AI Booms, Quantum Breakthroughs, Cloud Wars, & Massive Acquisitions Took Over Enterprise IT in 2025

It's the end of yet another year, and we are here to take a look at all of the big stories from 2025 with a variable degree of snarkiness in this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown.

It is December the 17th. It is getting very close to the end of the year, and we wanted to take a look back at the last 12 months to kind of give you some highlights of some of the big ideas in the news. We covered a lot of things over 2025.

There were a lot of great things going on. We hope that you are enjoying some pancakes with maple syrup 'cause it's maple syrup day. Um, and it's also national Say It Now Day, which honestly is kind of the thing that we do around here.

We just say it like it is now. Um, well on Wednesdays at least, uh, joining me of course is my co-host Alistair Cook. Al, it's good to see you again.

It is always a pleasure to be here and particularly on Pan-American Aviation Day. My first international flights were on Pan Am and flying to the United States, so, uh, great to be here on Pan-American Aviation Day. Well, speaking of flying this year really did fly by.

Um, we're gonna go ahead and jump into the first set of stories, though Al and I think you're probably the best one to talk about it because I think 2025 will go down as the year of ai. Yeah, and we kicked off this year of AI with a future and survey of CEOs asking about their AI readiness and the use of ai. And, and the results really painted a picture of unfulfilled promises.

We saw paralysis and slower moving firms who had no idea what they were doing with AI in this survey. And we also saw that more cloud native, uh, companies were still struggling with cohesive AI strategies and cohesive infrastructure. So, beginning of the year, AI was definitely, uh, a challenge for some vendors.

But Jensen Wang, the rockstar, CEO of Nvidia, was much more bullish. She presented in CES in January and announced that the Cosmos, uh, was a World Foundation model that, uh, of course NVIDIA's shipping and predicted widespread adoption of AI robotics everywhere. Of course, also in January, I sort of love the story of a, uh, sticky trap for ai crawlers.

Developer was sick of AI data gatherers that don't respect any of the fair use, uh, norms that are happening out on the internet, as well as some of the mechanisms like robots text that limits crawling. So this developer created a, uh, mechanism to create random cross-link pages with no real content and trap these AI trawlers in just a little corner of their website, but humor we would know not to look at. But AI, not so much.

Of course, January brought some really big AI news. That's when we learned about deep seek. The Chinese ai, uh, trained for far less cost than other LLMs.

Uh, also heavily censored dataset. Don't ask it about Chinaman Square. Uh, and also trained on a bunch of AI generated content.

And this was the point at which we thought, hmm, is it wise to feed an AI with AI generated content? Seems a little bit like some of the problems they had in the UK with chicken, where they were feeding bits of old chicken to brand new chicken and got disease right through the, uh, the feed line. That doesn't happen to ai.

Of course, AI being the thing that unifies all marketing departments this year, uh, February brought the news that WCA had restructured, was reorienting itself towards a generative AI company. And at the same time, hammer Space announced that object storage is not the only option for AI training data. This definitely shows us two successful specialist storage vendors confirming that AI is still the essential marketing term for 2025.

Heck, we're belly into February and Cisco and Nvidia decided they were gonna partner up as well, bringing Nvidia Spectrum X management for Cisco switches, and of course NVIDIA's Bluefield Smartnick into, uh, Cisco devices alongside the Silicon one. While we're talking about hot chips, uh, Broadcom launched their Tomahawk six switches giving over a hundred terabits per second throughput in a single device. Uh, this team presented at the AI infrastructure Field Day, showcasing the Tomahawk Ultra and Jericho, so as well got massive training networks.

You know, we skipped a whole bunch of the run rate kind of announcements around ai, but we did notice that in November, uh, AWS talked about a agent ai and particularly using a AI to help customers migrate from on-premises platforms into the AWS cloud. I think we've seen a lot of progressive AgTech AI tools through the year, and, uh, hopefully some of that confusion and paralysis that was happening at the beginning of 2025 is starting to clear and companies are starting to get some value out of building AI solutions and finding better tool sets than maybe they had at the beginning of the year. Another group that's been in the news a lot this year has been Intel.

There's been all sorts of trials and tribulations with Intel. Tom, I think they're one of your favorite companies in our, our coverage along the year. They are.

And we've spent a lot of time talking about them because quite honestly, there's been a lot of news. If you remember, we closed out 2024 with a lot of bad news, honestly. So how did 2025 start out?

Uh, honestly, it was a lot more down than up. We found out back in February that Intel was not going to release Falcon Shores. This was a big hit to what a lot of people considered to be kind of one of their make or break moments.

Uh, there started to be some rumors around that same time that Broadcom might be looking to buy out some of those chip designs that Intel had been working on on the cheap. You know how it feels whenever the Vultures starts circling it, it's maybe time to hang it up. And then news came that that big Ohio Fab facility that Steven Foskett has been so excited about was gonna have to, to be pushed out a few years because of construction, but also because of cash flow issues and some potential changes to the CHIPS Act.

And it was not really looking good for them. Now, one might be forgiven for thinking that the appointment of a new CEO in March was gonna be the start of Intel's big recovery. And lip Bhutan came in really ready to work.

He created some big restructuring plans for the organization. He did things like brokering the sale of controlling interest in Alterra to Silver Lake. You know, that was a, a big thing that Intel was very prideful of, and maybe this was gonna give them some cash to turn the ship.

Uh, the rest of the next quarter though, all we could talk about was Intel's layoffs. And, and some of these were confirmed kind of publicly. Some of them weren't.

And, and we were hearing lots of numbers, you know, 15,000 here, 17,000 there. It really, really hurt the industry because those thousands of jobs almost had to be sacrificed in order to get Intel back on track to their core business. But layoffs are never good for any companies like this.

I mean, things were looking pretty bad for Intel. I mean, how could it possibly get any worse? I know back in August, president Trump said publicly that lip Bhutan had conflicts of interest and he needed to resign as the CEO of the company.

I think that's pretty much the point that they hit rock bottom. But I know that that's the case because that really was the beginning of Intel's comeback in 2025, because it took less than a week. And we started to hear that Intel was securing investments.

SoftBank bought in, Nvidia bought in, and the US federal government made a deal. They would see 10% of Intel's proceeds going back to the US government. After that, everything took off.

Intel was no longer the punchline of a joke and also ran in the company. It was more than that because we started to hear rumors that maybe Apple was gonna be looking at Intel again as a partner on chip manufacturing. We also saw that because of the announcements of all of those investments that Intel decided not to sell off their networking business unit.

We just covered that, uh, last week. On the rundown, it seems like money fixes all problems. Intel, most importantly though, is positioning themselves to be the domestic chip manufacturing giant, because one of the things that we've seen that's kind of been a subtext for everything going on this year is the looming tariffs that are being positioned against companies being used as weapons against other investment vehicles and Intel.

Being a domestic chip manufacturer is effectively tariff proof instead of having TSMC need to come over and build a fab in Arizona to beat those tariffs. Intel already has fabs positioned everywhere, and they're trying to do more. They just need a little bit more runway in order to be able to pull that off.

Honestly, at this point, time will tell if this is enough to get them back on the right track, but having weathered everything that they've weathered this year, I can't imagine that Intel has much less position to fall from because they are slowly gaining the momentum, which doesn't seem like a lot against what's been going on in the AI market, but there is an opportunity for them to kind of right the ship. Finally, another thing that made the news this year was the massive spate of outages that really kind of knocked some knowledge workers off track. Al These outages started fairly small in January.

We saw, uh, Utelsat having an outage that left one web's broadband services offline. Now, a lot of the time these were backup services that were used in locations where the primary internet connectivity wasn't great. Few places, it was the primary connectivity.

So a couple of days without internet, that was pretty significant, but only for the small number of people who are significantly affected. In April, we got a bit of a warmup, uh, to the outages when Zoom. Uh, zoom got taken offline for 90 minutes and all of us, uh, had breaks from having calls.

Uh, we got actually to have some productive time since we weren't on Zoom calls all day for those 90 minutes. Turns out that, uh, GoDaddy, who hosts all of the US domains had for some reason blocked, uh, Zoom's DNS estimate, Hmm, maybe DNS is the root of all errors. Things scaled up quite a lot in June when we started to realize just how much popular applications like Spotify and Discord and Snapchat depend upon.

In this case, the Google Cloud. Uh, Google rolled out a new feature for some, uh, quota policy checks, and they weren't adequately tested. And so Google broke the, uh, the internet for a little while.

A bunch of popular applications were often we had to go other places in order to complain that we couldn't get to the internet net. A little later in June, we also saw a record breaking DDoS attack. 3 terabits per second, primarily of UDP frames being sent by the Mariah Botnet, uh, was all being soaked up by CloudFlare, one of our largest DDoS protection networks in the world.

And so hopefully it didn't take everybody offline along with it. But what we did see in October was something big. What we saw in October was that we have become very dependent on both DNS, but also some of the core services inside AWS.

And so again, it was a DNS fault that AWS, uh, had put in as a anti DNS record for the Dynamo DB database. Dynamo DB is the massively scalable key value store database. Uh, without Dynamo db, lots of business applications went offline.

Lots of AWS services went offline. We really saw this lots was out and down and not working. And we realized that when we started using these ubiquitous web services cloud services, we became very dependent on them.

And while the individual services are incredibly reliable, when they do go down, consequences are huge. So these services typically are very reliable yet because everybody uses these highly reliable services, if they have an outage, the impact is immense. And if you've been running your own database on premises, or if you've been running a database inside a virtual machine somewhere, the impact would've been far less.

It would've only been on your own services, but the likelihood of that failure would've been a little higher. People make mistakes. So, uh, sometimes there's a, a reflection here that using these big web services is a bad idea because we see headline news when it goes down.

But what you don't see in headline news is just how often services inside organizations go down. So it's not fair to tar these, um, single points of failure that we've built into our systems as being the, the the worst thing ever. Um, but nothing is a hundred percent uptime.

CloudFlare came back for us in December. Uh, they forced an outage because they saw an actively exported critical vulnerability. This reactor shell export was, was, um, being used in the wild to run arbitrary code on, uh, these, these websites that we using the React framework, uh, CloudFlare basically DDoS themselves.

They, they shut down those sites until they could get a more targeted mitigation in place. And so there was a a period of time where CloudFlare was brought blocking access to these vulnerable sites before more targeted reactions can come in place. Uh, I think Reactor Shell is gonna continue to be in the news for us for a little while.

It's gonna be the new version of the Log four J problem where lots of people didn't realize they had vulnerable code because, well, it was a dependency for the thing they actually wanted to have. And it turned up in all kinds of places that they didn't expect it to in terms of outages. We did see a whole bunch of outages this year.

We realized that the cloud is not a golden bullet that takes away all of our reliability problems in our applications. And even if you follow the best practice designs from the cloud providers, you're still not going to get 100% up time for years and years and years. There is still the possibility for things to truly mess up.

Another company that's been in the news a bit today and a good friend for us here at Tech Field Day has been HPE, uh, that's the enterprise part of what used to be hp separate from the people you buy your, uh, laptops and, and your printers from HPE is the, uh, large scale stuff we put in data centers and Unrun networks around. Tom, you've been across all of this because a lot of this news has been networking related. It has.

We really were kind of curious as to how this thing was gonna start out in the year because we had started to hear rumblings that possibly the US Department of Justice wanted to take a closer look at that proposed acquisition that they had of Juniper Networks. Well, February, almost one year to the day after the big blockbuster announcement, the DOJ decided, no, no, no, we're, we're gonna block this acquisition for the time being. We need to take a closer look at it for, uh, I don't know reasons.

Uh, we also got news that there was potentially some exposure from hacking group Intel brokers getting in. They, they might've gotten away with some source code. That one's kind of still ongoing.

Even to this day. We, we don't know exactly what happened. But then a couple months after that, in April, we got the most terrifying business news that a company can get.

Elliot Management took a position in HPE and immediately we started to hear some questions about Antonio NE's leadership, which is quite honestly kind of part and parcel for how Elliot works. Uh, they wanted to maybe make a change in the CEO chair or potentially get some board members up there that would, uh, look to unlock some of that mythical shareholder value that they seem to keep looking for, but can never seem to find. I think though that Q2 was really the start of HPE really becoming more of a unified company because back in May we saw that they really integrated their Morpheus acquisition into GreenLake and it helped fill out that offering a little bit more completely.

You may be wondering to yourself, well, what does GreenLake offer me? Well, if you're someone who's looking for refuge from the things that have been going on over at VMware by Broadcom, GreenLake has an opportunity to kind of supplant that. And that's how HP has been positioning Morpheus over the year.

They're basically saying, if, if you're not happy with what you're getting there, we have an offering that will work with you and we're gonna provide you the same kind of support that we always have. We're just gonna be working on a different hypervisor, and people seem to be responding well to that. Then at the very beginning of July, the Department of Justice came out with a list of some recommendations that Juniper and HP needed to do that would allow them to clear that acquisition.

They were a little bit strange. There was some discussion. We even recorded an episode of the Tech Field Day podcast about it, and it took no time at all for the companies to agree that, Hey, we're gonna do that.

And there you go, we're gonna close that acquisition. It's almost like as soon as they found out that this was an option, they're like, book it done. We're out the door.

Let's just do it. No buyer's remorse here. After that, we saw HP and Juniper really ramp up efforts to provide a combined offering, uh, whether it was new agentic AI offerings, integrating some of their product lines.

As we started to hear around the time of HP Discover Barcelona towards the end of the year, including if you were reading between the lines, some very forward-looking language that kind of will show you what the combined offering will eventually look like. But that doesn't mean that networking was the only group that was making advancements. The server side of the house did a lot of integration work, and they even picked up a deal to offer private cloud to the US Department of Defense, uh, as a way to kind of, you know, kind of jump in as to some of the remnants of those big projects that we've seen getting bounced back and forth between Microsoft and Amazon for a while.

They also released their Gen 12 server line, which is another big step in continuing to refresh the product lines that everybody feels are so critical to HP E's success. They also did a lot in the cybersecurity market. They included things like AI-based DDoS protection, and more importantly, they complied with some new European regulations that will require organizations that are undergoing outages or ransomware attacks to be able to isolate themselves from the internet to be able to clean those things up and not create a, a larger impact all over the market.

And as we know from the last couple of years, not being compliant with European regulations is a sure way to get yourself in a lot of trouble real fast because the European regulators do not mess around. Now, November was a bit of a mixed bag for companies that had partnered with HP because we saw that they had dropped support for some of their storage partners like Qumulo Scalability and wca. I think though that this is really more of HP refocusing their efforts on integrating their own storage offerings back into their lines and working with very specific partners in very specific situations.

As we've seen by the breadth of what HP offers, they really do wanna become the one stop shop. Whether you're doing something in the campus, whether you're trying to build a cloud integration, whether you're trying to work with ai, they want to be the sole source for everything you could possibly need. And if you wanna buy it, they have options that will do that for you.

If you want to rent it through GreenLake, they're happy to do that as well. It's one of those things where we're getting back to the kinds of service offerings that are important to the clients that are out there. It's not just a matter of, give me these parts and pieces, give me the expertise that will allow me to integrate them together and to make something out of this so that I have can have my knowledge workers focusing on outcomes that are business aligned instead of navel gazing about a bill of materials and some pieces and parts that maybe don't make a whole lot of sense.

Now that I, we've kind of dropped all of the drama of whether or not some of these acquisitions are actually gonna be able to be done. I think it's going to allow the leadership at HPE, including current CEO Antonio Neri, to kind of chart a course to not only keep their customers super happy with what's been going on, but keep the shareholders off their backs long enough for certain activists to maybe exit that position in the market. I kind of hinted to it in this story Al, but AI continued to be a huge part of what was going on in 2025, and you have a slightly different take on it with some more news stories.

Yeah. And, and this story comes in two parts and it's about buying, selling the inside baseball side, the who gets what bits of AI and, and the hard wolf for it and those kinds of things. The, the first part of it, and this started at the beginning of the year, was around who's allowed to buy what hardware and what are the impacts of tariffs.

But as things rolled through into later in the year, the focus shifted towards what looks like a whirlpool of AI funding announcements. So the, the first part began in 2025, beginning of 2025 in, in January when the Biden administration started coming to the end of their, uh, the, the governance were looking to restrict AI chip exports and 120 countries were on, uh, the books of being, uh, places to restrict. Of course there was some responses.

Um, there was the statement from TSMC that, uh, semiconductor trade with, uh, Taiwan and the US was win-win for both. And of course, Nvidia argued that AI expert controls would be detrimental to Nvidia export controls were put in place, uh, and Nvidia high-end GPUs weren't allowed to be taken, sent to places that was particularly targeting, keeping them out of China where they might be used to create some sort of, uh, large scale, uh, commercial or even uh, military benefits. So, uh, we covered some stories around, uh, Singapore, uh, arresting some alleged NVIDIA chip smugglers who were apparently sending, uh, the BA Blackwell GPUs to China.

By the time we gotta August tariffs were coming along and US companies were concerned about high cost of imported goods and servers, including GPUs and other semiconductors that were manufactured outside of the yield here. And, uh, the on again, off again, status of these terrorists throughout the middle of the year was a source of some tension. But by mid-August, Nvidia had agreed to pay the government 15% of its revenue from GPU sales to China and return for being allowed to export the medium powered H 20 GPUs.

But by December, the US government was allowing Nvidia to sell the powerful H 200 GPUs. That is quite a difference in the year from banning, uh, exports to hundreds of countries while over a hundred countries to actually allowing the, uh, the big enemy to have the most powerful GP news. I guess it reflects that China didn't actually hang all its hat entirely on getting Nvidia GPUs 'cause they're building their own the AI money go round as the other story.

It heated up. I mean it started early on in May. Open AI acquired Johnny I's new company I for 6 billion.

Despite IO didn't have description and trademark and really hard to find on Google. Uh, but by June AWS was announcing they were gonna spend $20 billion building two AI data center campuses in Pennsylvania. In July, Oracle made a bigger announcement, $30 billion when an unnamed client who are going to buy three times Oracle Cloud's current size.

At the time Oracle Cloud was doing about $10 billion a year in, uh, cloud infrastructure. This announcement was 30 billion. Turns out the unnamed client was open ai.

Then in August, meta committed to buying $10 billion of AI compute from Google Cloud. Hmm, part of a $72 billion commitment that meta was making to building AI data centers. That's a lot of money being spent carrying on.

3 billion worth of GPUs to Core Weave. But if Core Weave couldn't sell that GPU time that they had just bought, Nvidia would buy it back off. Seems a little odd following that.

We also had, uh, neas and Microsoft, uh, announcing a $19 billion deal in September. Uh, Microsoft is buying some GPU capacity in Europe to run AI systems to complicate matters. Microsoft's also an investor in Core Weave that we just saw doing a deal with Nvidia, an NVIDIA's an investor in neas that's just doing a deal with Microsoft.

And then in October we got even more serious numbers, uh, Microsoft this time with open ai, $135 billion invested by Microsoft into open ai. And so open AI will mostly be on Microsoft PLA platforms. Uh, apart from that 30 billion that's gonna Oracle Cloud as well.

Just to make another circle, in November, Microsoft Anthropic and Nvidia announced a set of investments. So Nvidia investing $10 billion in anthropic, Microsoft adding another 5 billion and in return Anthropic will buy $30 billion worth of cloud computing from Microsoft, which is their way of procuring a gigawatt. Uh, that must be more than a gigawatt, uh, multiple gigawatts of n of uh, Nvidia GPUs.

Uh, I wonder how Anthropic getting all of this money in throwing all this money out, how are we gonna make some profit from these investments? Of course, at the same time, uh, Nvidia committed to buying $26 billion worth of AI computing from a variety of providers, all of whom get those GPUs from Nvidia. There seems to be an awful lot of money going round in circles or some weird shapes to get between all of these different players.

And we're still not sure we end customers are actually going to want to pay for all of these things. Whether there is going to be business value for all of these billions of dollars running around and these massive data centers that are being built out over time, hopefully 2026, we're gonna start seeing some actual profitability from these AI startups. And we're going to start seeing that businesses are being transformed in a positive way by the use of generative AI and massive numbers of GPUs.

Of course, there could be a fly in the ointment as a new piece of technology comes along and changes everything. Uh, gotta be looking for all of the announcements of what's happening in the quantum computing world. And Tom, you've been following this a little bit this year.

I have, and quite honestly, for those of you that are already tired of all of this AI hype, I've got good news for you because the next big thing is on the horizon. Well, if you look closely 'cause it's small, really tiny quantum computing really has been around for decades. 2025 saw some advancements in the technology that we talked about quite a bit.

Uh, February ended with a considered to be a blockbuster announcement from Microsoft about the major Ron Quantum chip. It was rumored to have 1 million qubits of capacity and it also came in a really interesting form factor and did some things that people hadn't expected to see out of a quantum chip before. And that got a lot of people kind of talking about what was, what was gonna be happening.

Then we saw some novel new applications. Uh, one of the ones that I was kind of proud of was the fact that people were using quantum super precision for things like navigation. Uh, big important thing there was because it couldn't be jammed.

So if something were to happen that GPS would get taken out. There you go. Then we saw some announcements from Cisco around quantum networking.

I highly recommend you go back and watch some of the quantum networking discussions that we've had with Cisco over the years because they actually have some really cool stuff. Google announced that RSA encryption, which is kind of considered to be the watermark for when quantum will become supreme, could potentially be broken a lot easier than we were expecting. Instead of it taking hundreds of thousands or even millions of qubits, it could just be done with a few thousand that were no noisy.

The second half of the year focused on other big announcements that were a little bit more in the affordability range because there was a Chinese company called Quantum Ctech and yes, it's not spelled like the one from sneakers, but it's close enough to make you think. And then HSBC coming out with a discussion about how Quantum actually helped boost their trading algorithms, which of course had all the wa the tongues on Wall Street wagging as soon as possible. And then at the end of October we heard from IIBM and A MD because they were using traditional X 86 based architecture computing to be able to run error correction algorithms against quantum computers.

The reason that that's important is because instead of tying up those quantum computers being able to correct their own errors, we can use things that we've already built and deployed to kind of accelerate that. And that is a huge cost savings when you consider how much per watt or per second that these things cost to operate. Then the US government announced that millions of dollars in investment were gonna be sent to startups in the quantum space through the CHIPS Act, which was kind of bandied back and forth quite a bit over the year.

And it was good to kind of see the government stepping up and saying, we want to use this CHIPS act, uh, funding to kind of invest in some of these places. Now, the future of quantum computing looks very bright to people who want to play the long game. I know that AI is getting a lot of these headlines right now, as Al has pointed out in the last couple of stories, that there's a lot of people who are wanting to pour as much money as they can into ai, but no matter what, you've gotta play a longer game because there's still some physics things to overcome here and there's a lot of other things that need to be considered when you want to do quantum.

I don't care how much quantum foam is being churned up right now, I don't think we're seeing the bubble of quantum being inflated just yet. One of the things that we wanted to get back to, of course, is some more traditional stuff that we, we see and hear a lot and that's our good old friend in the last hype cycle, cloud computing and al that's your area of expertise. What stood out to you about cloud this year?

You know, cloud's full of ai and so there's a whole bunch of AI stories that I'm not gonna rehash here, but all of those AI stories were about cloud. I liked a story we covered in March where a survey of companies, uh, showed that they're using a lot of cloud financial operations or ops tools and identifying which parts of their estate might be better on premises than on cloud, as well as optimizing their spend on cloud. I think it's interesting to see that maturity level coming through with applications being repatriated to on premises where that predictable costs might align with predictable workloads and clouds being used more as places to put things that are more bursty, more inclined to go up and down in their utilization or that are more commonly accessed over the internet alone.

Uh, oh. I managed to slip some AI in here 'cause Google announced a whole bunch of AI capabilities at Google Cloud next, along with some nice application platform enhancements for its customers and staying with Google in July meta committed to spend $10 billion over six years buying capacity from the Google Cloud. Um, that's interesting in light of all of the other spend on Google Cloud for other purposes.

In the earlier stories also in September, a US judge put an into the antitrust case and allowed Google to keep the ownership of the Chrome browser. Thought the browser wars were over years ago, but the lawyers disagreed. One of the most surprising stories, it's a cold day in a typically hot place, uh, in December when AWS and Google announced that they'd built unified software defined networking to connects between their competing clouds.

That's a huge win for customers who have ended up with the reality of a multi-cloud and maybe hybrid multi-cloud estate. Uh, now Google and and AWS allow you to glue their clouds together without a huge amount of manual effort. I really do hope we see more cloud providers joining this scheme and that we get a much more unified way of dealing with the hybrid multi-cloud mess that is enterprise it.

You know, there's lots going on in the cloud. We particularly saw, uh, a lot of stories around application building, Kubernetes and all of the tooling that you need to get value out of the cloud over the year. Another thing that's happened over the year is of course, mergers, acquisitions, purchases.

Uh, we always get interested in who's buying what and from whom. And Tom, you've not had the opportunity to buy a large tech company or sell a large tech company for an exit, have you? Hey, you know, the year is still young.

You know, we, we talk about these, uh, over the, uh, course of 2025. One of the things that I do wanna remind everybody is, is we, we focus on enterprise tech, right? So we're not talking about media companies buying each other.

We're not talking about bidding wars for content libraries, that kind of stuff. We focus on the things that are happening kind of behind the scenes. I think maybe the biggest acquisition this year in enterprise tech had to be Google buying Security Company Wizz back in March for $32 billion.

And it was big not only because of the number attached to it, but also it took a lot of time to make this happen. Analysts were hot for it and then we heard it might not happen then we're back on it again. This back and forth will they, won't they shipping thing that happened?

Not a fan because it just kind of messes up our rundown stories where one week we're like, oh, they're buying it and then the next week, no they're not. And then two weeks later, it turns out they are. So, I, I don't know what to say about that.

Uh, security acquisitions continue to be big. We saw Palo Alto Networks picking up protect AI and cyber art to kind of fill out their portfolio. The data protection market continues to get really interesting.

Commvault bought si, Satori Cyber. Veeam also bought a company called Security. I thought that was kind of neat.

Uh, cloud Security group acquired Arc Terra, which you may not know of, but you may have heard the company that they were before. That was Veritas. Networking was no slouch as well.

We saw that Nokia purchased infinera and some of our friends over at Inventive were picked up by Hubble. Uh, it's maybe not a company that you've heard of, but you've probably heard of one of the other brands that they own a cell tech. So kind of some, uh, consolidation of the antenna market over there.

Arista bought VeloCloud to bolster their SD-WAN offerings. There was another one of those. Hey, we're hearing rumors that this might happen and it took a couple of weeks for it to kind of come to fruition.

I I loved being on a call with some of my Arista friends and kind of asking them casually, jokingly, and they're like, we don't know what you're talking about. Uh, network providers also kind of reduced some competition in the market. Uh, ISP Cox Communications got bought out by Charter.

That's kind of primarily focused in the residential areas, so most of you're probably at home watching us on a link provided by them. At and t also picked up CenturyLink, so that's kind of more of the, the bigger provider side. And of course it wouldn't be a year without private equity going out and buying some folks.

Uh, they bought SolarWinds, they also bought Scale computing and there were several others that got, uh, snapped up and you know, we're still kind of waiting to see where that comes out. And everyone's favorite big, uh, private equity firm. SoftBank bought into Ampere because they wanted to invest in the coming armed data center market.

AI was very active. Al already kind of mentioned that OpenAI bought Johnny Ives IO device and we also saw some acquisition from, uh, core Weave. They bought Core Scientific and Remo.

Qualcomm wanted to get involved not only in AI but in a, in chips. And so they bought a company called Alpha Wave. You can tell based on all of this, there's a lot of investor money that's floating around and it is aimed at making some strategic advances in the enterprise technology market.

There are a lot of large companies that feel like they're falling behind in some of these areas. And there's a lot of small startups that are usually founded by people that used to work at those large companies who are aiming to address some very specific pieces. And then usually what happens is, is that those large companies use their war chest or their investment money to go out and buy those companies and continue to integrate them in.

But the good news for us is that that tends to create these nice golden colored parachutes for people to go back out into the startup market and kind of attack those areas where they feel there's a gap that can be done. And this cycle repeats itself over and over again. As long as there are people that are willing to invest in small companies to solve big problems, there are big companies willing to buy small companies to solve those big problems.

And the nice thing about that for us is that it makes great fodder for rundown news stories. Al it's been a really interesting year of uh, being able to cover the news, uh, being able to see what's been going on, but it's also been a big year for Tech Field Day because when we're not laxing intellectual about the news and things that are going on, we're talking to a lot of those companies who are innovating, who are um, investing in these markets. What was one big highlight from Tech Field Day that you saw this year that really kind of said out loud to the people, this is something we need to follow?

I think it follows on from my very first story where at the beginning of the, were struggling to get their arms around what it meant to build AI into their applications. And that progressively as we've come through the year through AI infrastructure field days as well as AI field days, we've seen a lot more reality of actually what does it look like to get value out of ai? What do I need to build for it?

How can I make it easier to build out and get something some value out of ai? So I'm hoping that that means we're moving beyond straight up hype and and billion dollar funding circles towards actually delivering business value. Tom, I'm sure you've had a different impression because your events, of course are in the security networking and mobility spaces.

I think for me, security was probably the one that stood out the most is that people are really starting to take it seriously and they're starting to understand the security is an aspect of everything that they do. And we are having the conversations that we need to be having about securing things like agents and, uh, model context protocol servers. But we're also looking at using AI enhancements to make security run better, which is probably a good thing because we're seeing AI being used to create better, faster, more effective attacks.

And one of the things that kind of stood out to me this year was the fact that we relaunched the Security Boulevard podcast myself along with Alan Shimmel and Fernando Montenegro and Mitch Ashley get to spend a few minutes each week kind of talking about some of the big picture ideas in security. And it never fails to amaze me how intelligent and how uh, learned people in the security space are and the way that they have a perspective that kind of changes the way that you could potentially look at these things is something that I've taken away, especially in this latter half of the year as kind of refocusing what I want to do in 2026. Speaking of which, al you are the first one up on deck for 2026 when it comes to Tech Field day events.

I'm, I have AI Infrastructure Field Day coming up and the, uh, the last week of January and, uh, looking forward to having a, a really good crowd of, uh, delegates. I have got, most of my delegates are up on the website at the moment. Uh, this is gonna be quite network heavy.

So Tom, you might wanna tune in for some of these presentations as well. We have a, a collection of interesting networking companies as well as some, some a little more in the, the storage side of the infrastructure. Uh, it's, that's gonna be a really fun event.

It's gonna be a pretty packed event as well. What is on the Tech field day website is Cloud Field a 25. And so that's my, uh, trip in March to come out to Silicon Valley and spend some time looking at all things cloud that was starting to build out with my, uh, collection of wonderful people who'll be there with me, both the presenting companies as well as my delegates.

Uh, I'm gonna be back in April for Networking Field day and just so everybody knows, this is the 40th edition of Networking Field Day. Um, I am very happy to be bringing you something. We're probably gonna have to start calling XL 'cause we're gonna, we're gonna start naming a number of them like Super Bowls.

Uh, but this is shaping up to be another really good event. As, as Al kind of mentioned, you know, he's kicking off in the beginning of the year talking about some AI infrastructure and a lot of those companies are gonna be coming back just three months later to be talking about what they've been doing to a networking focused audience. And we've got some big stuff happening there.

com to find out more Right after that. We've got AI Active Field Day. I mean it's Active Field day, but you have to put AI on everything.

So I'm expecting to have a whole lot of interesting coverage of both the tools you use to build AI applications. Um, that's how you're getting value out of all that AI spend, but also the AI tools that help you build line of business applications, uh, should be a really fun event. And, uh, we've got a a whole collection of very different companies that we're lining up for that one.

Absolutely. And then of course I'm gonna be back, uh, towards the middle of the year with two really great events that I love. Security Field Day and Mobility Field Day.

com for more details, but one thing I do wanna call out Mobility Field Day is consistently one of our most popular events. How popular is that? Well, we're six months away and it's already half full.

That's how popular it is. Everybody wants to be a part of this event and we want you to be a part of it too. com and click on the link for delegates.

And when you do that, you can fill out a short form and you will go to the inbox so that Al and I can kind of check out, uh, what you're about and maybe invite you to a future field event. You can even nominate other people and we'd love for you to do that because the best recommendation that we get is word of mouth from the people in the community. Um, just give 'em a heads up that you nominated them because if they get a random phone call from us, they may not know what's up and, you know, maybe we we wanna help 'em out.

One of the things that happens quite a bit on the rundown is that when we are out at a field day event, we're pretty busy hosting things, which means that a lot of times we have to call on some of our amazing delegates and community members to be co-hosts for the event and we wanna take a special moment to kind of shout them out for all the help that they've put in this year. Of course, you know, Stephen Foskett is, uh, one of our favorite co-hosts and he has definitely jumped in to help out with rundown recordings and we love having him on, uh, when time permits and, and we're definitely gonna have him back on in 2026. But I wanna say a special thank you to folks like Jim Rinky, Keith Townsend, Kate Scarsella, Scott Roon, Ned Bevan, Chris Grundman, Jeffrey Powers, Gina Rosenthal, Brad Gregory, Corey Rockney, Romeo Gardner, Ron Westfall for Stepping Into the Chair, uh, learning a little bit about how we do things around here, bringing some snark to the news stories and, and overall elevating the experience.

We can't thank you enough for all the time and effort that you put in to making the rundown a huge success. But once again, I also need to shout out our third hidden co-host for all of the rundown events that we do. And that of course is Corey Doig.

You can't see Corey right now because he's hiding in the background, making sure that our levels are right and that we're making edits to all the little flubs that we do. But we really can't do this without Corey. We know we've tried a couple of times and he's way better at it than we are.

Uh, so when you leave a comment on our, uh, uh, our episodes when you, uh, let us know the things you liked, you are really thanking Corey at the same time. And we can't thank you enough. Corey, thanks for putting up with us, uh, getting stories in at the last minute, rearranging things on the fly.

Um, thanks for helping line up new co-hosts and everything like that. Uh, the unsung heroes are usually the ones that need the most applause. Well, I also like to thank every single one of you who has been listening, who has been watching as we've gone through this year of the rundown.

Uh, for many of you, you know that this is my first year as being one of the two primary hosts on this. And it has been a pleasure bringing the news to you every week. And, uh, I hope to continue bringing the news to you every week through next year.

Do follow us, uh, on your favorite social media, but also subscribe in your favorite podcast application on YouTube. While we're talking about the awesome things that Corey does, there's a whole collection more podcast that Corey is producing for Tech Field Day and for the wider Futurum group. Uh, I'll make sure that Corey lets you know where you can find all of those and subscribe to those podcasts as well as this one.

And wishing you and yours from myself, from Tom Hollingsworth and for the, from the entire team at Tech Field Day and Rum, a fabulous week. Fabulous Christmas, a great new Year. We will see you in January.