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This year’s Brainstorm Tech conference is, obviously, being held virtually. While that removes some of the fun elements (wait til next year, bike ride to Maroon Bells), it puts the focus on the content.
The speaker lineup on Tuesday included New York Stock Exchange president Stacey Cunningham, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim. I kept my head in the clouds, interviewing IBM CEO IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. As is often the case at Brainstorm Tech, a few themes started to emerge:
- The IPO wave shows no signs of cresting. “2021 has a pretty high bar to beat, but it’s looking busy so far,” NYSE president Cunningham said. There may be too much money floating around in special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, though. “It’s a heartbreak looking for a place to happen,” warned Lise Buyer, the founder of Glass V Group, a consultancy that provides advice about public listing.
- Cloud computing is getting to the hard part. For a few years, companies that had no need of running their own data centers were the prime customers of cloud providers. But a lot of the remaining corporate computing workloads are running on private networks due to regulations governing data in finance, healthcare, and other industries. So the catchphrase of the day is “hybrid cloud,” both Krishna and Kurian agreed. Krishna also discussed IBM’s push to develop quantum computers, while Kurian explained a new pandemic management tool, the on-site offsite.
- We also heard from some newsmakers trying hard not to make too much news. Are ads finally coming to Facebook’s third platform, WhatsApp? “At some point we’ll be excited to have that in WhatsApp,” Will Cathcart told Robert Hackett. Assistant attorney general Delrahim generally defended suing big tech companies but didn’t get too specific. He did mention that upgrading his phone this week sent him to customer service hell for hours trying to get it activated. He felt “practically paralyzed” and even more cognizant of how much we depend on those companies to run our lives now.
Day two brings more big players on stage, including Jennfier Tejada, PagerDuty’s CEO, Apple SVP Deirdre O’Brien, and Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com