91. What’s going on with IBM? Cloud-AI Tug of War, From DeepSeek to DOGE

In episode 91 of The Cube Pod, John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss their recent trip to New York, where they attended IBM’s investor meeting and analyzed the company’s AI strategy. They highlight IBM’s record-high stock price, attributing its success to the company’s integration-focused AI approach and open-source model, particularly through Red Hat.
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The discussion also explores the impact of DeepSeek on AI innovation, drawing parallels to the early days of cloud computing and the PC revolution. Furrier and Vellante examine industry trends, including enterprise AI adoption, the future of open-source AI and the role of tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They also touch on broader market dynamics, upcoming IPOs and how political and economic uncertainty may shape the business landscape in 2025.
To see John and Dave in action, follow theCUBE's live event coverage at www.thecube.net/
This Week in Enterprise:
As Trump and Musk scramble everything, investors cool on enterprise tech’s prospects
President Trump’s chaos and Elon Musk’s mischief with his dubious DOGE coup squad continued unabated, with far too many bizarre, racist and probably illegal actions to list here, not to mention rampant conflicts of interest and security and privacy violations.
It’s affecting pretty much all of us, including enterprise and tech companies. With all the lawsuits filed to stop them, it’s going to be an unpredictable mess for a long time to come, and we know how much businesses and investors love uncertainty.
Back in the normal world, such as it is, OpenAI keeps scrambling to respond to DeepSeek with new services and an admission by CEO Sam Altman that the company so far has missed the open-source boat. It’s not certain a bill to ban DeepSeek’s use in the U.S. will make a difference. And other cheap models are arriving fast. None of this, however, is discouraging investors from continuing to plow big bucks into OpenAI, and others such as former OpenAI exec Ilya Sutskever’s startup SSI.
It was a week of disappointing earnings at several big enterprise tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon and chipmakers AMD, Arm and Qualcomm, as investors squinted to find enough AI upside to justify high capital spending - which most definitely is not easing despite the DeepSeek shock - and high stock prices. That said, some firms such as Palantir and NXP showed enough upside to please investors. And in cyber, Cloudflare and Fortinet both saw their shares rise on quarterly beats.
In 2025 predictions from theCUBE Research analysts, generative AI remains the big theme, in everything from networking and software development to cybersecurity and consumer services.
After attending IBM’s first Analyst Day in years, John Furrier contends it’s showing how IBM can help lead in the new AI era where open source could rule.
The explosion of gen AI-mediated data will require a return to the skills of reference librarians - or what dbInsight’s Tony Baer calls knowledge engineers.
Layoffs are on the rise at Salesforce, Workday, Hugging Face, Okta, GM’s Cruise, Sprinkler, Sonos and beyond, in part thanks to AI. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he’s hiring 2,000 salesforce for Agentforce but AI will make more near-term engineer hires unnecessary.
SailPoint has another initial public offering coming, raising perennial speculation that the IPO market may have an opening in 2025.
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[@thornhillpatrick]

Great show Dave and John. I love these podcasts. They keep me ahead of the game.

[@moisesprat]

Great podcast, as usual, please keep up with these interesting discussions about tech