a Forbes article last year, l predicted that CHIP would mature much more rapidly than most standards and that commercial products would ship in 2022. It looks like I was right. CHIP has grown to 180 organizations with over 1,700 members. Products are in the pipeline for Smart Home and Smart Building verticals, test events started last month, and formal certification launches later this year. The group aims to ship the first wave of products later this year or early next. I can't wait to add CHIP devices from multiple suppliers to my home network with a single app click.
Edge intelligence is a 2021 megatrend. This week's most significant announcement is NVIDIA's "AI-on-5G" for accelerating edge A.I. on 5G networks at the software-defined, hardware-accelerated Telco edge. In essence, it's an NVIDIA certified EGX enterprise platform with the Aerial 5G RAN SDK leveraging the BlueField-2 A100 GPU+DPU card. This solution enables scalable, high-performance, real-time, AI-accelerated applications across many verticals, including hospitals, factories, warehouses, and retail stores. Partners include Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Mavenir, Radisys, and Wind River.

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Paul Smith-Goodson)

This week has been dominated by major announcements from NVIDIA at its GTC 2021 conference, where over 180,000 people are registered. Below are a few of its significant announcements:
- NVIDIA announced its first data center CPU. The module is called Grace and named after Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy rear admiral, and computer programming pioneer. Grace is a highly specialized processor built for training giant A.I. models with 100 trillion variables expected to exist by 2023 when Grace becomes available. Grace will be coupled with new generation GPUs that have yet to be announced. Grace will be 10x faster than today's x86 CPUs.
- NVIDIA also announced BlueField-3 Data Processing Unit for next-generation software-defined networking, storage, and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities. The previous model, BlueField-2, offloaded the equivalent of 30 CPU cores, But BlueField-3 can offload 300 CPU cores and accelerate network traffic at 400 Gbps providing 10x more performance than Bluefield-2.
- In another announcement, NVIDIA will upgrade its DGX Station "A.I. data center in-a-box" for workgroups, and the NVIDIA DGX SuperPod, NVIDIA's AI-data-center-as-a-product for intensive A.I. research and development. The new DGX Station 320G has 320Gbytes of super-fast HBM2e connected to 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs over 8 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth. NVIDIA has kept an eye on controlling power requirements because it can still be plugged into a standard wall outlet. It only consumes 1500 watts of power. Also, DGX SuperPODs get the new 80GB NVIDIA A100, providing the SuperPOD with 90 terabytes of HBM2e memory.

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)

Facebook teased many upcoming updates to the v28 software version of the Oculus Quest 2 with the addition of wireless streaming from Steam on the P.C. along with an increase in refresh rate up to 120 Hz. It also said that the Quest 2 is likely to have a longer product cycle than previous headsets, making sense because the original Quest lasted only a year, and the Quest 2 is vastly more powerful.
Ookla has given T-Mobile the fastest 5G crown for Q1 of 2021, and I believe that T-Mobile will hold that crown for at least the next 4-6 quarters
Qualcomm accomplished a data test call using the Snapdragon X65 with carrier aggregation and dual connectivity to show the benefits of aggregating Sub6 and mmWave.
The U.S. National Parks are moving to deploy 5G in a private network scenario using CBRS to improve coverage and speeds in National Parks, and this could be a great way to enhance tourism and public safety
FitXR has moved to a subscription model with a $10 a month subscription, copying Supernatural's business model. However, the issue is that many, including myself, have already spent $30 on the app and will likely not move forward with this new business model.
Huawei is in the process of being banned from being an infrastructure provider in Romania, and this is the extension of an agreement that the Romanian government signed with the U.S. government in 2019.
Sony launched two new 5G phones, the Xperia 1 III and Xperia 5 III. The exciting part is that these phones will have flagship features and appear to focus on the creator niche with 4K 120Hz OLED displays and Snapdragon 888 processors.
TCL finished launching its 20 Series phones and the TCL 20 Pro 5G, which promises to deliver flagship-grade quality at mid-tier prices. The company also showed off its new concept phone, which combines a foldable hinge and a rollable hinge to create a 3-in-1 concept that can be a phone, an 8" Phablet, and a 10" tablet all in one.
I have helped many friends build P.C.s, and the current state of the GPU market due to the chip shortage is beyond unsustainable. The only way to reliably secure a GPU is by purchasing a pre-built system at this point.

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

The Netherlands is another country funding quantum in a big way. The Netherlands ' National Growth fund has awarded about USD 700 million to Quantum Delta NL. The fund is used to train 2,000 researchers to scale 100 startups and 3 R&D labs by 2027. Quantum Delta NL is a combined private and public foundation that began in 2020 with the mandate to coordinate and execute Netherland's national agenda for quantum.
Democratization of quantum computing allows anyone from a kid in a garage to a researcher in a well-funded corporate lab to make quantum computing studies and even breakthroughs. That was recently proven when Pablo Bonilla Ataides, a second-year University of Sydney undergrad, made a breakthrough in quantum error correction. His discovery reduces the resources needed to detect and correct errors and essentially doubles the resources needed to identify and repair errors when running quantum programs. His code will be used by AWS and most likely others as well.

Security (Will Townsend)

From my perspective, Wi-Fi and 5G have equally closed the gap from a security standpoint, and thus the decision to deploy either will be based on the use case, propagation, and environment (I.T. vs. O.T.).

Podcasts:

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

Episode 47 - April 16, 2021
- AT&T announces its plans to bridge the digital divide in the U.S. - will it make a difference?
- Qualcomm and Ericsson pushing the limits of 5G with Carrier Aggregated calls and UL MIMO
- Vodafone becomes the first operator to launch 5G Standalone in Europe - will it become a competitive advantage?
- Ookla gives T-Mobile the fastest 5G crown
- Verizon launches "hyper-precise" positioning leveraging its IoT platform - is there a gap in their plans?
- U.S. National Parks to launch 5G service - what are the compelling use cases?

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

AMD Launches its EPYC New Server CPU
- What AMD's launch means to the server industry
- Latest infrastructure market numbers

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

GTC shows the Future of AI
- NVIDIA GTC
- Zoho Qntrl
- Dell Spins Off VMware
- Surface Laptop 4
- Microsoft Buying Nuance
- Big Money for Globalfoundries, Groq, Sambanova
VMware Shares the Decoder Ring for Cloud
- IBM FS Update
- Amazon Under Fire - Wages and Taxes
- Intel Ice Lake Launch
- Splunk Appoints Amazon Veteran as President
- VMware Cloud Universal

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

Press Citations:

AT&T, digital divide, pledge (Will Townsend)/ Dallas Innovates: https://dallasinnovates.com/the-digital-divide-is-real-att-commits-2-billion-to-bridge-the-broadband-connectivity-gap/
AT&T, digital divide, pledge (Will Townsend)/ Capacity Media: https://www.capacitymedia.com/articles/3828283/at-and-t-pledges-3-year-2bn-investment-to-bridge-the-digital-divide
AT&T, digital divide, pledge (Will Townsend)/ Cord Cutters News: https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/att-pledges-2-million-to-help-bridge-the-digital-divide/
Dell, VMware spinoff/ Tech Crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/should-dell-have-pursued-a-more-aggressive-debt-reduction-move-with-vmware/
Dell, VMware spinoff/ Austin American-Statesman: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/14/dell-spins-off-california-based-subsidiary-vmware/7227386002/
Dell, VMware spinoff/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/14/dell-announces-long-awaited-spinoff-vmware/
Groq, Series C funding round/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/14/ai-chip-maker-groq-raises-300m-series-c-round/
HMD Mobile, MVNO (Anshel Sag)/ Fierce Wireless: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/hmd-global-teams-ee-for-mvno-play
NVIDIA, GTC 2021, Grace CPU/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/12/nvidia-debuts-grace-first-data-center-cpu-advanced-ai-workloads/
NVIDIA, GTC 2021/ HPC Wire: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/04/12/watch-nvidias-gtc21-keynote-with-jensen-huang-livestreamed-here-at-hpcwire/
NVIDIA, GTC 2021, Grace CPU/ ET Centric: https://www.etcentric.org/nvidia-to-power-giant-ai-computing-with-its-arm-based-cpu/
NVIDIA, GTC 2021, Grace CPU/ VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/2021/04/12/nvidia-unveils-grace-arm-based-cpu-for-giant-scale-ai-and-hpc-apps/
Intel, TSMC, chip shortage/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/15/intel-tsmc-ceos-say-global-chip-shortage-drag-2023/
Microsoft, Nuance acquisition/ Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-nuance-acquisition-discord-strategy-satya-nadella-2021-4
SambaNova Systems, late-stage funding/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/13/ai-platform-startup-sambanova-systems-raises-676m-series-d-round/
Technology, predictions (Anshel Sag)/Tom's Hardware: https://www.tomshardware.com/opinion/15-technology-predictions-how-they-did

Company

AT&T, digital divide pledge (Will Townsend)/ https://about.att.com/story/2021/digital_divide.html

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

AMD Radeon RX 6700XT
Cisco Webex Desk Camera
Intel Core i9-11900K, Core i5-11600K
Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 (AMD), HoloLens 2
OnePlus 9 Pro & OnePlus 9
Poly P15 Personal Video Bar
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G

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

April 2021
- Apple "Spring Forward" Launch Event, April 20 (Mark Vena)
- RedisConf 2021, April 20-21 (Steve McDowell)
- SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit, April 21-22 (Steve McDowell)
- HPE Compute Day, April 21 (Patrick Moorhead)
- HP Wolf Security Event, April 22 (Mark Vena)
- Juniper Networks Global Summit, April 22 (Will Townsend)
- Crestron Virtual Event, April 27 (Mark Vena)
- RedHat Analyst Event, April 27-29 (Steve McDowell)
- Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Event, April 28 (Anshel Sag, Mark Vena)
- HP Security Roundtable, April 28 (Patrick Moorhead)
- MVNOs North America, April 28-29 (Will Townsend)
May 2021
- HPE Storage Day, May 4 (Patrick Moorhead)
- Dell Technologies World, May 5-6 (Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell, Will Townsend)
- MediaTek analyst Day, May 6 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
- IBM Think, May 11-12 (Steve McDowell, Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson, Will Townsend)
- Cloudera Spring Spotlight, May 14 (Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball)
- Nokia Roundtable, May 17 (Will Townsend)
- Google IO, May 18-20 (Anshel Sag)
- Qualcomm 5G Summit, May 19-20 (Anshel Sag, Will Townsend)
- Vivecon, May 20 (Anshel Sag)
- Inside Quantum Technology Conference, Panel Member Quantum Policy – China, May 20 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Spark + A.I. Summit, May 24-28 (Steve McDowell)
- Private Networks Forum, May 25 (Will Townsend)
- Google Data Cloud Summit, May 26 (Matt Kimball)
June 2021
- NetApp Analyst Summit, June 8-9 (Steve McDowell)
- Google A.I. Summit, June 10 (Matt Kimball)
- The Six-Five Summit, June 14-18 (Patrick Moorhead)
- HPE Discover, June 22 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
July 2021
- Google Security Summit, July 14 (Matt Kimball)
August 2021
September 2021
- Storage Develop Conference, Sept 28-29 (Steve McDowell)
October 2021
- VMWorld, October 5-7 (Steve McDowell)
- NAB 2021, October 10-13, Las Vegas, in person (Steve McDowell)
- Nutanix .NEXT, October 12-14 (Steve McDowell)
- Google Next 21, October 12-14 (Matt Kimball)
- IEEE Quantum Week Oct 18-22 (Paul Smith-Goodson)

The Team

Analysts, Analysts In-Residence, Contributors

Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage plus deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, IoT, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive
Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology
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; Machine Learning, A.I. and Quantum Computing
Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Security, Carrier Services, Networking
Chris Wilder, Contributor, 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.