Surprise: AI Drives Earnings Up and Down, Plus Agentic AI and Tariffs – Infrastrucure Matters EP74

This is Textron tv. All right. Episode 74 of Infrastructure Matters because it does matter as normal.

We, we've had a, you know, this is the second straight week that all three of us have been on Camely. Diane, welcome back to, you know, I, I would say this has been a action news packed week. There are plenty earnings to talk about.

There are some other industry news, but we're a couple of weeks away from the biggest AI conference of the year, GTC. And I expect, uh, based on all of our pre briefings, that the next week or two is going to be, we're gonna act, we're gonna whi for another half an hour for this show with the amount of AI related news that's gonna be coming out over the next two or three weeks. But we have plenty of other stuff to talk about.

Kimberly, you are the one who follows the markets for us mostly, and keeps us honest on what these, uh, tech giants are doing financially. Big news from coming out of, uh, both HPE and Broadcom this week. Yeah, many years ago I started reading the earnings transcript.

It's too bad. I'm not gonna listen to the thing, but I'm gonna read through the earnings transcript because it's in the q and a often that all the details come out, or somebody, you know, they're plowing in there is like, yes, I want to ask those questions. Uh, but we did have two big ones, um, today, this week, which was HPE and Broadcom.

And, um, on the Broadcom one, the thing that I'm looking at the most is the VMware items, but the big news for them was not the VMware, it was all the AI stuff. And, you know, he's making a lot of money. I mean, lemme run some numbers here through you.

I was like, revenue was up 25% year on year. The consolidated EBITDA was up 41%. Yes.

I mean, I was like, okay, that's A lot. That's a massive company. That's A lot.

That's a big number on top of a big number. That's a big number on top of a big number. And, and most, most of this was all driven by the ai AI level, Although the, uh, the VMware stuff didn't do bad either.

No. Well, well, I'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, they, and the VMware stuff did really well, but everything did well.

I mean, they're just hitting, they're hitting on all, all cylinders here. Um, or what do you say when you have a electric car? You don't hit on cylinders, you hit on something else.

Anyway, I guess electric motors, I don't, I know how to, that's really good. Your hole on all kilowatts, I'm not sure. Are you tapping it from every battery?

I don't know. You tapping it from every battery or whatever, but I think the big things here that I took away is that he talked about how big these hyperscalers are going, where they're going, and, um, and that they're building the xus, et cetera, to be able to support these very, very large areas that they're expecting to go. So, so they have a, quote unquote, we have a view towards scaling clusters of 500,000, 500,000 accelerators for hyperscaler customers.

Um, doubling the rate CAPA rate, X capacity of the existing tomahawk sites. These kind of things are going at. And then he goes on to talk about what the market looks like.

Um, expect the three hyperscale customers that they have will generate a serviceable market of range of 60 to 90 billion in 2027. We're not talking two 30, we're talking, you know, the immediate front that are talking about. Yeah.

My my, your eyes got really big there, dude. This is, I mean, it's just huge. Um, Yeah, their, their outlook is as impressive as their earnings.

So there, there are stocks up three point half percent this morning. Uh, they're, uh, they, they, and was, and the market really needed this news. That was good.

Good to see. Um, and the other piece of it that I love to watch is this infrastructure software revenue, which is basically VMware. Um, a couple quotes coming directly as at the end of Q1, which is what they were announcing.

70% of their largest 10,000 customers have adopted VCF. So whatever, you know, whether or not they got one hand behind the back that they're, you know, ripping them with or however they're doing, they're making it up. 7 billion was up 47% year to year.

You know, that's people figuring it out. Um, and, um, so it's just, you know, the numbers are huge. Um, and this one, I am not, maybe you guys can comment on this one because I don't know exactly the product line here on this piece of it, but as of today, in collaboration with Nvidia, we have 39 enterprise customers for the VMware private AI foundation.

That seems like a really tiny number. Well, it's, uh, Depends on how big those customers are, but Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But the, you know, the ambitions of VMware cloud, uh, private cloud, private AI, cloud, whatever they call the product, is very, very big. It's this idea that once enterprises get to the ING stage, they're not gonna want to go to cloud. So all of these, uh, AI accelerators, they're selling into the, uh, cloud providers on the chip side.

The enterprises are going to go more traditionally and have more airco systems, more traditional systems. And even for some of their pitch AI workloads, that's are, that's on the inferencing side, they're gonna be shared. So, and actually, uh, uh, VMware has printed several, presented several times on Tech Field Day on their, uh, private AI solution.

It is a very solid solution designed at Nvidia, and they went from zero customers, I think, last year to, you know, 30 something plus CU customers. Now it's, eh, it's pretty good. That's more than a hundred percent.

Well, you know, when you come from zero, that's, that's okay. I guess so. And then, you know, I would comment on the VMware piece of it.

At the same time, we've seen Nutanix, which is the high HCI guys with, you know, the anti know VMware tax people. They did very well too. And, and they're equating it to people migrating over.

So I'm thinking that's probably a lot of the sm you know, Hawk is very focused on the big customers. I'm gonna keep the big customers. Those are the ones that are most profitable.

The rest of the guys can, can disappear if, if you wanna disappear. And yeah. And some of those are probably going to Nutanix because it makes a whole lot of sense to do that.

Yeah, it is a weird effect, right? I talked to the folks at scale, well scale compute, who also competes with VMware, uh, said their enterprise business is up 400%. I don't know how big their enterprise business was to start, but up 400%.

So they're benefiting as well. I think the challenge for Hoc, according to my insiders, is that the commercial group, which is below Enterprise, is actually outperforming the enterprise. So, uh, Broadcom is reinvesting and making sure that they keep some of these smaller companies.

That is surprisingly from my data, uh, growing the business. Wow. Well, I didn't, I didn't catch on that one, but that's, that's real.

That's interesting. Yeah, I don't think it was in the, I don't think it was in the report, but it was, uh, just from my conversations from some of the folks who are inside VMware, the, they're very happy with the progress that the commercial team has helped. And for those that wanna just do, you know, your snoop snooping and deeper dive, uh, look to see who leads one business over the other, and what, what changes have been made over the past year, you'll get an indication of where the growth at outside of the outside of the report.

So, on the flip side, our buds that HPE had, um, not the best quarter. Um, and that Was, although revenue was up 16%, uh, you know, uh, it's the outlook that's I think really hurting them. Uh, you know, laying off 3000, up to 3000 workers in anticipation of a billion dollars in lower revenue due due to tariffs, uh, since a lot of their equipment is, uh, made in, uh, you know, in Mexico, that's a, that's a challenge.

The other piece that was they got hit on is the, uh, margins for their servers. Mm-hmm. So their margins were down from 11, 11 plus percent to 8%.

So, you know, three, almost three and a half percent that they dropped on the margins. And they blamed that, or they, you basically said that, you know, the mix of GPU, so, you know, they're paying money to Nvidia in order to ship the black wells or whatever they're shipping, um, aggressive pricing in the market. Um, and, um, you know, so some of the quote unquote sales discipline that was missing, um, but it was aggre, you know, the aggressive market.

So we didn't believe that we heard that kind of thing necessarily from Dell, um, when they then rolled out their earnings. But evidently this had a pretty significant impact here. Um, and then I think part of that is them also looking at how do they reduce some of their cost, which is getting into the 5% employee reduction.

Yeah, I remember, I'm sorry, I, I remember about three quarters ago, Dale had really blowout numbers, but, uh, they took a hit because of the margin on their AI server, the margins, they sold way more AI servers than anyone else in the industry. But that margin was very disappointing. So, uh, NVIDIA's winning when it comes to whoever sells their chips, the servers today, and both Dell, HBE Lenovo and all the OEMs are trying to find value and escape kind of the gravity of the revenue share with Nvidia, and find ways to get a little bit more of that revenue.

So I expect to see that, uh, raise up in services and the ability to add value beyond just selling the box that Nvidia chips comes in. Well, we, the, the industry is supply constrained. 5 because it just, they can't get enough GPUs.

Uh, and so that's, that's for limitation of HP is not a favorite vendor. Um, and, and can get the big, the, the chip supply like a, maybe a Dell can. Then they're at a competitive disadvantage.

And that's, that's really how the industry's shaping up right now. Whoever, who's the best friend of N Nvidia. Yeah.

So they did talk about how well, you know, GreenLake has, was up, although they were, you know, they were up significantly, although it's, um, year to year. Although the quarter was, you know, not, not looking as fabulous, um, quarter to quarter, but that's Q4 to QQ one easily can happen. Um, and they did highlight, okay, the storage person has to say, they did highlight their Electra MP is shipping in triple digits, but then again, last year it wasn't doing as well.

So again, you're coming from a lower number into a bigger number. So, so they're picking it up. One of the things we're seeing about HP is they're deprecating a lot of their other technologies for the Electra mp.

So they're, they're doubling down on this, um, focus on, on the MP and the other stuff kind of fades away, and they'll be winding that down over time, is what we're expecting to happen. Um, the last thing they did, well, not last thing, but one of the other things I brought up is that they did highlight that they had launched the KVM offering. Um, they said that there's a lot of engagement and interest.

Um, we've seen a lot of engagement and interest all over the place. So, you know, it's kind of odd that one on one hand, Hawane is making gobs of money off of VMware, and so is everybody else. How does that work?

Yeah, I think you're just unlocking a lot of value. The, the price increase from one, uh, means that the person who increases the prices and they have the, they, they have the captive audience that VMware has, they, they're gonna make a lot more money. And then for everyone, you know, there's a huge gap between those who can afford VCF and VMware and those who cannot and needing to use solutions.

So now these solutions that were too expensive or too complex to migrate to are looking pretty, uh, pretty, uh, enticing. I've talked to some folks in the community, the prox mos, which is based off of KVM. I originally laughed at the idea of enterprises using Prox Max, like prox mos, if you don't need to know, uh, hypervisors to know that prox MOS was never seriously considered a, uh, a great alternative to, to VMware, but price increases make you do fun.

I say, yeah, you might changed your mind given the, yeah, the, the, the, and the, uh, people have, the community has sprung up around it to, uh, write scripts and provide services to help customers migrate. So this has been kind of a, a, a, a weird rise, uh, rising tide re uh, raises all ships kind of thing. That's the way I would've thought, you know, it would, it would've been played.

But there, on the vendor side, there's no one unhappy with, uh, Broadcom creating more o opportunity for the rest of the market while Broadcom makes more money. That's an interesting perspective on that one. I do like that.

So the last thing you mentioned, um, Diane, you talked about the tariff situation. Um, Antonio directs, you know, addressed that and what they were looking at for mitigation purposes, he talked about how, you know, they, they manufacture around the world. So it sounds like what they're looking at doing is manufacturing closer to where they're gonna ship, or something along those lines.

Um, he, um, it's, uh, you know, I, it's an in, you know, we will see. And, and the other piece of it was also with Broadcom being asked that question, part of it is seeing how this is gonna shake out, um, because it's, it is the great unknown, you know, you don't know is tomorrow, tomorrow, yeah. Totally unpredictable.

So anyway, that's my commentary about that. That's enough about earnings. I'm done.

So you, you do have, uh, a note for Vast data here. They're not a publicly traded company. And I do, uh, there's, there's a follow on thought 'cause we both were in the briefing yesterday and, uh, their CEOI mean, their, uh, founder Ranon really had a really provocative statement.

And I'll share that after you share your thoughts on their results. Well, they just talked about how they are massively growing. They won't give you any numbers.

No. But they're also for a quote unquote, you know, whatever they are, multi-billion dollar startup, um, valuation, you know, they are cashflow positive. They don't have to take any, they asked, got asked about IPO and he goes like, dunno, you know, we don't have to do anything.

We're not looking for any money. So the growth is there. And to kind of stick the pin on, kind of like they, they, they, they were doing a victory lap yesterday.

And, uh, one of the analysts asked Renton, well, what happens when someone doesn't wanna put their data in a proprietary, uh, vast data store? And his result, his, uh, his, uh, response was basically, Hey, if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of rows, go ahead and use another solution. But if you have billions of rows of data, you have no other solution than vast data.

So good luck finding something else to put your data at. If you, if you have the size of data that, uh, requires a vast system, there is no other competition. I think we need to put that statement to the test in our signal 65 lapse at some point.

But I thought that was a really provocative statement yesterday. So that person that asked that question, whether or not you know that or not, is Brad Shiman Shiman, he just joined us. Ah, I did not know that was Brad.

I just, I I had it on in the background, and that was a very good question by Brad. That tip to Brad on the RUM group side. Yeah, here we go.

Alright. Uh, agent Force, which is, I don't know, uh, well, no, not Agent Force. The Salesforce release, agent Force two DX and Agent Exchange.

Uh, I don't know what any of that means. So, uh, Diane, you just wrote a big brilliant, uh, report on agent AI agents. Help us understand what Salesforce is, is delivering to the world.

Sure. Well, and, and actually we have two major reports on AI agents, because that is, as we talked about last week, AI is arguably a new layer in, in the infrastructure, uh, uh, world. Um, and the, the hot new, uh, part of that is agents.

So this is ai, instead of just generating content, it takes action for you, uh, typically via APIs. So you want to do something, it, it, it, it basically orchestrates for you. It's great.

You know, it's basically, you know, an adaptive, uh, uh, AI orchestration layer. Um, and agent force has been, uh, Salesforce's big foray into that. Um, they've got, uh, several thousand paying customers they say to, depending on whose numbers you look at, it's between one and 3000.

They charge $2 a transaction. That's how confident they are that, that it can do things that other other systems can't. And as part of our work, we actually interviewed a bunch of Asian Forest early adopters to say, all right, so what are you seeing?

Uh, and what's interesting is, uh, it does seem to be a very adaptive, um, uh, generative AI is quite malleable in it, in that it doesn't really, it's not as, um, intolerant of what it can accept in terms of you can give it any kind of content, any kind of API, and it just figures out how to use it, how to work with it. Um, and is it a Chat bot or something? What is, I don't even know what agent force is It?

Well, it can be a chat bot, um, uh, the, but it's a chat bot that does things for you. So we talk, I talked to the CIO of a large, uh, roadside service center, and their, their biggest challenges that people only use their service two, three times a year, so they don't remember how the website works. And so people come in, they want to, they want to update their credit card, they want to change their address, they wanna, um, uh, you know, ask about some specific benefit or, or use it.

They can't figure out how to do it because they don't, they don't use it that often. So they, they have an agent for us, uh, Bob that said that, you know, they log in and the agent knows everything about you, and you say, I wanna update my address. And it says, okay, well, what is your address?

And you type it in free form, and it says, okay, I've updated it for you. You're good to go. Uh, it's that sort of thing.

Uh, and or I wanna update my credit card. They're like, fine, tell me what it is and I'll go ahead and update the record for you. So it's that kind of very simple, uh, thing.

And that's what we really saw that although we, we have, we, there was one, um, agent for his customer that was doing very sophisticated things. They, uh, they were trying, trying to recommend, um, prescription drugs, uh, and they had to do it, uh, by processing all the regulations at the federal, state, and local level, the insurance policy and overlay all of that. And, and AI's really good at sorting through all of that and, and, uh, and then making a recommendation.

And then, uh, a doctor, uh, just has to, a human doctor has to check it, make sure that it did, did it right. But a process that took a week to sort through all of those different layers of regulations and, and overlap them, we come up with the Venn so they could figure out what to recommend that it took, uh, uh, a week on average. Now it just took, you know, 10 minutes using agent force, uh, from start to finish.

Uh, that's, that's, that Would be amazing for some of the cocktails they put together for cancer and the, that kind of treatment. Oh, yeah. It takes to account all your current drugs and everything.

Yeah. So the AI's really good at, at, at doing that very complicated analysis based on the patient file and, and the actual regulations. So, uh, they didn't expect it to be able to do all of that.

Uh, but they found this is, that was, its superpower is being able to, uh, you know, dump all this content, uh, that to make this decision. It sorts through all of the documents, and then it explains what you, what, what, what options you have available. And, and it's that expandability that that would, that is also very good.

Yeah. So agent forces is, uh, uh, one of the leading agent, uh, and, uh, it, it was part of our report. We did a study of all the, the commercial, uh, enterprise class agents right now.

Um, you know, so we looked at, um, uh, you know, SAP juul, uh, ServiceNow, Microsoft, uh, Oracle, that all the different agent frameworks and, and you know, this is going to be the, the big growth area with ai. And so, uh, agent Force scored very well, uh, at the top of the, at the top of the charts, but that was not all of, they had a big, uh, event this week, TDX, uh, Salesforce did, and they announced Agent Force two dx, which is an autonomous AI agent. There's no, there's no chat bot window.

It just watches your data and then based on changes to your data, it, it acts autonomously. And this is very powerful stuff. But I have, you know, a lot of concern about how we're gonna govern these sorts of things.

So as data changes in your enterprise, you, you, you tell it what to watch, it then will fire up agents based on the changes in the data and go out and do things for you. It's autonomous agents. So, yeah.

So This, it's back to the question that Brad had asked Vast, right? Yeah. Because you're putting that on the current transactional database, and the companies you're talking about are probably pretty darn large that they, you know, from an enterprise standpoint, and they're not gonna wanna move their transactional database because I'm gonna drop this agent stuff right on top of it.

But then again, this is more of the application as opposed to the inference maybe. Well, I guess it is part of the inference engine that you would consider it as opposed to a training. So, well, Interesting invoice will work with whatever you have.

They like it, it, it tends to work better if you use data Cloud. Um, but it will, you can plug pretty much anything you want into it. It's, it's very interop and, Uh, and the importance of all this, me and Diane had kind of this meta virtual conversation.

He really provocative report on where, uh, our, uh, blog posts on LinkedIn where you talked about SAP upgrades, ERP upgrades in general, being a trap. Like if, if you want to upgrade your ERP system today, or specifically SAP, you have to go to the cloud. There is no real upgrade And you had to Path Anymore and pay SaaS pricing.

And, and there's a of everything, there's Pay SaaS pricing, and people are seriously looking at alternatives. I'm, I'm going to have on a special conversation, I, I think it's under FNDA steel, but there's a major company looking if not having already replaced their SAP uh, environment with agents. So this idea of, you know, there's transactions that happen on a bus, so let's say it's a object stor storage bus, like a vast data maybe.

And then there's, that kicks off an event and that event is a agent and a workflow happens. So why do I need to pay SAP Oracle Microsoft for the luxury of their monolithic application when I can basically build these intelligent business workflows with agents from the ground up? So this is a really, really important part of infrastructure to look at because that itself, that capability, just like message buses, are now part of the IT infrastructure budget and, and line item object storages.

I don't see agent, uh, infrastructure being any different than those pieces of infrastructure that companies build solutions on. Yeah. And, and it's interesting times and, and you know, Salesforce with its $2 a transaction that's gonna price itself out of that particular market.

Uh, and, you know, this is what, you know, we have to look at. Um, but we've done our own economic calculation. Uh, the, uh, agent market is gonna address about $6 trillion of the, of the $50 trillion, um, uh, workforce economy, uh, is that, that is how much labor market is worth is 50 trillion and about 6 trillion of is addressable with today's agents as they're currently, uh, uh, realized in the industry.

So, So what does that mean? I mean, the workforce economy is what we paid the workforce, and you're saying the agents is gonna be able to address About 6 trillion of that now, 6 trillion of that which displaces people, or it moves us, moves people to, In the short term, it displaces people in the, uh, in the medium term, it should create a lot of AI jobs. So, yeah, and I that I did a, a little follow on hold.

I had a really great conversation with Brian Lo of AWS about how they're using, specifically how he's using AI agents to accelerate his application development. He hasn't lost his job. And, uh, so it, there's a really interesting, uh, transitionary period around AI and, and the workforce that's worth convers having a deeper conversation.

Why. But moving on this, well Actually, lemme, lemme just put a cap off. The, the, the announcement agent exchange was also announced, and it, and it is a digital labor market, but it's not people inside of it.

It's only AI skills and, and it's, it's agents to do whatever, you know, agents to, uh, audit something or, uh, you know, audit of financial service, uh, agents to do customer service, uh, agents to help you, uh, manage and run a marketing campaign. So yeah, it's, uh, we're, we're all gonna end up competing with the bots unless we're focusing on running the bots and managing and governing and, and putting guard rails and securing them. And that's the, you know, that's the new job.

You're gonna be All right. We would've, uh, normally this would've been at the head of our rundown before, but, eh, it's just another a hundred billion dollars TSMC committing a hundred billion dollars to ai. I, you know, what I, I jokingly say this, but I'm serious.

I don't know how much of this investment, these investment announcements are real. Exactly. There is nothing that holds any of these companies accountable to, to deliver on any of these commitments.

We saw this, uh, over the years, I don't care. The administration with Foxconn, with their investment in Wisconsin, you know, these, these folks make these, and even in some cases get tax, uh, benefits from it. And they just never, the, the jobs and, and actual investment never materialized.

So, so another a hundred billion revenue In 20 18, 300 50 billion they announced. And, and, you know, they, they didn't come anywhere close to, to actually doing that much. So Is this like a feeling good about that?

I'm having a building named after me or something. What's great pressure is, uh, this is the significance of this is that it's a hundred billion on shore, I think, right? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. And this is, uh, and we don't have time to go through it, but the president, you know, kind of pushed back on this idea that the CHIPS act is even needed.

You know, Intel is, Intel has committed to building the chip in Ohio, the chip factory in Ohio, delayed to 2030. The construction is, but they're under obligation to do so. And the president noted that TSMC made this obligation without any, uh, money from the government.

All right. Uh, Starling, let's end on this conversation around starlink. Is, am I gonna be able to stop paying my $165 a month to starlink, uh, Diane, what do, what do you think?

And if you look at the coverage maps, I mean, this is a, this is the issue is starlink has this unparalleled coverage right now, uh, and you can't beat the, the, the bandwidth that's available, and you can't beat the pricing. Now, uh, Utelsat, uh, has, uh, acquired one web, um, that's, that's the other alternative. I always, just before we got in the show here, I looked at the coverage map.

I mean, it's, it's far, far less. And, and, uh, uh, late last year, uh, uh, I met with, uh, some of the team, uh, at Amazon's, uh, Kuper. I mean, they're planning to go as big as starlink, but they got two satellites up, right?

So right now it's still, starlink is still the best game in town, but that's going to change, uh, with the geopolitical winds shifting, uh, with tariffs. Um, starlink has, you know, recently got dropped by the Canadian government. Um, they're, they're gonna replace, uh, in Ukraine, a lot of the starlink with Utelsat.

Um, and everyone's busy trying to get new constellations up. So yeah, it's a new world where, you know, lo locally sourced. It is considered, um, a strategic advantage, uh, a geopolitical advantage.

So Yeah, the challenge is getting Those satellite not changing anything. Yeah. The challenge is getting those satellites into orbit.

It's not like there's a lot of competition to launch satellites. No, there's not. The capacity doesn't exist.

Uh, uh, except we aren't, a lot of new rockets are coming online. So you got vol, uh, Vulcan Neutron, um, the, uh, uh, uh, E Bezos, uh, with his, um, blue Origin has, uh, oh, I'm trying to remember that New Glen, uh, a massive new rocket. It just launched for the first time.

So the capacity is coming, and that's gonna change, uh, the complexion of the industry, of the, of the constellation industry quite a bit. Yeah. But the, the availability of the solutions, we can now, I can now walk into Home Depot Yes.

And buy a starlink, uh, startup kit. I still complain about coverage because hey, I, I complain about slow internet on a, uh, airplane. So I'm, I'm going to complain about, uh, starlink coverage, which is still awesome, and I'm looking forward to there being competition, being more access, more internet access, more options for the Globe is better for the global economy, and helping people transition to, uh, a AI driven, uh, economy, which is all very, very scary.

So her Heavy is that stuff, because I got a backpacking trip coming up in May. So, uh, mini, yeah, there's a star link. Uh, the Patrick, uh, Morehead has a starlink mini where he tested that, and it's, and I think he was on a backpack truck.

It's backpackable. It's, it's actually, uh, the, if I was to, if I was into backpacking, I carry one for E versus C use. Yeah.

It log ultra, ultra like backpacking, though, that's the problem. No, but we're talking about Kimberly Backpacking, which is not ultra like she, I'm sure her bag is about 30 or 40 pounds. But yes, it's Usually about 40, depending upon how long we go.

But we're carrying, we're in the desert, so we have to carry water, so that makes it really Heavy. Water is heavy. We, we need to find dehydrated water that we just have to add water to get water.

So that's it for this episode of Infrastructure Matters. We are going to be out a lot over the next few weeks. Uh, g as I mentioned, GTC is kicking up and all the, the kind of Spring Tech shows are coming up.

You can, uh, follow me. Elon Kimberly has a bunch of stuff going on that she'll share over the next couple of months. Stay tuned for more just coverage from Six Five Network in general.

This is going to be an amazing part of the, uh, year of the industry.