| Constellation Research

Nvidia strong Q4, outlook eases AI infrastructure spending fears for now

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. ...

Nvidia delivered strong results in the fourth quarter as its data center business posted growth of 93% from a year ago.

The company reported fourth quarter earnings of 89 cents a share (GAAP and non-GAAP) on revenue of $39.3 billion, up 78% from a year ago.

Wall Street was expecting Nvidia to report fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 80 cents a share on revenue of $38.16 billion.

Going into the earnings, Nvidia investors had been skittish about AI infrastructure spending due to DeepSeek's emergence. With foundational models going commodity, the need to spend on AI infrastructure may be diminished.

The results appear to eased those AI infrastructure spending concerns for now. CEO Jensen Huang said: “We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter. AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionize the largest industries.”

As for the outlook, Nvidia projected first quarter revenue of $43 billion, give or take 2%.

Wall Street was looking for Nvidia to report first quarter earnings of 91 cents a share on revenue of $42.05 billion, up 61% from a year ago. Analysts were expecting Nvidia to report fiscal 2026 revenue of $196 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $4.43 a share.

Key comments from CFO Colette Kress:

"We delivered $11.0 billion of Blackwell architecture revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the fastest product ramp in our company’s history. Blackwell sales were led by large cloud service providers which represented approximately 50% of our Data Center revenue."
"Automotive revenue for fiscal 2025 was up 55% from a year ago. Automotive revenue for the fourth quarter was up 103% from a year ago and up 27% sequentially. These increases were driven by sales of our self-driving platforms."
"Networking revenue was $3.0 billion, down 9% from a year ago and down 3% sequentially. We are transitioning
from small NVLink 8 with Infiniband to large NVLink 72 with Spectrum X. Networking experienced growth in Ethernet for AI, which includes Spectrum-X end-to-end ethernet platform, and NVLink products related to the ramp of our Grace Blackwell platform."

Ahead of the earnings, Nvidia and Cisco said they will create a unified architecture for networks optimized for AI workloads.

Nvidia will couple Cisco Silicon One with Nvidia SuperNICs as part of the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform. Cisco becomes the only partner silicon in the networking system.

Cisco will build systems combining Nvidia Spectrum silicon with Cisco's operating system software. The companies will also co-sell the data center gear.

Huang commets

Speaking on an earnings conference call, Huang said the following:

"The amount of computation you use for post training is actually higher than pretraining. And it's kind of sensible in the sense that you could, while you're using reinforcement learning, generate an enormous amount of synthetic data or synthetically generated tokens."
"We have some 350 plants manufacturing the 1.5 million components that go into each one of the Blackwell racks, Grace Blackwell racks."
"The next train is on an annual rhythm and Blackwell Ultra with new networking, new memories and of course, new processors, and all of that is coming online. We've have been working with all of our partners and customers, laying this out. They have all of the necessary information, and we'll work with everybody to do the proper transition. This time between Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra, the system architecture is exactly the same."
"Using Agentic AI to revolutionize the way we work inside companies, that's just starting. This is now the beginning of the agent AI era, and you hear a lot of people talking about it and we got some really great things going on. And then there's the physical AI after that, and then there are robotic systems after that."
"The more the model thinks the smarter the answer. Models like OpenAI, Grok-3, DeepSeek-R1 are reasoning models that apply inference time scaling. Reasoning models can consume 100x more compute. Future reasoning models can consume much more compute. DeepSeek-R1 has ignited global enthusiast -- it's an excellent innovation. But even more importantly, it has open source a world-class reasoning AI model. Nearly every AI developer is applying R1 or chain of thought and reinforcement learning techniques like R1 to scale their model's performance."

Constellation Research's take

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Rumors of Nvidia’s demise courtesy of DeepSeek have not materialized, at least in this quarter. All YoY comparisons of Nvidia are out of this world – like revenue more than doubling, operating and net income up 140+%. The quarter over quarter comparisons are slower, and coming to a realistic pace for Nvidia. What is remarkable is that the team around Jensen Huang kept cost under control and Nvidia is more profitable now that a year ago. Nvidia shows thriftiness and frugality, never a bad trait in the volatile chip industry. It is remarkable that a tech vendor who had no substantial data center revenue, is now showing over 80% of revenue in data center, while being 10x larger. Truly remarkable. Let’s see how the party so far will switch to a happy growth mood in 2025 – or not. Q1 will tell."

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity nvidia AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about Nvidia strong Q4, outlook eases AI infrastructure spending fears for now

Salesforce landing Agentforce deals, but Q4 and outlook mixed

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Salesforce said it has closed 5,000 Agentforce deals since October with 3,000 of them paid, but the company's fourth quarter results were mixed relative to estimates.

The company reported fourth quarter earnings of $1.71 billion, or $1.75 a share, on revenue of $9.99 billion. Non-GAAP earnings in the fourth quarter were $2.78 a share. Wall Street was expecting Salesforce to report fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of $2.61 a share on revenue of $10.04 billion.

Salesforce, Google Cloud expand partnership: Here's what it means

See: Behind the Scenes: The Force Behind Agentforce | Salesforce launches Agentforce 2.0 as it ramps its release cadence | Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: Takeaways on agentic AI, platform, end of copilot era

For fiscal 2025, Salesforce reported earnings of $6.2 billion, or $6.36 a share, on revenue of $37.9 billion.

As for the outlook, Salesforce projected revenue growth, which remains in the single digit range.

For the first quarter, the company projected first quarter revenue of $9.71 billion to $9.76 billion, up about 7% in constant currency. Salesforce projected fiscal 2026 revenue of $40.5 billion to $40.9 billion up 7% to 8% in constant currency.

CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce is well positioned for "the digital labor revolution" and "deeply unified platform." CFO Amy Weaver, however, noted that it's early in the Agentforce adoption cycle. "The adoption cycle is still early as we focus on deployment with our customers. As a result, we are assuming a modest contribution to revenue in fiscal '26. We expect the momentum to build throughout the year, driving a more meaningful contribution in fiscal '27," she said.

In the second quarter, platform and other had revenue growth of 12%, but other clouds such as sales, service and marketing all had single digit revenue growth.

Speaking on an earnings conference call, Benioff hit on themes of a unified platform as well as Agentforce and Data Cloud traction. He said:

"We have this incredible Data Cloud, and this incredible agentic platform. These are the three layers, but it's this that it is a deeply unified platform. It's a deeply unified platform. It's just one piece of code. That's what makes it so unique in this market and that is why customers are having so great success with it.

It's not a collection of disjointed parts. You're going to have to kind of self-assemble, DIY it, all kinds of how do you get the security running, how do you do this, how do you do that. It's this idea that it's a deeply unified platform with one piece of code all wrapped in a beautiful layer of trust. And that's what gives Agentforce this incredible accuracy that we're seeing."

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Salesforce has a great quarter and year, missing the $10 billion revenue mark for the first time, by just a hair. Agentforce is front and central to growth, but now we will see in 2025 whether AI is adding to Salesforce related spend, or if it cannibalizes other Salesforce expenses. The question is, how much budget will CFOs 'rob' from somewhere else to fund AI from a SaaS vendor, or stick to the same apps budget. We know extra budget was found for custom AI, but the verdict for packaged AI is still out and Q1 / Q2 will tell.

The negotiation question for enterprises will be: What has the SaaS vendor delivered in maintenance improvement in it's core, non AI offering? If that is of substance, things are hard for a CFO / CPO. The argument can be made that the vendor poured all resources into AI and neglected the core business automation maintenance and natural functional automation progression. What wound you have done if there was no AI is the question?"

Data to Decisions Chief Information Officer

Read more about Salesforce landing Agentforce deals, but Q4 and outlook mixed

Snowflake adds OpenAI models to Cortex AI via expanded Microsoft partnership, integration

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Snowflake and Microsoft have expanded their partnership in a move that puts OpenAI and Anthropic models in Snowflake's Cortex AI natively.

Cortex AI is Snowflake's fully managed AI service. According to the companies, Snowflake Cortex AI will integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry. That move will put OpenAI's models Snowflake and make them available as data agents in Snowflake's AI Data Cloud.

The data platform space has seen a flurry of deals and partnerships. For instance, SAP and Databricks paired up on SAP Business Cloud. IBM acquired DataStax to add to its watsonx platform. Salesforce and Google Cloud also expanded a partnership that includes Data Cloud.

For Snowflake, adding OpenAI to Cortex AI gives it some differentiation for its data platform. Snowflake is looking to stand out for AI inference workloads across multiple cloud regions.

Snowflake's partnership with Microsoft includes the following:

Snowflake customers will be able to leverage OpenAI models within Snowflake Cortex AI on Microsoft Azure and run them with Snowflake Horizon Catalog and compliance and security settings.
Enterprises will be able to create data agents powered by OpenAI within Snowflake's AI Data Cloud.
Snowflake becomes a platform that hosts both Anthropic and OpenAI models on its platform.
The companies also announced a native integration to make Snowflake Cortex Agents available in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams. Microsoft users will be able to interact with unstructured and structured Snowflake data from their daily apps. Availability for this integration is expected in June.

Also see:

Snowflake posts strong Q4 growth

Separately, Snowflake reported strong fourth quarter results with revenue growth of 28% from a year ago. Snowflake reported a fourth quarter net loss of $327.47 million, or 99 cents a share, on revenue of $986.77 million. Non-GAAP earnings in the fourth quarter were 30 cents a share.

For fiscal 2025, Snowflake reported revenue of $3.63 billion, up 29% from a year ago. Snowflake's net loss for fiscal 2025 was $1.29 billion, or $3.86 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were 83 cents a share.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, said the company has become one of "the most consequential data and AI company in the world." Snowflake has more than 11,000 customers.

As for the outlook, Snowflake projected first quarter product revenue between $955 million to $960 million. For fiscal 2026, Snowflake projected product revenue of $4.28 billion, up 24% from a year ago.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Snowflake had a good growth quarter, but growth came at a cost, as it practically doubled its EPS loss year over year. Sridhar Ramaswamy and team now need to show that they cannot only grow, but they can also grow with profitability in mind, as the quarterly trend is not encouraging. When a single billion revenue tech vendor racks up an over $1 billion net loss, while growing almost 30% - the alarm bells go off. Running an AI company isn’t cheap – as cost of revenue is up 30+% YoY, and as operating expenses are up 25% the warning bells are being tested. We will see if Q1 bides better, the critical aspect being that Snowflake was not doing anything spectacular in regards of one time investments. With guidance for product revenue pulling back into the low 20ies there is further data for concern."

Speaking on an earnings conference call, Ramaswamy said:

"Our core business is very strong. Our product delivery is in overdrive and our go-to-market engine is humming. We are innovating better than ever and firing on all cylinders and we have an enormous opportunity ahead of us."
"As our competitors continue to require expensive engineering resources to maintain and scale, more and more customers are seeing real bottom-line impact by turning to Snowflake. We have seen more and more Snowflake customers save over 50% by migrating to us from other providers."
"Customers should have a right to decide where it is that their data should be. And as far as we are concerned, I think we are very uniquely positioned as a central and very efficient repository of data for most companies."

Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Tech Optimization Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity snowflake AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about Snowflake adds OpenAI models to Cortex AI via expanded Microsoft partnership, integration

Amazon's Alexa gets a brain transplant, showcases Amazon Bedrock, Nova

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Amazon launched Alexa+, a revamped version of its voice assistant powered by generative AI models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude via AWS' Amazon Bedrock.

Alexa+ will work with most of the 600 million Alexa devices in the field. Amazon will charge $19.99 a month, but Amazon Prime members get Alexa+ bundled in. Alexa+ will also be able to navigate the web to act on your behalf for things like scheduling and dinner reservations.

While Amazon's Alexa+ launch and portfolio of devices was consumer focused, the effort will also be a showcase for AWS and Amazon Bedrock.

Daniel Rausch, vice president for Alexa and Echo, talked about the architecture behind Alexa's brain transplant. Key points about Alexa+ architecture include:

Alexa+ leverages large language models (LLMs) including Amazon Nova and Anthropic.
Alexa+ will select the best model for any task via a new routing system.
Amazon forged agreements with major news organizations to ground answers.
Alexa+ has a new architecture that orchestrates APIs at scale so it can book appointments and order items from the likes of GrubHub, OpenTable, Amazon, and a host of others.
LLMs integrate with APIs, but can make several API calls in a row.
Alexa+ will have the ability to carry out agentic actions and navigate web pages as you would.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity amazon AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about Amazon's Alexa gets a brain transplant, showcases Amazon Bedrock, Nova

Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Customer experiences and employee experiences are often comingled, AI has CX potential but it's only as good as the data quality, and maybe you should think of your AI agents as your children.

These were a few of the takeaways from Constellation Research's Ambient Experience Summit 2025. Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller referred to customer and employee experience as a soup where data, people, process and AI all blend together to create a holistic approach.

Here's a look at the takeaways on customer and employee experience at Ambient Experience.

People

Customer and employee experiences are often cast in digital, data and AI terms, but in the end it's all about people. Heather Wilson, SVP, Head of Communications & Marketing at AccentCare, said customer experience in health care boils down to the human in front of them. Sure, there are data stores and systems for operations, but the front lines are about human connections.

"If your front line workers are happy, they are doing good work that affects the patient experience," said Wilson. "The human piece is how we grow."

CX and EX are one in the same. Thomas Rocharz, Director, Contact Center, Cape Air, said when he joined the company his first mission was to address attrition and burnout among service agents. He said:

"When you talk about the intersection between CX and EX, my approach is there is no intersection. For me, employee experience and customer experience are the same thing. My employees are customers. They are my customers. When they call HR, they are HR customers. We're all in this experience soup, and that's my approach to it. How do you stop the morale the same way you create good customer experience, give them what they want, listen to them."

Jaylene Owen, HR Director at Hames Corp., a retailer based in Sitka, Alaska, has a customer base that is also employees. The reason? Sitka has 8,300 people and most of them worked at Hames at some point. "When it comes down to treating my employees and my customers, I consider them the same," said Owen. "It's like a big family, and you have to realize that your part of a bigger picture than it just being about profit."

Remember your physical channels and experience touch points. Casey Carl, Founder of North Coast Ventures, has been an executive at Walmart and Target. He said customer experience can be aided by data and AI, but for many people retail is about the interaction they have with people in the community.

Christian Manzella, Head of Digital/UX at Ford Pro, said his unit is focused on fleet management and software, but business-to-business interactions also rely on "sitting down and talking to customers." The same approach applies to employees.

Data

It's the data quality. It's always the data quality. This refrain was heard repeatedly from executives. "If you train AI on crap data, it's going to give you crap results," said Laura MacDonald, Chief Growth Officer of Hotwire.

Data quality is an integration issue between silos. Raja Renganathan, Chief Growth Officer at Randstad Digital, said enterprises have different tools, data silos and applications that don't talk to each other. This data work never stops and your ability to use AI to personalize the customer experience depends on it.

Data is a team sport. Kristina Chambers, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at TTX Co., said her company's goal is to get railroad assets to the right place at the right time and optimized. Much of the data is structured, but also cross-functional. Chambers started a data camp program modeled after Google to get employees experienced in data. "We bring together employees across all the different functions to work hands on with our data using the new technologies that we brought in," she said. "It's all about creating good data habits, good hygiene, and a solid digital footprint especially in developing dashboards."

AI

AI will revamp CX, but enterprises aren't organized to benefit. CX is one of those things that are owned by everyone and no one at the same time. The customer experience is hampered by silos with different returns. AccentCare has a patient experience leader and the idea is worth following for other companies in various industries.

AI can enable strategic transformation. GE Healthcare VP of marketing Joseph Anzalone said the primary customer for his company is clinicians. GE Healthcare is training foundation models to give clinicians predictive analytics to save lives, streamline processes and drive patient outcomes.

"In the future, a clinical application will pull all the structured and unstructured data, images, wave forms, clinical notes, patient history, family history and genomics, put that together and give you a diagnosis or recommendation," said Anzalone, who noted that the technology is there but the healthcare model isn't. In addition, healthcare innovation varies by system, hospital and even division.

Personalization. MacDonald said that AI agents will ultimately be able to know the customer through interactions to tailor experiences. Another area will be leveraging AI to create synthetic personas that will further refine customer targeting and inform individual interactions.

Think of AI agents as your children. In analogy of the day, Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller compared AI agents and your children. Children at first need to be trained. It's messy. You have to feed them. Eventually they learn how to feed themselves. "What we really want is for them to be autonomous," said Mueller. "An autonomous being is one you can bring to school and they come back in six hours. The teenage years are like AI hallucinations."

In the end, children and AI will continue to be shaped by experiences, new inputs and training. The good news? You can swap models if your AI doesn't behave.

Next-Generation Customer Experience B2C CX Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Data Officer

Read more about Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI

The Intersection of AI, Customer Experience, and Success Metrics | AX100 Interviews

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Constellation Insights editor-in-chief Larry Dignan interviews Michael Storey, Chief Experience Officer at RentSpree about how the company is leveraging #AI and intelligent #automation to streamline workflows and create a more seamless experience for real estate agents and landlords managing rental properties. Michael discusses RentSpree's evolution from a screening and application provider to a full-suite rental property management platform. He explains how they use generative research and AI integration to reduce administrative tasks, personalize the experience, and help agents and landlords focus on what matters most. Hear Michael's insights on RentSpree's customer-centric approach and the role of emerging technologies in transforming the rental management industry!

Read more about The Intersection of AI, Customer Experience, and Success Metrics | AX100 Interviews

On <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ettl3bE3qTQ?si=yocS60feBmd1poNZ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

R "Ray" Wang Interviews Zoho Founders About Leadership Shifts, Future Innovation

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

Exciting leadership changes and innovation at Zoho ðŸš€ Constellation founder R "Ray" Wang sat down with Zoho founders - Sridhar Vembu, Mani Vembu, and Tony Thomas - during Zoho's Analyst Day to learn more...

The team shared insights on the challenges facing the software industry, the need for true #innovation and exponential efficiency, and Zoho's vision to deliver domain-specific app platforms powered by advanced #AI and low-code development.

Sridhar has shifted from Zoho CEO to Chief Scientist, driving R&D and pioneering new AI-powered capabilities. Mani has taken on the CEO role for the Zoho.com division, focusing on platform strategy and global expansion. And Tony is leading the Zoho US market, working to strengthen customer engagement and go-to-market execution.

ðŸ’¡ ðŸ¤ Zoho continues to disrupt the market and provide customers with exceptional value. Watch the full interview here!

Read more about R "Ray" Wang Interviews Zoho Founders About Leadership Shifts, Future Innovation

On <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0bkJ2paWsFY?si=BttdRMVSR5ZNvsc_" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Workday delivers strong Q4, sees strong demand for AI offerings

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Workday reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings as the company saw strong demand for its AI products and more penetration across industries.

The company reported fourth quarter earnings of 35 cents a share on revenue of $2.21 billion, up 15% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the fourth quarter was $1.92 a share.

Wall Street was expecting Workday to report non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings of $1.78 a share on revenue of $2.18 billion.

For fiscal 2025, Workday reported earnings of $1.95 a share on revenue of $8.45 billion, up 16.4% from fiscal 2024. Non-GAAP earnings for fiscal 2025 was $7.30 a share.

As for the outlook, Workday projected first quarter subscription revenue of $2.05 billion, up 13% from a year ago. Workday projected subscription revenue of $8.8 billion, up 14% for fiscal 2026.

Workday aims to be system of record for AI agents, digital labor

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said the company was benefiting from its platform approach as well as demand for its AI products.

CFO Zane Rowe said Workday saw good traction in industry verticals.

"With our unified platform, our customers can unlock value faster, reduce their total cost of ownership and harness the power of AI across our best in class HR and Finance solutions," said Eschenbach.

Eschenbach touted AI efforts such as its Agent System of Record. "We continue to see increasing demand for AI solutions. In fact, AI is front and center in every conversation I have with customers, prospects, and partners. They want to move beyond incremental productivity gains—they’re looking for ROI that will help drive growth back into their business," he said.

Workday also said that product and technology chief Sayan Chakraborty has retired. He will be replaced by Gerrit Kazmaier, who will be President of Product and Technology March 10. Kazmaier joints Workday from Google Cloud where he led data analytics and business intelligence. He was at SAP before Google.

By the numbers:

Workday has more than 11,000 customers.
Workday Student has more than 135 customers and half will be live by the Spring.
The company has more than 6,100 core HCM and financial customers.
30% of the customer expansion deals involve one or more AI SKUs.
15% of Workday's net new annual contract value is through partners.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience New C-Suite Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Marketing Transformation Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity workday AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing Metaverse developer SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Quantum Computing Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Social Healthcare VR CCaaS UCaaS Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Customer Experience Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about Workday delivers strong Q4, sees strong demand for AI offerings

IBM acquires DataStax, aims to integrate into watsonx portfolio

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

IBM said it will acquire DataStax in a move that will help it build out its watsonx genAI portfolio with various open source tools.

Financial details weren't disclosed.

DataStax is the company behind AstraDB, DataStax Enterprise and tools that are falling under the Apache Cassandra open source project. IBM said it will continue to support DataStax's participation in projects such as Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch.

The plan for IBM is to leverage DataStax's technologies and combine them with its Granite large language models. IBM will also be a bigger player in vector databases and leveraging unstructured data for enterprises.

DataStax competes with Couchbase and MongoDB among others.

Specific plans include:

IBM will add DataStax AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise to watsonx.data.
DataStax will bring vector and graphRAG capabilities to watsonx.
IBM will also have tighter integration with Langflow via DataStax.

In a blog post, DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor said the companies have worked together on multiple joint customer projects.

"DataStax and IBM have collaborated in the market since 2020, serving customers such as T-Mobile, Audi, The Home Depot, and Intuit," said Kapoor. "Over the last year, DataStax introduced HCD and Mission Control, further bringing Cassandra into the cloud-native era, deployed on top of IBM OpenShift."

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.

Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said:

"DataStax brings IBM both high-scale NoSQL software and cloud services that provide the data underpinning for online giants ranging from Netflix, Overstock and Priceline to Dataworkz, Digital River and Intuit. The press release mostly addresses GenAI opportunities, by way of DataStax's 2024 introduction of vector storage and embedding capabilities, but the underlying platform is solid and geared to massive, global-scale deployments."

DataStax has faced increased competition in recent years, primarily from Public Cloud providers, leading with AWS, which offers both DynamoDB (a similarly scalable NoSQL database) and Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra).

It will be interesting to see whether big, cloud-native customers (Netflix, Priceline, Overstock, etc.) with skilled engineering teams turn to self-managing Cassandra in the wake of this acquisition."

Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Tech Optimization Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity IBM AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about IBM acquires DataStax, aims to integrate into watsonx portfolio

Qualcomm launches Dragonwing, expands into industrial AI

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Qualcomm said it has launched a new brand called Dragonwing as it expands its footprint more into enterprise and industrial use cases.

The move, which comes ahead of Mobile World Congress, highlights how Qualcomm is looking to be more than a mobile computing chipmaker. Sure, it has expanded into PCs, autos and elsewhere, but the game plan is much broader.

In a blog post, Qualcomm said Dragonwing is designed to be "relevant to more industries than ever before." The company said the Dragonwing effort is designed to target industrial robots, handhelds and drones to name a few.

"Qualcomm is expanding its brand with the new Dragonwing set of processors to go wider than ever before," said Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller. "The interesting announcement though is the work on hybrid AI, where Qualcomm gets access to the data center, a totally new total addressable market (TAM)."

Dragonwing lands at an opportune time given physical AI is kicking off as is edge AI use cases that will need low-power compute and connectivity. These technologies will sit at the intersection of AI and automation. Physical AI, world foundation models will move to forefront

For instance, Honeywell executives argued that the industrial automation play has been overlooked. Speaking at an investment conference, Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur put AI in context with other technologies.

The main point is that AI is one part of Honeywell's big picture that revolves around autonomy.

Kapor said:

"The biggest trend I see is in context of Honeywell as move towards autonomy. This is something which is not discussed enough. We discuss things in isolation. There are three trends which are coming together for a company like us. First is ability to collect data on cloud. Second is 5G, which allows you to collect data without wires with many buildings and many plants. And finally, AI. How do you use the three together and build a solution which takes automation toward autonomy?"

Qualcomm said Dragonwing products will be aimed at energy and utilities, retail, supply chain, manufacturing and telecom. Qualcomm said that it is targeting $22 billion in non-handset revenue by 2029 led by AI and its applications in industries such as automotive.

Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, reiterated that industrial edge AI applications will be a big market, on the company’s first quarter earnings call. Amon said:

"We continue to believe that industrial edge devices with connectivity, high-performance computing and on device AI will become one of our largest addressable opportunities fueled by the secular trends of digital transformation. As such, we're accelerating our investments in solutions, ecosystem and broad channel enablement to position ourselves for growth while we navigate the industry-wide inventory draw down."

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work New C-Suite Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Read more about Qualcomm launches Dragonwing, expands into industrial AI

Subscribe to

Nvidia strong Q4, outlook eases AI infrastructure spending fears for now