There is still a place for fully integrated and engineered systems. If you have the need for high levels of concurrency, performance, availability, and need to know… not guess… what your opex is going to look like. I’m a user and supporter of cloud providers, but there are some fat, fat margins being booked there. Not every company can have a storage team, network team, and compute team to integrate those things properly.

0xide is one of the few really interesting new tech companies out there.

I have to admit some bias, as I was involved with a company offering a “poor mans vBlock” around 2010. We didn’t grow fast large but we never once lost a deal against commodity hardware vendors. They were easy to beat.