Google flexes its Arm; Metronome runs the meter
Today: Google's first custom Arm server processor is now available, Metronome's new tool could help SaaS companies switch to usage-based pricing, and the quote of the week.
Today on Runtime: why Snowflake's run as a stock market and data darling might have hit a wall, ransomware continues to plague businesses, and the quote of the week.
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Today on Runtime: why Snowflake's run as a stock market and data darling might have hit a wall, ransomware continues to plague businesses, and the quote of the week.
A quick glance at Snowflake's earnings results for its first fiscal quarter of the year — a 50% jump in revenue that beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday — does not explain why investors punished the cloud data warehouse upstart over the rest of the week. The company's executives filled in the gaps with their comments after the numbers were released.
"We are … operating in an unsettled demand environment and we see this reflected in consumption patterns across the board," said CEO Frank Slootman, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, on a conference call Wednesday. "While enthusiasm for Snowflake is high, enterprises are preoccupied with cost in response to their own uncertainties."
Snowflake fared better than most of its counterparts over that period, growing revenue by 70% during its 2023 fiscal year, which ended in January. That resilience came to an end during the past quarter.
If data is the new oil, these days enterprise tech buyers are looking for hybrid cars.
However, if the AI boom has staying power, eventually those customers will need to increase their use of data to power those new applications.
It was always going to be hard for Snowflake to live up to the expectations set by its IPO. It could be even harder to convince its current customers to keep spending.
Security professionals were holding out at least a little bit of hope last year that the collapse of the crypto market might put the brakes on ransomware, which had become an enormous problem for businesses around the world. New research from Veeam suggests that was wishful thinking.
Ransomware attacks grew 12% last year, according to a survey of 1,200 IT professionals conducted by Veeam. Victims of ransomware have been able to buy insurance policies to protect them in the event of such an attack, but insurance companies are starting to balk at the idea: 21% of respondents said "ransomware is specifically excluded from their security insurance" and 74% of respondents said their premiums went up.
It's a tricky problem to solve given the international nature of many attacks, and the reluctance of many businesses to acknowledge they've been victims of ransomware. In its report, Veeam — which sells backup and recovery software — urged companies to invest in backup and recovery software as a way to mitigate the problem, but that's a tough sell at the municipal government level, where such attacks on cash-strapped agencies can have far-reaching effects.
"It’s a terrible job. You do not want to be in charge of all the GPUs in a world of AI, and it’s been miserable for five years now." — Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, lamenting his role as the GPU gatekeeper inside Microsoft as OpenAI and internal teams compete for resources.
The U.S. Treasury Department launched a new steering group to investigate how financial services companies, government agencies, and cloud computing companies should work together.
New Relic might stay independent a little longer. Francisco Partners and TPG are no longer in talks to acquire the company, according to Reuters.
A good weekend read: The infamous Mirai botnet was created in order to crash the course registration site at Rutgers University because a freshman student couldn't get into the electives he wanted.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!