Research Notes

Research Note: Dynatrace Acquires DevCycle, Integrating Observability & Feature Management

Steve McDowell January 18, 2026

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

Steve McDowell January 18, 2026

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.

Research Note: Qualcomm Validates Wi‑Fi 8 Silicon with LitePoint — A Key Readiness Milestone

Michael McDowell January 13, 2026

For enterprise leaders the marketing noise of Wi-Fi 8 is beginning to be replaced by concrete readiness indicators.

Research Note: VAST’s Novel Approach to NVIDIA’s new Inference Context Memory Storage Platform

Steve McDowell January 9, 2026

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 Inference Context Memory Storage Platform

Steve McDowell January 9, 2026

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.

Research Note: Dynatrace & Google Cloud Collaborate on Observability for Agentic AI

Steve McDowell January 5, 2026

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.