On theCUBE Pod: Business as code and the huge opportunities for tech giants

Big events, such as AWS: re:Invent are on the way, and that has many thinking about new developments right around the corner. Those significant transformations, as well as code-based business automation or business as code, were big subjects for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast.

There’s a Cambrian explosion of apps coming, and harmonization is a key word, according to Furrier. It brings to mind that infrastructure as code created the DevOps movement.

“That was what APIs did. I was talking [on theCUBE] about business as code and starting to lay out that framework,” Furrier said. “What does business as code mean? This is a really big discussion around the future.”

Code-based business automation outlined

Business as code essentially is going to bring a DevOps-like methodology to business applications. That’s because productivity will empower workers to write their own SQL, by giving a large language model or artificial intelligence tool-specific instructions, according to Furrier.

“‘Write me a SQL query that does the following: Find me sales by month for the next five years,’” Furrier explained of code-based business automation. “Then, it just gives a SQL query, spits out the code and you just type it yourself or execute it. That is a game-changer, and it’s creating harmony between people.”

When friction is removed in work, AI creates derivative benefits. Last week, Furrier wrote about the 10-year journey of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Lambda.

“We all know in the cloud world, enabled serverless, their entire world changed because a lot of the hassles around configuring the EC2s and all these servers basically went away,” he said. “Now companies, like Databricks, announced at their last show that they’re basically all serverless.”

What serverless did for infrastructure, AI will start to do for productivity, Furrier added. That’s where it’s important to consider code-based business automation, known as business as code.

“I think this business as code concept is going to change the deployment of applications and give this agentic layer some programmability to it, like DevOps did,” he said.

Business as code would represent a transformative approach to automating processes. It would essentially automate all those unautomated processes that companies haven’t been able to automate, according to Vellante.

“We talked about this last week, the top-down and sort of bottoms-up productivity boom. But there’s a lot of things that you alluded to under the hood that have to happen in order for this to take place,” Vellante said.

Huge opportunity still on the table

These days, cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC are competing to power this next wave of technology with cost-efficient, scalable hardware and tools. But as much as the opportunities are massive for Amazon, don’t count Google or Microsoft out, according to Vellante.

“They also have a huge opportunity, as does Meta, as do these large companies like Dell, JPMorganChase, HPE, to the extent that they can apply this stuff, this AI, this automation internally, and essentially teach their customers how to go forward and build solutions around it,” Vellante said.

It’s the same story with Google, according to Vellante. It’s just a matter of execution.

“We know that Amazon can execute. It’s, like I said, this double whammy. To me, it’s like the internet, where if you wanted to take advantage of it, like Michael Dell did, you could,” he said. “I just think to the extent these big companies are applying AI and automation internally, that’s going to give them a big win as they point that at their customers.”

Events on the radar

In addition to AWS re:Invent, the end of the year has brought with it a number of notable events, including SC24 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024. They are three important shows because they will set the agenda for the next year, according to Furrier.

“We’re in this reality mode. Hype cycle’s gone. We’re in the reality cycle of, ‘Show me the money, show me the value,’” Furrier said.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA is the cloud-native showcase, SC24 will reveal what those working in hardware are up to, and AWS re:Invent serves as a bellwether, according to Furrier. New generative AI stacks are emerging.

“What’s happening is that it’s just another layer of innovation … that’s why I said it looks like the ’90s in some layers — like the old days, networking and compute, when chips were coming out from Intel and networking gear was faster,” Furrier said. “Then you have the applications getting smarter. The same thing’s happening here.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Deepak Singh, VP at AWS
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of database, analytics and machine learning at AWS
Dilip Kumar, VP at AWS
Jeremy Siegel, economist
Donald Trump, 45th U.S. president
Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO at OpenAI
George Gilbert, senior analyst at theCUBE Research
Jerry Chen, general partner at Greylock Partners
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo
David Brown, VP of compute and networking services at AWS
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO at Dell Technologies
James Hamilton, SVP and distinguished engineer at Amazon
Peter Desantis, SVP for AWS utility computing products
Judge Thomas C. Wheeler, former judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims

Here’s the full theCUBE Pod episode:

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Photo: SiliconANGLE

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