I hope you all had a great week!  

Last week, I attended Oracle Live and Microsoft Ignite (with Matt). Melody attended The Most Powerful Women in Banking.  Will attended MVNO World Berlin.

This week, I will be attending NVIDIA GTC (with Paul) and a processor vendor analyst council.  Anshel will be attending AWE USA 2021.  Melody will be attending VentureBeat’s GamesBeat Summit Next.

Our MI&S team published 14 deliverables: 

• 6 (Forbes and eWEEK) columns 
• 1 MI&S blog
• 7 podcasts   
• 0 research papers

The press quoted us with 15 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Blackblaze, Cloud, Google, Inseego, Intel, Metaverse, and Qualcomm. 

Quick Insights:

 A.I./Machine Learning (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• Facebook has been using some form of facial recognition for over a decade. It used tagging to allow people to identify faces in photographs, supposedly to make it easier for users. Recently Facebook has been involved in a controversy about AI technology. There have been lawsuits and regulatory issues to deal with. It will be shedding that headache because it announced it would shut down facial recognition and delete more than a billion photos.

 AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• The PiMax Frontier is the first PC VR headset to use Qualcomm's XR2 standalone purposes to enable the headset to be both an 8K PC headset and a standalone 5K headset. It will retail for $2,400 and be available in about a year.
• Varjo announced the Aero VR headset, which brings the price of its high-end VR solutions down to $2,000. This is the lowest the company has ever offered and will enable more prosumers to access their platform, as well as a broader set of business users, including those wanting to use a laptop.
• Meta has become the new brand name for the parent company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as the company pursues the Metaverse and its hardware plans in VR and AR.
• Meta acquired arguably the best and most popular VR fitness app, Supernatural, through acquiring its parent company, Within. This shows that Meta isn’t just investing in gaming and games but also fitness, which is how many people are likely to enter VR outside of gaming
• AT&T, Ericsson, and Wevr show how 5G and VR can work together to enable seamless LBE experiences that can deliver the next generation of entertainment experiences

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

• T-Mobile reported 3Q earnings, and one standout statistic from my perspective is the growth of its fixed wireless access business. Launched earlier this year, the company says it is on track to secure 500,000 subscribers by the end of 2021 and a projected 7-8 million forecast by the end of 2025. There are impressive numbers, and as I expected, much of the growth is coming from rural areas of the U.S. underserved by fiber and cable.  

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • You don’t always think about Lenovo when you think about storage, but that’s a mistake. In its earnings release this past week, the company disclosed that its storage business grew by more than 50%, while its overall datacenter business grew by 34%.  Lenovo is an interesting company in that it just shows up and delivers. Given earnings like this past quarter’s, they seem to be doing a great job of it.
  • The enterprise infrastructure and hyper-scale market continue to be strong if Western Digital’s performance is any indication. WD released earnings this past week, showing both YoY and sequential QoQ growth in its enterprise and cloud business. It grew that business 12% quarter/quarter, but a whopping 72% year/year. This represents 44% of WD’s business. CEO David Goeckeler called out 44% sequential growth in enterprise SSDs, with hard disk drives growing a record 70% year-over-year. The company is on a great run of solid execution, and all signs are that it will continue.
  • The storage TwitterVerse has latched on to a disclosure in Intel’s most recent 10-Q filing with the SEC that says that its high-performance Optane business has a negative operating income of $473M year-to-date against revenues of $298M.  Intel also hasn’t mentioned Optane in an earnings call in over a year, despite the technology being exempted from Intel’s sale of its storage operation to SK Hynix and Micron’s selling the only 3D XPOINT production fab to Texas Instruments (who have indicated they will use that fab for something other than 3D XPOINT).  There are more questions than answers about the future of Optane. One thing that’s been proven is that there is an appetite for byte-addressable persistent memory for a number of high-performance business-critical workloads. Whether the answer is Optane, or a derivative technology connected across a more open bus such as CXL, remains to be seen. Keep watching this space. 
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • I recently attended the Juniper Networks analyst summit. My biggest takeaway is how well the infrastructure provider is leaning into its AI DNA to up-level its enterprise portfolio. The company recently announced enhancements to simplify network operations with improved device provisioning, security, visibility, and insights at scale based on a modern microservices architecture. 
• Server- (Matt Kimball) 
  • N/A     

FinTech (Melody Brue)

• N/A

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• This week, Amazon joined the Thread Group at the board level, joining Google, Apple, Samsung, and nine other companies as sponsors. Here’s why this is a big deal. These companies are also leading the CSA’s Matter initiative. Together, Thread and Matter lower the highest barrier to IoT expansion for consumer and small business verticals – interoperability. Matter defines the “lingua franca” for IoT device communication over any IP-bearing network. Thread extends IP networks to small, cheap, low-power wireless devices such as lights, door locks, sensors, and actuators. Matter and Thread form a complete solution that enables any device to communicate with any other device or application regardless of how it’s connected – WiFi, Thread, 5G, Ethernet, whatever. This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky 10-year vision – it’s working today. Thread-enabled consumer products are already on the market and adopting Matter as the application layer protocol is easy to do. Thread is already a mature wireless standard, and Matter will be ready to scale next year. After 25 years of Balkanized, proprietary, non-interoperable device networks, Amazon’s endorsement of Thread signals that the IoT industry is now ready to remove undifferentiated friction from the marketplace. Beginning the back half of next year, we can buy compliant devices from multiple vendors with confidence they’ll work with any major application framework.

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• The FAA’s notice regarding CBAND has caused considerable confusion within the industry since it claims that a report generated over a year ago before the auction began suddenly says that there is an unsafe amount of interference with Airline Radar Altimeters. This has caused Verizon and AT&T to delay their rollouts of the new critical 5G spectrum from December 5 to January 5, even though their spectrum is physically the furthest from the Airline Radar systems which operate in the 4.2 to 4.4GHz band.
• T-Mobile has demonstrated what midband paired with mmWave can look like in performance with a nearly 5 Gbps commercial deployment result. We’ve seen the likes of 3Gbps and even 4 Gbps with mmWave, but with mid-band aggregation, we can now see almost 5 Gbps which is truly amazing.
• Qualcomm reported monster earnings which have shown the company’s diversification, and 5G bets have paid off significantly for the company, and its planning earlier this year has allowed it to say that it expects the chip shortage to be in the rearview mirror by the end of the year.

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• Just a general observation about quantum - I think that IonQ going public has been good for the entire ecosystem.  It has caused other startups to step up their activity. We see a lot of activity as companies begin to publicize plans and roadmaps at what seems like an accelerated pace. An upfront injection of a few hundred million dollars and a listed stock represents a lot of research and more researchers. 
• We almost have a full complement of technologies running prototype quantum machines, but we are still missing one of the most beautiful theories, Majorana. Unfortunately, Microsoft's efforts ended in disaster as a result of wayward researchers, but at least Microsoft stuck with it longer than anyone thought they would. It will likely be many more years, if ever before a majorana machine is built. There is also a chance that the best and most workable technology has yet to be discovered. I also think 2022 is the year we'll see some excellent progress made with error correction, which will speed up quantum computing development significantly.   
• IBM is making a major push to make the new and improved quantum volume a useful quantum computing benchmarking tool. IBM Research has done an excellent job with the concept. What is especially impressive is that some of IBM's machines show deficiencies for certain aspects. Quality, speed, and scale are the three major aspects of the measurement. I would like to see more companies giving it a try and publishing their results.

Security (Will Townsend)

• Palo Alto Networks and Siemens recently announced a partnership to protect critical infrastructure. The tie-up aims to combine Palo Alto's VM-Series firewall platform with Siemens’ Ruggedcom networking and security appliances. The integration seems compelling on the surface and opens a new addressable market for Palo Alto.     

Columns Published (Forbes, eWEEK, UPLOAD VR, and others)        

1. Amazon Expands Social Safety Net For Hourly Parents And Military Spouses, by Patrick Moorhead
2. HP Inc. Expands Forest Conservation Partnership With World Wildlife Fund, by Patrick Moorhead
3. BoxWorks 2021: Advancing Security, Mobile, And Integrated Offerings, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Movandi Makes MmWaves At Mobile World Congress Los Angeles 2021, by Patrick Moorhead
5. AMD Doubles Down On HPC With Milan-X And MI200, by Matt Kimball
6. Therabody Introduces RecoveryAir Compression Therapy To Their Growing Tech Wellness, by Zane Pickett

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. Google Unveils The New Tensor SoC, The Heart Of The New Pixel 6 Line Of Phones, by Patrick Moorhead

Research Paper(s):

• N/A

Podcasts:

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

• The G2 on 5G Podcast - Episode 74 - November 5, 2021Movandi makes 5G mmWaves at MWCLA 2021 with a handful of announcements
  • T-Mobile is growing its 5G FWA footprint - how is its business services portfolio coming together?
  • FAA Notice Causes AT&T and Verizon to Delay 5G CBAND Mid Band rollout
  • Verizon points to IoT as a multi-billion dollar opportunity - but is their strategy optimized to monetize?
  • T-Mobile hits almost 5 Gbps in a world-first Standalone NR DC call on a commercial network combining mid-band with mmWave spectrum
  • FCC approves Boeing’s ability to launch a satellite network to deliver broadband communications - is the space race getting too crowded?
  • Qualcomm delivers monster earnings, heavily influenced by 5G growth and diversification, sees chip shortage in the rearview mirror

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

• Delivering Database-as-a-Service with Nutanix Era & HPE GreenLake
  • Joining Steve and Matt are Kate Davis, Global Marketing Manager for HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, and Maggie Smith, senior solution manager for Nutanix database solutions.
  • The Nutanix Cloud Platform complements the public cloud-like billing and standby capacity of HPE GreenLake, with fully integrated compute, storage, and virtualization building blocks that provide turnkey, instant operations.

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

• Ep101: We are LIVE! talking Qualcomm, SkyWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Dell Tech, and VMware
  • Qualcomm Earnings $QCOM
  • SkyWorks Earnings $SWKS
  • Microsoft Ignite 2021
  • Oracle LIVE Analytics and AI Event
  • IBM-Kyndryl Spin Off
  • Dell+VMware Spin Out
• Talking IBM Post-Kyndryl Spin with IBM’s Bob Lord, SVP of Ecosystems - Six Five Insiders
  • Introduction of Show
  • Welcome Guest SVP Bob Lord
  • Conclusion and wrap
• Ep100: We're Talking Earnings From Google, Microsoft, AMD, Amazon, & WebexOne & IntelON Events
  • Alphabet Earnings $GOOG $GOOGL
  • Microsoft Earnings $MSFT
  • AMD Earnings $AMD
  • Amazon Earnings $AMZN
  • IntelON Developer Event
  • Cisco WebexOne

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

• Talking About the Future of the Datacenter with Micron’s Raz Hazra and Jeremy Werner
  • Welcome and introductions
  • Why does Micron talk about the future of the datacenter?
  • What are the challenges to overcome in today's data center?
  • What near-term data center innovations are going to be available to help with taxed infrastructure (Today’s Data Center)?
  • https://investors.micron.com/news-rel...
  • As we look into the future, what are the key enabling technologies for the next-generation datacenter
  • How is Micron driving innovation to solve these problems and working with the ecosystem?
  • Any final thoughts to leave the audience with?
• #FinTech Friday Ep8: Fly Now, Pay Later, CFPB says: Show Me the Money Data, What’s New in the $HOOD
  • Fly Now, Pay Later
  • CFPB Says “Show Me the Money (data)” 
  • What’s New in the $HOOD? 
  • Acronym of the Week: API 
  • What’s Coming Up?  

 Press Citations: 

1. Blackblaze / TechTarget https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/252509041/Backblaze-files-IPO-to-grow-brand-data-center-presence (Steve McDowell)
2. Cloud, earnings / Techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/29/cloud-infrastructure-market-hits-180b-run-rate-in-q3-as-even-chip-shortages-cant-slow-it-down/
3. Google, Snapchat / Phoneworld.com https://www.phoneworld.com.pk/googles-partnership-with-snapchat-will-boost-pixel-6-sales-experts/ (Anshel Sag)
4. Inseego, 5G, T-Mobile / Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2021-11-02/inseego-s-5g-fixed-wireless-router-launches-at-t-mobile-for-business (Will Townsend)
5. Inseego, 5G, T-Mobile / Business Wire  https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211102005541/en/Inseego%E2%80%99s-5G-Fixed-Wireless-Router-Launches-at-T-Mobile-for-Business (Will Townsend)
6. Intel, AMD / Windowscentral https://www.windowscentral.com/do-intels-12th-gen-processors-have-edge-against-amd-and-apple-experts-weigh (Anshel Sag)
7. Metaverse, VR, AR / Androidcentral https://www.androidcentral.com/metaverse-needs-more-vr-ar-succeed?amp (Anshel Sag)
8. Qualcomm, earnings / Siliconangle https://siliconangle.com/2021/11/03/qualcomms-stock-pops-smartphone-chip-sales-multiply-q4/
9. Qualcomm, earnings / Fierceelectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/iot-wireless/qualcomm-marks-huge-quarter-based-revenue-diversification
10. Qualcomm, earnings / Marketwatch https://www.marketwatch.com/story/qualcomm-stock-jumps-more-than-5-after-earnings-forecast-easily-beat-projections-11635970753
11. Qualcomm / Newsdirect https://newsdirect.com/news/qualcomms-quest-to-make-cities-smarter-795558682 (Will Townsend)
12. Qualcomm / Yahoo Finance https://finance.yahoo.com/news/qualcomms-quest-cities-smarter-133608705.html (Will Townsend)
13. Qualcomm, earnings / TimesofSandDiego https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2021/11/03/qualcomm-forecast-beats-estimates-as-diversified-chip-making-strategy-pays-off/
14. Qualcomm, earnings / Marketwatch https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/qualcomm-stock-jumps-more-than-5-after-earnings-forecast-easily-beat-projections-11635970753
15. Qualcomm, earnings / Reuters https://www.reuters.com/technology/qualcomm-forecast-beats-estimates-diversification-efforts-pay-off-2021-11-03/

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

• AMD RX 6600XT
• Apple iPhone 13 mini
• Dell UltraSharp Webcam 4K, XPS 17
• HP Reverb G2 Omnicept
• Intel Alder Lake
• Samsung Galaxy buds 2, Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Z Fold3 5G, and the Galaxy Z Flip3 5G, Galaxy Watch4 Classic 46mm
• Surface Duo 2, Surface Laptop Studio
• TCL 20 Pro 5G
• Xilinx Kria KV260 Vision AI Kit

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

• November
  • NVIDIA GTC, Nov 8-11 (Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • VentureBeat’s GamesBeat Summit Next (virtual) (Melody Brue) November 9-10
  • AWE USA 2021 - Santa Clara - Nov 9-11 (Anshel Sag) 
  • Processor vendor analyst council, November 11 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • SAP TechEd, November 15 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Nokia GAF – November 15-18 (Will Townsend)
  • Lenovo Advisory Council, November 16-18 (Patrick Moorhead) 
  • Qualcomm Investor Day, November 16 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • IBM Quantum Summit, November 16 (Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Red Hat Analyst Conf, November 18 (Matt Kimball)
  • 5G Techritory Latvia – November 22-25 (Will Townsend)
  • AWS re:Invent – November 29-December 5 (Melody Brue, Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
  • Snapdragon Tech Summit, Nov 30-Dec 2, Hawaii (Patrick Moorhead, Anshel Sag)
• December
  • Marvell industry analyst day, December 7 (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Processor vendor analyst council, December 17 (Patrick Moorhead)
• January
  • CES 2022, Jan 5-7, Las Vegas (Anshel Sag, Patrick Moorhead)

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The Team 

Analysts, Analysts In-Residence, Contributors

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

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, AP., AR, travel, writer 
5. Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate 
6. Jacob Freyman, Writer, and Researcher