SE05E09 - IDP Pivots!

The forty-third episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out, available in audio everywhere you get your podcasts and in video on YouTube (embedded below). Dan's back with Matt this month to talk about a few more of the latest drop of vendor profiles, the great Instabase/SuperApp pivot, and his choices in our new segment, "Hugs or Bugs".

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: New Research (pt2)

Last month, we started discussing the latest set of vendor profiles made available to subscribers in July; Alan published a blog post with a brief summary of each at the time. This time, Matt and Dan discuss the next three in that collection. 

First up is Flexor, which has pivoted from data extraction to providing data with veracity for agentic use cases: the translation layer between documents and agents that fills in the parts LLMs struggle with. Next up is Haystac and its Ominsuite, which is a set of document processing pipeline tools that are largely OEM-ed to other software companies. They use small, industry-specific VLMs (Visual Language Models) that process image versions of documents and can be deployed on an air-gapped, discreet on-premises basis. 

Finally, we have SimplAI, an agentic automation AI platform designed to help enterprises and system integrators operationalize agentic AI. This enables the development and management of conversational AI agents, voice and vision functions, and IDP and full multi-step agentic process automation. Dan mentions that this fits into the discussion in his recent blog "Have we reached “peak” AI model wars?". SimplAI has kindly made this vendor profile available from their website for free and has also published a comprehensive blog post about their report here. Thanks to them for that.

Topic 2: Super Pivot?

In August, the heavily backed IDP vendor Instabase announced a significant pivot in its business, deciding it no longer wanted to be an IDP vendor and instead wanted to play in the nascent world of "multiplayer AI" and be called a Super App. Dan has followed the company for a while and wrote about this pivot here, and here reminds us that Instabase never really wanted to be thought of as an IDP vendor in the first place. He also walks us through the various rounds of investment the company received (~$300m; a record in this market) and how the most recent round brought in new investors who may have influenced this change of heart. Dan also reminds us that he's been warning - ever since our predictions in late 2024 - that for IDP vendors to grow to the size investors might wish, they need to grow beyond what IDP currently was ("crossing the border" in his terms). Matt and Dan go on to discuss what this super pivot might mean in terms of the newly named entity's future business and competitors.

Topic 3: Hugs or Bugs?

It's time for a new podcast game - following on from our previous ones on banned words, analyst value and briefing dos and don'ts - which Matt is calling "Hugs or Bugs?". Here, Dan offers a trend which he likes (Hugs!) and one that he dislikes (Bugs!). The hug goes to open-source and open-weight LLMs for how they're enabling innovation for software companies, large and, critically, small. The bug goes to companies that talk about their revenues in ARR terms (Annual Recurring Revenue, so multiplying a recent period to create a yearly figure) rather than TTM (Trailing Twelve Months, so real revenue for the preceding 12 months). Turns out both Matt and Dan have strong opinions on this one. STRONG opinions.