Futurum Acquires Aptiviti, AI Power Concentrates and GDPR Turns 8

Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday, and welcome to The Techstrong Gang. I don't know if you caught that special intro that our producer, Taylor, put together for you, but it's sporting my New York Knicks colors, blue and orange.

We're in the NBA finals. The last time the Knicks won a championship, I was being bar mitzvahed in 1973. So, I'm pulling hard for them.

Go New York, go New York. Great. But that being said, beyond the Knicks being in the finals, it's a big day here on the Gang.

We've got big news. Futurum broke some big news today. It's something I was in the know about, I'll admit it now, for a while, and been following it eagerly.

But Futurum announced it's a definitive agreement to acquire, and we're hoping the acquisition follows through quickly, with a company called ETR. Now, if you're not a Wall Street big shot or a big-time investor, and you don't rely on the real deal in terms of spending dollars and stuff like that, you may not have heard of ETR. Or maybe you're one of the 10,000 people in the ETR, or nearly 10,000 people, in the ETR community who actually voluntarily submit some of the numbers that you're spending on IT spend and so forth that go into the ETR data feed.

" We've got a big show for you today. Let me introduce you to them, and we're going to jump right into that news. We've got Terry Robinson, Andy Mann, Jon Swartz, and joining us, he hasn't been on in a while, my friend Dan O'Brien, president, COO over at Futurum.

So Dan, what is the big deal? Yeah, as you mentioned, Alan, announced the definitive agreement to acquire ETR today. What is ETR?

So ETR is a community of technology decision-makers across IT and line of business. I think you mentioned earlier, it's a community of about 10,000 people representing about $2 trillion in technology spend every year. So roughly $6 trillion technology market.

It's about a third of the spend represented at a highly granular, highly detailed level. Now, ETR's business has primarily been selling into institutional investors. Think about the hedge funds, the long-only investors, the smartest people in the world who find the data edge to create that alpha, have been using this data to trade the enterprise sector for the last decade.

And I think what's really exciting about the news for us at Futurum is obviously Futurum has had a lot of influence in financial markets, mostly through our media work. We're interviewed on broadcast media all the time. Just last week, our Futurum Equities sell-side unit launched initiating coverage on the semiconductor sector, and I think ETR really brings for us that formal foothold serving the investor community and client base, and look forward to the Futurum Equities team folding in with ETR, which will operate as a separate business under the Futurum group, really serving institutional investors.

At the core of ETR is the data. The data is the real asset, not only the historical data, but the data machine to keep the pulse on where the market is going. And what I'm excited about is really bringing that data over to our vendor clients in the technology ecosystem.

Like I said, primarily, ETR's business has been working with investors. They've had a small nascent business working with technology vendors. They've actually made incredible progress over the last 18 to 24 months, where they've started to focus on that.

And that's what I'm excited about, is Futurum really helping them to accelerate that. I've done something similar to this earlier in my career. We had a great semiconductor business selling into buy-side funds and institutional investors.

And what we found then, and I think what we'll find now, is that that same data can be operationalized inside these companies really, really well. It's a highly differentiated data asset. It's timely, it's proprietary, it's incremental.

And I think there's been some really good early signs on the enterprise side of their business in terms of very large technology vendors using this data in corporate development as part of their M&A work, both on idea generation as well as due diligence within product teams when it comes to competitiveness in the market. Marketing teams on brand perception, MICI. CFO, IR, is using it to understand what signals the data is sending to the investor side, the folks that they're dealing with.

So, a really powerful data asset. Asset. And I think Futurum fundamentally believes that there's only a few moats left in the analyst business.

There's proprietary data, and there's an audience that follows what you say. And I think this really helps strengthen us on the proprietary data side, an area we're already strong, but would love to be stronger. And really excited about bringing this data to our technology vendor clients, and helping them really better understand their customers' intentions when it comes to how much they're going to spend with them versus competitors.

I think we see great use cases around MICI, M&A, partnership opportunities, looking at same accounts, right? Like account analysis across you and potentially other vendors you want to partner with or acquire. So an incredibly powerful data asset joining the Futurum research family.

Couldn't be more excited. YeahSo- Hey Go ahead. Oh.

I'm going to ask you a quick question, Dan. In a sense, through all these acquisitions, and we were talking earlier about the number of acquisitions Futurum has made. In a sense, the public markets probably, in a sense, view you, the Futurum Group, us, as an AI decision intelligence platform versus these traditional analyst firms.

Is that kind of where things are headed? I think so, absolutely. I think that's very fair to say.

I don't think we are trying to build another traditional analyst firm. That's never been the goal. I think we see that business model as fundamentally flawed and one that needs disrupting, and I think a lot of clients would give us credit for being the disruptor over the past several years.

So, certainly, that's the goal, is to become that decision intelligence tool. We've already got investors today making decisions off of the data. Technology vendors as well.

I think a core part of the community value add is getting the data back, so as a user you know what you're doing, understanding what your peer is doing, and taking that into the decision-making process. I think we're really trying to serve those three audiences, the investor, the tech vendor, and the tech buyer. Obviously, some of our other acquisitions have been in other places.

I think that's another part of the value prop for this forward analyst concept and the analyst firm of the future is we're not just an analyst firm. We have testing and benchmarking capabilities. We've got a robust media portfolio, in terms of audiences that consume our content.

And obviously, we've really strengthened the core data and advisory element with the acquisition we launched here today. Yep. Let me jump in, and then Andy, Terry, feel free.

So first of all, I feel obligated to mention that we've actually got three articles up on Techstrong, properties around today's announcement. Two are up on Techstrong IT. One is the hard news story.

It's the press release with some Techstrong spin on it. it, is my article on this and why I think it's important. ai, where I have a Q&A article up with Daniel.

Daniel Newman, not Daniel O'Brien, CEO of Futurum. And I want to jump in there because really, I think what you're going to see in that Q&A is the beginning of a manifesto for a new age of analyst firms. You know, Andy, you've been an analyst.

Terry, John, you guys have been covering this space and know as much as most of the analysts out there. You both have decades involved. Yes.

Dan's been in it, I've been in it. The fact of the matter is, and Daniel Newman is calling the emperor out for not having clothes, is the old analyst model worked for a long time. Mm-hmm.

There's some great firms. No one's knocking the G Men or Forrest or any of these folks. But the times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan says.

And we need a new model for a new era, for a new time. Yeah. And so Dan mentioned the word forward.

I think that's a word you're going to be hearing a lot about. And again, I encourage you to read Daniel's Q&A. A lot of it is laid out in there.

But there's a couple things. Number one, AI. We all live in it.

We acknowledge it. It's changing. The Pope's writing 43,000 words about it.

But here's the deal. One of the issues with AI is it's the thirst for more data, for better data to train these things on, to get inference from. Every single analyst firm can go out there and use the frontier models.

We're all free to use the frontier models. But increasingly, what's going to separate the cream from the crop is what data do you have that powers your AI? We just bought the mother lode.

We already had an agreement, and when I say we, obviously Techstrong's part of Futurum. So we just got the mother-- We already had an agreement with G2 for their data. We've now got this.

We have our analyst data. We have the Techstrong data of eight different sites, millions of visitors a year. That's the kind of proprietary moat, as Dan called it, that's going to set apart the kind of research, the kind of analysis, the kinds of decision-making help you can get from a next-gen analyst firm like Futurum for this next era.

We didn't mention, and quite frankly, we don't blow our horn enough on Techstrong gang, but Futurum, we have the Futurum Intelligence Platform, where a lot of this data lives, and now Futurum customers can go in and access it. You don't need an analyst. It's like when they changed the mass from Latin to the native language.

You don't need a priest interpreting it for you. You can go right into the platform. Andy's laughing.

You could go right into the platform and get it yourself. What a great equalizer that is. It's a great time to be alive.

So I'm really bullish on this. But Andy, Terry, you guys are not Futurum. John works here, I work here, Dan works here.

What do you guys think about what we're saying? Andy, I'll throw it to you Yeah. Look, I was once an analyst and then once again an analyst.

I used to work for a smaller analyst firm here in Boulder, Colorado. We always punched above our weight. I also started my own analyst business.

I will tell you, the new model is what I key in here. This enables you, Dan, to do different things in different ways, which is what I love about innovation. And Alan, I absolutely agree with you.

That old guard is still valuable. I will say, especially individual analysts are still valuable. From a CTO perspective, I'm looking at M&A, I'm looking at product planning, I'm looking at market sizing, a lot of stuff like that.

A lot of that is opinion, especially the market research type stuff. What do your customers want to buy? What features are more important?

Some of that's still about humans talking to humans, but so much of what I need now is data-driven intelligence that I needed yesterday. Look, if I wanted to wait until tomorrow, then I wouldn't ask for it until the day after. Right?

Of course, I need everything yesterday. So this idea that you're using AI, data, massive data set, giving me access to do what I want to do with that data set, and getting those answers quickly with data-driven responses, this is enormous for me. I actually agree, it doesn't replace some of the big three, the big whatever you'd call them now.

But it definitely lights a fire under them because it creates such a valuable data ecosystem, they're going to have to pay attention to it. So I love it because it adds to my world and gives me more opportunity to get better insights. So this is very cool, I reckon.

Yeah. Well, so for all of those things, yes. Right?

I agree with you on that. I also feel like the big three or the big whoevers, have been feeling the heat for some time because a look at the tea leaves has shown that it's going to go in this direction, and some of them have struggled. I'm not going to name names, but we know that there's been a struggle there with some of these firms.

And so all that, yeah, all well and good, I agree with you, sort of the democrat-- This is always appealing to me. I guess what I want to know more about is the security, which would make sense, the security aspect of this. You're right, people can go up now, they get data, whatever, you're constantly interrogating data.

How do you protect that? That's a bit different than when it's- Sure ... close.

So that part, I'm very interested in. Let me give you a little... So Brad, and I'm going to mispronounce his last name, Dan.

It's not Locascio. Lostaglio. Say it again?

Brad Lostaglio. Lostaglio. So I spoke to Brad about this, and we're going to have him on.

Actually, he's scheduled. I'm doing a TechstrongTV interview with him tomorrow. Mm-hmm.

It'll probably air Friday. They've been around for 15 plus years, and they've been supplying this proprietary data, as Dan said, to some of the biggest houses and hedge funds on Wall Street. So they've had to deal with that security issue.

Because their data is their lifeblood. If that data got out, it'd be hard for them to make a living. So they've been dealing with this for 15 years, and so they built the proper processes and policies and procedures and technology that keeps that data safe.

Yeah. Security is really fundamental to the business model. Yeah.

Yeah. So is the AI going to only have access to the anonymized metadata? Or how is that- No.

Well, so you know what? I'm going to ask Brad that for you tomorrow. But understand something about the Futurum intelligence platform and why it's different than, let's say, just going on ChatGPT, right?

Or any of these frontier models. That data set is not shared, or it's not out there that was used in training some model that everybody and their mom can ask a question of. It's a moded data set only available to Futurum subscribers in there, and you can't just take that data with you, so to speak.

Right? Like any other kind of high-value data. So there is a lot of security.

Terri, I'm going to try to get you a pass in to go play with it and see for yourself. It's- Yeah, no, I'd love to do that ... a great idea at system level prompts, level that really understand the data set well, understand how to query it.

There's a lot of, I'll call it prebuilt workflows for the types of repeatable analyses that we see our clients wanting to do. We're very much approaching this from a persona perspective, so understanding how a corp dev leader would use the data versus a product leader versus a marketing leader, and really trying to codify some of those workflows into our prompt IP so that with a single click of the button, you can get your vendor health dashboard that tells you everything, the buying intent signals, the AI product data, the deep qualitative interviews are telling us. And by the way, Terri- Yeah ...

you really nailed some of the competitive advantage here from my perspective. And as a former analyst, this is like the Holy Grail for me. This idea that you can get multiple customers to contribute to a shared data set.

Oh, I have wanted to do this for 20 years as a vendor. Like you think about the opportunities a vendor to share security and penetration data. You think about as a vendor to share operational uptime, availability, network downtime, outage data across boundary lines.

I did my own research as an analyst. When you share information across boundary lines, the broader the boundary line, the better the return on investment becomes. So for me, as an analyst, to be able to look at this data across these boundary lines, absolutely the security and compliance issues are why this is such a rare and unique asset to get.

Because I've tried this. This is the hardest thing to do, is to get large enterprises to share that data, but that's what they're doing. So that for me, you've nailed it, Terry.

That's why- They track $2 trillion worth of IT spend. $2 trillion. And then- I know we got a lot of security folks here, Alan.

We'll maybe drop in the chat after, Taylor, the ETR State of Security report that they'd use at RSAC every year, just about a month or so old. So we can get that out to everybody if they want to take a look. Yeah, we'll put that in the notes.

And I was going to tell you that Terry, they have amazing security data that you might find helpful in some of the articles and stuff you're working on. Sure. Great.

Yep. With Secure Boulevard of John Erdie, I'm sure has taken a look at it. Hey, we're going to jump to our next segment, but before we do, the legal beagles, we've always got to satisfy the legal beagles.

And so I want to make clear that what's happened here is we didn't acquire ETR today. We entered a definitive agreement to acquire the parent company of ETR, and we expect that transaction to close forthwith, but certainly by the end of the quarter, let's say. Forthwith's always a good legal word a lawyer loves to throw out right before henceforth.

Forthwith. But, so that should satisfy our legal friends. I want to make that clear.

We're not saying the acquisition closed today. We signed a definitive agreement. it, on Tekstrong AI, and on the Futurum Group website, as well as the press release.

And also, look, it's all over LinkedIn, X, and social media, so check for that as well. We've got a landing page on Futurum for the announcement, and anybody who wants to get a demo of the dataset, there's a web form right there, and somebody will reach out to you soon. Absolutely.

Very cool. All right. Let's jump to number two.

Again, going back, well, truth be told, I'm too young to remember this, but they tell me that President Eisenhower, in his speech leaving the presidency and turning it over to a young JFK, talked about the rise of the military industrial complex and how we had to fear them kind of taking over too much of our business world and too much of our government. I was reading an article the other day about this data center they're building in Utah, which is, I think the better part of a county or something like that. I forget how many tens of thousands of square feet.

But it made me think that we're seeing the rise of the AI industrial complex. Andy, I know you have thoughts on this. What's your thought?

My friend, I have so many thoughts on this. My goodness. That Stratos Data Center, I can't believe that.

That is nuts. That is going to use so much power. That's going to use more power and throw off more heat than the entire state of Utah does today.

Yeah. Look, this is crazy. And- That's- Say again, Terry?

I said that's one hot state, too. I know, right? It's already hot enough out here.

Our ski season out in the Rocky Mountain regional area was appalling this year. Look, we don't need more climate change to start with, but there's much more going on. You're right, Alan.

The military industrial complex has just essentially got a new player in the group. It's the same complex, it's just different names. The industrial becomes the technology.

And so we do have this unholy nexus of the highly funded oligarchic tech bros who must, must, must invest and make this work. They have failed so many times on so many projects: VR, 3D, a whole bunch of stuff, right? AI's got to be successful.

So they're just throwing money at it. And you need data centers to do this. And data centers are really important, and AI's really important, but there's a bunch of problems here.

Look, it's going to generate power and heat. It's not really a big job creator. " Look, you build it.

Takes maybe six months, probably less for just a shell, and then you've got maybe, I don't know, 10 people running the whole thing, including shifts, right? And these are all being put in rural and poor areas. The people who are benefiting most are the people who are able to get themselves away from all the negative consequences.

The people who are going to be burdened most are the people who can't get away from any of that and get none of the benefits. So local communities are going to be saturated for power, their water. I know AOC held up some water samples from data centers, mega centers from, I think it was Alabama or Georgia recently, and it just looked like sewer water.

This is the drinking water that people are going to have to deal with. Yes, you can do stuff about this. You can have closed systems.

That costs more, so of course they don't want to do that. These are really important compute processing facilities that we absolutely do need. And national security comes up a lot.

We need to beat the Chinese at AI. We need to be self-sufficient in our targeting systems, et cetera. But by the same token, it's not always security.

Look, a billion dollars got earmarked as a security payment to fund building a ballroom. We can talk about anything but security because it just shuts down conversation. Yep.

These are industrial facilities. We should be treating them and talking about them in our communities like that. I got big problems with this stuff, Alan.

Look, I read the notes. It's 40,000 acres. Dan, I don't know if we could even get our hands around how big 40,000 acres actually is.

Pretty big. It's huge. It's like you take Yellowstone Ranch or something and just make it one big data center.

Oh, God. I give you- You shouldn't say that out loud. Don't say that out loud.

Somebody will do it. I actually saw a picture the other day that this data center is approximately the size of the entire Central Park in Manhattan. Wow, okay.

20 city blocks, something like that. No, 40,000 acres has got to be bigger than that. It might be the size of Manhattan.

That might be the size of Manhattan. But it's not just the acreage. It's, as you said, Andy, I think it's going to take more electricity to run than the whole state of Utah consumes right now on a daily basis.

Yeah. Where's water coming from? The water.

That's what I don't understand. There are always water problems out in that area of the country. Why is- In Utah.

Utah, I know. Look, and I have problems with the Meta one in Louisiana, my home state. We got a lot of water there just standing around.

Yes, you do. You can almost make some argument for it there, but even then, that's predicted to suck up more water than that state really generates, and compromise the people. Oh, by the way, they announced on that one that it was going to have three to 500 jobs.

I think that is a crock. That's a funny thing to say from Louisiana, because you guys got more gators than crocs, but- Yeah ... but I get it.

I get where you're coming from. But here's the tactic. They are wrapping it in the flag, right?

This is our patriotic duty to build these things before the Chinese do, and so forth. John? Reminds me of the build-out of the national highway system.

I mean, it's- Yeah. Yeah. But in hindsight, what a great thing that was.

Well, yeah, that was really good, actually. Talking about Eisenhower. I just want to point out, by the way, there's a very distinct parallel there.

It's really important you bring that up, Dan. When we built the freeway system, you know where we built it? Straight through the middle of poor- Middle of poor ...

communities, through communities of color, through marginalized. This is exactly what's happening with data centers. We're putting these into marginalized communities exactly the same way we did with- Right ...

the freeway system. I would've thought we'd learned something about that. Tendency to discriminate.

Yep. Yep. So at what point does this national security framing shift from a legitimate geopolitical strategy to it's more like an economic shield against regulatory oversight, and I think about these host communities that are in these situations.

Are they going to be able, Alan, for instance, or anyone, to restructure agreements with tech giants to ensure long-term resilient economic value? Given that modern data centers offer almost no permanent local employment? Well, I think what you're trading in most of these data center deals that I've seen, they don't make promise on jobs.

What they do make promise is on paying property taxes. Mm. Right?

And then that money theoretically goes back into the community in terms of services. However, the flip side is there's a huge competition from Louisiana to Texas to Utah to Georgia to everywhere else, Ohio, where they give these companies tax- Well, that's it ... abatements.

They don't pay taxes for five years, 10 years, or whatever- Yeah ... to land the deal. Because traditionally, that's the way local...

Look, I remember the city of Frisco in Texas. Frisco, right outside of Dallas, they did an amazing job of attracting small, mid-size tech companies by basically giving them free office space and taxes. Mm-hmm.

And tax rebates. But they brought real jobs. Those were real tech companies with real jobs.

Well, that's right, and around these data centers, you don't typically see, for the very nature of them, the sound and the smell and everything else. No, there is that. You don't really- A lot of people complain.

Yeah, but you don't really see ecosystems developing around those things like you would with the construction of a stadium, right? Yeah. Well, Frisco's the headquarters of the Cowboys.

That's where their corporate headquarters is, and it was- Yeah ... an outgrowth of that as a business. Why do you think all these localities are competing over these things, right?

We've established they're incredibly resource intensive on local resources like power and water. We've established they don't necessarily bring a lot of jobs. Clearly, somebody's seeing a benefit to putting these up there.

What are we missing? We're ... I think that's a good question.

I think a lot of people are still operating under the old model where any business is good business. You bring something in, and it creates jobs, and that's what they think. They have- Right.

I mean- Probably more in the building. Probably less in the maintenance, but... Yeah.

Look, it does bring the initial construction. Oh, that part of the economy is pretty good. That's good jobs.

HVAC, carpenters, electricians.... concrete workers and stuff like that. Yeah.

I mean, are we underestimating how much of that sticks around, right? It feels like- Well, now it's needed. It's fine ...

two, three generations of hardware later, you're ripping it all out and putting new stuff in, right? Yeah. Yeah, but that's good.

That's more money being spent. Well, I don't know. I feel like there's some sustainability to the labor force.

Right. So there is. Yeah.

That would be a good question to ask, I think, John, you brought up, is are the tenants or owners, operators of the data center signing on to a long-term commitment there? I read an article, this big one they built out in Abilene, Texas, was originally supposed to be primarily for Oracle. " And so the operators of the data center switched and brought in Microsoft for Oracle.

I just have to assume that these are like every other IT project in that we promise the world, and we never measure our results. Just move on. Every Sounds like the analyst industry, Andy.

Well, here's the other thing, too, I'm going to just say, you would think that there would be something sustainable there, as you said, Dan, right, with the concrete pours and all of that. The problem is, and I come from a state that's a big oil and gas state, and I can tell you this happens when there's drilling and when there's whatever, you get that big burst, but unfortunately, maybe you get those people back when there's another boom, but there's a gap in between there where people- There is, yes ... get work and lag.

There's a lag. There's definitely- There's a lag. There's a huge gap.

Actually, I was going to mention, in the last few weeks, I've been traveling maybe too much, but I've gone to a lot of different parts of the country, and what I'm noticing are a number of television political ads that focus on data centers and focus on- Mm-hmm ... those who support them, and that is used as a club against the candidate- Yeah ... especially in California.

A lot of the references are going at the ballot box, yeah. Yeah. Guys, it's a couple of trillion dollars worth of spend.

When there's that kind of money being bandied about- Well- ... you're going to see that What's growing in the market, right? There's been some interesting analysis on if you take out the AI infrastructure build-out, how healthy does the economy look?

It's not a great picture, right? Yeah. So, it's kind of floating us along right now.

Well, also, I mean, this morning, NVIDIA announced their $150 billion a year spending in Taiwan in terms of an AI hub. I know it's not the United States, but this is where the growth is. This is where the jobs are.

This is where the economy's moving, for now. For now. For now.

All right. Guys, we've got to move right along here. We've got a birthday to celebrate.

I don't know if you brought your hats, your candles, and your noisemakers, but the GDPR turned eight years old, eight years ago. Yeah. Happy birthday, GDPR.

Terry, has it had the impact we security people thought it would? Eh. Eh.

I guess that says it all. Yes and no. I think there's been more opportunity there than real results.

I was thinking about this a lot, because when Mike asked me if I wanted to write the story, I'm like, it's sad that I actually know the anniversary or the birth date of this regulation because we covered it hard, right, as journalists in the- Mm-hmm ... lead up to it. And I looked at it, even back then, as not just a compliance thing, right, but as something that would help companies.

If you really took GDPR seriously and you were trying to get to where you complied, you would assess your data. You would see what you had, how it was being used, who was touching it, all those things that organizations should know, but anybody who goes back eight or nine years knows that they didn't know that stuff by and large. It was alarming almost.

And so I felt like there would be more to it. It seems like the general feeling now is, yes, there's been this compliance component, but now we're into using GDPR for governance. That is a logical kind of evolution of that previous idea.

And I see. And then the other thing that, to me, really affected it, because you thought you're going to see these big fines, and you've seen some really... The thing has had some teeth, right?

There's been big fines. But it's a drop in the bucket for these companies that are getting fined. You've got to take that into consideration.

And then I think it was stymied a bit by the pandemic because I think that there were fewer fines and less regulatory action when we were all trying to figure out this sort of new model of working from home and what that meant for security and privacy. And I don't think we saw those huge fines that we thought we were going to see early enough on for this. Well, there has been $6 billion in fines.

Six billion. But- Yes ... a lot of them are tied up in these multi-year legal appeals.

No, yeah. That's right. That's the other- So in a sense, GDPR is almost an uncollectable paper tiger- Mm-hmm ...

versus a successful deterrent. Well, I bet you half of that money is tied up in Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple- Mm-hmm ... the mag seven kinds.

It doesn't really affect the little guy. Privacy by design a real thing, too. I think it really- Yeah, it did.

Did it make privacy by design a real thing or did it make a cookie acknowledgement by design, right? For most businesses, GDPR means I've got an accept my cookies pop-up when you come to my website. Right.

Well, isn't it, also isn't this GDPR just not as stringent as it used to be? Didn't they decide to roll back the definition of personal data and they're carving out these AI training exceptions in a sense- Well, they are kind of- ... it's kind of, yeah It's getting, some of it has been diluted in recent years, I think.

Sure. Look, as far as I can tell, from a CTO perspective, I'm building software, I'm trying to sell it, I'm trying to work across boundary lines, all this sort of stuff. This is a lot like when I lock up my bike.

If someone comes along and wants to steal my bike, they're going to steal my bike. What I can do is try and do the best that I can do- Yeah ... and follow the best guidelines I can do, if I care.

And if I don't care, I just leave my beta parked by the side of the road and someone nicks it and I don't care. It's been really positive for people who want to do the right thing. It's given me, as a CTO, great guidelines.

It's really important for my individual contributors, like developers, operators, stuff like that, who need to make real-time decisions. Can I work with this data? Can I give this data to someone else?

What can I do? That's been really, really positive. But you're right, it's been diluted to the point where it becomes easy to ignore or at least overcome if you don't really care.

And there's been a lot of regulatory overreach, which has made a lot of people go, "You know what? " So I think it's like a good lock. Mm-hmm.

But don't blame the player, blame the game, right? Right. Don't blame the player.

The fact of the matter is, it's devolved into compliance, and compliance is always least common denominator security. So people do what they have to, not because they necessarily care whether or not they're breached or they got the lock on or what have you. They do it because that's what they have to do to comply with the reg.

And that's it. Well, at least there's a framework in Europe. At least, let's say- Yeah, but no, anyone who thinks- We haven't been able to produce one over here ...

it affects everyone. The United States needs to produce some sort of- Guys, I will tell you, our compliance complaints come to me here at Techstrong. I get them every day.

Sometimes people will claim GDPR, they're a citizen of Poland or Germany or wherever. " And that's who I shared them with. We're not in the information broker business.

But speaking of the business, Dan, how does this relate to today's acquisition news? Hmm. Well, protecting PII is critical, right?

The community that we foster relies on that continued anonymity and protecting of their identify in order to participate. So it's fundamental to me, Alan. Yeah.

I would love to see, and you don't have this off the top of your head, Dan, because if you did, I think I'd fall over. Yeah. But does ETR, they probably track in their dataset how much money people are spending on compliance tools.

Absolutely, yes. Right? And I'm going to venture that it's a pretty penny.

Yeah, you can see some of that in the bi-monthly AI product survey. Some of those kind of AI security and compliance software tools are showing really strong adoption as AI scales up. Absolutely.

Question to the panel. All right, it's eight years in. What's next, guys?

Or is this it? Have we reached the zenith of privacy data protection, or is there something else beyond? Terry, you're the security expert.

Yeah. Oh, thanks a lot. Well, I don't know exactly what's next except that maybe there's some life to all of this with, as AI continues to influence.

Because you're going to have to do all this at scale and maybe, but I'm, and I hear, again, I know I've got the Debbie Downer reputation here. No. I don't have a lot of confidence.

I admire that. Nice. Thank you.

I don't think that I don't have a lot of confidence in that there's going to be any big strides in privacy anymore. I'm with you on that, Terry. I don't have the faith that this is going to happen organically in any way, shape, or form.

But I will say, you're right, Alan, with AI coming on, I think we will get to a point where, especially in Europe, where they have, for want of a better description, a lot more of input from people into how the government works. I think there's going to be a backlash around how AI data is created and used, because don't forget, at this point in time, I can obey all of GDPR and I could work myself backwards to individual identities just based on a whole bunch of metadata. That's right.

That's right. Yeah, I think you're right. Synthetic data becomes really, really interesting because there's so much synthetic data being created, and it's using the type of data we're supposed to be protecting, and I can't imagine we're far away from somebody's agent getting access to the wrong database- Mm ...

and stuff leaking despite all the best intentions around controls and security. And I think that would be potentially where the next evolution comes in, Alan- Yeah ... is some statement on liability for agents going rogue.

Yeah. So synthetic isn't as synthetic as we think Well, synthetic becomes synthetic off of real data, right? Yep.

Right. Somewhere in there is the truth. Anyway, guys, we're about out of time.

Mike's not here today, so I wanted to close things up with kind of how these things all connect, right? All three topics today are really about who's controlling and what are we doing with data infrastructure and the rules that power us in tech. From the Futurum ETR piece, it's that intelligence layer, the AI industrial complex, the physical layer.

We're building these 40,000 acre things, and the regulatory layer. All three of them, though, get to the heart of how are we controlling in this great new age that promises so much if we just keep our wits about us and stay on that line. Thank you for watching today.

ai. I think for anyone in the IT industry, it's a good read. But that's going to wrap for today's Techstrong gang.

Thank you to our gang members, to our audience. Thanks for watching. As usual, we do this every day at noon.

tv. Techstrong is a part of the Futurum Group family of companies, so we've got a big disclaimer out there for covering our news today. And if you want to say we had a horse in the race, so be it.

I'm your jockey. But we'll be back tomorrow with more. Dan, John, Terry, Andy, thanks for joining.

Thank you for joining. Mike will be back tomorrow, too, but for now, we're out of here.