Dave Graham

Yesterday, the IBM acquisition of Confluent officially closed...and if the Red Hat acquisition taught us anything, it’s that $11B valuations usually lead to "Cloud Pak" bundles and gated source code. As Jeff Mery breaks down in his latest deep dive, the "IBM Cycle" often trades community-driven innovation for high-margin proprietary features and aggressive audits. If you’re tired of the "Streaming Tax" and want to see how 100% upstream, diskless Kafka can slash your infra costs by 97% before your roadmap gets "IBM-ified," this is the one article you need to read today. Read the full analysis and see the breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/dZ9bBt5V

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Solid update for Data Scientists and Data Engineers who want to save time and seeking more simplicity in #AI. NetApp

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Just published the final article in my three-part Dell Technologies series on AI PCs and workstations. In this last piece, I dig into: - Why NPUs alone aren’t enough for serious AI workloads - How CPU + NPU + discrete NVIDIA RTX GPU together become the new gold standard for local, private AI - What to consider when choosing between Dell Pro, Dell Pro Max, and Dell Precision for your AI workflows If you’re wondering what to actually buy for emerging agentic AI and multi-agent workloads, this one’s for you. #Iwork4Dell Read Part 3 here:

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Product market fit is dead. Founders now have to reinvent every 6 months before they fall behind. In my latest conversation, I sat down with Bipul Sinha, the former VC turned Rubrik CEO ($18B in the public markets today) who built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies of the last decade. We covered why the old startup playbook is broken, and what it takes for founders and VCs to win in a world of AI agents, compressed product cycles, and disappearing mid-size venture outcomes. A few takeaways: ➡️ Running a startup is like driving 100mph in the dark… You’re not making decisions based on what’s 20 miles ahead, you’re reacting to what’s 10 feet in front of you and must survive by following your intuition. The biggest risk is missing something. That’s why Bipul Sinha’s decision-making modus operandi is to make a gut call first - then bring in his full team to express everything they’re feeling about a situation. Once he’s surfaced all angles, he uses those inputs to validate (or veto) his original instinct. It’s how he did venture & how he runs Rubrik today. ➡️ Product market fit is no longer a one-and-done milestone Bipul Sinha believes in today’s rapidly evolving markets, you now have to repeat zero-to-one every six months. This shift has massive implications for venture. When a new market becomes real, a flood of startups rushes in. One of them will hit escape velocity and scale from $500M to $10B+, while the rest will get consolidated under $500M. In Bipul’s view, the middle is collapsing to expose a huge pool of smaller outcomes and very few huge winners, and VC firms need to evolve fast for this new reality. ➡️ Bipul’s prediction: there will be a trillion-dollar cybersecurity company within five years He believes we’re massively underestimating where this market is headed. With AI set to boost global productivity by 5-10+%, the surge in new software, systems, and workflows will require unprecedented levels of security. And yet, today’s largest cybersecurity company is just $100B. If Nvidia can reach $3T in under a decade, why not cybersecurity next? Tech moves in nonlinear waves, and the winners will be the ones who stop benchmarking the future against the past. Full episode: https://lnkd.in/dx2A2Pq7

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More from #NetAppINSIGHT: NetApp's new #cyberresilience service and expanded partnerships with #publiccloud providers further highlight its widening focus beyond #datastorage into #datamanagement. My coverage, with presentation comments from Syam Nair and analysis from Philip Bues and Simon Robinson, below. #googlecloud #azure #googlecloudnetappvolumes #GCNV #multicloud #flexcache #azurenetappfiles #geminienterprise #ransomwareresilience #ransomwareattacks #AI

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🔆 Why Decentralized AI Matters — And Why You Should Be Paying Attention This week marked a major milestone for Vana. Our work was featured in WIRED, spotlighting our partnership with Flower Labs on COLLECTIVE-1, the world’s first decentralized, user-owned large language model (LLM). A huge thanks to Will Knight for covering this story and helping bring awareness to an entirely new approach to building AI—one that prioritizes people, privacy, and permission. ❓Why does this coverage matter ❓ It's a proof point for something many think is impossible: We can build powerful, truly open AI systems without handing control to a few centralized tech giants. Decentralized AI is more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamentally different architecture for intelligence—and it’s already working with Vana leading the way. 🛠️ How Decentralized AI Works It comes down to two breakthrough shifts: 1. User-Owned Data In the current AI ecosystem, most models are trained on scraped data—your emails, public posts, and digital footprint—without consent or compensation. In decentralized AI, that changes. People can contribute data voluntarily, retain ownership, and participate in the upside of the models they help train. This means better data, fairer incentives, and AI that reflects the real world—not just what’s available online. 2. Permissionless, Distributed Compute Training massive AI models used to require centralized supercomputers. Now, with projects like Flower Labs, it’s possible to train models across distributed networks of devices—more resilient, more inclusive, and impossible to monopolize. This isn’t science fiction. It’s already live. ❓ Why You Should Care ❓ If you work in AI, data, or digital policy—and you’re frustrated by the closed nature of today’s models—you should be paying attention. Decentralized AI offers: • Transparency in how models are built • Sovereignty over your personal data • Participation in the next wave of innovation This space is where data ethics, technical innovation, and economic inclusion intersect. And it’s moving fast. I’m grateful to work alongside Vana's founders Anna Kazlauskas Art A. who not only see a better future for the global digital economy but are delivering on it every day.

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Great conversation with Arindam Banerjee, Technical Fellow/VP, Product Architecture at NetApp. We discussed the single most important action a C-suite executive should take to establish a data-centric governance strategy for their AI initiatives 🔴 Full episode here 👇👇👇 https://lnkd.in/e94gFhAz 🔴🔴 Learn more here 👇👇👇 https://lnkd.in/eMr64B3m #cybersecurity #AI #CISO #data #advisor #thoughtleader Gabie Boko Gagan Gulati The Cybersphere Group

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