John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise IoT, Mobility, Private Networks, and Service Innovations.
Summary Bullets:
• Comcast Business has set a long-term goal of generating its “next $10 billion” in annual revenues.
• Mobile and IoT are among areas where some of that growth is being sought, but efforts so far can be described as pragmatic and realistic.
As Comcast Business contemplates what it sees as a total addressable market of $50 billion, it has been pragmatically plugging holes in its portfolio to pursue some of the lower-hanging fruit around small business, including mobile (where it reported 6.9 million consumer and business customers in Q1 2024). Indeed, mobility and IoT were included often in executives’ comments at the Comcast Business Analyst Conference in April 2024 where there was also agreement that it remains early days for the company in those domains.
• Virgin Media O2 reports significant direct carbon emissions reductions, climate-related efficiencies through smart meters, and progress in the circular economy with device refurbishment and reuse.
• BT’s trial of repurposed street cabinets for vehicle charging adds to initiatives and innovations that illustrate potential power of action by tech companies and customers.
In the week reported, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day of 2023 and – shortly after – the UK government was defeated in court for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is encouraging to see telcos in the UK addressing the global climate crisis.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) uncovered exploitation of vulnerabilities nearly tripled last year, up 180% from 2022.
• The DBIR underscores the need for end-user education, with non-malicious human interactions associated with 68% of breaches.
Verizon’s 2024 DBIR paints a complex and challenging picture of the global threat landscape. Studying 30,458 security incidents and 10,626 confirmed breaches, the report saw a huge jump in vulnerability exploitations versus the prior year. Fourteen percent of all breaches involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities with Verizon assigning responsibility for this to the targeting of unpatched systems and zero day vulnerabilities. Verizon noted threat actors used MOVEit and other zero day exploits to launch their ransom demands.
• Microsoft and AWS continue to invest in GenAI partnerships.
• OSS technologies begin to disrupt the GenAI space.
Cloud giants, used to pulling out all the stops in the ongoing cloud wars, are now directing a good amount of efforts (and budget) at the generative AI (GenAI) arena. Microsoft has set its sights on global dominance in the GenAI space with a new $1.5 billion investment in an Abu Dhabi (UAE) AI initiative. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed its final round of $4 billion in funding to partner Anthropic, striving to gain a foothold following Microsoft’s mega OpenAI investment.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Bedrock in Australia, and it is helping customers develop generative AI (GenAI) applications using different foundation models to meet their specific needs.
• Australia is an attractive market for AWS since the company has a significant presence in the country, and it can support GenAI workloads sustainably as the country is seeing investments in clean energy and more efficient data centers.
AWS highlighted, at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney (Australia), that Australia was an important market for the company and that it was optimistic about the potential of GenAI adoption in the country. At the event, AWS also discussed its GenAI strategy. Rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud have been actively promoting their GenAI development through OpenAI and with Google Gemini, respectively, as well as building foundational models to help customers tap GenAI capabilities without building their own. While AWS has its models under the umbrella of Amazon Titan, it emphasizes giving customers their model of choice, including its own and partner models hosted within its cloud environment. This is through Amazon Bedrock, which is a fully managed service. It gives customers the ability to choose from a range of models based on their needs and preferences. They can develop GenAI capabilities and use cases without leaving the AWS environment. So far, AWS has agreements with several AI companies, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) specialists, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. The advancement of LLM is happening by leaps and bounds with new startups entering the fray and new versions being announced at an ever-faster pace. The introduction of Anthropic’s Claude 3, Mistral-Large, and Stable Diffusion 3, for example, have drawn global attention, offering even more powerful models and creating new possibilities such as self-awareness and actualization, tier reasoning capabilities, and video generation.
As training techniques improve, small language models (SLMs) are becoming more and more accurate, increasing their appeal.
The smaller models make sense for simpler tasks; they can work offline and are a good alternative when organizations want to process information close to the source of collection.
The generative AI (GenAI) landscape has been evolving at breakneck speed since OpenAI exploded onto the scene in late 2022. And despite the numerous new GenAI solutions and product enhancements already brought to market in the last 18 months, momentum around natural language processing (NLP) shows no signs of slowing down. The latest buzz worth paying attention to is around SLMs, which offer capabilities similar to large language models (LLMs) but require far less training data and processing power. Easier to adopt, less expensive to run, and with a smaller carbon footprint, these models hold the potential to further accelerate the already rapid pace of GenAI adoption.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• IBM’s pending deal to acquire HashiCorp, with its Terraform infrastructure-as-code software platform, gives the company a popular cloud configuration toolset.
• The buy isn’t a slam dunk; HashiCorp has struggled to make money from its formerly open-source software.
One of the issues organizations struggle with is efficiently setting up and managing their multi-cloud environments. Last week, IBM announced plans to acquire Hashicorp, a vendor with a Terraform platform the company says can help IBM clients do that. HashiCorp’s catalog includes infrastructure lifecycle management and security lifecycle management solutions enterprises can use to automate hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This will extend IBM’s automation and multi-cloud management product set, which it delivers through the Red Hat subsidiary.
• UK telcos are using Earth Day to launch new climate change and circular economy initiatives for all types of customers from consumers to businesses.
• Selling benefits like cost savings and guaranteeing refurbished equipment alongside providing emissions reduction training, advice, and tools enable further sustainability progress.
April 22, 2024 marks Earth Day, which highlights the importance of protecting the environment. The impact of climate change is becoming more of a daily event worldwide as evidenced by reports of unprecedented flooding in Dubai (UAE) and Guangdong (China) in just the past seven days. Telcos in the UK are using Earth Day to launch and re-emphasize initiatives and programs they are undertaking to address the challenge of CO2 reduction.
Kathryn Weldon – Research Director, Business Network and IT Services – Americas
Summary Bullets:
• IoT platform vendor dropouts were in the news in 2023, suggesting not only consolidation but reduced demand and profitability concerns.
• While hyperscalers remain leaders, industrial stalwarts such as PTC, Software AG, and Siemens are still innovating and enhancing platforms with security, easy of use, and integration with adjacent products in their portfolios.
Over the last year, the most compelling changes in the market for enterprise IoT platforms were the dropping out of key vendors including Google Cloud IoT (in August 2023), presumably based on lack of revenues/profitability; the decommissioning of most services from SAP’s IoT PaaS offering, announced at end-2023; and IBM’s winding down of its Watson IoT platform service in December 2023, with IBM focusing instead on offering IoT capabilities via its hybrid cloud solutions and software. In addition to these dropouts of platforms, which focused on IoT application enablement, products focused on connectivity and device management, such as the Ericsson IoT Connectivity platform, changed hands, having been sold to IoT MVNO and platform vendor Aeris. Some of the other original leaders have also marginalized their IoT offerings, embedding them in vertical solutions, or combining IoT with big data and AI tools, positioning IoT primarily as a data collection enabler. Industrial stalwarts Software AG and Siemens, however, are becoming innovators in this market, with good reviews for functionality, vertical solutions, and contributions to positive ROI.
• The impact of IT technologies that are growing beyond IT is staggering and shows the need for advanced test and measurement.
• According to the GlobalData Deal Trends database, there have been over 20 acquisitions in this space since 2020 and numerous asset purchases and partnerships.
For every technology product that comes to market, both hardware and software, there is testing. One of the best ways to see where a market is heading, and what technologies are coming up in the next 4+ years, is to watch the testing market. The software testing market for development and deployment gets a lot of press – mostly because that kind of software testing is part of the production chain both at independent software vendors (ISVs) and in enterprises. However, the broader testing market is where the latest technologies that are not even close to release are being evaluated, where chip designers, chip manufacturers, engineers, and product companies are doing cutting edge research. These test tools can be specialized hardware, software, or both. In addition, many of the largest multinational enterprises use testing tools to validate and tweak advanced designs in their own IT and OT environments. Much of this research is done hand in hand with the testing equipment companies. Keeping an eye on what’s happening in the testing/measurement market shows clearly the investments being made for the future.
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