HPE Discover: Agentic Governance, Vera CPU, and Confidential Computing added to AI Factory w/ NVIDIA
Hewlett Packard Enterprise extended its HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA to support production-ready agentic AI deployments at its just-wrapped HPE Discover 2026. The announcements add governance, security, and compute capabilities for organizations moving AI agents into operational production environments.
HPE Discover: Self-Driving Networks and AI Data Center Switching for the Agentic Enterprise
At its recent HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a broad set of networking updates spanning AI data center switching, autonomous network operations, and unified secure access, extending its “self-driving” networking strategy into general availability across AI factories, data centers, campus, and edge environments.
HPE Discover 2026: The First True Look at HPE + Juniper
HPE is now a networking company with a compute business. Not the other way around.
Huntsman-Olin: The $300 Million Promise
The CIO role is the one to watch next. Whoever gets that seat inherits both transformation programs, both mid-flight ERP decisions, and a 24-month deadline with a nine-figure number attached to it.
Arista Networks’ Next-Generation 1.6 Terabit Portfolio for AI Fabrics
Arista Networks recently announced its new 7060XE7 Series, a portfolio of 1.6 Terabit (1.6T) Ethernet switching platforms designed for rack-scale AI infrastructure. The announcement extends Arista’s Etherlink architecture from 800G to 1.6T and introduces three hardware configurations for air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and high-density 128-port deployments.
IBM’s LLM-Guided Evolutionary Framework for Quantum Error Correction Code Discovery
IBM Research recently published a paper on an LLM-guided evolutionary framework for discovering quantum error-correction (QEC) codes, accompanied by the open-source release of OpenEvolve on GitHub. The framework applies evolutionary artificial intelligence techniques, originally developed for general program synthesis, to the domain of quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes.
Carrier Satellite JV: SpaceX Panic Disguised as a Partnership
The carriers saw it coming and panicked, but even with SpaceX’s massive lead, satellite technology hits a brick wall of pure physics.
Microsoft’s Majorana 2 Topological Quantum Chip
Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2 at its recent Build developer conference in San Francisco, introducing its second-generation topological quantum chip and announcing the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI platform for scientific research and development.
Majorana 2 delivers qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than those in its predecessor, Majorana 1, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and peak instances approaching 1 minute.
Quantinuum’s $1.68 Billion IPO & the Race to Quantum Commercialization
Quantinuum opened trading on the Nasdaq last week (symbol: QNT), raising $1.68 billion in the largest traditional IPO to date for a pure-play quantum computing company.
Priced at $60 per share, above the marketed range of $53 to $55, and oversubscribed by a double-digit multiple before trading began, the debut caps a multi-year run of technical milestones, high-profile partnerships, and deepening enterprise engagement.
Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design
At the recent Computex 2026, Qualcomm introduced the Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design (RRD), the company’s most concrete commitment to the physical AI market to date. The new platform consolidates compute, sensor interfaces, deterministic I/O, networking, and a layered software stack into a single enclosed reference design for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), industrial robotics, and humanoid platforms.
Microsoft: Project Solara & the Agentic Operating Plane for the Non-NVIDIA World
At its recent Build 2026 event, Microsoft introduced Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform built specifically for devices whose primary interface is an AI agent. Solara runs on the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP), a lightweight operating system built on AOSP that hosts an Agent Shell capable of dynamically loading and tailoring cloud-based agents, paired with […]
Cisco’s Full-Stack Play for Agentic Enterprise AI
At Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, Cisco unveiled Cisco Cloud Control, a unified management plane designed for human operators and AI agents to jointly run and defend enterprise infrastructure. The platform anchors Cisco’s AgenticOps operating model, unifying networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration under a single login and a shared data layer.
Computex 2026: AI Infrastructure, the PC Wars, and the New Connectivity Arms Race
Computex has historically been a client- and consumer-focused event, but those markets now take a back seat to enterprise infrastructure and the components that define an AI factory. The key messages were all AI, all the time.
The keynotes were entirely semiconductor-first, with talks by three chip CEOs: Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, Lip-Bu Tan of Intel, and Matt Murphy of Marvell. Each painted a slightly different picture about where the AI buildout is headed.
NVIDIA Is Rewiring the Data Center with Light
NVIDIA is actively working to replace electrons with photons across the entire connectivity stack, from co-packaged optics at the switch level to optical fiber cabling throughout the rack and facility.
IBM’s Big Quantum Month: A $10 Billion Bet, a National Fab, and a 2029 Deadline
A version of this post previously appeared in a LinkedIn newsletter IBM revealed that it will invest more than $10 billion in quantum computing over the next five years, with the goal of delivering the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The disclosure, which arrived not via a press release but through an SEC […]
Ericsson Cradlepoint W2255: Wireless WAN Steps Into the Enterprise
If you’re planning a multi‑year WAN refresh, the W2255 forces its way into the RFP conversation
IBM & Red Hat: Project Lightwell, Protecting Open Source Software
IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5 billion initiative to establish a trusted enterprise clearinghouse for open-source software security. The project deploys more than 20,000 engineers, augmented by AI, to identify, triage, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities across open-source supply chains at a scale that exceeds what most enterprises can achieve independently.
IBM: Anderon Quantum Foundry and the Industrialization of Quantum Hardware
IBM and the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a Letter of Intent to establish Anderon, a standalone company that will operate the United States’ first pure-play quantum chip foundry.
The initiative has a combined commitment of $2 billion, including $1 billion in proposed CHIPS Act R&D incentives from the Department of Commerce and $1 billion in cash from IBM, supplemented by IBM’s intellectual property, fabrication assets, and an existing skilled workforce.
Dell Technologies: AI Data Platform and Storage Portfolio for the Agentic Enterprise
At the recent Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell announced a broad expansion of its AI Data Platform and storage portfolio, centered on the general availability of the Lightning File System (formerly Project Lightning), the introduction of Exascale Storage as a unified 4-in-1 rack architecture, the refreshed ObjectScale X7700 appliance, and enhancements to the Dell AI Data Platform’s orchestration, analytics, and search layers.
Veeam Redefines AI Trust, Resilience, and Recovery
Veeam is betting that the next decade of enterprise AI will be defined by trust infrastructure
Memory & NAND Flash Crisis: May 2026 Update
What began as an AI-driven reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward HBM has compounded through consecutive quarters of record-breaking price increases, affecting enterprise IT budgets, consumer device pricing, and cloud infrastructure spending in equal measure.
SailPoint Agentic Fabric Extends Identity Governance to AI Agents & Non-Human Identities
SailPoint recently announced SailPoint Agentic Fabric, a new product layer that extends the identity governance and administration (IGA) model the company has built for human users to AI agents, machine identities, and other non-human identities (NHIs).
Atlassian Team ’26: Context as Infrastructure
At Atlassian’s recent Team’26 conference, the company released a broad set of announcements organized around the thesis that organizational context is the primary source of AI differentiation. The announcements clearly show that Atlassian intends to serve as the infrastructure layer that makes that context actionable
Two Conferences, One Consensus on Enterprise AI
IBM Think 2026 and Atlassian Team ’26 both took place last week in different cities, for different audiences, and with different product portfolios on stage. IBM gathered infrastructure architects and enterprise IT executives in Boston, while Atlassian convened developer teams, platform practitioners, and collaboration leaders in Anaheim.
Think 2026: IBM’s AI Operating Model Takes Shape
At its annual Think conference in Boston earlier this month, IBM delivered the most comprehensive expansion to date of its enterprise AI and hybrid cloud portfolio. The announcements center on what IBM calls an AI Operating Model, a four-pillar architecture built around agents, data, automation, and hybrid infrastructure.
NVIDIA MRC Enables Spectrum-X Ethernet for AI-At-Scale, Now at OCP
NVIDIA recently announced that Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC), an RDMA transport protocol developed for and in production on Spectrum-X Ethernet hardware, is now available to the broader industry via the OCP.
Research Note: Extreme Networks’ Platform Pivot Accelerates
If the company continues to execute on this direction, it will be competing at the AI-networking architectural level where long‑term winners are defined.
Cisco Acquiring Astrix Security to Extend Zero Trust to the Agentic Workforce
Cisco announced its intent to acquire Astrix Security, a Tel Aviv-based company specializing in Non-Human Identity (NHI) security. The acquisition targets the growing, largely underserved segment of enterprise security focused on governance, visibility, and threat detection for non-human identities, including API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, and AI agents.
Data Center Power: The Transition to 800 VDC
For the past two decades, power architecture has evolved incrementally around a familiar model: utility AC enters the facility, passes through switchgear, transformers, UPS systems, power distribution units, and rack power shelves, and is ultimately converted to low-voltage DC for CPUs, GPUs, memory, networking, and storage.
That model worked for conventional enterprise and cloud computing. It was good enough when racks consumed 10kW, 20kW, or even 50kW, but it becomes far more difficult as AI infrastructure pushes rack densities toward hundreds of kilowatts and, in some designs, beyond 1MW.
Palo Alto Networks: Portkey Acquisition Anchors its Agentic Security Stack
Palo Alto Networks recently announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a San Francisco-based AI gateway and control plane company. The deal, expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fiscal fourth quarter of 2026, will integrate Portkey’s technology into Prisma AIRS, the company’s agentic AI security platform.
HPE ProLiant: Edge Compute for AI and Mission-Critical Workloads
HPE recently expanded its HPE ProLiant edge portfolio with three new platforms: the HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis, two new Gen12 servers built for the EL2000 (the EL220 and EL240), and an enhanced version of the HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 server, now powered by AMD EPYC 8005 series processors. The announcement also introduced an Environmental Ruggedization Option Kit applicable across the portfolio.
Celona Frequency 2026: The Self-Managed Shift and Why Celona Is Handing Over the Roadmap
Celona’s strategy reflects a vendor that listens, prioritizes, and executes, with a clear focus on real use cases, real operational challenges, and the ROI behind them.
Google Cloud: 8th-Generation TPU Family Splits Training and Inference
At Google Cloud Next 2026, Google unveiled its 8th-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) family, splitting its custom silicon lineup into two purpose-built architectures for the first time.
The TPU 8t targets large-scale model training, emphasizing compute throughput and scale-up bandwidth, while the TPU 8i addresses inference and reasoning workloads, emphasizing memory bandwidth and low-latency communication.
Google Cloud Next ‘26: Storage Infrastructure Advances + the NetApp Partnership
At its recent Next ’26 conference, Google Cloud advanced its storage portfolio across three fronts: high-performance infrastructure for AI training and inference, intelligent metadata capabilities built directly into the storage layer, and expanded ecosystem integrations.
The announcements span Cloud Storage Rapid, Google Cloud Managed Lustre with 10 TB/s throughput, Hyperdisk Exapools, Smart Storage automation, and material expansions to the Google Cloud NetApp Volumes service, including a deeper partnership with NetApp.
IBM’s AI Strategy: Play the Long Game, Not the Headlines
IBM reported 6% revenue growth, expanding margins, strong free cash flow, and software acceleration in its Q1’2026 earnings.
The more consequential signals, however, came from the strategic narrative beneath those figures. IBM is not competing for the most visible positions in AI, but rather building the infrastructure layer that enterprises will ultimately depend on, regardless of their more tactical AI choices.
ServiceNow Earnings: The Real AI Story Isn’t What You Think
ServiceNow delivered a strong fiscal Q1 2026, exceeding guidance across revenue, margins, and bookings. This earnings call offers a clearer view of how AI is reshaping enterprise software and of ServiceNow’s role in that shift. The implications span pricing architecture, competitive positioning, labor economics, and how enterprises actually spend.
P5G Alone Won’t Unlock Value
Investing in ecosystems, and building partnerships that actually matter will define the next decade of industrial connectivity.
Google Cloud Next 2026: Enterprise AI Enters Production
Google Cloud Next 2026, held last week in Las Vegas, delivered a clear, consistent message: the experimental phase of enterprise AI is over, and the production phase of autonomous agent deployment has begun. Google made an incredible 260 announcements at the event, with most aligned with the idea that enterprises will increasingly operate through fleets […]
SUSECON 2026: SUSE Shows Off Platform Strategy and Agentic Infrastructure
SUSECON 2026, recently held in Prague, saw SUSE lay out a coherent platform direction, shifting from being primarily a Linux and Kubernetes distribution vendor to a provider of an integrated open infrastructure stack spanning virtualization, edge, and AI-augmented operations.
Why Nokia Is Becoming a Major Data Center “Day Zero” Vendor
In a market full of incumbents modernizing legacy systems, Nokia is the rare vendor starting from zero, and that’s exactly why they’re gaining traction.
Nutanix .NEXT 2026: Beyond the Hypervisor
Nutanix held its annual .NEXT user conference earlier this month in Chicago drew more than 5,000 attendees and over 100 sponsors. The event came at an inflection point for enterprise infrastructure, as the post-VMware market continues to consolidate, AI workloads move from pilot to production, and hardware supply constraints continue to complicate infrastructure planning.
MEXT: Predictive Memory Software to Control DRAM Costs
MEXT, a Santa Clara-based startup founded just three years ago, recently launched Predictive Memory, a software-only solution that uses AI-driven prediction to extend effective server memory capacity by treating flash storage as a transparent extension of DRAM.
The company claims its product reduces infrastructure costs by 50% and increases usable memory capacity by 2x to 4x without requiring changes to hardware, operating systems, or applications.
Arista’s Early Lead in the Race to Rebuild the Data Center
And while the race is far from over, Arista has carved out an early lead.
P5G in 2026: The Great Divide Between Carpet and Concrete
Neither Siemens nor Celona is wrong. They’re just solving different problems for different people.
IBM & Arm: Together Extending Arm Architecture into Enterprise Computing
IBM and Arm announced a strategic partnership to support the Arm architecture on IBM’s enterprise computing platforms, IBM Z and LinuxONE. The collaboration aims to address two key enterprise needs: greater workload flexibility and infrastructure capable of handling AI- and data-heavy applications at a mission-critical level.
MLPerf Inference 6.0: Software Gains & Broadening Competition Shake Things Up
MLCommons released MLPerf Inference v6.0 results, marking what the consortium describes as the most significant update to the benchmark suite to date.
The round introduced five new workloads, including a multimodal vision-language model, a text-to-video generation benchmark, and a new interactive scenario for the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model.
RSAC 2026: Agentic AI Security Takes Center Stage at Industry’s Marquee Event
If RSAC 2025 was the year the industry debated AI’s role in security, RSAC 2026 was the year the debate ended. Agentic AI, with its autonomous systems that perceive, decide, and act without human intervention, dominated every keynote, expo-floor conversation, and press release at this year’s conference.
From Zero Trust to Zero Assumption: The RSAC 2026 Vibe Shift
Zero Trust, as it’s been marketed for the last decade, has officially entered its “participation trophy” era.
Everpure: Evergreen//One + Everpure Data Stream for AI Infrastructure (GTC 2026)
Everpure announced two updates to its AI infrastructure platform at GTC 2026: the expansion of Evergreen//One storage-as-a-service to FlashBlade//EXA, and the beta release of Everpure Data Stream, a co-engineered data pipeline solution built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.
WEKA: NeuralMesh AIDP & STX Integration (GTC 2026)
At the recent GTC 2026, WEKA announced two major updates that enhance its position at the crossroads of AI storage and inference infrastructure. The company revealed the general availability of NeuralMesh AI Data Platform (AIDP), a ready-to-use appliance-style system based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design
Nutanix: Full-Stack Agentic AI Platform for Enterprise AI Factories (GTC 2026)
At the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event, Nutanix announced Nutanix Agentic AI, a full-stack software solution designed to help enterprises build, operate, and govern AI factories at scale.
The announcement enhances Nutanix’s existing hybrid cloud platform — including its AHV hypervisor, Flow Virtual Networking, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, and Nutanix Enterprise AI — with features specifically designed for the operational needs of production agentic AI workloads.
HPE: AI Factory & Storage Advancements (GTC 2026)
At NVIDIA GTC 2026, HPE announced a broad expansion of its portfolio, including AI factory infrastructure, supercomputing platforms, and enterprise storage. These announcements collectively strengthen HPE’s role as a comprehensive NVIDIA-aligned infrastructure provider, extending the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio with hardware based on the Vera Rubin and Blackwell GPU architectures, new CPU compute options, updated networking, and various software and services integrations.
NetApp: Next-Generation EF-Series Arrays for AI & HPC (GTC 2026)
NetApp announced the new EF50 and EF80 all-flash block storage arrays, the latest generation of its EF-Series, at the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026. The systems replace the previous EF-Series generation with a purpose-built design aimed at AI model training, high-performance computing simulations, and high-throughput transactional databases.
Cisco: Secure AI Factory Expands to the Edge with Agentic Security (GTC 2026)
At NVIDIA GTC 2026, Cisco announced a significant expansion of its Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, broadening its validated AI infrastructure architecture from centralized data centers to enterprise and service provider edge deployments. The announcement includes hardware-accelerated security, updated switching silicon, new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), and a formalized multi-agent reference architecture.
Dell Technologies: AI Data Platform with NVIDIA (GTC 2026)
Dell Technologies announced a major expansion of its AI Data Platform at the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event. Dell’s AI Data Platform serves as the data foundation layer of its Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. The announcement highlights three new architectural pillars: Data Orchestration Engine built on Dataloop, GPU-accelerated analytics embedded directly into the data layer, and
two new high-performance storage innovations, Lightning File System and Exascale Storage.
NVIDIA STX & CMX: Infrastructure for AI Context Storage (GTC 2026)
NVIDIA announced its BlueField-4 STX reference architecture at GTC 2026, introducing a modular framework for deploying accelerated storage infrastructure optimized for agentic AI workloads. The architecture addresses a specific technical challenge: as AI systems evolve from single-turn interactions to complex, multi-step agentic workflows with context windows spanning millions of tokens, existing storage hierarchies struggle to efficiently manage the growing KV cache that stores an AI agent’s working memory.
NVIDIA GTC 2026: Infrastructure Announcements
The focus at NVIDIA GTC 2026 was on developing a unified infrastructure model that vendors are now adopting. The industry has effectively reached a stage where NVIDIA sets the architectural standard, while partners compete on how well they implement it in enterprise and service-provider environments.
NVIDIA Just Rewired the AI Factory — And Networking Is Now the Star of the Show (GTC 2026)
Together, these components make a rack behave like a single system instead of a collection of servers held together by hope and bailing wire.
Everpure ActiveCluster for File
Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) recently announced ActiveCluster for file, extending its synchronous replication and continuous availability capabilities from block storage to file workloads. The company sees this capability as a foundational component of its Enterprise Data Cloud strategy, with general availability planned for Q2 2026.
IBM Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Reference Architecture
IBM has announced the industry’s first published reference architecture for quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC), offering a technical blueprint for combining quantum processing units (QPUs) with traditional HPC infrastructure.
The framework focuses on computational problems that exceed traditional computing capabilities, particularly in molecular simulations and quantum chemistry calculations, where quantum mechanics governs system behavior.
Qualcomm Wi‑Fi 8 MWC 2026: Architecting the “Deterministic” Generation
Qualcomm’s MWC 2026 announcements highlight a pivot toward deterministic performance in dense, interference‑heavy environments.
Domino Data Lab Winter Release 2026: The Agentic AI Development Lifecycle
Domino Data Lab recently announced its Winter Release, becoming the first vendor to offer a fully governed, end-to-end platform for operationalizing agentic AI systems. The release features a new Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) experience along with LLM hosting capabilities.
HPE Connectivity and Compute Announcements (MWC 2026)
At MWC 2026, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a significant expansion of its service provider portfolio, its broadest set of announcements following its acquisition last year of Juniper Networks.
The announcements focus on three primary pillars: ultra-high-density routing for AI backbones, modular compute for the telecommunications edge, and an integrated cloud operations stack. HPE is positioning these releases to address the “bursty” and high-bandwidth nature of AI training and inference workloads that are increasingly distributed across regional data centers.
Call Notes: Quarterly Semiconductor Update (March 2026)
Every quarter I participate in a call for buy-side investment analysts focused on the broader datacenter/hyperscaler semiconductor ecosystem. Here, I’m sharing the raw notes I used to drive that call.
NVIDIA Strategic Investments in Optical Interconnects
NVIDIA has committed over $4 billion in direct strategic investments across two optical interconnect companies, Lumentum and Coherent, supplemented by multibillion-dollar purchase agreements and equity participation in the optical startup Ayar Labs
Memory & Flash Crisis: March 2026 Update
The global memory market entered 2026 in a state of structural supply constraint. AI infrastructure demand has reallocated semiconductor manufacturing capacity toward HBM for GPU accelerators, creating scarcity in conventional DRAM and NAND flash products.
How to Think about VAST Data
If you’ve been tracking the enterprise infrastructure space for the past few years, you’ve probably encountered VAST Data. And if you’re like most IT practitioners I talk to, you’ve probably filed them in the “high-performance storage vendor” folder in your brain.
Everpure: Pure Storage’s Rebrand & Evolution to Data Management Platform
Pure Storage has rebranded as Everpure, reflecting a multi-year evolution from storage management into broader data management, and is also acquiring 1touch: Executive Summary Pure Storage today rebranded as Everpure, matching its ongoing expansion from its roots in performance flash storage into the broader data management market. The transition is accompanied by its intent to […]
SUSE Acquires Losant: Extending the Open Edge Stack into Industrial IoT
SUSE announced the acquisition of Losant, a Cincinnati-based industrial IoT (IIoT) platform. The acquisition marks a material expansion for SUSE, moving the company from being primarily an edge infrastructure provider (built around SUSE Linux Micro and K3s) to the application and orchestration layer, where operational data from industrial devices is aggregated, visualized, and acted on.
Dell Expands Private Cloud Portfolio with Nutanix AHV Support
Dell Technologies recently announced the expansion of its Dell Private Cloud offering to support Nutanix AHV as a third hypervisor option, complementing existing support for VMware vSphere and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
IBM FlashSystem: Next Generation, Autonomous Storage Meets Agentic AI
IBM recently announced a significant refresh of its FlashSystem all-flash storage portfolio, replacing the 5300, 7300, and 9500 product lines with new 5600, 7600, and 9600 models. The company also introduced its new FlashSystem.ai, an agentic AI administration layer that IBM claims can reduce manual storage management effort by up to 90%.
Verizon’s Pivot Opens the Door: Why Private 5G Pioneers Are Prime M&A Targets in 2026
Real, paying customers are driving demand for edge inference in manufacturing and logistics, and Verizon is backing that with One Fiber.
Why Cisco Builds Silicon for the Data Center but Buys It for Wi‑Fi
Two domains. Two silicons. One intentional strategy.
The Carrier Pivot: What Verizon’s AI Strategy Signals for the Next Phase of Private 5G
What stands out is Verizon’s insistence that this is not speculative infrastructure building.
Call Notes: Compute Hardware & Semiconductor Ecosystem
Every quarter I participate in a call for buy-side investment analysts focused on compute hardware and the broader semiconductor ecosystem. Here, I’m sharing the raw notes from that call.
Research Note: Microsoft Azure Maia 200 Inference Accelerator
Microsoft recently announced its second-generation custom AI accelerator, the Maia 200. The new chip is an inference-optimized alternative to third-party GPUs in its Azure infrastructure. The company says the accelerator delivers 30% better performance per dollar than existing Azure hardware while supporting OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models and Microsoft’s own synthetic data generation workloads.
Research Note: Commvault Unified Data Vault, S3-Compatible Protection for Modern Workloads
Commvault recently announced its Commvault Cloud Unified Data Vault, a cloud-native service that extends its air-gapped protection capabilities to data written using the S3 protocol. The service provides an S3-compatible endpoint that applies policy-driven protection to S3-based workloads without requiring agent installation or custom integration work.
Research Note: WD Innovation Day
Western Digital’s February 2026 Innovation Day showed a company fundamentally transformed from its legacy PC-centric storage roots into a critical AI infrastructure provider. The presentations unveiled breakthrough innovations that challenge long-held assumptions about hard drive technology limits.
Explainer: What Does It Mean to “Support Apache Iceberg” in a Storage System
Over the past several years, “Apache Iceberg support” has quietly become table stakes in modern data infrastructure conversations. Storage vendors list it in press releases, lakehouse platforms lead with it and architects assume it.
Broadcom Heats the Wi‑Fi 8 Conversation
Qualcomm is signaling readiness through ecosystem validation, while Broadcom is sampling silicon to OEMs to kickstart hardware development.
Research Note: Veeam Acquires Object First, Consolidating Its Backup Appliance Strategy
Veeam recently confirmed its acquisition earlier this month of Object First, an immutable backup storage appliance vendor founded by Veeam’s original co-founders Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov in 2022.
The transaction resolves a strategic conflict where Veeam competed directly with Object First’s Ootbi appliance while simultaneously offering its own Veeam Software Appliance for backup storage. The acquisition provides Veeam with purpose-built hardware capabilities to complement its software-first strategy.
Research Note: HPE’s New Networking & Compute (NRF 2026)
At the recent NRF 2026 in New York, HPE expanded its retail-focused infrastructure portfolio with new networking and compute capabilities intended for always-on retail environments. The announcements emphasize tighter integration between edge networking, cloud-native AI operations, and fault-tolerant compute to support transaction continuity, operational visibility, and distributed retail services.
Research Note: CrowdStrike’s Shopping Spree, Acquires SGNL and Seraphic
CrowdStrike announced two strategic acquisitions in January 2026 that extend its Falcon platform into browser runtime security and continuous identity authorization. The company acquired SGNL for $740 million and Seraphic Security for an undisclosed amount, with both transactions expected to close in Q1 FY2027.
Research Note: Dell PowerStore OS v4.3 brings Capacity Expansion and Enterprise Resilience Enhancements
Dell Technologies has released PowerStore OS v4.3, introducing higher-capacity QLC flash drives, expanded replication capabilities, and file system operational improvements.
Research Note: Dynatrace Acquires DevCycle, Integrating Observability & Feature Management
Dynatrace this week announced the acquisition of DevCycle, a feature management platform built on the OpenFeature standard. The acquisition addresses a fundamental gap in modern software delivery: the disconnect between feature flag controls and runtime observability.
Research Note: Snowflake Acquires Observe, Advancing Data Platform & Observability Integration
Snowflake recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, an AI-powered observability platform built on Snowflake’s infrastructure. Valued at approximately $1 billion, this is Snowflake’s second observability-related acquisition, after TruEra in May 2024.
These acquisitions challenge the traditional separation between observability infrastructure and data platforms. By treating telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) as first-class data within Snowflake rather than requiring specialized observability infrastructure, the combined offering promises to reduce observability costs while enabling full-fidelity data retention.
“Chips” is now the “C” in CES
While the focus of CES 2026 remained on consumer electronics, this year felt different. More expansive, with the semiconductor industry dominating the pre-show with overlapping announcements that reveal diverging strategies for AI workload acceleration, manufacturing sovereignty, and market expansion beyond traditional computing segments.
Research Report: Cisco FlashStack with Nutanix
The enterprise infrastructure market is faced with disruption across multiple fronts. Traditional virtualization platforms face unprecedented disruption, while emerging AI-first workloads demand architectures that seamlessly span on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.
It’s against this backdrop that Nutanix, Cisco, and Pure Storage have collaborated to reimagine converged infrastructure with Cisco’s FlashStack with Nutanix.
Research Note: Qualcomm Validates Wi‑Fi 8 Silicon with LitePoint — A Key Readiness Milestone
For enterprise leaders the marketing noise of Wi-Fi 8 is beginning to be replaced by concrete readiness indicators.
Building the “Always‑On” Store – HPE’s Practical Approach to Retail at NRF 2026
HPE’s presence at NRF 2026 shows a broader industry shift toward “always‑on” retail
Stop Buying Labels and Start Buying Silicon
Most buyers never ask about it.
Most vendors never volunteer it.
But it’s the only part of the AP that actually matters: the silicon.
Research Note: VAST’s Novel Approach to NVIDIA’s new CMX Inference Context Memory Storage Platform
VAST Data announced support for NVIDIA’s recently unveiled Inference Context Memory Storage (ICMS) Platform, targeting the NVIDIA Rubin GPU architecture. The announcement addresses the challenge of managing KV cache data that exceeds GPU and CPU memory capacity as context windows scale to millions of tokens across multi-turn, agentic AI workflows.
Research Note: Improving Inference with NVIDIA’s ‘CMX’ Inference Context Memory Storage Platform
At NVIDIA Live at CES 2026, NVIDIA introduced its Inference Context Memory Storage (ICMS) platform as part of its Rubin AI infrastructure architecture. NVIDIA’s ICMS addresses KV cache scaling challenges in LLM inference workloads.
The technology targets a specific gap in existing memory hierarchies where GPU high-bandwidth memory proves too limited for growing context requirements while general-purpose network storage introduces latency and power consumption penalties that degrade inference efficiency.
NVIDIA at CES: When the Compute Stack Outgrew the Showroom
Jensen used the stage to argue that the world is shifting from CPU‑centric computing to AI‑driven, GPU‑first platforms, and the shift isn’t just for hyperscalers.
Research Note: Dynatrace & Google Cloud Collaborate on Observability for Agentic AI
Dynatrace and Google Cloud have expanded their collaboration to provide observability capabilities for agentic AI workloads through two primary integrations: a Gemini CLI extension for developer access to observability data within terminal environments, and an A2A protocol integration with Gemini Enterprise for real-time system monitoring.
Research Note: Nutanix and Pure Storage Integrated Solution now GA
Nutanix and Pure Storage announced the general availability of their previously announced integrated solution combining Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure with Pure Storage FlashArray. The partnership addresses growing market pressure around VMware licensing costs and vendor consolidation following Broadcom’s acquisition.
Research Note: ServiceNow Acquires Cyber-Security Player Armis for $7.75 Billion
ServiceNow recently entered into an agreement to acquire Armis, a cyber exposure management and cyber-physical security platform, for $7.75 billion in cash. The transaction is ServiceNow’s third major security-focused acquisition in 2025, following Moveworks ($2.85 billion) and Veza (undisclosed terms).
Call Notes: Q4 2025 Neocloud Market
Just before the Holiday break, I participated in an advisory session on the current state of the neocloud market, which is continuing to experience significant growth as the demand for AI infrastructure continues unabated. Can it continue?
Here I’m sharing some of the notes I used for that discussion.
Call Notes: Memory & NAND Market Update (Dec 2025)
Just before the Holiday break, I participated in an advisory session on the current state of the memory and NAND market, which is experiencing a marked upturn driven by constrained supply of legacy DRAM products and surging demand from higher-margin products like HBM and DDR5.
Here I’m sharing some of the notes I used for that discussion.
The Ecosystem Takes Center Stage at AWS re:Invent 2025
AWS re:Invent 2025 has become an industry show, with this year’s event showcasing a partner ecosystem focused on agentic AI integration and unified observability. The conference featured major announcements from enterprise ISVs, security platforms, and enterprise software providers, all positioning their technologies to work seamlessly with AWS’s new AI capabilities.