The Futurum Group – Techstrong Group Acquisition with Daniel Newman (Part 2)

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel again here on Textron tv. You know, I wanted to continue our discussions around our recent big news of Textron joining the Futurum Group, forming what we think is one of the biggest analyst media combinations reach in the tech world today.

Really excited by it. If you haven't caught part one of our discussion, or the, the live announcement that Daniel and I did, I urge you to go check it out on Techstrong TV and bring you up to speed. But whether you did or did it, this is standalone anyway, so no need, you could do that later.

Wanted to spend some time today though, talking about the current state of the B2B Tech media and analyst market. Joining me. I have introduced him before.

My partner here, Daniel Newman, CEO, founder of Futurum Group, and then the man in the middle. It's not a security attacker or anything. Absolutely.

The man in the middle is the Chief Content Officer here at Techstrong. Um, Michael Vard. Hey, Mike.

Hey, how you doing bud? Good. So if we're gonna talk about sort of the history and the current state of the B2B tech, media and analyst market, there aren't two people I could think of who would be a better authorities to talk about this.

Mike, you you've been in the tech media world since 19. Um, yeah, and well, I, I, I'd love to get your opinion on this 'cause I have a pet peeve on the subject anyway, but, and it comes down to, I feel like a lot of the research that I've seen is on a historical model, it's kinda whether it's, you know, I jokingly refer to it as the big giant report that somebody creates and they drop it on your desk. And some firms call it a, you know, their, their mythical quadrant and other folks call it their rogue wave or whatever they're gonna be.

And I find that the pace of innovation exceeds the ability to, of those reports to be relevant because by the time they land on somebody's desk, the market's moved four times over. So does all this need to be a more of a real time conversation between the analysts and the, and the end customer who's buying the product and the vendors in that flow? And has that whole process changed and evolved?

So to your first part, right, I give a lot of credit to those companies that have built these moats with, uh, quadrants and triangles and waves and other geometric shapes. Having said that, yes, from the day we started the firm, we believed that this business model was already aging. That the idea of something that's static, right?

It's kind of like we got the data one time and every 12 months, can you imagine the stock market, if we only quoted the stocks annually or even twice a year, people move very quickly. We pulse data every day. We do, uh, surveys on our Twitter accounts and LinkedIn, and we get real time to the minute.

And if you have the right audience, you can get really pretty close to right up to the minute insights as to preference. You could say, which cloud providers are you investing in right now? Which silicon are you running your workloads on right now?

Which tools are you developing apps on? com has for developers or, um, like cyber B uh, security Boulevard has for cybersecurity, you can get a real time taste of what people are doing. So, you know, a long arrival to your question is the era of this sort of 36 week to year and a half process for developing some sort of research or an economic validation study, or a testing a new variant of a, of a piece of silicon being done over months and years doesn't work when new products are being shipped and developed on multi-time a year basis, sometimes quarterly.

And with Agile software, it can be, there can be updates every week That next day, man. Mm-Hmm. So, and you, did I get there?

Did I answer? You just hit it on, you just hit the nail on the head though, Daniel, because here's the thing. This is analogous to the whole agile DevOps movement, right?

When I, I was doing software companies, co-founding software companies, if we did two releases a year, it was a great year. Some years we didn't get to in a year, we only got one. And it pushed in a world where we release 10 XA day.

It's not unusual. It's not unusual to release every day as very, most companies now are releasing at least monthly, if not daily, weekly. Um, why shouldn't our intelligence be that the fact that our intelligence is not, and we wait for a yearly update to a quadrant or a wave or whatever the next tsunami is.

It's, it's kind of, when you think about it backwards, it's just, it's not a model for today's world. The same way our software, well, we, we wouldn't, we demand more from our apps. We demand more from our research, but we also demand more from our media.

It's Caching a moment in time, right? Literally, it's like right now in this exact moment, which the biggest and most problematic part of it, Mike, is that the cache of that moment in time is actually an amalgamation of data points that were probably taking over a year prior. So what I'm saying is when you say, okay, which cloud platform has the most robust set of DevOps tools, and we're gonna put it in a, in a grid, you know, again, let's not pick on anyone.

This is how things have been done for a long time. But the bottom line is that scorecard was created with data that's now three months old, six months old, nine months old. And so it helps from the standpoint of how do people consume content?

People want a grid, they want scorecard, they want a bar chart, right? That's why when I tweet, I put images because that's what people want. Having said that though, if I'm a buyer and I'm actually ready to spend money on technology, I don't want to know 12 months ago, 12 months, there's been, you know, dozens of te uh, software releases, maybe three or four new iterations, a new instance of silicon.

I mean, just this last week, and I, I realize I'm rambling and everybody just bear with me. I'm gonna get there. You know, just this last week you saw Apple pulled forward leaked.

Apple doesn't leak anything. It leaked its M four announcement, right? Why did that happen?

Well, there was a chain of events that took place that week. Um, first of all, Intel was able to announce that it was able to deliver its new lunar, like the A IPC silicon that's gonna now be available with OEM designs. By Christmas, you have Qualcomm coming out with these new ARM-based apple killers.

So they say, um, and we'll see. Um, and Apple sitting there with their, sitting on their thumbs a little bit and everybody's saying, well, what's Apple doing? I mean, Apple's had a no good, no good terrible, really bad set of weeks.

This is a, this is a sort of grand picture 'cause Silicon works even a little different than software. But the point that I'm trying to make is, is that Apple's decision to kind of come out and say, here's what we're doing with our A IPC was basically driven by all these other moving factors. Had, had Intel not said we could pull forward and everybody wasn't rushing and copy text wasn't coming.

Apple might have waited till ww DC to make an announcement. So decisions are made. So that's a, that's a macrocosm of how decisions are made by companies.

But 12 month old data is, is it can't be more than one point out of hundreds they should use in terms of making a tech buying decision. So I have a pet theory that says that this whole thing is gonna accelerate even faster, because what used to happen is vendors would count on the fact they could lock in somebody. It feels like to me, and I've seen the numbers examples of this already, where the ability to re-engineer the code.

So if something was written in an old version of Java or Cold Wall, I can now cut that down and maybe a 10th of the time. So now the cost of switching is dropping, which means that I'm not as locked into my platform selection as it occurred. So I think a lot of customers are gonna be more willing to switch vendors and switch platforms because it won't be as expensive as it used to be.

And I think that's happening now already. We've seen modernization projects. I think the guys in Amazon were touting something they had done where they had written, you know, hundreds of millions of lines of code inside it, like two months that normally would've taken five years.

So I wonder if you see the same thing, but I think the whole pace of this thing is gonna accelerate by a factor of 20. I'll Give, I'll give an example and, and I, and I wanna hear round's take on this too, but you know, we were recently at Google Cloud next, and as we know, Google Cloud is sort of the third massive hyperscale cloud provider. Um, you know, Oracle fourth, Azure second AWS first.

That's the way it's pretty well understood. And for a long time when it was just traditional compute instances, right? Just for traditional enterprise workloads, there was this kind of idea that you could use one public cloud and maybe you'd have your on-prem, but a hybrid architecture was never more than one cloud.

And then obviously AI came, and Google has a pretty substantial provenance as it relates to its ai, the largest data set in the world because of its search. Uh, you know, and long and short is, I was talking to some of the senior executive president level people within Google, and they said, look, there was a time when we were competing, but now we're working in addition to, so you talk about platform selection, what I'm saying is more and more of these companies are saying, well, we're not going away from AWS we value a lot of things we do there. Their architecture, their tools, their technologies, the data.

We have what we've built, but these fabrics have been created now. And they say, well, we really like some of the things that Google's doing as it relates to LLMs. And, and so the point is, we can do both.

And so the agility and the ability to have, uh, disparate offerings under the same enterprise roof from multiple competitive companies, it's not only an OR thing, it's become an hand thing. And they're moving really quick. They're developing an AWS are developing in Azure because maybe they're running Office 365 and they wanna run co-pilots and they're using AWS and they're saying, well, we like Bedrock and we like what they've built there for open LLM access.

Google has some really, really interesting capabilities with Vertex for application development. So we're gonna do app development over here. We're gonna run, you know, database over here and we're gonna use our co-pilots.

It is what I'm saying is platform selection has gotten diverse, it's gotten really fast and it's gotten very agile. It's gotten, it's given people choices. And that's really what it's about.

So this whole multi-cloud thing is what we're describing. And I've seen that. Look, I think Gen AI has accelerated it, but we've seen a build it, it kind snuck up on the industry.

I did not see a lot of analysts to be fair, pointing to multi-cloud four years ago, what you did four years ago. Okay, we're good. Look, we got the tape, you got a red flag flag, I think throw the red flag.

I think Not many. There's, but there's a difference. There's a difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud.

In my mind, Big difference. There's A big difference. And hybrid cloud to me speaks of more centralized control and having a control plane that spans those things.

And I think we're gonna see a lot more of that coming back to this show we just had a couple of days ago where the reasoning engine in the LLM is getting a lot smarter. So I can orchestrate a series of tasks and I can prompt that to do that. So I don't have to have this big massive console with all this stuff going on.

I can rely more on the AI to connect the disparate databases, the AI model, a co-pilot, a queue. Yeah. And the workload.

But the real key to it is though is a case of, you know, this is Darwinism at its best, right? You got these for us, it's three or four cloud vendors. If you take in the Chinese clouds, there's a couple more, but you've got these, all these cloud vendors that all kinda started at the same place and infrastructure as a service, right?

With hypervisors and so forth. And in a case of, you know, evolution or it's actually accelerated evolution, they've all developed, you hit on some of Google specialties. Microsoft of course, has, you know, know Office 365 up their sleeve with, with copilot and the open AI thing.

AWS has their own philanthropic and whatever else they're, they are over time developing into their own species, right? And, and so I think over the next couple years you're going to see that continue. Does that mean we're a zoologists?

Yeah, I always wanted to be like Darwin, I dug the beard, but um, you know, maybe we go to the Galapagos and see what happens. But anyway, you know, they can continue it to separate from themselves and each one does different things better to that point. Are there new, keeping that metaphor, new species that we keep showing up with, we see a lot more startups, more vendors.

What do you think is the relationship in the ecosystem between the startups that we spend a lot of time on and the more established providers of platforms, whether it's a Microsoft, Google, Amazon who may be, how, what does that dynamic look like to you these days? Well, we obviously see more dollars, like from an investment standpoint, cramming into the two ends of the spectrum. You got the very high risk people looking for huge rewards venture.

And of course that changes during different, uh, economic environments. We're at a higher rate environment that mean discount rates, future cash flows means that venture companies are being a little bit more selective and careful in who they get into. And of course, at the same time you see dollars pouring into this sort of, you know, whatever they call it, the Mag seven, the fantastic six, the delicious eight, the it changes daily.

You know, Tesla's recently been in bad shape. I don't know if they'll be in bad shape by the time this post, but who knows? But the point is, it comes and goes, Apple's really bad, terrible, no, good week.

They were a bad company a week ago, according to some people. But the long and short as you see these kinds of investment thesis, but what I see is an innovation ecosystem. So look, these big companies need to grow.

They have to continue to grow. They grow through a couple different vehicles. Of course, the one is m and a, but in the current, uh, m and a climate, they really aren't allowed to acquire companies.

Very complicated for big acquisitions to get done. We heard about Google, HubSpot. That hasn't gone anywhere yet.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Of course, Microsoft Activision, I think was, um, an abarition and that actually got done. I was shocked it got done.

Um, but big deals, you know, Nvidia armed, these kinds of things don't really happen. So what are the other ways? Well, they incubate, they invest.

So the, the tech companies and of course Sandhill Road, they're pouring money into these companies saying, build the things we need. We talked about multi-cloud. How do we tie all these clouds together, make it seamless?

Is there a single control plane that can run three or four clouds, finops all the things we're trying to understand about our environments? Startups can really quickly build and develop these tools and these big companies adopt 'em. They eventually, either they license it, they put 'em into their sort of, uh, app ecosystems or partner ecosystems, or they try to buy 'em.

And heck, what do we see with inflection ai? Even Microsoft now is developing new ways to acquire companies without buying them. You invest in talent, you invest in the company, you get the company to stop selling to anyone else, license it, and suddenly you own it.

Uh, very interesting. I'm wondering if that's a mike, if that's gonna be a new trend line of how to buy a company without buying a company. Mm-Hmm.

Um, but what do I, what do I think in the end, we need the fast pace of startup and innovators to keep the big companies in check, to keep 'em honest. We need the big companies to be pouring investment through VC and m and a to keep markets, uh, enticed and exuberant. We want markets to be excited.

That's how people's assets grow. We don't want hyperinflation. I wanna be very clear about that.

Mm-Hmm. But we want people to be enticed by innovation. We want big companies.

They're the one other than the public markets. The big company's the only one that can write the checks. You know what, we, I did an, an interview this week with a company.

They announced it was actually huge, a series B of 150 million. Their new lead investor was Snowflake. Yeah.

Now, snowflake's not a public cloud, but it's that data lake. It's that big data thing. They actually, I forgot who snowflakes are now, but I'm not, it's not important.

A w well, I mean, they're on AWS Okay. Yeah. Whatever.

It's, that's not the important part. The important part is what you're saying, right? This is a case where a snowflake, which is pretty big public company now is on sale investing.

They're, they're, well, but they're, they're stepping into the shoes of the vc Yeah. By saying, Hey, I'm going to give this company that uses our technology and then adds something to our technology. Yeah.

Enough money to lead the pack. Like this was the old edge. You're seeing Horowitz type of, we Saw recently, uh, IBM you have a bunch of money to Cohesity.

Yeah. You know, I mean, this happens. So as the VC markets tightened up because of interest rates, these strategic investors are becoming more and more important to, to the startup ecosystem.

But let's be clear, the startup ecosystem brings innovation. Mm-Hmm. A lot of these bigger companies just can't innovate as quickly as they're not as nimble, right?

As these startups a Cohesity to I, ibm, uh, you know, and, and et cetera. So I think we're gonna see that accelerate a lot more. It just seems to me that the pace of innovation is so fast that if I'm sitting there and I'm A-C-I-O-C-T-O, senior IT leader, I have a full-time job.

I cannot keep track of all of that myself. And so I think our job is to augment that and provide that capability to them and say, Hey guys, we're here for you in that regard, because we'll do it full-time. Lemme tell you something, young men, you guys are a couple of young guys.

But one of the things that I identified at the beginning of this journey was that the way that happened, that exact thing you talked about was oftentimes you'd hire a big, big firm to consult, or you'd hire a big analyst firm for inquiry. And the idea was the CIO would have some sort of access to a person to say, Hey, what should I buy? I'm looking for a new database.

I'm looking for some tools to do some app development. We're looking at generative ai. What should I buy for us young guys collectively?

We used to, we know what it means to pick up the phone or even get on a video call. But, you know, lemme tell you about my 22-year-old daughter and how she communicates with people. Lemme tell you about even, um, you know, thir young, early thirties people that I know, they wanna read an FAQ.

And when I say an FAQ, they don't know what a Q is, but they wanna watch a video, right? They want to consume a TikTok, they want to talk to their peers in ways that are very digitally enhanced. Now, that doesn't mean they don't want to go into detail and they don't need to be able to click down and learn, but these are people that are of the YouTube and reels generation.

This is how they have learned. And so inquiry to them might be access to, you know, a short article, a video, a 15 minute webcast, some type of consumption model that doesn't look like the way we used to learn. So when we built this, we basically were assuming that digital interaction with content, now that content roadmap changes every day.

Um, you know, whether it's a TikTok, a reel, a video, a blog post, a long form, the 57,000 page report with a picture of a square on the front of it, whatever it is, though, that was all the journey. But the thing is, is that this young generation, these rising IT dms, the rising CISOs, CIOs, they do not necessarily want to get on the phone with some big firm consultant, have a call. This is gonna be done through an intelligence platform, through a large generative model that's gonna have access to lots of content.

This is gonna be done through chatbots that are going to have all the knowledge of those it, those experts. But it's gonna be done in new ways. So this content ecosystem, this real time engine of videos and interactions with say, future intelligence, the pulse data that you're able to get off text strong, the testing performance stuff that you'll be able to consume through quick videos and snapshots and YouTube videos, that is more, in my opinion, reflective of how buying is going to happen.

And so we're building this eco, this future and group Textron partnership. This, uh, this merging of forces is about, I use this in the other video, and so if you've watched it, I, I apologize, but the empirical to the ephemeral, it's the data-driven insights that come out in interesting, usable, consumable outputs. We have seen this.

I'm, lemme just, I'm Okay, go ahead. Just let follow that thought because we've seen this before, right? And we've talked about it and that sales funnel is collapsing.

Yeah. All these folks that we engage with have already pretty much made a decision about where they're heading long before they ever touch a sales rep for a vendor. So that whole thing that's over the last person in touch is just collapsing like crazy.

And I just think that, you know, I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that funnel just keeps getting smaller and smaller. We're gonna end this right here. 'cause what we're really talking about is what's the future of content?

Mm-Hmm. Right. And we're gonna discuss that in episode three.

It'll be on shortly. Catch it. We're gonna, hopefully Mike Rizza will hang around with us for that.

This Alan Shimel for Techstrong tv. We're gonna be back with our next episode.