Futurum Tech Webcast

The episode delivers a handful of genuinely non-obvious data points - run/change ratios inverting in best-in-class firms, IT inflation exceeding IT budget growth for the first time, SaaS vs IaaS/PaaS disaggregation - but it is padded with substantial host commentary, meandering asides, and general platitudes like 'invest with purpose' that dilute the signal.

“the average company that's using these sort of old style single line strategies and this goes across a database of 3000 companies for about 30 years is it 70% of the cost to run 30% is being able to change”

“you'll find that uh, on average you'll see public cloud cloud is looked at about 18% of IT spending. But of that maybe of the 18%, maybe 14% is SaaS influence on IT and the rest is the IIS and PaaS stuff”

The IT-inflation-outpacing-budgets finding and the disaggregation of cloud growth into SaaS vs IaaS/PaaS are genuinely counterintuitive and under-reported; reframing technology platforms as financial 'asset classes' is a useful analogy though not wholly novel. Much of the rest - hybrid good, mono-platform bad, AI needs purpose - is recycled industry consensus.

“He or she with the most stuff on the cloud wins. It just doesn't work that way.”

“public cloud spending for the past five years has stayed at 4 to 5% of it, budget period”

Dr. Rubin is a legitimate longitudinal researcher - 30 years of data, 3,000-company database, Gartner alliance - which places him well above a typical thought-leader guest; however he is an analyst-researcher rather than a practitioner who has operated at scale, which caps the ceiling on direct operational applicability.

“this goes across a database of 3000 companies for about 30 years”

“I watch things from a very, a very high level”

The episode is unusually number-rich for a podcast of this type: per-trade technology cost-of-goods figures, run/change ratio benchmarks, IT inflation rates with timestamps, and total global IT spend projections give listeners concrete anchors they can actually use or validate.

“in banking and again depends on the size of trading, it might cost uh, you 11 cent per trade is your technology cost of goods for trade you go for a best in class organization, you go further out. It's like 25 or 30 cents”

“By July, it was up to 5.8%. And now folks are thinking about it's going about 6% next year”

The hosts frequently summarise or affirm the guest rather than probe, and a mid-episode detour where the two co-hosts debate each other's AI views displaces substantive follow-up questions; a few sharp interjections appear but they are outnumbered by softballs and rhetorical agreement.

“So that was a ton of numbers. That was a ton of numbers and a ton of data. But to simplify it”

“I want to poke with you Daniel, because I was trying to figure out”