Nvidia Corp. recently held an industry analyst briefing on the topic of physical artificial intelligence, and Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been consistent in his talk track in every keynote he has done this year that physical AI is the next wave of AI. In fact, he has often stated that eventually anything that moves – from lawnmowers to forklifts to cars — will be autonomous giving rise to the physical AI era.
Palo Alto Networks Inc. kicked off the annual Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas this week with today’s announcement of its Cortex Cloud Application Security Posture Management solution. The ASPM offering is designed to fix security issues before cloud and AI applications have been deployed. The traditional method of securing apps is a highly fragmented set of manual processes. Instead of a single, unified platform, developers rely on a collection of point products and manual processes that are disconnected from each other.
Palo Alto Networks Inc.‘s announcement Tuesday of its intent to acquire CyberArk for $25 billion implies a heavy price tag, as its shares fell on the news. But I believe it to be a good, long-term strategic move for Palo Alto and a logical extension of its platformization strategy. Valuation is interesting to look at but highly overrated long-term. If an acquisition is a good one and helps transform a company, then the purchase price won’t matter over time. Consider the purchase of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. by Nvidia Corp., which was almost $7 billion in 2019.
Recently Zoom Video Communications Inc. held its annual industry analyst event, Perspectives, at its headquarters in San Jose, and it revealed much about the ongoing evolution of the videoconferencing company. The company’s first act was built on video and given a massive steroid shot during the COVID era, which turned a company few had heard of into a household name. Since then, the company has added a boatload of new features, added enterprise clients, reduced the churn in its online business, and moved into adjacent markets, most notably contact center.
Since launching its Generative AI Innovation Center in 2023, Amazon Web Services Inc. has had one primary goal: help customers turn the potential of artificial intelligence into real business value. Now, the company has invested an additional $100 million in the center to enable customers to pioneer the new wave of autonomous agentic AI systems. Post-announcement, I talked with Taimur Rashid, managing director of generative AI innovation and delivery, who oversees the center.