As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
With the research on industry analysts and AR for our recent fiction book, The AI Analyst, I have been inviting a number of players from that world to present on how they see their position evolving. Sam Gupta presents on his boutique firm, ElevatIQ and how they navigate the fragmented market for technology advice and research.
He describes the changing market and the role the traditional analyst firms (like Gartner), strategy consulting firms (like McKinsey) and consulting arms of SIs (like Accenture) play – their strengths and their conflicts.
He then describes two dimensions his firm focuses on – solutions driven by size of buying enterprise and by micro-verticals. Needless to say, “Vinnie Vertical” especially likes the second focus.
As they grow, they will find opportunities to also segment the market by global region with solutions reflective of changing compliance requirements and regional nuances. Similarly, they will find opportunities to go into vertical edge applications, not just look at the market from the lens of categories like ERP and CRM which have been around for decades.
As Patrick Brennan, the analyst in our fiction mystery tells his colleagues “You guys are very good analysts. But you are mostly horizontal—you cover back office silos. The next opportunity calls for us to be orthogonal—by which I mean we have to be verticalized, globalized, and rearchitected for a world of applications that will be more analytical than transactional.” There are so many market niches for firms like Sam’s will get to explore.
He did not mention it, but Sam is also very active in podcast circles and social media. Its another aspect many boutique firms like his have introduced to the analyst market.
Nicely done in about half an hour.
A conversation with Satya
Satya Nadella of Microsoft has been in the press quite a bit recently with his comments that we have moved to the age of digital agents and they will cause the end of SaaS and broadly other business applications, which he says essentially only provide skin deep services front-ending databases – create, replace, update, delete (CRUD)
Whenever I hear “end of” or “death of” something, it triggers for me two other thought leaders:
In their defense, both Fukuyuma and Carr were pointing to inflection points, not “endings”. So I would read Satya with a similar lens – he is pointing to a transition point, not a wall we are about to crash into.
And Satya is only pointing to the obvious. As I wrote in From BOPS to FAANG to the Magnificent Seven enterprise application vendors and their services partners have gradually but precipitously slipped in market leadership over the last 3 decades.
Satya has certainly earned the right to opine on the trajectory of the industry. Watch this fascinating conversation with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner. Satya has taken the Azure cloud business from $1 to 66 billion in revenues. He has added $3 trillion to Microsoft’s market cap. His early investment in OpenAI was brilliant. He is humble enough to talk of the “winner’s curse” where competitors can sneak up, duplicate success in a heartbeat. But the really intimidating part for his competitors is towards the end when they talk about model scaling and over 60 data centers across the globe and massive capex spend of nearly $70 billion in 2025. No wonder Satya mostly names his Mag 7 compatriots (he alludes to the Mag 8 to include OpenAI) like Elon, Jensen, Sam and Mark in his comments, not any of the application vendor execs.
I have met Satya a couple of times, and would love the opportunity to take the conversation further with more of an application and business use case perspective : who would train the new world of agents, where would the training data be sourced from, where are we going to provision the humongous energy needed to run power hungry GPUs and data centers etc.
Here are 5 areas I would love to discuss with him given the changes the new US administration is likely to bring to the global economy, and based on research we did for the fiction book we have just released, The AI Analyst
Would love to get Satya’s perspective on the coming changes in our industry from his perch. I loved his demeanor in the Bill and Brad show. It was an unusually long session but he came across so comfortable, confident and articulate. A true industry leader.
January 07, 2025 in Agentic AI, Energy trends, Globalization and Technology, Humanoid Robots, Industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, AMR, others), Industry Commentary, The AI Analyst - a fiction thriller, Vertical Markets (Banking, Retail etc) | Permalink | Comments (0)