A Wild Earnings Season
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We’re just out of the recent earnings season and we’ve seen a wild range of results and some interesting implications. Melissa Otto CFA, head of S&P Global’s Visible Alpha research team, returns to discuss what that markets have been saying and what she makes of the data with host Eric Hanselman. Macroeconomic effects are having some impact, as consumer sentiment diverges across the top and the bottom of the economy. In technology, there are mixed feelings about AI as the hunt continues for use cases with decisive revenue returns. The hyperscalers are continuing to invest capital at...
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The Agentic Enterprise
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For the 250th episode, we’re looking a bit further forward to explore what enterprises should be thinking about as they look to put agentic capabilities to work. Melissa Incera, Alex Johnston and Sheryl Kingstone return to discuss the challenges and potential with host Eric Hanselman. As AI agents evolve beyond simple chatbots in customer experience and business operations, enterprises have to adapt both their infrastructure and data management capabilities to benefit from agentic potential. Automation is great, but getting to fully autonomous operations requires building more trust than...
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AWS re:Invent conference
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This year’s AWS re:Inforce conference was larger and fueled by greater agentic capabilities. Part of the 451 Research team that was at the conference, Henry Baltazar, Scott Crawford, William Fellows and Melanie Posey, join host Eric Hanselman to explore the announcements and progress that’s been made in expanding agentic capabilities and much more. As an incumbent infrastructure provider, AWS is looking to the top of the infrastructure stack to secure their advantage. A suite of developer tools, including the Kiro IDE, are looking to make the creation and operation of agents simpler. There...
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SC25 Supercomputing Conference
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Supercomputing has shifted from an esoteric and exotic part of technology to much more mainstream, mostly driven by AI. The massive amounts of computational power that once were reserved for the largest of computing problems in high performance computing (HPC), like weather and seismic analysis, are now commonplace in the world of AI. Analyst Gabriella Brown returns to talk about complex computing problems, quantum computing and photonics with host Eric Hanselman. SC25 has grown to over 16,000 attendees and almost 600 exhibitors, enough to sprawl across St. Louis’ Americas Center and into...
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Security and Observability
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The worlds of IT security and operations are being pulled together and AI is a catalyst that’s making it happen. The focus on observability that’s been part of the DevOps movement, is playing an important role in improving security effectiveness and Scott Crawford, Mark Ehr and Mike Fratto return to look at how this is happening with host Eric Hanselman. Security teams have always wrestled with making effective use of telemetry data from the infrastructure and applications they are securing. Correlating data from just the security tooling is hard enough, let alone adding operational data...
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Context Engineering
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As organizations have worked to leverage the power of AI in interacting with large language models, they’ve invested in prompt engineering to generate better results. But agents shift the need manage the full context of not only the prompt, but also the data that’s being presented. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Alex Johnston return to the podcast to look at the new discipline of context engineering and how it’s being put to work in AI environments with host Eric Hanselman. The process of context engineering looks at ensuring that the right data context is in place for agents to act on. It...
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The Big Picture Reports
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The latest Big Picture reports are out and cover a wide range of topics from financial markets to supply chains and onward to technology and AI. Two of the authors, Lindsey Hall and Chris Rogers, join host Eric Hanselman to talk about sustainability, supply chains and AI. These are tightly interwoven and their dependencies spill out into geopolitics, as well. Sustainability conversations have focused on climate adaptation and resilience. Climate risks are growing and yet only 35% of businesses have adaptation plans in place. The urgent demands for AI infrastructure are consuming both energy...
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Agentic Customer Experience
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As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, this year thoughts are turning to agents and the changing role of AI in commerce. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss the impacts and offer insights into strategies for putting agents to work and working in a world of agents with host Eric Hanselman. AI is spanning generations in technology adoption and engagement in ways that previous technologies have struggled. Search and digital engagement had strong splits between different generations. The natural language capabilities of chat interfaces are stepping across technology hesitancy. But it...
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Money 20/20
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One of the biggest banking and payments conferences, Money 20/20, has wrapped up and the enthusiasm for all things stablecoin has continued. Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma and McKayla Wooldridge return to discuss how this is evolving with host Eric Hanselman. The cryptocurrency has become the buzzy headline in so many of the conversations at Money 20/20. But consumers are still wary of stablecoins and the larger questions is around how financial services companies will deliver valuable services using them. Unlike previous years, there were no dark clouds hovering over the payments markets. The...
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Open Compute Project Summit
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The equipment that fills data centers is evolving rapidly, driven by the need to fulfill the seemingly insatiable appetite of AI applications. The Open Compute Project (OCP) was founded by Meta/Facebook to promulgate equipment standards and its annual Summit has grown from a small specialized gathering, to an event that strains the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center. Senior research analyst Perkins Liu returns to offer his take on this meteoric growth with host Eric Hanselman. AI requirements are pushing ever greater scale both logically and physically, with the width of server racks...
info_outlineThe equipment that fills data centers is evolving rapidly, driven by the need to fulfill the seemingly insatiable appetite of AI applications. The Open Compute Project (OCP) was founded by Meta/Facebook to promulgate equipment standards and its annual Summit has grown from a small specialized gathering, to an event that strains the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center. Senior research analyst Perkins Liu returns to offer his take on this meteoric growth with host Eric Hanselman. AI requirements are pushing ever greater scale both logically and physically, with the width of server racks doubling in the Open Rack Wide (ORW) specification to support greater density and better serviceability. The OCP Foundation is also working on silicon interoperability and is setting specifications for chiplet integration. Liquid cooling has moved from a nice to have feature to a required capability as a means to dissipate the huge amount of energy drawn by ever denser GPU arrays. Energy delivery is changing with the advent of higher voltage DC power. The early OCP efforts on 48 volt DC are paling in the face of new 800 volts designs.
The OCP Foundation is also expanding its mission to include education, with the establishment of the OCP Academy. It aims to raise workforce skills in open hardware and will offer online training in data center technologies. That underscores not only the expansion of the OCP Foundation’s mission, but also the increasing scale of the ecosystem that supports data center environments and complexity and interdependency that AI creates.
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Credits:
- Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
- Guest: Perkins Liu
- Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
- Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith