“hyperconverged data”
I think “hyperconverged infrastructure” is something that Gartner or Forrester coined for virtualization of all network, storage, and compute in an x64 blade chassis. What is “hyperconverged data”? I’ve never heard of it, and can’t find anything about it.
Blockchain is completely unrelated within the field of computing. It’s like asking if I-O is a positive for heart valves.
I know I’m both a wet blanket and a broken record on this, but “hyperconvergence” is an enterprise buzzword with no technical significance. You have a big computer, and you use the general purpose cpu capacity to virtualize networking, external storage, and computers on that one computer. In its most simple terms, your big computer pretends to be a SAN, switches, and a bunch of computers. It benefits service integrators (AYX, Apigee/GOOGL) and management tooling (AppDynamics/CSCO, NEWR, MULE) hurts hardware vendors (like ANET).
Blockchain means different things to different people. But at its most simple, you have a bunch of computers storing the same bunch of transactions in a way that it’s theoretically very difficult to alter the history of transactions. Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies have created a mess by creating competition among the members of the bunch of computers by requiring them to race to compute a random number describing those transactions that is smaller than very small arbitary number. That’s why everyone has been buying GPUs (or more serious people buy ASICs or FPGAs) that can compute those random numbers extremely. If you define blockchain this way (requiring this type of “proof of work”) then it’s actually incompatible/antagonistic to hyperconvergence, because each virtual computer on a single hyperconverged chassis will not have sufficient dedicated compute at its disposal to be competitive in the distributed blockchain’s network (and there’s no way around that).
Take this as a gentle criticism of the board, but while the stock picking has been amazing lately and the performance speaks for itself, a lot of y’all do seem to not have as deep a technical understanding of the software and hardware stocks that you are heavily invested in as you probably should. This Bert guy on SA hasn’t worked in actual tech for almost 30 years. You fully buy into a lot of tech buzzwords and marketing in fields that have lots of promise but not a great track record of producing profits. I’m not including stuff like SHOP, WIX or SQ (at least pre-blockchain silliness SQ), which I would categorize much more as builders of better mouse-traps. Long term low yields have driven a lot of desperation for growth (and sales multiples proportional to that desperation), which has probably led to some people trying to take advantage of that desperation.
The playbook for this is pretty simple. Paint a huge TAM, sell $1 for $.90, talk about gross margins vs net margins, and point to a some date a few years out for profit break-even. Sometimes it’s legit and sometimes its not, and it’s pretty hard to know the difference. Even if it’s legit, sometimes the future net margins are subject to new competitors or technologies that are very difficult to predict at the time you are making your investment.
I am concerned for some of you that sound like you are all-in with family retirement money on this, and even some that seem to be using call options for leveraged long positions. Please be careful. I’m not saying to sell everything, but be prudent.
