Join John Furrier and Rob Strechay at theCUBE's East Coast Hub to discuss the latest developments in artificial intelligence and cloud technology. As Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., John Furrier leads the conversation with Rob Strechay, Director and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research. They explore insights gained from the AWS Summit and the implications for cloud and AI leaders across industries.
Strechay brings expertise in cloud and artificial intelligence to discuss key trends and initiatives from the AWS Summit. Having attended both the pre-event analyst sessions and the summit itself, Strechay offers unique insights into AWS's developments, including their approach to AI workflows and partnerships with global systems integrators. The conversation covers the significance of Multi-Cluster Protocol and Application-to-Application protocols and their growing influence on open-source community contributions, led by organizations such as Amazon and Google, as noted by Strechay.
The discussion provides valuable takeaways on the evolving landscape of data platforms and AI integration, as emphasized by Strechay. According to them, the strategic shifts in data pipeline structures by companies such as Databricks and Snowflake highlight the need for organizations to adapt to a new ecosystem dominated by AI-enabled frameworks. Strechay emphasizes the necessity for traditional storage vendors to evolve into comprehensive data platforms to remain competitive.
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Rob Strechay, theCUBE Research | AI + Cloud Leaders
Join John Furrier and Rob Strechay at theCUBE's East Coast Hub to discuss the latest developments in artificial intelligence and cloud technology. As Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., John Furrier leads the conversation with Rob Strechay, Director and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research. They explore insights gained from the AWS Summit and the implications for cloud and AI leaders across industries.
Strechay brings expertise in cloud and artificial intelligence to discuss key trends and initiatives from the AWS Summit. Having attended both the pre-event analyst sessions and the summit itself, Strechay offers unique insights into AWS's developments, including their approach to AI workflows and partnerships with global systems integrators. The conversation covers the significance of Multi-Cluster Protocol and Application-to-Application protocols and their growing influence on open-source community contributions, led by organizations such as Amazon and Google, as noted by Strechay.
The discussion provides valuable takeaways on the evolving landscape of data platforms and AI integration, as emphasized by Strechay. According to them, the strategic shifts in data pipeline structures by companies such as Databricks and Snowflake highlight the need for organizations to adapt to a new ecosystem dominated by AI-enabled frameworks. Strechay emphasizes the necessity for traditional storage vendors to evolve into comprehensive data platforms to remain competitive.
Rob Strechay, theCUBE Research | AI + Cloud Leaders
Rob Strechay
Dir./Principal Analyst & HosttheCUBE Research
HOST
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI + Cloud Leaders wrap-up segment, Rob Strechay, analyst at theCUBE Research, joins John Furrier to unpack the critical inflection point facing cloud and AI ecosystems post-AWS Summit and ahead of re:Invent 2025. Drawing from his on-the-ground insights and executive briefings, Strechay breaks down the momentum behind MCP servers, the rise of agentic frameworks, and the strategic posture of Amazon, Google and the Linux Foundation in shaping the future of open AI protocols.
The conversation dives deep into the architectural...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What were the highlights of the AWS event regarding AI workflows and partnerships?add
What is the speaker's perspective on the distribution and management of MCP servers, and how does it relate to A2A and contributions from Amazon and Google?add
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What are some considerations and announcements regarding AWS Transform and its use of AI for migrating off mainframes?add
Rob Strechay, theCUBE Research | AI + Cloud Leaders
search
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE, here at the NYSC Studio. This is theCUBE's East
Coast Hub, of course, localizing out all the action in New York. We have a whole team here. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto
hub, connecting Wall Street with Silicon Valley, and
of course in Boston area, we have the Marlboro Studio,
where Rob Strechay is with me. That's where his home base
is. We got the three studios. Of course, we cover all
the events. I was just at AWS this week. This is our media week here as
part of theCUBE and the NYSC and our Wired community out there. So again, we're covering cloud and AI all day long until
they turn off the lights. Rob, great to see you. I know
you were banging the streets hard, pounding the pavement,
doing a lot of briefings, getting the inside baseball at AWS Summit. You were pre-event, at the analyst event, deep in the weeds, talking to the leaders. What's the scoop?
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, I think what was
great with AWS this week was, they brought together a lot of what was going on from an
AI workflow perspective and all of the pieces and
foundational pieces to that. A lot of that also had to do
with many of their partners. There was a lot of
activity around GSIs, a lot of their ISV partnerships
that you've had on, as well. And I think what's really been a lot of fun has been the fact that
it's such a community event, and this event in general
has grown so huge. Just tons of stuff. Really, I would say that how they were bringing together
making agents easy was kind of the theme I came away with. >> Yeah. What was your takeaway on the MCP server debate... Not really debate, but
it's clearly momentum. The organic rallying around
that protocol has been, I mean, I think a smashing
result of good community. Reminds me of Kubernetes,
when they had to rally around Kubernetes, say,
"Let's just cut the BS. Let's get behind something. " But then you have all
these MCP sprawls, right?
Rob Strechay
>> Yep. - And then now you've
got Amazon saying, "Let's tune >> these, make sure they're solid. " It's not that it's not
secure, it's just protocol. Now, if it gets unsecured,
it's because of other things. I mean, that's my take. What's your take? >> No, I think it's like Oprah.
Rob Strechay
>> You get an MCP server,
you get an MCP server, everybody gets an MCP server. When you start to look at MCP sprawl- >> People are building their own.
Rob Strechay
>> Well, they are. So it's
almost bring your own MCP >> server, easy to say. But then you also had Swami
up there talking about A2A, and I think it's not a
either/or type of thing. And I think Amazon realizes that. Google realizes it by donating A2A to the Linux community and
to the Linux Foundation. And what you see is that Amazon is, again, showing their open source
chops by contributing to both projects. And I think that's going to
be key to them long-term. >> I saw Alison Wagenfeld
from Google at RAISE >> in Paris last week. Jim Zemlin was also there. So I had a nice little powwow with Alison, and she mentioned, of course she mentioned that they donated it. But then Swami's trying
to take credit for it too. They're on the chair. So they're both kind of on the committee. But then my conversation
with Jim Zemlin on the boat, on the cruise, was interesting. He's having a rationalization
moment right now, because he has both projects. And he didn't say it was a problem. He's just saying, "We'll see. " But there's enough overlap,
but they're not that the same. So he basically was
trying to be political. On one hand, you can have MCP, on the other hand, you can have A2A. But then he just basically said to me, we might have another, and I'm paraphrasing, CNCF-like moment, because there's so much action
going on around the AI side of the moment in Linux, that
it might have enough gravity to feel like the CNCF,
which was formed out of KubeCon when you had a zillion vendors, a zillion end users coming in.
Rob Strechay
>> Well, I mean, if you look... >> What do you think about that?
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, both are in the
Linux Foundation, right? >> MCP is part of CNCF. You have Linux Foundation doing A2A now. I think that it's a good center
of gravity for both of them, and I think to your point, I think they also have their
PyTorch community as well, which has a center of gravity around AI. So I think what you
could see, to your point, is an AI moment for the
Linux Foundation around this, where you have a lot of
things that are in CNCF that may not fit nicely into
their model, that may need to be shifted over. And I think there'll be
some rationalization. They're smart people, and I
think they're looking at... I think to your point, I think
MCP is really the protocol, and you start to look at
it, most people, it's a way to communicate via APIs and
basically publish-subscribe. I mean, we're old enough
to remember publish- subscribe moments, and that's really what
they're doing with this, and having a way to discover
tools that AI can go and use. And Bedrock is really
looking to leverage that. I think you look at SageMaker and what they're doing, making
Nova part of that as well, and so that you can use that
as part of a tool set as well. I think how LLMs get utilized and how different pieces are the MCP, then are the agents using A2A to talk and communicate as you
get into these multi- agentic frameworks. A lot of pieces that are moving around. >> Yeah, everyone's an AI company. I noticed that at the RAISE conference. It's like, PagerDuty's up
there and they have AI. But no one goes on stage and
says, "I'm not an AI company. " You can't say that, "I'm
old." You got to be relevant. And I was just talking
with Mark Castleman earlier before you came on, Intel,
he's a senior executive. He's seen a lot like you,
he's looking at that, but he's not in the industry side, analyst side like you are. You have to be an AI
company, or you're dead. So it's like, AI-washing is a reality, because that's the new normal. But then again, there is real
AI, then there's fake AI. So as you look at the industry, what's your takeaway for the
impact of what Amazon just did, and what's happening in the industry? Because it's going to impact
people in a positive way. Some people maybe put their
head in the sand and ignore it. What's your feeling of
the reality setting in inside other people in the
ecosystem, other vendors?
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, I think it's going
to have a huge impact on how the data platform vendors are there. And if you think of them
like the Snowflakes, the Databricks, even some of the Amazon, when you look at some of
the Aurora Postgres stuff that they're doing, EDB, who's a, another open source
Postgres on Kubernetes. I think a lot of these
people are looking at how that they play in this new
ecosystem, where the framework of agentic is sitting above
them, and how tied in is it? And I think that goes back
to Swami talking about, AWS S3 buckets for vectors. And when you start to look
at what vectors get tiered, now we're talking about tiering vectors, not just tiering storage
and things like that. And I think the complication of bringing this all
together is a perfect place for somebody like an Amazon. But you have people like
Databricks that have their stack, and you have Snowflake
building their stack, and you have people on the
other data platforms building their stacks and other clouds in particular building their stack. >> I know with S3, the vectors got kind >> of buried in the news.
Rob Strechay
>> It did.
- They did talk about it. >> I mean, even Kiro was
pre-released the day before. It's almost like the throwaway news.
Rob Strechay
>> And SageMaker catalog,
which was kind of redoing how SageMaker is really
subsuming some other technologies that they
had in the catalog space. Because when you look at it, and I look at where, an analogy for me was vCenter with VMware. Why did VMware really
take off like a rocket? Because it became a center of gravity where people were really
integrating into the vCenter, and that became a control plane. So to break away from that control plane, you had to do a lot. Nutanix did a ton in that space. Now you have people
looking at the catalogs as that control space, and really
that metadata semantic layer inside the catalogs and across catalogs. Hence, you've got people like Salesforce announcing their intentions
to buy Informatica, and we'll see where that goes. But that's to unlock that walled
garden to go cross-catalog. And I think that's really
where people are going to go. >> So the data impact,
you think that data... >> So storage and data
platforms are probably going to be most impacted because
of the structural change and enablement? Is that kind of the thought? >> I think you're going to see
things like data pipelines
Rob Strechay
>> and Iceberg really changing
storage into data platforms, that they can then be
leveraged by other parts of the data management stack,
which I would put Spark and Databricks and Snowflake
into, those compute engines. And then you start to look at
how this is all being brought, and you'll have catalogs
of catalogs, and integrated or federated catalogs. Something is going to
happen in that space. And then you have to
have things, like I said, at the storage level, where S3 is going with their table buckets,
where others like HPE, Dell and on-prem crew NetApp
are going with theirs, their storage arrays. >> And so storage, networking >> and compute vendors are
going to be impacted. >> Correct.
- Cloud data center >> and semiconductors certainly
is seeing SageMaker tuning.
Rob Strechay
>> Yes.
- And then the database world's impacted. >> Security, not so much.
Rob Strechay
>> No, I think security
is still a, it's one
Rob Strechay
>> of those places where people
have not figured it out yet. >> I think it'll change, but I don't think it's
going to be threatening to any companies.
Rob Strechay
>> No, I think you're right. I think it's an opportunity, not a... >> I'm looking at who's going
to die, who's going to win? Because right now, the things that I see, and I'd love to get your
reaction to this, is that there are going to be winners and losers clearly in this
race, because everyone... Okay, first of all,
everyone is an AI company. That's a fact. If you
believe that to be true, and it is true, everyone's
saying they're an AI company, because they have to, then
not everyone is an AI. Because that's true too, right? So there will be dead players coming. Okay, so the question
is, who's going to die? Vast data, DDN, Oracle, HPE,
NetApp, Dell, IBM, AWS, Weka, Supermicro Hammerspace,
Solidyne, Hitachi Vantara, MEAN io, Nutanix, Cisco,
Juniper, Arista, Extreme. Of those lists, who dies?
Rob Strechay
>> I think...
- Maybe don't answer that. >> Yeah, I'm not going
to answer specifically,
Rob Strechay
>> but I think that out of
the storage layer, the ones who don't evolve from being storage to being a data platform, and having true data
platform capabilities. And don't come closer to the
compute layer, are really going to suffer, and they're
going to just fade away. They'll have, because you
still have your traditional ML and other applications in HPC, which maybe they can do just fine in that, but if you don't come up the stack and get to the metadata layer and open table formats, you're
going to have a tough time. I think those who... >> So those are real changes that are going to impact everyone out of the gate.
Rob Strechay
>> And the self-configuring, I
mean, still the last mile, the being able to go fast, is
constrained by networking. So I think that talking to Bob
Laliberté on the team here, when we talk about AI for networking and networking for AI, there's definitely a transition there. And a lot of it is, how do you use AI to manage it and make it easier? But at the same time, you
need to be able to have DPUs and things of that nature,
which the cards in there, the network cards that help you categorize all the data.
So there's a lot of change. >> On the cloud data center and semi side, >> and I think that's more
of a, who can enable their services in a way,
or kind of a configured, because one of the things
that came out of AWS from my interviews yesterday and today, was Amazon's
pretty much got everything. It's how you turn it on and what you want to light up. I'll take some of that
and then just do it. The startup that came in
earlier, they're like, "Hey, I have OpenSurge, but I
might just use their stuff. It's better." So it's like,
okay, you can just turn it on. So I think that system
view of a platform inside AWS is interesting. I
mean, what's your take?
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, I think it is.
And I think to your point, I think AWS has taken
a different approach to how they look at AI,
and I think it becomes, because it's what Bezos
laid out forever ago, it's the everything store. And being everything marketplace and the everything data center
is what they're really... and everything cloud, is what they're really
aiming at doing, is giving that functionality so you can
build better on top of them. Now, I think there's others,
like you have Microsoft and Google and Oracle all doing very sometimes bespoke stuff, but also providing some
other abilities outside of their stuff. Like Amazon, okay, Nova,
you don't want to use Nova, which is Amazon's, go and use Anthropic. Go and use Claude. Go and use some of these other
things that are out there. And you can use them over
MCP, you can use them over just the straight APIs. They're really focused on that diversity. I think where they have, and they've embraced the
APN network that they have, is really focusing on a lot of the GSIs and in the community around
that that can help them. I met with Accenture, TCS. You had... I'm forgetting one. Deloitte. And I went and dove deep into
a lot of what they're doing, and in many ways, they're
looking at bringing to that model their marketplace,
the agent marketplace, they're bringing agent frameworks there. And what they're trying
to do is help people, especially these uber-large
companies, get from that POC paralysis, to get to production. How do you get out of paralysis
and get to production? And what they're saying is,
"Hey, instead of eight months, let's get you there in eight weeks," and things of that nature. And that was talking to
the folks at Accenture. Deloitte had two different
platforms that they were aiming for, Zora being one of
them, that was a SaaS- delivered platform that
they were looking to also, but it was more templated. So you can also think down market, and where they're going to be strong is where they understand workflows. And I think this was the big
piece that came out of this, is nobody's got the
process focus nailed down yet in all of these places. And we talk to people like our friends over in Germany that... >> Celonis. - Celonis, when
we're talking with them about
Rob Strechay
>> how do you do process mapping? >> And they have a lot of
the GSIs that use them and things of this nature. So I think there's a lot to still be done. We're early innings, big time. And the actual gap in people who know how to do
stuff is really probably our number one impediment. >> Yeah, it's hard. The
consensus is hard to do agent. It looks easy on paper.
Rob Strechay
>> Yes.
- In fact, Kalent >> was telling us they're seeing
a lot of database migrations. So it's also a side effect
of this agent momentum is, let's get our databases ported over and/ or moved off of X to Y. So, are you seeing similar
action around migrations for readiness preparedness? It's like, get ready for the earthquake.
Rob Strechay
>> I think you can just look at it at one of the announcements where AWS
talked about AWS Transform, which they had announced previously, but where they're using
AI to move off mainframes. And this is all the way
down into the database level and how you do those database
migrations, where the GSIs, maybe they can do a part of
it and the GSIs leverage that, but they also have some
magic on top of that. I was talking to Deloitte
about how they go about this. It's still not easy, and especially, you want
to get your data in order before you do AI, because once you've plumbed
it, you're kind of screwed. >> Yeah, you got to get your shit together. I know that's a technical
term. Get your shit together. And you can swear on theCUBE.
Rob Strechay
>> Exactly.
- They got to get their act together. >> Rob, always great to have you on.
Rob Strechay
>> Thank you.
- Again, I know you work really hard at >> getting the data, just
getting the word out. Looking forward to following
up on more content. And then just, we started
to turn the studio on here. Love the calls out here on the... >> I know. I love the energy.
The energy is fantastic.
Rob Strechay
>> The luxury box for the
option. It is really beautiful. >> It's like, I feel about
the game. Go Red Sox. >> Yes, exactly. Go Sox.
- All right, thanks for coming on. >> The Yankees are up the street.
Rob Strechay
>> It's okay. It's okay. >> I saw some Trump fans out in Florida.
Rob Strechay
>> Just heading over to City Field, there. >> I grew up in New
Jersey as a Red Sox fan.
Rob Strechay
>> I can handle the heat and I'm
proud and loud with Red Sox. >> Go Sox.
- All right, more action coming. >> We are at the NYSE CUBE
Studios, NYSE Wired,
Rob Strechay
>> bringing all the leaders together, part of our AWS Summit coverage. This is our portion where
we expand the conversation around AI and those events. So, thanks for watching.
