Enterprise tech confronts tariff chaos

Welcome to Runtime! Today: What the first week of Q1 Big Tech earnings says about the enterprise market heading into the rest of the year, the creators of NATS are trying to pull off the old-fashioned "takesies-backsies" gambit with the CNCF, and the latest enterprise moves.

(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

Brace for impact

There are countless things about the future of life in these United States that are hard to predict after the first quarter of 2025. And while the health of the market for enterprise tech pales in comparison to many of those topics, that's what we do here.

Earnings reports from several big players this week revealed varying degrees of exposure to both the Trump administration's unhinged tariff policy as well as the dipshits who call themselves DOGE, two of the biggest forces causing chaos throughout the business world right now. While the consequences of both those efforts probably won't arrive until a little later in the second quarter, they were top of mind for everyone over the last several weeks.

It's clear that some companies are better positioned to weather this storm than others.

• Google Cloud reported revenue growth of 28% during the first quarter on Thursday, which was a fraction less than expected by Wall Street (according to CNBC) but pretty strong considering the economic headwinds.
• And it appears Google Cloud has headroom to grow against a shaky economy — assuming demand for AI infrastructure products and services doesn't collapse — thanks to its unique position in this market.
• On Wednesday, ServiceNow beat Wall Street estimates for revenue and profit and raised its guidance for subscription revenue this year.
• "[ServiceNow CEO Bill] McDermott said the company grew its U.S. public sector business 30% year-over-year in the first-quarter," according to Reuters, suggesting that DOGE has spared its business with the federal government to this point.

But companies that were already on shaky ground heading into the first quarter of Trump 2.0 are in trouble.

• IBM's stock fell 6.6% Thursday after it acknowledged Wednesday that several of its consulting deals with the federal government "were impacted in the first quarter" by the slash-and-burn strategy DOGE has inflicted on the federal government.
• Among enterprise tech companies, IBM is uniquely exposed to both of the Trump administration's chaos machines; it relies heavily on government customers and huge global enterprises that have been using its technology for decades.
• Intel's problems predate the second Trump administration, but a shaky economy won't offset any boost it might get from potential tariffs on semiconductors made outside the U.S.
• The company issued a forecast for second-quarter revenue Thursday that was well below Wall Street estimates, according to Reuters, and it is reportedly planning to lay off 20,000 employees.

Several companies with enterprise tech interests including Amazon, Microsoft, SuperMicro, and Equinix report earnings next week, so we'll get a more rounded picture of what the upcoming quarter might look like at that point. But the bigger question is how companies outside the tech industry plan to alter their tech-spending plans in response to the economic uncertainty that has descended upon the world over the last six weeks.

• “Predicting the next few quarters is essentially playing darts blindfolded,” Wedbush Securities analysts said in a research note this week that was otherwise bullish on the impact of AI on tech budgets.
• Conflicting reports emerged from Washington this week regarding whether Trump is preparing to back down from the egregious tariffs placed on Chinese goods, which would probably go a long way toward easing the uncertainty in tech circles.
• But this administration is as nondeterministic as a large-language model, prone to hallucinations and cost overruns.

That's a new one

So many companies have imposed restrictive licenses on open-source projects over the last several years that it's getting hard to keep track. Synadia, however, appears to have innovated on that strategy.

"Synadia, the original donor of the NATS project, has notified CNCF of its intention to 'withdraw' the NATS project from the foundation and relicense the code under the Business Source License (BUSL)—a non-open source license that restricts user freedoms and undermines years of open development," the CNCF said in a blog post Thursday (emphasis theirs). NATS was accepted as an incubating project back in 2018, but lawyers for Synadia sent a letter to the CNCF in March claiming that Synadia still retains the right to the NATS trademark despite that 2018 agreement, which usually requires that an accepted project hand over the trademark.

Apparently, that transfer never happened because Major League Baseball's Washington Nationals objected to Synadia's original attempt to trademark "NATS," and "even after the issue was cleared … Synadia did not complete the promised transfer of the trademark registration," the CNCF said in its blog post. Nobody looks good here; it's not at all clear why it took the CNCF seven years to secure the trademark, or why Synadia seemed content to let the CNCF manage and market NATS over that same period of time before changing its mind after raising $25 million last year.

Enterprise moves

Sumeet Arora is the new chief product officer at Teradata, joining the data warehousing company from ThoughtSpot.

Christopher Burger is the new CISO at F5, following security leadership roles at Slalom and Russell Investments.

George Gerchow is the new chief security officer at Bedrock Security, joining the security platform company from MongoDB.

Matt Schatz is the new chief revenue officer at Hivelocity, following technology leadership roles at Flowspace and WP Engine.

Jitender Aswani is the new senior vice president of engineering at Starburst, joining the data-management platform company from StarTree.

The Runtime roundup

Microsoft announced an expanded bug bounty program for its Dynamics 365 and Power Platform products and services, which could pay up to $30,000 to security researchers that find and ethically disclose vulnerabilities.

Datadog acquired Metaplane, a startup working in the emerging field of data observability, for an undisclosed amount.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!