From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020, and we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock, and, of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020, when in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls that did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR.

Erik Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis, and we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Erik, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you on theCUBE, my friend. Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. Well, let's get right into it. Let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Erik, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work, and we've listed a number of them here in this slide. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, the pace of the vaccine rollout. I've called this a forced march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand, and work from home, we're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just, (laughs) you were just delayed. Just delayed a little bit, that's all. No, very much so. Early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher, and that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have, it's a must have, and that spending is going quickly. There's a rapid pace on that spending, so I do think that's going to push it and, of course, security. We're going to get to this later on so I don't want to bury the lede, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned and there will definitely be increased security spending that might push this 4% even higher. Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT, there are fewer layoffs, there's more hiring, we're accelerating IT deployments, so that, I think, 34% last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months, so that's great news. And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more head count comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in your headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year-end 2021. Now, I love this chart, you guys. It's been amazingly consistent to me, Erik. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s, and we're going to stay close to that, according to the ETR data, in the first half of 2021, but by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Erik, that's double the pre-pandemic numbers and that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six month, and even within the sub-samples. Yeah, super surprised by the consistency, Dave. You're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent, and that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change, it really isn't, and there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up, and we'll talk about that in a second, but if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting, they're working more, they're working effectively, there is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. I mean, good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020 and productivity apps are going to benefit. Now, of course, I'm always careful to cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much did productivity increase. It's a very hard thing to estimate depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are seeing productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Erik, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even Webex benefit, but how do you see this playing out in 2021? Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity, and our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time, so that's number one. But you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide lifted all boats, even Citrix got pulled up, but over time you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again.

It's not happening. I don't care if you go back to the office or you go back to headquarters. This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in. I was a little concerned about it 'cause it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that this, the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working, so that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call out would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience, but when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there, companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well, not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? Certainly Zoom just escalated this year, a huge ascendancy, and Teams I look at a little differently 'cause it's not just video conferencing, and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? There's no way around it, our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects. It did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward, and there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom 'cause they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine, but you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in in pricing.

I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon, so maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile, but there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it, so we'll see, but the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. I think I'm inferring Teams is a little different because it's Microsoft. They've got this huge software estate they can leverage. They can bundle. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. It will be, but listen, just the other day there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful in the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology, and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. Yep. I agree. Okay, let's bring up number four, prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work sort of hyper-pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. They've been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, and just a couple that we called, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler has really benefited and we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Erik, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on microsegmentation and other, some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be. That's not changing, and that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with a CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking but pretty close, is the way he put it, so there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Okta, continued on identity access. See no reason why that changes. CrowdStrike, continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas, like we just mentioned, in network segmentation. Illumio is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30 to 60%, so I am watching in real time, as this data comes in in the later part of our survey, that it's really happening Forescout is another one that's in there.

We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now, to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we can talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto was in this space as well, but I do believe that network and microsegmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out that I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends, and catch something sooner. Varonis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Varonis is a name to watch in that area as well. Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player. Their subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit in on a VENN, which is ETR's proprietary roundtable, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work, many of them, anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, best of breed versus the big portfolio companies, and I think 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. I completely agree and you nailed it again. Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them, but let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like their own full-on platform in the cloud, and they're starting to market that, I'm starting to hear more about it, and I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right, Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, of positive sentiment. Now, let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again in a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space, that we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing, there is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. Yes. No question. A highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watch word and so I would expect, which brings us, Erik, to prediction number five. Can be hard to do prediction posts without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending driving more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one. Airbnb, DoorDash, outside of our enterprise tech but still notable. Palantir, JFrog, number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, "Over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think Automation Anywhere is going to follow suit at some point." Hashicorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others, and, Erik, we've seen some real shifts in observability. The ELK Stack gaining prominence with Elastic, ChaosSearch just raised 40 million, and everybody's going after 5G. Lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? I think if we're going to make this a prediction show, I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names. I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space, is it's Grafana along with the ELK Stack is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been, so I think the observability area is certainly one.

We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but CloudFlare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight, and there's a few startups in that space and the CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days, and they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six, and this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer-term prediction and that prediction is in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms, and the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes and data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and embedded into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today.

They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context. Different data agendas. Those, we think, are going to be subsumed within the business lines, and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation, and this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Erik, anything you'd add to this? I'm going to let you kind of own that one 'cause I completely agree, and for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought and I think it's fantastic and I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they got over the hype of machine learning, they're sick of vendors saying machine learning, and I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics, we need 'em at the edge, we need 'em faster, we need 'em in real time. That's happening, and what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor-agnostic tools. This isn't just AWS-aligned. This isn't just GCP-aligned or Azure-aligned. The winners are the Snowflakes. The winners are the Databricks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports what you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction, is about the lines of business owning it 'cause I think this is even bigger.

Right now, we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing, it's coming under the purview of sales, so we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user or the business lines and obviously data first, so I think you're 100% right. Yeah, and if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics, the business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems, and we talked about Snowflake and Databricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, applying Databricks machine learning on top of Snowflake, I actually see them going in diverging places. I see Databricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see Snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh, and it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out. The data behind Snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. Yeah, it's just, real quickly to add on that if we have time, Dave. Yeah, sure. We all know the valuation of Snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for Databricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile. If you look at their stock chart every time they report, it's got a little bit of a roller coaster ride going on, and our most recent data for Databricks is actually decelerating, so again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1,300 or so, so it's not done yet, but right now we are putting Databricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. Well, it's interesting because I do see Databricks as more incremental on data lakes and I see Snowflake as more transformative, so at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. This is talking about the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started and it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And, Erik, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady margin share gains relative to on-prem, but the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. Just a couple of years ago, AWS, they never talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates.

Still, they're so large now. 45 billion or so this year. The data is mixed. This ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads, and then a similar, in the cloud workloads, and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds, so really interesting dynamic there. Erik, how do you see it shaking out? Yeah, the data is interesting here, and I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year, so we're not seeing a huge increase in spend, and coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey, is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective that various do point on AWS. Let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center. They wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability.

Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos which is allowing you to have interoperability in more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher. Law of numbers, of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in a context of what the data's showing 'cause I would agree we're, and particularly two areas that I would call out in ETR data, VMware Cloud on AWS as well as VM Cloud Foundation are showing real momentum and also OpenStack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal, and it's interesting to see. VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat in throughout everybody's stack, and so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting to, especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer-friendly. It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new, different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with, but I don't see anyone moving to them that wasn't already net new there and I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic, but I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud, containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity, so really is those are the kind of the big four, cloud, containers, AI, automation, And, Erik, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud, containers, AI and automation, in the form of RPA especially, as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum, but we put an asterisk around the cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary 'cause the survey's still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here, but cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares.

Now, as you said, earlier you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. Virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum, and even those two, we're seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before, with the freezing of the IT projects starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that, one on the machine learning automation. Without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now, and I've had a multiple number of people reach out or in my interviews say to me, "This is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly." Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney, and this guy obviously has a big budget and he was basically saying UiPath and Automation Anywhere dominate RPA, and that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen, we needed to find a way to get rid of these mundane tasks, we had to put them into real workloads.

And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation, so we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick. You brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about, you said about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. Great, thank you for that, and then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now, you may say, "Okay, well, this is a lay-up," but not necessarily. UiPath and Automation Anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UiPath, I've said UiPath and Automation Anywhere, if they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year, so I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together, so this is not necessarily a lay-up for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go for it. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation, and combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation.

And we think 2021, we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools, they're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Erik, how do you see it, and what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? Yeah, completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment, and those two are the leader. In our data, UiPath by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on Automation Anywhere, so they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing, starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now, again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling, so if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once but not in depth, so we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data, UiPath is still number one, Automation Anywhere is number two, and Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but a call out to Pegasystems. We put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. Their spending momentum, the early signs in the latest survey are just becoming, starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UiPath and Automation Anywhere head-on, and so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Infor, and everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here who's a software player. I completely agree, but I do think there's a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to be, prove their ROI, trying to say, "Yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back." Business process has always been, at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the Pega, the IBMs, really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article I'm about to post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company said, "Not only are UiPath and AA dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well." So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing and what Pega's doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that, but I did think it was an interesting comment for and an interesting opportunity for UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the mouths of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think, require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design, and the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower costs versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like Nvidia, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs, and they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think, and they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors.

Erik, look, we've seen cloud players. They're diversifying their processor suppliers. They're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year, certainly if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity. Your thoughts? Yeah, there's a lot there and I think you're right. It's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication, but right now, it's there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great chip famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again and some of that is due to just overwhelming demand, like you mentioned. Things like IoT. Things like 5G. Just the increased power of handheld devices. The remote from work home. All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired, and you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit, just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer, and I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this.

And maybe we can leave that as there and we could do this some other time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G roll out, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply. No doubt. It's also could have really huge implications for the CDN network. All right, there you have it, folks. Erik, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. Always. Have a great holiday, everybody. Stay safe. Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 and the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you got to check out etr.plus. It's where all the survey action is. Definitely subscribe to their services if you haven't already. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)