Best Laid Plans and Confidence Over the Summer Still Leading to Supply Chain Shortages in 4Q2110/19/2021 Our supply chain checks across the technology and cloud sector continue to turn pessimistic during the early days of October. As a result, orders for semiconductors that were thought to be secured and guaranteed are being cut. The implications are clear that most segments we track are in for several bumpy months, with all efforts to bring 2022 back to normal. Component suppliers are cutting or negotiating back existing commitments – Factory shutdowns, lack of fab capacity, and logistics gridlock continue to hamper the ability of system vendors to get adequate supplies. Vendors continue to burn through their stock, and no vendor can ship a 99% complete product. Vendor resources, which should be on 2022 product launches and securing capacity for future product cycles, are instead spent figuring out what to ship and adjusting components in existing product lines. In general, vendors are shipping fewer varieties of SKUs now than at any point in the past 20 years. Prices are increasing for components and, in some cases, will never return to the previous price – While some price increases could be classified as temporary or transitionary like rush charges, air freight, and redesigns, many events are leading to more permanent price increases. At the very least, vendors will dual source suppliers, manufacturing across many geographic regions leading to lower volume with each supplier. As a result, we view some semiconductor components as never returning to pre-COVID price levels. So the big question remains when products will return to historic price erosion? 2022 lacks new product designs – In 2021, there were very few new product introductions and downsizing in SKU offerings. In some markets, we track there was minimal impact, but in other areas like 400/800G, the lack of clarity is causing many hyperscalers to reevaluate their speed transitions. We expect a different tone in earnings season as vendors, component suppliers, and customers adjust to the new normal of not getting every type of product they want over the next several quarters. As a result, some projects will be delayed, others scaled back, and spare capacity at AWS/Azure/GCP will be put to the test as many enterprises embrace capacity to buffer shortfalls in premises-based hardware. 
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Marvell to Add Innovium to Its Portfolio to Enhance High-End DC Switching On August 3rd, Marvell announced its planned acquisition of Innovium for $1.1B. The addition has good synergies. Innovium had several design wins in the hyperscaler segment and Marvell provides additional scale, desire to expand custom, semi-custom, and merchant networking offerings in the Cloud. While the deal is pending regulatoriy approval with a planned close date by the end of 2021, we do not see any impediments to the deal closing or being delayed. We have been tracking merchant silicon performance for over four years and for the entire 12.8 Tbps sampling and production curve and see many positives to this deal. The current state of 12.8 Tbps in 2021 remains the tale of two sets of customers. Over 1M ports of 400 Gbps a quarter ship into three hyperscalers in each quarter already. These customers use a mix of copper and fiber, and Innovium’s market share is impressive as a challenger to Broadcom. The rest of the market is mainly in trials, delayed by COVID-19 and multiple semiconductor shortages. As the market moves to mainstream 12.8 Tbps adoption, those three hyperscalers will move to 25.6 Tbps, a chip that Innvoium is currently sampling. This market dynamic creates an opportunity for Marvell. Not only are there synergies, but Marvell obtains a more substantial portfolio for what lies ahead in networking (chiplets, onboard optics, and silicon photonics) and back-to-back opportunities to win ASIC share. Marvell’s recent product announcements and Inphi acquisition highlight several go-to-market opportunities and new scale as a data center supplier that Innovium can now participate in. 650 Group's early hyperscaler executive leadership interviews indicate positive feedback regarding the announced deal. While this is a consolidation amongst ASIC suppliers, we view the long-term state of Marvell with Innovium as leading to more OEM/ODM ASIC choices and increased innovation and R&D for this market. The deal paves the way for the market to be more robust when we discuss 51.2 Tbps which is not that far out. It’s important to note that the future state of data center switching involves significant innovation and increasing importance inside the data center. Ethernet switches will be critical to deploying AI/ML and other future workload technologies to move beyond plumbing to a key interconnect technology. Turning to vendors, we see an increased interest in using ASICs as a way to differentiate product offerings, and our OEM/ODM interviews indicate a similarly positive view of this announcement. Product launches in 1H21 were slow as vendors took a conservative approach to launch new products and not ship. We view the timing as suitable for OEM/ODM as they look to early 2022 for new product launches. We look forward to learning more when the deal closes and during Marvell’s analyst day later this year. - Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst at 650 Group.  Extreme Networks held its investor day and highlighted multiple themes. The company highlighted its Networking-focused Cloud-management capabilities, its large addressable market, how the company can benefit from the 5G market and its pivot to growth markets. CEO Ed Meyercord addressed Cloud, 5G and artificial intelligence themes. For us, we thought that Extreme's focus on 5G was new and incremental to what the company has talked about in past presentations. And, of course, Extreme's playing up its market position in Wi-Fi cloud-managed services makes sense because this trend has been growing and Extreme is ranked second. We see cloud-managed services as a continuing growth trend for the next several years and we highlight these details in our WLAN and Campus switching research programs.        Meyercord explained that as workers, data and computing become increasingly distributed, cloud-managed networking becomes critical. Meyercord cited 650 Group research confirming that Extreme CloudIQ revenues rank number two in the industry. The company cited a $26B total addressable market relating to Enterprise Networking and a $3B addressable market associated with the Service Provider market. The company cited that the 5G market is expected to benefit Extreme Networks, explaining that 80% of the Mobile RAN market will be 5G-related by the year 2025; it cited that 5G-related is a "longer-term growth opportunity". Extreme sees its next fiscal year will be at least in part driven by: (a) taking share in high-growth networking industry segments, (b) cross-selling and driving cloud-adoption (it cited 5M installed base but only 1.5M cloud installed base), (c) new product introductions such as Universal Platform and Co-Pilot Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Extreme invited Major League Baseball to its investor day. We were encouraged to hear that MLB sees that 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are complementary, as opposed to competitive. This debate about two of the main types of wireless has been very active and an important industry player like MLB confirming that it sees the two as complementary validates our own view that Wi-Fi and cellular play together well. AWS (Amazon Web Services) grew nearly 30% Y/Y, remarkable results for a $10B a quarter business. 650 Group enterprise interviews indicate that IaaS is the preferred platform for new application development in the new-normal COVID-19 world. We do expect at some point enterprises will move some of these workloads back to the premise, but don’t expect a headwind. Still, more of normalization as this premises-based move in 2021 will be occurring right as AI workloads add a new leg of growth to IaaS providers. AWS Custom ASIC and semi-custom ASIC development include many projects beyond Annapurna’s Smart NIC and Amazon’s investment into satellite connectivity with a $10B investment in project Kuiper for low earth satellites in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink will make the company's Cloud platform even more popular. Also, if satellite connectivity is just for media, which we see as unlikely, the way consumers connect their devices over the next decade is going to go through a significant transformation, and this is just the best-case will have a minimal impact.  Google, the largest US Hyperscaler by revenue, reported Search and Social results that declined Y/Y for the first time while IaaS revenue grew nearly $1B Y/Y. We were a little surprised at Facebook’s robust growth compared to Google’s. Google’s results were in line with our overall expectations for Search and Social decline in 2020 as consumers and advertisers resetting to the new normal. We expect more targeted ads throughout 2020 as consumers live and work from home, and many students live and study from home during the fall semester.
Google has made big bets and investments in IaaS, and we continue to see AI as an area where they will attack AWS and Azure. It is unclear if IaaS is compatible with the culture withing Google, which could put an upper limit on the verticals and companies Google can sell to. During 1H20, Google was surpassed by Amazon in our supply chain interviews as the company with the most influence on the technological direction of industry-wide future products. We see a passing of the guard as AWS CAPEX is now much higher than Google’s, and the supply chain sees Amazon as more significant revenue potential. We expect this change to reverberate throughout the supply chain, primarily based on how each Cloud provider uses custom or semi-custom semiconductors in their data center infrastructure. This is something we are happy to talk about as we prepare our 2Q20 results and our fall readouts. -- Alan Weckel, Founding Analyst, 650 Group Over the next five days, we will highlight each of the US Hyperscalers and the results they had during 1H20 and 2Q20. Today we will start with the overall trends in the market. US Hyperscaler revenue grew 20% in 2Q20 compared to a year ago, setting a new record. US trade war activities, mainly against Huawei, caused significant lead time increases in many critical components for Cloud data center build-outs during the quarter as the 5G battle against China is having ripple effects into the Cloud supply chain. Custom ASIC and semi-custom ASIC development in the Cloud continue to expand with multiple new initiates around #AI #ML., #SmartNICs, accelerators, and #CPUs underway. This is not to mention Amazon Web Services (AWS) getting into #6G with a $10B investment in project #Kuiper for low earth satellites in direct competition with @SpaceX Starlink. There are over 50 custom ASIC projects in the Cloud. Each one has implications on the supply chain and immediate potential to shift market share from each Cloud provider. Our overall projections for data center spend in switching, servers, and storage remain relatively unchanged since our previous forecast. Current results affirm our forecasts as we shift to vendor performance over the next two weeks, which we expect to be dependent on each company’s vertical and enterprise exposure.   Alan Weckel: This week, HPE Aruba announced its planned acquisition of Silver Peak for $925 million with an expected close date during HPE's fiscal 2020, so we expect the deal to close in calendar 4Q20. SD-WAN is becoming a battleground for vendors as an increasing portion of enterprises want single-pane and cloud-managed solutions for their branch equipment. Our research indicates the average branch employee connects to over one dozen cloud services daily and the edge-to-cloud experience has never been more critical in the COVID and post-COVID world as businesses try to engage with customers across an increasing amount of physical and virtual locations. Enterprises will accelerate the retirement of MPLS links for more advanced WAN architectures with Cloud-first principles in their physical branches. Enterprise will also deploy a mix of hardware and software into employee's houses as Work-From-Home (WFH) changes every employee's residence into a new branch extension of the enterprise. We have conducted significant research into the Branch in 2020 and how it will transform across verticals and product categories (SD-WAN, legacy routing, WLAN, switching, and security) based on long-term structural changes to the market as well as the sudden changes forced on customers by COVID-19. We project SD-WAN as the fastest-growing component in the Branch over the next five years. Silver Peak's advanced SD-WAN portfolio (both hardware and software), completes HPE Aruba’s breadth of WAN offerings, strengthens Aruba ESP (Edge Service Platform) and complements Aruba's strong position in Ethernet Switching, and WLAN, especially Aruba's newer WiFi 6 APs and custom ASIC-based 6200/6300 Access switches. We expect that AI/ML will increasingly become part of the Branch market in each year of our forecast driven by further product integration by vendors and the need to control and monitor an increasing amount of user and device (IoT) traffic. As the AI engines learn, self directly networks will move towards self-driving as automation of tasks beyond simple device management become common across networks. The ability to use AI at this scale in networking today is limited to the largest hyperscalers, but will quickly make its way to campus and branch networks. We expect overall Branch spending to increase above its 2019 run rate during the forecast period (post-COVID) and single-pane management to nearly triple during that timeframe. HPE Aruba's acquisition of Silver Peak will help them address the fastest-growing part of SD-WAN and Branch networking. While there are dozens of SD-WAN, campus switching, WLAN, and security vendors vying for Branch spend, there are only 6 US-based vendors that have a holistic portfolio that customers want and need. Posted by Alan Weckel, founding technology analyst. 650 Group to deliver keynote presentation on open source network market at onf connect '198/29/2019  Chris DePuy, founding analyst for 650 Group will deliver the ONF Connect Friday keynote: CORD TAM Research Update at ONF Connect 2019 happening Sept 10-13th in Silicon Valley. Telecom operators including AT&T, Comcast, DT and Comcast, along with big cloud providers like Google Cloud, are participating in the Open Source network infrastructure movement. They are building large-scale network deployments addressing broadband, edge cloud, optical and RAN. Chris DePuy's Friday keynote session at ONF Connect (Santa Clara Marriott, September 13th at 11:30am) provides Insight into the latest 650 Group custom research exploring the scale and scope of the market impact of CORD will be shared. 650 data is sourced from comprehensive market research, survey data from top global telecom operators and executive level conversations covering these emerging trends in depth. Please visit the Keynote session link: https://onfconnect2019.sched.com/event/Tkxx?iframe=no F5 kicked off its #F5Agility18 conference with over 1,300 attendees. The company’s themes was “Any app, anywhere,” and words repeated included “Automation” and “as a service.” The company is moving towards selling security as a standalone offering. Accompanying the show, there was a press release announcing Gi LAN traffic management and Gi Firewall VNFs generally available September 2018 focused on mobile operators, available on capacity-based consumption model. A striking difference between this year’s conference in Boston and last year’s conference in Chicago was that a significant portion of the management team is different: new CIO, CFO, regional VP, Chief Strategy Officer, two new SVP/GMs of business units, EVP HR, EVP Services. Generally, the company is planning on delivering new capabilities:
Here are the three eras of market development for F5:
The company is putting significant investment into SP, software, automation. “Any app, anywhere” vision.
 F5 strategy slide: Every App, Everywhere from #F5Agility18 Growth strategy:
 Not quite a year ago, Cisco and Google announced a Cloud partnership. Today, at the very first keynote at Cisco Live 2018, Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud joined Chuck Robbins on stage to talk about the partnership, highlighting Kubernetes and a unified security policy. Both Chuck and Diane want a large ecosystem of partners and developers. Later on, Chuck mentioned Cisco passing the 500K developer milestone for DEVNET.
Chuck touched a litter on routing, mentioning next-generation branch and highlighting intent based networking activity in the SP space. For example, one of their SP customers updates 60,000 routers each night using automation. He then quickly got back to the Catalyst 9K switch, highlighted as the fastest ramping product ever in Cisco history. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles was highlighted as a customer of the Cat 9K. As a customer, they have over 35,000 connected devices. They purchased over 2,000 WLAN APs and over 200 Cat 9300 switches. They are also deploying ISE and have done over 23,000 different device profiles/identifications and are track to start policy enforcement. They are now in the process of deploying at their branch locations. They noted 550k blocked threats over the first few months of deployment. My key takeaways are that there is an explosion of devices and data on the network, much of which is encrypted and a human can only do so much; thus the network must scale and automate. Cisco is looking to use AI, automation, and its architecture to allow the customer to scale with those IoT devices and to have the network automate many tasks, especially around security. Monetization for Cisco will occur both in the hardware, but also in the solution sale. An ideal customer would be end-to-end Cisco, but Cisco will also support open APIs in order to allow partners and customers to operate with their preferred solutions. |
CHRIS DePUY
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