The tech market is in a time of transition — earnings reports are rolling in, IPOs are stirring and geopolitical uncertainties loom large.

On the latest episode of the CUBE Podcast, theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) discussed the latest developments in the technology world, including the IBM DataStax acquisition.

Tech is in a state of flux right now, making it difficult to predict what’s coming next, according to Furrier. Some areas are thriving, while others face significant challenges.

“The market’s weird right now,” he said.” I think we might be in that mode where there’s a little bit of bubble bursting … air letting out. It’s a mixed bag right now in tech, Dave.”

Market in flux

Some insiders who spoke with Furrier recently confirmed that many companies are closely watching the market, with several preparing to go public. This includes a lot of private equity and mergers and acquisitions.

“If you’re not on the right side of this, you don’t have the revenue … and the startup ecosystem looks good on paper, but a lot of these companies I talked to have one-year annual contracts,” Furrier said. “They say they have ARR, but they’re one-year contracts. They still have to renew them.”

Despite all the uncertainty in the market, there were some promising signs. That included a rally at the end of the week for the Nasdaq.

The week also brought news that CoreWeave Inc. is looking to go public. The company has massive debt overhang, according to Vellante.

“We’ve said companies that are going to go IPO in the first half are the ones that need the dough,” Vellante said. “Cerebras. But it’s good to see some action going on. Let’s go. But Trump’s tariffs, and all the uncertainty, inflation, slower GDP growth, the Ukraine stuff, it’s causing some friction and headwinds in the market.”

IBM DataStax acquisition

Last week, IBM Corp. closed its acquisition of infrastructure automation provider HashiCorp Inc. for $6.4 billion and announced IBM DataStax acquisition news. That’s the right path forward for IBM, according to Furrier.

“Because NoSQL, they get the open source and the on-prem, and DataStax,” Furrier said. “Remember they started on-prem, but then went cloud. They both got on-premises and cloud.”

The thing about DataStax is that it’s a transaction database and is ACID compliant, according to Vellante. That makes the IBM DataStax acquisition in the company’s wheelhouse.

“IBM used to be great at acquisitions, and then it lost its way. Remember they bought the Weather Channel and all kinds of head-scratchers?” Vellante said. “They tried to get in the cloud with SoftLayer. You were always very critical of that acquisition.”

Considering the IBM DataStax acquisition news and other recent moves, the company appears to have gotten its mojo back, according to Vellante. That really started with the acquisition of Red Hat Inc.

“What they’ve done with HashiCorp, Apptio, many, many others,” Vellante said. “I like the DataStax acquisition. I think it tucks in nicely to IBM’s portfolio.”

Event calendar keeps on rolling

This week, much of theCUBE team will be focused on MWC25 Barcelona, which is showcasing groundbreaking advancements in AI, 5G and the future of mobile connectivity. Also of great interest is the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards program, which aims to celebrate remarkable technology achievements, reward ingenuity and inspire future innovators.

“We did a legit awards program. We thought it’d be like a handful of us. We had 43 judges,” Furrier said. “We had AI experts, we had other analysts … we had Anand [Pradhan] from NYSE, who runs their AI labs and evaluates tons of products.”

As far as MWC25 goes, it’s expected that the show will heavily feature AI, as most shows do in this era. Last year, it was the AI World Congress, according to Vellante.

“I expect the same thing it’s going to be this year. It’s a telco show, a lot of mobile,” Vellante said.

At the same time, there will be interesting developments to keep an eye on. It’s striking how prominently Chinese companies are featured at MWC and how warmly they are welcomed by European countries and hosts, according to Vellante.

“You think about these tier-two countries that are in that purgatory zone for the AI diffusion regulation. We’re pushing them to China, and you see that. It’s palpable at MWC,” Vellante said. “But we have a great lineup. I’m stoked.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Jamie Dimon, chairman, president and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
Donald Trump, 45th and 47th U.S. presdient
Billy Bosworth, former CEO of DataStax
Ginni Rometty, Aspen economic strategy group member and former CEO of IBM
Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM
Bruno Aziza, group VP, data, BI and AI at IBM
Steve Mills, retired EVP at IBM
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
George Gilbert, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
David Flynn, CEO of Hammerspace
Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce
Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft
David Floyer, analyst emeritus at theCUBE Research
Dario Gil, SVP and director of research at IBM
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Amy Hood, EVP and CFO of Microsoft
Stephen Orban, VP of migrations of Google Cloud at Google
Sergey Brin, former president of Alphabet
Charles Fitzgerald, consultative strategist and investor
Joseph Lubin, founder and CEO of ConsenSys
David Ripley, co-CEO of Kraken
Gene Hoffman, president and CEO of Chia Network
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum
Mike Cagney, co-founder and CEO of Figure Markets
Marshall Beard, COO of Gemini
A.J. Warner, CSO of Offchain Labs
Anthony Di Iorio, founder and CEO of Decentral
Hartej Sawhney, co-founder of Sealth Startup
Bill Tai, venture capitalist, athlete, adjunct professor
Brian J. Baumann, founder of NYSE Wired and director of capital markets, technology at NYSE
Charles Sennott, founder, executive director and editor-in-chief of The Groundtruth Project
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine
George W. Bush, 43rd U.S. president
Dick Cheney, businessman and former U.S. vice president
Kristen Martin, chief of staff of SiliconANGLE Media
Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam Software
Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Rebecca Knight, host at theCUBE
Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness
Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks
Jeetu Patel, EVP and CPO of Cisco
Chris Lewis, founding director at Lewis Insight
Charlie Kawwas, president at Broadcom
Vilas Dhar, president of The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
Mohamed Awad, SVP/GM, infrastructure business at Arm
Mohamad Ali, SVP and head of IBM Consulting at IBM
Nevash Pillay, global head communications industry at Databricks
Sarbjeet Johal, founder and CEO of Stackpane
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research
Christopher Niederman, managing director for AWS Industries and Solutions at Amazon
John Mack, founder of Life Calling

Here’s the full theCUBE Pod episode: 

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Photo: SiliconANGLE