We believe today’s so-called modern data stack, as currently envisioned, will be challenged by emerging use cases and AI-infused apps that begin to represent the real world, in real time, at massive data scale. To support these new applications, a change in underlying data and data center architectures will be necessary, particularly for exabyte scale workloads. Today’s generally accepted state of the art of separating compute from storage, must evolve in our view to separate compute from data and further enable compute to operate on a unified view of coherent and composable data elements. Moreover, our opinion is that AI will be used to enrich metadata to turn strings (i.e. ASCII code, files, objects, etc.) into things that represent real world capabilities of a business.

In this Breaking Analysis we continue our quest to more deeply understand the emergence of a sixth data platform that can support intelligent applications in real time. To do so we are pleased to welcome two founders of VAST Data, CEO Renen Hallak and Jeff Denworth. VAST just closed a modest $118M financing round that included Fidelity at a valuation of ~$9B, which implies a quite minor change to the cap table.