70th IT Press Tour, Part 1 of 2: Phison nearly quadrupled its quarterly revenue on AI, and now it wants flash to do DRAM's job - full video and article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… A year ago, Phison sat in front of the IT Press Tour and introduced us to Pascari, its brand-new enterprise SSD label. This year, Phison US President and GM, Michael Wu, opened with a slide that would make most chief financial officers weep with joy. Phison's revenue for the first half of 2026 was US$3.4 billion. That's 147% of what the company made in the whole of 2025 (US$2.345 billion), and it took six months. "This year, Phison has turned into a very different company," Wu said. This is part 1 of my Phison coverage. A large slab of what we saw, including the technical sessions from Phison CTO North America, Sebastien Jean, and several product announcements, is under embargo until 17 November, US time (18 November here in Australia). I've seen it, and part 2 is the bigger story. For now, here's everything I can tell you. Full video and article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/…

70th IT Press Tour: DDN wants every GPU earning its keep, and NVIDIA and Google already run on its data engines - full article and video here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… A GPU waiting for data still draws full power. DDN has built its entire pitch around that one uncomfortable fact, and with bookings growing threefold, a rebuilt executive team and a fresh inference engine, it reckons its found the money in fixing it. I was at the The IT Press Tour (70th edition) in California last week, where DDN gave journalists an impressively detailed briefing session, under the banner Make AI profitable. Presenting were DDN president and chief revenue officer, Kevin Delane, and DDN chief product officer, Omer Asad. DDN’s new chief marketing officer, @AdamBerlew, sat in and chimed in as appropriate, despite being on what he told us was day eight in the job. IT Press Tour founder, Philippe NICOLAS, said this was the ninth or tenth time the tour had visited DDN. The faces on the other side of the table were mostly new. So, how do you make AI profitable? Full article and video here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… #ITPT @CDP_FST @coustautc

Hammerspace says production AI dies in the data layer, and its fix already ships in your Linux kernel - the full article and video can be seen here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… 70% of enterprise AI projects sail through the proof of concept and then quietly die before production. Hammerspacereckons it knows why, and it argues the cure is sitting on storage you've already paid for. I was at The IT Press Tour, 70th edition, in Redwood City, California, on 8 October 2026, where Hammerspace VP of product marketing, Floyd Christofferson, gave the assembled journalists a fast-moving tour of the company's technology, its customers and where it thinks enterprise AI is heading. Christofferson opened by placing his job somewhere in the middle of product and marketing. Sitting at the end of the table was Hammerspace VP of products and operations, Douglas Fallstrom, who I was told is one of the company's founding team. Christofferson described Fallstrom's daily life as wrangling the engineers who are building this stuff into the product, which sounds about right for anyone running products at a storage company. The 70% problem Christofferson had flown in from an HPC user forum in Germany, where he said research AI adoption is running hot (around 70% utilisation) on carefully curated data sets. Before that hed been at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara.Enterprise is a different beast. At SDC, Christofferson heard the CTO of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies (an SGI alumna, which Christofferson, himself ex-SGI, clearly considered a strong reference) tell a room of technologists that roughly 70% of enterprise AI projects fail.They succeed at the POC stage. They fail on the way to production. To see the rest of this article, and the video, go here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… #ITPT @ITPressTour @CDP_FST @coustautc @Hammerspace_Inc

Well worth a read! Thank you to the @ITPressTour for the opportunity to cover ExpectedIT - you can expect more coverage of The IT Press Tour participants, soon!

69th IT Press Tour: Veridion reads 1.4 billion web pages a month because the company register can't tell you what a business actually does - see the full article and video here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… The IT Press Tour (69th edition) ran through Ljubljana on 1 and 2 September, and the Veridion session contained a screenshot of the Slovenian Business Register. So, why was that important? The entry was for MIKLOSIC 3 HOTEL d.o.o. A name, a street address, activity code 55.100 for hotels and similar accommodation, a registration date of 15 June 2022, status "registered", size "Small". One director, one procurator, one partner. That was the hotel the presentation was being made in. Here's what the register didn't mention. The company holds the building on a 20-year lease rather than owning it. The brand is Eurostars uHotel. The operator runs around 300 hotels across 23 countries under 7 brands. The parent is Grupo Hotusa of Barcelona, founded 1977, roughly 1.65 billion euros in revenue and 6,000-plus staff. There are 3 Eurostars properties in Ljubljana totalling 566 rooms. This one has 224 rooms, a rooftop indoor pool with castle views, Ljubljana's largest conference centre at about 2,500 square metres, and 4.4 stars from roughly 1,700 Google reviews, with the pool and sauna shut for renovation. Veridion Growth Lead for Data and Credit Verticals, Alexandra Tofan, used that gap to frame 90 minutes of argument: every one of those facts is public, every one of them matters if you're underwriting, lending to or buying from that business, and not one of them lives in the filing. More here: itwire.com/business-it-news/…

69th IT Press Tour: HYCU says the next thing to wipe your data will be fully authorised, and backup is the only undo left - watch the video and read the full article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… The IT Press Tour (69th edition) ran through Ljubljana on 1 and 2 September, and HYCU, Inc. used its slot to make an argument that should worry anyone who has quietly let a copilot loose inside their tenancy. The deck was titled "Stepping into a new era in data protection". The number on slide 8 was nine seconds. That's how long an AI coding agent took to delete a company's production database and every backup of it. HYCU put it on screen as the defining statistic of what it calls the agentic era, and then spent 90 minutes explaining why your existing controls have no answer to it. I've already covered the ExpectedIT session from this tour, where the pitch was that the rack should behave like the CPU. HYCU's pitch operates at the opposite end of the stack, and it's a more uncomfortable one, because the threat it describes is already inside your building with a valid token. Read the rest here: itwire.com/business-it-news/…

69th IT Press Tour: DataCore spent 5 years buying storage companies, now it has to make them behave like one - full article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… The 69th edition of The IT Press Tour ran through Ljubljana on 1 and 2 September, and the DataCore session opened with a slide that was doing a lot of work: "Freedom to choose. Intelligence to operate." DataCore VP of Products Said Boukhizou had 90 minutes, a 27-slide deck he freely admitted he no longer builds by hand, and 25 years of history with the same company to draw on. "I hate giving a lecture," he told the room early. "I do love interactions." He got his wish, because the questions came thick and fast, and a couple of them landed on things DataCore has historically been quiet about. I've covered the ExpectedIT session from the same tour already, where the pitch was that the rack should behave like the CPU. DataCore's pitch sits one layer up: whatever silicon you can actually get your hands on in 2026, the data services above it shouldn't have to change. Full article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… #ITPT @ITPressTour @DataCore_FR @DataCore @DataCore_DE

69th IT Press Tour: StratoFoundry wants to give your S3 bucket a memory, and a receipt for every decision. Full article and video here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… The IT Press Tour (69th edition) ran through Ljubljana on 1 and 2 September, and the StratoFoundry session opened with an apology about the product name. "First, I'm sorry that you may have seen different names for the product before, like ChronoVolt," StratoFoundryfounder Emmanuel FORGUES told the room. "We changed the name because it was not possible to use this name at all as a product". The product is now KARL, and this was its first public outing anywhere. "This is the first presentation of this product," Forgues said, which is the sort of thing you hear maybe twice a year on a press tour and almost never from a company that is two months old. StratoFoundry was incorporated in France in July 2026 with 10,000 euros in share capital. That is not a typo, and it is roughly the price of a mid-range server, which makes the ambition attached to it worth examining closely. Full article and video here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… #ITPT @ITPressTour

69th IT Press Tour: Cybee builds a European backup business on Restic, and bets the whole thing on restore speed. Full video and article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… The Cybee session at The IT Press Tour (69th Edition) in Ljubljana opened with an admission that had nothing to do with backup. "It's the first time we speak [about] Cybee in English, and in front of journalists," said Cybee founder and CEO Eric Deronzier, apologising in advance for any hunting through notes. "So maybe it won't be very fluid." It was fluid enough. What followed over 90 minutes on 1 and 2 September was one of the more clear-eyed vendor sessions I've sat through, largely because the man presenting has been selling disaster recovery for 12 years and has stopped pretending that backup is the interesting part. His argument, stripped to the frame: the only question a regulator or a board ever asks is whether the business came back, and how fast. Full video and article here: itwire.com/business-it-news/… @ITPressTour @CDP_FST @coustautc #ITPT #cybee #backup #restore