The big news in the technology world this week was the Wall Street Journal report that Qualcomm Inc. approached Intel Corp. about a potential acquisition. Those rumors and the Intel Foundry subsidiary news were main areas of focus during the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast with John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right).
Still, it’s unclear whether such a move would ever take place. Qualcomm may not even want to move ahead, according to Furrier.
“If I’m Qualcomm, I’m looking for the strategic assets, but I wouldn’t want the core products or the foundry,” he said. “I think it doesn’t make sense for them. We’ll see what they do, but I don’t see Qualcomm buying Intel at all.”
Intel Foundry subsidiary plans
This week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote in a blog that the company planned to establish an independent Intel Foundry subsidiary inside of Intel. The governance structure will complete the process the company started earlier this year, when it separated P&L and financial reporting for Intel foundry and Intel products.
“A [Intel Foundry subsidiary] will unlock important benefits. It provides our external foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel,” Gelsinger wrote. “Importantly, [an Intel Foundry subsidiary] also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth and shareholder value creation.”
The former statement on the Intel foundry subsidiary might lead to one inferring that it could be the issue that Intel is facing, according to Vellante. It could suggest that nobody wants to do business with Intel because they’re competitive.
“I think that’s complete obfuscation of the core issues, which I’ve said is volume and cost structure. We laid that out last week,” Vellante said. “I think that is, again, smokescreen. The second part of that, that it gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding, i.e., we’re going to need more cash, and this allows us to spin it out, sell it.”
Thoughts on Salesforce rolling out Agentforce
During Salesforce Inc.’s Dreamforce gathering last week, Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff introduced the company’s artificial intelligence platform Agentforce. Salesforce has always been an insular, monolithic company, but recently went on a binge of acquisitions, Furrier noted.
“I think that’s super smart of them to go after the agent market,” he said. “I think that is the application layer of the future. As we pointed out last Pod in great detail, we actually laid out that at the top of the stack, gen AI’s impact will be at the application layer.”
As end users interact with agentic systems, the data layer will continue to transform and evolve. The infrastructure will be the supercomputing that has been democratized, according to Furrier.
“From the Nvidia’s of the world and other providers like the cloud hyperscalers, that’s the next-gen. Those SaaS apps become agent apps, outside of the other new apps that we pointed out, or scalable apps I call them,” Furrier said. “Those are the ones that are new. Those will be the new big powered apps that solve hard problems with a lot of compute.”
Takeaways from mWISE and Fal.Con
There were a number of events that took place over the past days, including mWISE 2024. The event was a chance to take a wide view of the entire landscape of the security market, according to Furrier.
“Cloud SaaS is evolving to agentic as one of the categorical clear lines of sight into applications. Applications with gen AI, clearly agentic, which is going to open up, as we pointed out in our security coverage this week,” he said. “Application security will be a big part of that.”
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. also held its annual Fal.Con, not too far removed from this summer’s content update incident. There was some trepidation before the event given ETR data that suggested that spending data does not look too pretty, which comes as no surprise, according to Vellante.
“CrowdStrike has had to reset its ARR expectations. So, they’ve acknowledged that. I’ve always given George Kurtz high marks for transparency and fast response,” Vellante said.
The event was amazing, Vellante added. It included a moment from Kurtz that was striking.
“First thing he said when he came out on stage, tongue in cheek, ‘How was your summer?’ That was pretty funny,” Vellante said. “But then he went all business. He made it about business resiliency. It’s like, the apology tour was over. He is thinking, he’s moving forward, looking ahead.”
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