Rubrik, cyber resilience hitting inflection point

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Cyber resilience is a simple concept: You're going to be hit by a data breach. What matters is how quickly you recover.

Rubrik's fourth quarter results, which were better than expected, hammered home how enterprises are focusing more on cyber resilience. During Rubrik's conference call, cyber resilience was mentioned 30 times.

CEO Bipul Sinha said:

"If you look at cyber resilience, what we are telling our customers is that a assumed breaches will happen to you. And if you have to have an assumed breach posture, how do you ensure that you understand the risk in your most critical assets as well as your services? And how do you ensure that your services are up and running even when confronted with cyber attacks.

Think about the fundamental risk to the data comes from the user interaction with the data. The user could be human or nonhuman identities."

Constellation Research analyst Chirag Mehta has been talking about cyber resilience and recovering from data breaches. His Shortlist on Cyber Resilience features Rubrik as well as Cohesity, which is also a leader due to the acquisition of Veritas’ data protection unit. Mehta noted:

"Cyber resilience solutions go beyond traditional backup and recovery to ensure data integrity, rapid restoration, and business continuity following a breach or disruption. These solutions are designed with a post-breach resilience mindset, enabling organizations to bounce back quickly and minimize operational downtime while protecting critical assets.

Boards are no longer satisfied with the 'we have controls in place' argument. Their focus has shifted toward ensuring that organizations are truly breach-ready, with the ability to recover operations swiftly and mitigate the impact of cyber incidents. They want to understand how resilient their business and technology landscape is in the face of an attack—how quickly they can restore critical functions, limit financial losses, and, most importantly, prevent lasting brand damage."

• Enterprise security customers conundrum: Can you have both resilience, consolidation?

Rubrik has been public a year and has been able to build out its business nicely. A partnership with Microsoft has also helped Rubrik grow. Rubrik also raised its fiscal 2026 outlook. Sinha said that CIOs and CISOs are focusing on securing data across multiple environments.

"What is clear is that companies are undergoing multiple technology transformations to find success in the AI era. As organizations prepare their infrastructure for generative AI and replatform to accelerate cloud adoption, they quickly realize the need for a modern data security strategy that provides robust cyber resilience," said Sinha.

Rubrik has been benefiting from the ability to protect data across clouds. The company cited a proof of concept where it protected and managed data across AWS and Microsoft Azure and was able to cut infrastructure and storage costs. Rubrik was also able to show an ability to recover 98% faster than native recovery tools.

Sinha noted that Rubrik is early in its journey and plans to accelerate product innovation and seed future growth. On March 4, Rubrik launched new Identity Recovery for Active Directory and Entra ID and introduced new tools to recover from cyber incidents including machine learning detection, orchestrated recovery and new threat hunting capabilities.

The numbers

Rubrik reported a fourth quarter net loss of $114.89 million, or 61 cents a share, on revenue of $258.1 million, up 47% from a year ago. Non-GAAP loss for the fourth quarter was 18 cents a share, well above estimates.

For fiscal 2025, Rubrik reported a net loss of $7.48 a share on revenue of $886.5 million, up 41% from a year ago.

As for the outlook, Rubrik projected first quarter revenue of $259 million to $261 million with a non-GAAP loss of 31 cents a share to 33 cents a share.

For fiscal 2026, Rubrik projected revenue of $1.145 billion to $1.161 billion with a non-GAAP earnings per share loss of $1.13 to $1.23.

Enterprise vendors starting to feel economic, federal government uncertainty

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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• Enterprise AI: Here are the trends to know right now

"We continue to work closely with our federal customers and their feedback is consistent. Our agentic platform drives tangible efficiencies and is a part of their go-forward roadmap. At the same time, we acknowledge that in the short term, the government is working through administration priorities, which we will work to support. And we have factored this into our linearity and our overall guidance for the year. There has also been a significant increase in volatility in the overall macroeconomic environment, particularly in the last two weeks.

 

In recent discussions with customers, the external environment has created uncertainty around their budgets. Foreign exchange rates have also significantly fluctuated over the last week. Given these trends, we are taking a measured for fiscal 2026, adding additional prudence to our overall guidance given the volatile environment. We are confident that we are appropriately factoring in the macro trends as we see them today."

"We're mindful of macroeconomic conditions, deal timing and federal spending uncertainty. In addition, we're focused on delivering efficiencies and that means prioritizing our investments in data, cloud and especially AI."

"There's definitely a level of unknown and uncertainty. There's no question that there's a lot of change that's happening. With that, we've actually seen our federal pipeline expand. I would also say for the type of offering that we can cater to for federal agencies, and especially given that we're one of the only security vendors that can sell AI into a FedRAMP High type of an environment.

 

In many cases, we actually create cost synergies. At the same time, I would say, there is maybe some unclarity on deal timing and budgets, and we're just working at the pace of the customer."

"On the federal side, it depends on which agency you're working with. So far not a significant slowdown, but remember, the HPE Company provides core tech infrastructure for the Department of Defense and Department of Energy and many agencies that provide national security of sorts. And therefore, that has not been seen, but we see what happened next. Hard to predict at this point in time."

"Recent tariff announcements have created uncertainty for our industry, primarily affecting our Server business. We are working on plans to mitigate these impacts through supply chain measures and pricing actions. Through these efforts, we expect to mitigate to a significant degree the impact on the second half of the year and to a lesser extent the impact on Q2 as it takes time to implement mitigations."

"It's not unusual, especially with the focus on efficiency and driving that value for the citizens of The U.S. and dealing with the deficit challenges and so forth that it could be a timing situation. So, we're very transparent on that, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet. And I actually see a tremendous amount of evidence, and we've gotten this feedback incidentally, that our platform maps beautifully to attacking the cost, the assets not being fully utilized, the mission of sending people back to the office."

Hotwire's Laura MacDonald on AI's role in marketing personalization, analytics

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Laura MacDonald, Chief Growth Officer of Hotwire, said AI's role in marketing and communications has only grown, but practitioners need to ensure quality data is training models and humans are adding the creativity. 

I caught up with MacDonald, a 2025 AX100 customer experience leader, at Constellation Research's Ambient Experience conference. Here are the takeaways.

AI for data analysis: Hotwire uses AI to analyze data and provide recommendations for better marketing campaigns. The AI acts as a co-pilot, quickly generating answers and campaign ideas. However, AI doesn't replace human creativity. "We can use AI to a certain point to get much more, much quicker to answers and comments, but you still need that human element from a creativity and content point of view," said MacDonald. 

AI Search Discovery Tool: Hotwire has developed an AI tool that aggregates data from various sources to understand user behavior and identify key trends. This tool uses synthetic personas to gather information and optimize future responses.

For instance, AI can help marketers take a persona such as a CTO in the US and then role play to create a composite. "We're asking the chat bot questions based on the role of a CTO. There are some big caveats, but it's pulling from data and content to say these are the questions that have been asked before. It gets you there faster," said MacDonald.

• Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI
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Personalization: AI can personalize responses based on user interactions, but it doesn't access external personal data. The personalization is limited to the information provided during the conversation. "I think you're going to see more personalization based on your behavior and what has been said," said MacDonald. "AI agents will be able to say, 'this is what I've learned' and here's what's going to benefit this person vs. another offer. It should make a better experience."

Other key items from our conversation.

• Human Creativity: While AI is useful for data analysis and quick answers, human creativity remains essential for effective content creation and campaigns. Marketing AI will always need a human in the loop.
• Data Challenges: The biggest challenges in AI implementation are ensuring data quality and compliance with security and privacy laws. AI is only as good as the data it's trained on.
• Ethical Considerations: There's a need for guardrails to ensure AI provides a great user experience without overstepping ethical boundaries or asking for unnecessary information.

Databricks, Palantir forge integration pact

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Databricks and Palantir said they will integrate platforms in a move designed to enable AI workflows and data architectures.

In a statement, the companies said they will forge a strategic partnership that does the following:

• Combines Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Palantir AIP, which is gaining traction with enterprises.
• The partnership revolves around a data architecture that combines Palantir's Ontology System with Databricks data processing.
• The integration will be facilitated by combining Databricks Unity Catalog through Delta Sharing and Palantir's multimodal security system.

According to Databricks and Palantir, the companies already have a set of joint customers benefiting from the integration including the Department of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services and BP.

Databricks recently outlined a partnership with SAP. For its part, Palantir has been gaining enterprise customers and tight integration with Databricks and similar platforms will help its cause.

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The news was announced ahead of Palantir's AIPcon where enterprises showcase various use cases.

Intel names Tan CEO

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Intel has its new CEO. Lip-Bu Tan, formerly CEO of Cadence Design Systems, will take over as CEO, effective March 18.

He will replace interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus.

While Tan will put the uncertainty of the CEO search to bed, Intel still faces multiple challenges including Intel Foundry's losses and the chipmaker's positioning in AI data centers where Nvidia leads.

• Intel Q1 outlook light, Q4 better-than-expected
• Intel CEO Gelsinger out: 5 looming questions ahead
• Intel defends Gaudi 3 as it misses 2024 sales targets
• Intel's Q2 wipeout: Guidance cut, 15% layoffs, dividend suspended

Zinsner will remain CFO and Holthaus will remain CEO of Intel Products. Frank Yeary, interim executive chair, said Tan's track record, knowledge of the semiconductor industry and his role as a board member were big wins.

Tan said:

"Intel has a powerful and differentiated computing platform, a vast customer installed base and a robust manufacturing footprint that is getting stronger by the day as we rebuild our process technology roadmap."

Adobe reports strong Q1, adds Firefly subscriptions

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Adobe delivered-getter-than-expected first quarter earnings and said it is focused on taking advantage of AI and taking the "opportunity to reimagine our technology platforms to serve an increasingly large and diverse customer universe," said CEO Shantanu Narayen.

The company reported first quarter net income of $1.81 billion, or $4.14 share, on revenue of $5.71 billion, 10% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the quarter was $5.08 a share.

Wall Street was expecting Adobe to report first quarter earnings of $4.97 a share on revenue of $5.66 billion.

The company reaffirmed its outlook for the fiscal year. Adobe has a bevy of releases on tap at Adobe Summit next week as well as an Investor Day.

In prepared remarks, Narayen said Adobe is using its platform to give creative professionals access to a variety of models. These AI features will include new Firefly web app subscriptions.

Digital Media revenue in the first quarter was $4.23 billion, up 11% from a year ago. Digital Experience revenue was $1.41 billion in the first quarter, up 10%.

Narayen said:

"While Adobe’s commercially safe Firefly models will be integral to this offering, we will support additional third-party models to be part of this creative process. The Firefly app will be the umbrella destination for new creative categories like ideation. We recently introduced and incorporated our new Firefly video model into this offering, adding to the already supported image, vector and design models. In addition to monetizing standalone subscriptions for Firefly, we will introduce multiple Creative Cloud offerings that include Firefly tiering."

Adobe is also refining how it will report results from its primary audiences--business professionals and consumers and creative and marketing professionals. "We will win by focusing on “Business Professionals and Consumers” and “Creative and Marketing Professionals” with a unified product strategy and go-to-market. We will start to provide financial visibility into these two new groups starting this quarter and expand on this at our Investor Day at Summit next week," said Narayen.

As for the outlook, Adobe projected fiscal second quarter revenue of $5.77 billion to $5.82 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $4.95 a share to $5 a share. For fiscal 2025, Adobe said revenue will be $23.3 billion to $23.55 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $20.20 a share to $20.50 a share.

D-Wave claims quantum supremacy breakthrough, reports Q4

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

D-Wave Quantum said its quantum computer has outperformed a classical supercomputer in solving magnetic materials simulation problems and proves quantum computational supremacy.

The breakthrough, published in Science, revolved around using D-Wave's annealing quantum computer, Advantage2, performed magnetic materials simulation in minutes. That problem would have taken nearly 1 million years for a classical supercomputer.

Quantum annealing is one flavor of quantum computing. Annealing is designed for optimization over general purpose computing and D-Wave has championed this approach.

Even though it's early in the year, 2025 appears to be the year of quantum already. In March, the news from the quantum computing industry continued to roll.

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In a statement, D-Wave said:

"An international collaboration of scientists led by D-Wave performed simulations of quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses—computationally hard magnetic materials simulation problems with known applications to business and science—on both D-Wave’s Advantage2 prototype annealing quantum computer and the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The work simulated the behavior of a suite of lattice structures and sizes across a variety of evolution times and delivered a multiplicity of important material properties."

Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave, said the demonstration of quantum supremacy on a useful problem is an industry first. "D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers are now capable of solving useful problems beyond the reach of the world’s most powerful supercomputers," said Baratz.

The milestone took two years of collaboration across 11 institutions worldwide. D-Wave's Advantage2 prototype is now available via its D-Wave Leap quantum cloud service.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Quantum computing is maturing quickly, and the question enterprises need to watch is how capable the latest Quantum machines are, and then see which use cases can be automated. D-Wave's news here is of relevance as it puts all industries on notice that need simulation of new magnetic materials. If you don't have a quantum platform for this, you can no longer compete. Every enterprise that created new magnetic materials or want to simulate how magnetic material will interact with a larger product is now on notice."

D-Wave takes aim at rivals

D-Wave executives moved to defend its claims of quantum supremacy. That defense was a common theme on D-Wave's conference call.

Baratz on a conference call said:

"This was not just solving a problem that can't be solved classically, this was solving an important, useful real-world problem. It happens to be in the area of magnetic material simulation, and solving it in a matter of minutes, whereas it would take nearly a million years to solve on classical computers, and it would require more than the world's annual energy consumption."

He added:

"This is a first for the industry. The other physicist papers published this week do not come close to achieving what we accomplished on the D-Wave advantage to quantum computer, and their claims are just claim confusing the public."

Dr. Andrew King, Distinguished Scientist at D-Wave, noted that there have been other claims about quantum supremacy, but they didn't measure up to what D-Wave accomplished. "They didn't reproduce the suite of simulations we performed," said King. "You don't just need to do the easy simulations. You need to do the hard ones as well. And nobody has demonstrated that. This is why we call this quantum supremacy, because it's a problem that you cannot solve if you don't have a quantum computer."

D-Wave Chief Development Officer Dr. Trevor Lanting said it now has several research customers doing magnetic simulation work to accelerate scientific discovery and annealing systems for quantum simulation overall. Next up, D-Wave plans on launching its Advantage2 system to general availability. Baratz said the system will be available before the end of the year. 

Q4 earnings and outlook

D-Wave also reported fourth quarter earnings. In the fourth quarter, D-Wave reported a net loss of $86.1 million, or 37 cents a share, on revenue of $2.3 billion, down 21% from a year ago. The non-GAAP net loss as 8 cents a share. 

For 2024, D-Wave reported a net loss of $143.9 million, or 75 cents a share, on revenue of $8.8 million flat with a year ago. D-Wave ended the year with 135 customers, up from 133 a year ago. 

As for the outlook, D-Wave said first quarter revenue will top $10 million due to the sales of an Advantage annealing quantum computer. 

D-Wave ended the year with $178 million in cash. In the fourth quarter, D-Wave raised $161.3 million.