Early Earnings in 2024, Apple Vision Gets A Look

It was quite a busy week of earnings news with numerous firms starting the year with high hopes and potential missteps.

The juggarnaut that is Amazon Web Services (AWS) is slowing somewhat (down 16% YoY) all while Google Cloud sees some slight growth in same time frame, especially in Q4 2023. Alphabet's GCP cloud growth along with their ads, YouTube, and subscriptions business is leading to more and more solid growth.

Microsoft and Azure, buttressed by AI, keeps the cloud titans race for supremacy still a growing fight with influencers taking notice to the Seattle firm. Revenue and EPS were beaten over the quarter, so it's a good look for Microsoft.

In addition to the large cloud players, IBM, AMD, SAP, Intel, and Tesla all earned some analysis from recent earnings calls along with solid growth from CGI and Fujitsu to Europe as growth region for the tech services firm.

Check out The Futurum Group 's Daniel Newman and Moor Insights & Strategy 's Patrick Moorhead talking about the fantastic metrics of ServiceNow with (!) no layoffs to explain either.

Visualization Of The Week: Work Life In Information Technology Still Screams Flexibility

Chris Marsh 's great blog on the key challenges of modern work notes some interesting things about current work styles:

• "In a 2023 client survey among enterprises in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, 62% of business managers were finding it harder to understand their company’s strategy, their own goals or what their colleagues are doing; 59% find it harder to maintain a positive work-life balance or stay on top of growing workloads; and 48% are struggling to build trusted relationships and work effectively in cross-functional capacities."
• 43% of employees want to make more decisions outside of hierarchical chains of command and/or have more say over how they get work done.
• respondents said senior management is not providing the right technologies to support day-to-day work (70%), not being considerate of the general well-being of their teams (70%), not distributing work appropriately across teams (69%), and not being transparent (65%) or providing enough clarity around goals and responsibilities (63%)

Definitely appears that tech might be indeed booming but work issues still arise. Perhaps workers should be attacking their performance, being ready for it with AI-enabled work styles, workflow automation, and Zoom-directed activities and companions like Apple Vision For Zoom.

Apple Vision Pro Reviews Coming In

First opinions are trickling in for Apple Vision Pro (user group here) and it appears folks feel the future of spatial computing is here (however with more investment from the users needed).

Analysts are already noting this is the future of personal computing at large, signaling their product past will shape their product future.

Will the Vision Pro be Apple’s next big hit? Microsoft and others are already trying to find their way to mesh computing, so why not add a hot product served by Apple to Teams calls as well.

Interesting Bits & Blogs

Sales Enablement in 2024: AI-driven Strategies for Revenue Growth

How Social Media Marketers Can Manage Multiple Projects Efficiently

Zuckerberg Apologizes To Parents Of Victims In A Very Heated US Senate Hearing

Shein is expected to be the UKs sixth largest apparel retailer by 2027, says GlobalData

Acquisitions, Partnerships, Deals

SmartBear Advances Testing Arsenal with Acquisition of Reflect

Box's Acquisition of Crooze Stands To Accelerate Customer Innovation

Amadeus acquires Vision-Box

Index Insider: Cloud managed services acquisitions are heating up

Databricks acquires natural language data platform Einblick

Dynatrace Unlocks AI-Driven Compliance & Protection With Runecast acquisition

Juniper Networks Acquisition by HPE: 5 Key Insights

Competitive Reports & Market Guides

The Forrester Wave?: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2024

Market Guide for Digital Evidence Management Systems

Market Guide for Mobile Marketing Platforms

GigaOm Radar for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

Clinical and Care Management Operations Services – Provider Compendium 2024

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide B2C Digital Commerce Platforms for Midmarket Growth