Is Nvidia more like Cisco or Google and an RSA Conference preview – Business
It’s set to be another busy event season for theCUBE, with RSA Conference, Red Hat Summit and Boomi World ready to kick off.
Last week’s MongoDB.local NYC event also provided lots for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) to discuss on the latest episode of the CUBE podcast. The event was all about MongoDB Inc.’s having developed an application framework, according to Vellante. The company brought in hyperscalers, LLM vendors and startups.
“Mongo plays, as you know, at the top layers of the stack. There’s infrastructure, there’s tooling and LLMs, and then there’s applications, and they play in the second and third layer,” Vellante said. “MAAP, MongoDB new application AI program, brings in all those elements that I just talked about and really is how they’re adding value to that ecosystem.”
The show was a really good event with a lot of momentum, but it didn’t involve a lot of short-term guidance, according to Vellante. It did provide a chance at one point to further discuss a poll Vellante posted on X, asking whether Nvidia Corp. is Cisco Systems Inc. or Google LLC.
“I struck a nerve with some folks on my response. I said, they’re not Google, they’re Cisco all the way. They’re a chip company, not a software company,” Furrier said.
If one goes back to 1999 or 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company in the word, Vellante noted. After the dotcom bubble burst, other companies emerged.
“Google, Amazon, eBay, all the social media companies that came seven, eight years after, and then the iPhone came,” Vellante said. “Is Nvidia, which is the grandaddy now of AI, are they Cisco — great company, but not the greatest company in the world — or are they Google, the most profitable entity in the history of entities?”
Could Nvidia become Apple?
The opportunity for Nvidia is to become Apple Inc., though they’re not there yet, according to Furrier. Apple was a laptop company before the iPhone and iPod, before ultimately launching the App Store.
“Are they an application business? Is Apple an applications business? No, but their App Store is a key moat in that. I would compare CUDA to App Store if you want to draw the competitive strategy linkages,” Furrier said. “But they’re still in the business of consumer devices, mainly the iPhone, and they make a ton of dough. They’re highly nested, a lot of leverage. That’s Apple.”
Cisco, meanwhile, was the connective tissue and hardware that connected the internet, Furrier noted. They had two businesses — devices that connected major networks together that ran the public internet, as well as connected businesses.
“What made Cisco great was that they had such an inimitable competitive entrenchment, with connecting buildings, that their switching costs were so high at that time, no competitor could displace Cisco because the opportunity costs to replace them would be eight weeks of planning, tons of conditions, the cost to go to a better box,” Furrier said.
There wasn’t as much value to justify the switching costs, thus Cisco was never replaced. That’s why they have the monopoly on networking, Furrier noted.
“Nvidia has got the … GPU monopoly right now. And so I think they look more like Cisco, because they have that core presence that has massive moat potential,” Furrier said. “Meaning, it’s hard to replace the GPUs with Nvidia, because frankly, they’re great, and they have the software behind it, just like Cisco had routing software that would make sure cache coherence, all that technical stuff would work. So they are more like Cisco today.”
What company Nvidia can be compared to is a detailed and nuanced conversation. When it comes to Apple, that involves hardware and software, and that’s transformative.
“That’s the question. Could Nvidia do that?” Vellante said.
What to watch for at this year’s RSA Conference
At the RSA Conference May 6 to 9, theCUBE will be covering all of the latest news on site. Ahead of RSA, theCUBE collaborated with ETR to do a survey, which presented some key findings.
But what many will be watching for at RSA is the conversation around AI. There are going to be a number of AI innovators at the conference, including existing players such as Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Zscaler Inc.
“Everybody in security is going to be talking AI, but you’re going to have some new entrants that really are born AI, just like we had cloud-native. You’re going to have AI native, and I think you’re going to hear a lot about that and there’s going to be some real differentiation,” Vellante said. “There’s going to be a lot of AI washing, and there’s going to be a big scramble to get attention at this event.”
Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:
Jim Cramer, TV personality and author
Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Edward J. Zander, former CEO of Motorolla Mobility and former COO of Sun Microsystems
Peter W. Bell, co-founder, president and CEO of Storage Networks
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo
Carl Olofson, VP at IDC
Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research
David Floyer, analyst emeritus at theCUBE Research
Elizabeth Mynatt, dean at Northeastern University
George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike
Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle
Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB
Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom
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