ETR Insights presents an interview with the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of a real estate technology company, whose experience as an AI researcher adds welcome color to the ongoing public discussion around OpenAI. This smaller organization’s technology spend is limited as they prefer to build themselves rather than buy new vendors. The organization is exploring AI to generate images, infographics, and demographic-specific text, as well as VR and AR technologies. Read on to learn more about why our guest leverages AWS as their primary cloud platform provider, Zoom, for communications and concerns of potential misinformation with AI models.
Economic Overview
ETR’s Technology Spending Intentions Survey data suggests overall tech spending is down, and our guest understands why. “I'm expecting it to be pretty tight. The driving factor, at least for me and for the outfits with which I'm concerned, is really the scarcity of venture capital.” The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank has created concerns about capital and liquidity, which may have a systemic impact on the tech ecosystem, creating further anxiety within the community. “I know certain bigger outfits who also banked with SVB effectively had covenants on their accounts that forced them to bank with SVB because they had loans through SVB. That meant that they were forced into a lack of diversification to protect their assets.”
As a small organization, this company prioritizes technology that aligns with its specific market segment rather than chasing “flavor of the month” tech trends. They care about analytics but don't have quantities of data, so many of the technologies on the market are not relevant to them at this stage. When it comes to adopting new vendors, the company prefers to build things themselves and minimize interactions with outside vendors. “Right now, we're mostly focused on business development and growth, so this means that where we have the choice of going to some random vendor or building it ourselves, we're going to be building it ourselves for the most part.”
Vendor-Specific Commentary
AWS. The company has chosen AWS as its primary platform provider for their scalable cloud computing, database service, file service, and related technology. “It’s not like we have a theological belief in them or anything, but they provide all the services that we care about.” AWS offers greater scalability and reliability at a fraction of the price of a colocation data center facility. In addition, AWS’ platform is supportive of open-source development and other components our guest uses. Moreover, “The fact that AWS has its own CDN means that we can easily provide our service around the world as much as we might like.” The organization is not yet of a size to consider Cloudflare or Akamai for CDN. Our guest has used some Google services, such as image recognition, but they otherwise prefer to keep everything under one umbrella with AWS, as it is more cost-effective to deal with one vendor. The company uses AWS for communication, messaging, alerts, and SMS integration, as well as a separate small hosting service called WestHost for email.
ETR Data: Above, we look at ETR’s single vendor view across all sectors we track AWS, based on preliminary OCT23 TSIS data. While the vendor maintains a very healthy Net Score above 43% within seven of the ten sectors we track, the survey-over-survey declining trend is readily apparent in nine of the sectors. In fact, only Contact Center bucks the trend with a 20% jump from prior survey levels. In addition, as our interview guest alludes to in her choice of utilizing Zoom for communications and video conferencing, AWS Chime is an underperforming outlier for the company as the only area where the cloud giant has a negative Net Score.
Zoom. This tech executive has explored integration with other platforms like GoToMeeting and AWS Chime but found that there were things she could do with Zoom that she could not with those platforms. “It's pretty much the default in the culture now. In general, I would still stick with Zoom. It's the path of least resistance.”
OpenAI. While our guest is exploring AI to generate images, infographics, and demographic-specific text, she otherwise expresses skepticism about the technology and its potential for misinformation. “ChatGPT is able to produce astonishingly fluid, fluent-seeming paragraphs of text apparently on point, but its ability to understand what you're doing is very limited as far as I can see, and its ability to be truthful about how to answer things and to be honest about the amount that it knows is profoundly limited.” Our guest warns against putting too much faith in such models and suggests being cautious about their limitations.
VR + AR. This executive sees little business value in the metaverse as it is presently conceived. They are, however, exploring VR and AR technologies, in particular a tool called Pano2VR, produced by UK-based Garden Gnome Software, for creating virtual tours. “I'm particularly interested in its application in the educational space. Whether that means you’re doing a virtual tour of a house, or it means you're a school kid doing a virtual tour of the British Museum, all those sorts of things that are potentially relevant.”
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Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai