Research Notes

Research Note: Qualcomm Introduces AI200 & AI250 for Data Center Inference

Steve McDowell October 29, 2025

Qualcomm Technologies recently announced two data center inference accelerators, the AI200 and AI250, targeting commercial availability in 2026 and 2027, respectively. The products are Qualcomm’s first strategic push into rack-scale AI inference.

Research Note: Red Hat AI 3.0

Steve McDowell October 22, 2025

Red Hat released version 3.0 of its AI platform, introducing production-ready features for distributed inference, expanded hardware support, and foundational components for agentic AI systems.

Key additions include the generally available llm-d project for Kubernetes-native distributed inference, support for IBM Spyre accelerators alongside existing NVIDIA and AMD GPU options, and developer preview features for Llama Stack and MCP integration.

Purpose-Driven Networking is the New Standard: RUCKUS Networks Goes All-In on Experience-Critical Verticals

Michael McDowell October 19, 2025

Your Network Isn’t Just Infrastructure—It’s Your Biggest Business Risk. RUCKUS Networks Builds the Mitigation Strategy.

Research Note: Qualcomm Acquires Arduino, Extends IoT Reach

Steve McDowell October 8, 2025

Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Arduino, an open-source hardware and software company with an estimated 33 million active users.

The acquisition arrives as Qualcomm accelerates diversification beyond smartphones through its Dragonwing brand, launched earlier in 2025, showing the strong organizational commitment to IoT and edge computing as primary growth engines, alongside automotive.

Research Note: IBM Releases Granite Model for DocLing Document Processing

Steve McDowell October 1, 2025

IBM recently released Granite-Docling-258M, a specialized vision-language model for document conversion that operates at 258 million parameters under an Apache 2.0 license. The new model is a production-ready iteration of the experimental SmolDocling-256M-preview released earlier this year and incorporates architectural improvements and stability enhancements.

Research Note: Cloudera Adds Support for Dell ObjectScale

Steve McDowell September 28, 2025

Cloudera announced the integration of Dell ObjectScale into its AI-in-a-Box offering, positioning the collaboration as a comprehensive Private AI platform for enterprise-scale deployments.

The new integration allows Cloudera’s compute engines to operate directly against Dell’s object storage infrastructure, creating what the vendors characterize as a validated, integrated data platform.