The State of Cloud and AI from re:Invent 2025 (with David Linthicum)

neXt Curve's reThink Podcast focuses on tech and the industry topics that matter.

In this episode, Leonard Lee of neXt Curve is joined by renowned cloud computing thought leader, David Linthicum of Linthicum Research, to talk  about the state of cloud and AI along with a recap of our time at re:Invent 2025. 

They discuss the current state of cloud computing, particularly focusing on the widespread shift towards AI and agentic AI. David shares his experiences and thoughts on the significant focus on AI infrastructure witnessed at AWS re:Invent 2025. Both Leonard and David delve into the potential pitfalls of overemphasizing AI while neglecting core cloud services, stressing the importance of a balanced approach. They also explore the innovations and the lack thereof in the current cloud landscape and provide insights for what they expect and recommend for AWS in 2026.

Topics that mattered:

🔥 00:48 Background and Experience of David Linthicum
🔥 01:20 Consulting and Career Insights
🔥 03:44 Discussion on Cloud and AI Trends
🔥 04:56 Challenges and Realities of AI Adoption
🔥 14:52 Advice for Enterprises on AI Strategy
🔥 17:54 The Hype of Technology Providers
🔥 18:58 Reinventing Thought Leadership
🔥 19:20 AWS and the AI Overcorrection
🔥 19:47 Innovation and Core Business Focus
🔥 21:42 Missed Opportunities and Future Directions
🔥 24:06 AWS's Industrial Footprint
🔥 27:47 Recommendations for AWS 2026
🔥 33:00 Technical Debt and Modernization

Hit Leonard, David up on LinkedIn and take part in their industry and tech insights.

Check out David Linthicum at www.davidlinthicum.com.

Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.

Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com and our Substack (https://substack.com/@nextcurve) for the tech and industry insights that matter.

NOTE: The transcript is AI-generated and will contain errors.

Transcript

Leonard Lee: 0:06

Next curve. Hi everyone. Welcome to this next Curve Rethink podcast episode where we break down the latest tech and industry events and happenings into the, uh, insights that matter from the world of cloud ai and much, much more. And I'm Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Curve. And in this, episode, I am going to be joined by the illustrious, famous and wonderful David Linthicum. hey, how's it going?

David Linthicum: 0:38

Pretty good. I've never been called illustrious before, so why not? I'm have to Google that and see if I should be mad or not, but I take it as a compliment. Oh, come on,

Leonard Lee: 0:46

come on. Are you serious? Yeah. You know what? I would say nothing but great stuff about you, but I know that you are the founder of Angum research, right? Yep. And a lot of other stuff, hey, this guy is famous. He's one of the original thought leaders in cloud computing. probably shall I characterize you as a bit of a maverick in that regard?

David Linthicum: 1:07

Yeah. Yeah. I was talking cloud before it was cool to talk cloud and talking lots of stuff before it was cool to talk about it. But yeah, I was definitely go out there and pick flights, is what I do.

Leonard Lee: 1:17

This is gonna be fun then. Well, you know what, we have a common background in consulting, tech consulting, digital transformation consulting. You are a former, Deloitte partner, right?

David Linthicum: 1:30

Yeah. Yeah, served for eight years. I was a chief cloud strategy officer and, built a lot of stuff. Worked with a lot of people. Had a lot of fun there for a, short time in my career.

Leonard Lee: 1:39

Yeah, he built stuff, folks built stuff that's important. You know what? We were both at ENY at the same time.

David Linthicum: 1:47

Oh yeah. That was long, long time ago. Yeah, that's a long time ago. That was before my first CTO gig. I was there for I think six months. And then Software g Americas hired me away'cause they were taking it public and. I said, well, that's good. So I'm gonna go live there for a while. So I joined them as a PTO. ENY was a tough job to leave because it was, a fun job. It was working on a variety of stuff, working with big banks, bankers, trust, and a bunch of stuff. I like the consulting stuff. sometimes it comes with too much politics and overhead and things like too many rules and regulations, but it's a lot of fun. If you're like me where you're very much a DD and you want a content switch all the time, you get into different problems solving different things. And if you don't like. Working in a problem domain, solve the problem and move on to something else. And that's what I did.

Leonard Lee: 2:28

you and I are very, very similar in that regard. I'm a bit like that as well. Six months. That's why we didn't end up bumping into each other. But yeah. EMY was great. I thought they had some great thought leadership in, process reengineering, and that was, that's where I kind of cut my teeth on all that stuff. when I was with, uh, EY and also, introduced me to quote unquote.com industry. I, I, well, they're all middle market. When they were all middle market companies, you know?

David Linthicum: 2:55

Yeah. Ever since when AI came by and ruined it for, for the rest of the consultings come in, I thought consulting was a great jumping off point for a career. I always tell people to go. Get a job in consulting.'cause two years there is gonna be five years of experience. Oh yeah. I don't think it's that way anymore.'cause they're doing system morphing changes and different technology pushes, things like that. But it's a good opportunity for people who wanna work hard and travel.

Leonard Lee: 3:19

Yeah. And you've shared some really good perspectives on that, on LinkedIn and other channels that you're. I'm pretty, vocal and frequent on. And so by the way, everyone, he is also a YouTuber with over a hundred thousand subscribers. And, you know, you probably know him because he contributes to several, tech publications and I know you most prominently from your contributions in Info World. So, David, I, I wanted to talk to you. I have a conversation with you about, two things. Number one, the state of cloud and where you think. Things are going right, because I think especially with this whole neo cloud thingy that everyone's going bonkers about, things are changing and, it would be great to have a conversation with you about that. And then you and I were at AWS reinvent, 2025, which took place about, a couple weeks ago. I'd love to get your takes on that. I have a general idea, but it would be nice if you could share it with the next curve audience and, um. And while you're doing that, I'm gonna see if I can reset my brain.'cause I just got back from, Santa Clara. I was attending the Marvell industry analyst day and my head is filled with AI infrastructure tech. So I'm gonna see if I can purge that. And then now focus on cloud and all this stuff that, you and I were talking about two weeks ago. Your thoughts? I mean, what was 2025 about? for cloud?

David Linthicum: 4:50

Well, it was, everything was focused on AI and AI infrastructure, you know, almost 80, 90%. Yeah. The marketing, the, even the innovation that's occurring within the cloud. Things, I mean, we'll talk about reinvent, but reinvent was basically, it's now an AI conference that, is around a particular cloud. So, yeah. Everything was that and everybody started focusing on what's gonna be needed for that, how to access, GPUs and get to the infrastructure you need to build and deploy some of these AI systems out there. And no focus on the traditional stuff. So, you know, all of my clients that I gathered over the last. 15 years, they're not really running to AI yet'cause they can't afford it. And so they're not getting upgrades and innovation around storage. The serv, we're not seeing innovations that are coming directly from the cloud providers. And AWS is gonna be included in that. Everybody is focused on the AI space and that's getting a little bit bothersome when the enterprises aren't prepared to spend money on the space and grow in the space. As somebody told me at the Reinvent conference last week, he goes, I, I'm not gonna do AI for four years. I can't afford it. And I came here to get some upgrades to my storage and my compute systems. And in next EC2 instances and maybe 10% of the announcements that they made were around the core infrastructure. So the people that's gonna be 90% of their business and they're getting no love from the innovation from any of the cloud providers. That's the big notion. It's almost. Static other than the AI pieces that they're growing like crazy. And that's a lot of taking existing tools and stuff and repositioning it as ai. There's not a lot of innovation that's going on. The ingenix stack that AWS is selling is stuff they had before. And if you new things that they're just repurposing, as a agentic and AI systems and everybody's doing it to catch up. And I think that we're leaving the traditional enterprises behind who rely on cloud computing. They're seeing no innovation. based on what they normally see. And I think that's gonna put everybody in a bad place. I think they're gonna end up reducing the usage of cloud computing because they're not gonna see a value to it because they're not going anywhere based on what they need.

Leonard Lee: 6:45

Yeah. That's a really great observation and it's a ground truth that, it's an industry disconnect that is, actually recognized. It's just that recognition doesn't have much of a spotlight shined on it other than, maybe some hints suggested by the MIT. you know that MIT research paper that came out that suggested that, only 5% or less of enterprises that have invested in, agentic and IV ai, have seen a return. the curious thing is, and the telling thing is that we don't see any of the. Cloud service providers who have made this sort of hard pivot toward ai, deny that that's the truth, right? That in fact adoption is much slower and insufficient to. support and justify the infrastructure spend that's happening right now. So I think you're touching on something really important that the industry, is apparently not tuning into, especially from a marketing perspective. And the other thing that I've noticed, David, I wanna get your reaction to this, is, you know, as they start, they talk about agentic ai. It becomes increasingly apparent. Your cloud maturity needs to be very high, right? Because a lot of the agents are being implemented either as, containers, right? microservice based containers or serverless functions. these aren't just VMs, right? These are fine grain cloud, deployments and instantiations for gentech ai. And going back to your comment before, if you're not. Emphasizing and working with your, clients to up their cloud game, right? And write up this maturity curve, you're really not going to meet them, with any degree of, appetite, for agent ai.

David Linthicum: 8:56

No, you're absolutely right. And I think that, there's probably an overemphasis on agentic AI right now, and I wrote, you know, did that in a YouTube video. I said Too much and I put a bunch of AWS people in clown suits. Um, oh no, come on. I know

Leonard Lee: 9:11

you gotta add a few Microsoft people in Google, people in there. Well. I'll see

David Linthicum: 9:15

if I can get invited to ignite. And, they'll be the next target. But the reality is, is there's a couple of things with a Gentech ai, I don't think people grasp how to deploy it. They're not mature enough and their infrastructure's not mature enough. The point you brought up to make any kind of, uh. You know, inroads into it. Everybody understands that it just has something to do with agents and they're cool. They don't nec necessarily know how they're gonna be applied. I have, one of the most popular agen AI courses in the world right now. And I've had that, you know, for last, did it three years ago. And. But at the essence of what it is, it's not gonna be applicable to every problem domain. And when you do apply it, it's gonna need a lot of maturity and a lot of knowledge and a lot of talent in terms of how you're gonna build it. Exactly. you're building something that's going to be 20 times as complex based on the design patterns of it, and it is gonna cost 20 times more than a traditional system. So. You're gonna end up wasting money if you're misusing the technology, you're gonna end up wasting money if you're heading off to a failure. And the reason we're seeing so many failures right now is because people don't grasp what it takes to architect and build any of these systems, or finding the wrong use cases or misapplying it. Yeah. And I think we're gonna have to touch the stove for a couple of years as we go through this hype cycle to get on the other side of it. Yeah. You know, to realize how dumb we were in 2025.'cause I don't see a lot of productivity that's coming out of it. You know, the other, thing I do is run around fixing projects. So projects that are failing come in, you know, trying to figure out what's going on and do a postmortem It is a complete disconnect in terms of understanding how the technology was gonna be used, missed application. Technology. Right. And then having no technological maturity in the company, whether they have no chance of making this stuff work, they shouldn't have even tried it.

Leonard Lee: 10:50

Yeah. And you know, typically the people who, push back. On, let's, let's call a, a more grounded perspective. Are typically those who are just extraordinary developers, right? That would know how to, build the scaffolding, build the controls, to build the guardrails or institute the guardrails to make, the technology, safe and usable. But, one of the things that I'm noticing. Is that, a lot of the ingenix stuff is really starting to look a hell of a lot more like RPA. Yeah. one of the things that I've been telling folks, lately is that, a lot of these egen frameworks and approaches, serve to take agency away from the LLM. And so you. When we look at this whole idea of an AI revolution, you need to start from the beginning. what were the assumption sets that went into, creating this narrative and the expectations associated with, generative AI revolution? And what we're finding out now three years later is that. A lot of these theories and narratives have failed. Right. and you're, I think you're spot on. We, we will continue to find out for the industries. that are dabbling into this stuff and driving this stuff, we'll find out how wrong they were because a lot of the investments are driven off of fomo. And so the important thing that I think the winners are gonna have to do is discern and be ahead of, you know what? I will simply qualify as nonsense. and there's so much out there. And this is why I think your perspective is such an important, element of the AI conversation because there needs to be more distilling forces, filters introduced into the conversation. So I just wanted to throw that in there really quickly. I think you are spot on and the fact that you have a lot of experience and continued experience as I have in the past, fixing broken projects. I think that gives us a unique perspective of, versus just a academic treatment of, what's going on, you know? So anyway. Yeah,

David Linthicum: 13:08

and it's the craziness of it right now. You hit the nail on the head with the FOMO stuff. Most people are adopting agen based frameworks, even generative based, AI as well, because they suspect they're being left behind by everybody else out there. We saw the same thing with cloud computing. You know, in 2000, you know, 2009 through 2015 and everybody was migrating to it. Yeah. And probably in a willy-nilly, haphazard way, where now we're looping back and fixing those issues. We're doing some repatriation and modernizing the various systems. Same thing. Exactly the same thing, but this one is probably five times as worse because of the marketing dollars that are in it. I've never seen so much money being spent on marketing dollars around any of a technical space, generative AI and gen ai. it's just sucking all the energy out of the room and everybody is moving forward. And I don't think they're seeing the practical advantages of it and when it should be used. We're not stopping to figure out what are objectives here? How are we gonna be helping the business? And I know that's, fuddyduddy old, there's goes old man Linthicum again with his, practical perspectives. But the reality, if we don't do that, we're gonna end up missing. The boat on any kind of value that's gonna come in, and these things are damn expensive, so you're gonna blow the budget on something that's not gonna help your business, and you're not gonna have a lot of resources to grow your business around some other disruptor that's able to figure it out. Yeah. And I think that's of. Fundamental issue that many of the enterprises are dealing with right now. And I think the tail is wagging the dog. We have so much marketing hype out there and so much marketing spin that's going on out there. People are just over sensitized as to what this stuff is and are marching almost like zombies toward this, you know, AI based framework without any kind of understanding where it's gonna add value. My advice is stop. Do an assessment, create a strategy, figure out some sort of a plan to make it happen. Figure out what technology's gonna work for you, what stuff's not gonna work for you, what kind of infrastructure upgrades you need to make, including your cloud stuff, and just start marching in that direction. And people are refusing to do that now. They're just not. they don't have the talent to make the assessment. I understand it's been expensive stuff out there, but if they don't put a plan to see old ad, you know, adage, they're gonna plan to lose. And I think that, we're gonna see a lot of failures in 20 26, 20 27.

Leonard Lee: 15:17

Yeah, well, you know what? I have a simple recommendation. it's a message to boards out there and, executive, C-suite teams out there. Listen to your own professionals. Actually, I find that, CIOs and CSOs have a pretty good perspective from a risk standpoint of, what are the. Implications and factors to consider in adopting these technologies? It's fundamental. It's just like basic, filters that, a CIO or a CSO are typically gonna have with any technology. And to your point about, simple and basic practices being overridden, um, I think executive teams need to respect, their technical leadership. Especially the security folks, who are increasingly, on the leading edge of understanding what the risk profile is for adoption, right? and they're oftentimes the most disregarded. there's almost a very, available and simple, way of, tapping into, a source of sensibility within most organizations. Right now, what you really want to be careful about as a business leader is, the evangelists because they're typically selling you a future. and setting expectations, of a future that will probably never come. and if they can't answer hard questions. then they're definitely the ones that you, want to disregard. talk to your CIO talk to trusted, technical leaders, within your organization who have dealt with emerging, technologies and hype technologies in the past, and have the frameworks of determining, what to say yes to and what to say no to, having that discipline. I appreciate your perspective on this. it's very sound and good advice.

David Linthicum: 17:11

Well, one of the things I would also say is I'm beyond the evangelist. I'm already not listening to those guys. they were wrong about so much stuff in the past. They have just no credit. And obviously they're getting paid to evangelize, but, listening to the big consulting firms out there, I have lots of forensic consulting, things like that, but they're complicit in overselling and over-hyping the technology because it's. To their benefit. In other words, they make money from change. And as people are moving to generative AI and certainly agen based frameworks, things like that, they're coming up with a bunch of gimmicks, in terms of how to get there in 10 days, speed to agen AI without understanding any of the base problems or looking to solve. Yeah. And that's not something that should come from them. So they're complicit. they become, in essence a sales arm for many of the technology providers. I don't get why that should be the case. they're missing an opportunity to lead thought and really put a pragmatic framework around it and show people guidance how to go through it versus just aligning with the technology players and. sponsoring a conference and then trying to sell a particular technology that says a solution. It never was a solution. You are understanding of your existing needs and backing the appropriate technology stack into that. It's a fairly simple procedure and we just need to figure out how that happens. And we're not getting a lot of thought leadership. We're not getting a lot of, guidance, I think from the smartest. People out there in the world.'cause they're, I think they're compromised. they're,, in with the big technology providers, they figure out that's where their bread's getting buttered and they're not gonna go off script. So guys like me, I'm just one voice and there's other voices out there, they're screaming from the highest yard arms that we're in for some. Stakes coming forward if we keep on the present path. And I'm a lone voice, pretty much maybe yourself and some other people who are saying it. and I think we're going to end up forcing normalization in the market that we didn't anticipate.

Leonard Lee: 18:50

Yeah. so why don't we now pivot toward, reinvent that. I'd love to get your thoughts there on what. Your key takeaways were, and what kind of stood out for you? And what didn't, maybe because I have a feeling we get a lot of the latter.

David Linthicum: 19:13

I, I mean just at it's a 30,000 foot level, it felt to me like a company that was trying to catch up. because they felt they were behind three or four years ago when the generative AI thing came up. and they felt they weren't where they needed to be. And I think everybody was telling them that. So they almost overcorrected. now it's. Too much about ai, it's too much about ag, agentic based frameworks. A lot of agent washing, what I heard last week, and not necessarily getting down to the solutions and not how this technology can be used and worked. And that should be their focus, and it is going to be steering away their budget and their innovation away from the traditional, cloud computing technology that built them. So 90% of the revenue's coming from. The traditional stuff, and it's gonna be funding the innovation that's occurring on the AI space, and they're not spending time and upgrading those systems. Also, I'm not seeing a lot of innovation that's coming out of them. I wrote an infra world blog six months ago that talked about AWS lost its innovation curve. It used to be doing serverless and, container bases as a system and things like that. They're pulling a lot of rabbits out of a hat that were pretty innovative and pretty progressive in the market. And they're not doing that now. I'm just not seeing a lot of innovation. The ENT stuff and the generative AI stuff, they're just copying people. They're making their own LLM. Okay, great. We have 300 of those now. I don't need another one. they're talking about, the foundational stuff with the ENT stuff. Okay. We don't know what that means, and you gotta really kind of figure out how it's gonna be used. Mm-hmm. And we're missing that piece. So they're trying to get out here and my hands' going way away. And they're not necessarily, and they're trying to act as if they're, uh, three or four years ahead in the innovation stuff. They should focus on their existing customers. They should focus on being innovative despite the AI stuff. And they should focus on creating net new stuff. They're always really good at that. It's people that us could, write a paper and submit it to their boss and get an idea Off the ground, get it funded and get a product out in six months. And so we're not seeing that right now. It's a lot of agent watching their existing stuff. I wasn't very impressed with the agent core stuff that I saw. There's not a lot of new stuff that's going on there, so I was completely disappointed with the event. I was the only one, everybody else was a, you know, a ai, AWS fan, boys and girls,, are there for the AWS party and all the social stuff. And I went to a few of those as well. But overall, I would give them a D in progress.

Leonard Lee: 21:25

Oh wow. Wow. I would say that, they've been perceived as being, behind unjustifiably. if anything, last year I thought they did a great job of focusing more on cloud. That foundation, you know, trying to maintain that conversation around cloud. I don't know if you recall, but Matt Garmin, when he got up on stage, he was leading with security and cloud. He was, those are the two things that are foundational to even. Making a first step toward, enterprise ai, much less the ag agentic stage of stuff. I totally Agree with you, ag agentic, way too much of it. I don't think it really helped them, but, if you were to look at the, benchmarks that folks are, using right now to evaluate AI leadership, I mean, they're on par with everyone else, right? I don't think that Microsoft is any further ahead or Google's further ahead. They're all trying to meet the table stakes. And, but going back to your comment earlier. how important is that given that that is not the core of your business at the moment? Not and, and given that adoption is low. It's a hard sell and so I thought it was a missed opportunity that they didn't take more time to talk about all the core stuff that you are mentioning. I spent a lot of time with the telco guys as well as the IOT guys, and they have some great stories there. A lot of stuff that I think, could differentiate AWS in being a cloud player because, you know, I think each of these guys are different, right? Like GCP, they have some, enterprise stuff, but holistically, if you look at their business, the forte that they have is consumer, right? If you look at just even beyond GCP, as a company, their forte is consumer. GCP, you know, there's pro productivity bit in there. There's an enterprise, pass bit in there. with, Microsoft, their forte is enterprise, right? they have a lot of productivity tools. they have a really, tight grasp on the enterprise, graph. that's their advantage. the way I look at, AWS they have a pretty solid footprint in industrial, right? While the others have kind of given up on, let's say, telco or, IOT and some of these. Other, business areas or, sectors, that are part of what you might call, the industrial AI opportunity. AWS tends to have a much more mature footprint there and I think they have a lot of good stuff going on there. And so if you were to look at what kind of impact Cloud could have plus AI in industrial and operational environments. driving transformation there. I think they have a really good positioning there. And you didn't see a lot of that with the different sector groups. And I think that would've been a really powerful differentiating story for them to present where they actually have proof points, you know what I'm saying?

David Linthicum: 24:51

Yeah, I do. And I think maybe that goes to you and I should run AWS let's, get with Gorman and tell'em let's go, let's get rid with it. it was, a huge missed opportunity for them to, with all the AI hype, to take a contrarian view and then find a productive path and messaging things that I think their core people want to hear as well as the AI people wanna hear. No, that means not leading with ai. If Gor, I would've gone to the Gormet and says, listen, look. every other CEO is gonna tell you how they partnered with Nvidia and you know how they're doing ai and we're gonna say AG agentic a hundred times, and I'm not gonna do that. Let's focus on our core activities in terms of why we exist and here's what we're improving around our core services. Here's an industry thing, and I would broaden, you know, an in, case study from an industry player, you just, and they. And, you know, they present and then other people present and other people present, and they just keep forming it to the fact that, okay, this is a really solid company. Yeah. That we can build our foundations upon anything including ai. And by the time they get to the end of the presentation, then you can start on the AI stuff. Don't harp on it. Yeah. But make sure you're supporting your existing infrastructure, supporting your existing audience. And I think that would've gone over so well, because I think all the analysts would've been respectful of that. And anybody who wants to throw a criticism that they're, behind on ai. Who cares? Everybody's, racing on ai, it, that's not gonna matter.

Leonard Lee: 26:08

Well, but it seems like everyone is behind on ai. Of

David Linthicum: 26:14

course, yeah. Technology. I mean, maybe

Leonard Lee: 26:16

not in AI infrastructure spend, but that's nothing to brag about. Right? Hey, I'm spending the most on AI infrastructure. I mean,

David Linthicum: 26:25

yeah, the token,

Leonard Lee: 26:26

uh, you, you won't the token right to that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. How are you helping customers getting, I mean, it, it goes back fundamentally. to what AWS how AWS and Amazon, have in the past identified themselves as a customer first company. Right. That's been their mantra. And if they stick to it, I think, I, I think you're absolutely right. They would find themselves in a different narrative path than what they took at reinvent. But going back to last year's event, which I thought was really good, by the way, they, they brought, folks from the Hartford, the Chief AI Officer of The Hartford. That guy is a rockstar. He was present two years in a row. this year he wasn't there, or at least if he was there, I missed him. he was astonishingly good, had great perspective on what it actually takes to adopt. AI and, for AWS to continue that continuum of grounding, I thought would've been great. So we'll see what happens next year. what are your thoughts on 2026? What do you think we might see What would you recommend for AWS in 2026?

David Linthicum: 27:40

I think you're gonna see weaker sales from AWS next year because they're not supporting their core business. So the lack of innovation is gonna end up costing them some revenue that bleeds out the door. And I'm seeing lots of enterprises now, people I'm working with that are second guessing their relationship with AWS, even though they've been with them for 15 years. So I think that weakness in the market may wake them up. In other words, if. We're not seeing the uptake in AI and industry, that's gonna be an industry wide thing that's gonna take a while before people can afford it and get the expertise and the talent to make that happen. And so we're gonna see a shift in focus back to the basics. I think that's gonna be the core theme of, reinvent 2026. And yeah, we probably went, we, shifted too much to AI and now we're focused on the core thing, and we're gonna spend instead of 70% of our releases that are gonna focus on, ai. We're gonna only do 30% and we're gonna focus the rest on innovation in our course world. Yeah. And creating something like serverless and creating something like, container management systems, creating something that're gonna be actually useful to people who are using this stuff and upgrading their platforms and things like that. Creating the ability to optimize these systems costs, the ability to reduce costs. All these kinds of things are what they're asking for. If they don't hear it pretty soon they're gone. The only reason they're not gone now is'cause they're very much locked into that platform. But they'll unlock and they'll move their stuff other to some of the other cloud, cloud options out there, sovereign clouds, neo clouds for the AI stuff. All these other things are legitimate options now. And it wasn't 10 years ago where none of those things worked. And AWS work, that's why people use it now. All that stuff works. All that stuff is pretty good. And it provides a viable option. AWS needs to understand that, or they're gonna find themselves behind the curve in terms of reduced sales and they're gonna have trouble innovating because they're not gonna have enough money and resources to do it.

Leonard Lee: 29:19

Yeah, and I would just add security and trust because, going forward, that's just going to become one of the top two.

David Linthicum: 29:29

I agree.

Leonard Lee: 29:29

I agree. I, I agree. And again, going back to how they led in last year, they led in with security and I thought that was killer. And by the way, you know, if there's this, narrative change that happens in, 2006, then I think you and I are gonna be the biggest advocates of that pivot, right? What I would consider better. I thought they were thought leading last year, even though there was a perception they were behind. I think that would be a pivot back to, leading thought. And, going back to your, comment about, Switching between clouds. I mean, one of their big announcements was a AWS interconnect multi-cloud, right? So, yeah. that optionality is opening up, but I thought a lot of the reason why they did that was because of, impressions around, AI data because, one of the things that, Matt, frequently talks about is about how only, what was it, like 10% or 15% of, enterprise workloads are in the cloud? So if you do the math, that means you don't have most of the enterprise data of your clients. And so in most instances, and so, you know what, um, I think yeah, thought leadership is in a completely different direction than what we've seen from all of the cloud providers I agree with you 2026, whether these guys like it or not. There's going to be pressure for more grounded conversation, and I think the ones that do it first are going to, be the ones who win. they will have two advocates here. Yeah,

David Linthicum: 31:09

I'll, I'll, I'll definitely give'em an a next year if they do that. I understand why you don't feel like it's right to do it.'cause you have the whole company that's looking at you and they're saying, let's do ai, let's do, how about ai? Gonna get money for ai, gonna do AI in this market toward things like that. but I think it's gonna be pivotal for them'cause of what their business is. And I think that in many cases this is including some of the other companies that are out there include IBM and hp and Dell and some of the others in there. They're spinning way off too much into the future and trying to get ahead of them. And I think that's not gonna work out, you know, for the future of their technology.'cause the consumption and the way enterprises are gonna consume their technology is very much different than the way they think right now. They're seeing weaknesses in the market. They're not seeing a lot of uptick based on the stuff that they're, they're doing so much. So they're trading value back and forth and doing these multi-billion dollar deals. Yeah. eventually someone's gonna have to buy this stuff and put it into the operations. And so if we don't have able to do that, there's not gonna be a market. And I think they're aiming at the market differently. I think if they just. Slowed the role a bit and focused on the basics and focused on the core customers and what they want. Spending money in efficient ways and stop the marketing madness. This stuff is crazy. Yeah. people will be attracted to that because people are attracted to contrarian. Be thinking when you'll find that many people are thinking the same thing. And you stand up in front of 10,000 people at a conference and you say, how many people think, you know, AI is way too hyped and we're, we're sick of hearing of it. You're gonna get a standing ovation because everybody's done. they get it. It's baked in the cake. I know what generative AI does. I know what a agentic AI does. I'm gonna find some uses for it. But you're constant hyping on it and turning everything into an agent is not helping. It's confusing the hell out of everybody. And it's, you're spending money on stuff that's. Not gonna have a productive end, and it's not gonna help me. Yeah. So I'm gonna stop partnering with people who are doing that.

Leonard Lee: 32:53

Oh, one thing that I thought was important and cool, and you might think this is cool too, is the whole, Technical debt thing with, AWS transform. I think that's a good, that was a bright spot for me. focusing on the modernization challenges of your customer that's meeting your customer where they are today.

David Linthicum: 33:12

Yeah, I thought so too. I had a little different take on it because I look at technical debt and much of the technical debt that I see is AWS workloads that were migrated 10 years ago, and people are trying to work through that stuff right now, but they're getting into the fact that people are looking for assist. In moving their stuff into something that's gonna be more productive. Now, some of the transform stuff did focus on, picking up your existing stuff and pushing it into ag based frameworks on AWS. So there was the Hypee stuff and I'm like, okay guys, you don't know if that's gonna be the case, if that's gonna be, helpful or not. So we're seeing the odds. You know, the odd oversimplification around that. But it is good that they're focused on the basics, what their customers are interested in. That's what their customers are interested in The customers are not interested and, and they don't have a billion dollars to spend on ai. They have a certain pile of money they have to keep the company running. 80% of their stuff may have gone to AWS and now they need those guys to be innovative and creative for them so they can keep that ball rolling.

Leonard Lee: 34:05

Cool. Well, wonderful. Hey, so, thank you David and, to our, next curve audience, make sure to reach out to David Linthicum. obviously he is a, thought leader in all of this stuff and, very vocal. He has his own, mind about this, which I appreciate very, very much. And you can find David at. Linthicum research at www david,

David Linthicum: 34:33

www david linthicum.com or just, just hit me up on LinkedIn. anybody can send me a message.

Leonard Lee: 34:38

Yeah, and also make sure to check out his, YouTube channels. you have two, right?

David Linthicum: 34:43

Cloud computing Insider. I have about, a quarter of a million subscribers out there and just started four weeks ago. Dave's not ai, and I have 50,000 subscribers.

Leonard Lee: 34:52

Wonderful. So, thank you so much David. And, everyone, please subscribe to our podcast, which will be featured on the Next Curve YouTube channel, and check out the audio version on Buzz Sprouts. or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Also subscribe to the next curve research portal@www.next curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's probably because I have to sneeze after this whole time. Now I have to sneeze. David, go ahead and sneeze. No, we'll sign off. Take care everyone. Happy holidays and we'll see you in 2026.