I hope you all had a great week!  

This week, I attended VMware Analyst Summit (with Steve), HPE Greenlake Day, and T-Mobile Analyst Day (with Will).  Will attended AT&T Analyst Day.

Next week, Matt will be attending AMD Datacenter Launch Event.  Melody will be attending Powering the Intelligence and eCommerce Revolutions.

Our MI&S team published 15 deliverables last week: 

• 5 Forbes columns 
• 5 MI&S blogs
• 4 podcasts   
• 1 research paper

The press quoted us with 8 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Apple, Chips, Facebook, Framework, NetApp, NVIDIA, and Samsung.

Quick Insights:

President's Corner (Patrick Moorhead)

• Hybrid cloud: I still see people debating it, but this ship has sailed. Dell Tech, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, IBM, Oracle, VMware, AWS, Azure, and GCP have embraced it. The only thing we're debating is multi-cloud across multiple public clouds as there are very real security, networking, and data challenges. I'm not talking just about a K8 orchestrator, but rather a more unified experience.
• Enterprise SaaS: The giant sucking sound from SAP ERP to Oracle Cloud ERP sounds real. Oracle CEO spent 15 minutes reading his list of 100 customers who made the shift. Expect SAP to have their list in the future of customers it's stealing from Oracle.
• Enterprise software: Expect a burst of increased revenue from enterprise software vendors as enterprises move from Covid triage to strategic projects. 
• Semiconductors: G.F.'s direct deal with Bosch on mmWave reinforces that Tier 1s are finally embracing silicon as strategic and not just for supply reasons. Bosch is creating its antenna versus buying it from a vendor. 
• 5G Spectrum: After looking at how much Verizon and AT&T paid for higher-bandwidth 5G spectrum, it just reinforces what a good move T-Mobile made buying Sprint and its mid-band 5G capabilities. Now it's up to T-Mobile to make it matter.
• Exchange hack: The on-prem Microsoft Exchange hack reinforces that the cloud can be more secure in some ways. Plugged-in I.T. staffs have already implemented patches, but I am concerned about the small businesses that are not plugged in and work with a VAR. Small businesses should consider moving to the Exchange cloud now.   
• M1 Macs: I have been thinking about Paul Thurott's statement on the M1 Macs where he characterized as still just Macs. He's right. The new M1-based Macs are still just Macs with many of the same pros and cons versus Windows and Chrome devices. Except they do them a bit faster and quieter than they did before.  
• Innovation: If you told me five years ago Honeywell would be on the same innovation list as Microsoft and Twilio, I would have said you were crazy. Honeywell did and is on FastCompany's top innovator list. Not too big of a surprise as Paul and I started covering the company and seeing what it is doing in Quantum and EPM, but industry leaders.

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• N/A

 Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

• Verizon unveiled the plans for its nearly $46B purchase of C-Band upper mid-band spectrum at an investor day event this week.  It involves spending an astounding $10B more over the next three years to densify the deployment. The operator is already spending $18B this year to deploy 5G in 2021. From my perspective, Verizon will face significant challenges driving enough service ARPU to recoup, let alone profit from these investments.  

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • N/A         
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • The Linux Foundation released its "State of the Edge" report this week, coinciding with its virtual Open Networking and Edge Summit event. The report estimates that edge infrastructure will grow to a value of $800B by 2028.  I believe this projection is low given the acceleration of MEC driven by both networking infrastructure providers and hyperscalers.
• Server- (Matt Kimball) 
  • HPE announced the expansion of its GreenLake cloud services with the availability of several services targeted at enabling the mid-market customer through many partners, including some of its largest distributors, including Ingram, Arrow, and others. Here's what I like about what HPE is doing with GreenLake – 
    • It stays true to its strategy of everything as a service, as Antonio proclaimed at Discover in 2019.  How many times do we hear platitudes and pronouncements that are seemingly forgotten just a few months later? 
    • The company uses GreenLake to drive additional value for its customer base by delivering technology solutions that would otherwise be too expensive and complex to deploy and manage. 
    • The company continues to demonstrate its "channel-friendly" approach to the market by further enabling the potential for value-added service delivery. This is crucial to the success of all – customers can work with familiar partners; partners can deliver those services, and HPE can maintain its strong position with both. 
  • Here's a crazy stat that should scare everybody – since the pandemic, cyber events are up four-fold. The global cost in 2020?  $1 Trillion, according to the world economic forum.  Further, with exploits like the latest to MSFT Exchange, hackers can review patches and reverse engineer – potentially opening new vulnerabilities. I.T. is starting to get that comprehensive security strategy is bigger than just a few software and hardware products that work independently of one another. I.T. Solutions companies – from OEMs to software providers-should include security portfolios and services as a key messaging pillar, including capabilities in every customer discussion.

FinTech (Melody Brue)

• African payments company Flutterwave raised $170 million Series C from investors Avenir Growth Capital, with Greycroft Ventures and others to pursue additional customers and bolster its technology. Investors remain bullish about the fintech opportunities that are in full swing across Africa. 
• Beanworks, the accounts payable (A.P.) automation provider to significant enterprise customers, introduced SmartCapture, using artificial intelligence (A.I.) for data capture functionality, drastically increasing customers' data entry speed and accuracy. The financial world has been progressively adopting smart solutions to manage the industry's evolving digital landscape over the past several years. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning (ML) have almost entirely penetrated every facet of the fintech space, from customer-facing functions to back-end processes. Although they can't solve all the issues of productivity, Fintech tools can automate much of these high business value but low-enjoyment processes that may be causing lags in corporate productivity, giving people back time to do the essential things that could lead to narrowing the gap.   
• The "every startup is a Fintech" trend continues as trading cards become part of the broader democratization ecosystem of investing in all types of asset classes. Announced this week, Alt, a platform for investment in trading cards, is catering to the wealthier nostalgic generations with a Coinbase-like model that allows for trading sports cards just like stocks. Several other startups exist for investing in collectibles, breaking costly assets down into more palatable shares. The fast-growing sports card and memorabilia market is worth upwards of $10 billion.

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena) 

• Apps are everywhere, and pretty much all of them gather data about us whenever we use them. In light of that, Apple in December began requiring app developers to list information about the data its apps gather in an accessible privacy label. The company is taking things one step further, with an easily searchable database of privacy labels for Apple's apps. That means anyone running any of Apple's apps on a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple Watch, or an Apple T.V. can quickly check to see what data is getting gobbled up.
• Good news for cord-cutters: AT&T announced last year that it was working on an ad-supported version of its HBO Max streaming service at some point this spring. While we still don't know the exact details on when or what the monthly price would be, the carrier announced this week that the new option would be available in June for those in the U.S. 
• Time to rejoice: the Apple Watch will make unlocking your iPhone less of a hassle while wearing a mask and brings AirPlay 2 compatibility to Apple's new Fitness Plus workout service. Apple hasn't revealed the official launch date for its next round of software updates, but the public beta of watchOS 7.4 gives us a glimpse of all the new features we can expect to arrive on the Apple Watch in the next few weeks. 
• File this in the crackdown category: Netflix has more than 200 million subscribers worldwide. Now, the company is looking at ways to curb password sharing for both business and security reasons. A new feature prevents people who are not authorized to use the account from accessing it. If Netflix detects that someone is trying to use the account without being an account owner, they'll be asked to verify later or verify being an account owner through an email code or text code.

 IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• Microsoft continues to generate industrial IoT buzz this week as companies assess the significance of Percept and other recent Azure IoT announcements. Percept, a logic layer on top of Azure IoT, simplifies A.I. deployment on edge platforms. That's big news, but it's a component of a more significant trend – the accelerating maturity of Azure IoT as a comprehensive horizontal end-to-end IIoT platform. Here are a few additional examples of recent Azure IoT progress:
  • Device Update for Azure IoT Hub (public preview)
  • IoT Plug and Play Bridge (G.A.) – converts simple sensors into Azure plug-and-play devices
  • NXP Sphere-compliant processor (preview later this year)
  • Digital twins for modeling intelligent environments (steady progress)
• Some analysts criticize Percept, Sphere, and Azure IoT device management as being too prescriptive, adding cost and decreasing flexibility. But Azure IoT aims to deliver the IoT platform trifecta – end-to-end functionality within minutes of unboxing, a good selection of compatible components, and easy customization for industrial applications. If its ecosystem growth accelerates, Azure IoT has the potential to change the calculus for IIoT platform decisions from minimizing device cost to increasing project success rates and maximizing overall ROI

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Paul Smith-Goodson) 

• N/A

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• C-Band is getting a lot of attention this week, with all the three big operators talking about how it will affect their long term 5G network plans
• Verizon's approach to 5G continues to be perplexing. The company claims that it will only have to spend an additional $10 billion over the next three years to roll out the new spectrum, which operates at a much higher frequency than its current network. While carrier aggregation and densification are ways to address this, Verizon seems to have shunned both solutions claiming that its network its already dense enough.
• Apple is investing $1.2 billion over the next three years to build out its European semiconductor design capabilities in Munich, primarily for its 5G efforts.
• The new ASUS ROG Phone 5 sets a new record for Snapdragon 888 performance and RAM capacity at 18 G.B.
• According to The Information, Apple has over 10,000 employees globally dedicated to its AR/VR efforts which may be the most of any company globally and represents roughly 20% of the company
• HTC has announced a new, smaller, and more power-efficient version of its tracker and a new accessory for the Vive Pro to track facial expressions.

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• IonQ will be the first pure-play quantum computing company to go public. The IPO will happen through a SPAC - dMY Technology Group. The Proforma value of the entire deal will be almost $2 billion. IonQ will be getting $600 million and equity of nearly 65% of the shares. It's a good sign for the quantum ecosystem. Now that the door has been opened, I would expect other pure plays such as quantum software groups to go public.
• Xanadu and NIST have developed a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits. It has the typical components including beam splitters, squeezed, light, interferometers, and photon detectors, with a much-improved design. What is most important, a few more improvements. It appears to be able to scale much higher. Could this be a breakthrough for quantum advantage? If so, it is several years ahead of our expectations. 
• For over a year, I've been questioning Microsoft's research into topological computing. Despite more than a decade, there's been no concrete evidence of Majorana particles other than a 2018 Nature paper. Now that paper has been officially retracted by the authors for "insufficient scientific rigor" in the original data analysis. Eventually, someone will take up the torch for proving Majorana particles exist. Theoretically, the physics is beautiful.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Columns Published (Forbes, UPLOAD VR, and others)        

1. HPE GreenLake Cloud Services—Coming To 100,000 Technology Providers Near You, by Patrick Moorhead
2. GlobalFoundries And Bosch Partner On MmWave Radar, Reinforcing Silicon Is Strategic, by Patrick Moorhead
3. The "Edge-To- Cloud" Race Heats Up With IBM Cloud Satellite, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Can Dreamium Labs Become Master Of The Metaverse? by Mark Vena
5. AWS Expands Its Elastic File System Offerings With 'One Zone' For 47% Less, by Steve McDowell

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. IBM Smoothing The Road To Hybrid Cloud With Expanded Red Hat Capabilities On IBM Power Systems, by Patrick Moorhead
2. HP Inc. Acquires HyperX PC Gaming Accessories Maker For $425M, by Patrick Moorhead
3. Cisco Seeks To Enable An Inclusive Covid-19 Recovery, by Will Townsend
4. Pure Storage's Steady Hand: Fiscal Q4 And Product Updates, by Steve McDowell
5. How Qualcomm Plans To Make AR Viewers Smarter And More Useful, by Anshel Sag

Research Paper

•  RESEARCH PAPER: Reinvention: H.P.'s Second Nature, by Mark Vena

Podcasts:

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

• Episode 42 – March 12, 2021
  • T-Mobile and AT&T analyst day recaps
  • Verizon analyst day recap & CBRS 4G
  • MWC21 - will the show go on?
  • Apple Building a $1.2 billion 5G silicon R&D facility in Munich
  • Nokia CBand analyst session recap and Open RAN announcement
  • GoGo delays 5G Network Deployment to 2022 Due to Chip Shortage

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

• Professional Services for Modern Enterprise I.T. – guests Tom Schroeder, V.P. of Professional Services at Pure Storage, and Don McCullough, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Professional Services at Pure Storage.
  • The Pure teams detail its "evaluate, activate, innovate" philosophy to help move digital transformation and I.T. modernization programs forward. This includes everything from strategy workshops, through project planning and scoping, all the way through projects such as legacy data migration.

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

• SmartTechCheck Podcast (3-11-21)
  • Walt Mossberg discusses the Smart Home

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

• All Is Well At Honeywell - Six Five Podcast - Episode 70
  • HPE GreenLake Day
  • Honeywell Innovation Award and Quantum Update
  • Oracle Earnings
  • IBM Satellites Announcement
  • Cloudera Earnings
  • Amazon EFS "One Zone"

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

•  N/A

 Press Citations: 

1. Apple / BusinessInsider https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-tim-cook-vr-headset-car-foldable-iphone-future-decade-2021-3 
2. Chips / Gamersnexus https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3644-hw-news-steam-says-6800-xt-rtx-3070-dont-exist-intel-lawsuit-nintendo-switch 
3. Chips, Semiconductors / NEWS18 https://www.news18.com/news/tech/long-wait-for-your-new-car-laptops-out-of-stock-cant-buy-a-playstation-5-blame-the-chip-shortage-3517562.html 
4. Facebook, Apple / USATODAY https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/03/09/facebook-apple-iphone-data-privacy-ios-14-lawsuit-feud/6888907002/ 
5. Framework / Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/dwightsilverman/2021/03/11/laptop-startup-framework-thinks-it-can-succeed-where-many-others-have-failed/?ss=consumertech&sh=1a951875569c  (Mark Vena) 
6. NetApp / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/10/netapp-astra-brings-data-portability-kubernetes-apps-netapp-astra/ (Steve McDowell) 
7. Nvidia, AMD / TechTarget https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/Nvidia-vs-AMD-Compare-GPU-offerings 
8. Samsung / Austin American-Statesman https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/03/10/samsungs-austin-fab-still-shut-down-weeks-after-texas-freeze/6924766002/ 

Other/Video 

• N/A

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

• Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1, MacBook Air M1, MacBook Mini M1, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro Max 
• Cash App's Crypto Boost
• Dell XPS 13 EVO laptop
• EK-Quantum Power Kit RX 6800/6900 D-RGB P360 - AMD Edition
• HP Spectre EVO 13 laptop
• Huawei P40 Pro 
• IBM Qiskit software
• Intel ATX12VO motherboard & PSU
• Oura Ring
• Razer EVO laptop
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2, S21, and S21 Ultra, Tab S7 + 5G
• Sony blogger camera
• TCL 10 5G U.W.
• Xbox Series X 

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

• March 2021
  • AMD Datacenter Launch Event, March 15 (Matt Kimball)
  • Powering the Intelligence and eCommerce Revolutions, March 16 (Melody Brue)
  • Lendit Fintech Conference, Speaker, March 24 (Melody Brue)
  • American Banker's Leader Forum on Collaboration of Fintechs and Incumbents, Speaker, March 25 (Melody Brue)
  • Oracle Live, March 24 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Cisco LIVE, March 30 (Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell, Will Townsend)
  • TBD Event, March 31 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • CCA Mobile Carriers Show, March 30-31 (Will Townsend)
• April 2021
  • Quantum Tech, April 12-14 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • NVIDIA GTC, April 12-16 (Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit, April 21-22 (Steve McDowell)
  • RedHat Analyst Event, April 27-29 (Steve McDowell)
• May 2021
  • IBM Think, May 11-12 (Steve McDowell, Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Spark + A.I. Summit,  May 24-28 (Steve McDowell)
• June 2021
  • NetApp Analyst Summit, June 8-9 (Steve McDowell)
  • HPE Discover, June 22 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)

• July 2021
• 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)
  • IEEE Quantum Week Oct 18-22 (Paul Smith-Goodson)

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The Team 

Analysts, Analysts In-Residence, Contributors

1. Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage plus deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, IoT, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive 
2. Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology 
3. Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI 
4. Melody Brue, Senior Analyst, Financial Tech
5. Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies 
6. Anshel Sag, Senior Analyst; V.R., P.C. Gaming, Mobile Platforms 
7. Paul Smith-Goodson, Senior Analyst; Machine Learning, A.I. and Quantum Computing 
8. Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Security, Carrier Services, Networking 
9. Chris Wilder, Contributor, Security 
10. Mark Vena, Senior Analyst, Smart Home, and Home Security 

Operations 

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