Now that half of 2023 is behind us, let’s take a closer look a the state of the global economy, with a special focus on the enterprise IT industry. As we’ve discussed, many different factors are impacting the current slowdown in sales of enterprise and cloud tech: Over-buying and hiring coming out of the pandemic, repercussions from the supply chain shortages, the war in Ukraine, tensions between the US, Europe, and China, a global cybercrime wave, and shifting demand from datacenter to cloud. Let’s take a look at some of these changes and consider the state of the industry in mid 2023. This and more on this week’s Gestalt IT Rundown.
0:37 – Apache Iceberg can now be used with BigLake
Google Cloud has announced the availability of BigLake, which supports Apache Iceberg and enables organizations to transform their data lakehouses. Apache Iceberg is an open table format that facilitates data management and analytics over a single copy of data. With BigLake, customers can leverage open-source engines like Spark, Trino, and Flink to process Iceberg tables, while BigQuery enables querying of those tables. Is this a major move in the world of data?
Read More: Transform your Apache Iceberg lakehouse with BigLake
2:31 – Orion Investigation focuses on SolarWinds CISO and CFO
It’s time once again for “You Don’t Want the Government Emailing You For No Reason”. Today’s lucky contestant is SolarWinds. The company got a Wells notice last week, which is an official communication from the SEC saying they are planning on taking actions against officers of a company for something they did. While several officers were the lucky recipients, the SEC filing specifically mentions the CFO, J. Barton Kalsu, and CISO, Tim Brown. These notices stem from the hacking fiasco that happened in late 2020 and are the latest in a long line of measures being taken by the government to hold the company accountable for the hacking operation that exposed federal and private networks to foreign state actors.
Read More: SolarWinds CISO and CFO are focus of SEC’s Orion investigation
6:00 – Samsung Lays Out Foundry Roadmap
Samsung is on track for some tiny improvements. Or more specifically improvements in tiny things. At the Samsung Foundry Forum it was announced that the production of 2nm nodes is anticipated for 2025 while the even-smaller 1.4nm nodes will be ready by 2027. In between Samsung will be offering a process optimized for HPC in 2026 as well as an automotive focused process the year after that. These announcements put the company in line with TSMC and Intel, who will both be releasing new processes on small fab designs in the next couple of years. Stephen, is tiny news a big deal?
Read More: Samsung Updates Foundry Roadmap: 2nm in 2025, 1.4nm in 2027
9:30 – Ex-Splunk CEO Doug Merritt to lead Startup Aviatrix Systems
Aviatrix announced last week that they’re bringing on a new CEO for the company. Doug Merritt is no stranger to the top spot. He’s the former CEO of Splunk. He jumps in to a company poised to be a big part of the growing cloud networking space. Since being valued at around $2 billion by investors in 2021, Aviatrix has grown to annual revenue of $100 million. Merritt takes over for Steve Mullaney and has already said that Aviatrix won’t need another funding round as is on track for an IPO in 2025. Tom, is Aviatrix ready to hit the big time?
Read More: Ex-Splunk CEO Joins $2 Billion Cloud Startup
12:55 – Intel Max Blade Installation Complete on Argonne Aurora Supercomputer
Argonne’s Aurora supercomputer is now humming along with Intel. The installation of 10,624 dual CPU blades is now complete. The unit is running on the Ponte Vecchio GPU as well, with six of them being installed in every blade for a grand total of 63,744 GPUs. The formal launch of Aurora is expected to come later and should bring the unit in line or even above the current record holder, which runs on AMD processors. Stephen, can I get this thing to run Doom?
Read More: Argonne Aurora Supercomputer Intel Max Blade Installation is Complete
Read More: The Aurora Supercomputer Is Installed: 2 ExaFLOPS, Tens of Thousands of CPUs and GPUs
16:10 – Prosmio Launches Freemium MCN Offering
Cloud networking company Prosimo has announced that their flagship multicloud networking platform, MCN, is now available for free. This isn’t a trial offering, either. It is full cloud networking across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The basic connectivity is free and any additional services offered by Prosimo, such as zero trust, policy management, and visbility, are available for an additional monthly fee. This follows competitor Alkira’s free offering, released last year, however Alkira’s free solution is visibility only. Tom, why is Prosimo giving their product away?
Read More: Prosimo Disrupts MCN Market by Making Multi-Cloud Connectivity Free
19:33 – Checking In on the State of the IT Economy Half Way Through 2023
Now that half of 2023 is behind us, let’s take a closer look a the state of the global economy, with a special focus on the enterprise IT industry. As we’ve discussed, many different factors are impacting the current slowdown in sales of enterprise and cloud tech: Over-buying and hiring coming out of the pandemic, repercussions from the supply chain shortages, the war in Ukraine, tensions between the US, Europe, and China, a global cybercrime wave, and shifting demand from datacenter to cloud. Let’s take a look at some of these changes and consider the state of the industry in mid 2023.
Read More: China just played a trump card in the chip war. Are more export curbs coming?
36:44 – The Weeks Ahead
Networking Field Day 32 – July 26-27
Tech Field Day Extra at VMware Explore – August 21-23
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
