The ascendancy of cloud and SaaS has shone new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once-sought-after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays and maximizing server utilization have been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros and developers with expertise in microservices, container app development and similar skills. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech, touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. It begs the question: Is hardware going the way of COBOL? Well, not likely — software has to run on something. But the labor and skills needed to deploy, troubleshoot and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting quite dramatically. 

At the same time we’ve seen the value flow also changing in hardware. Once a world dominated by x86 processors, value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and Arm-based designs. Moreover, other components like NICs, accelerators and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated and increasingly important. 

The question is: Does it matter? If so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs and the broader society? 

In this Breaking Analysis we try to answer these questions and to do so we’ve organized a special CUBE Power Panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question: Does Hardware (Still) Matter?