Next in Tech: Recent Episodes
451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence
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The world of IT is filled with technical qualifications in all manner of disciplines. They've become an expected baseline for knowledge in broad fields like networking and security, as well as narrower, vendor-specific knowledge and skills. But what happens as IT leaders move up to more senior roles? Steve Clarke, cofounder and director of Freeman Clarke joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the challenges that senior IT professionals have in establishing their bona fides as technical business people. The role of a CIO, CTO, CISO or CDO requires technical depth, but the more important part is the ability to integrate that knowledge with business operations. It's not an easy transition to undertake and even more complicated to identify.
Discussions that are taking place in the 451 Research 451 Alliance community brought up the idea of a business level certification process and how it would have to characterize that unique knowledge set. The Standard is an approach that Steve and his colleagues began to address this issue. The 451 Alliance membership is free and open to all qualified IT professionals and business leaders who want to contribute to industry-leading research. Members take anonymous online surveys in exchange for access to research results that power their IT strategy. More S&P Global Content:
- Join the 451 Alliance
- The Standard Certification
- The Problem with the Status Quo
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- US tech spending intent dips in Q2, but projects to grow in Q3 – Tech Demand Indicator Highlights from Q2 2026
- Beyond connectivity: A CIO's road map from network APIs to business impact
- Enterprises cautiously optimistic for AI amid data management challenges
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guest: Steve Clarke, cofounder and director of Freeman Clarke and Tech Leaders Connect
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun and Sophie Carr
As enterprises integrate greater levels of AI into their operational workflows, many are concerned about the effectiveness and accuracy of the decisions with which it's being entrusted. Mike Fratto joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about his recent research into the ways in which observability can provide greater context to AI systems and administrative teams. Data is the raw material from which AI value is created and a lack of solid operational data will mean that management systems won't have a complete perspective. Observability platforms have been expanding to collect and correlate a broader range of data and they can be particularly useful, if they're integrated well.
Observability data can also assist in building confidence in automation and support automation efforts by creating scripts and validating control decisions. It can be a huge help to staff to digest and make sense of existing run books and processes and guide decisions in the event of failures. When novel incidents occur, being able to rule out certain areas can be just as powerful as finding the root cause. No, the network isn't always the cause of the outage…
More S&P Global Content: Next in Tech | Ep. 271: AI Networking Next in Tech | Ep. 247: Security and Observability
For S&P Global subscribers: Updating processes and building trust are key to full operational autonomy – Highlights from VotE: DevOps Observability Market Monitor & Forecast Agent orchestration and observability go hand in hand: The case for governance in motion
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guest: Mike Fratto
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun and Sophie Carr
There is a dramatic push of technology into space. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are changing the broadband communications market and there's speculation about putting data centers in orbit. Analysts Ellie Brown and Johan Vermij join host Eric Hanselman to look at the practical aspects of this push into a new frontier as a preview to their upcoming webinar. The cost of access to space has been dropping significantly, but there are many considerations that impact the viability of some of these plans. LEO satellite lifetimes are shorter than geosynchronous ones and the sustainability impacts of the launch volumes necessary to maintain multiple, massive constellations are daunting. Space is an attractive vantage point for observation with imaging to support geopolitical needs and ecological ends, like methane emissions tracking. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is piercing cloud and vegetation layers to reveal landscape details.
Space-based data centers are seeing a lot of interest, but popular misconceptions about cooling capabilities may be adding more encouragement than is warranted. While space is "cold", radiating heat is more complicated in its vacuum. The International Space Station, with a massive radiation system, rejects only 70 KW of heat, less than a few racks of equipment and much less than a typical GPU cluster. And the need to service equipment on orbit hasn't been meaningfully addressed. Smaller satellites with distributed processing could pre-process data before it's sent to earth, but that will require greater levels of coordination to manage the massive scale on which this would have to operate.
More S&P Global Content:
- Join the webinar: Orbit as the Next Data Frontier: Capital Flows, Risk, and Realities
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- NVIDIA gives 'space cred' to orbital data center race with Vera Rubin Space module announcement
- STMicroelectronics eyes $3 billion in annual space revenue as demand for LEO satellites surges
- As the space sector enters the infrastructure era, M&A could become a force to be reckoned with
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guests: Ellie Brown and Johan Vermij
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun and Sophie Carr
The popular image of quantum computers is the sparkling "chandelier" of the superconducting approach, but this next episode in our Quantum CEO series looks neutral atom quantum computers. Quantum analyst Ellie Brown returns to the podcast to join Andy Ory, the CEO of QuEra, to discuss their approach, the benefits of practical fault tolerant qubits and the advantages of quantum hubs that may have a dearth of beer with host Eric Hanselman. Neutral atom systems don't require the ultra-low operating temperatures used for superconduction. They stabilize the atoms they're using with lasers that still their motion. That free space setting allows simpler interaction between larger numbers of qubits that improves scaling of quantum computations. Stability reduces error rates and can improve the effectiveness of quantum error correction.
Quantum computing has become a very buzzy topic, with IPO's and major funding announcements. There is growth of the supporting ecosystems around quantum application development, with software tools and cloud-based services offerings that are expanding access. The greatest challenge is the supply of a quantum workforce that can put quantum capabilities to work. Systems doing optimization approaches, like quantum annealing, are here today. The date for the availability of general purpose, practical quantum computers keeps getting closer. Some have said 2030 might be a target date and QuEra is talking about delivering their next-generation system in 2028. It's time to be getting quantum-literate today!
More S&P Global Content:
- Long-term advantage is triggering a quantum wave, but cost and immaturity remain barriers
- Cybersecurity, talent needs and ongoing adoption were key themes at Quantum.Tech USA 2025
- Access to quantum hardware remains cloudy, but more options are starting to appear
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Quantum road maps signal steady gains and a shift from promise to performance
- Long-term advantage is triggering a quantum wave, but cost and immaturity remain barriers – Highlights from VotE: Digital Pulse
- Quantum Computing Market Monitor & Forecast
- AI, quantum and high-performance computing join forces at SC25
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guests: Andy Ory and Ellie Brown
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun and Sophie Carr
This episode of our AI CEO series looks at the potential for AI capabilities to address one of AI's largest challenges – energy availability. Dr. Varun Sivaram, founder and CEO of Emerald AI, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore how greater flexibility is AI workloads can unlock unused capacity. Traditionally, data center construction has focused on delivering peak capacity, even at those times when it may not be needed. That doesn't mesh well with a power grid that is already under stress. AI intelligence can shift workloads dynamically to reduce data center demands when the power grid needs it and to leverage excess grid capacity when it's available.
Flexing AI workloads to respond to grid conditions isn't simple, but it can be more attractive than alternatives. Adding generation capacity is a long-term and expensive process and community concerns about rate increases are creating headwinds for new data center builds. Adding Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are costly and have their own capacity and durability limitations. Flexing workload demand could address grid integration problems on a much shorter timeline.
More S&P Gobal content:
- 2026 Trends in Data Center Services & Infrastructure
- Geopolitics of data centers: An AI showdown that will reshape the world
- AI's global resource race: Challenges and opportunities
- Hyperscaler earnings quarterly: What price inference?
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Data Center Services & Infrastructure Market Monitor & Forecast: US ISO Region
- BYOP emerges as a strategic decision for data center operators in response to grid challenges
- US Independent System Operators 101
- Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
- Survey Data Hub – VoCUL: Connected Customer, AI & Data Centers 2026
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guest: Varun Sivaram
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun and Sophie Carr
Market dynamics in data center buildouts and dealmaking are complex, but there are some common threads that are spanning the globe. Analysts Soon Chen Kang and Stefanie Williams join host Eric Hanselman to explore their research in the Asia Pacific market. AI demand is a driving force and concerns about power availability can be a headwind, but there are regional nuances that make the markets that comprise the APAC region unique. One treats the market as a cohesive whole at one's peril! Geopolitical concerns have a significant impact on both demand forces and capacity uptake. Access to GPU's to feed AI applications takes on new dimensions in a market where technology embargoes are moving workloads. Neoclouds are a new market provider and driving new builds, as well.
The boom days of speculative building have tapered off, in many cases, due to the availability of power, but that doesn't mean activity is slowing. Activity is shifting to find available capacity, but a common challenge in some of these early markets is the lack of transparency on both power deals and the build and financing processes. Check out the research to get more details.
More S&P Global Content:
Compute sovereignty: The strategic importance of digital infrastructure AI in action: unleashing agentic potential Hyperscaler earnings quarterly: What price inference? Will datacenter growth in India propel it to global hub status?
For S&P Global subscribers:
Beyond disaster recovery: Greater Osaka's rise as a stand-alone data center hub APAC data center growth on course in 2026, driven by hyperscaler, regional neocloud demand Rising community opposition impacts site selection, cancellations and delays increase Singapore kicks off tender process, promising at least 200 MW for data centers 2026 Trends in Data Center Services & Infrastructure
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Soon Chen Kang, Stefanie Williams
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun, Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith,
We're in the early days of cost impacts for AI applications. While there are some cautionary tales, current spending seems to be a small fraction what's to come. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Melanie Posey return to the podcast to talk about what they heard at the FinOps X conference with host Eric Hanselman. The need for cost management in AI is seen as so great that the FinOps Foundation, a project of the Linux Foundation, is talking about morphing its conference into Tokenomicon and pivot into token economics. The portmanteau of tokenomics is sweeping across cloud and AI services providers, as well as IT vendors, as enterprises wrestle with dueling forces of AI acceleration and management constraints for access and cost.
Unlike FinOps for cloud operations, the costs and metrics for AI are fairly opaque. Some enterprises are trying to manage costs by limiting access, but that risks stifling the innovation and democratization that is supposed to come with AI transformation. Request routing is promising, but it requires understanding the nature of the request and the suitability of available infrastructure to fulfill it, something that is not well understood by many. Most are just getting comfortable with managing model lifecycles and the step up to cost management can be a large one.
More S&P Global Content:
- Compute sovereignty: The strategic importance of digital infrastructure
- Next in Tech | Ep. 222: FinOps – Managing Cloud and AI Costs
- AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
- Hyperscaler earnings quarterly: What price inference?
For S&P Global subscribers:
- FinOps in the age of agentic AI
- FinOps Foundation expands FinOps discipline beyond cloud to technology value management
- Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
- FinOps Market Monitor & Forecast
Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
Guests: Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey
Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible
Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun, Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith,
There's great momentum in moving to greater levels of agentic automation, but there are critical areas where deeper consideration is required in how it's applied. In capital markets, trust is a foundational element on which transactions are built and Krisha Vinjamuri, Head of Technology, Enterprise Solutions at S&P Global Market Intelligence, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about how this can be achieved and the important aspects of successful implementations.
One of the useful things in capital markets, is that there are open standards on which to base data ontologies. It's not exciting, but it's the basis of a semantic foundation that can not only ensure that there is depth in data definitions, but can also reduce errors generated by agents. The larger question that looms beyond the construction of foundational architecture, is how the operational envelope that bounds agentic action will be established. This has to be built from policy definitions that take those actions into account. There is great promise and much work that needs to be done.
More S&P Global Content:
- AI-enable Corporate Actions
- AI-driven Portfolio Monitoring with iLEVEL
- AI-automated SSI
- Equity Bookbuilding AI Assist
- Market Intelligence AI Hub
For S&P Global subscribers:
- FinOps in the age of agentic AI
- AI Infrastructure Market Monitor & Forecast
- Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
- In 2026, the telecom network becomes code
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Krishna Vinjamuri
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
Networking can be an invisible part of IT infrastructure, but AI is creating demands that make it a critical part of keeping AI application fed with data. Mike Fratto returns to the podcast to discuss both the long haul and local requirements for AI networking with host Eric Hanselman. It's always been important to link chunks of infrastructure efficiently, but AI's voracious need for data has dramatically increased the scope and scale of the need. The risk that any gap in performance or capacity presents is that precious GPU resources will be idled, an increasingly expensive proposition.
The realities of AI application architectures is that infrastructure is ever more hybrid, requiring access to repositories of data both on-premises and in various clouds and models scattered across various providers. The need for dynamic connectivity is driven by the rapid evolution of preferences for new models and the diversifying needs of agents to reach new data sources. It's not only forcing network expansion, but it's also driving M&A activity as network providers look to enhance automation in response to customer demands.
More S&P Global Content:
- Compute sovereignty: The strategic importance of digital infrastructure
- AI won't solve its own energy problem – and that might be fine
- AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
- AI infrastructure results in 2025 top expectations, forecast upgraded
For S&P Global subscribers:
- MWC 2026: Agentic AI as the next operating model for networks and network operations
- AI Infrastructure Market Monitor & Forecast
- Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
- In 2026, the telecom network becomes code
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Mike Fratto
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
The shifts that the agentic revolution is driving are felt in many areas of technology and Dell Technologies spans some of those that are seeing the greatest upheaval. The 451 Research team was in attendance at the annual Dell Technologies World conference and Brian Partridge, William Fellows, Henry Baltazar and Greg Macatee joined host Eric Hanselman to talk about their perspectives on the conference, agentic advancement and the technology market. Dell has positioned itself as a purveyor of not only the compute infrastructure needed to build the foundation for AI, but also as the custodian of AI's most critical raw material – data.
The rapid evolution of agentic applications has created a need for new capabilities that is being complicated by both technology infrastructure demands and geopolitical events. Supply chains are being challenged by increasing demand for storage at a time when silicon pipelines were already under tremendous pressure. All of this is happening as the costs of AI are starting to have a material impact on businesses. Tokenomics, the impact of the cost of producing AI tokens, has taken center stage.
More S&P Global Content:
- Compute sovereignty: The strategic importance of digital infrastructure
- AI won't solve its own energy problem – and that might be fine
- AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
- AI infrastructure results in 2025 top expectations, forecast upgraded
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Dell Technologies' unified private cloud strategy: IT environments reimagined
- AI Infrastructure Market Monitor & Forecast
- Quantum Computing Market Monitor & Forecast
- Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Brian Partridge, William Fellows, Henry Baltazar, Gregg Macatee
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
One of the more interesting areas where AI is having an impact is in building operations. While building automation technology has made significant advances, AI is bridging gaps in building system controls. Analyst Zöe Roth has been researching the approaches and achievements from various smart building automation technologies and joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss what she's seen and what opportunities lie ahead. Some of the advances from data center information management (DCIM) systems are being applied to smart buildings. A typical building has multiple control capabilities for HVAC, lighting, and mechanical that often aren't interconnected and smart building systems can unify visibility and operations.
The integration of AI in smart buildings has to balance a number of different aspects of both the human in the loop for control and the scale that the introduction of cloud-based management offers. Fully autonomous operations may be some time off, but vendors are working to build trust and capability. Cloud-based systems can provide a consolidated view of a portfolio of buildings and improve maintenance operations, but face reluctance in some sectors where on-premises preferences prevail. AI is advancing rapidly and will accelerate further as it matures.
More S&P Global Content:
- 451 Digital Industries Insider
- Next in Tech | Ep. 208: Smart Spaces
For S&P Global subscribers:
- 2026 Trends in IoT, Edge & Digital Industries
- Smart buildings 2025: Market trends, vertical strategies and vendor positioning
- Redefining OT security and ensuring operational continuity in the age of hybrid, AI-driven OT
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Zöe Roth
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun with Barb Dalumpines
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
The rush to capitalize on agentic capabilities is in full swing in enterprise, but there is caution in operational settings, like industrial control systems. Getting to autonomy in these environments requires a greater consideration in design and implementation and Cody Falcon of ABB joins host Eric Hanselman to continue a conversation that started at CERAWeek to explore the many aspects that should be in consideration. Risk is, of course, much greater in physical systems and AI requires more complex guardrails to manage it. But the greater challenge is in building trust.
AI's ability to handle scope and scale can be tremendously valuable in control systems and the ready availability of telemetry and operational data give implementations a solid base to work from. The journey to autonomy is one that has to be built on proven successes. As with any new employee, agents will need to build trust.
More S&P Global Content:
- The CERAWeek conference
- Next in Tech | Ep. 259: The RSAC Conference – Agents on The Loose
- AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
- 2026 Trends in Information Security
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Redefining OT security and ensuring operational continuity in the age of hybrid, AI-driven OT
- Tech Trend in Focus: Digital twins in the oil and gas industry
- 2026 Trends in IoT, Edge & Digital Industries
- Key learnings from the CERAWeek Chief AI Officer Leadership Circle
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Cody Falcon, Global Digital Portfolio & Technology Leader, Energy Industries, ABB
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
The recent announcement of the capabilities of the Mythos AI model have raised many concerns about the cybersecurity implications of ever more powerful AI tools. Scott Crawford and Daniel Kennedy return to the podcast to debate the impact with host Eric Hanselman. Is this more marketing than real attack potential? It seems like the pace and scale of the discovery of new vulnerabilities could overwhelm traditional remediation and patching practices. Is this a reason to hold back the release of new AI models?
If nothing else, these developments should serve as a wakeup call for enterprises to revamp the way in which they approach both their software supply chains and operational procedures. Increased speed and scale are necessary, but it's also critical to secure the source of patches and updates to counter attacker efforts to compromise them. Attackers have always been good at taking well intentioned improvements and weaponizing them.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 259: The RSAC Conference – Agents on The Loose
- AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
- 2026 Trends in Information Security
For S&P Global subscribers:
- RSAC Conference 2026: Record turnout confronts both the promise and threat of agentic AI
- Information security budgets rise, but must address cloud security, AI governance – Highlights from…
- AI's impact in security and its application are not always aligned – Highlights from VotE: Informat…
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Dan Kennedy
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith, Dylan Scheible
Demand for data center capacity is booming, which won't come as a surprise to any of our listeners, but that boom is extending into the associated areas that are looking to manage risk in this growth. Analysts Tony Lenoir and Kelly Morgan return to the podcast to discuss an upcoming webinar that explores the challenges that insurers are facing with host Eric Hanselman. The "Underwriting the Digital Backbone: Navigating Risk and Growth in Data Center Insurance" webinar digs into the complex risk equations that insurers have to navigate. Data center projects have escalated in scale and cost and this creates concerns not only about financing, but also the entangled supply chain and energy grid connectivity pathways. When data center power demands are approaching the gigawatt level, simply providing reliable power becomes much more challenging.
At the same time, the risks for data centers are becoming more complicated. The shift to liquid cooling can deliver much more efficient operation, when compared with air cooling, but it has a downside. When racks of GPU's can dissipate almost a megawatt of energy, even short interruptions of cooling supply can cause catastrophic damage. And the GPU's being damaged are tremendously valuable and in short supply. Business continuity insurance has to account for these much greater loss potentials, as well as looking at location risks from environmental hazards. Geopolitical concerns are now a key part of balancing risk, as well. Check out the webinar for a deeper dive with more details.
More S&P Global Content:
- Join the Navigating Risk and Growth webinar here
- Nearly two-thirds of planned US BESS projects eligible for 40% tax credits
- Next in Tech | Ep. 245: The Big Picture Reports
For S&P Global subscribers:
- 2026 Trends in Data Center Services & Infrastructure
- S&P Global Data Center & Energy Innovation Summit: Lending and investing
- Revamped US energy strategy — meeting AI-driven data center demand amid shifting geopolitics
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Tony Lenoir, Kelly Morgan
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
While expanding regulatory requirements have been pushing developments in digital sovereignty, increasing levels of geopolitical concerns are driving greater urgency in improving control of digital assets. Andreas Prins, global head of sovereignty solutions for SUSE joins host Eric Hanselman to look at how organizations need to shift their thinking to leverage all of the benefits that sovereignty initiatives offer. We've seen study results that show that enterprises see sovereignty as a path to better workload and data portability. To make this work effectively, they need to consider the full technology stack that supports their digital environments. Understanding the controls available to manage sovereignty goals is an important first step, but it's just as important to look at how applications and data can be pulled out of any environment, if the need arises. Understanding the effort to exit can highlight dependencies that could hinder a path to improved sovereignty.
Focusing exclusively on sovereignty can also miss another important benefit – improvements in business resilience. By starting with resilience, organizations can link together security and sovereignty with operational concerns. The result can be more efficient and effective technology operations that go beyond fulfilling simple regulatory requirements and help to build stronger businesses.
More S&P Global Content:
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- Are we the data? Data ownership and control dynamics in the GenAI age
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Data governance and privacy practices poised to support enterprise AI
- Survey Data Hub – Voice of the Enterprise: Data & Analytics, Data Governance & Privacy 2026
- Generative AI Market Monitor & Forecast
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Andreas Prins
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The next episode of our Quantum CEO series looks at the software development stack for quantum computing and how quantum software is developed. Co-founder of Classiq, Amir Naveh, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the challenges in working across the dramatically different architectures that make up the current quantum computing landscape. It's been nine years since IBM introduced the Qiskit development environment and much has changed. Developers can move from simple quantum circuits designs to much more high-level representations of quantum logic, while targeting a broad set of quantum computers on which the can run. Much as classical computing tools advanced to more effective and efficient compilers and tool chains, quantum development tooling is tackling more complex problems and raising the level of abstraction at which developers can operate.
The improvements in development tools are expanding the audience for quantum computing and reinforcing the imperative that enterprises large and small should be working to understand how they can put quantum computing to work. Quantum is not a technology for a distant future, it's a reality that can have impacts in many applications today.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 262: Quantum CEO Series: Alan Baratz
- Next in Tech | Ep. 248:SC25 Supercomputing conference
- Quantum computing and the future of data privacy
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Quantum Computing Market Monitor & Forecast
- AI, quantum and high-performance computing join forces at SC25
- Access to quantum hardware remains cloudy, but more options are starting to appear
- Welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Amir Naveh
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The next in our Quantum CEO series looks at the nature of a fundamental element of quantum computing – the qubit. Dr. Theau Peronnin, cofounder and CEO of Alice & Bob, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the nature and characteristics of this often-misunderstood foundation of the quantum world. There is no standardized definition for a qubit, and yet, many quantum efforts measure their success in terms of qubit counts. At the same time, there are efforts to define logical qubits, as a more functional measure, further clouding the term. It's far better to look at the work that they can do and what the constraints are in their operation. The current generation of quantum computers work with environments that are computationally noisy, creating error rates that are more than eighteen orders of magnitude greater than classical computers. That puts a focus not only on managing error rates, but also on establishing meaningful benchmarks around quantum performance.
There are also efforts to expand the working life of a qubit, the coherence time, and the speed of computation. Differing approaches to quantum computing trade off stability and durability of the quantum state needed to perform a computation. Quantum capabilities are expanding more rapidly than many had predicted and organizations need to develop a better understanding of where and when quantum computing can fit in their business plans.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 262: Quantum CEO Series: Alan Baratz
- Next in Tech | Ep. 248:SC25 Supercomputing conference
- Quantum computing and the future of data privacy
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Quantum Computing Market Monitor & Forecast
- AI, quantum and high-performance computing join forces at SC25
- Access to quantum hardware remains cloudy, but more options are starting to appear
- Welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Dr. Theau Peronnin
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
We kick off the next in our CEO series with a look at quantum computing. Alan Baratz is the CEO of D-Wave and he joins host Eric Hanselman to explore quantum computing architectures, how they're evolving, and how enterprises should be considering quantum computing applications. D-Wave now offers both annealing and gate model quantum computing systems, with different types of problems being suited to each type. While many view quantum computing as a distant future, quantum approaches are delivering business value today, particularly in quantum annealing, where optimization of scheduling and processing can be done with greater precision and speed.
One of the challenges the enterprises face is translating existing use cases into the quantum realm. So often, heuristics are developed to approximate the computations that are required. The shift to quantum thinking steps beyond the heuristics that were applied to reduce computational efforts and looks at directly addressing computationally complex problems. It's a shift to embracing a new way addressing some of the most challenging enterprise problems.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 248:SC25 Supercomputing conference
- Quantum computing and the future of data privacy
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Quantum Computing Market Monitor & Forecast
- AI, quantum and high-performance computing join forces at SC25
- Access to quantum hardware remains cloudy, but more options are starting to appear
- Welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Alan Baratz
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
While the annual gathering of all things telecom might have been dampened by geopolitical impacts, Mobile World Congress was still a hotbed of everything new and next. Analysts Raul Castañon-Martinez and Rich Karpinski join host Eric Hanselman to discuss what they saw in Barcelona and what it portends for not only the telecom players, but also the wider technology ecosystem that was clamoring for attention. MWC has evolved into an event that spans technology in many different forms. There's a telecom anchor that expands from smartphones, to infrastructure, out to AI and agentic, even out to quantum computing. There seemed to be more quantum computers on display than the perennial stand attraction – Formula 1 cars.
This year presented and more pointed challenge to telecom operators to make the jump into being technology providers. There's certainly a desire to get to a "Connectivity plus" footing, but there are many ecosystem players looking to be the provider of choice for AI services. Operators are trying to avoid the over-the-top displacement of previous tech transitions, but they're facing a much broader set of competitors.
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For S&P Global subscribers:
- MWC 2026: Agentic AI as the next operating model for networks and network operations
- Data Insight: GenAI in the contact center matures, as vendor focus shifts to proof of value
- In 2026, the telecom network becomes code
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Raul Castañon-Martinez, Rich Karpinski
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
We're well underway in the integration of agents into various enterprise workflows, but there are many questions about where and how they can be used effectively. Emily Jasper and Sheryl Kingstone return to the podcast to discuss their recent research and upcoming webinar with host Eric Hanselman. Much has been made of claims that agents are going to replace SaaS applications, particularly in applications like CRM, but that relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of where their value lies. CRM systems are the repositories of crucial enterprise data and agents can help to deliver on many of their unfulfilled promises. Many systems have
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- Join the webinar: Putting AI agents to work
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For S&P Global subscribers:
- The rise of agentic sales execution
- Agentic experiences redefine retail execution at NRF 2026
- From assistance to autonomy: Mapping the future of agentic commerce
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Emily Jasper, Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The RSAC Conference, a major cybersecurity gathering in the spring, is coming up and the impacts of agents will be on full display. Scott Crawford, Brenon Daly, and Dan Kennedy join host Eric Hanselman to explore their expectations and look at what's been taking place in both the marketplace, investments and M&A activity. Agents are automating tasks, not jobs, and there are a great set of use cases, but they're not a panacea. There will be disruption, but it will be in specific areas, rather than a universal replacement of existing tooling.
Are we industrializing the automated creation of software? Will agents really replace SaaS applications? We're clearly in the early days, but these questions are causing massive market shifts. A better question is how agentic interactions will change how we interact with the applications that drive businesses today.
Join the team at RSAC and get all the details we didn't have time to cover. The annual 451 Research breakfast will be on, as always, so you can meet the team in person.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Brenon Daly, Daniel Kennedy
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
Wildfires have grabbed the headlines recently and AI is being put to work to assess risk aid strategic planning in reducing events. The next in our CEO series brings Bryan Spear, the CEO of Technosylva, in to talk with host Eric Hanselman about not only wildfire, but also the ways in which AI can address flood and extreme weather risks, as well. There are interesting commonalities in the datasets that are used and AI has helped them to pivot into new areas as they dig deeper into what, in many cases, was data they already had.
Their computational requirements have driven them to invest in a dedicated compute environment. They're running analyses on scale where they can keep utilization high enough that the costs make sense. It's a calculus that many enterprises are making as they trade off the convenience of cloud with the predictable costs of owning one's own infrastructure.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Bryan Spear
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
We continue our CEO series with Douwe Kiela, the CEO of Contextual AI, who is addressing the challenges of building effective agentic applications. The shift to agentic amplifies the need for enterprises to improve their data management capabilities and infrastructure scaling. The best models won't perform well, if there isn't well built context to support them. Much like people, if there's not enough of the right information, decision making is going to suffer. There's an evolution from the prompt engineering needed to generate better results from LLM's, to the context engineering that crafts the right data to feed agents.
This is an area where agents can also help to tackle the data quality problem that many enterprises face. Standing the old computing paradigm on its head, effective agentic applications ought to take garbage in and put information out. Well built agentic architectures can understand data characteristics and not only evaluate its quality, but also classify it and apply the appropriate security controls to its use. The scope and scale of agentic potential demands much greater thought to achieve its full value. We need only look to the recent Open Claw project to see both the up and downsides.
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- The CX AI Agent Index 2025
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Douwe Kiela
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The next in our series of discussions with CEO's of companies that are putting AI to work has Fransico Martin-Rayo of Helios discussing the agricultural supply chain with host Eric Hanselman. Helios is leveraging AI to generate insights in the complex dynamics of food production and sourcing at a dramatically finer level of granularity. AI not only enables more complex analysis but also allows customized delivery of the results. Shifting interfaces from legacy dashboards and static reports to queryable constructs lets users explore the analyses in ways that better fit their needs. AI can deliver custom insights at scale in ways that weren't possible with traditional application interfaces.
One of the principal shifts accelerating AI, is the availability of better data. Helios integrates massive weather data sets with market history and global events to generate forecasts. While the volumes of data are growing it's seen significant reductions in the cost per token in their infrastructure. Improving efficiency can expand the depth of analysis, as well as the frequency of forecast updates.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Francisco Martin-Rayo, CEO and Co-Founder of Helios
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
We're kicking off a new series of discussions with CEO's of companies that are putting AI to work to tackle complex problems. Sean Kelly of Amperon joins host Eric Hanselman to dig into how they're using AI for energy grid forecasting. The combination of weather, changes in generation capacity with renewables, and now increased data center demand is making forecasting a critical requirement for grid stability, as well as energy trading. While this might have been a problem that could be tackled with spreadsheets back in the day, scope and scale of the problem has grown to a size that is outstripping traditional methods. AI-based approaches can scale, but there are challenges with managing the size of the datasets being used and the computational costs that some models demand.
Effective integration of AI into complex problem solving demands not only a deep understanding of the problem space, but also innovation in sourcing data and scaling its applications. The payoff can be much faster results with greater perspective depth. But that requires investment in automation and careful engineering to get there.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Sean Kelly, CEO, Amperon
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
There are such significant changes going on in how data is managed and in how AI manages data, that it's not always clear which requirements are driving which trends. Jim Curtis returns to look data highlights from AWS re:Invent and to identify important changes that are taking place. FinOps and broader cloud cost management efforts are leading providers to offer tools and programs to corral spending. AWS has introduced database savings plans to provide discounts in much the same way they've done with other services as they look to foster platform commitment. AWS is also expanding its platform capabilities for AI development, with AWS SageMaker integrating additional tools to simplify the creation and deployment of AI solutions.
The intersection of databases, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence is creating more focus on vectorization. It's fueled the evolution of search capabilities, which offers a more semantically rich and efficient way to organize and retrieve data compared to traditional methods. AWS S3 now has vector support, taking the venerable object store into AI-capable territory. AI is revitalizing established technologies and compelling cloud providers to deliver more integrated and tailored services.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: James Curtis
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The National Retail Federation's annual NRF conference has become a showplace for the latest technology, as well its core retail foundations. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss what was on display and how it will impact retail and the larger tech landscape with host Eric Hanselman. While we may be a ways off from having robot dogs retrieving shoes at your local mall store, automation and agentic applications are delivering significant value in customer interactions - $22 billion in the recent 451 Research study. The days of clunky chatbot interfaces seem to be well and truly behind us.
One the greater challenges in scaling agentic applications is maintaining consumer trust as applications and use cases grow. Part of that trust will depend on effectively managing fleets of agents. In order to scale, organizations have to develop an AI agent control plane that can manage memory, maintain context and guide agent actions. Regulatory requirements are in their early stages, but enterprises have to focus on controls that will ensure they can maintain customer trust as matter of basic business operations.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The choice of use cases in AI has a significant impact on achieving on project outcomes. The latest results of the 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise AI use cases study are out and Alex Johnston joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the data and its implications. The study highlights a widespread, yet often unstructured and fragmented, adoption of AI within organizations, indicating a stall in overall maturity despite significant growth in usage. Key challenges include a clogged project pipeline, where many initiatives remain in limited deployment, and difficulties in consistently measuring return on investment (ROI), although most projects are seen as delivering value.
Organizations achieving better outcomes prioritize strong governance, consistent measurement, and "human-in-the-loop" applications, rather than attempting immediate full autonomy. There are major concerns around data quality, rising costs, and a lack of centralized control stemming from the diverse sourcing of AI capabilities and varied user proficiency. Cost concerns are driving organizations towards
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Alex Johnston
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
We're just out of the recent earnings season and we've seen a wild range of results and some interesting implications. Melissa Otto CFA, head of S&P Global's Visible Alpha research team, returns to discuss what that markets have been saying and what she makes of the data with host Eric Hanselman. Macroeconomic effects are having some impact, as consumer sentiment diverges across the top and the bottom of the economy. In technology, there are mixed feelings about AI as the hunt continues for use cases with decisive revenue returns. The hyperscalers are continuing to invest capital at staggering rates and, so far, the markets have mostly approved. AI supply chain companies, like NVIDIA, are generally moving forward with solid results.
The larger question is where is the AI boom headed. There are constraints not only in supply chains for data centers, but also in energy supply. Agentic AI has a lot of promise, but needs to prove out its value and earn trust, as providers look to improve efficiency with more targeted silicon, like ASICs, to stand up alongside the forests of GPU's being deployed. As investors hunt for improved returns, they may be rotating to international opportunities and small cap companies that might be able to see faster returns from AI deployments.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Melissa Otto, CFA
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
For the 250th episode, we're looking a bit further forward to explore what enterprises should be thinking about as they look to put agentic capabilities to work. Melissa Incera, Alex Johnston and Sheryl Kingstone return to discuss the challenges and potential with host Eric Hanselman. As AI agents evolve beyond simple chatbots in customer experience and business operations, enterprises have to adapt both their infrastructure and data management capabilities to benefit from agentic potential. Automation is great, but getting to fully autonomous operations requires building more trust than exists today for most. In fact, 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise study results show that those who show a healthy skepticism about agent capabilities are the most successful in achieving their AI project goals.
Agents are making big step forward in establishing continuity in processes by adding memory to AI model interactions. At the same time, concerns about cost are bringing up the need for the same types of visibility and control that's being used with FinOps efforts in cloud. All of this is taking place in an evolving regulatory landscape where the need for a balanced approach between innovation and safety is guiding the best outcomes.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Melissa Incera, Alex Johnston, Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
This year's AWS re:Inforce conference was larger and fueled by greater agentic capabilities. Part of the 451 Research team that was at the conference, Henry Baltazar, Scott Crawford, William Fellows and Melanie Posey, join host Eric Hanselman to explore the announcements and progress that's been made in expanding agentic capabilities and much more. As an incumbent infrastructure provider, AWS is looking to the top of the infrastructure stack to secure their advantage. A suite of developer tools, including the Kiro IDE, are looking to make the creation and operation of agents simpler. There was progress in FinOps, with greater cost transparency and support for partner opportunities in helping customers manage their cloud spend.
There was also a more enthusiastic embrace of multicloud environments, with the introduction of AWS Interconnect, a service that provides easy and scalable interconnection with other cloud providers, with Google being the first and Microsoft Azure said to be in the works. 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) data shows dramatic increases in data migration volumes, making interconnection performance more critical. With the holidays in full swing, how many Mariah Carey song title references can you spot in this episode?
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Henry Baltazar, Scott Crawford, William Fellows, Melanie Posey
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
Supercomputing has shifted from an esoteric and exotic part of technology to much more mainstream, mostly driven by AI. The massive amounts of computational power that once were reserved for the largest of computing problems in high performance computing (HPC), like weather and seismic analysis, are now commonplace in the world of AI. Analyst Gabriella Brown returns to talk about complex computing problems, quantum computing and photonics with host Eric Hanselman. SC25 has grown to over 16,000 attendees and almost 600 exhibitors, enough to sprawl across St. Louis' Americas Center and into its football stadium. As they mature, the next step in enterprise adoption is working out how all of these will work together. AI is tackling many problems, but quantum could address a whole different class of computing questions.
Quantum computing is scaling up and moving closer to becoming a key part of an everyday computing portfolio. Techniques like quantum annealing are finding practical applications today while pure-play quantum approaches are increasing the density and stability of their computing capabilities as they push for quantum advantage, the point at which they're doing things that classical computers can't. New areas like photonic computing were also on display at SC25, as well as all of the supporting infrastructure to power, house and cool HPC installations. As AI clusters head toward gigawatt power dissipation, they require specialized support.
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Credits
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Gabriella (Ellie) Brown
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The worlds of IT security and operations are being pulled together and AI is a catalyst that's making it happen. The focus on observability that's been part of the DevOps movement, is playing an important role in improving security effectiveness and Scott Crawford, Mark Ehr and Mike Fratto return to look at how this is happening with host Eric Hanselman. Security teams have always wrestled with making effective use of telemetry data from the infrastructure and applications they are securing. Correlating data from just the security tooling is hard enough, let alone adding operational data to the mix. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems came into existence many years ago specifically to address this problem, but they were complex to configure and operate and needed tending to stay accurate. The volumes of data coming from observability initiatives was promising, but new approaches were required and AI and ML have been key to unlocking that value.
Once again, we've hit an opportunity where it's all about the data and getting it to where it can be put to work. The Open Telemetry project simplified data interchange, but the question remained as to where all of this data had to live. It's not practical to get all of the data in one place, but data fabrics and federation can manage access effectively. Better correlation opens the door to many possibilities, including building a single source of truth for IT assets. There's a lot of benefit to bringing security and operations together.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Mark Ehr, Mike Fratto
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
As organizations have worked to leverage the power of AI in interacting with large language models, they've invested in prompt engineering to generate better results. But agents shift the need manage the full context of not only the prompt, but also the data that's being presented. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Alex Johnston return to the podcast to look at the new discipline of context engineering and how it's being put to work in AI environments with host Eric Hanselman. The process of context engineering looks at ensuring that the right data context is in place for agents to act on. It requires a shift from thinking that more data is necessarily better and understanding to getting the right data is the best insurance against agents picking up bad habits. We've come full circle in approaches to data and organizations need to raise the level of abstraction at which they address data need for agentic applications.
We've been working through waves of capability in the march to agentic operations. Organizations have access to the same models, but how they're used is where differentiation is possible. Agentic approaches demand greater sophistication and understanding around the context with which data is presented to applications. There has to be more careful curation, to get reasonable results.
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- Big Picture Report: 2026 AI Outlook – Unleashing agentic potential
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, Alex Johnston
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The latest Big Picture reports are out and cover a wide range of topics from financial markets to supply chains and onward to technology and AI. Two of the authors, Lindsey Hall and Chris Rogers, join host Eric Hanselman to talk about sustainability, supply chains and AI. These are tightly interwoven and their dependencies spill out into geopolitics, as well. Sustainability conversations have focused on climate adaptation and resilience. Climate risks are growing and yet only 35% of businesses have adaptation plans in place. The urgent demands for AI infrastructure are consuming both energy and the materials to build data centers. Meeting those needs is shifting sustainability priorities for the companies looking to deploy AI, as well as energy focus. Renewables are still a key part of energy plans, but they've moved to an all-of-the-above approach to fuel AI-driven consumption levels.
It's been what could be called an un-fun year in supply chain. Uncertainty has become the new certainty. Changes in tariff policies have had the side effect of pushing the affected countries closer together. That's led to reshoring efforts, which have seen particular growth in ASEAN countries. One of complexities of this shift is that labor forces are now competing with manufacturing automation and robotics, rather than skills and cost differentials in different regions. The rise of agentic AI is only increasing pressure on infrastructure and energy supplies as it accelerates operational velocity.
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- Big Picture Report: 2026 AI Outlook – Unleashing agentic potential
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Lindsey Hall, Chris Rogers
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, this year thoughts are turning to agents and the changing role of AI in commerce. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss the impacts and offer insights into strategies for putting agents to work and working in a world of agents with host Eric Hanselman. AI is spanning generations in technology adoption and engagement in ways that previous technologies have struggled. Search and digital engagement had strong splits between different generations. The natural language capabilities of chat interfaces are stepping across technology hesitancy. But it is creating challenges for businesses in reaching their customers. Search engine optimization is well understood, but how can a business ensure it's found by AI entities? Making more information available, but being more selective about which interactions get what data is a critical balance to achieve. Bot management has become a lot more complicated.
Building trust in autonomous experiences is the next big hurdle that AI technologies have to accomplish. Gen Z users are more comfortable with automated actions, but trust is still key. Building connections with brand advocates is just as important as it's always been and now has to be delivered through AI. Internal chat can be a good start and it needs to be extended to become a more complete assistant-style interaction. It requires a significant improvement from legacy chatbots and the business it creates can make it worthwhile.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
One of the biggest banking and payments conferences, Money 20/20, has wrapped up and the enthusiasm for all things stablecoin has continued. Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma and McKayla Wooldridge return to discuss how this is evolving with host Eric Hanselman. The cryptocurrency has become the buzzy headline in so many of the conversations at Money 20/20. But consumers are still wary of stablecoins and the larger questions is around how financial services companies will deliver valuable services using them.
Unlike previous years, there were no dark clouds hovering over the payments markets. The industry is generally upbeat and starting to embrace agentic AI. Efforts are underway to standardize agent-driven commerce with the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). It's a point of cooperation across payments companies that normally compete for share of consumer wallets. There's still work to be done in developing governance mechanisms for agentic transactions and those efforts will also need to build consumer trust.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma, McKayla Wooldridge
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The equipment that fills data centers is evolving rapidly, driven by the need to fulfill the seemingly insatiable appetite of AI applications. The Open Compute Project (OCP) was founded by Meta/Facebook to promulgate equipment standards and its annual Summit has grown from a small specialized gathering, to an event that strains the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center. Senior research analyst Perkins Liu returns to offer his take on this meteoric growth with host Eric Hanselman. AI requirements are pushing ever greater scale both logically and physically, with the width of server racks doubling in the Open Rack Wide (ORW) specification to support greater density and better serviceability. The OCP Foundation is also working on silicon interoperability and is setting specifications for chiplet integration. Liquid cooling has moved from a nice to have feature to a required capability as a means to dissipate the huge amount of energy drawn by ever denser GPU arrays. Energy delivery is changing with the advent of higher voltage DC power. The early OCP efforts on 48 volt DC are paling in the face of new 800 volts designs.
The OCP Foundation is also expanding its mission to include education, with the establishment of the OCP Academy. It aims to raise workforce skills in open hardware and will offer online training in data center technologies. That underscores not only the expansion of the OCP Foundation's mission, but also the increasing scale of the ecosystem that supports data center environments and complexity and interdependency that AI creates.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Perkins Liu
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
There are many ways to frame conversations around cyber security. They can take on many aspects of security, ranging across the technical to the human. With the press towards platform consolidation, it's critical to reconsider the interaction between the human and technical elements and research director Scott Crawford and Javvad Malik, CISO advisor at KnowBe4, join host Eric Hanselman to dig into this important interplay. It's all too easy to fall into security practices that focus on technical requirements and don't account for the friction that is created for the people who use them. It's also easy to drop into a mindset that better security is just a matter of user education. Effective security requires thinking about user experience, as well as technical controls.
Authentication is one of the most frequently experienced security interactions and also one where a technical focus can have the highest impact on the people using. Authentication happens often and is also a key element in securing IT environments. The push to multifactor authentication, for example, is an important step in security enforcement and can require a significant change in how people interact with the systems that support their daily lives. A wholistic approach to security can help teams move beyond the frustrating cycle of user training and shift to collaborative security implementations.
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- The evolution of security platforms – 6 centers of gravity shaping the market
- AI for security: Agentic AI will be a focus for security operations in 2025
- From KnowBe4: The Hidden Cybersecurity Threat: Securing the Human-AI Relationship
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Security for agentic AI: Key areas of focus
- Worlds colliding: Uniting proactive and reactive security
- Identity & Access Management Market Monitor & Forecast
- Beyond ITDR: Viewing identity security through a wider lens
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Javvad Malik
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The enthusiasm for AI has been impressive and it's leading to the inevitable questions about whether or not all of it is warranted. Melissa Otto CFA, head of S&P Global's Visible Alpha research team, returns to discuss concerns about an AI bubble with host Eric Hanselman. Defining what actually indicates a bubble might be the trickiest aspect of the question. Is it outsized levels of debt? Unrealistic valuations? Both debt and valuations are high, but are they unreasonably so? So much depends on seeing what AI capabilities can deliver and we're still in the early days of understanding what ROI really is. There are still challenges in getting the domain approaches right. Doing real analytical work is more challenging and there is still more work to do in integrating with business processes.
And it's not just the technical aspects that are in play. It's possible that macroeconomic restraints are holding back even more enthusiastic spending that could create a bubble. Current interest rates create caution in taking on additional debt. It's also possible that rate cuts could unleash more risk taking and overextension through debt. That might be an indicator of a looming bubble. Or maybe not…
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- Datacenter & Energy Innovation Summit 2025
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- Netflix earnings preview: Q3 2025
- Next in Tech podcast, Episode 239: AI Infrastructure
- Next in Tech podcast, Episode 221: Datacenter slowdown?
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Shifting AI exits
- Venture capital outlook: Investments surge as exits lag
- Hyperscaler earnings quarterly: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud capex projections trend still higher
- Tech Trend in Focus: GPUaaS market momentum
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Melissa Otto, CFA
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
The world of cryptocurrencies has seen no shortage of upheaval, but regulatory clarity that has arrived with recent legislation has created opportunities. Stablecoins are an area that's seeing renewed interest in FinTech as a means of reducing friction for global payments. Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma and Nathan Stovall return to the podcast with host Eric Hanselman to look at how stablecoins are being put to work and how they're being used. For applications like cross border trade and the remittances trade, stablecoins can increase speed and potentially reduce costs. They can be considered another payment rail through which to conduct business.
Stablecoins are not without challenges. There are regulatory imperatives to be met, like anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC). Trust needs to be built in the market and education is needed around their potential benefits and risks. Traditional banks are getting involved, but they have additional stumbling blocks. There are technical hurdles, such as the readiness of backend systems to handle the higher precision values of stablecoins. And there are new concerns around custody risk, as handling wallets and the enhanced security required are new skills for many. The potential benefits and lucrative markets may give them enough incentive to take the plunge.
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- US banks maintain favorable earnings while confronting economic uncertainty
- Money20/20 Europe 2025: Key trends and developments
- Balance sheet, M&A and capital raising strategies for a volatile environment
- Next in Tech | Ep. 230: FinTech Advances
- Street Talk | Episode 142: Despite Looming Rate Cuts, Strong Deposit Franchises Still Take The Cake
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Data Insight: Cross-border payments volume to surpass $17 trillion by 2030
- Cross-Border Payments Market Monitor & Forecast - Data Visualization
- Cross-border payments, stablecoins generate buzz at a low-key Money20/20 Asia
- Tariffs create urgency for payment optimization strategies among large merchants, SMBs
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma, Nathan Stovall
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
Some might think that the metaverse has been a passing technology fad, but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. While the language may have shifted to things like spatial computing and augmented reality, the technologies and use cases have been flourishing. Analysts Neil Barbour and Ian Hughes return to discuss recent study results and industrial metaverse progress with host Eric Hanselman. Companies are working to build a digital thread that runs through their organizations, linking the physical and virtual worlds. They’re leveraging digital twins to simulate operations and putting AI to work creating and populating the virtual environments in which they run.
When gaming companies shift to building virtual large world models in partnership with defense contractors, the metaverse has clearly shifted gears. Virtual environments are being used for training as well as strategic planning. Smart phones are being integrated into retail space planning and assessment and emergency teams are playing Tetris to secure helicopter landing sites. The metaverse is alive and well and making some large steps forward.
More S&P Global Content:
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- Metaverse Survey: Nearly half of consumers interested in buying smart glasses
- Metaverse Digest: A look at Augmented World Expo, Snap updates Lens Studio
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For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Industrial metaverse adoption grows – Highlights from Metaverse B2B survey
- Metaverse Digest: Generative AI interactive world-building accelerates
- More consumers piling into virtual worlds – Highlights from Metaverse Consumer survey
- The dawn of industrial AI
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Neil Barbour, Ian Hughes
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
Managing the capabilities of an organization’s workforce is challenging in the best of times, but the current upheaval created by AI technologies entering the workplace makes it all the more complex. The technologies that have put to work around this problem are many and varied and analyst Ethan Ray joins host Eric Hanselman to look at where we’ve come from and where we could be headed. There’s a rush to determine if new technologies are making workers more productive and what skills are needed to leverage them. Both a recent S&P Global study and the HR Tech conference showed some trends that could be transforming working environments. Workforce intelligence approaches are looking to build a wholistic picture of knowledge, skills and ability of employees and then do skills matching and development planning.
As in other technology disciplines, a proliferation of tools has made many organizations’ efforts at workforce management complicated. It’s another place where many are considering integrated platforms that that can bring together HR, IT and financial teams to better understand the use of tools and resulting productivity. There are questions about what we can and what we should measure to truly understand efficiency and effectiveness. How can we understand what combination of skills and tools are generating the best financial outcomes? Better technology should hold the answer, but the path forward is not always clear.
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- AI upskilling: Navigating the urgent need for workforce transformation
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Take 5: AI shakes up HR
- Workday strengthens standing in AI-driven frontline recruitment space with Paradox buy
- HR teams see AI as vital but face adoption barriers – Highlights from VotE: Workforce Pro…
- AI holds potential for workplace transformation, but employee concerns must be addressed – Highligh…
- MIT Manufacturing Day headlined by circular economy, workforce skills and modularity
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Ethan Ray
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
Getting data to where it’s needed has always been an infrastructure challenge, but the scope and scale of the problem has become much more acute as data volumes rise and AI demands more. Research director Henry Baltazar returns to look at the latest results from the Voice of the Enterprise Data Migration study with host Eric Hanselman and reflect on how organizations are addressing the crunch in data movement. There’s been a significant increase in the number of enterprises reporting that they’ve moved to migrating petabytes of data and they’re now not only shifting to cloud, but moving between clouds, as well. They’re also enlisting the help of service providers more often, an indication that the scale of these activities requires professional support to manage risk.
Data movement at this scale demands a shift in tactics and more are using physical transport, the shipping of storage media to cloud providers, to get the job done. They can’t risk the downtime needed for network transit, although network capacities are also rising. There are opportunities that cloudy environments present in managing data costs and new strategies that enterprises can put to work to lower not only costs, but risks, too.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 234: Broadcom VMware Explore Conference
- Next in Tech | Ep. 224: Context Around MCP
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Data Insight: Public cloud storage market to hit $56B by 2029 as data demand rises
- As data migration evolves, outage and security concerns grow
- Security concerns, large payloads are key challenges for data migration – Highlights from VotE: Sto…
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Henry Baltazar
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
To get to the benefits that AI offers, organizations have to address their technology infrastructure in ways that are much broader than historical approaches. Senior analyst Greg Macatee joins host Eric Hanselman to delve into what’s required and what enterprises are identifying in the recent Voice of the Enterprise AI and Machine Learning study. Enterprises are struggling with raising the success levels of AI projects. Over 60% report moderate to severe challenges in achieving AI success. Bringing together the computational power and the right quality data in the right locations can be complicated in the hybrid environments that more are operating. It’s not just a matter of being more selective with use cases, AI requires a set of organizational skills that have to be honed. Starting small and iterating can reduce risk while building competency.
Infrastructure has to shift in new ways, as well. Data management processes that can build the necessary data pipelines to feed AI applications bring together a broader set of tech disciplines. There are new wrinkles in AI infrastructure ecosystems, with new providers looking to address supply chain constraints, like the Neocloud or GPU as a Service (GPUaaS) providers. Even hyperscalers are looking to them to meet surging demand in a tight market. Those new options offer new choices, but enterprises need to match them with their AI goals.
More S&P Global Content:
- Navigating the AI infrastructure landscape
- The path from LLMs to agentic AI
- Next in Tech | Ep. 225: Security for MCP
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- AI infrastructure strategies evolve amid widespread data challenges – Highlights from VotE: AI & Machine Learning
- Generative AI Market Monitor & Forecast
- AI infrastructure: Trends, thoughts and a 2025 research agenda
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Greg Macatee
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual gathering on infrastructure virtualization that is the VMware by Broadcom Explore conference has wrapped up and there are important takeaways from both the formal program and informal discussions. Analysts Jean Atelsek, Henry Baltazar and William Fellows join host Eric Hanselman to talk about their takes on the event. The newly integrated VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (VCF) suite has shipped and along with it a new approach to the product portfolio. AI-focused capabilities have been added as VMware aims to create a private cloud portfolio to rival the public cloud offerings. Higher level data services are the first service abstractions available, with the promise of more to come.
In the new organizational structure, the Tanzu product offering is now in its own division in Broadcom. While that offers it independence, it’s also meant that in areas like AI functionality, there is some overlap between it and AI capabilities being built into VCF 9. The larger challenge for Broadcom is to motivate customers to fully implement VCF 9 and put all of its capabilities to work.
More S&P Global Content:
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- Next in Tech | Ep. 214: KubeCon and Cloud Native
- Next in Tech | Ep. 183: Exploring Broadcom VMware
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 manifests Broadcom's vision for modern private cloud
- VMware Tanzu enhances support for generative AI and agents with Tanzu AI Solutions
- VMware remains dominant as organizations evaluate alternative virtualization technologies
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Jean Atelsek, Henry Baltazar, William Fellows
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Can you have too much data for an AI application? In the mad dash to collect the raw material for AI applications, it can be tempting to pull in as much as you can. Product manager Emily Jasper returns to the podcast with a set of recommendations for more strategic use of data with host Eric Hanselman. Just as it might not be wise to load up on everything on a buffet, being strategic about using the data that best suits the goals of your project can improve outcomes and help to manage risk. By understanding the data that you’re putting to work, you can bound the universe of outcomes and simplify the process of bringing it into the AI application pipeline. At the same time, the process of data governance becomes clearer when the sources are better understood.
Bringing an understanding of the set of data resources that an enterprise has is critical and has to be accompanied by knowledge of the quality of that data. The principles of library sciences are back in focus in AI, as organizations work to curate data characteristics and provenance. As in so much of AI, matching the ecosystem of tools, data providers, and capabilities to the use cases being built is fundamental to project success. Managing risk in AI has become a process of bringing the right data to the right problem.
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- The path from LLMs to agentic AI
- Next in Tech | Ep. 224: Context Around MCP
- Next in Tech | Ep. 225: Security for MCP
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Data Management Market Monitor & Forecast
- Automation pervades data management practices – Highlights from VotE: Data & Analytics
- Technology Primer: Model Context Protocol explained
- The evolution of agentic process automation: Midyear market and technology update
- Pace of AI agent advancement could spur M&A in the sales automation market
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Emily Jasper
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The typical process of deploying technology has been one of enterprises designing infrastructure around vendor capabilities. The Open Networking Users Group (ONUG) was founded to reverse that equation and define enterprise requirements for technology and work with vendors to achieve them. Co-founder Nick Lippis joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the approach that ONUG takes, the nature of its community and the work that they’re doing today. While their roots are in the networking world, they’ve expanded to address a wide range of enterprise concerns. The current collaborations include security related work in cloud and security operations automation, WAN connectivity and a reference architecture for AI infrastructure.
The ONUG fall conference takes place in New York on October 22-23.
More S&P Global Content:
- The ONUG fall conference
- The path from LLMs to agentic AI
- Next in Tech | Ep. 225: Security for MCP
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- The evolution of agentic process automation: Midyear market and technology update
- Pace of AI agent advancement could spur M&A in the sales automation market
- 2025 will be pivotal for network APIs – Highlights from Communication and Network APIs Global Survey 2024
- Use of open-source software driven by reliability, low cost – Highlights from VotE: DevOps
- Glimpses of cybersecurity talent development: Industry and community
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Nick Lippis, ONUG co-founder
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual “security summer camp” that is made up of the Black Hat and DefCon conferences is just past and the security analyst team, Scott Crawford, Dan Kennedy, Justin Lam and Mark Ehr, join host Eric Hanselman to examine what they saw and discuss the implications. Despite the heat of a Las Vegas summer, it’s become bigger than the two main conferences, with a number of side events, like B-Sides, there’s a lot going on. AI conversations are evolving and maturing. We’ve mostly moved beyond blaming user foibles for breaches, but AI is expanding the attack surface with new and more complex tactics for user manipulation. AI is lowering the barriers for attackers. The days of script kiddies have morphed into Claude Code-fueled attack development.
The larger question is how security vendors are responding to AI risks. Claims that tier 1 security analysts should start looking for another job just seem irresponsible in the current environment. AI augmentation can reduce toil and digest the masses of events that security teams struggle to deal with today. At the same time, AI is scaling attack volumes. It’s the constant hegemony that’s always played out at the core of security.
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- AI for security: Agentic AI will be a focus for security operations in 2025
- Next in Tech | Ep. 215: RSA Conference Preview
- Deep Pocket Inspection: RSAC Innovation Sandbox Retrospective & Perspective
- Next in Tech | Ep. 227: Managed Security Services
- Next in Tech | Ep. 225: Security for MCP
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Use of GenAI security solutions has spiked, continued uptake projected – Highlights from VotE: Information Security
- Infosec spending projected to rise 27% on average in 2025 – Highlights from VotE: Information Security
- CNAPP in focus after large infosec acquisition – Highlights from VotE: Information Security
- Data Insight: Data security market to top $26B in 2029
- Data Security Market Monitor & Forecast
- CNAPP matures into full-spectrum security solution
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Dan Kennedy, Justin Lam, Mark Ehr
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The FinTech market has seen considerable upheaval in activity and valuations. But spring may be coming to the funding winter that FinTech has seen and Jordan McKee and Sampath Sharma return to examine the green shoots with host Eric Hanselman. Data platforms, payment rails and insurance tech are seeing renewed interest, while riskier areas, like lending, are not seeing the same focus. FinTech companies are looking at addressing infrastructure and process challenges faced by the banking sector as they transition to the world of instant payments.
Interest in cryptocurrency is roaring back, particularly in stablecoins. The U.S. GENIUS Act has delivered a framework for their use and opened the door to new experimentation. It’s another area where FinTech’s have an infrastructure opportunity, as a number of FinTech companies already have stablecoin experience and can put it to work for their banking partners. All of this and more will also be on the agenda for the upcoming Banking Infrastructure Modernization webinar at the link below.
More S&P Global Content:
- Upcoming FinTech Webinar: Banking Infrastructure Modernization: Building for Instant Payments
- Money20/20 Europe 2025: Key trends and developments
- National Retail Federation looks to revitalize the modern commerce experience
- Fintech funding falls 42% to $35B in 2023, but downturn may be nearing end
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Tech Trend in Focus: Payment orchestration
- Cross-border payments, stablecoins generate buzz at a low-key Money20/20 Asia
- Real-time payments, stablecoins draw VC attention in Q3 2024 fintech funding
- 2025 Trends in Fintech
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
While advertising is a fundamental part of business, the creator economy has become a fundamental part of advertising. Analyst Zach Ciampa joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the many facets of which it’s composed and look at the market impacts. Businesses are working to balance the mix of paid, earned and owned content that they’re putting to work to establish, guide and strengthen their brands. The process of influencing buying behavior and brand loyalty and the media mix as part of it continues to evolve. While TikTok may be the view that many have of user generated content (UGC), it’s a much richer palette that businesses can use.
Social media has become a large part of advertising, in no small part because of the allure of virality. But is this just gambling on an outcome? The human connection of social media and its people-first nature can have great power, but can be challenging to manage. Technology is being thrown at it in various forms, from influencer management platforms, to agency-driven tech M&A. AI has a role to play, but the human aspect is often the most powerful.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 228: Advertising and Tech
- National Retail Federation looks to revitalize the modern commerce experience
- Kagan Media and Telecom Summit
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Payments composability, optimization and resilience are top merchant priorities – Highlights from VotE: Customer Experience & Commerce
- Technology Primer: Building the digital foundation for retail transformation
- Convenience, flexibility, speed drive consumer behavior – Highlights from VoCUL: Connected Customer
- Key takeaways from Shoptalk Spring 2025
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Zach Ciampa
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Advertising is fundamental part of business and it’s one that has been buffeted by the impacts of technology in both the path to markets and the management of its delivery. Creating a brand reputation and influencing consumers is the core function and analyst Natalie Colakides and Ian Whittaker, managing director of Liberty Sky Advisors, join host Eric Hanselman to discuss the nuances of advertising and technology’s evolution around it. Shifts in media have had a profound effect - the reach of linear television media has decreased significantly, while digital advertising options have expanded. Businesses are looking to blend linear and streaming advertising, but it can be complex to make an effective distinction.
There is significant global variation in media consumption and advertising potential. While the UK was the first market where digital spending overtook traditional, the European market is diverging from patterns in the U.S.. Many businesses are looking to AdTech to make the process more efficient, but there are limits its capabilities. Agencies still have a significant role to play, but the advertising buying and planning that has been a big part of their business could be under threat from advances delivered by AI. Enterprises have a lot to wrestle with, but they need to keep focused on the fundamental task of winning hearts and minds.
More S&P Global Content:
- Kagan Media and Telecom Summit event link
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Big Four ad agencies see mixed results due to macro uncertainty
- A sneak preview of the Kagan Media & Telecom Summit 2025
- See it in charts: TV Networks, June 2025
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Natalie Colakides, Ian Whittaker
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Effective security management has never been simple and the expanded threat landscape enhanced by AI has only widened the gap between defenders and attackers. Scott Crawford and Greg Zwakman return to discuss the managed security services market with host Eric Hanselman. Security services have been an option for enterprises since the earliest days of IT, but the need for more depth and breadth in security operations has changed market dynamics and the enterprise security calculus. Part of this shift is driven by the scope and scale of security operations. Expanded attack surfaces with more devices, more SaaS applications and hybrid infrastructure can be all the more difficult to secure. Integrated security operations patterns, like Managed Detection and Response (MDR) can provide more comprehensive services and ones that are targeted at delivering improved security outcomes, rather than just operational support.
Changing security requirements are driving M&A activity, as well. Where services had been an augmentation to vendor products, some vendors now see them as a critical part of their portfolio and a key to platform aspirations. Zscaler’s acquisition of Red Canary and Sophos’ pick up of SecureWorks are some of the more notable transactions in this trend. Security management has shifted front of security markets.
More S&P Global Content:
- AI for security: Agentic AI will be a focus for security operations in 2025
- The evolution of security platforms – 6 centers of gravity shaping the market
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Managed Security Services Market Monitor & Forecast
- For sale: MDR vendors
- 2025 Trends in Information Security
- Ending SecureWorks' search for a suitor, Sophos takes it off Dell's hands
- Zscaler expands its platform play into a new market by reaching for Red Canary
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Greg Zwakman
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual Kagan Media and Telecom Summit in New York is in the books and it not only covered a lot of market activity, but it was also surrounded by a number of media and sports rights headlines. Justin Nielson, Eric Keith, Scott Robson and Seth Shafer joined host Eric Hanselman to look at what was covered in the expansive event and the time around it. There were big shifts in media rights and a couple of sports team sales that led to lively discussions. Networks are balking at some of the lofty prices for sports media rights in the face of streaming services’ higher demand. The realignment of regional sports coverage is still shaking out, as well.
Media consolidation keeps hovering, but will it always be next year’s prospect? Macroeconomic uncertainty seems to be playing a role and the pendulum on cord cutting seems to be swinging back around.
In broadband, the reset of the BEAD program has states scrambling to reapply under the new, much tighter deadline. Will this drive fixed wireless access (FWA)? Satellite is still a possibility in remote regions, but costs may hold it back. Private equity activity in fiber networks could be reaching a tipping point, as their investments mature and operators’ partners shift strategies. There was a lot in store and much more to come.
More S&P Global Content:
- Kagan Media and Telecom Summit event link
For S&P Global subscribers:
- A sneak preview of the Kagan Media & Telecom Summit 2025
- See it in charts: TV Networks, June 2025
- Comcast strikes sports network deal; Streaming services expand sports viewing
- New media rights deal a slam dunk for the NBA
- Kagan Media & Telecom Summit 2025: Broadband panel discussion
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Justin Nielson, Erik Keith, Scott Robson, Seth Shafer
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification has helped to accelerate access to a wide range of data sources for AI applications. But there are questions about the security and trust implications around a protocol that is still in its infancy. Scott Crawford and Justin Lam return to the podcast to examine the concerns that have been raised and changes that are underway in the specification with host Eric Hanselman. The previous episode introduced MCP and some of the market forces that are in play. Security considerations didn’t appear to be fully sorted out in the first version of the specification, but more work is being done to move beyond the OAuth-based approach. Automating the data access process can be powerful, but also fraught with the potential for abuse.
The larger questions in MCP revolve around understanding risk and establishing trust. Data exposure has been a constant concern in AI, but the more complex issues exist in the integrity of the data that’s being used. AI technology is moving forward rapidly and adversaries that are looking to compromise it and moving right along with these advances.
More S&P Global Content:
- The 2025 Generative AI Outlook
- Next in Tech | Ep. 224: Context Around MCP
For S&P Global Subscribers:
- Technology Primer: Model Context Protocol explained
- Databases and analytic services get the agentic AI treatment at Google Cloud Next 2025
- IT Insider 3: A roundup for IT decision-makers
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Justin Lam
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Linking generative AI models to the agents that are going to use them now has a standard for queries, the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Suddenly all sorts of things are vying to be your data source of choice. What could go wrong? Analysts Jean Atelsek, James Curtis and Henry Baltazar join host Eric Hanselman to provide an introduction to what MCP is, what all the fuss is about and where this is headed. Since Anthropic released the standard in November of 2024, there has been significant progress in expanding and clarifying it, but it is still very much a work in progress. Database providers and storage vendors have been the obvious participants and many others are joining in. The larger questions are around ensuring trust and transparency in this market. Basic authentication has been worked out, but more sophisticated authorization mechanisms need to be defined.
The mad dash is already leading to M&A activity, with storage vendors looking to expand their opportunities and maintain their relevance. Microsoft has released its MCP definition and Google has created an agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol for direct agent interactions. There are many pieces that are coming together to enable fully agentic operations and there is still a lot of work to be done.
More S&P Global Content:
- The 2025 Generative AI Outlook
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Technology Primer: Model Context Protocol explained
- Databases and analytic services get the agentic AI treatment at Google Cloud Next 2025
- IT Insider 3: A roundup for IT decision-makers
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, James Curtis, Henry Baltazar
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Developer experience is one of the areas where AI applications are showing significant return on investment, but there are significant hurdles to overcome in both changing established development patterns, as well as integrating AI tooling. Analyst Jean Atelsek and AWS vice president for developer experience Deepak Singh join host Eric Hanselman to explore the current state of AI code assistance and look at where it’s headed. Auto-complete, where the next bit of a line of code is filled in for a programmer, has been evolving over a number of years, but the arrival of agents to augment code generation and task automation is being to revolutionize software development. Changing development patterns is hard, but the benefits offer strong incentives to change habits. Where early uses had AI engines generate smaller code snippets that developers integrated, that’s changing to having AI tackle full functions that are then reviewed and corrected. Tooling around AI implementations are tailoring they way in which they interact with individual developers, enhancing their experience.
Application modernization is an area where AI can shine, as it can assess a massive codebase whose authors are no longer available and provide not only documentation, but also prioritize recoding efforts. It’s a task where the hours required for manual assessment can be daunting and error prone. Leveraging AI code generation securely requires that organizations have sufficiently secure development pipelines. Mitigating risks from confabulation and errors in AI generated code is the same process as ought to be in place for human coders, an area where some less mature organizations may have some catching up to do.
More S&P Global Content:
- The 2025 Generative AI Outlook
For S&P Global subscribers:
- Can generative AI modernize legacy code bases? It depends
- Tech Trend in Focus: Generative AI in programming
- Generative AI Market Monitor & Forecast
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, Deepak Singh
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Managing IT costs has always been challenging and the FinOps movement is working to tackle this problem. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Melanie Posey return to the podcast to discuss their research and what they saw at the FinOps X conference with host Eric Hanselman. Cost angst has been exacerbated by the move to cloud. The shift from capital expense to operational expense has been a complicated transition for many. The infrastructure spending growth that being driven by AI initiatives has only just begun, but is already concerning. As cloud costs have become material expenses, more focus has been put on managing them. There are a host of startups that are looking to provide tools and cloud providers all have some form of cost management tooling.
The shift to virtualization opened the door to optimization, but was one that only few walked through. Efforts at charge-back and show-back accounting created better visibility, but FinOps is looking to take things a step further by identifying costs early in the development cycle. Putting the vast quantities of operational data that cloud throws off to work requires a new focus. It’s another area where AI can help businesses work their way out of the looming costs that AI applications create. It requires bringing together lines of business, development teams and IT operations, but the benefits could be significant.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey,
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
A set of questions are being asked about whether the velocity of datacenter build outs is wavering. Analyst Dan Thompson returns to the podcast to explore the realities of the market with host Eric Hanselman. There are some facts that raised the questions, including Microsoft demurring on some datacenter projects, and they have fueled concerns that the heady pace might slacken. The DeepSeek model’s debut with claims of lower training requirements spooked the tech markets in January. There have been layoffs. Are these harbingers of AI doom?
In the same way that DeepSeek signaled the next phase of optimization in AI models, datacenter markets can be expected to adjust over time. The difference is that the time scales for the two areas are vastly different. With AI ecosystems seemingly cycling daily, the multiyear scheduling of datacenters might appear glacial by comparison. But it’s a market influenced by many factors, including a complex supply chain. Capital spending across hyperscale cloud providers remains healthy and maintains an eye on a future with much greater density of AI functionality. We’re still a long way from a correction.
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- 2025 US datacenters and nuclear energy report
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Dan Thompson
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
In the rush to build out AI applications, a full understanding of the dynamics of personal data management can be difficult to achieve. As we kick off Pride Month, the complexities of personal data handling deserve more attention and Emily Jasper and Alan Moore join host Eric Hanselman to discuss the concerns and approaches to address privacy issues. Enterprises accumulate both operational and self-reported personal data, some with regulatory requirements for collection and reporting and some in support of employee development. Is that data the new oil that can fuel their efforts, the new water that can leak or the new plutonium that can be powerful, but also dangerous?
With many systems accumulating data, it can be difficult to ensure that right data is in the right places. Data migration is hard, but can be necessary in technology transitions. Data is the raw material that builds AI value, but personal data increases the risks of not only expose, but of creating presumptions by AI models of association and affiliation. There are additional risks in inadequate datasets for training. As we’ve pointed out in previous episodes, organizations need to be aware of how well their training data reflects the populations they intend to serve.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Emily Jasper, Alan Moore
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Around the globe, municipalities are facing a set of challenges managing the impacts of more extreme weather, while addressing aging infrastructure and more chronic issues, such as rising heat and sea levels. There are a set of technologies that can help them to both be aware of the risks and improve planning to work on mitigating them. The Internet of Things (IoT) can play a role in sensing and advances in digital twins can aid in simulating climate-driven events. It’s a set of tools that, when applied well, can help to better build resilience.
At the same time, the resilience of utility systems are being challenged by tech advances. Power consumption by datacenters is impacting the load on electricity grids. The transition to greater use of renewables is changing grid dynamics and investment is needed to maintain stability. Climate impacts can have differing impacts across society and efforts manage equity are critical. The upcoming webinar will dig into all of this in more detail – join us to continue the conversation!
Join the webinar: Risk to Resilience: How Technology is Reinventing Urban Preparedness
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Therese Feng, Zoë Roth, Johan Vermij
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
With all of the drama associated with AI, it’s easy to miss the need to understand the foundations that deliver the data that is the raw element from which AI value is built. Databases and storage infrastructure are critical components that have to work in concert with AI plans and returning guests Henry Baltazar and James Curtis join host Eric Hanselman to discuss what’s been happening and what enterprises need to know about the future. Databases and storage management systems have been intertwined for a long time and AI pressures are tightening that connection. Storage systems perform analytics on the data they store to optimize its handling, tracking use and characteristics. The same insights that aid in compression and tiering are also useful in classifying data for AI. Data classification has always been a challenge for enterprises, as storage systems are typically disconnected from the data owners and applications that use them. Intelligent storage systems have been able to intuit the nature of content, including mapping databases and virtual machines. Databases have been able to leverage storage capabilities like snapshotting for resilience.
Into this mix a new set of AI focused storage and database offerings arrive that target AI uses. The question is whether the native database and storage systems can do enough of what’s needed. They already store key data and have valuable insights and classification capabilities. Some vendors are attaching GPU clusters to storage systems to provide high performance AI model training functionality. The major issue for most, is the matter of data placement. Shifting petabytes of data is no small task and concerns about data security and the costs involved now loom much larger.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Henry Baltazar, James Curtis
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual NAB Show delivered a more fully digital ecosystem when it convened in Las Vegas this year. While traditional broadcast technologies are still the focus, hyperscale cloud providers, digital media platforms and no shortage of AI were all on display. Returning guests Justin Neilson and Peter Leitzinger join host Eric Hanselman to discuss what they saw at broadcasting’s big event and the impacts of various technologies on the media landscape. The digital television evolution is continuing apace. The ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV standard has been rolling out across the globe, albeit a bit more slowly in the U.S.. The higher resolution, more interactive capability is available to over three quarters of the market. Multi-screening functionality is interesting, but digital advertisers are looking to the direct access to consumers as a better path to monetizing viewers and delivering a direct path to content creators. The smart TV market is also hopeful, driving the uptake of new chipsets and televisions.
The show also revealed the greater participation of the hyperscale cloud providers in broadcast media. Greater volumes of digital content are depending on cloud scale in ever greater measure. The creeping incrementalism of AI in media production still has to overcome some fundamental objections from studios and some content creators, but it is working its way into many parts of the industry. It seems like its convenience and velocity may be too much to resist.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Justin Nielson, Peter Leitzinger
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The game of Rugby is having a moment on the global stage. It’s attracting investment and growing its fan base and audiences. The Six Nations competition has just finished, with France triumphing over Scotland and the Women’s World Cup is on the horizon. With dedicated fans and upmarket advertisers, the media rights are garnering significant interest. An old saying contrasted soccer (football to most of the world) with rugby by saying that football was a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, while rugby was a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen. And today, both the women’s and men’s games are gaining prominence. Unlike soccer (football), the world governing body for rugby spans both leagues and has strong female representation on its board.
With high value advertisers driving revenue and both country competitions and national leagues creating a rich game schedule, media valuations are continuing to grow. From its origins as an amateur league, it’s become much more. There’s a nascent shift from free-to-air broadcast to paid media and streaming. It’s quite a scrum!
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Richard Berndes
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual RSA Conference on information security is coming up and it arrives during a very active security market. Analysts Garrett Bekker, Dan Kennedy and research director Scott Crawford return to the podcast to discuss what they expect to see in San Franscisco with host Eric Hanselman. The largest transaction ever in the information security world, Google’s acquisition of cloud security unicorn Wiz, has been echoing across capital and technology markets. It’s reinforced the importance of cloud security and its nature as a distinct technology segment. Enterprises have become fully hybrid in their infrastructure mix and they’re struggling to mitigate cloud risks. Part of the struggle is leading to tool consolidation and platform approaches to security management. It’s a situation that’s led by the fact that the average enterprise already reports spending a third of their security budgets on a single security operations vendor.
Of course, AI will be front and center and this year agentic AI is being examined as a way to scale up security capabilities. AI capabilities have been part of security tools for many years and the challenge has always been building trust in automated actions. It will be some time before autonomous actions are turned on. There’s a long history of keeping human review in place as trust is built. It’s not that different from previous technology automation transitions, but with security, there’s a greater imperative.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Garrett Bekker, Scott Crawford, Daniel Kennedy
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Cloud native patterns and open source developments were on display at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference. The biannual gathering was showing how the container ecosystem continues to mature and analysts Jean Atelsek and William Fellows join host Eric Hanselman to explore their insights. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the Linux Foundation, continues to expand the event and advance the maturity of the open source projects that are part of its purview. Day 2 operations have been gaining focus and the pre-conference FinOps X event was an indication of the emphasis on operational controls as it digs into infrastructure cost management. The opening “Day 0” events at KubeCon, which have been the forum for specialized project meetings, have become a key part of the conference, with over 6,000 attendees, almost half of the reported 13,000 total.
The Kubernetes container management project is now over ten years old and one of the other signs of technology evolution was the integration of the OpenInfra Foundation, which managed the OpenStack project and other infrastructure elements, into the Linux Foundation. Open source projects are gaining wider adoption and one of the messages from projects and vendors at KubeCon, was the hope that it could offer alternatives to enterprise infrastructure stalwart, VMware. The CNCF is expanding its investments in improving security across the projects under its umbrella. There was also continued development of platform engineering initiatives. Bounding the expanding world of open source projects to create consistent development and operational tool chains for enterprise is one more sign of maturity in the container world.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, William Fellows
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The many impacts of AI extend across business and consumer interests and issues around privacy are some of the broadest. Analyst Paige Bartley returns to the podcast to discuss the results of two recent studies on enterprise and consumer perspectives on AI and privacy with host Eric Hanselman. Enterprise privacy concerns are shifting from regulatory to operational and reputational, as the awareness of the importance of data privacy grows. The landmark UK GDPR legislation was announced in 2016 and most early efforts focused on compliance. That’s shifted to building privacy functionality into the foundations of the way businesses operate.
PrivacyOps approaches are growing rapidly as organizations come to realize that customer trust has to both be established and maintained in ways that are meaningful to customers. The opportunity for businesses is to move from treating privacy as overhead to making part of supporting business interests. It comes full circle by helping to enable better data use for AI.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Paige Bartley
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
It’s come a long way from its game developer roots and the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2025 edition was so well attended, it was straining the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center, its long-term home. John Abbott returns to discuss what debuted and the implications with host Eric Hanselman. NVIDIA has taken a starring role in AI and this year’s GTC had all of the glitz of a Hollywood production – CEO’s of major tech partners delivered a video tribute and Disney-designed robots cavorted on stage with CEO Jensen Huang. The event reinforced the extent to which NVIDIA has become a systems and software company, rather than simply a supplier of high performance silicon.
The event highlighted not only new GPU’s and rack-scale compute systems, but also countered the concerns around declines in GPU demand raised by the release of the DeepSeek AI models. The shift to reasoning models for AI is expected to drive further demand. The impacts on energy consumption and associated pressure on energy transition plans weren’t mentioned, but are a large part of the larger discussion around AI.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: John Abbott
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The M&A markets are in a tough situation. Transactions are harder to get done and exits just not happening. To sort out where this is all going, Scott Denne and Brenon Daly return to the podcast with host Eric Hanselman. Investors across technology have portfolios that are getting long in the tooth. They need exits to return value to their funds, but there are limited options. The IPO market is tentative, at best.
At the same time, strategic investors are stepping back as they spend on AI. Capital expenditures continue to grow, with hyperscalers shelling out billions to expand their own infrastructure, as well as investing in AI startups. Google’s acquisition of Wiz is a massive transaction, but it is dwarfed by the ongoing internal investments. How far does this go and what will be the return on these investments?
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Brenon Daly, Scott Denne
- Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The arrival of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite capabilities is changing broadband market dynamics as it increases capacity and improves performance. Mau Rodriguez joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss where displacement is taking place and the potential for new market entrants. The Geosynchronous satellite services that had been the backbone of remote connectivity have capacity, but come along with relatively high latency in data delivery. They’re orbiting at tens of thousands of miles, which is very long signal path, when compared to LEO satellites at around 500 miles.
The broadband market is dominated by terrestrial technologies, with cable leading the installed base and fiber growing rapidly. The subscriber cost for satellite is far higher, but the deployment cost can be much lower than that required for remote locations. While Starlink dominates this market, AWS aims to compete with its Project Kuiper plans. It just needs to get a lot of satellites launched, first.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Mau Rodriguez
- Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar, Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The demand for power driven by datacenter expansion is a global challenge and European markets are responding with some interesting aspects. With there has been a strong renewable component to energy supply, the complexity of the energy grid has meant that unified approaches were elusive. At the same time energy markets have faced three crises – demand reduction from the COVID pandemic, strong renewable investment and market disruption from the Russian-Ukraine war. Into this congested environment, Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) offer a way to channel investment in new generation capacity. The EU has just announced guarantees for non-investment grade PPA’s, creating the possibility for expanded markets and extending the ability to treat them as an addition to commodity markets for energy.
Energy generation projects have become increasingly hybrid, bringing together multiple renewable sources with energy storage. Smoothing out renewable peaks can help it better address base load demand. Nuclear remains an expensive option, with approaches like Small Modular Reactors (SMR) still being a long ways off. There is the potential to have AI improve grid efficiency, by balancing demand and generation, an almost circular relationship, given that it is driving so much of demand. That will require more decentralization of the grid to increase flexibility and the acceptance of cryptographic protections for data sovereignty could allow workload placement near sources of power generation. There is a lot of potential for what has become an urgent issue.
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Credits:
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- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
So much of the world around us is sensing and controlling with data, but it’s not often coordinated. Smart spaces technologies put that data to work and integrate capabilities and Zoë Roth returns to the podcast to dig into the potential of these systems with host Eric Hanselman. Smart spaces have grown out of the sensing roots in technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and shares a key element – the need to link operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT). Things like building environmental systems have historically been separated from the technology stack supporting the people that work in the building. Integration of these systems has the potential for a wide range of benefits, including improving working conditions, enhancing physical and logical security and reducing energy use. Stadiums and public venues are putting smart spaces technology to work to improve fan experience and improve safety.
Extending to the macro scale, when smart spaces integrate at a city level, there’s greater efficiency and effectiveness across transportation systems, electric grids and governmental systems. Making this all work requires extending across information and functional silos. It’s a similar set of challenges that exist in digitization efforts in areas like retail, manufacturing and energy. As capabilities like digital twins and expanded support in edge computing mature, they hold promise to make smart spaces even more capable.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
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- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Mobile World Congress, the annual gathering of telecom industry players, has expanded to embrace a broad range of technology and this year’s event will bring together a broad range of vendors, telecom operators and industry leaders. The theme of convergence has seen real world impacts and Raul Castañon, Mohammed Hamza and Lynnette Luna return to discuss what they’re expecting to see with host Eric Hanselman. The rise of network API’s for security and location services looks to open the door to greater application integration. It’s something operators have been hoping for, but there are questions about how they’ll monetize it.
Many of the technologies that previewed in previous years are gaining traction. Open RAN technologies have matured and the ecosystem supporting them has expanded. There are still questions lingering about deployment timelines, but that seems to be shifting to a matter of when, rather than if. And, of course, AI is playing a role in much of what’s taking place in the exhibition halls.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Raul Castañon-Martinez, Mohammed Hamza, Lynnette Luna
- Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Of the many companies that are part of the AI wave, NVIDIA has been at the core of AI infrastructure and a darling of the markets. Their performance in the market is driven in part by consistency in their performance and Melissa Otto, head of TMT Research for Visible Alpha, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the sentiment around the upcoming earnings. The enthusiasm for AI has driven expectations higher and higher and the company has delivered.
The rampant enthusiasm for AI’s future hasn’t been without some cautious moments. In January, the announcement of the DeepSeek model roiled markets with the prospect of lower compute consumption for model training. The concern was that demand for all things AI, GPU’s included, might wane. It might also have been a reason for a jumpy market to take a step back. If you dust off your economics textbooks, Jevon’s Paradox has been cited by many as an indication that consumption could accelerate. Time will tell!
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Melissa Otto
- Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The next phase of the AI wave is the arrival of agentic AI – where agents can take action on a user’s behalf. That’s enough of a big deal, but when the head of a tech giant says agentic is going to replace most SaaS applications, something different might be afoot. Analysts Sheryl Kingstone and Chris Marsh return to the podcast to look at the realities of this suggestion with host Eric Hanselman. Agents could become the new user interface for enterprise data, but there are a set of challenges in making this work. On the one hand, one of the largest issues with autonomous action, accountability for actions taken, is far from settled in both regulatory and legal frameworks. On the other, much of enterprise information is still held in systems where it may be difficult for an agent to reach.
Agentic AI could provide a gateway to the myriad of systems that run the modern business. Opening access to data and the ability to aggregate across an organization could be tremendously powerful. Capturing the business logic that is often embedded in SaaS systems is difficult, but the shift to decoupling through API’s and the expansion of systems of delivery could open the door to agentic progress.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Chris Marsh, Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Kyle Cangialosi and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Ethical concerns about the use of AI have to start with training data. Too often, the primary concern is simply generating sufficient data, rather than understanding its nature. Emily Jasper and Abby Simmons are back to continue the conversation started in episode 198 with host Eric Hanselman. With generative AI, the data is the application in its most formative sense. Unlike traditional application development, where the expectation is that functionality will be expanded in later releases, GenAI applications require careful design of training data before training takes place. The perspectives contained in data age rapidly and model training doesn’t differentiate between outdated and current indications. Old data can effectively poison model outputs. Businesses risk alienating customers with models that are trained with data that don’t properly represent them. This is particularly true with marginalized communities, where language and context can change over shorter time frames.
While there is research work on model retraining, work in AI today has to focus on effective data quality management. DeepSeek is causing a significant rethinking. Human data cleansing can be effective, but can’t scale to AI demands. Data workbench tools and synthetic data approaches can help, but better automation is needed to ensure that data sets are truly representative. Data collection and data sourcing need much greater attention to ensure that model results can engage the target audience and not be a liability. It’s a fundamental question of accountability that requires thinking in ways that are different than legacy development processes.
Mentioned in this episode:
- https://transtechtent.com
- https://kevinguyan.com/queer-data/
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Credits:
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- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The National Retail Federation conference (NRF) launches just as retailers are cleaning up from the holiday shopping season. This year there was a focus on how technology can empower employees while reducing customer friction. Sheryl Kingstone, Rich Karpinski and Jordan McKee return to the podcast to share their insights on the conference with host Eric Hanselman. Traditional in-store retail concerns are a big part of NRF and innovation in Point of Sale (PoS) technologies, like softPoS and the integration of biometrics were on display. For the latter, there’s still the issue of consumer trust, as well as onboarding requirements. The show also saw an issuing bank debut its own PoS offering.
The promise and the challenges of AI were a large part of the conference. Delivering on AI will take infrastructure upgrades and retailers are looking at building ecosystems across technology vendors to share cost and risk. Digitization is going forward as logistics look to move from picking products to smart warehouses that can sense products. AI mastery can create a competitive advantage, but it requires the integration of a lot of moving parts.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Sheryl Kingstone, Rich Karpinski, Jordan McKee
- Producer/Editor: Kyle Cangialosi and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual technology fest that kicks off of the year, the CES conference (formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show), showcased the latest consumer technology, from smart glasses to smart homes. Neil Barbour and Stefan Modrich join host Eric Hanselman to explore what made an impact and what’s happened to technology debuts from previous years. The metaverse headlines of a couple of years ago have transformed into augmented reality. ChatGPT hasn’t been integrated into any cars, yet, but agentic AI is being rolled out.
Much of what’s on display at CES is a vision of the future. The transparent TV’s last year were early prototypes and this year they’re on the market, albeit with a hefty price tag. There is more that’s taking place behind the scenes in consumer interactions. Advertising is becoming more digital and smart devices are the new frontier in engagement. Media purveyors are looking to link consumer experiences across devices. The omnichannel strategies of the past have been realized in multi-screen engagement today. They are becoming the next retail channel in new and different ways that create opportunities, as long as businesses can master the technologies required to capitalize on them.
More S&P Global Content:
- Next in Tech | Ep. 185: Consumer Tech Evolution
- Incoming Trump administration's expected tech policy shifts
- Robot visions
- LG Electronics elucidates smart home strategy
- Gen Z presents opportunities and challenges for video entertainment providers – Highlights from VoCUL: Mobile, TV & Streaming Video Services Trends
- 2025 Trends in Customer Experience & Commerce
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Neil Barbour, Stefan Modrich
- Producer/Editor: Kyle Cangialosi and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Sports media are in the middle of a significant transition, as streaming media companies compete with traditional linear broadcasters. The Netflix deal for the U.S. rights to the Women’s World Cup is only the latest and Richard Berndes returns to look at how the shift is shaking out with host Eric Hanselman. Women’s sports have seen a dramatic rise in viewership and represent a new and unique audience for media providers. They’re also a fanbase that’s particularly dedicated and committed. That’s translated into increasing rights valuations, with Netflix being only the latest to strike a notable deal. This comes as advertising dollars are shifting to more digital spending and streaming providers are expanding their monetization of sport to more documentary-style programming.
As the value of sports rights increases, there is more pressure on pay TV providers, as they look to hang on to subscribers. Sporting events have the unique characteristic of a viewing imperative. Most audiences won’t watch, if the know the outcome. Early attempts by streamers were marked by some missteps, but they’ve upped their game and are taking a strong position in sports media. Consumer cord-cutting is continuing in a trend that favors streaming outlets and sport is a big part of where they see growth. How much sporting activity can linear channels afford to lose?
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- Special Edition: Best of the Business of Sports, 2024
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Richard Berndes
- Producer/Editor: Darren Rose and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
As the old Danish proverb goes, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but we’re going to kick off the New Year with an exploration of where technology is headed a little further out in the future. While there have been headline-grabbing projections about AI and other buzzy topics, there are underlying connections across the technology landscape that are weaving the progress of the disparate branches of technology together. Research leaders Sheryl Kingstone, Justin Nielson, and Rich Karpinski join host Eric Hanselman to explore these changes and take on the difficult task of sorting out future possibilities. The opportunities to create additional revenue are large – many billions are lost to problems in customer transactions that better technology implementations could address. Macroeconomic pressures have a significant impact and will affect the speed of technology deployments and refresh cycles.
Improvements in technology infrastructure are a critical part of being able to generate better outcomes. The world of sensors and IoT has made it into sports in increasing player performance and enhancing viewer experience with more detailed statistics, but stadiums have to be equipped with the technology and connectivity to make it possible. Advertising spending is becoming increasingly digital, but advertisers want greater breadth that connected devices like smart TV’s can provide. Those digital pathways can become new retail channels, but, once again, the infrastructure has to be in place to make it happen.
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- 2025 Outlooks
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Sheryl Kingstone, Justin Nielson, Rich Karpinski
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Mysterious lights are seen in the sky above New Jersey, throwing many into a panic. Is this the current concern about drones or the War of the Worlds radio broadcast 86 years ago? There are interesting similarities and analyst Johan Vermij returns to the podcast to kick off the New Year discussing aliens, drones and the more recent furor in the Garden State. Various forms of drones, in the air, in the seas and on land are becoming a ubiquitous resource. Costs have come down and they’ve become much more capable. But they’re still not well understood by society at large. The New Jersey sightings are still being investigated, but many seem attributable to more conventional aviation activities. That’s not to say that these sightings can be disregarded. There are many documented cases of geopolitically driven military surveillance, with arrests of drone pilots with apparently nefarious intent around the globe. This is one more factor in play in the very complex world of drones today.
It’s all too easy to deflect the conversation around drones from the many practical uses in which they’re put to work today. Drones are being used to aid first responders, with drone-in-a-box (DiaB) technologies available to be first on the scene to enhance situational awareness in critical situations. They’re surveying crops to increase yields while reducing pesticide use, finding methane leaks to reduce gas emissions and improving maintenance of cell towers and power transmission lines. And they’ve revolutionized the battlefield, creating an asymmetric advantage and driving a rapid evolution of technologies in a conflict-driven proving ground. We won’t see the replacement of jets and howitzers, but drone’s impacts have already been far reaching.
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- 2025 Trends in IoT, Edge & Digital Industries
- How the Russia-Ukraine war is raising the bar for the drone industry
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Johan Vermij
- Producer/Editor: Kyle Cangialosi and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
In the rush to deliver data to AI projects, it’s all to easy for teams to pull data that’s most easily accessible, without given consideration to its nature and scope. Emily Jasper and Abby Simmons return to discuss ethical concerns about the data that feeds AI projects with host Eric Hanselman. AI implementations place a much greater burden on data quality than traditional IT projects. When data becomes the product, development practices, such as minimum viable product (MVP) releases, require that data be held to a much higher quality standard to address ethical concerns about its suitability. If a dataset contains bias or lacks representation for the community it serves, it will not only fall short in function, but can reinforce the bias and errors in the data. In effect, it becomes its own data poisoning attack, one of the key security concerns in AI applications.
Ethical approaches to AI applications have to focus on ensuring that outputs reflect the diverse nature of society and move beyond a narrow, middle of the road, average. They have to integrate perspectives and feedback from the full spectrum of the society they claim to represent. It involves additional work to achieve this and it can pay off in the expanded market it gives access to. At the same time, organizations need to put their capabilities to work to serve those parts of their community that don’t have access to AI’s benefits. This can help to keep marginalized segments of society from being left behind, in what is becoming the next chasm in the digital divide.
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- Next in Tech | Episode 119: Defeating Digital Deficiencies
- 2025 Trends in Data, AI & Analytics
- Take 5: Data quality and AI — a bidirectional relationship
- Compliance automation, Part 1: Governance, risk and compliance, or something new?
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Emily Jasper, Abby Simmons
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Other Resources:
- Trans Tech Tent
- Kevin Guyan - Queer Data
Enterprises are wrestling with delivering data to fuel their AI efforts, hitting roadblocks around data security and privacy concerns and sifting through use cases and models to put it to work. Too many are making high-stake gambles feeding vast quantities of data into massive models. Jesse Robbins, one of the founders of Chef, a progenitor of the DevOps movement, a builder of the early Internet infrastructure and now partner at Heavybit, joins host Eric Hanselman to look at alternatives to the path that many are taking in pursuit of successful AI projects. In much the same way that DevOps patterns look to shift application development to more smaller, incremental changes with a pipeline that drives continuous improvement, AI projects can work with smaller models and localized datasets to manage risk and iterate faster. It’s a pattern that avoids concerns of pushing sensitive data to cloud-based offerings by working locally. Using smaller models reduces infrastructure costs and the need for vast quantities of GPU’s.
Larger models sizes and data sets create two problems – more computational power and supporting infrastructure is required and more data complicates data provenance, security and ownership issues. Starting smaller and expecting to iterate on the results locally can have multiple benefits. If the data being used never leaves the local confines, security concerns are constrained to local environments. Tools like the open source project Ollama can deliver a choice of models to fit a variety of use cases and infrastructure capacities. Just like DevOps patterns, starting small and iterating quickly can get further faster and with lower risk.
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- Big Picture GenAI report
- Kubernetes community capitalizes on open source and AI synergies
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jesse Robbins
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Other Resources:
- The Data Pipeline is the New Secret Sauce
- Ollama
- Continue
Much of business success depends on successfully managing risk, but that includes not only those aspects under direct control, but also the risks in relationships with third parties. It’s a task that can be daunting for any business and Luke Nordlie joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the challenges and technology-based approaches to risk assessment, monitoring and compliance. With expanding supplier ecosystems, businesses are faced with issues of scaling their third party risk management efforts to match that growth. At the same time, there is growing regulatory pressure and associated compliance mandates. For many businesses, this comes at a time when they’re working with fewer staff, as they try to manage costs. To become more efficient and effective, they need to shift their tactics from point-in-time evaluations to a continuous compliance process, leveraging data to build better understanding of their risk posture. It’s an approach that has seen use in cybersecurity and insurance.
With increasing desire to outsource non-core business functions comes a growing supplier inventory. Better controls are needed for onboarding new suppliers to help understand inherent risk. But as industries rely on common providers for specific capabilities, concentration risk increases across them. Regulators are focusing on resilience, with regulations like the UK’s DORA explicitly requiring assessments of third party risk. There is additional pressure placed in areas like FinTech, where changes in the funding landscape are translating into needs for greater resilience. Performing due diligence in these new conditions is putting focus on technologies like questionnaire-less onboarding and monitoring using different data sources. Efforts at regulatory harmonization show promise in aiding third party risk management and helping it become a continuous process of evaluation and understanding of risk posture.
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- Getting Smarter with TPRM: Reimaginin Due Diligence Webinar
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Luke Nordlie
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard, Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The excitement swirling around AI often obscures the infrastructure that makes it possible. Since long before AI was at the forefront of technology discussions, datacenters have been powering technology and Jonathan Schroth returns to discuss datacenter markets and the complex forces that impact them with host Eric Hanselman. Datacenter demand is driven by the need for capacity in power, as well as interconnection. Recent subsea cable landings in the Pacific Northwest that link Pacific and Asian markets are driving demand in Oregon and Vancouver. That’s in spite of higher costs in the latter. Interconnection is also a factor in Toronto.
Constraints on power capacity are impacting these markets, as well as shaping the situation across Canada. What was once plentiful hydroelectric power around the Columbia River Gorge, is seen as beginning to plateau while demand continues to increase. The situation is the same in Eastern Canada, as winter power demands are exceeding what can be delivered by hydro. In the distant future, nuclear power could play a role, if small modular reactor designs can be deployed, but some locations, such as Oregon, have nuclear bans in place. Once again, key factors beyond the underlying technologies are the key factors in growth.
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- Seattle, the so-called 'cloud city,' is anything but with subdued datacenter growth
- Big Tech's construction blitz in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia Plateau
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jonathan Schroth
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual Big Picture Reports are out and they span the breadth and depth of our research areas, including capital markets, commodities, commercial real estate, emerging technology, M&A and supply chain. Analysts Melissa Incera and Iuri Struta join host Eric Hanselman to talk about what they reveal and the strong interconnections across them all. A core driver is the rapid adoption of AI. It’s affecting capital markets, increasing energy demand and exacerbating water stress in some regions. The commodity insights report looks at datacenter growth and the effects on utility grids. That growth is a bright spot in commercial real estate. The technology adoption behind it is not all smooth sailing, though. Enterprises are struggling with a number of challenges in achieving the promised value of AI.
The levels of capital spending for AI are concerning the markets and raising questions about when these massive investments will bear fruit. It’s a situation where strategic investors feel they have to compete to gain access to a critical technology. It’s also one where potential changes in the U.S. FTC posture could shift M&A thinking, if concerns about aggressive action are lifted. The reports cover all of this and much more!
See the Big Picture for 2025
More S&P Global Content:
- Powering AI – Opportunities, tensions in datacenter and energy markets
- Generative AI Digest: The debate over open-source vs. closed-source models
- Big Tech ramps up capex as 1st signs of AI returns emerge
- GenAI funding on track to set new record in 2024
- Calling all private equity, venture capital and limited partner professionals to participate in our 2025 Private Equity and Venture Capital Outlook survey! Share your thoughts on private markets sentiment and trends you anticipate over the next 12 months across deal activity, investment strategies, fundraising conditions, technology adoption and more. Results will be available via our outlook report published in Q1 of 2025. Take the survey now: Annual Private Equity and Venture Capital Outlook Survey
Research subscribers can access additional content, including:
- Moving from hype to ROI: Tracking success and value in AI initiatives
- Generative AI Digest 19: A roundup of latest breakthroughs and developments
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Melissa Incera, Iuri Struta
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
Fresh from the 12th annual Money 20/20 US conference, Jordan McKee and McKayla Wooldridge return to the podcast to discuss all things FinTech with host Eric Hanselman. While the theme of the conference, “human in the machine”, focused on AI, there was less drama, as exhibitors and attendees grappled with a changing investment landscape and regulatory pressures. The CFPB’s release of the open banking rule is generating significant activity as both banks and FinTech companies implement open banking capabilities. There was added regulatory scrutiny to contend with after a notable failure in the banking as a service market. Ecosystems are expanding in payment orchestration, as more providers open their environments to support multiple payment processors, driven by merchant demands. While there has been a significant pullback in investments compared to previous years, funding is happening and deals are getting done.
There were some long-standing trends that came back this year. Jordan is branding the renewed focus on cloud wallets as Wallet War II, as vendors vie to win guest checkout placements. Cryptocurrency in the form of stable coins, was back as means for cross border transactions. It’s an area where there is significant tech being applied. As McKayla discussed in episode 186, B2B payments are seeing ongoing digitization. The conference was rife with activity and there is much more that we discussed.
More S&P Global Content: - A primer on payments orchestration - Key takeaways from 2024's Money20/20 US - Virtual cards offer a boost to security, could help streamline B2B payables - Payments, fraud prevention enhance strategic value for merchants – Highlights from VotE: Customer Experience & Commerce - Emerging fraud typologies primer, Part 1: Fighting 'friendly fraud' in e-commerce
Credits: - Host/Author: Eric Hanselman - Guests: Jordan McKee, McKayla Wooldridge - Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan - Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
There is continuing positive sentiment among technology buyers, a trend that’s continued for a fourth quarter. Sheryl Kingstone and Liam Eagle return to discuss the latest Tech Demand Indicator (TDI) study results with host Eric Hanselman. The numbers have shown strong correlation with aggregate revenue changes for companies in the S&P 500 Information Technology Index. There are a number of interesting trends within the data. Previously eager spending intent for AI technology has cooled slightly, but remains positive. It has slipped to third place behind information technology and cloud infrastructure. Influence on sentiment shifted in some areas, but external economic conditions continued to lead. When contrasting technology intent versus lines of business intent, selling and customer experience focus predominates. The TDI serves as a signal that guides other parts of research and can help provide insights into market trends. When integrated with other data products, it can provide correlation with more specific markers to create forward-looking indications. When it comes to making the most of the TDI data, it’s all interconnected!
More S&P Global Content:
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- Tech spending intent extends consistent period of positive demand – Tech Demand Indicator highlights from Q3’24
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Sheryl Kingstone, Liam Eagle
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
As the seasons shift gears, there’s activity happening off the playing fields with sports media deals that are getting teams on their feet. Analysts Scott Robson and Michael Johnson join host Eric Hanselman to look at deals in women’s and men’s sports in the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NWSL and NHL. Streaming media companies are pushing into an area where linear media has dominated and they’re competing aggressively to secure events. At the same time, leagues are expanding both their calendars and playing fields. International games have become common as they look to build fan bases in new geographies. College teams are dealing both with player compensation demands and are stepping beyond the traditional conference boundaries to create matchups that will draw larger viewership.
Regional sports networks have struggled, with a notable bankruptcy disrupting the market. That continues a shift that was forced during the pandemic and continues today. Cord cutting by consumers has only accelerated this trend. Many teams are developing direct-to-consumer streaming services as a result. It’s still a question as to whether these efforts will be viable, given the constraints they face. At the same time streaming services are expanding into a broader range of sports. Pickleball, anyone?
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Robson, Michael Johnson
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
As the payment industry works to address security and fraud, they’re moving beyond being consumers of security technology and becoming acquirers. Mastercard’s recent acquisition of Recorded Future is the latest example of this trend. Jordan McKee and Scott Crawford return to discuss the dynamics on both sides of this equation with host Eric Hanselman. This is only the latest of nine transactions for Mastercard and it indicates the need for greater payment security in a number of ways. As transaction security is ratcheted up, attackers are shifting tactics. Identity fraud has become the stage on which this struggle is playing out. Fraud liability can fall to merchants and fraud prevention can build value for issuing banks. At the same time, banks want to minimize false declines to encourage use of their cards.
Mastercard isn’t the only payment company making acquisitions and it raises the question of this becoming a more viable exit path for security companies. The $2.65 billion deal is the thirteenth largest by a strategic acquirer in the 451 Research M&A Knowledgebase. American Express, Discover and Visa have been active in dealmaking, as well, but not yet at this scale.
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- Emerging fraud typologies primer, Part 1: Fighting 'friendly fraud' in e-commerce
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Scott Crawford, Jordan McKee
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
If your view of the technology that drives the human resources end of business is mostly hiring, firing and time off management, your head would have been spinning at the HR Tech conference that just wrapped up. Analyst Conner Forrest was there and joined host Eric Hanselman to look at not only the highlights of the conference, but also his recent research and market explorations. It’s an area that has seen dramatic transformation, as organizations work to manage their internal capabilities with one of their most valuable assets, their employees. Analytics now play a much greater role in many aspects of management. People analytics can address performance management to gauge and guide team effectiveness. It’s grown into employee experience analysis, as organizations look to manage and retain key talents and skills. Using intelligent skills gap analysis can strengthen training programs, particularly when it becomes part of employee growth planning. When it’s done right, investing in employee experience can also improve customer experience.
HR tech is another market where there is a tension between integrated analytical functionality and standalone products. The recent HR tech Market Monitor looks at shifts in growth, startup opportunities and market dynamics. Larger players want to maintain a platform advantage and newcomers are trying to carve out their own niche. There are a host of possibilities to improve performance, culture and employee focus.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Conner Forrest
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
As cloud-based infrastructure becomes a larger part of enterprise portfolios, there’s greater focus on securing it effectively. Analyst Mark Ehr joins host Eric Hanselman to wade into the acronym-rich world of cloud native application security. Like other aspects of cloud and cloud native, security is a matter of dealing with speed and scale. There’s more telemetry that’s available, but workloads are more ephemeral and extending the same methods used in on-premises security risks overwhelming security teams and ballooning costs. Decomposing CNAPP into infrastructure and application development patterns creates an explosion of subsegments – Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and many more. Security vendors are bundling the various pieces together into platforms, but buyers aren’t fully buying in. Efforts to move security earlier into the application development process, the “shift left” movement, has added the need to secure the infrastructure provisioning process that’s taking place in cloudy environments.
Cloud security has become the leading pain point for security teams, according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise study data, and cloud native skills are one of their leading skills gaps. At the same time, most organizations use multiple cloud providers, increasing complexity. Operational scale is necessitating a move beyond the siloed approaches that have been the norm for security. To provide effective security, data has to be shared across infrastructure. It also happens to be an area where cloud-based security tooling is taking a greater role.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Mark Ehr
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The energy impacts of technology have been a concern for some time, but the rapid growth of AI has added additional pressure and speculation about the short and long term needs of the datacenter industry. The Datacenter and Energy Innovation Summit will be tackling a host of these topics, from energy to investments on October 30th, in Washington, D.C.. Analysts Kelly Morgan, Steve Piper and Dan Thompson join host Eric Hanselman to explore the topics that are at the heart of the event, as well as the challenges faced by energy providers, datacenter operators and the technology sector.
Technology-driven increases in energy demands have upset the long-term balance of energy grid operators. Short-term increases in a business that plans over decades has datacenter builders and investors going to new lengths to secure the power they require. Nuclear power is back in favor, but the plans for Small Modular Reactors (SMR) from a year ago have been usurped by moves to repurpose existing facilities, with Apple and Microsoft both inking recent deals. At the same time, the large investments required to secure AI infrastructure are leading to some creative financing. Listen to get the details and attend the Summit for even more.
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- Datacenter and Energy Innovation Summit 2024
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- Next in Tech | Episode 169: AI’s Impact on Datacenter Power
- Datacenters and energy 101 — Powering through renewable intermittency Powering the AI revolution — opportunities and tensions in datacenter and energy markets
- 2024 US Datacenters and Energy Report
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Kelly Morgan, Steve Piper, Dan Thompson
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
We’re all familiar with consumer payments technology in its various forms, but business transactions have a different set of requirements and a very different set of technologies and market participants. McKayla Wooldridge joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the results of a recent study and explore the dynamics of this complex market. The core accounting operations of any business are their lifeblood and change can be challenging, but the pressure to digitize to streamline operations, reduce errors and fraud and better manage cash flow are fueling interest in B2B payments. Much like transitions in other areas, like logistics or healthcare, going digital has to include a bridge from existing methods to electronic payments. In a world where 16% are transacting in cash, that’s no small task.
There are many players in this market, including software vendors looking to centralize on platforms for both payables and receivables, as well as banks with business-focused payment technologies. Moving from paper checks to credit card backed transactions might be a good first step, but businesses need to leverage the data that their payment activities generate to realize the full set of benefits. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but significant benefits for those that can do it well.
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- Virtual cards offer a boost to security, could help streamline B2B payables
- Payments, fraud prevention enhance strategic value for merchants – Highlights from VotE: Customer Experience & Commerce
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: McKayla Wooldridge
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The primary exposure to advances in technology for most is in the consumer world. Phones, video and gaming are driven by the latest innovations, but have been experiencing a softening of the markets. Analyst Neil Barbour returns with host Eric Hanselman to look at recent research in consumer technology and explore some global market shifts. Phone replacement cycles have lengthened and North American and European markets are softer. How saturated they are remains a question for discussion. The new iPhone announcement has raised interest, but the unknown impact of the need for AI-capable end user devices is still hovering in the future. There have to be compelling applications to complete the picture and they’re not yet fully defined. The markets will need more than early adopters to thrive.
Asia Pacific consumer technology markets are transforming and may offer interesting opportunities. Console gaming in China is seeing a focus that could drive an industry that is in the doldrums in other parts of the globe. Home broadband connections are projected to grow and could drive technology purchases. It’s still early days, though.
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For S&P subscribers:
- Survey: Half of adults are in the metaverse; why is the other half holding out?
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Neil Barbour
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The flagship event for Salesforce, its Dreamforce conference, returns to San Francisco and some of the 451 Research analyst team who will be there join host Eric Hanselman to talk about what they expect and the key issues that will be in play. Sheryl Kingstone is looking at practical technology implementations as enterprises try to make sense of the real delivered value that’s beyond the hype. Paige Bartley is exploring the challenges in balancing data quality and controls while supporting privacy and regulatory mandates. James Curtis is digging into the infrastructure technologies that are needed to support the innovation needed. Generative AI will be front and center in much what’s going on at Dreamforce. It’s already seeing significant application in customer service. But organizations are wrestling with managing data to feed their AI engines. There’s a growing question as to the role of platforms like Salesforce in becoming the overarching manager of all data resources, certainly one that will generate a lot of discussion at Dreamforce.
The annual 451 Research breakfast will be taking place at Dreamforce and listeners should contact the analyst or account team to register to attend.
More S&P Global Content:
- Salesforce goes deep with an integrated generative AI strategy built on trust
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Paige Bartley, James Curtis, Sheryl Kingstone
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
The annual VMware Explore conference kicked off in Las Vegas in a new situation with the company now being part of Broadcom, after its acquisition. 451 Research analysts Jean Atelsek, Melaney Posey, Henry Baltazar and Liam Eagle were there with host Eric Hanselman and this special episode captures their insights about what was happening at the conference and how things have changed. After acquisition, there have been significant changes in VMware’s go to market motion, including a repackaging of products, a change in licensing model and some upheaval in its partner ecosystem. There has been a renewed focus on simplifying the private cloud experience to offer a more competitive position relative to hyperscale cloud providers. There has been a strong push on the merits of a private cloud-based AI approach, identifying benefits in cost, security and privacy. All of this momentum is being driven by a new version of VMware Cloud Foundation – VCF 9. There is lots of promise, but like the delivery date for VCF 9, specifics can be elusive.
More S&P Global Content:
- Broadcom hits the reset button on VMware packaging, pricing, licensing and partnerships
- Changes at VMware as Broadcom takes over, but multicloud VCF remains the spear tip
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey, Henry Baltazar, Liam Eagle
- Producer/Editor: Odesha Chan
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
To predicate a business decision on the risk and potential reward, it’s important to understand the size of the reward. Correctly estimating the Total Available Market (TAM) and the smaller Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is critical to that planning process. Research director Greg Zwakman joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the challenges in creating TAM and SAM estimates that support decision processes and build a convincing business case. There are a host of difficulties, including a dearth of relevant data, that can lead to “narrative” sizing. The problem with enthusiastic storytelling, is that it may not lead to great decisions and it won’t convince business leaders or investors.
A realistic TAM/SAM estimate has to be built on a defensible foundation, starting with an assumption tree with its roots firmly fixed in achievable market values. Use cases for the products and services and the use case density informs the perspective on market motions. An objective assessment of competitors, their successes and market geographies complete the circle. Enthusiasm is a key part of making a product or service succeed, but the business case needs a lot more!
More S&P Global Content:
- Network API TAM/SAM study (for S&P clients)
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Greg Zwakman
- Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith
www.spglobal.com
Connectivity had been having a moment through the pandemic, but the urgent need for high-performance interconnection has rolled back a bit and fiber optic networks and the markets around them are showing the effects of that change. Kagan analysts Natalie Colakides and Mohammed Hamza join host Eric Hanselman to look at what’s going on in fiber markets. While backbone business is solid, investments in last mile build out, the connections to homes, has slowed. As nations look to address the digital divide, the gap between the well and less connected, they’re having to push harder and invest more. The density of urban environments allowed greater scale, but rural fiber is more expensive to build per subscriber, given the lower density. At the same time, urban take up rates, the percentage of subscription to available services, are much higher than rural rates. It could be caused by rural often being served by brands that are less well known. More effective marketing could also be a key to accelerating fiber markets, but it will have to overcome latent friction in changing from existing services. With advances in digital homes, consumers will need more bandwidth eventually, but the question is when greater numbers of services and devices will drive them to upgrade. The stall in the current market has led to some consolidation-driven M&A and more may occur opportunistically. Growth is in the future, the only question is when it will happen.
More S&P Global Content:
- Webinar: Fiber Investments in the Spotlight Navigating the Data Center Frenzy and Tower Asset Evolution
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Mohammed Hamza, Natalie Colakides
- Producer/Editor: Valentino Alfred
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith
www.spglobal.com
The soaring estimates for energy demand are impacting utilities, datacenters and the companies that rely on both of them. Sustainability targets are taking a hit as power providers grapple with meeting technology driven growth and Adam Wilson from S&P’s Commodity Insights team and Dan Thompson from 451 Research’s datacenter group join host Eric Hanselman to discuss where this is leading. Datacenter demand is real and new builds are kicking off that are fully funded. Power availability and cost have become a key criteria for site selection. Both datacenters and power generation investments are long term plans, often decades in the making, but the large shift in demand has upended those strategies.
Simply getting power from where it’s available to where it’s needed is one of the major challenges. Grid interconnection and power transmission improvements are underway to address some of the gaps, but new technology is many years away. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) are only in their early stages and battery storage is still maturing in its capacity. It may not be until 2030 when technology and grid capacity reach parity with demand.
This the final episode that completes the conversations that had started with the AI, datacenter and energy webinar.
More S&P Global Content:
- Webinar Replay (registration required): Talk to the Experts - Artificial intelligence, Datacenters and Energy: Looming crisis or latest craze?
- Energy Research: Coastal radiation surplus in Q2 boosts earnings prospects for top solar owners
- For 451 Research Clients: US datacenter energy profile: Powering the AI economy
- For 451 Research Clients: 2024 US Datacenters and Energy Report
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Adam Wilson, Dan Thompson
www.spglobal.com
For the first time since the pandemic, the Kagan Media and Telecom Summit was back in person in New York, with a packed agenda looking at topics ranging from sports media rights to broadband technology and regulatory changes. Analysts Justin Nielson and John Fletcher join host Eric Hanselman to explore the insights and aspects that made up the Summit. There are media rights deals that have shattered previous records in the NBA and women’s sports, such as the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League. Advertising technology has changed how market participants are looking at monetization. Given this is an election year, ad spending will be booming and additional advertising channels add complexity to value and pricing.
Broadband was a new addition to the Summit program, given the importance of interconnection and the various developments that are roiling the markets. There are ongoing concerns about effective ways of addressing the digital divide, the gap between those that are digitally well-connected and those that are not, whether that’s because of availability or economic issues. The U.S. federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is trying to be the Rural Electrification Act (REA) for the new century, but funds have been delayed for years and still won’t address economic inequities. The intersection of broadband and content is swinging the pendulum on bundling of service offerings back to packaging of offerings, after years of focus on unbundling. Content providers, streaming services and service providers and hoping to garner new business as consumers look for simplification.
More S&P Global Content:
- 2024 Kagan Media Telecom Summit
Credits:
- Host: Eric Hanselman
- Guests: Justin Nielson, John Fletcher
www.spglobal.com
With larger portions of IT budgets being consumed by cloud, there’s a greater imperative to understand the nature of price, value and availability of cloud services. Since its inception in 2015, the Cloud Price Index (CPI) has tracked the current state of cloud services across the globe. New data tools have made it even more valuable and analyst Gabriella Brown joins host Eric Hanselman to explore how clients are putting it to work and the trends that are shaping the changes taking place. Using a basket of goods model and scanning of millions of offered services, the CPI normalizes cloud capabilities, allowing comparisons between providers and regions.
The FinOps movement is bringing new rigor to managing cloud costs and building capabilities to plan more strategically. With a greater focus on sustainability, the CPI can target green and low carbon regions for workload deployment. It also tracks trends, like the reduction and, in some cases, elimination of discounts on new instance types. While they can offer better value in price for performance, it’s an indication that cloud providers may be looking at more margin retention in their offerings, as they adapt their supporting infrastructure to deal with demand from AI.
Host: Eric Hanselman
Guest: Gabriella Brown
Links to show content: https://clients.451research.com/reports?cat0=349
Generative AI is having far reaching impacts on datacenters and new data shedding light on the nature and extent of the impacts. Analysts Melissa Incera and Dan Thompson return to the podcast to dig into the data and discuss the ramifications for enterprises, datacenter builders and operators and those putting AI to work with host Eric Hanselman. The computational requirements of generative AI are unique, taking demands similar to high performance computing or cryptomining and spreading them across a vast new community of users. The demands for GPU-based capacity are consuming more power, sometimes with order of magnitude increases. It’s also driving retrofitting of existing datacenters. The need for higher capacity and innovations like liquid cooling are causing a new surge. We’re at the beginning of the shift from a focus on model training to greater amounts of inferencing, changing where capacity is needed.
Looking at money flows in this market offers additional nuance. Investments in AI startups have been massive. Capital investments from hyperscalers in their own infrastructure is also massive, but it remains to be seen if they’ll pay off in equivalent amounts of revenue. Is all of this sustainable? It’s an complicated question in the many aspects of the word.
Host: Eric Hanselman
Guests:
Melissa Incera
Dan Thompson
Links to show content:
Webinar replay (registration required)
For 451 Research clients:
https://clients.451research.com/reports/204284
https://clients.451research.com/reports/204175
451 Research commissioned report highlights:
New Report from S&P Global Market Intelligence and Vultr Provides Unique Glimpse into Path to AI Maturity
Full report (registration required)
There’s substantial cybersecurity risk in critical infrastructure and addressing it is a complex problem that involves regulatory and private sector efforts. Joshua Corman, founder of I am the Cavalry and the CyberMed Summit, and Rob Knake, cybersecurity expert and former federal cybersecurity official, join host Eric Hanselman to explore the nature of the problems and the challenges we face in addressing them. This is a conversation that continues from their session at the America’s Growth Capital’s annual West Coast Cybersecurity Conference that ran alongside the RSA Conference.
One of the challenges in securing critical infrastructure, is that it’s often addressed as independent activities. That can miss the impact of cascading failures that can occur, given the interdependencies that exist across utilities and the social services that depend on them. Ransomware attacks on hospitals have taken weeks to resolve, rather than days. The Colonial pipeline attack shutdown services for a week. Behind this is a set of challenges that need to be addressed on the scale of the Y2K crisis at the start of the century, but that lack a hard deadline. There is progress being made, but there is much more to do.
Host:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/contributors/1535668/eric-hanselman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erichanselman/
Guests:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcorman/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rknake/
Links to show content:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/National-Cybersecurity-Strategy-2023.pdf
https://youtu.be/dhJvslRRlFc?si=TmNbbRuh4MeSu0BO
https://www.rsaconference.com/library/presentation/usa/2024/getting%20serious%20critical%20disruptionsthinkingresponses%20%20rumors%20of%20war
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/programs/chemical-facility-anti-terrorism-standards-cfats
Rumors of the demise of the metaverse have circulated widely, but the latest revenue numbers and market activity are showing that it’s recovering from post-pandemic pull-backs. The industrial metaverse is showing strong growth and attendance at the 15th anniversary of Augmented World Expo USA is up. Analysts Neil Barbour and Ian Hughes are just back from the Expo and discuss their insights with host Eric Hanselman. Metaverse and augmented reality tools are shifting the conversation from human interface to humane interface technologies, looking to better convey information. Semiconductor advances are putting more power into headsets and glasses, and remote rendering and cloud streaming are offloading some of the computational load to the cloud. It’s a combination that is bringing the metaverse into retail applications and making it useful for the people who are putting it to work. AI is in the mix, as well, both building worlds and performing language translation.
Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen said that software was eating the world and today we could easily say that open source is eating the software world. It’s widely adopted and deployed and has become a key element of the IT landscape. The last year has seen some players shifting their approaches to the market, but have these affected the fundamental values of the open source community? Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technical and Product Officer at SUSE and Cloud Native Computing Foundation board member, joins host Eric Hanselman at the SUSECON conference to talk about some of the dynamics of the open source market. Enterprises are leveraging open source to reduce risk in experimentation and tapping into the innovations that are coming out of the open source community. It’s not always a simple path, but it’s one that more are finding attractive, particularly in light of upheavals in the proprietary markets.
Guest: Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo
Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Producer/Editor: Kyle Cangialosi, Donovan Menard
- Published with assistance from: Sophie Carr
While most of us have a basic understanding of phishing, the email attack tactic that’s been with us for years, attack techniques and the attacker community have been evolving rapidly. The speed of that evolution is outpacing the ability of users to detect the latest instances of phishing attacks and the advances are not slowing down. Poornima DeBolle, co-founder and chief product officer at Menlo Security, joins host Eric Hanselman to look at how phishing has changed and the options available to defenders. The days of misspelled, badly worded emails are disappearing behind us, being replaced by ever more targeted versions, enhanced with the power of AI. Defenses are being challenged, from new tactics to appear more trustworthy, to advanced proxies that can subvert multifactor authentication. There’s a greater need for technical protections, as attackers get better at outfoxing even the best trained users.
Host: Eric Hanselman
Guest: Poornima DeBolle
IT buying sentiment has remained positive in the latest edition of the 451 Research Tech Demand Indicator study. It showed a strong start to 2024, but there were other signals buried in the data. Liam Eagle and Malav Parekh, two of the study’s authors, return to the podcast to join host Eric Hanselman to explore the results and their implications. The study explores spending sentiment and contrasts it with macroeconomic impacts, looking at shifts across demographics and technology verticals. Information security spending stays strong, but the gap between expectations in consumers is notable. High-income households are much more positive than their lower-income counterparts. The study data can inform those trying to make sense of the IT landscape.
Tech Demand Indicator webinar
Link to the 451 Alliance application
Recent study results are identifying where AI is being put to work and how customers and end users are reacting to its use. Sheryl Kingstone, head of the experiences team, returns to look at the Voice of the Connected User Landscape: Connected Customer, Disruptive Experiences 2024 study with host Eric Hanselman. This longitudinal study tracks changes in attitude and use of AI. While there is significant use of AI, there are strong differences between generations across the study. One of the questions the study raises is how users will work with AI capabilities that are integrated into products and services. There has been a slight positive shift in attitudes as there is more practical use in writing assistance and content creation. Enterprises are starting to integrate traditional AI techniques, such as machine learning, with generative AI capabilities and having success in customer service applications. It’s a complex landscape that impacts how AI will be viewed and leveraged.
Sentiment analysis is a common use case for large language models in generative AI and we’re kicking off Pride Month with a discussion of a recent study that examined the way firms are talking about LGBTQ+ issues in public statements. Returning guest Emily Sandler and Ilan Attar of Pronto NLP, who led the analysis, join host Eric Hanselman to look at what the study explored, how they trained the model used for the analysis, and some of the results. While many organizations make supporting statements around diversity, equity and inclusion, insights can be gleaned on the depth of the commitment expressed. It requires much more than the typical sentiment analysis, not only because of the common use of the word pride, but also because of the complexity of the environments in which supporting statements are made. In a year where DEI initiatives have been under strain, determining the level of “pinkwashing” that may be taking place can offer useful perspectives on positioning and support.
The power required to fuel the wave of generative AI use could be massive, but there are many factors that will determine when the crest of that demand will arrive. Analysts Leika Kawasaki and Dan Thompson join host Eric Hanselman to look at recent research in current demand profiles and discuss where it’s headed. The demand for AI infrastructure is here today, but additional datacenter capacity takes years to build. Feeding AI hunger has become a supply chain problem. It’s demand that can reach 92 MW and will certainly go higher, when the full force of AI requirements are evaluated.
As organizations push to realize the benefits of AI, they are increasingly challenged to deliver the necessary data to fuel their initiatives. While most have data repositories to draw from, the quality and accessibility of that data can be an issue. Shiv Trisal of Databricks and John Shirripa, product manager for distribution solutions at S&P Global Market Intelligence, join host Eric Hanselman to explore the nature of these challenges and ways to address them. One of the major benefits of AI tooling is the democratization of access to data and it has to be a primary goal, but it’s not always easy to achieve. It means pulling together complex data sets and being able to wrap the necessary controls around them. Governance concerns demand better data quality at the outset, to make the path to implementation simpler.
This week’s guests:Shiv Trisal, global industry lead for manufacturing and industry at DatabricksJohn Shirripa, product manager, distribution solutions at S&P Global Market Intelligence
In this special report from the RSA Conference, we hear from seven of the team who were there at the event. It’s a set of quick takes on the latest trends and take aways from the conference in discussions with host Eric Hanselman. Whether it’s AI, cybersecurity or M&A, there was a lot going on and a lot to sort out.
Guests:Scott Crawford, Research director for information securityGarrett Bekker, Principal research analystDan Kennedy, Principal research analystPaige Bartley, Senior research analystMark Ehr, Principal research analystJustin Lam, Senior research analystBrenon Daly, Research director, M&A
The flexibility and adaptability of cloud-based infrastructure brings great value to enterprises, but most have been wrestling with managing cloud costs. Melanie Posey, Jean Atelsek and William Fellows join host Eric Hanselman to look at FinOps, the cost management initiative that is looking to regain control of infrastructure costs in this new model. Hyperscalers are expanding their tooling and a bevy of startups are angling to optimize both operations and deployment. It’s not a simple path.
The NAB show, what’s become not only a venue for broadcast innovations, but also the latest in consumer electronics, has just wrapped up. Analysts Justin Nielson and Peter Leitzinger join host Eric Hanselman to discuss their thoughts on the show and perspectives on NextGen TV, AI capabilities and advertising. For over 100 years, the NAB show has served as a forum for content alignment and it’s taking on more. High-definition television got another boost with advances in ATSC 3.0 delivery.
The annual gathering of the business side of the cybersecurity industry, the RSA Conference, will kick off in early May. Scott Crawford and Dan Kennedy return to preview what they’ll be expecting with host Eric Hanselman. The upheaval in the security markets is being mirrored at the conference, with one major vendor deciding not to exhibit and consolidation taking place. All of this takes place as security teams struggle with operational scale. AI to the rescue? We’ll have to see.
Semiconductors are back in the spotlight with the shortage of GPU’s in the generative AI explosion. But the supply chain that produces them is complex and is not a simple thing to accelerate or scale up. This episode brings Next in Tech together with the Economics and Country Risk podcast, hosted by Kristen Hallam. Chris Rogers and John Abbott join us to dig into the dynamics and geopolitical pressures that make the supply chain so difficult to fix.
Effectively managing information security for any enterprise can be a challenge, but airlines have to deal with the compounding effects of regulations in multiple domains, life safety issues and much more. Air New Zealand CISO, Phil Ross, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss prioritizing cybersecurity efforts, the practical aspects of zero trust and the potential of new security architectures. Tackling technical debt can be struggle, particularly in risk averse areas, like aviation.
While getting to a cloud native development pattern is a goal for most organizations, it can be a significant journey to transform both infrastructure and processes. Analyst Carl Lehmann joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the paths that can move enterprises forward. DevOps approaches can speed development, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) can change ways of managing risk and platform engineering can simplify tool sets, but adoption does not always follow a straight line.
The integration of payment technologies in the automotive realm offers interesting potential, but it has to be done with care to ensure customer experience meets expectations. FinTech’s move into the EV software ecosystem is a first step and analysts Beatriz Minamy and Sophia Furber join host Eric Hanselman to explore automotive as the latest software platform to embed payments, what’s needed, concerns about fraud and how the market is evolving. It can be more than charging, if it’s done well.
While there is no end of generative AI discussion, it’s not often clear how it’s being used. Nick Patience and Alex Johnston return to explore the results of a recent study that digs into AI use cases with host Eric Hanselman. Projects are charging forward and concerns around data dominate. Getting access to data remains challenging, but, as use matures, data quality has become increasingly critical. Interestingly, trust in AI results is declining as understanding grows. Hallucination anyone?
The spring edition of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon/CloudNativeCon is about to get underway and Jean Atelsek and William Fellows return to discuss what will be playing out in the sessions and on the exhibit floor with host Eric Hanselman. The next stage of licensing pull back from a number of open source providers is on display, as Open Core revenue models are realigned. FinOps efforts try to tame operational costs and evolution of platform engineering approaches continues.
The curtain has come down on Mobile World Congress for 2024, but the repercussions are just beginning to settle out. Brian Patridge and Rich Karpinski join host Eric Hanselman to look at what happened at the Congress and how the implications are panning out. 5G advanced and 6G were being soft pedaled as operators look to monetize the investments they’ve already made in 5G. The promise of AI loomed large and the promise of API delivered network services offered a new service opportunity.
The world of gen AI is complex, but the web of investments in both cash and infrastructure that are supporting the many AI companies is wildly intertwined. Analyst Melissa Incera returns to look at what these interrelationships mean with host Eric Hanselman. Typical investment priorities have been contorted with strategic investors, in many cases competitors, are vying for stakes in what has become the must-have technology. Funds keep pouring in, but returns are far from assured.
Digital customer interactions are critical to business success. The effect on customer satisfaction can be dramatic, but the technology behind those interactions is often hidden. Raul Castañon Martinez joins host Eric Hanselman to look at Communications Platform and Contact Center as a Service (CPaaS and CCaaS) technologies and how they’re evolving. Gen AI can improve interactions, but is also increasing fraud. Check out the research here.
What has been the premier telecom conference has expanded to be a technology showcase for everything from IoT to AR/VR. Lynnette Luna, Julber Osio and Mohammed Hamza, part of the analyst team braving the 100,000 or so attendees converging on Barcelona, join host Eric Hanselman to discuss what they’ll be looking for. Will satellite have an impact on fixed wireless access? Could spectrum allocations shift focus to the Chinese consumer markets? There’s a lot to digest ahead of this massive event.
Many thought that supply chain woes faded with pandemic concerns, but they’re back and with new dimensions. Analyst Mark Fontecchio returns to explore its cyclic nature and the challenges technological approaches are facing with host Eric Hanselman. Shippers and logistics firms are refocusing on digitizing core processes and data handling. ROI justifications have become critical gates to projects. Recent research and our Digital Infrastructure webinar have more details.
While visions of smart cities might conjure up flying cars and robot delivery, the reality is that many are leveraging digitization today with significant impacts on a smaller scale. Analyst Zoë Roth looks at what’s going on today and the potential for the future with host Eric Hanselman. Digital infrastructure is a key foundation, but effective data management is needed to develop the full potential of smart cities. Recent research and our Digital Infrastructure webinar have more details.
The intersection of technology and financial markets in security is creating interesting dynamics. Analysts Thomas Mason, Dan Kennedy and Scott Crawford join host Eric Hanselman to dig into the complexities of cyber insurance and the technologies surrounding it. Insurers have struggled in the rapidly evolving information security market. Insurance is a key part of managing risk in any business, but the existential risk presented by attacks, like ransomware, has shifted those calculations.
Security in cloud-based infrastructure has different possibilities, but enterprises don’t always leverage cloud’s potential to improve security footing, particularly in networking. Quint Van Deman, senior principal within the office of the CISO at Amazon Web Services joins host Eric Hanselman to look at what can be done better to improve cloud security posture. There’s a lot more telemetry available and enterprises have to step beyond on-premises thinking to put it to work effectively.
Technology’s impacts are felt in many areas, including podcasts! We pull back the curtain a little with producers Darren Rose and Kyle Cangialosi joining host Eric Hanselman to look at the transformations that are driving media production. Concerns about deep fakes are all the rage, but the realities of the technical capabilities are still progressing in their ability to deliver professional quality media. Our podcast is benefiting from AI-powered studio tools, too.
It might seem like generative AI has eclipsed the metaverse as a buzzy tech topic, but the two are intersecting in ways that are impacting autonomous vehicles and wealth of pursuits beyond gaming. Ian Hughes returns to the podcast to explore what this interaction is creating today and where it’s headed. The complexities of the real world are difficult to recreate in training and simulation settings, but are critically needed, particularly those of unpredictable humans…
A set of significant deals in sports media rights have just closed and Richard Berndes returns to explore their impacts with host Eric Hanselman. There’s a shifting mix of free-to-air, pay TV and streaming providers competing for the rights to air games. The English Premier League just settled a four year deal with a record total valuation and the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League closed one at forty times its previous. All of this cash may be aiding gender parity in coaching pay, as well.
Increasing power densities in the devices that are populating datacenters are pushing their cooling capabilities to new technologies. Perkins Liu returns to dig into liquid cooling and progress at the Open Compute Summit with host Eric Hanselman. The OCP is working on extending its ecosystem efforts to liquid cooling as generative AI and other high performance computing uses look to leverage its greater capacity and sustainability. High powered GPU’s are driving direct to chip cooling.
As semiconductor vendors wrestle with building more capable devices, they’re turning to innovations to manage cost, improve yields and get to market faster. Chiplets let them pull together the best capabilities from different processes and geometries and build better parts. John Abbott returns to discuss the benefits and where chiplets are being put to work with host Eric Hanselman. Driven by the efficiency and power demands of AI, they’re being used in next-generation GPU’s and processors.
Many aspects of technology are interlinked with energy, but there are even more complex interactions that are in play. Our annual Big Picture reports are out and Veronica Retamales Burford and Nick Patience join host Eric Hanselman to explore the connections between water, both its use in datacenters and the issues caused by flooding and drought, energy, with its generation and consumption, and the demands and uses of AI.
spglobal.com/bigpicture
Vectors have an important property - they have both scale and direction. A new research product, the Technology Demand Indicator, offers this perspective in evaluating tech trends. Research Director Liam Eagle and Analyst Malav Parekh join host Eric Hanselman to discuss how it was developed and where it can be used. The panels, built from the 451 Alliance, generate insights that can provide direction.
To learn more about the 451 Alliance, visit: 451alliance.com
There are significant concerns about the security of the various publicly accessible generative AI tools that are available. Many organizations have enacted outright bans on their use for fear of exposing sensitive data. There’s a path to access the benefits of these tools while managing the risk and Steve Riley, field CTO for Netskope, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore it. Starting with role-based controls and moving in to more specific shades of access can simplify security policies.
As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, customer experience becomes an even more critical part of retail. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss data from recent studies with host Eric Hanselman. Customers are expecting better integration of their online and in-person experiences and effective blending of digital capabilities is needed to keep from missing out on potential revenue. Digital infrastructure has to extend into stores, alongside a full complement of payment options.
There’s been rapid expansion in financial technologies and its adoption. Research director Jordan McKee joins host Eric Hanselman to look at trends and highlights from the Money 20/20 conference. Where cryptocurrencies played an outsized role in previous years, practical uses of blockchain capabilities have taken their place. Concerns about generative AI’s negative impacts on fraud overshadowed benefits. Open banking initiatives stand to create new opportunities, as well as a few risks.
With the ebb and flow of workloads to and from cloud, data doesn’t get the attention it should as a critical resource. Research director Henry Baltazar joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the need for better data intelligence and results from the recent Voice of the Enterprise study. Gaps between data and storage infrastructure and the applications using it can lead to problems with application performance or increased costs with egress or retrieval fees. Better planning can prevent pain.
The excitement for 5G has waned after its initial rollout, but there is great promise that many of its capabilities will be put to work in Internet of Things applications. Rich Karpinski joins host Eric Hanselman to explore insights from the 5G Americas conference and look at impacts in the 5G and IoT markets. There’s a lot of 4G inertia to overcome and the 5G ecosystem and related investment is still building. 5G deployments are growing unevenly. Much more is to come, but the question is when?
So many of our perspectives on technology are driven by end user studies and numbers can be informative, but there can be much more to the story. The in-depth interviews that are part of much of the study work we do can offer nuance and Amy Hedrick, who manages this process, discusses the insights with host Eric Hanselman. The real world thoughts on current technology and its transitions can aid planning and decision making. Join the 451 Alliance for more: https://www.451alliance.com/
While the surge of interest in the last few months around generative AI might make this all seem new, we’ve been tracking attitudes about AI for a number of years and see interesting transitions in thoughts and perceptions of respondents. Sheryl Kingstone and Alex Johnston return to the podcast to explore trends in attitudes about AI with host Eric Hanselman. Strong generational differences exist in sentiment and a surprising uptick in the number of people using it and the frequency of use.
Generative AI is creating many challenges in the infrastructure that supports it. Nick Patience and Dan Thompson return to discuss these impacts and what they’ll be talking about at the Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit with host Eric Hanselman. Significant increases in power demand are creating a “Virginia Paradox” with local grid impacts. The shift from training to massive amounts of inference could only exacerbate things. Join us at HCTS to hear more! https://www.spglobal.com/hctsny
For over 15 years, the Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit has been a forum for sorting out the complexities of digital infrastructure and this year it’s back in person and in New York City on October 10th. Brian Partridge and Kelly Morgan join host Eric Hanselman to talk about the latest in edge computing and M&A activity in the datacenter world. Both areas are undergoing tremendous change and you can find out more about HCTS here: https://spglobal.com/hctsny
Managing complex application environments successfully requires not only insights into both application behavior and the infrastructure that’s supporting them but also the ability to correlate all of that data. Analyst Mike Fratto returns to the podcast to explore observability, an approach to effectively managing new application patterns that steps beyond traditional methods. From the cloud native world, it’s gaining wider traction and simplifying operations with observability pipelines.
The last month has seen larger players in digital infrastructure make the case for their views on how it should be built and what’s needed to embrace generative AI. Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey and Henry Baltazar return to the podcast to look at what was pitched at VMware Explore, Google Cloud Next and other recent industry events. Access to data is a key decision point, but many are still wrestling with cloud operating models. Fundamental questions on managing compliance concerns loom large.
The explosion of interest in generative AI is impacting many things, including datacenters, with some identifying a new beast in the AI datacenter. Analyst Dan Thompson returns to sort out what’s real and what’s “AI washing”. There are increasing demands being placed by AI and power densities in datacenters have already been increasing. More efficient design, liquid cooling and better air handling may hold off the need for magic sauce to meet AI’s needs today, but the future is uncharted.
The last few quarters of the merger and acquisition markets have not been great, but the few green shoots of spring have turned into a blossom or two. The winds are blowing both hot and cold and analyst Melissa Incera returns to explore what these lumpy conditions are creating with host Eric Hanselman. Emerging markets, such as private 5G are getting active, strategic acquirers are getting their pencils out, but private equity is still wrestling with the realities of higher interest rates.
As the idea of cloud moves into its third decade, do we still need to be thinking about cloud as a special concept in technology infrastructure? On the one hand, cloud technologies have become better understood and might even be considered boring, but it’s also the place where the latest technologies are available on demand. Research director Melanie Posey returns to the podcast to sort out how we should be thinking about what has become a reasonably mature resource with host Eric Hanselman.
In one of the faster swings of the technology pendulum, semiconductors are back in a very bright spotlight. John Abbott returns to discuss the phoenix-like rise of high-performance silicon devices, like GPUs, with host Eric Hanselman. New architectures aim at challenges presented by generative AI and large language models (LLM). Performant access to larger volumes of data is pushing levels of integration and chipset approaches. The ecosystems to support them are ever more critical.
We’ve talked about supply chain challenges, but the shift to greater levels of digitization holds huge potential to not only reduce costs, but improve sustainability. Analyst Mark Fontecchio returns to explore the challenges to achieving these gains with host Eric Hanselman. Data sharing across the industry faces resistance without a clear model for who benefits. Digitization is gaining traction in optimizing routes and improving performance and might open the door to electric vehicles.
While it’s not often acknowledged, much of the progress in technology is underpinned by the idea that “everything old is new again” and vector databases, a concept that is many years old, are having a moment in generative AI. Analyst James Curtis joins host Eric Hanselman to dig into why this powerful idea has become so valuable in large language models and other aspects of AI. While it’s possible to overlay vector functions on a traditional database for data access, it may not be advisable.
An impact of expanding digitization is growth in demand for datacenter capacity. In Latin America, that’s impacting markets across the region in a variety of ways. Analyst Pedro Schweizer joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the different dynamics in play. There are different trajectories across the region, defying any attempt to treat it as a monolith. São Paulo, Santiago and Querétaro may be the centers of activity, but opportunities are being driven by growth and subsea connectivity.
We’ve been tracking attitudes about AI since well before the current generative AI explosion and the shift in expectations is dramatic. Returning guests Sheryl Kingstone and Alex Johnston join host Eric Hanselman to explore differences by demographic and discuss practical aspects of AI that will have significant impacts. Model coordination is key and organizations have to consider where their training data is coming from and what they need to accomplish while addressing societal concerns.
The growth in Free, Ad-Supported Television (FAST) is impacting media markets as consumers blend new forms of consumption. FAST has become a notable player, generating billions in ad revenue and improving and increasing the content available. It’s still a small percentage of the Streaming Video On-Demand (SVOD) revenues, particularly in Europe, but the relatively low cost to spin up new channels is letting it address new and niche media content. It’s not all Baywatch and Bob Ross any more.
In the midst of wild enthusiasm for generative AI, it’s worth taking a thoughtful look at technologies, vendors and what the realities of the market are today and what they could become. Research director Nick Patience returns to discuss the results of the recently published Market Monitor with host Eric Hanselman. While it’s just half a year since the release of ChatGPT, the market for foundation models, text and image generation, and the nascent code generation segment are expanding rapidly.
Quantum computing can seem exotic, but there are a growing number of offerings from cloud and colocation providers that provide ready access for those that aren’t quite ready to step up to one of their own. Analyst Gabriella Brown returns to discuss the services and technologies that are available with host Eric Hanselman. It’s getting easier to use and now generative AI tools can translate natural language prompts into quantum circuits. Onramps for quantum experimentation are ready for all.
The idea of zero trust in security is many years old, but seems to evade clear definition. Returning guests Dan Kennedy and Garrett Bekker join host Eric Hanselman to discuss the various tenets of zero trust and look into issues with implementation. There’s strong desire to get to a zero trust footing, but a lot of hurdles to clear in the journey. A U.S. executive order has added pressure, but delivering reasonable user experiences is complicated by limited support and legacy technologies.
While the hype may have faded, predictions of the death of the metaverse are greatly exaggerated. While Apple never uttered the word at their headset announcement, it’s another step in the progress of “spatial computing.” Returning guests Neil Barbour and Ian Hughes explore the impact and the supporting ecosystem with host Eric Hanselman. Keeping clear of buzzy terms could aid adoption, as more practical uses are leading the charge. The future may be here, just not very evenly distributed…
We kick off Pride Month with a look at the technology challenges faced by many marginalized communities and effective ways to build capabilities to overcome them. Cybersecurity analyst Abby Simmons and returning guest Emily Jasper, president of our Pride Resource Group, join host Eric Hanselman to talk about efforts to bridge the technology gap, transfer skills and overcome barriers to success. Actions for allies like smartphone repair and working for Right to Repair are just the beginning.
There’s an interesting intersection between technology and the physical world that’s happening in eSports and it arrives with a lot of the same drama we see in traditional sports leagues. It’s easy to conflate recreational gaming, but returning guest Richard Berndes joins host Eric Hanselman to explain the differences and look at where this multi-billion dollar industry is headed. eSports is growing rapidly and the line between traditional sports leagues, media, broadcasters, and fans is blurring.
While we’ve talked a lot about the general aspects of digital transformation, in manufacturing there are an additional set of concerns and benefits. Consulting analyst, David Immerman joins host Eric Hanselman to explore where technology improvements are improving efficiency and how they’re looking at addressing a set of new challenges. Adoption of new technologies is more complex than in the IT world and issues like sustainability weigh heavily.
The modern digital business is wrestling with how to balance competing concerns across data management, privacy and security. Sheryl Kingstone, Paige Bartley and Justin Lam return to the podcast to look at how organizations are addressing them with host Eric Hanselman. Data is needed to improve customer and employee experience, but regulations are imposing restrictions on its use. At the same time, data security concerns are driving the adoption of new technologies. What’s a business to do?
With all of the furor surrounding generative AI, a more fundamental understanding of the technology can provide better insights. Peter Licursi and Chris Tanner of Kensho return to look at the history and technology on which all of the AI hype rests with host Eric Hanselman. Language models have been with us for years, but the combination of lower cost computing and the ready availability of large volumes of training data have transformed the types of problems that we’re able to address.
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With the attention given to the metaverse, it’s worth digging into the more practical details of how it’s impacting the need for infrastructure, and what the market impacts can be. Ian Hughes and Neil Barbour return to look at recent research, market forecasts, and the evolution of advertising in this new realm with host Eric Hanselman. As practical applications extend from gaming to the industrial metaverse and investment strategies change, branding and advertising are changing along with them.
The RSA Conference in San Francisco is a major event for the information security industry and this year will have the risks and benefits of generative AI to add to the conversations. Research director Scott Crawford and security analysts Garrett Bekker and Dan Kennedy join host Eric Hanselman to explore the realities of the trends and technologies at the conference. AI has the in improving security operations, but the attacker community is already weaponizing it for their own ends.
Networking has long been the static plumbing that just made connectivity happen, but that’s changing rapidly to address the demands of modern enterprise applications. Interconnect has to happen at higher levels of abstraction and with greater levels of automation to get to the scale required. Fears of robots gone wild in the network should be shelved in favor of managed API’s and automation platforms. There are still a lot of moving parts, but the transformation of a lagging field is underway.
The buffeting the technology sector has received has forced a serious reevaluation of venture capital community positions. M&A analyst Melissa Incera digs into the current situation with host Eric Hanselman and points at that there are some bright spots in all of the gloom. While portfolio valuations are down, expectations for valuations are also lower. That presents possibilities for both VC’s and corporate acquirers, but cash flowing into funds is more selective. The green shoots of spring?
The world of Financial Technologies is evolving rapidly and the APAC region is one of the most diverse, with some countries having some of the deepest levels of FinTech adoption to others, that are bypassing traditional financial frameworks as so much of their populations are unbanked. Analyst Sampath Sharma joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the wide range of FinTech approaches that are in play and how they fit into the global perspective. The future is bright but in some very different ways.
Risk analytics can be powerful, but depend on the quality of data and the underlying model. How can we be certain that the results are valid? Arsene Lui, associate director for quantitative modeling, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the challenges of quantifying uncertainty - particularly important in these turbulent economic times. Credit risks are particularly complicated to sort out, given macroeconomic scenarios that seem to shift by the hour. More details - https://spglobal.com/unlock
This year’s Mobile World Congress was back with the massive throngs of years past and some notable advances in the technological partnerships between hyperscalers and telecom operators. Brian Partridge and Ian Hughes return to discuss the latest advances with host Eric Hanselman. Private wireless got expanded focus while issues around spectrum realities are being worked out. The industrial metaverse has emerged as the pragmatic course for this buzzy technology. There’s money to be made there.
Shipping and logistics are the core of the supply chain and digital transformation could have a massive impact, but it’s not a simple transition. Analyst Mark Fontecchio and Eric Johnson from the Journal of Commerce return to discuss study results and the activities taking place at the TPM and TPM Tech conferences with host Eric Hanselman. It’s a business that has been information-heavy, but technology challenged. Perennial problems in skills and scale are holding them back.
Data can be a powerful tool to gain competitive advantage, but to put it to work, organizations needs skills and technologies that can be hard to acquire. Research analyst Paige Bartley and head of channels David Coluccio join host Eric Hanselman to discuss the implications of their recent webinar that offered some perspectives and paths forward for organizations that are struggling in the journey to better digitization. Check out the full webinar here: https://spglobal.com/Datathatdelivers
Breaking through boundaries and sparking innovation has been the hallmark of the CERAWeek conference for almost two decades and this year it arrives with a world that’s in much greater turmoil but one where innovation offers greater hope. Analysts Gabrielle Brown, Jonathan Schroth and Johan Vermij are chairing panels at the conference and exploring what they’ll be discussing with host Eric Hanselman. Crypto energy use, generative manufacturing and quantum are all on: https://ceraweek.com/
Breaking through boundaries and sparking innovation has been the hallmark of the CERAWeek conference for almost two decades and this year it arrives with a world that’s in much greater turmoil but one where innovation offers greater hope. Analysts Gabrielle Brown, Jonathan Schroth and Johan Vermij are chairing panels at the conference and exploring what they’ll be discussing with host Eric Hanselman. Crypto energy use, generative manufacturing and quantum are all on: https://ceraweek.com/
The technology landscape has been transformed, and not for the better. Brenon Daly returns to deliver a dour outlook on M&A prospects with host Eric Hanselman. Will a macroeconomic woodchuck nip the buds of an M&A spring? Private equity has pulled back, and some previous mega-deals may get unwound. The technology market is looking to just get through the current situation and move forward to better times. The webinar has more detail under events here: https://spglobal.com/Datathatdelivers
Hidden behind all of the buzz around ChatGPT is the dependence on the nature and quality of the data that built the models that run it. Peter Licursi and Chris Tanner join host Eric Hanselman to discuss how data drives the model’s capabilities, but can also create unwanted bias and scaling issues driven by the large compute requirements. Is generative AI the single most compelling piece of computational technology that humanity has seen? So much of what it can do comes down to the data.
The Super Bowl is coming up and there’s a lot that’s changing beyond just the teams that are playing. Justin Nielson and Scott Robson join host Eric Hanselman to examine the changes in advertising, the growth of gaming as it fills the holes left by crypto and the lack of streaming options. The linear version of the event gets a technology boost with the latest over the air digital video standard. There will still be beer commercials, but they’ll be different, too. There’s also a football game.
Infrastructure supporting technology is often hidden from sight. Understanding fundamentals, such as where the datacenters are that house so much of what we work with every day can be a complex exercise. A source of clarity is the Datacenter Knowledgebase and analyst Stefanie Williams joins host Eric Hanselman to look at what it is and how it’s used. Capacity and resource consumption for ESG tracking are just a start. http://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/2023-trends-in-tech
For our 100th episode, analysts Nick Patience and Dan Thompson rejoin host Eric Hanselman to look at practical things that we can do with AI tools today. Improving the quality of astrophotographic images is a complex task that AI approaches have radically simplified and enhanced. Coupling natural language processing, as ChatGPT has done at OpenAI, opens new uses. AI driven models have taken speech synthesis to levels where it might even be hard to tell which is the real podcast host...
The regular glitz and hype of Las Vegas was kicked up a notch with the Consumer Electronics Show, now just CES, debuting the latest in technology. Analyst Neil Barbour joins host Eric Hanselman to look at what was more of an incremental step up, as the event returned to its pre-pandemic size. The crowds were back, but there were fewer mind-bending innovations, as automotive and industrial collaborations took the spotlight and display technologies improved. And yes, there was a lot of metaverse…
New technologies cycle through visibility phases, surfacing when breakthroughs are made, and quantum computing has just had a number. Still, the buzziness of the previous year seems to have faded. Is quantum getting boring? Analyst Gabriella Brown joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss why it’s not. New records have been set in qubit counts, and practical applications are flowering. Growing numbers of tools make it easier to put quantum to work, and more businesses are harnessing its possibilities.
As the New Year dawns, there’s a lot to consider in tech. Simon Robinson kicks off the year with a look at the trends reports for the coming year with host Eric Hanselman. This year the coverage has expanded even further than the traditional 451 Research Previews with the larger TMT view, looking at cloud, multichannel and broadband, fintech, customer experience, security, IoT, data, AI and analytics, workforce productivity, media, DevOps, cloud-native and more. And yes, even the metaverse!
The holiday season has most of us thinking of customer experience. Still, businesses have to expand their thinking to fully engage not only consumers but also the employees who are interacting with them. Research director Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss how this season has progressed and look at what’s needed to make service a path to a better brand reputation. “Emotion is the currency of experience,” and businesses must embrace all available channels, including the metaverse.
The pandemic has made us all supply chain specialists as we worked to find things in a time of constraint. Eric Johnson, a Senior technology editor at the Journal of Commerce, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about technology in the logistics industry and what’s changing in this complex market. Much like the ecosystems around the cloud, there’s a Cambrian explosion of companies working to address logistics complexity. Check out the TMP Tech conference: https://events.joc.com/tpmtech/
Many discussions around modern infrastructure pit cloud and datacenter choices against each other. Research directors Melanie Posey and Dan Thompson return to the podcast to sort out best execution venue, workload repatriation and the realities of modern infrastructure. Spoiler alert – it’s all of the above and organizations have to build skills first to understand what’s working for them and what they’re capable of putting to work and then build teams to run it well.
Every four years, teams from around the globe compete together in the World Cup of soccer (football outside of the states), and beyond the hype and controversy of this year’s matches, there’s a lot of tech. Analyst Richard Berndes joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the game, media markets, and the tech impacts on the game. There’s a new ball with IoT capabilities that further shift decisions from referees to technology and soccer pitches that can pull the turf underground for protection.
Remote work and workplace upheaval have increased the focus and dependence on digital devices. Analyst Abby Balint joins host Eric Hanselman to dig into the data about those devices that the Digital Endpoint Tracker is made of. With a panel of over 10,000 respondents, it offers insights not only into device use, but also macroeconomic perspectives. Spending is riding through economic uncertainty and ESG concerns about device manufacturers are driving preferences. spglobal.com/451-research
Technology pervades many aspects of life, and ensuring that we’re building it with inclusivity in mind is critical. Sonal Sakhardande, Technology Group Director for Markit Digital, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore considerations to expand inclusivity in technology teams and the things they develop. While building diverse teams can go a long way to bringing wider viewpoints to a project, the team and their efforts have to be supported by their organizations. A superpower or two might help!
The 2023 edition of the Technology, Media, and Telecom Big Picture report is out, and it covers key topics in payments and FinTech, data centers, telco and edge, and the metaverse. Analysts Seth Shafer and Michail Chandakas join host Eric Hanselman to talk about the streaming media aspects of the report, looking at how the market is maturing amid changing competitive pressures. Check out the report here: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/the-big-picture
The 27th meeting of the UN Climate Conference is coming up in the second week of November, and the activities happening in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, will affect technology use and policy. Thomas Yagel, Chief Operating Officer for Sustainable1, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss what we can expect from COP27 and what to look out for around the conference. Technology plays a role not only in emissions but can also raise visibility into many of the issues on the table.
The 27th meeting of the UN Climate Conference is coming up in the second week of November, and the activities happening in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, will affect technology use and policy. Thomas Yagel, Chief Operating Officer for Sustainable1, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss what we can expect from COP27 and what to look out for around the conference. Technology plays a role not only in emissions but can also raise visibility into many of the issues on the table.
One part of AI and ML that's often overlooked, is the role that supporting infrastructure plays in delivering on its promise. Building automation to handle model life cycle and data handling is a start, but there's much more. Nick Patience returns to talk with host Eric Hanselman about what's needed to drive scale in AI/ML and what he’ll be talking about at the 451NEXUS conference. You can also check out the detailed session at the 451NEXUS conference here: https://spglobal.com/451nexus
One part of AI and ML that's often overlooked, is the role that supporting infrastructure plays in delivering on its promise. Building automation to handle model life cycle and data handling is a start, but there's much more. Nick Patience returns to talk with host Eric Hanselman about what's needed to drive scale in AI/ML and what he’ll be talking about at the 451NEXUS conference. You can also check out the detailed session at the 451NEXUS conference here: https://spglobal.com/451nexus
The payment world has transformed as it steps from the end of the customer experience journey to being integrated across customer relationships. Payments have expanded into many areas of finance. Jordan McKee, research director for Fintech, returns to talk with host Eric Hanselman about how enterprises can leverage this change and what he’ll be talking about at the 451NEXUS conference. You can also check out the detailed session at the 451NEXUS conference here: https://spglobal.com/451nexus
The impacts of data privacy and security reach from the technical into our personal lives. The concerns are intersecting, but are they colliding? Analysts Paige Bartley and Justin Lam return to discuss the different aspects of data with host Eric Hanselman. Is data the new oil or possibly uranium? Analogies abound, but managing data to extract value, while protecting it, is not a simple task. You can also check out the detailed session at the 451NEXUS conference here: https://spglobal.com/451nexus
We’re kicking off the previews for the 451NEXUS conference and Melanie Posey, the conference chair, is back to talk about the sessions and the expanded content with host Eric Hanselman. One of the biggest challenges organizations face in digitization and the shift to hybrid operations is complexity. It’s not simple to tame, but greater use of automation and operational integration can help. The conference covers this and more. Check out the full agenda here: https://spglobal.com/451nexus
While tech had led the markets as it was running up, it’s also led on the way back down and that’s impacting merger and acquisition activity. M&A practice lead Brenon Daly is back with host Eric Hanselman to look at how the M&A environment has changed. The fuel that was heating dealmaking has been cut off and it’s also raising temperatures in the deal process. Brenon is going to be diving deeper at 451NEXUS in its new, virtual format, starting October 31. Join us there! Spglobal.com/451nexus
While tech had led the markets as it was running up, it’s also led on the way back down and that’s impacting merger and acquisition activity. M&A practice lead Brenon Daly is back with host Eric Hanselman to look at how the M&A environment has changed. The fuel that was heating dealmaking has been cut off and it’s also raising temperatures in the deal process. Brenon is going to be diving deeper at 451NEXUS in its new, virtual format, starting October 31. Join us there! Spglobal.com/451nexus
The dramatic shift to remote work experienced over the last two years has changed employee expectations about not only where work gets done, but what tools are needed to work efficiently. Senior analyst Conner Forrest returns with study data showing just how attitudes have changed and analyzes the impacts with host Eric Hanselman. People are no longer satisfied with the “minimum viable work experiences” driven out of the pandemic. They’ve seen the future and want it now.
The dramatic shift to remote work experienced over the last two years has changed employee expectations about not only where work gets done, but what tools are needed to work efficiently. Senior analyst Conner Forrest returns with study data showing just how attitudes have changed and analyzes the impacts with host Eric Hanselman. People are no longer satisfied with the “minimum viable work experiences” driven out of the pandemic. They’ve seen the future and want it now.
Enterprises are working hard to meet the needs of developers and lines of business, but it’s a much more challenging task with the polyglot resources they’re pulling together. Senior analyst Jean Atelsek and research director William Fellows are back on the podcast with host Eric Hanselman to explore this shift and look at data that point to how it will be addressed. We revisit the question of if we should still be treating cloud as a special case. Can we manage a market with 1,000 aisles?
Enterprises are working hard to meet the needs of developers and lines of business, but it’s a much more challenging task with the polyglot resources they’re pulling together. Senior analyst Jean Atelsek and research director William Fellows are back on the podcast with host Eric Hanselman to explore this shift and look at data that point to how it will be addressed. We revisit the question of if we should still be treating cloud as a special case. Can we manage a market with 1,000 aisles?
Attitudes about cloud are maturing and organizations are putting the abstractions that they provide to work in better ways. Research Director Melanie Posey returns to the podcast to look at these changes and explore study data with host Eric Hanselman. The shift from capex to opex is no longer the main challenge. The data point to some success stories that these mature approaches are bringing. Will there be a time when we no longer talk about cloud?
Attitudes about cloud are maturing and organizations are putting the abstractions that they provide to work in better ways. Research Director Melanie Posey returns to the podcast to look at these changes and explore study data with host Eric Hanselman. The shift from capex to opex is no longer the main challenge. The data point to some success stories that these mature approaches are bringing. Will there be a time when we no longer talk about cloud?
The various pieces of decentralized finance (DeFi), Web3 and cryptocurrencies all share a common foundation in blockchain, but they’re often lumped together. Blockchain has a distinct set of uses and benefits and analyst Alex Johnston joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the insights from a recent study that looks at enterprise uses. Understanding is maturing, but some are delaying deployment as they wrestle with skills gaps. As with DeFi, platforms that abstract complexity can help.
The various pieces of decentralized finance (DeFi), Web3 and cryptocurrencies all share a common foundation in blockchain, but they’re often lumped together. Blockchain has a distinct set of uses and benefits and analyst Alex Johnston joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the insights from a recent study that looks at enterprise uses. Understanding is maturing, but some are delaying deployment as they wrestle with skills gaps. As with DeFi, platforms that abstract complexity can help.
The difference between augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) can be gray in some uses, but there’s a continuum of capabilities that have become essential for modern enterprise. Ian Hughes returns to explore super powers that AR/VR can confer with host Eric Hanselman and look at how enterprises should be putting them to work. Digital twins aren’t standard issue, yet, but they’re a key part of making metaverses valuable.
There’s renewed focus on the sustainability of datatcenters. Dan Thompson returns to explore what’s driving recent regulatory activity, concerns about efficiency measurement and what application architectures could do for sustainability with host Eric Hanselman. PUE and the more recent WUE are useful metrics, but they need to viewed in an operating context to understand tradeoffs. Report here: https://pages.marketintelligence.spglobal.com/Datacenter-Sustainability-Report-Demo-Request.html
Too often, the language in technology is taken for granted and yet it is the fundamental means through which we communicate ideas. Director of company information services, Emily Jasper, and copy editor, Patrice Calise, join host Eric Hanselman to look at ways we can be more intentional in language use and more mindful of the communities that consume it. Organizations need to take a wider view and check the lens through which they’re viewing their audience. Clarity and understanding can follow!
Macroeconomic concerns are weighing on technology markets, but there are conflicting signals in the data from the latest outlook study. Research analyst Malav Parekh returns to pick through the complexities in inflation concerns and interest rates with host Eric Hanselman. Respondents say that they can’t hire fast enough, but are also concerned about inflation trends. They’re worrying about borrowing and repayment, too. Will dreary impressions turn into self-fulfilling prophecies?
With the upheaval taking place in the cryptocurrency markets, there’s a lot of confusion about the realities of DeFi. Charles Jansen, head of DeFi transformation for S&P Global Ratings, joins host Eric Hanselman to focus on the distance between the two and look at innovations aiming to manage risk as the industry matures. DeFi capabilities can speed transactions while reducing cost and are already finding their way into payments channels. Useful abstractions are powering innovation.
Data-driven decision-making is accelerating, and organizations need to ensure that they’ve got the data and infrastructure to fuel this imperative. Senior analyst James Curtis joins host Eric Hanselman to look at data about expectations for addressing hybrid computing environments, data movement and advanced database technologies and why they’re critical for digitization. The data we discussed and more on AI and ML uses is available here: https://www.spglobal.com/setthepace
AI and ML can help insurers, but the InsurTech world has a lot more going on. Automation is delivering faster quotes and improving customer experience. Senior analyst Thomas Mason joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the impacts of market opinion and interest rate increases. Market worries about tech are hitting stock prices, but investment portfolios could be helped by higher rates. There’s promise integrating insurance into consumer purchasing, similar to what’s happening with financing.
AI and ML can help insurers, but the InsurTech world has a lot more going on. Automation is delivering faster quotes and improving customer experience. Senior analyst Thomas Mason joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the impacts of market opinion and interest rate increases. Market worries about tech are hitting stock prices, but investment portfolios could be helped by higher rates. There’s promise integrating insurance into consumer purchasing, similar to what’s happening with financing.
The year has been full of contradictory signals in technology markets, with some areas accelerating and others pulling back. Simon Robinson, head of TMT research returns to identify, if not make sense, of the forces at play with host Eric Hanselman. The winds of inflation, M&A and maturing expectations for ESG are beating across tech companies as they look to navigate a path through these choppy waters. Fintech advances in spite of the crypto winter and blockchain might actually get real.
Innovations in the payments world continue with the advances in Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL). It’s beloved by a new generation of online shoppers and big step from the layaway plans of old. Associate analyst McKayla Wooldridge joins host Eric Hanselman to delve into its appeal and look at recent study results that show both positive and negative angles for consumers and merchants. The latter want increased purchasing volumes, but the former are concerned about refund complexities and hidden costs.
While we’ve come a ways from Robby the Robot being society’s image of robots, there’s more useful nuance. Senior research analyst Ian Hughes returns to discuss a model of nine levels of autonomy with host Eric Hanselman and effects on applications of robotic technology. Self-driving vehicles are just a start and many of the enabling technologies are in early stages, but digital twins play a key role in training the models that are driving robots and link them to digital realms and metaverses.
The shift to subscription sales models is sweeping across many industries, but it’s a change that requires more than just a new way to buy. Senior research analyst Bruce Daly joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the shift in mindset it requires and the organizational challenges that many have faced. While customer success approaches can be supported by software systems, there’s an underlying organizational and operational change that’s required. More digitization complexity!
Supporting the communities that make up the modern enterprise requires visibility in ways that many might not have considered. Analyst Marie Froehlicher and Emily Jasper, President of the Global Pride Resource Group, join host Eric Hanselman to explore the path to greater understanding. Organizations have to understand that, unlike other corporate metrics, DEI perspectives are dynamic and have to consider language to capture the nuances of the constituencies that make up their community.
While information security budgets are increasing, the market isn’t being kind to infosec vendors and that could dampen M&A prospects. Returning guests Garrett Bekker and Brenon Daly join host Eric Hanselman to talk about those prospects and look at the implications of the huge Broadcom/VMware deal. That massive transaction has all of the hallmarks of a private equity deal and is an indicator of the shifting market dynamics that will be at play as we head back to an in-person RSA Conference.
Can cars make the transition to being a subscription service? Returning guests Mark Fontecchio and Johan Vermij join host Eric Hanselman to sort out what works in this transition and what’s possible. Consumers see value in vehicle-specific services, but have grown accustomed to using personal devices for functions like navigation and entertainment. Security is a very different matter, as consumers want greater control over data and where it’s used. Greater trust could unlock many options.
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is growing rapidly, but there’s not a lot of visibility into the set of supporting capabilities that have to be in place to support it. Nick Patience returns to discuss the results of the latest AI/ML study and to dig into use cases and operations aspects with host Eric Hanselman. While a lack of data scientists has been a popular concern, there’s a lot more that’s needed to support AI/ML efforts. MLOps can come to the rescue!
Organizations are sorting out what’s needed for their digital infrastructures. There’s natural synergy between compute and connectivity and senior analyst Lynnette Luna and principal analyst Dan Thompson join host Eric Hanselman to look at today’s reality and future potential. Is close enough compute sufficient for today’s uses? The promise is driving M&A activity between cell tower and datacenter owners and opening opportunities for service provider’s easier to consume, abstracted offerings.
Women’s experiences in the technology workplace are many and varied and research directors Katie Darden and Melanie Posey join host Eric Hanselman to explore the results of the Women in Technology study. Produced in collaboration with the California Technology Council and WE Global, it looks at different aspects, including the power of virtuous circles that women role models can create in tech and how perspectives differ across age groups. Important insights with some surprises!
We talk a lot about theoretical aspects of ML/IA, but this episode brings in Giorgio Baldassarri and Kieran Shand from S&P Global's Credit Modeling and DMS teams to talk about the practical aspects of Machine Learning (ML) implementations with host Eric Hanselman. They are tackling a complex problem in tracking credit risk and building ML models to identify higher-risk credit instruments. It’s a situation where the data can be incomplete and, in a regulated industry, model explainability is key.
There’s tremendous focus on environmental, social, and governance issues, but consumers seem to view these as more discrete aspects, rather than an integrated set of concerns. Sheryl Kingstone, head of Customer Experience and Commerce, joins host Eric Hanselman to look at recent study data that indicates the challenges and opportunities that businesses face. Reported declines in trust mean better communications are needed, but consumers say they value companies that live and express ESG values.
Does more data give you better decisions? That’s open for debate, but the quality of the data you use can have an impact on getting to decisions faster. Justine Iverson, head of S&P’s Global Marketplace explores the different aspects of working with data sets with host Eric Hanselman. Tools with higher levels of abstraction can put data-driven decision-making in the hands of more people and power a digitized business. Will the fridge of the future be adorned with data plots from school? Maybe.
Does more data give you better decisions? That’s open for debate, but the quality of the data you use can have an impact on getting to decisions faster. Justine Iverson, head of S&P’s Global Marketplace explores the different aspects of working with data sets with host Eric Hanselman. Tools with higher levels of abstraction can put data-driven decision-making in the hands of more people and power a digitized business. Will the fridge of the future be adorned with data plots from school? Maybe.
While we’ve talked about the uses of data, there are complex issues around securing it, especially with more remote work. Security analyst Justin Lam joins host Eric Hanselman to look into changing approaches that can address the fluidity of data in modern applications. The scale of data volume growth is straining traditional approaches. Organizations are wrestling with declining storage costs that tempt them to retain everything, but a better path might be to learn how to let data go.
While we’ve talked about the uses of data, there are complex issues around securing it, especially with more remote work. Security analyst Justin Lam joins host Eric Hanselman to look into changing approaches that can address the fluidity of data in modern applications. The scale of data volume growth is straining traditional approaches. Organizations are wrestling with declining storage costs that tempt them to retain everything, but a better path might be to learn how to let data go.
There have been chronic hiring issues in tech, even before the great resignation, and it’s been particularly acute in information security. Research analyst Megan Goodwin joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about alternatives to the traditional internal paths and where targeted learning can be useful. With concerns about burnout being ever more prevalent, training options like boot camps could help to skill up existing staff, but organizations have to invest to make those options pay off.
The conflict in Ukraine is having dire humanitarian consequences and is creating economic disruption. The impacts that many expected in the cyber realm have been more muted. Scott Crawford and Johan Vermij return to discuss what this means for the evolution of the attacker community and what organizations should be considering with host Eric Hanselman. Alignments between state actors and some criminal groups may not be as tight many expected, but it’s clear that we’re in a very new situation.
It’s being talked about in grand terms, but The Metaverse not a single thing or even a specific technology. Senior analyst Ian Hughes is back to discuss the many facets of metaverses with host Eric Hanselman. While some are laying claim, the metaverse comes in many forms and holds the promise of enriching human interactions. Gaming interfaces are a popular representation, but the interconnection can have ties to the physical world. Is this podcast a metaverse? Maybe just a part of one…
There’s an evolution in digital transactions whose various elements are being rolled up under the banner of Web3. Analysts Jackie McGuire and Jordan McKee join host Eric Hanselman to explore the fusion of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFT’s and more. Billions of dollars are changing hands through decentralized transactions, but they’re passing through just a few parties who are defining the markets with early stage technologies. It’s wild and wooly today, but changing quickly.
There’s an evolution in digital transactions whose various elements are being rolled up under the banner of Web3. Analysts Jackie McGuire and Jordan McKee join host Eric Hanselman to explore the fusion of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFT’s and more. Billions of dollars are changing hands through decentralized transactions, but they’re passing through just a few parties who are defining the markets with early stage technologies. It’s wild and wooly today, but changing quickly.
As organizations digitize their businesses, they’re trying to quantify the impacts on customer experience. Research director Sheryl Kingstone rejoins host Eric Hanselman to the results of the brainchild formed by the intersection of the Global Unified Commerce Forecast and the Voice of the Connected User Landscape (VOCUL) study. Quantifying over $300B USD of North American customer experiences, it has some fascinating insights. Digitally demanding customers have some of the highest revenue potential and almost half said they would pay a premium for the experiences they want.
As organizations digitize their businesses, they’re trying to quantify the impacts on customer experience. Research director Sheryl Kingstone rejoins host Eric Hanselman to the results of the brainchild formed by the intersection of the Global Unified Commerce Forecast and the Voice of the Connected User Landscape (VOCUL) study. Quantifying over $300B USD of North American customer experiences, it has some fascinating insights. Digitally demanding customers have some of the highest revenue potential and almost half said they would pay a premium for the experiences they want.
As organizations digitize their businesses, they’re trying to quantify the impacts on customer experience. Research director Sheryl Kingstone rejoins host Eric Hanselman to the results of the brainchild formed by the intersection of the Global Unified Commerce Forecast and the Voice of the Connected User Landscape (VOCUL) study. Quantifying over $300B USD of North American customer experiences, it has some fascinating insights. Digitally demanding customers have some of the highest revenue potential and almost half said they would pay a premium for the experiences they want.
Interest rates are top of mind in tech, influencing markets and M&A activity. Research analyst Malav Parekh joins host Eric Hanselman to look at the hard questions that concerns about interest rates are creating and discusses the data from the latest Voice of the Customer Macroeconomic Outlook study. Translating study results is challenging at the best of times, but nothing’s normal now, and working out the impacts is not going to be easy.
Consumer expectations about spending have been buffeted by the pandemic and their perceptions about the economy. Mike Nocerino, the author of a recent report on the results of the Voice of the Connected User Landscape (VoCUL) study, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about macroeconomic effects and activities like revenge spending. Consumers are saying that things are getting better, but that there’s a lingering unease. It’s a look beyond the raw economic data to the human side of the economy.
Last year closed out tremendously strong, with M&A deal volumes setting new records. Research director Brenon Daly returns to talk with host Eric Hanselman about rocket-like growth and the results of the M&A Outlook study. Valuation multiples are up a full turn, but will this continue into 2022? Interest rates and market pressures may begin to weigh on deals. The report’s here: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/tech-ma-outlook-2022-another-year-for-the-ages
Attitudes about security are evolving, but expectations about spending continue strong. Dan Kennedy, the lead analyst on the Information Security VotE study, is back to discuss the results with host Eric Hanselman. There is greater awareness of the realities of cloud security and organizations say that they’re buckling down to support remote work as a permanent change. It sounds like regulatory requirements are moving to expand their remit, but are they on target for things like open source?
Attitudes about security are evolving, but expectations about spending continue strong. Dan Kennedy, the lead analyst on the Information Security VotE study, is back to discuss the results with host Eric Hanselman. There is greater awareness of the realities of cloud security and organizations say that they’re buckling down to support remote work as a permanent change. It sounds like regulatory requirements are moving to expand their remit, but are they on target for things like open source?
While cloud datacenters consume significant amounts of energy, they are much more efficient than the typical enterprise environment. Kelly Morgan and Dan Thompson return to the podcast to discuss the carbon reduction potential of shifting workloads to cloud with host Eric Hanselman. Power reduction in more recent generations of server technology make a big difference. It’s compelling when coupled with datacenter efficiency improvements and better access to green energy grids.
Instrumentation and monitoring is what most think about for IoT in industry, but there is so much more. Senior analyst Ian Hughes joins host Eric Hanselman to look at how digital twins and threads are unlocking innovation in industrial processes, by powering simulations. It’s a shift where AR has become the user interface to IoT and more effectively integrates the human aspects in a range of businesses. Process efficiency is a first order benefit and there is much more that can be achieved.
The role of technology services companies, like systems integrators and technology consultants, is being transformed as they’re working to support their clients’ transformations. Senior analyst Dr. Katy Ring talks about this transition and the way some have shifted their relationships with tech services vendors with host Eric Hanselman. She offers paths to escape pilot project purgatory and looks at ensuring that IoT projects aren’t burdened with mandates that are too broad to ever succeed.
The payment part of digital engagement has evolved from a technology best left to specialists, to something that’s a critical part of customer engagement. Principal research analyst Jordan McKee joins host Eric Hanselman to look at how payment technology and functionality is being integrated into software platforms that are extending to financial services offerings to increase revenue opportunities. They’re leveraging market adjacencies to deepen customer ties and provide better insights.
The recently released Big Picture reports cover topics like metals and mining, insurance, energy and finance. Despite that variety, common themes link them. Research directors and report authors Ian Olgeirson and Scott Crawford join host Eric Hanselman to discuss different aspects of M&A activity in media and security. The former is playing for reach, the latter is reaching for functionality. Check out the reports: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/the-big-picture
The pandemic laid bare problems with the set of assumptions organizations have been making about work. Few have thought strategically about how work gets done. The future of work is one of topics in the recently released Big Picture reports and research director Chris Marsh returns with host Eric Hanselman to discuss better ways to approach work and employee engagement. Technology alone won’t fix it. Check out the report: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/the-big-picture
The term cloud native is important, but wildly overused. What does it really mean and what are the important aspects that organizations need to understand? Analysts Jean Atelsek and Jay Lyman join host Eric Hanselman to explore the ideas that cloud native embodies. Is it really Apps, Automation and Abstraction? Should everyone be on a journey to the Planet of the Apps? There are many aspects and similar obstacles to be overcome that we’ve seen before, only harder this time. Silo busting again!
Want your AI/ML project to succeed? Better pay close attention to the infrastructure on which you plan to run it. Research director Nick Patience returns to talk about the specialized needs of AI/ML with host Eric Hanselman. The more organic nature of AI/ML development needs support for its specialized needs. Training is not just happening in datacenters and the volumes of data involved create their own pressures. They dig into the need for data access and, once again, wind up at The Edge.
The increasing use of renewable energy sources is transforming the planet and cutting emissions, but they’re complicating the operation of energy grids. IoT’s capabilities and appropriate analytics can help adapt the grid to make better use of these options and senior research analyst Johan Vermij joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about where they come into play and how they’re being put to work. They’re part of ensuring that the benefits of these improvements are being distributed equitably.
Have we crossed a new threshold when William Shatner actually goes to space? Technology’s final frontier has seen skyrocketing interest and investment as hyperscalers and enterprises grapple with putting the promise of space to work. Rahiel Nasir and Craig Matsumoto join host Eric Hanselman to look at how capabilities in space-borne technology are going beyond communications. Real time analysis of imaging data can help with everything from natural disaster response to freight logistics.
While Tesla’s may grab the headlines, commercial transportation has a considerable impact on markets and their supply chains and IoT technologies could improve their performance. Research analyst Mark Fontecchio joins host Eric Hanselman to look at what’s underway now and where it’s headed. The technology is ready, but the hard part is getting it integrated into the myriad providers across the transportation industry. No electric trucks soon, but IoT deployments are getting in gear.
Every region on the globe has their own characteristics, but the high levels of digitization in China create interesting requirements. Perkins Liu, senior research analyst, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore the dynamics of the market and the forces at work. High levels of mobile phone use and the accompanying dominance of mobile payments are driving datacenter expansion. China also has proactive requirements for power optimization and green grid utilization to manage environmental impacts.
Tech M&A and funding events are flashy, but a lot of the real work in finance is done in insurance. And the insurance business itself is being transformed by tech. Tim Zawacki, Principal Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, explores these interactions with host Eric Hanselman and looks at how the pandemic and climate change are driving near term analytics. Insurance became a part of cyber risk management, but ransomware is upending expectations.
We knew customer experience was important and new research points out just how much impact investments in CX can have. Sheryl Kingstone is back on the podcast with her research partner Sudeep Kesh to talk about their results with host Eric Hanselman. They’ve shown that companies that indicate strong investments in CX have noticeably better credit and equity performance. The Digital Leaders significantly outperform the Digital Laggards. The ability to quantify that difference is exciting news! Learn more at: https://451alliance.com/nit
Sorting out the roots of innovation is complex and this special edition of Next in Tech brings in Guy Kawasaki, Apple veteran and inveterate innovator, to discuss its many aspects with host Eric Hanselman. The metaphors run hot and heavy (including a breakfast as a guide to empathy) as they explore ways that organizations can embrace innovation. Success stories are many and it’s worth taking a glance into the dustbin of history.
Hear more topics at the 451Nexus conference: https://www.spglobal.com/451Nexus
The need for more modern authentication techniques has never been more pressing and multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a key building block of zero trust approaches. Tom Gersic, VP of customer success at Salesforce and Garrett Bekker from the 451 security team join host Eric Hanselman to talk about what’s needed. The threat landscape demands MFA, but users can be hesitant. It doesn’t have to be this way. See Garrett’s fireside chat at the 451Nexus conference: https://www.spglobal.com/451Nexus
The previous year upended IT plans, but what have we seen in 2021? In this rebroadcast of our first Next in Tech webinar, Head of Research at 451 Research, Simon Robinson, joins host Eric Hanselman to reveal three surprises about cloud workloads, CX impacts and ML success rates. They discuss the analysis of IT research data, courtesy of the 451 Alliance, and what it reveals about IT trends past, present, and future. Learn more at: https://451alliance.com/nit
We’re living in an age of next-gen everything and tech infrastructure seems like it’s always in flux. Liam Rogers, research analyst in 451’s infrastructure team, joins host Eric Hanselman to open up what’s really changing and their impacts, take us back to the Planet of the Apps and generally work at making sense of these ideas. They look at the concept of observability and how it can manage the scale of cloud native operations and microservices architectures, even coping with ESG requirements.
Learn more at: spglobal.com/451Nexus
Cloud native can seem like a buzzy term, but there are important shifts in operations and mindsets that it represents. 451 founder William Fellows is back with senior analyst Jay Lyman to dig into its realities with host Eric Hanselman in a preview for the 451Nexus conference. As enterprises wrestle with the Cambrian explosion of cloud services, they’ve got to change their expectations of how infrastructure gets built. They need a successful journey to the Planet of the Apps to stay competitive.
Learn more at: spglobal.com/451Nexus
The idea of workload repatriation from cloud is a lively topic of debate and Melanie Posey and Dan Thompson are back with host Eric Hanselman to hash it out and duel with data. This is a preview of a session at the 451Nexus conference in October and digs into a fundamental question of modern infrastructure – where should workloads go? What’s the real goal? Mobility, agility or cost management? Does being hybrid mean never having to say you’re sorry? They look at options and motivations.
Learn more at: spglobal.com/451Nexus
It’s easy to gloss over digital transformation hype as just the latest fad, but there’s a core aspect in the drive to digitization that’s increasingly critical to staying competitive. Simon Robinson, head of research at 451, talks with host Eric Hanselman about the need for digital infrastructure and how it’s the foundation of the 451Nexus conference in October. It’s time to take stock of how far you’ve come and what you need to put in place to be ready for whatever the future throws at you.
Learn more at: spglobal.com/451Nexus
The pandemic-induced shift to virtual conferences and events comes with complex impacts. Melanie Posey, the chair of the 451Nexus conference, is back on the podcast to talk with host Eric Hanselman about the “interesting” transition, what she’s doing with the conference, and the expansion from the original Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS). Are virtual conferences here to stay? Will we ever gather together in-person again? They look at tradeoffs and preview what’s coming in October.
Learn more at: spglobal.com/451Nexus
With staffing shortages and skills gaps in information security becoming chronic, organizations are turning to security services offerings. Aaron Sherrill and Scott Crawford from the 451 Research information security team join host Eric Hanselman to examine study data and technology trends that are behind this change. Demand has grown up out of the mid-market as larger organizations also sign up for more advanced offerings, like Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Incident Response (IR).
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Failures in supply chain security in both logistics and technology are grabbing headlines and disrupting businesses. Chris Rogers, supply chain analyst from S&P Global’s Panjiva team, and Scott Crawford, research director for security on the 451 Research side, join host Eric Hanselman to look at the impacts of these recent increases, the shift in tactics by attackers and what organizations should be considering at they evaluate suppliers, shippers and software supply chains.
Backup is the main job for batteries in most large technology implementations, but that’s changing. Kelly Morgan, research director for datacenters, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore ESG and regulatory changes and how recycled electric vehicle (EV) batteries are getting a second life as supplemental supplies that can shave off demand peaks. The shift in chemistry has both opportunities and challenges. This is a follow-up to the S&P Global Battery Trends webinar and covers key points.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
The last year drove a dramatic influx of technology into healthcare, but that surge was already well underway. Brian O’Rourke, senior research analyst, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about the impact of the Internet of Things in healthcare and how organizations are dealing with the volumes of data that they’re creating. Technology management challenges are being replaced by those around data management. There are echoes from our data privacy episode and a reference back to the Egyptians.
Learn more spglobal.com/nextintech
Data privacy is an area where there are many concerns, a lot of confusion and a bunch of new regulation. Paige Bartley, senior research analyst, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss the importance of understanding differences in data security and privacy and the complexities that both consumers and enterprises have in getting either right. Security gets a lot of focus, but working out the privacy and governance parts correctly can have benefits for digitized businesses beyond happy customers.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
The latest results from the 451 Research Digital Pulse study are fresh from the field and Liam Eagle is back to talk with host Eric Hanselman about indications of disruption, transformation and expectations in technology. This edition of the study was itself transformed by pandemic realities and expanded its look into the broader state of its respondents. They were optimistic about the year ahead, but had striking differences across technology leaders and laggards in some areas, including ESG.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
It’s been a year and half since 451 Research joined S&P Global Market Intelligence and head of research, Simon Robinson, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about making progress in the time of a pandemic and the research focus in the year ahead. There’s an exploration of the frothy M&A market and a dive into what that overused term, digital transformation is really all about. There’s a lot more to digitization than just technology and organizations have to work hard to get it right. Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
This is a special edition episode with highlights from an important, live streamed event that addresses diversity and inclusion in technology. It’s based on a 451 Research VotE study on diversity and inclusion and features Melanie Posey, the study author, and Sarah Cottle, head of news, moderated by Sarah James, industry editor on the TMT news team. It’s a conversation that explores progress and challenges around diversity and inclusion and looks at how S&P Global is working to address them
Watch the livestream: http://ow.ly/LfIr50FrW8t
Learn more: https://www.spglobal.com/nextintech
With all of the excitement around 5G technology, the realities of real enterprise value can be hard to discern. Research director Brian Partridge and senior research analyst Erik Keith join host Eric Hanselman to peer through the fog to sort our where 5G is today. There are great enterprise opportunities, but they need to be ready to put them to work. Study data is showing that, while there’s activity, operators still have a lot of investment ahead of them to get to useful levels of coverage.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Networks are a fundamental piece of the infrastructure puzzle, but they’ve lagged behind the needs of modern applications. Mike Fratto, senior research analyst for Applied Infrastructure and DevOps, joins host Eric Hanselman to talk about network automation and what organizations can do to get greater change velocity from this key resource. Bringing developers and networking teams together can ensure that connectivity needs are well integrated. Even when it comes to network connected cows.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Is data the new oil, the lifeblood of the digital domain or some other trite phrase? It doesn’t matter, if it’s not working for the business. Matt Aslett, research director for Data, AI & Analytics, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss challenges organizations are facing putting data to work and how they can address them. Becoming a data-driven organization isn’t simple. The term Big Data may be passé, but the need to make tools accessible to a larger part of business is critical.
While the impacts of ESG are becoming much more visible, the nuances in technology can be harder to discern. Chris Marsh, principal research analyst, joins host Eric Hanselman to explore some upcoming research that looks at ESG aspects in enterprise technology. It goes beyond energy or carbon footprint, extending to working environments, data management and customer experience. This is a conversation that has to expand to putting technology to work improving business practices and more. Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Datacenters receive a lot of attention for their environmental impact and regulations are changing, shifting the economics. Dan Thompson, principal research analyst, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss some of the issues that datacenter operators face as they look for more green energy from electric grids that may not be able to provide it. What Dan’s referring to as the Great Green Squeeze should be a call to action for operators to put their skills to work solving this important ESG issue. Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
The RSA Conference is a main event in the security community’s calendar and was one of the last in-person conferences many of us attended in 2020. Scott Crawford, 451’s research director for security, and Garrett Bekker and Fernando Montenegro, analysts on Scott’s team, join host Eric Hanselman to ponder what to look for in the first virtual version of RSA. We’ll miss the human contact, but might learn something. We kick around hot topics like zero trust and SASE and have some fun with MTTSW.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Quantum computing holds tremendous potential, is the subject of a lot of tech speculation and can be strange and puzzling. Dr. Owen Rogers, research director for the 451 Research digital economics unit and the founder of our Quantum Center of Excellence and James Sanders, research analyst for differentiated silicon and quantum computing, join host Eric Hanselman to discuss where quantum computing is today and what organizations should be considering about its impacts, from qubits to encryption.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Discussions around the Internet of Things get tangled up with ideas about edge infrastructure. Christian Renaud, research director for the 451 Research IoT practice, joins host Eric Hanselman to sort out the distinctions and look at how the understanding of the value of IoT is maturing. We dive into how the nature of the IT/OT divide has changed along with business models. Once again, we’re back at the edge.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Are we going back to the future with semiconductors? 451 Research founders John Abbott and Nick Patience join host Eric Hanselman to flash back to some history that seems to be repeating itself in the processor battles we see emerging today. The supply chain tug of war between hyperscalers, the automotive market and mainstream tech isn’t playing out well for any of them. Will the demands of AL/ML further complicate these strains? We echo the last episode, as we keep winding up at the edge.
The last year has seen a maturing of the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). It’s also been whipsawed by the pandemic. Peter Licursi, product manager for the Natural Language Processing team with Kensho and Nick Patience, a 451 Research founder and research director for the AI Applications and Platforms practice, join host Eric Hanselman to discuss how AI/ML use is changing. There’s more cloud and less need for data scientists, it turns out, for those doing it right.
Dr. Owen Rogers, Research Director for Cloud Transformation and the Digital Economics Unit, joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss his "Laws of Cloud", how enterprises are managing cloud complexity and disorder, the Cloud Price Index, and what enterprises should be focusing on in the year ahead.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Is digital transformation really worth it? In this episode, customer experience head Sheryl Kingstone is back to talk with Eric Hanselman about the results of a recent study that shows digitization is worth the investment. The results indicate that technology leaders have a significant advantage over laggards in their business success. Sheryl’s team was right when they predicted this back in 2016! Sheryl also digs into the impacts of transformation and talks about where AI is being used successfully in consumer applications.
Research director Scott Crawford and senior analyst Daniel Kennedy join Eric Hanselman to discuss the impact of one of information security’s hottest topics, the SolarWinds compromise. Was this beyond the expectations of the average enterprise’s security controls? Our guests also look at the recent results of the latest Voice of the Enterprise Information Security study and explore the impacts of the pandemic on security infrastructure.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
When we look at the overall M&A market, we need to set aside technology because it was a market that not only survived, but also thrived during the pandemic. Learn why and what may come next with Brenon Daly, Research Director of Finance, and host Eric Hanselman in this episode of Next in Tech.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Dan Thompson, Principal Research Analyst for Multi-tenant Datacenters, and Eric Hanselman discuss the wild world of datacenters and what is left behind with the shift to remote work where many businesses are reducing their real estate footprint.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
In this episode of Next in Tech, Eric Hanselman and Senior Analyst Conner Forrest discuss the employee experience, what matters most to the workforce and the challenges businesses face to meet the priorities of their workforces. Conner also shares insight into the data 451 Research tracks around the Future of Work.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
In this episode, Melanie Posey and Liam Eagle discuss our research on COVID-19 and the impact it had on enterprise IT and the businesses that operate in that space through 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise survey research. What have the top IT decision makers done to adapt, and what does the future look like?
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
Host Eric Hanselman is joined by Sheryl Kingstone, who leads 451 Research's customer experience and commerce research, to discuss the changes to customer experience as a result of impacts from COVID-19 including the dramatic shift to mobile and how businesses are rethinking their customer experience journey. Recorded in December of 2020.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
In this episode of the Next in Tech podcast, host Eric Hanselman continues his discussion on why 451 Research, a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence, was founded and why the market needed this insight — with two of the founders, William Fellows and Nick Patience.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech
In this episode of the Next in Tech podcast, host Eric Hanselman discusses why 451 Research, a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence, was founded and why the market needed this insight — with two of the founders, William Fellows and Nick Patience.
Learn more: spglobal.com/nextintech