(upbeat music) >> Hello, beautiful cloud community, and welcome back to AWS reInvent. It is day four here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My voice can feel it, clearly. I'm Savannah Peterson with my co-host Paul Gillin. Paul, how you doing? >> Doing fine, Savannah. >> Are your feet about where my voice is? >> Well, getting little rest here as we have back to back segments. >> Yeah, yeah, we'll keep you off those. Very excited about this next segment. We get to have a chat with one of our very favorite analysts, Keith Townsend. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Savannah Page. I'm going to use your south names, Savannah Page. Thank you for having me, Paul. Good to see you again. It's been been too long since CubeCon Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Valencia. >> Well at that beautiful lisp, love that. Keith, how's the show been for you so far? >> It has been great. I tweeted it a couple of days ago. Amazon reInvent is back. >> Savannah: Whoo! Love that. >> 50, 60 thousand people, you know? After 40 thousand, I stop countin'. It has been an amazing show. I don't know if it's just the assignment of returning, but easily the best reInvent of the four that I've attended. >> Savannah: Love that. >> Paul: I love that we have you here because, you know, we tend to get anchored to these desks, and we don't really get a sense of what's going on out there. You've been spending the last four days traversing the floor and talking to people. What are you hearing? Are there any mega themes that are emerging? >> Keith: So, a couple of mega themes is... We were in the Allen session with Adam, and Adam bought up the idea of hybrid cloud. At the 2019 show, that would be unheard of. There's only one cloud, and that's the AWS cloud, when you're at the Amazon show. Booths, folks, I was at the VMware booth and there's a hybrid cloud sign session. People are talking about multicloud. Yes, we're at the AWS show, but the reality that most customers' environments are complex. Adam mentioned that it's hybrid today and more than likely to be hybrid in the future in Amazon, and the ecosystem has adjusted to that reality. >> Paul: Now, is that because they want sell more outposts? >> You know, outpost is definitely a part of the story, but it's a tactile realization that outposts alone won't get it. So, you know, from Todd Consulting, to Capgemini, to PWC, to many of the integrations on the show floor... I even saw company that's doing HP-UX in the cloud or on-prem. The reality is these, well, we've deemed these legacy systems aren't going anywhere. AWS announced the mainframe service last year for converting mainframe code into cloud workloads, and it's just not taking on the, I think, the way that the Amazon would like, and that's a reality that is too complex for all of it to run in the cloud. >> Paul: So it sounds like the strategy is to envelop and consume then if you have mainframe conversion services and HP-UX in the cloud, I mean, you're talking about serious legacy stuff there. >> Keith: You're talking about serious legacy stuff. They haven't de-emphasized their relationship with VMware. You know, hybrid is not a place, it is a operating model. So VMware cloud on AWS allows you to do both models concurrently if you have those applications that need layer two. You have these workloads that just don't... SAP just doesn't... Sorry, AWS, SAP in the cloud and EC2 just doesn't make financial sense. It's a reality. It's accepting of that and meeting customers where they're at. >> And all the collaboration, I mean, you've mentioned so many companies in that answer, and I think it's very interesting to see how much we're all going to have to work together to make the cloud its own operating system. Cloud as an OS came up on our last conversation here and I think it's absolutely fascinating. >> Keith: Yeah, cloud is the OS I think is a thing. This idea that I'm going to use the cloud as my base layer of abstraction. I've talked to a really interesting startup... Well actually it's a open source project cross plane of where they're taking that cloud model and now I can put my VMware vsphere, my AWS, GCP, et cetera, behind that and use that operating model to manage my overall infrastructure. So, the maturity of the market has fascinated me over the past year, year and a half. >> It really feels like we're at a new inflection point. I totally agree. I want to talk about something completely different. >> Keith: Okay. >> Because I know that we both did this challenge. So one of the things that's really inspiring quite frankly about being here at AWS reInvent, and I know you all at home don't have an opportunity to walk the floor and get the experience and get as many steps as Paul gets in, but there's a real emphasis on giving back. This community cares about giving back and AWS is doing a variety of different activations to donate to a variety of different charities. And there's a DJ booth. I've been joking. It kind of feels like you're arriving at a rave when you get to reInvent. And right next to that, there is a hydrate and help station with these reusable water bottles. This is actually firm. It's not one of those plastic ones that's going to end up in the recycled bin or the landfill. And every single time that you fill up your water bottle, AWS will donate $3 to help women in Kenya get access to water. One of the things that I found really fascinating about the activation is women in sub-Saharan Africa spend 16 million hours carrying water a day, which is a wild concept to think about, and water is heavy. Keith, my man, I know that you did the activation. They had you carrying two 20 pound jugs of water. >> Keith: For about 15 feet. It's not the... >> (laughs) >> 20 pound jugs of water, 20 gallons, whatever the amount is. It was extremely heavy. I'm a fairly sizeable guy. Six four, six five. >> You're in good shape, yeah. >> Keith: Couple of a hundred pounds. >> Yeah. >> Keith: And I could not imagine spending that many hours simply getting fresh water. We take it for granted. Every time I run the water in the sink, my family gets on me because I get on them when they leave the sink water. It's like my dad's left the light on. If you leave the water on in my house, you are going to hear it from me because, you know, things like this tickle in my mind like, wow, people walk that far. >> Savannah: That's your whole day. >> Just water, and that's probably not even enough water for the day. >> Paul: Yeah. We think of that as being, like, an 18th century phenomenon, but it's very much today in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. >> I know, and we're so privileged. For me, it was just, we work in technology. Everyone here is pretty blessed, and to do that activation really got my head in the right space to think, wow I'm so lucky. The team here, the fabulous production team, can go refill my water bottle. I mean, so simple. They've also got a fitness activation going on. You can jump on a bike, a treadmill, and if you work out for five minutes, they donate $5 to Fred Hutch up in Seattle. And that was nice. I did a little cross-training in between segments yesterday and I just, I really love seeing that emphasis. None of this matters if we're not taking care of community. >> Yeah, I'm going to go out and google Fred Hutch, and just donate the five bucks. 'Cause I'm not, I'm not. >> (laughs) >> I'll run forever, but I'm not getting on a bike. >> This from a guy who did 100 5Ks in a row last year. >> Yeah. I did 100 5Ks in a row, and I'm not doing five minutes on a bike. That's it. That's crazy, right? >> I mean there is a treadmill And they have the little hands workout thing too if you want. >> About five minutes though. >> Savannah: I know. >> Like five minutes is way longer than what you think it is. >> I mean, it's true. I was up there in a dress in sequence. Hopefully, I didn't scar any anyone on the show floor yesterday. It's still toss up. >> I'm going to take us back to back. >> Take us back Paul. >> Back to what we were talking about. I want to know what you're hearing. So we've had a lot of people on this show, a lot of vendors on the show who have said AWS is our most important cloud partner, which would imply that AWS's lead is solidifying its lead and pulling away from the pack as the number one. Do you hear that as well? Or is that lip service? >> Keith: So I always think about AWS reInvent as the Amazon victory lap. This is where they come and just thumb their noses at all the other cloud providers and just show how far ahead they're are. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon's keynotes, so I hadn't watched it yet, but at that keynote, this is where they literally take the victory lap and say that we're going to expose what we did four or five years ago on stage, and what we did four or five years ago is ahead of every cloud provider with maybe the exception of GCP and they're maybe three years behind. So customers are overwhelmingly choosing Amazon for these reasons. Don't get me wrong, Corey Quinn, Gardner folks, really went at Adam yesterday about Amazon had three majors outages in December last year. AWS has way too many services that are disconnected, but from the pure capability, I talked to a born in the cloud data protection company who could repatriate their data protection and storage on-prem private data center, save money. Instead, they double down on Amazon. They're using, they modernize their application and they're reduced their cost by 60 to 70%. >> Massive. >> This is massive. AWS is keeping up with customers no matter where they're at on the spectrum. >> Savannah: I love that you use the term victory lap. We've had a lot of folks from AWS here up on the show this week, and a couple of them have said they live for this. I mean, and it's got to be pretty cool. You've got 70 thousand plus people obsessed with your product and so many different partners doing so many different things from the edge to hospital to the largest companies on earth to the Israeli Ministry of Defense we were just talking about earlier, so everybody needs the cloud. I feel like that's where we're at. >> Keith: Yeah, and the next step, I think the next level opportunity for AWS is to get to that analyst or that citizen developer, being able to enable the end user to use a lambda, use these data services to create new applications, and the meanwhile, there's folks on the show floor filling that gap that enable develop... the piece of owner, the piece of parlor owner, to create a web portal that compares his prices and solutions to other vendors in his area and adjust dynamically. You go into a restaurant now and there is no price menu. There's a QR code that Amazon is powering much of that dynamic relationship between the restaurateur, the customer, and even the menu and availability. It's just a wonderful time. >> I always ask for the print menu. I'm sorry. >> Yeah. You want the printed menu. >> Look down, my phone doesn't work. >> Gimme something I could shine my light on. >> I know you didn't have have a chance to look at Vogel's keynote yet, but I mean you mentioned citizen developer. One of the things they announced this morning was essentially a low code lambda interface. So you can plug, take your lamb dysfunctions and do drag and drop a connection between them. So they are going after that market. >> Keith: So I guess I'll take my victory lap because that was my prediction. That's where Amazon's next... >> Well done, Keith. >> Because Lambda is that thing when you look at what server list was and the name of the concept of being, not having to have to worry about servers in your application development, the logical next step, I won't take too much of a leap. That logical first step is, well, code less code. This is something that Kelsey Hightower has talked about a lot. Low code, no code, the ability to empower people without having these artificial barriers, learning how to code in a different language. This is the time where I can go to Valencia, it's pronounced, where I can go to Valencia and not speak Spanish and just have my phone. Why can't we do, at business value, for people who have amazing ideas and enable those amazing ideas before I have to stick a developer in between them and the system. >> Paul: Low-code market is growing 35% a year. It's not surprising, given the potential that's out there. >> And as a non-technical person, who works in technology, I've been waiting for this moment. So keep predicting this kind of thing, Keith. 'Cause hopefully it'll keep happening. Keith, I'm going to give you the challenge we've been giving all of our guests this week. >> Keith: Okay. >> And I know you're going to absolutely crush this. So we are looking for your 32nd Instagram real, sizzle hot take, biggest takeaway from this year's show. >> So 32nd Instagram, I'll even put it on TikTok. >> Savannah: Heck yeah. >> Hybrid cloud, hybrid infrastructure. This is way bigger than Amazon. Whether we're talking about Amazon, AWS, I mean AWS's solutions, Google Cloud, Azure, OCI, on-prem. Customers want it all. They want a way to manage it all, and they need the skill and tools to enable their not-so-growing work force to do it. That is, that's AWS reInvent 2019 to 2022. >> Absolutely nailed it. Keith Townsend, it is always such a joy to have you here on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us >> Savannah Page. Great to have you. Paul, you too. You're always a great co-host. >> (laughs) We co-hosted for three days. >> We've got a lot of love for each other here. And we have even more love for all of you tuning into our fabulous livestream from AWS reInvent Las Vegas, Nevada, with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of the cube coverage here at VMware VMware Explorer, not world 12 years. The Cube's been covering VMware is end user conference this year. It's called explore previously world. We got two great guests, friends of the cube friend, cube, alumni and cloud rod, Keith Townson, principal CTO advisor, air streaming his way into world this year in a big way. Congratulations. And course James Erhard principal technology, a at tan zoo cloud ARA. He's been in cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time, even before cloud was cloud. So great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to >>Be here. So day threes are kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will, will trash it. We'll debate. It'll be controversial and say this damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tansu, but really the end of the game is, is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're we're totally into it. And we've been saying infrastructure is code as the end state. We want to get there. Right? DevOps and infrastructure is code has always been the, the, the underlying fire burning in, in all the innovation, but it's now getting legitimately enterprised it's adopted in, in, in large scale, Amazon web services. We saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I gotta say, you know, the Broadcom thing has put like an electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem cuz they don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of gotta spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous, energy or excitement around something happening, it's all cloud native. So, you know, as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi cloud's the story. Right? So, so messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys let's, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream you're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you what's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future. >>Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing. And what I mean by that is the, the abstractions that sort of bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is, is the strong evidence of that. But also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that we're strong evidence of that. So I think what's, what's starting to happen now then is, is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from, from anything other than saying, I need compute, I need network. I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we've figured out how to do that at a team level, like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or, or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right >>Now. I mean the, the developer we talking, we're going on camera before you came on camera Keith around, you know, your contr statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry. It's, it's at an all time high and relative to euphoria, you know, sit on the beach with sunglasses. You couldn't be better if you were a developer open source, booming, everything's driving to their doorstep, self service. They're at the center of the security conversation, which shift left. Yeah. There's some things there, but it's, it's a good time. If you're a developer now is VMware gonna be changing that and, and you know, are they gonna meet the developers where they are? Are they gonna try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but, but you have a take on this, Keith, what's your, what's your position on this? How do the developer experience core and tangential played? >>Yeah, we're I think we're doing a disservice to the industry and I think it's hurting and, or D I think I'm gonna stand by my statement. It's damaging the in industry to, to an extent VMware >>What's damaging to the >>Industry. The focusing over focusing on developer experience developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience the, the detriment of infrastructure, the infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core to meet the developer where the developer, the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when we're, when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations, like adding block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer down the road? >>It should mean nothing because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right. >>It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay. >>I see the damage there. The, >>The, when you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just simply provide Dr. Service for my on-prem service to this new block level stores, because I can do that in a enterprise today. Non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap and we're, you know, and then I think we, we, when buyers look at what we say, and we, we say VMware, isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds. I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the, the, the, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way. I gotta talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and, and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space, the right >>Latitude. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay. If I'm a, if the developers are key to the, to the cloud native role, which I, I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want, and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting the weeds in which some lot people love to do. I wanna just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service, I don't care about locking someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm gonna just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure. And I'm moving on being creative and doing my thing, building apps. Okay. That's the kind of the generic, generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to >>Get there? Yeah. Someone, someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move as 400, still propagate the data center. They're still H P X running SAP, E there's still, you know, 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP. And most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Yeah. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do Dr. Between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes, the, the Kubernetes consuming that, that work isn't done. Yeah. It >>Is. It's an >>Opportunity. It's on paper. >>It's an opportunity though. It's not, I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix a lot of gaps. All right. I want Jay, I wanna bring you in, because we had a panel at super cloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, beaker was on here. Yeah. He's always snarky, but he's building, he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his, his hands dirty, rolling up his sleeves. The title of panel was originally called the innovators dilemma with a question, mark, you know, haha you know, innovators, dilemma, little goof on that. Cuz you know, there's challenges and trade offs like, like he's talking about, he says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state. >>But there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are, are key to this API security. One of the most talked about things. I mean I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So yeah. I mean I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. Yeah. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked. And so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so, so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations, what's your read on this to make the complexity go away. You guys have the, the chaos rain here, which I actually like that Dave does too, but you know, Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that reign in the chaos mode. Now what's your take on what Keith was saying around. Yeah. >>So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's it's there's in fact, and, and I, I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's there's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level works with VMs works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available, makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. >>It makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications, but ultimately creates an in environment that begins to pull away from having to know, to write code about infrastructure. Right. And so infrastructure's, code's great. But if you have a right platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually D declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. Yeah. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing >>With. Yeah. I remember when we first Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, gonna go out and a couple companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds and our, our dream at that time was Hey. And, and we, we mentioned and Stratus in our, our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that now look at Kubernetes. Now it's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me, that's not nowhere in the market today. Nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds. >>It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was, was using AKs for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS. And they said it took them a couple of hours to, to get through the few issues they ran into. >>Yeah. I talked to a customer who who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle cloud on Oracle cloud's VMware solution. And he raved about now he has a inherent backup Dr. For his O CVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And >>How did he do >>That? The, there there's a solution. And this is where the white space is. James talked about in the past exists. When, when I go to a conference like Cuban, the cube will be there in, in Detroit, in, in, in about 45 days or so. I talk to platform group at the platform group. That's doing the work that VMware red had hash Corp all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim while we rave and, and talk about the power Kubernetes. That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of their, for the platform right now there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap one, 1.3. And the thing that I'm surprised, the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever, and now it, it just magically happens. The marketing at the end of developing the application. Think if you're in you're, you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications, there's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. >>Well guys, thanks for coming on the cube. I really appreciate we're on a time deadline, which we're gonna do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. No problem. See you pleasure. Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with more live coverage. You, after this short break, stay with us.

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio today, the COVID thing is continuing to go, and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world. Those things have all been canceled or made virtual, and everyone's still trying to figure out, what does a virtual event look like, what are the characteristics of it, and we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us, Keith jumped in with both feet, right when this thing went down, and said "I'm going to have my own CTO Advisor "virtual conference," so first off, Keith, I miss you, great to see you, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time, so great to see you, how are you doing? >> Good to see you, if it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. >> So tell us about your decision to jump in with both feet, and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. >> So I talked about this a little bit on a random, just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from in-person events. And plus my brand, The CTO Advisor, is tied to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content, kind of on the ground, guerrilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution for most things, one, we feed off the energy of the community, so we need to be on the ground as much as possible, so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions, and two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problems, so we jumped in, head in, to say "Let's do a virtual event." I don't know if I would've done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. >> So before we jump into the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug, when is it, where should people go, registration I assume is still open, want to just get that out there for the folks. >> So even if you see this after registration closes, quote unquote closes, it's April 21st, >> 10: 30 AM central to 3:30 PM central, that's US time. You can register at CTOAdvisorVirtualConference.com. >> Excellent, so let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things as you said in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space, and there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event, almost by definition, is now you've broken up the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date. The actual display, or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you worked with this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world, and how are you finding it in terms of actually day to day execution? >> So you guys have done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in theCUBE studio, you have commercial internet, it's fairly reliable when you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference-centered, but it's still enterprise class internet access, so you can do real-time video on theCUBE fine. We can go to Cube.tv, Cube.net, and see what you guys are doing real-time, and it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in, remote to you, while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event, so in a background, you'll see that we're in Keith Townsend's basement, the other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content, because there's not much value in it being live, if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about theCUBE, is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground, they're watching it live, they're interacting with it live, we're tweeting about it, so how do you reproduce, if not that exact feeling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content, and that's what we focused on, creating high quality video content, that you can consume, kind of as a watch party, so on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time, so that you can enjoy the community, and the speakers who are presenting, you can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running, and they're able to interact with you, so we've embraced the medium, and then after the fact of course we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact, 'cause the majority of people will watch it after the video's done. >> All right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have, approximately? >> So we have I think 21 sessions, in a five hour period, so we're running three separate tracks, two super techy, geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself, and we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. >> Right, you know it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue, that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent-sized venue, it'd be expensive, and then you would have to pick your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in, and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing, and so it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions, is really a function of what you can manage, or what the community can kind of self-organize, you're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Sands Convention Center, and the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event, because they're actually presenting, so, we had a guy in the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about a car is not a mechanical horse, it's not the same, digital's not the same as physical, and there are some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. >> Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of put off by the idea of, "Wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? "How will I interact with webinars now?" And I think this is the other end of the spectrum, Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too, it's not a in-person event, and it's also not a webinar, so don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned, phony questions that some people have behind the scenes, it is a real, authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service, I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left, I was watching the service, and the minister's delivering his sermon, and in the Zoom meeting, there he is, playing with his little two year old daughter, while he's giving the talk, and I just opened chat at him, and next thing I know there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand, so it is a really unique experience. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point, it's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not, and it can't be a webinar, and when we were first going through this kind of shake-up, and we were really trying to identify some of those things, and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar, 'cause what's a webinar, it's generally a one way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there, and they only open it up to Q&A at the very end, and it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in, and you don't know how they're picking, and it only goes to the hosts, so, really having an open, live engagement around an engaged group of people, with a piece of content as kind of the coalescing of those people, really, it's not a webinar, it's a very different kind of experience, and sounds like you're really embracing that. >> Yeah, it'll never replace a live event, live has, again we talked about the energy, the, people are like "Do you really "want to smell the Sands, Keith?" You know what, it's all part of the energy, it's instant reminders to "Oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here," and you have these instant cues that we as humans love, we don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it'll augment, I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment theCUBE once we return to physical events. >> Yeah, I mean I think this behavior that we're now been forced to engage in, in terms of increased working from home, and kind of increased use of videoconferencing, and that is a different communication mode, I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually, I think if you look at what a conference is, there's a couple different tracks, as you said, there's the expression going around, kind of the rally moment, right, the keynote, we want, we have a strong message, the CEO wants to get something out, and I think that's of tremendous value, but then you look at all the breakout sessions and the information flow and the community engagement, those quite frankly can be done online much more efficiently and with much less cost, so will the new conference be kind of this, the celebration and basically a customer appreciation event, they want to have a party, but really that, I don't think it will be quite the information flow, 'cause why should product group A wait until the conference date, if they're ready to release their information, and wait for product group B or C or D, so this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas, I don't think it makes any sense, you know, it's Waterfall versus DevOps, and if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why hold the information back, it really doesn't make sense, and decouple the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will, and the education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter 2021, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it, I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams super interesting as folks like theCUBE, The CTO Advisor, we're able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it, that our partners will come and embrace. >> Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder, as you've been collecting your content for your show next week is that, the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall, surrounded by 10,000 people, in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world an alt-tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have as a distraction, it's really going to come in on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver, or else you're going to lose the audience, and I think it's going to be really interesting, people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning, and some of these tips and tricks, aren't going to carry the weight, because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp, it's got to be powerful, and it's got to be engaging, or people are just going to step away. >> And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how, when I take a break at a conference, I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference center, I might go back out to take a call, et cetera, but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get 'em to come back, they don't have to come back that day, or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal, so we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event, this is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event, a virtual event, you know what, you've got a third of your audience that first day, a third of the audience the next week, and then the rest of the audience creeps in over the next three or four weeks, and how do you engage them, how do you get them to come back, and ultimately consume your content and your message? It's something that I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet, but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. >> Yeah, but I think we have, right, in the way, how do you consume video today, how do you find information, right, you go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right, and right now the biggest phenom in pop media is the Tiger King, right, so when do people watch the Tiger King, how do they hear about the Tiger King, when do they actually sit down and watch it, has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages, I say "Hey, Keith, have you seen the new episode?" So when you look at consumption patterns, to me it's really interesting, it's kind of bifurcated, you either binge watch, and just really get into something that you're into, and you just go go go for hours and hours and hours, or you're getting snippets, you're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits, and I think it's this kind of ugly middle, where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out, and I think it's really going to kind of bifurcate, and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways, and piece parts, and you don't have to necessarily kind of sit through kind of a straight row consumption as a captive audience, I think the opportunity's really really good, if the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things of course as well. >> So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot, and one of our co-hosts on theCUBE, and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn, and he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say "You know what, I'm going to live tweet this session "from three months ago," and that refreshes the conversation, it's not about when the content was created, it's about the conversation, as long as it's relevant, and finding mediums to help amplify that message. >> Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity, you know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right, and Live Nation around concerts, they had that particular event when you go to the show, and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right, extending the glow after, and also kind of building the excitement before, and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played, and I think we've got the same opportunity here, that's why again if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up, and you can get it back out there again, and then again hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community, and you talked about QuinnyPig, @QuinnyPig I think is his Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration, and I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet, I know you do a lot of that, so working with other influencers if you will, or other people in the communities, and introducing each other's community to one another, I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities, and if there's some overlap there then they both have kind of a win-win, and again I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once, it really opens up this opportunity for much more win-win, let's work together, and build community together, cross leverage, versus it's either yours or mine, and it's really more of a competitive thing. >> And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers, and you bring up a really interesting concept. Our friends at VMware's going to be putting on VMworld in the next few months, and they usually had a US conference and a European conference, were both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit the live experience to the US timezone? Why can't I cater this, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event, it's going to be a all-out hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe, and the US, and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone, and cross-pollinating, so that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the US event, or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital, so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. >> Yeah, yeah, and I'm just going to get one more concept, which I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it, but if you think of the value to the company, let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there, and again we talked about this rallying moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides, now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees' point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience, or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people, and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one way communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically, 'cause there's so much institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. >> Yeah, two points, two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house, at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to to kind of do a five, eight second "Hey, this is the Townsend family, "happy Easter," and then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family after family after family that I recognize, saying "Hi, happy Easter," so you have that moment, and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well, they amplify end user content, there was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours, went viral. You have these opportunities, again, to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day, one of my attendees and presenters said "You know what, Keith, the virtual conference "is such a democratizing event because "it enables me, whether I could not afford "to go to a conference before, "or I couldn't travel, or whatever reasons "I could not attend a conference before," the virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. >> Yeah, it's great, so again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts, and again, for everybody, April 21st 2020, next week, >> 10: 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. >> You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. >> All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue covering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi, I'm stew Minutemen. And this is the Cube Worldwide Leader and live tech coverage. >> We're on the ground here at the V Tug winter warmer, and it is twenty nineteen. It's actually, the thirteenth year of this event was one of the original, if not the original Veum, where user groups covers virtual ization, cloud computing and even Mohr, always great to be able to get back to the community, get some good interviews and no better person helped me start with my first interview at a show of the year. But good friend of the program, Keith Towns and he is the CTO advisor. And he's also now a slew front architect with the M. Where Keith. Thanks for joining >> us. Thanks for having me on the cute. >> Yeah. So, Keith, I mean, you were host of our program for a number of years. You're now, you know, back working on the vendor side. But you know, you know this community. You know what I always say in my career, There, certain communities, an ecosystem where there's just love to be a part of it. And the virtual ization group. You know, I've been part of it for a long time. You know, Veum, wear and beyond, though, you know people that you know, they get excited, They geek out on the technology and they love to share. And that's why we come to events like this. >> Yeah, it is amazing. Just, you know, the every every show is getting smaller, but maybe with the session of a Ws re event, but I don't think the intensity has shrunk at all. You get around friends, you know, we're just at a desk and one of the ten days, actually, how did I get a job doing X? And the community was like, Oh, you just talk to the people at this table. So it is. It is a great, great commute. >> Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic you talk about. You know, we've seen the huge growth in Meetups in user groups and regional shows. You know, vm Where does Veum World but the VM world being where forums around the globe. I'm sure you probably have to go for a few of those they've been doing well. I'm right back in my emcee Daisy M. C. Did a number of those. So we see you. Amazon Reinvent is growing, but oh, my God, they're regional shows are ridiculous. I I've said some of those regional shows either different communities or different localities can actually be even better than some of the big shows on. You know, we love Keith. We're happy to welcome you here to the home of the NFC Championship. New England Patriots ur >> First off, Congratulations. The wait went a little better for you to bare sand and say, You know what? Tom Brady won't play forever, so enjoy it. This is amazing backdrop through him. Little finish that you've not involved. Invited me to a veto before now. >> Oh. Oh, I'm sorry, Keith. It's It's a community thing that absolutely got to come. Absolutely. I've had friends. Most of them. It is local. I'm talking to users from Maine and Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut and like so you gave a keynote this morning and you didn't True fashion. You did a block post about reality check leading in, and I thought it was a great way for us to start is, You know, there's so much change in the industry, uh, those of us that are technologies that you know, we're super excited because there's so much new stuff. It's not like Oh, jeez, you know, twenty nineteen is probably going to be just like twenty eighteen. It's like, Oh, my gosh, what did I do in twenty eighteen? What do I have to change? How do I keep up? How do I manage it? I would love to get your viewpoint. You know what's going on with Keith? And you're talking about a lot of users, so you know how help share, You know, what is the reality? Check that everybody's going >> to know. We're talking about a pre recording in the banter. Just, you know, whether it's, you know, Vienna where we're hip Theo and all the stuff that Casey Kelsey Hightower is going out with Cooper Netease. Then as you spent spent out to serve earless, uh, infrastructures Cole scripting it centre. There's much to learn that you're a bit overwhelmed and we're seeing this out. You know, as I'm talking to executive CTO CEOs, VP of infrastructure, they're filling the same kind of excitement at the same time. Overwhelmed this Like what? What's what's really You know, we had the big cloud movements over a few years ago where I think we're at the height cycle where organizations are starting to understand that. You know, Cloud isn't the destination is part of a strategy, and everyone seems to be in the throes of figuring out what that means for us. We're just on the crowd chat, talking about multi Cloud and the drivers around. Multi Cloud. You guys did a great job hosting that cloud shit chat, nothing. We saw the gambit off where people are. You know, uh, there's not really a business rationality people who are really in the throes of trying to figure it out. >> Yeah, actually, I love to comment friend of ours that we've had on the program before, Bobby Allen from Cloud General said when he's working with companies, if they ask for a three year strategy plan, he said, I will not do it unless we guarantee that we will go revisit it every six months because I looked back. You know, Clay Christensen, you no way talks about strategy is strategy is a point in time thing, not something that you write it in stone. I've been saying for a couple of years cloud strategies that companies today is, they wrote it in ink and the ink still drying. And, you know, you're probably going to need toe, you know, go through it and change it because it is changing fast and therefore, you know, huge. Out I started Deploy something. Oh, wait, what about the next thing? Or there's some new practice or something to do it. So it is challenging because I need to run my business. Today. I got to set my budget for the year, usually, um and it's I need to be agile. But, you know, I can't constantly be tearing everything up and you're not going to be throwing it out or re training and skills. I mean, there's so many challenges. >> So still, you might remember when when I was on the other side of the the table. I, uh it was meant at somewhat of a D that Veum where moves at the speed of the aisle, and it was picked up as Maury compliment. But >> it was a >> big I'll be honest that it was a dig. And what I've learned the past few months is that Veum, where has to move at the speed of the CIA, is no longer and It's not just being wherever the community has and the CIA always faced with that we could do a few years ago. A cloud strategy, and that thing can sit on the desk for a year, and it would still be valid. But the bobbies point, if you're going to do a strategy and three year strategy, got to revisit that every six months and this agility that were not accustomed to previously in the industry, we have to now become super agile and figure out how do we keep the lights on and innovate at the pace That business, these witches? Pretty good chance. >> Yeah, it's attorney were beginning the year I made a comment personally said, You know, I'm not a big believer in, you know, setting. You know, Resolutions. Mohr. You know, let's set goals Your runner, I do some biking and it's like, Okay, you know, I've got a big race I want to do this year. I'm gonna work myself, you know, towards that goal and raise the money. You've got a certain target and something that you could do over the year. It's and there's no way that you do that, cos you know they've got goals that they need to accomplish and business. And it's great to say, Oh, well, we need to be more efficient. We need to do some down something different. But, you know, reality is, you know, it's not just digital transformation of modernizing. It was, you know. Oh, okay. Do I need to transform my backup? You know, data protection, you know, huge activity going on in the marketplace right now, you know? So, what >> is sixty million noon investment in one >> week? Exactly. You know, the wave of hyper convergence is one that really changed a lot of architectures and had people change. You know, we've talked cloud computing. They're what are some of the, You know, some of the big, you know, movements that you see, you know, will you? Tracking the industry? It was kind of the the intel refunds for a cycle, and, you know, Oh, well, it's the next version of Microsoft or, you know, Veum, where operating system would be one of those big, you know, kind of ticked. Talks of what? What are some of the big commonalities that you're seeing Al? So they're actually moving people to >> new things without a doubt. There is one conversation that customers cannot get the enough of. And I had Ah, on my little vlog. I had game being from Vienna, where V P off the Storch and Business availability unit and I challenged her on the via Where? Vision around this. But customers cannot get enough of having a conversation around data. What they What do they do with data? And how does a move data? How did they get compute closest to data? How did we get data they're closest to? They're re sources. We talked about it on the multi cloud conversation, but by far conversations are around. Howto they extract value from data had really protect data, and howto they make sure their compliant with the data is something that that's driving a lot of innovation and a lot of conversation. A lot of interest. >> Yeah, Keith, it's a great one. When I look at you know, our research team, that wicked bond data is that the center of everything. In many ways, the failings of big data was talking about, You know, the challenges. I have infrastructure. No, the growth and the variety and blah, blah, blah and everything that's not what important to the business they don't care about, You know, it's like, Oh, well, there's a storage problem in a network problem. It's the business says there's data, you know? Do I protect my bird business to make sure that I'm not a risk? You know, all the things like DDP are coming And can I livered value? Do I Can I get new lines of business? Can I generate revenue out of that? And I've seen early signs that we've learned this whole, You know, a I m l movement. You know, data, Really? At the center. All right, we've seen enough storage. We went from talking about storing data to about, you know, that data ecosystem, Andi, even computing and I ot data where data needs to be, how I work it. Absolutely a center. So, yeah, it's great to hear that. Customers are identifying that. We've been doing like, chief data officer events for many years. You know, where does data live? Is that a CEO Thing? Is that a different part of the business? I don't know if you've got anything you're seeing from, you know, your customers is Tau, >> who owns the Data initiative, So it's really interesting. I had a conversation with a major bank, and it was a one on one with the CDO and what I thought was the most tricky part of the conversation is that here, Not only does he report directly into the CIA, which you know is to be expected, but he meets regularly with the board of directors. So data were seen. I've seen these seedy old rolls being popped up, and it's not just about the technology as you mentioned. It's about the whole approach about this asset that we have. It's so critical that worth creating a sea level position that today might reporting to the CEO but is most definitely accountable to the border director. >> Well, yeah, Keith, it's that the trend we've been watching for a while, as it used to be, it was a cost center. And, you know, it's kind of, you know, that's what it was considered today. If it isn't in, you know, direct relationship, working with the business, the business will go find somebody else to do it. The whole stealthy movement. You know, I can go find an answer for what I'm doing. I think about project I've worked on in my career and been like, I wish it was easy. You know, fifteen years ago, it was today to do those. But we see security's a board level discussion data as a board level discussion is excellent. And all of those things that traditionally you would think that own them. Having awareness and visibility and information communication flow between the board in the C suite is great progress. You >> know, it's interesting. I was a big proponent of this prior to coming on The vendor side is that vendors have to start having conversations outside of it. So traditional infrastructure of injustice, his goal. Hurry, right saw and where the whole the Dale emcee Dale Technologies they have to skill up and have conversations with CIA moles. Seo's CEO Ole's H R directors because the these buying centers now have power to go out and buy solutions. You know, talked about in my no keynote this morning. You know how many people have worked day? How many people have salesforce applications? They had nothing to do when I had no nothing to do with the procurement of off these solutions. The ball is moving outside of just traditional for court technology is starting to get to the point where regular users can consume business users can consume these massive, massive solutions based on technology and just happens to be a label. The technology, whether sales Force worked in >> Sochi, thought on this this whole point there want to ask you, In my career, there's often been groups inside a business that didn't get along. And we, you know, built silos. You know, the storage in the network team don't get along cloud and traditional I t You know what we're fighting? You know who owns it? Turf wars Managing that, You know, have we built silos in multi cloud today? Is everybody holding hands and, you know, pointing the business in the same direction, you could kind of give us the good the bad. So what? We need to work on going forward. >> I think the good is that you know that the umbrella of infrastructure starting to work as a single. Uh, you So you have storage, compu networking, even configuration man groups that were kind of confrontational before and territorial. Those groups are starting. Tio. Come on. Their one senior manager or one senior executive looking at? How do you provide services as a group and providing those services? I think we're we're starting to see Silos is actually the developer versus the infrastructure group is developers just wantto FBI, too. A set of services. They want infrastructure to get away. Developers themselves. Haven't you know, kind of katende enough of the scars from heaven have to do operations, So there's a different view off the world. And, uh, today I think developers haven't yet getting the budget power off operations. But the business wants solutions, and they're going out there competing with traditional Teo get the dollars to run the services in the cloud or or wherever, however they consumed them, whether it's, you know, just saw Chick fil a's deploying two thousand ten points to run six thousand containers at the edge. Is that something that's run by tears? That something wrong? Run by developers? I don't know. Check feeling well enough to know about. This is what we're seeing in >> industry. Yeah. All right. Well, keep towns. And always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check him out see Teo advisor on Twitter, check out his blogged. And of course, thank you so much for watching. We'll be back. Uh, lots more coverage here at V tug. Winter warmer, twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome inside the VM Village at VMworld 2018 where we have a nice, big set. Double set of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host John Troyer and wait, Keith Townsend? >> Did you mess up the intro? >> Oh my gosh. (Keith chuckling) Luckily, the great thing about VMworld is it's got a great community. Remember a couple of years ago, had a couple of my staff that weren't going to be here and I'm like oh my gosh, what do we do? So I reached out to community members. John Troyer, Keith Townsend. I said hey, guys, how'd you like to do some CUBE stuff? Keith did a whole bunch of CUBE with us for a couple of years and something happened. You decided to go and take a real job? >> Evidently, you can't live off borrowed time for too long. It catches up with you. But VMware, obviously, world-class organization. I've been on the other side interview folks on here so I've gotten a good window in to the org over the past couple of years, thanks to theCUBE. >> Yeah, well, Keith, look, first of all, thank you for all the time you did. We call you the once and future guest host of theCUBE. (both laughing) So we have not seen the end of Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. You're now a solutions architect, though, at VMware. If people want, go read Keith's blog. Great resource to the community as to looking at jobs. Keith didn't apply to VMware once or twice, it was one of those you keep trying and eventually you found a pretty sweet job. >> Yeah. >> Maybe give us a little insight as to what brought you, what excited you to come join VMware? You've know the community, been a vExpert. Been a watcher and a partner and a customer of VMware. What's it like being inside, wearing that logo? >> I've said on theCUBE, a couple of times, VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. You can take that one of two different ways. You can say VMware is really slow organization, or they go right where the CIO needs them to go. The thing the intrigued me about VMware all the time is that no company is better positioned to walk through digital transformation than VMware. As seen by the announcements this morning. VMware is struggling through, we're struggling through to find our way through what it is that the right combination of partnerships, technologies, people, process to help companies transition to this new digital age and that is an exciting thing to be a part of. >> Definitely interesting times. I'm sure there's a number of companies that would say hi, Microsoft, Amazon, and the like, that we think we're pretty well positioned to lead companies to where you need to go. But definitely interesting stuff in the keynote. That maturation of cloud and networking. Put your CTO Advisor hat on there. How're they doing? >> This is where I got, I tweeted it out earlier that man, I got to be careful, because some of the stuff that I want to tweet I'm like, oh, I can't say that as a VMware employee. But I can say definitely, I was surprised at the RDS announcement and people love the VMware ESXi on ARM. Two amazing announcements, but what really excited me was the RDS announcement. On theCUBE, I've pushed Chris Wolf, I've pushed Lee Caswell, all of these GMs, these BU GMs, about when is the innovation going to come out of VMware again? Let's not just get V1 updates. Why should somebody upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.7? Give us a compelling reason. I think this morning we heard some really compelling stuff. RDS on vSphere is, I can't overstate how disruptive of an innovation that is. >> That could be really interesting. I like what you said in the beginning about the digital transformation. I think we also heard this morning the word digital foundation a lot, which is, again, one of my goals here for this show, Stu and Keith, is to pin down what does VMware do? What does it do? And it's not quite fair, because it has quite a wide portfolio but it seems to me, Keith, that it feels like the early days when I was there. You had to work with a whole set of OEMs in the hypervisor and some of the same things are happening with a whole bunch of clouds and working as a neutral Switzerland or partners with all them. But I was actually wanting to pivot over a little bit over to you as a communicator and as a member of the community. You were a customer. You worked for a large pharmaceutical company and ran a lot of billion dollars worth of stuff. You chose to become a communicator and an explainer and to be part of the learning process and buying process as an independent. Now back on the vendor side. Is there anything in that journey you've learned about 2018 about how people learn and how IT people figure this stuff. How do I even know where to go or what to buy or even what to consider? Any insights into that? >> So John, that's a really great question. I went on a run this morning, the vFit Run. We do it every year at VMworld and I was with VMUG CEO, Brad Tompkins. And we actually talked about this. vSphere admins want all the vSphere content that they can consume. In reality, they need to transition from just being focused on vSphere, vSphere, vSphere, and VXLAN and NSX to this broader picture. Pat on stage this morning talked through PKS, which is Kubernetes, he talked a little bit of serverless. I mean, from a CEO of a software company, that was a lot to consume just on the stage this morning. So you can be a deer in the headlights and think, what should I focus on? I think the thing to focus on, one of my peers gave a talk, well two of my peers, Craig Fletcher, who brought me into VMware, and Joseph Griffith, gave a talk today on culture. And this is about culture. The culture to learn and grow. You don't necessarily have to learn a specific technology, but you should most definitely have the attitude that if the CXO comes to me and asks me about X business process, I need to know a high level answer to that and how do I get there? Simple, simple steps is learn your business processes. I'll throw just one out there. Order to cash. Every organization has some process from when they either request money, they place an order, and how they eventually get paid. If you learn that process, the technology bits I think fall in place. >> Yeah it's an interesting point. I've talked to some of the users here, and they were a little bit overwhelmed this morning. I don't think there's anybody at this show, that if you put them in front of the CEO of their company, and said, okay tell me everything VMware's doing. (Keith laughing) Nobody can explain that. Nobody inside VMware nobody out. There's too much. Part of the answer I get all the time, is how do I keep up? Look, you're not going to keep up on everything. You need to have, I think the role you're in now Keith, is part of helping customers understand what are the things they need to understand, what are the steps they can be taking in the areas they need to learn and the things they can lean on you and your partners to get there. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah I did a podcast with Brian Gracely maybe about a year, a year and half ago and we talked about this very topic. At the highest level, you just need, from a CIO perspective, CIO, CTO, and if you don't have a CTO, that's probably step one. But from a CIO perspective, you need someone who can just think about big picture, how the moving parts work. And then you need people to go deep and different areas. I talked to a financial services senior VP and he was talking through how he needed today a Pivotal guy But tomorrow that Pivotal guy would not need to be a Pivotal guy but a Kubernetes guy specifically. And how that guy would morph into something else so he's structured in his organization. So that he can, hey today, this guy or gal knows this technology stack but more important, they know systems and they can adjust and learn the technology that they need to learn to be effective. Because even as an analyst, near the end of the CTO Advisor as a full time opportunity, I thought about focusing all on VMware, because the company's that big now. Pat on stage said one of the things they learned from AWS, is how to add features every quarter. Stu, if I told you five years ago VMware would add a feature every quarter, the culture just isn't there, until now. >> Yeah, so, Keith, that's a really interesting point. That pace of change, because most people when you talk about vSphere upgrades, it was oh wow. It came out every year, every year and a half or so like that >> That's too fast >> I'm usually a couple generations behind. Every quarter there's no way I'm going to do that. We still have a bit of an impedance mismatch. When I go use the cloud, some of the base things happen under line. But other things I still need to choose or there's automation that will help me. How do we help CIOs, IT businesses to get to this more fluid, dynamic, upgradeable environment compared to the oh wait I need to consciously think about when do I upgrade, when do I move, how do I make those changes? >> So we have to get out of this mindset that IT is in this constant ops mode. Whether it's vSphere and the announcements that were made today or any other platform. We add no value by engineering upgrades. Putting time into designing and testing the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 update 1 really doesn't add value at the end of the day. VMware made critical announcements about the path to having VMware manage that. VMware cloud on AWS is a great example but the technologies are out there where we're no longer consuming our OSes. There's Linux distributions, there's Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows desktop ever and we'll get those updates directly from Microsoft. So we need to get out of the mindset that we add value as executives to managing upgrades and move our organizations where we're consuming these things as the black boxes they should be. >> Alright, so Keith, last question. What's surprised you so much, so far inside of VMware? >> You know what? I'm going to give an honest, raw answer to that, Stu. I'm not used to competing against my friends. (Stu laughing) It's one of those things, you know what, you got to make money, you got to win deals but both me and you have made a lot of friends, and John, we've made a lot of friends in this community. And you run into situations where you're pitting your technology against someone you just had dinner with last night or the week before at the last conference. And you've known for years and they're actually your friend. And keeping that competitive nature but at the same time maintaining your friendship, that's been surprisingly interesting. >> Alright, well hey, Keith, pleasure to catch up with you, as always, you're always welcome on our program in one of these seats. And yeah, absolutely, what I love about this community is that I see lots of people that are friends that are fierce competitors but they're grabbing out, hanging out at parties, taking selfies together, doing stuff like that. So, community, definitely key themes. Keith, thank you for being our community guest for today. Day one of three days live wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas, VMworld 2018. For John Troyer, the CTO Advisor Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas, "theCube" is on our fourth day of covering AWS re:Invent, live from the Venetian Expo Center. This week has been amazing. We've created a ton of content, as you know, 'cause you've been watching. But, there's been north of 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. We've had amazing conversations across the AWS ecosystem. Lisa Martin, Paul Gillan. Paul, what's your, kind of, take on day four of the conference? It's still highly packed. >> Oh, there's lots of people here. (laughs) >> Yep. Unusual for the final day of a conference. I think Werner Vogels, if I'm pronouncing it right kicked things off today when he talked about asymmetry and how the world is, you know, asymmetric. We build symmetric software, because it's convenient to do so, but asymmetric software actually scales and evolves much better. And I think that that was a conversation starter for a lot of what people are talking about here today, which is how the cloud changes the way we think about building software. >> Absolutely does. >> Our next guest, Holger Mueller, that's one of his key areas of focus. And Holger, welcome, thanks for joining us on the "theCube". >> Thanks for having me. >> What did you take away from the keynote this morning? >> Well, how do you feel on the final day of the marathon, right? We're like 23, 24 miles. Hit the ball yesterday, right? >> We are going strong Holger. And, of course, >> Yeah. >> you guys, we can either talk about business transformation with cloud or the World Cup. >> Or we can do both. >> The World Cup, hands down. World Cup. (Lisa laughs) Germany's out, I'm unbiased now. They just got eliminated. >> Spain is out now. >> What will the U.S. do against Netherlands tomorrow? >> They're going to win. What's your forecast? U.S. will win? >> They're going to win 2 to 1. >> What do you say, 2:1? >> I'm optimistic, but realistic. >> 3? >> I think Netherlands. >> Netherlands will win? >> 2 to nothing. >> Okay, I'll vote for the U.S.. >> Okay, okay >> 3:1 for the U.S.. >> Be optimistic. >> Root for the U.S.. >> Okay, I like that. >> Hope for the best wherever you work. >> Tomorrow you'll see how much soccer experts we are. >> If your prediction was right. (laughs) >> (laughs) Ja, ja. Or yours was right, right, so. Cool, no, but the event, I think the event is great to have 50,000 people. Biggest event of the year again, right? Not yet the 70,000 we had in 2019. But it's great to have the energy. I've never seen the show floor going all the way down like this, right? >> I haven't either. >> I've never seen that. I think it's a record. Often vendors get the space here and they have the keynote area, and the entertainment area, >> Yeah. >> and the food area, and then there's an exposition, right? This is packed. >> It's packed. >> Maybe it'll pay off. >> You don't see the big empty booths that you often see. >> Oh no. >> Exactly, exactly. You know, the white spaces and so on. >> No. >> Right. >> Which is a good thing. >> There's lots of energy, which is great. And today's, of course, the developer day, like you said before, right now Vogels' a rockstar in the developer community, right. Revered visionary on what has been built, right? And he's becoming a little professorial is my feeling, right. He had these moments before too, when it was justifying how AWS moved off the Oracle database about the importance of data warehouses and structures and why DynamoDB is better and so on. But, he had a large part of this too, and this coming right across the keynotes, right? Adam Selipsky talking about Antarctica, right? Scott against almonds and what went wrong. He didn't tell us, by the way, which often the tech winners forget. Scott banked on technology. He had motorized sleds, which failed after three miles. So, that's not the story to tell the technology. Let everything down. Everybody went back to ponies and horses and dogs. >> Maybe goes back to these asynchronous behavior. >> Yeah. >> The way of nature. >> And, yesterday, Swami talking about the bridges, right? The root bridges, right? >> Right. >> So, how could Werner pick up with his video at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> And then talk about space and other things? So I think it's important to educate about event-based architecture, right? And we see this massive transformation. Modern software has to be event based, right? Because, that's how things work and we didn't think like this before. I see this massive transformation in my other research area in other platforms about the HR space, where payrolls are being rebuilt completely. And payroll used to be one of the three peaks of ERP, right? You would size your ERP machine before the cloud to financial close, to run the payroll, and to do an MRP manufacturing run if you're manufacturing. God forbid you run those three at the same time. Your machine wouldn't be able to do that, right? So it was like start the engine, start the boosters, we are running payroll. And now the modern payroll designs like you see from ADP or from Ceridian, they're taking every payroll relevant event. You check in time wise, right? You go overtime, you take a day of vacation and right away they trigger and run the payroll, so it's up to date for you, up to date for you, which, in this economy, is super important, because we have more gig workers, we have more contractors, we have employees who are leaving suddenly, right? The great resignation, which is happening. So, from that perspective, it's the modern way of building software. So it's great to see Werner showing that. The dirty little secrets though is that is more efficient software for the cloud platform vendor too. Takes less resources, gets less committed things, so it's a much more scalable architecture. You can move the events, you can work asynchronously much better. And the biggest showcase, right? What's the biggest transactional showcase for an eventually consistent asynchronous transactional application? I know it's a mouthful, but we at Amazon, AWS, Amazon, right? You buy something on Amazon they tell you it's going to come tomorrow. >> Yep. >> They don't know it's going to come tomorrow by that time, because it's not transactionally consistent, right? We're just making every ERP vendor, who lives in transactional work, having nightmares of course, (Lisa laughs) but for them it's like, yes we have the delivery to promise, a promise to do that, right? But they come back to you and say, "Sorry, we couldn't make it, delivery didn't work and so on. It's going to be a new date. We are out of the product.", right? So these kind of event base asynchronous things are more and more what's going to scale around the world. It's going to be efficient for everybody, it's going to be better customer experience, better employee experience, ultimately better user experience, it's going to be better for the enterprise to build, but we have to learn to build it. So big announcement was to build our environment to build better eventful applications from today. >> Talk about... This is the first re:Invent... Well, actually, I'm sorry, it's the second re:Invent under Adam Selipsky. >> Right. Adam Selipsky, yep. >> But his first year. >> Right >> We're hearing a lot of momentum. What's your takeaway with what he delivered with the direction Amazon is going, their vision? >> Ja, I think compared to the Jassy times, right, we didn't see the hockey stick slide, right? With a number of innovations and releases. That was done in 2019 too, right? So I think it's a more pedestrian pace, which, ultimately, is good for everybody, because it means that when software vendors go slower, they do less width, but more depth. >> Yeah. >> And depth is what customers need. So Amazon's building more on the depth side, which is good news. I also think, and that's not official, right, but Adam Selipsky came from Tableau, right? >> Yeah. So he is a BI analytics guy. So it's no surprise we have three data lake offerings, right? Security data lake, we have a healthcare data lake and we have a supply chain data lake, right? Where all, again, the epigonos mentioned them I was like, "Oh, my god, Amazon's coming to supply chain.", but it's actually data lakes, which is an interesting part. But, I think it's not a surprise that someone who comes heavily out of the analytics BI world, it's off ringside, if I was pitching internally to him maybe I'd do something which he's is familiar with and I think that's what we see in the major announcement of his keynote on Tuesday. >> I mean, speaking of analytics, one of the big announcements early on was Amazon is trying to bridge the gap between Aurora. >> Yep. >> And Redshift. >> Right. >> And setting up for continuous pipelines, continuous integration. >> Right. >> Seems to be a trend that is common to all database players. I mean, Oracle is doing the same thing. SAP is doing the same thing. MariaDB. Do you see the distinction between transactional and analytical databases going away? >> It's coming together, right? Certainly coming together, from that perspective, but there's a fundamental different starting point, right? And with the big idea part, right? The universal database, which does everything for you in one system, whereas the suite of specialized databases, right? Oracle is in the classic Oracle database in the universal database camp. On the other side you have Amazon, which built a database. This is one of the first few Amazon re:Invents. It's my 10th where there was no new database announced. Right? >> No. >> So it was always add another one specially- >> I think they have enough. >> It's a great approach. They have enough, right? So it's a great approach to build something quick, which Amazon is all about. It's not so great when customers want to leverage things. And, ultimately, which I think with Selipsky, AWS is waking up to the enterprise saying, "I have all this different database and what is in them matters to me." >> Yeah. >> "So how can I get this better?" So no surprise between the two most popular database, Aurora and RDS. They're bring together the data with some out of the box parts. I think it's kind of, like, silly when Swami's saying, "Hey, no ETL.". (chuckles) Right? >> Yeah. >> There shouldn't be an ETL from the same vendor, right? There should be data pipes from that perspective anyway. So it looks like, on the overall value proposition database side, AWS is moving closer to the universal database on the Oracle side, right? Because, if you lift, of course, the universal database, under the hood, you see, well, there's different database there, different part there, you do something there, you have to configure stuff, which is also the case but it's one part of it, right, so. >> With that shift, talk about the value that's going to be in it for customers regardless of industry. >> Well, the value for customers is great, because when software vendors, or platform vendors, go in depth, you get more functionality, you get more maturity you get easier ways of setting up the whole things. You get ways of maintaining things. And you, ultimately, get lower TCO to build them, which is super important for enterprise. Because, here, this is the developer cloud, right? Developers love AWS. Developers are scarce, expensive. Might not be want to work for you, right? So developer velocity getting more done with same amount of developers, getting less done, less developers getting more done, is super crucial, super important. So this is all good news for enterprise banking on AWS and then providing them more efficiency, more automation, out of the box. >> Some of your customer conversations this week, talk to us about some of the feedback. What's the common denominator amongst customers right now? >> Customers are excited. First of all, like, first event, again in person, large, right? >> Yeah. >> People can travel, people meet each other, meet in person. They have a good handle around the complexity, which used to be a huge challenge in the past, because people say, "Do I do this?" I know so many CXOs saying, "Yeah, I want to build, say, something in IoT with AWS. The first reference built it like this, the next reference built it completely different. The third one built it completely different again. So now I'm doubting if my team has the skills to build things successfully, because will they be smart enough, like your teams, because there's no repetitiveness and that repetitiveness is going to be very important for AWS to come up with some higher packaging and version numbers.", right? But customers like that message. They like that things are working better together. They're not missing the big announcement, right? One of the traditional things of AWS would be, and they made it even proud, as a system, Jassy was saying, "If we look at the IT spend and we see something which is, like, high margin for us and not served well and we announced something there, right?" So Quick Start, Workspaces, where all liaisons where AWS went after traditional IT spend and had an offering. We haven't had this in 2019, we don't have them in 2020. Last year and didn't have it now. So something is changing on the AWS side. It's a little bit too early to figure out what, but they're not chewing off as many big things as they used in the past. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Did you get the sense that... Keith Townsend, from "The CTO Advisor", was on earlier. >> Yep. >> And he said he's been to many re:Invents, as you have, and he said that he got the sense that this is Amazon's chance to do a victory lap, as he called it. That this is a way for Amazon to reinforce the leadership cloud. >> Ja. >> And really, kind of, establish that nobody can come close to them, nobody can compete with them. >> You don't think that- >> I don't think that's at all... I mean, love Keith, he's a great guy, but I don't think that's the mindset at all, right? So, I mean, Jassy was always saying, "It's still the morning of the day in the cloud.", right? They're far away from being done. They're obsessed over being right. They do more work with the analysts. We think we got something right. And I like the passion, from that perspective. So I think Amazon's far from being complacent and the area, which is the biggest bit, right, the biggest. The only thing where Amazon truly has floundered, always floundered, is the AI space, right? So, 2018, Werner Vogels was doing more technical stuff that "Oh, this is all about linear regression.", right? And Amazon didn't start to put algorithms on silicon, right? And they have a three four trail and they didn't announce anything new here, behind Google who's been doing this for much, much longer than TPU platform, so. >> But they have now. >> They're keen aware. >> Yep. >> They now have three, or they own two of their own hardware platforms for AI. >> Right. >> They support the Intel platform. They seem to be catching up in that area. >> It's very hard to catch up on hardware, right? Because, there's release cycles, right? And just the volume that, just talking about the largest models that we have right now, to do with the language models, and Google is just doing a side note of saying, "Oh, we supported 50 less or 30 less, not little spoken languages, which I've never even heard of, because they're under banked and under supported and here's the language model, right? And I think it's all about little bit the organizational DNA of a company. I'm a strong believer in that. And, you have to remember AWS comes from the retail side, right? >> Yeah. >> Their roll out of data centers follows their retail strategy. Open secret, right? But, the same thing as the scale of the AI is very very different than if you take a look over at Google where it makes sense of the internet, right? The scale right away >> Right. >> is a solution, which is a good solution for some of the DNA of AWS. Also, Microsoft Azure is good. There has no chance to even get off the ship of that at Google, right? And these leaders with Google and it's not getting smaller, right? We didn't hear anything. I mean so much focused on data. Why do they focus so much on data? Because, data is the first step for AI. If AWS was doing a victory lap, data would've been done. They would own data, right? They would have a competitor to BigQuery Omni from the Google side to get data from the different clouds. There's crickets on that topic, right? So I think they know that they're catching up on the AI side, but it's really, really hard. It's not like in software where you can't acquire someone they could acquire in video. >> Not at Core Donovan. >> Might play a game, but that's not a good idea, right? So you can't, there's no shortcuts on the hardware side. As much as I'm a software guy and love software and don't like hardware, it's always a pain, right? There's no shortcuts there and there's nothing, which I think, has a new Artanium instance, of course, certainly, but they're not catching up. The distance is the same, yep. >> One of the things is funny, one of our guests, I think it was Tuesday, it was, it was right after Adam's keynote. >> Sure. >> Said that Adam Selipsky stood up on stage and talked about data for 52 minutes. >> Yeah. Right. >> It was timed, 52 minutes. >> Right. >> Huge emphasis on that. One of the things that Adam said to John Furrier when they were able to sit down >> Yeah >> a week or so ago at an event preview, was that CIOs and CEOs are not coming to Adam to talk about technology. They want to talk about transformation. They want to talk about business transformation. >> Sure, yes, yes. >> Talk to me in our last couple of minutes about what CEOs and CIOs are coming to you saying, "Holger, help us figure this out. We have to transform the business." >> Right. So we advise, I'm going quote our friends at Gartner, once the type A company. So we'll use technology aggressively, right? So take everything in the audience with a grain of salt, followers are the laggards, and so on. So for them, it's really the cusp of doing AI, right? Getting that data together. It has to be in the cloud. We live in the air of infinite computing. The cloud makes computing infinite, both from a storage, from a compute perspective, from an AI perspective, and then define new business models and create new best practices on top of that. Because, in the past, everything was fine out on premise, right? We talked about the (indistinct) size. Now in the cloud, it's just the business model to say, "Do I want to have a little more AI? Do I want a to run a little more? Will it give me the insight in the business?". So, that's the transformation that is happening, really. So, bringing your data together, this live conversation data, but not for bringing the data together. There's often the big win for the business for the first time to see the data. AWS is banking on that. The supply chain product, as an example. So many disparate systems, bring them them together. Big win for the business. But, the win for the business, ultimately, is when you change the paradigm from the user showing up to do something, to software doing stuff for us, right? >> Right. >> We have too much in this operator paradigm. If the user doesn't show up, doesn't find the click, doesn't find where to go, nothing happens. It can't be done in the 21st century, right? Software has to look over your shoulder. >> Good point. >> Understand one for you, autonomous self-driving systems. That's what CXOs, who're future looking, will be talked to come to AWS and all the other cloud vendors. >> Got it, last question for you. We're making a sizzle reel on Instagram. >> Yeah. >> If you had, like, a phrase, like, or a 30 second pitch that would describe re:Invent 2022 in the direction the company's going. What would that elevator pitch say? >> 30 second pitch? >> Yeah. >> All right, just timing. AWS is doing well. It's providing more depth, less breadth. Making things work together. It's catching up in some areas, has some interesting offerings, like the healthcare offering, the security data lake offering, which might change some things in the industry. It's staying the course and it's going strong. >> Ah, beautifully said, Holger. Thank you so much for joining Paul and me. >> Might have been too short. I don't know. (laughs) >> About 10 seconds left over. >> It was perfect, absolutely perfect. >> Thanks for having me. >> Perfect sizzle reel. >> Appreciate it. >> We appreciate your insights, what you're seeing this week, and the direction the company is going. We can't wait to see what happens in the next year. And, yeah. >> Thanks for having me. >> And of course, we've been on so many times. We know we're going to have you back. (laughs) >> Looking forward to it, thank you. >> All right, for Holger Mueller and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCube", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Greetings, brilliant community and thank you so much for tuning in to theCUBE here for the last three days where we've been live from Detroit, Michigan. I've had the pleasure of spending this week with Lisa Martin and John Furrier. Thank you both so much for hanging out, for inviting me into the CUBE family. It's our first show together, it's been wonderful. >> Thank you. >> You nailed it. >> Oh thanks, sweetheart. >> Great job. Great job team, well done. Free wall to wall coverage, it's what we do. We stay till everyone else-- >> Savannah: 100 percent. >> Everyone else leaves, till they pull the plug. >> Lisa: Till they turn the lights out. We're still there. >> Literally. >> Literally last night. >> Still broadcasting. >> Whatever takes to get the stories and get 'em out there at scale. >> Yeah. >> Great time. >> 33. 33 different segments too. Very impressive. John, I'm curious, you're a trend watcher and you've been at every single KubeCon. >> Yep. >> What are the trends this year? Give us the breakdown. >> I think CNCF does this, it's a hard job to balance all the stakeholders. So one, congratulations to the CNCF for another great KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It is really hard to balance bringing in the experts who, as time goes by, seven years we've been all of, as you said, you get experts, you get seniority, and people who can be mentors, 60% new people. You have vendors who are sponsoring and there's always people complaining and bitching and moaning. They want this, they want that. It's always hard and they always do a good job of balancing it. We're lucky that we get to scale the stories with CUBE and that's been great. We had some great stories here, but it's a great community and again, they're inclusive. As I've said before, we've talked about it. This year though is an inflection point in my opinion, because you're seeing the developer ecosystem growing so fast. It's global. You're seeing events pop up, you're seeing derivative events. CNCF is at the center point and they have to maintain the culture of developer experts, maintainers, while balancing the newbies. And that's going to be >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. really hard. And they've done a great job. We had a great conversation with them. So great job. And I think it's going to continue. I think the attendance metric is a little bit of a false positive. There's a lot of online people who didn't come to Detroit this year. And I think maybe the combination of the venue, the city, or just Covid preferences may not look good on paper, on the numbers 'cause it's not a major step up in attendance. It's still bigger, but the community, I think, is going to continue to grow. I'm bullish on it. >> Yeah, I mean at least we did see double the number of people that we had in Los Angeles. Very curious. I think Amsterdam, where we'll be next with CNCF in the spring, in April. I think that's actually going to be a better pulse check. We'll be in Europe, we'll see what's going on. >> John: Totally. >> I mean, who doesn't like Amsterdam in the springtime? Lisa, what have been some of your observations? >> Oh, so many observations. The evolution of the conference, the hallway track conversations really shifting towards adjusting to the enterprise. The enterprise momentum that we saw here as well. We had on the show, Ford. >> Savannah: Yes. We had MassMutual, we had ING, that was today. Home Depot is here. We are seeing all these big companies that we know and love, become software companies right before our eyes. >> Yeah. Well, and I think we forget that software powers our entire world. And so of course they're going to have to be here. So much running on Kubernetes. It's on-prem, it's at the edge, it's everywhere. It's exciting. Woo, I'm excited. John, what do you think is the number one story? This is your question. I love asking you this question. What is the number one story out KubeCon? >> Well, I think the top story is a combination of two things. One is the evolution of Cloud Native. We're starting to see web assembly. That's a big hyped up area. It got a lot of attention. >> Savannah: Yeah. That's kind of teething out the future. >> Savannah: Rightfully so. The future of this kind of lightweight. You got the heavy duty VMs, you got Kubernetes and containers, and now this web assembly, shows a trajectory of apps, server-like environment. And then the big story is security. Software supply chain is, to me, was the number one consistent theme. At almost all the interviews, in the containers, and the workflows, >> Savannah: Very hot. software supply chain is real. The CD Foundation mentioned >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> they had 16,000 vulnerabilities identified in their code base. They were going to automate that. So again, >> Savannah: That was wild. >> That's the top story. The growth of open source exposes potential vulnerabilities with security. So software supply chain gets my vote. >> Did you hear anything that surprised you? You guys did this great preview of what you thought we were going to hear and see and feel and touch at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2022. You talked about, for example, the, you know, healthcare financial services being early adopters of this. Anything surprise either one of you in terms of what you predicted versus what we saw? Savannah, let's start with you. >> You know what really surprised me, and this is ironic, so I'm a community gal by trade. But I was really just impressed by the energy that everyone brought here and the desire to help. The thing about the open source community that always strikes me is, I mean 187 different countries participating. You've got, I believe it's something like 175,000 people contributing to the 140 projects plus that CNCF is working on. But that culture of collaboration extends far beyond just the CNCF projects. Everyone here is keen to help each other. We had the conversation just before about the teaching and the learnings that are going on here. They brought in Detroit's students to come and learn, which is just the most heartwarming story out of this entire thing. And I think it's just the authenticity of everyone in this community and their passion. Even though I know it's here, it still surprises me to see it in the flesh. Especially in a place like Detroit. >> It's nice. >> Yeah. >> It's so nice to see it. And you bring up a good point. It's very authentic. >> Savannah: It's super authentic. >> I mean, what surprised me is one, the Wasm, or web assembly. I didn't see that coming at the scale of the conversation. It sucked a lot of options out of the room in my opinion, still hyped up. But this looks like it's got a good trajectory. I like that. The other thing that surprised me that was a learning was my interview with Solo.io, Idit, and Brian Gracely, because he's a CUBE alumni and former host of theCUBE, and analyst at Wikibon, was how their go-to-market was an example of a modern company in Covid with a clean sheet of paper and smart people, they're just doing things different. They're in Slack with their customers. And I walked away with, "Wow that's like a playbook that's not, was never, in the go-to-market VC-backed company playbook." I thought that was, for me, a personal walk away saying that's important. I like how they did that. And there's a lot of companies I think could learn from that. Especially as the recession comes where partnering with customers has always been a top priority. And how they did that was very clever, very effective, very efficient. So I walked away with that saying, "I think that's going to be a standard." So that was a pleasant surprise. >> That was a great surprise. Also, that's a female-founded company, which is obviously not super common. And the growth that they've experienced, to your point, really being catalyzed by Covid, is incredibly impressive. I mean they have some massive brand name customers, Amex, BMW for example. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Great point. >> And I interviewed her years ago and I remember saying to myself, "Wow, she's impressive." I liked her. She's a player. A player for sure. And she's got confidence. Even on the interview she said, "We're just better, we have better product." And I just like the point of view. Very customer-focused but confident. And I just took, that's again, a great company. And again, I'm not surprised that Brian Gracely left Red Hat to go work there. So yeah, great, great call there. And of course other things that weren't surprising that I predicted, Red Hat continued to invest. They continue to bring people on theCUBE, they support theCUBE but more importantly they have a good strategy. They're in that multicloud positioning. They're going to have an opportunity to get a bite at the apple. And I what I call the supercloud. As enterprises try to go and be mainstream, Cloud Native, they're going to need some help. And Red Hat is always has the large enterprise customers. >> Savannah: What surprised you, Lisa? >> Oh my gosh, so many things. I think some of the memorable conversations that we had. I love talking with some of the enterprises that we mentioned, ING Bank for example. You know, or institutions that have been around for 100 plus years. >> Savannah: Oh, yeah. To see not only how much they've innovated and stayed relevant to meet the demands of the consumer, which are only increasing, but they're doing so while fostering a culture of innovation and a culture that allows these technology leaders to really grow within the organization. That was a really refreshing conversation that I think we had. 'Cause you can kind of >> Savannah: Absolutely. think about these old stodgy companies. Nah, of course they're going to digitize. >> Thinking about working for the bank, I think it's boring. >> Right? >> Yeah. And they were talking about, in fact, those great t-shirts that they had on, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. were all about getting more people to understand how fun it is to work in tech for ING Bank in different industries. You don't just have to work for the big tech companies to be doing really cool stuff in technology. >> What I really liked about this show is we had two female hosts. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> How about that? Come on. >> Hey, well done, well done on your recruitment there, champ. >> Yes, thank you boss. (John laughs) >> And not to mention we have a really all-star production team. I do just want to give them a little shout out. To all the wonderful folks behind the lines here. (people clapping) >> John: Brendan. Good job. >> Yeah. Without Brendan, Anderson, Noah, and Andrew, we would be-- >> Of course Frank Faye holding it back there too. >> Yeah, >> Of course, Frank. >> I mean, without the business development wheels on the ship we'd really be in an unfortunate spot. I almost just swore on television. We're not going to do that. >> It's okay. No one's regulating. >> Yeah. (all laugh) >> Elon Musk just took over Twitter. >> It was a close call. >> That's right! >> It's going to be a hellscape. >> Yeah, I mean it's, shit's on fire. So we'll just see what happens next. I do, I really want to talk about this because I think it's really special. It's an ethos and some magic has happened here. Let's talk about Detroit. Let's talk about what it means to be here. We saw so many, and I can't stress this enough, but I think it really matters. There was a commitment to celebrating place here. Lisa, did you notice this too? >> Absolutely. And it surprised me because we just don't see that at conferences. >> Yeah. We're so used to going to the same places. >> Right. >> Vegas. Vegas, Vegas. More Vegas. >> Your tone-- >> San Francisco >> (both laugh) sums up my feelings. Yes. >> Right? >> Yeah. And, well, it's almost robotic but, and the fact that we're like, oh Detroit, really? But there was so much love for this city and recognizing and supporting its residents that we just don't see at conferences. You uncovered a lot of that with your swag-savvy segments, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you got more of that to talk about today. >> Don't worry, it's coming. Yeah. (laughs) >> What about you? Have you enjoyed Detroit? I know you hadn't been here in a long time, when we did our intro session. >> I think it's a bold move for the CNCF to come here and celebrate. What they did, from teaching the kids in the city some tech, they had a session. I thought that was good. >> Savannah: Loved that. I think it was a risky move because a lot of people, like, weren't sure if they were going to fly to Detroit. So some say it might impact the attendance. I thought they did a good job. Their theme, Road Ahead. Nice tie in. >> Savannah: Yeah. And so I think I enjoyed Detroit. The weather was great. It didn't rain. Nice breeze outside. >> Yeah. >> The weather was great, the restaurants are phenomenal. So Detroit's a good city. I missed some hockey games. I'd love to see the Red Wings play. Missed that game. But we always come back. >> I think it's really special. I mean, every time I talked to a company about their swag, that had sourced it locally, there was a real reason for this story. I mean even with Kasten in that last segment when I noticed that they had done Carhartt beanies, Carhartt being a Michigan company. They said, "I'm so glad you noticed. That's why we did it." And I think that type of, the community commitment to place, it all comes back to community. One of the bigger themes of the show. But that passion and that support, we need more of that. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And the thing about the guests we've had this past three days have been phenomenal. We had a diverse set of companies, individuals come on theCUBE, you know, from Scott Johnston at Docker. A really one on one. We had a great intense conversation. >> Savannah: Great way to kick it off. >> We shared a lot of inside baseball, about Docker, super important company. You know, impressed with companies like Platform9 it's been around since the OpenStack days who are now in a relevant position. Rafi Systems, hot startup, they don't have a lot of resources, a lot of guerilla marketing going on. So I love to see the mix of startups really contributing. The big players are here. So it's a real great mix of companies. And I thought the interviews were phenomenal, like you said, Ford. We had, Kubia launched on theCUBE. >> Savannah: Yes. >> That's-- >> We snooped the location for KubeCon North America. >> You did? >> Chicago, everyone. In case you missed it, Bianca was nice enough to share that with us. >> We had Sarbjeet Johal, CUBE analyst came on, Keith Townsend, yesterday with you guys. >> We had like analyst speed dating last night. (all laugh) >> How'd that go? (laughs) >> It was actually great. One of the things that they-- >> Did they hug and kiss at the end? >> Here's the funny thing is that they were debating the size of the CNC app. One thinks it's too big, one thinks it's too small. And I thought, is John Goldilocks? (John laughs) >> Savannah: Yeah. >> What is John going to think about that? >> Well I loved that segment. I thought, 'cause Keith and Sarbjeet argue with each other on Twitter all the time. And I heard Keith say before, he went, "Yeah let's have it out on theCUBE." So that was fun to watch. >> Thank you for creating this forum for us to have that kind of discourse. >> Lisa: Yes, thank you. >> Well, it wouldn't be possible without the sponsors. Want to thank the CNCF. >> Absolutely. >> And all the ecosystem partners and sponsors that make theCUBE possible. We love doing this. We love getting the stories. No story's too small for theCUBE. We'll go with it. Do whatever it takes. And if it wasn't for the sponsors, the community wouldn't get all the great knowledge. So, and thank you guys. >> Hey. Yeah, we're, we're happy to be here. Speaking of sponsors and vendors, should we talk a little swag? >> Yeah. >> What do you guys think? All right. Okay. So now this is becoming a tradition on theCUBE so I'm very delighted, the savvy swag segment. I do think it's interesting though. I mean, it's not, this isn't just me shouting out folks and showing off t-shirts and socks. It's about standing out from the noise. There's a lot of players in this space. We got a lot of CNCF projects and one of the ways to catch the attention of people walking the show floor is to have interesting swag. So we looked for the most unique swag on Wednesday and I hadn't found this yet, but I do just want to bring it up. Oops, I think I might have just dropped it. This is cute. Is, most random swag of the entire show goes to this toothbrush. I don't really have more in terms of the pitch there because this is just random. (Lisa laughs) >> But so, everyone needs that. >> John: So what's their tagline? >> And you forget these. >> Yeah, so the idea was to brush your cloud bills. So I think they're reducing the cost of-- >> Kind of a hygiene angle. >> Yeah, yeah. Very much a hygiene angle, which I found a little ironic in this crowd to be completely honest with you. >> John: Don't leave the lights on theCUBE. That's what they say. >> Yeah. >> I mean we are theCUBE so it would be unjust of me not to show you a Rubik's cube. This is actually one of those speed cubes. I'm not going to be able to solve this for you with one hand on camera, but apparently someone did it in 17 seconds at the booth. Knowing this audience, not surprising to me at all. Today we are, and yesterday, was the t-shirt contest. Best t-shirt contest. Today we really dove into the socks. So this is, I noticed this trend at KubeCon in Los Angeles last year. Lots of different socks, clouds obviously a theme for the cloud. I'm just going to lay these out. Lots of gamers in the house. Not surprising. Here on this one. >> John: Level up. >> Got to level up. I love these 'cause they say, "It's not a bug." And anyone who's coded has obviously had to deal with that. We've got, so Star Wars is a huge theme here. There's Lego sets. >> John: I think it's Star Trek. But. >> That's Star Trek? >> John: That's okay. >> Could be both. (Lisa laughs) >> John: Nevermind, I don't want to. >> You can flex your nerd and geek with us anytime you want, John. I don't mind getting corrected. I'm all about, I'm all about the truth. >> Star Trek. Star Wars. Okay, we're all the same. Okay, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, no, this is great. Slim.ai was nice enough to host us for dinner on Tuesday night. These are their lovely cloud socks. You can see Cloud Native, obviously Cloud Native Foundation, cloud socks, whole theme here. But if we're going to narrow it down to some champions, I love these little bee elephants from Raft. And when I went up to these guys, I actually probably would've called these my personal winner. They said, again, so community focused and humble here at CNCF, they said that Wiz was actually the champion according to the community. These unicorn socks are pretty excellent. And I have to say the branding is flawless. So we'll go ahead and give Wiz the win on the best sock contest. >> John: For the win. >> Yeah, Wiz for the win. However, the thing that I am probably going to use the most is this really dope Detroit snapback from Kasten. So I'm going to be rocking this from now on for the rest of the segment as well. And I feel great about this snapback. >> Looks great. Looks good on you. >> Yeah. >> Thanks John. (John laughs) >> So what are we expecting between now and KubeCon in Amsterdam? >> Well, I think it's going to be great to see how they, the European side, it's a chill show. It's great. Brings in the European audience from the global perspective. I always love the EU shows because one, it's a great destination. Amsterdam's going to be a great location. >> Savannah: I'm pumped. >> The American crowd loves going over there. All the event cities that they choose are always awesome. I missed Valencia cause I got Covid. I'm really bummed about that. But I love the European shows. It's just a little bit, it's high intensity, but it's the European chill. They got a little bit more of that siesta vibe going on. >> Yeah. >> And it's just awesome. >> Yeah, >> And I think that the mojo that carried throughout this week, it's really challenging to not only have a show that's five days, >> but to go through all week, >> Savannah: Seriously. >> to a Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, and still have the people here, the energy and all the collaboration. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> The conversations that are still happening. I think we're going to see a lot more innovation come spring 2023. >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> So should we do a bet, somebody's got to buy dinner? Who, well, I guess the folks who lose this will buy dinner for the other one. How many attendees do you think we'll see in Amsterdam? So we had 4,000, >> Oh, I'm going to lose this one. >> roughly in Los Angeles. Priyanka was nice enough to share with us, there was 8,000 here in Detroit. And I'm talking in person, we're not going to meddle this with the online. >> 6500. >> Lisa: I was going to say six, six K. >> I'm going 12,000. >> Ooh! >> I'm going to go ahead and go big I'm going to go opposite Price Is Right. >> One dollar. >> Yeah. (all laugh) That's exactly where I was driving with it. I'm going, I'm going absolutely all in. I think the momentum here is building. I think if we look at the numbers from-- >> John: You could go Family Feud >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they mentioned that they had 11,000 people who have taken their Kubernetes course in that first year. If that's a benchmark and an indicator, we've got the veteran players here. But I do think that, I personally think that the hype of Kubernetes has actually preceded adoption. If you look at the data and now we're finally tipping over. I think the last two years we were on the fringe and right now we're there. It's great. (voice blares loudly on loudspeaker) >> Well, on that note (all laugh) On that note, actually, on that note, as we are talking, so I got to give cred to my cohosts. We deal with a lot of background noise here on theCUBE. It is a live show floor. There's literally someone on an e-scooter behind me. There's been Pong going on in the background. The sound will haunt the three of us for the rest of our lives, as well as the production crew. (Lisa laughs) And, and just as we're sitting here doing this segment last night, they turned the lights off on us, today they're letting everyone know that the event is over. So on that note, I just want to say, Lisa, thank you so much. Such a warm welcome to the team. >> Thank you. >> John, what would we do without you? >> You did an amazing job. First CUBE, three days. It's a big show. You got staying power, I got to say. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Look at that. Not bad. >> You said it on camera now. >> Not bad. >> So you all are stuck with me. (all laugh) >> A plus. Great job to the team. Again, we do so much flow here. Brandon, Team, Andrew, Noah, Anderson, Frank. >> They're doing our hair, they're touching up makeup. They're helping me clean my teeth, staying hydrated. >> We look good because of you. >> And the guests. Thanks for coming on and spending time with us. And of course the sponsors, again, we can't do it without the sponsors. If you're watching this and you're a sponsor, support theCUBE, it helps people get what they need. And also we're do a lot more segments around community and a lot more educational stuff. >> Savannah: Yeah. So we're going to do a lot more in the EU and beyond. So thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. And thank you to everyone. Thank you to the community, thank you to theCUBE community and thank you for tuning in, making it possible for us to have somebody to talk to on the other side of the camera. My name is Savannah Peterson for the last time in Detroit, Michigan. Thanks for tuning into theCUBE. >> Okay, we're done. (bright upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22. This is the Cube's live presentation streaming out virtually our inaugural event, kind of a pilot I'm John Furo of the cube with Dave ante. Got a great panel here to discuss the enablers and blockers question mark for superclouds. We got, we got kit Culbert, CTO of VMware basketball, Gor CEO platform nine, and has Pani who is the CEO of RA systems. We got a mix of the big leader, VMware and the upstart companies growing into the same space, all cloud native friends of the cube. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>You. >>Start. All right. So there's no debate cloud native is booming. We see that clearly Kubernetes became a unifying force. It's an ops layer kind of almost like a kind of a midline between dev and ops DevSecOps is happening at scale. What are the blockers and what are the enablers for super cloud? What do we need? Let's see what do get your take? >>Sure. So UN I spoke about this a little bit in, at New York summit, the big trend I'm seeing, and it's, it's a blocker that's being sort of taken care of by enterprises, which is, you know, until very recently, Kubernetes was effectively a project that NA would take on. They'd try things out, they'd go to the cloud, they'd spin things up. And then the next team would come and they'd do the same things. And there was no consistency. There was no ization, it's a mess, right? It's all over the place. Some things are moving fast. Some things are not going fast and this is not how enterprises do business, right? That's not how things work. Traditionally enterprises have had it organizations that create standards, right? So those it organizations now kind of are starting to think like a platform organization. So centrally come up with the right framework for all application teams to consume infrastructure, modern infrastructure. So I'm not using the word Kubernetes here because Kubernetes is an enabler. We are a Kubernetes company, obviously, but it's about modern applications, modern infrastructure. So stepping back and thinking about it as to how an enterprise will do this across the board is the right answer. And I'm seeing this happen in a pretty significant way across all the large enterprises I talked to. >>That's why you've had a great career. And we talked before you came on Opia you did a turnaround there, we, you even go back to the old days of the web web 1.0 and early software. You've seen the movie before. >>Yes. >>You know, complexity is not solved way more complexity. This is kind of the old enterprise way. And they don't want that. They've seen the benefits of self-service. They see architecture and standards as being an enabler. Where are we in here in the market? Is, are we positioned in your opinion for customers to get the value of a super cloud? >>Absolutely. So if you think about, first of all, I think the topic of cloud native developers and app developers picking containers and Kubernetes, that's a done deal, right? That has already happened. So every cloud native developer is already using these tools. Now, I think as has been discussed today in you, in the earlier sessions, is, are the operations and infrastructure catching up or they're lagging behind, right? As more and more developers are using multi-cloud technologies, enterprises are creating a choice, I think operations and what we also strongly believe that's actually part of the name of our company is, is a platform. The platform of which a company uses to transform itself to be cloud native is the big opportunity. I don't think it's a blocker, but it's a huge opportunity. And I think this is where, you know, as you can't stop developers from developing on different clouds, private, public, multi edge, that's gonna happen. Innovation is gonna continue. But then how does the infrastructure in the platform make it seamless? Right? And almost treat all these different clouds as a single pan super cloud platform. That's I think is the >>Opportunity. So we in a platform more than with other companies, or is there one unified platform called cloud native? We know customers been buying tools from security they're they got so many tools in, in their tools shed, so to speak. What is that platform? I mean, is it more unique, fragmentation? Is it unified? >>I mean, if you think about it, a couple of it's a combination of tools that are stitched together to reach a purpose, right? So if you think about, you know, APIs continued APIs that's been discussed earlier today, I think that's, that should be standardized. The other thing is always on monitoring because I think that's a very key aspect. Once you build it, then as the enterprises are using it, the always on monitoring becomes. So I think it's a combination of capabilities that are stitched together to enable the acceleration for companies to become cloud native. >>I, I have a thought on a blocker. None of you guys are gonna like it. Oh, maybe you can come. Maybe some of you guys probably won't but comment, but maybe John will. I think AWS is a blocker to Supercloud cuz they, they don't want those cross cloud service. It's like they, they, for years they wouldn't even say multicloud. The first time I heard it was in Boston three weeks ago, I actually heard it. So Hey, you see, >>You know, I'm gonna disagree with that. Okay. >>But, but okay, go ahead. All >>So we'll get their reaction. So my, we just heard from the last panel that the security should be leading the consortium. Yeah. Because they're, they're not the enemy they're actually, >>Maybe they should be >>Well back in the old web days, when standards were driving things, you had a common enemy, proprietary NASAs, proprietary networking stack. So the evil empire was at and T that's owned Unix. If you remember, they copyright that. >>So you think they're greasing the skids for, >>I think Supercloud, I think the hyperscalers could cuz they're driving the CapEx, they're providing the value. So in my opinion, Amazon and Azure, whoever does the right thing first can win every, maybe >>This is how Google could catch up >>It. It could be a, it could be a Slingshot move. It could, you know, boomerang, someone to the front of the line or extend. Amazon's already huge lead. So if I'm AWS, if I'm Adam Slosky and I'm talking to Andy Jassy, he says, how am I gonna differentiate myself? I'd say, I'm gonna come in and own multicloud. I'm gonna own Supercloud we are the Supercloud and you work with AWS's primitives in a way that makes services work. I would go for that. I'd be like, okay, show me more. What do you >>Think? I, I, I don't think think any one company is going to be a super cloud because I think yes, there is going to be a lot of workloads on public clouds, but there's a huge amount of workloads at the enterprise at the edge at the store. I think those will continue for various reasons, whether it's data, sovereignty regulations. So I think it's going to be a combination. Everybody's not gonna go to one, you know, cloud, it's going to be an amalgamation. >>Okay. But I I've argued that snowflake is a form of a super data cloud and a very specific use case, you know, Aviatrix is trying to be a network, you know, layer and you know, sneak in a security, let me on and on, on a lot of small you get, you get super cloud stove pipes, but, but nonetheless you're, you're still abstracting. I mean, we've this industry attractions, right? >>Well this, this concept I completely agree with, right? This idea that, so, so one of the, my is that right now enterprises buy 500 different technologies and they have to become PhDs in 500 different things. It's just never gonna happen skills issue, which is no way. Right. So what's gonna happen is all of these providers are gonna essentially become managed service providers. Cloud is in manifestation of that. Snowflake is a ation data breaks is a manifestation of that. Right? So in our general industry, there's gonna be a handful of platforms. Right. And they're gonna work across these clouds. Amazon may have one too. Right? Look, they, they, they, for the longest time sort of ignored OnPrem, but now they have something called SSA, which runs on Preem. Right. Why, why would they bother? Because, well, obviously there's a lot of money to be made in a data center as well. >>So I, my sense is they get it completely understand and appreciate that there's other things outside of Amazon. But in terms of what Bosco was talking about, my sense is, you know, these multiple platforms will come about. And to the point we were making earlier about standardization and I, I mean, is it gonna be one company or is it gonna be standards that everybody will else will adopt? There's a topic that the three of us have talked about before, which is this vCenter for Kubernetes. Right. And all due respect to kit. Right. My sense is that there there's gonna be multiple companies that are gonna start working towards a vCenter for Kubernetes. And it is right. I mean, that's how I've, I mean, I've been thinking about this before and a half years, including >>VMware. >>Yeah. And you know, and we, we should compare notes. Right. But what's gonna happen is there was a, there was a distinct advantage VMware had back in the day because ESX was their product. Right. And that was a standard right now. What's the ESX in the new it's sort of Kubernetes, right. I mean, it's on bare metal for the most part or whatever VMs. So that's a standard, that's got standardized APIs, the things around it are standardized APIs. So what is the unfair advantage that one company has other than execution? >>Nothing. Well also composability if you over rotate on Kubernetes, for example, and not take advantage of say C two, for instance. Totally, >>Totally. >>It's a mix and match. >>Yeah. But I think, I think if you get too focused on Kubernetes, it's a means to an end. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it it's a mean to end end. And I think all these tools, there's a lot of standardization happening that's gonna happen. Right. And no one vendor is gonna control that. Right. It's it's going to be, it's gonna continue. I think how you bring these together and orchestrate right. And manage the service. Because I think that if you think about the lack of skills to keep up with the operations and platforms is one of the largest inhibitors right now for enterprises to move as fast as they want to become cloud native. >>And you have the shiny new toy problem kit where people just go and grab it. You know, Keith Townsend has a, as a quote, he says, look, we essentially move at the speed of the CIO or else we're going too fast or too slow. So, so the, to, to the point about the new toy now I've got new skills. >>Yep. Well, so this has been a really good discussion. And I think so there's a couple of things, right. Going back to the, the paper that we wrote, right. How we have these different sort of layers of multi-cloud services or, or categories of multi-cloud services. And it's exactly to capture some of the ex different examples you just mentioned. And yeah, the challenge is that each of them by themselves are a little bit of an island today. Like you don't have that extra level of integration. And so what the platform teams typically do is try to add that extra glue to make the experience more seamless for the, the, the, you know, developers at that company. And so like, you know, for instance, things like identity. So the nice thing about going to a single public cloud is that there's one, usually one identity system for everything. And that's great. All the different services roles are, you know, are back all that. Stuff's all centralized, but you don't have that when you're going across many different multicloud services. So what does that look like? So I think there's some of these different crosscutting concerns that we need to look at how we standardize on as an industry. And that's, again, one of the things >>You felt that part. And I think, I think also the other key thing is yes, you can always say I'll put everything in one world, world garden and I'm done. Yeah. Okay. But that's not the reality because at some point you need, the flexibility and cost comes into play and flexibility to move comes into play. And I think that is a key factor. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. And so like, so then the question is, what degrees of freedom do you give yourself there? And I think that's the architectural question is how you, how do you design it? What sort of abstractions do you leverage? And I think that goes back to some of our discussion before, which is, do you directly go on top of a native cloud service or do you use a multi-cloud service? >>But I think it's a combination of, I don't think it's either or no, it's not, it's not an either or you have to have the ability to choose a public cloud or do it private. Yeah. At the same time you don't change. It's like a common dictionary, right. You're not gonna change every time the accent changes, you know? So that's, >>So here's a question for you guys. So what has to happen for super clouds, be existing assume that AWS and Azure and Google, aren't gonna sit still assume that maybe they normalize into some sort of swim lane or position that they have to rationalize. What, assuming they're not gonna sit still, what has to happen for super clouds to, to actually work >>Well? Well, I think, you know, really quick going back to the platform team point, I would say that the platform teams at various companies, and we got one at VMware two, they're creating a rudimentary form of a super cloud. Right. Cause they, you know, absolutely like if, if they are supporting multiple clouds, like all the things they're stitching together and all that work, that is a super cloud. The problem is that there's not really a standard approach or architecture or reusable things to enable that. I think that's really what's missing. >>Yeah. But I think the key here is standard us reusable. Because for example, we have customers who are in doesn't matter where they are, some of their loads are in public cloud. Some are in private, some are at the edge, but they're still using the same platform. Yeah. Right. So it is a standard open source based technology. So it is standard. There's no lock in for them from an infrastructure point of view. Yep. And it gives them the flexibility because certain apps, you wanna put it on the public cloud, certain apps, you do not, you need the, I mean, for example, some of the AI, I think earlier discussion that was going on about chips and AI and ML workloads. I mean, think about moving all of that to a public cloud, to, and I think a lot of machine learning and AI applications are going to happen where the data is getting created at the edge. Yeah. At the edge >>Public cloud. It's not gonna happen cloud. It's gonna be real time in, >>It's gonna the end time. And so therefore you have to decide based on your workload, what are you gonna move all the way to a public cloud? And what are you need to do to make business decisions at this spot where the data is created? >>That's a huge disruptor potentially to Supercloud. This is a whole new architecture that emerges at the edge with a whole new set of economics. I >>Think the edge is gonna be like massively disruptive. >>I think it's gonna think about, if you think about the edge, go beyond just the classic definition of edge. Think about branches in stores, retail stores. Yeah. Right. I mean, you cannot shut down retail store because you lost connectivity to the network or something you still have to serve your company >>Edge is a disruptive enabler. I think it's gonna change potentially change the position of the players in the business. Whoever embraces the edge. >>Yeah. Maybe going back to the question that you had asked before, which is what is, what is a framework for a super cloud? So you said something that is important, which is your team's burning one. Yeah. I met that team. Actually. They seem to be very sharp guys. >>They're they're mine. They're my are great. They're awesome. >>We got a deal going on here. Yeah. >>I tried. We have >>It. >>So this is the interesting part, right? So I will pause it that the super cloud of the future will be a company that owns zero servers and no network. >>Okay. >>That's gonna happen. Okay. So I just kind of it's >>Full point you >>Made before I made that point just about the public cloud, just so Mr. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that really interesting. Not >>We that, so I've thought about this a long time that in my opinion, and I've, I'm, I'm sure I've said this to you, John, that, you know, the one company that I've always believed has the best shot at doing this well is actually VMware because that's the one company that's, you know, that there's, there's no, you know, infrastructure back haul. Right. You know, that you're carrying, but, but in terms of thinking and getting there, you know, being, being a company that can do it is not the same as being the company who has done it. That's a, there's a distance, but >>I have to defend that now because hyperscalers are not gonna be able to super cloud. They're not now it's hype. See, agreed, great point. Public clouds will be part of the super cloud. Yeah, totally. But they will not, the hyperscalers are not building super clouds. Totally. They're blocking it. Right. Yeah. >>They're enabling it. >>We agree on >>No, they're enabling >>Because it's, it's not in there to their advantage. Right. Look, the, the snowflake example you gave is the pivotal example in this conversation. Yep. Right. Why does snowflake exist at all when Redshift exists and all these other things exist because they provide value that is beyond a single clouds purview. Right. And at that point, just step back from our platforms and what we sell. Forget about that for a minute. Right. It's it's about, look, I think, I think this, we are, this market is early, we're out early, right. 10 years from now, what will a company look like? That actually solves a superly problem they're gonna solve for yeah. Kubernetes, whatever. Right. But they're gonna solve for truly modern applications. >>Yeah. They're gonna refactor application that has new economics new value, right. >>At that point, this idea of edge and cloud, forget about it. Right. This is all distribution issues, right. It doesn't really matter. Is it retail or not? Yeah, absolutely. These are places, but, but the way, the right way to think about this is not about edge versus cloud, right? This is about an app. Sometimes it needs to run in one location and it's good enough. Sometimes it needs to run in 10,000 locations and, and it's a distribution issue. I've always believed there's this idea of edge versus cloud. This is BS, right? Because it, it is a cloud over a different size. Sure. But, but I'm making a slightly different point. Sure. Which is, it's a distribution problem. Right. If you step back and think about distribution, my app could run in Azure or AWS or in a retail store, in a branch or whatever. Right. >>And once that is done, the question is, how am I in, in making all this happen? There was a point made in the prior conversation, in the, in the session about a database kind of popping up in the place where I needed to run. Okay. Nobody does that today, by the way. Right. At least truly well right about that, sir, that will come. Right? Yeah. But when that comes, my application is a conglomerate of compute data. I don't know a, a service bus and network and all these things and they will all kind of pop together. That company does not exist >>Today. Well, we'll, we will be documenting which we have more time. We're gonna document it. We have to unfortunately stop this panel because it's awesome. We can go for another hour. Sure. Let's bring you guys back, but that's it. The super cloud of the future will look like something and we're gonna debate it. And speaking of snowflake, we have the co-founder here next to sit down with us to talk about what he thinks about this super cloud. He, he probably heard the comment, come back more coverage. This break with the co-founder of snowflake after the short break. >>Do thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We have a returning Cube alumni, Ramesh Prabagan, who is the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo.io. Great to see you, Ramesh. Thanks for coming in to our studio, and welcome to the new layout. >> Thanks for having me here, John. After a series of Zoom conversations, it's great to be live and in the flesh! >> Great to be in person. We also got a new stage for our Supercloud event, which we've been opening up to the community, looking forward to getting your perspective on that soon as well. But I want to keep the conversation really about you guys. I want to get the story down. You guys came out of stealth, Multicloud, Supercloud is right in your wheelhouse. >> Exactly. >> You got to love Supercloud. >> Yeah. As I walked in, I saw Supercloud all over the place, and it just gives you a jolt of energy. >> Well, you guys are in the middle of the action. Your company, I want you to explain this in a minute, is in the middle of this next wave. Because we had the structural change I called Cloud One. Amazon, use case, developers, no need to build a data center, all that goodness happens, higher level service of abstractions are happening, and then Azure comes in. More PaaS, and then more install base, now they're nipping at the heels. So full on hyperscale, Cap Backs growth, great for everybody. Now comes new use cases. Cloud to cloud, app to app, you see Databricks, Snowflake, MongoDB, all doing extremely well by leveraging the Cap Backs, now it's an ops problem. >> Exactly. >> Now ops and security. >> Yeah. It's speed of applications. >> How are you guys vectoring into that? Explain what you guys do. >> Absolutely. So let me take kind of the customer pain point first, right? Because it's always easier to explain that, and then we explain what is it that we do. So, it's no surprise. Applications are moving into the cloud, or people are building apps in the cloud in masses. The infrastructure that's sitting in front of these applications, cutting across networking, security, the operational piece associated with that, does not move at the same speed. The apps sometimes get upgraded two, three times a day, the infrastructure gets touched one time a week at best. And so increasingly, the cloud platform teams, the developers are all like, "Hey, why? Why? Why?" Right? "I thought things were supposed to move fast in the cloud." It doesn't. Now, if you double click on that, really, it's two reasons. One, those that won't have consistency across the stack that they hired in the data center, they bring a virtual form factor of that stack and line it up in the cloud, and before you know it, it's cost, it's operation complexity, there are multiple single panes of glass, all the fun stuff associated... >> Just to interject real quick. It is fast in the cloud if you're a developer. >> Exactly. >> So it's kind of like, hurry up, slow down, wait. >> Correct. >> So the developers are shifting left, open source is booming. Things are fine for developers right now. If you're a developer, things are good. >> But the guy sitting in front of that... >> The ops guys, they've got to deal with things like lock-in, choice, security. >> Exactly. And those are really the key challenges. We've seen some that actually said, "Hey, know what, I don't want to bring my data center stack into the cloud. Let me go cloud-native. And they start to build it up. 14 services from AWS, 15 from iGR, 14 more from GCP, even if you are in a single cloud. They just keep it to that. I need to know how to put this together. Because all these services are great, but how do I put this together. And enterprises don't have just one application, they have hundreds of these applications. So the requirements of a database is different than a service mesh, different than a serverless application, different than a web application. And before you know it, "How do I put all these things together?" And so we looked at this problem, and we said, "Okay. We subscribe to the fact that cloud-native is the way to go, right, but something needs to be there to make this simple." Right? And so, first thing that we did was bring all these cloud-native services together, we help orchestrate that, and we said, "okay, know what, Mr. Enterprise? We got you covered." Right? But now, it doesn't stop there. That's like, 10% of the value, right? What do you really need? What do you care about now? Because the apps are in the center of the universe, and who's talking to it? It's another application sitting either in the same cloud, or in a different cloud, or it's a user connecting into the application. So now, let's talk about what are the networking security operational requirements required for these apps to talk to each other, or the user to talk to the application. That's really what we focus on. >> Yeah. And I think one of the things that's driving this opportunity for you, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that the modern application movement is all about cloud-native. Okay, they're obviously doing great. Now, kind of the kumbaya moment in enterprise is that the security team and ops teams have to play ball and be friends with the developer, and vice versa. So harmony's coming there. So the little harmony. And two, the business is driving apps. IT is transforming over. This is why the Supercloud idea is interesting to Dave and I. Because when we coined that term, multi-cloud was not a market. Everyone has multiple clouds, 'cause they have Microsoft Office, that's now in the cloud, they got SQL Server, I mean it's really kind of Microsoft Cloud. >> Exactly. >> So you have a cloud. But do you have ops teams building on the stack? What about the network layer? This is where the rubber meets the road. >> Absolutely, yeah. And if you look at the challenges there, if you just focus on networking and security, right? When applications need to talk to each other, you have a whole bunch of underlying services, but somebody needs to put this thing on top. Because what you care about is "can these group of users talk to these class of applications." Or, "these group of applications, can they talk to each other," right? This whole notion of connectivity is just table stakes. Everybody just assumes it's there, right? It's the next layer up, which is, "how do I bring Zero Trust access? How do I get the observability?" And observability is not just a bunch of pretty donut chats. I have had people look to me in my previous company, the start-up, and said, "okay, give me all these nice donut chats, but so what? What do you want me to do with this?" And so you have to translate that into real actions, right? "How do I bring Zero Trust capabilities? How do I bring the observability capabilities? How do I understand cloud-native and networking and bring those things together so that you can help solve for the problem." >> It's interesting, one of the questions I had here to ask you was "what does it mean to be cloud-native, and why now?" And you brought up Zero Trust, trust and verify, these are security concepts. But if you look at what's going on at KubeKon and CNCF and Linux Foundation, software supply chain's a huge issue, where trust is the issue. They want trust there, so you got Zero Trust here. What is it? Zero Trust or trust? I mean, what's there? Is one hardware based, perimeter, networking? That kind of perimeter's dead, ton of... >> No, the whole- >> Trust or Zero Trust. >> The whole concept of Zero Trust is don't trust what is underlying, just trust what you're talking to. So if you and I talking to each other, John, you need to trust me, I need to trust you, and be able to have this conversation. >> You've been verified. >> Exactly, right? But in the application world, if you talk about two apps that are talking to each other, let's say there is a web application in one AWS region talking to a database in a different region, right? Now, do you want to make sure you are able to build that trust all the way from the application to the application? Or do you want to move the trust boundary to the two entities that are talking to each other so that irrespective of what they go on underneath the covers, you can be always sure that these two things are trusted. >> So, Ramesh, I was on LinkedIn yesterday, I wrote a comment, Dave Vallante wrote a post on Supercloud, we're talking about it, and I wrote, "Cloud as a commodity," question, and then a bunch of other stuff that we're going to talk about, and Keith Townsend jumped on that, and got on Twitter, put a poll, "Is cloud a commodity? Source: me." So, it started a big thread. And the reaction was interesting. And my point was to be provocative on "Cloud isn't commodity, but there's commodity elements." EC2 and S3, you can look at that and say, "that's commodity IaaS," but Amazon Web Services has done an amazing job for higher level services. Okay, so how does that translate into the use cases that you see that you guys are going after and solving, because it's the same kind of concept. IaaS and SaaS have to work together to solve problems, but that's in an integrated environment, say, in a native-cloud. How does that work across clouds? >> Yeah, no, you bring up a great point, John. So, let's take the simple use case, right? Let's keep the user to app thing to the side. Let us say two apps need to talk to each other, right? There are multiple ways in which you can solve this problem. You can build highways. That's what our customers call it. I'll build highways. I don't care what goes on those highways, I'll just build highways. You bring any kind of application workload on it, I just make sure that the highways are good, right? That's kind of the lowest common denominator. It's the path to least resistance. You can get stuff done, but it's not going to move the needle, right? Then you have really modern, kind of service networking, where, okay, I'm looking at every single HTTP, API, n:point, whatnot, and I'm optimizing for that. Right? Great if you know what you're doing, but, like, if you have thousands of these applications, it's not going to be really feasible to do that. And so, what we have seen customers do, actually, is employ a mixed approach, where they say, "I'm going to build these highways, the highways are going to make sure that I can go from one place to another, and maybe within regions, across clouds, whatnot, but then, I have specific requirements that my business needs, that actually needs tweaking, right? And so I'm going to tweak those things. That's why, what we call as like, full stack transit, is exactly that, right, which is, I'll build you the guts of it so that hey, you know what, if somebody screams at you, "Hey, why is my application not accessible?" You don't have that problem. It is always accessible. But then, the requirements for performance, the requirements for Zero Trust, the requirements for segmentation, and all of that are things that... >> That's a hard problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. >> And you guys are solving that? >> Absolutely, exactly. >> So, let me throw this at you. So, okay, I get that. And by the way, that's exactly what we're seeing. Dave and I were also debating about multi-cloud as what it is. Now, the nirvana definition is, "Well, I have a workload, that's going to work the same, and just magically just shift to Azure." (Ramesh laughs) >> Like, 'cause there's better resources. >> There is no magic there. >> So, but this brings up the point of operations. Now, Databricks and Snowflake, they're building their software to run on multi-cloud seamlessly. Now they can do that, 'cause it's their application. What is the multi-cloud use case, so that's a Supercloud use case in your mind, because right now it's not yet there. What is the Supercloud use case that's going to allow this seamless management or workloads. What's your view? >> Yeah, so if you take enterprise, right? Large enterprise in particular. They invariably have some workloads that are on, let's say, if the primary cloud is AWS, there are some workloads in Azure. Maybe they have acquired a new company, maybe a start-up that uses GCP, whatnot. So they have sprinkles of workloads in other clouds. >> So that's the breed kind of thing. >> Yeah, exactly. That's not what causes anybody to wake up in the morning and say, "I need to have a Supercloud strategy." That's not the thing, right? But now, increasingly you're seeing "pick the right cloud for the appropriate workload." That is going to change quite a bit. Because I have my infrastructure heavy workloads in AWS. I have quite a bit of like, analytics and mining type of applications that are better on GCP. I have all of my package applications work well on Azure, right? How do I make sure all of this. And it's not apps of this kind. Even simple things like VDI. VDI always used to be, "I have this instance I run up" and whatnot. Now every single cloud provider is giving you their own flavor of virtual desktop. And so, how do you make sure all of these things work together, right? And once again, what we have seen customers do is they settle on one cloud as their primary, but then you always have sprinkles of workloads across all of the clouds. Now, you could also go down the path, and you're increasingly seeing this, you could go down the path of, "Hey, I'm using cloud as backbone," right? Cloud providers have invested massive amounts of dollars to make sure that the infrastructure reaches there. Literally almost to the extent that every user in a metro city is ten milliseconds from the public cloud. And so they have allowed for that. Now, you can actually use cloud backbones to get the availability, the liability and whatnot. So these are some new use cases that we have seen actually blew up in customers. I was just doing an interview, and the topic was the innovator's dilemma. And one of the panelists said, "It's not the innovator's dilemma, it's the integrator dilemma." Because if you have commodity, and you have choices on, say, backbones and whatnot for transit, the integration is the key glue now. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And we have seen, we used to spend quite a bit of time in kind of what is the day zero problem, right? Like, how do I put this together? Conversations are moved past that, because there are multiple ways in which you can do that right now, right? Conversations are moving to kind of, "this is more of an operational problem for me." It's not just operations in the form of "Hey, I need to find out where the problem is, troubleshoot it, and so forth. But I need to make like really high quality decisions." And those decisions are going to be guided by data. We have enterprise customers that acquire new companies. Or they have a new site that they open up. >> It's a mishmash. >> Yeah, exactly. It's a New York based company and they acquire a team out in Sidney, Australia, right? Does your cloud tell you today that you have new users, or new applications that are in Sidney, and naturally just extend? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to look at the macro problem, look at "Where are all my workloads?" Do a bunch of engineering to make that work, right? We took it upon ourselves to say "Hey, you know what, twenty-four hours later, you're going to get a recommendation in the platform that says, 'okay, you have new set of applications, a new set of users coming from Sidney, Australia, what have you done about it?' Click a button, and then you expand on it. >> It's kind of like how IT became the easy way to run the data center. Before IT you had to be a PhD, and roll out, I mean, you know how it was, right? So you're kind of taking that same approach. Okay, well, Ramesh, great stuff. I want to do a followup, certainly with you on this. 'Cause you're in the middle of where this wave is going, this structural change, and certainly can participate in that Supercloud conversation. But for your company, what's going on there? Give us an update, customer activity, what's it like, you guys came out of stealth, what's been the reaction, give a plug for the company, who you going to hire, take a minute to plug it. >> Oh, wonderful, thank you. So, primary use cases are really around cloud networking. How do you go within the cloud, and across clouds, and to the cloud, right? So those are really the key use cases. We go after large enterprises predominantly, but any kind of mid enterprise that is extremely cloud oriented, has lot of workloads in the cloud, equally applicable, applicable there. So we have about 60 of the Fortune 500s that we are engaged in right now. Many of them are paying customers as well. >> How are they buying, service? Is it... >> Yeah. So we provide software that actually sits inside the customer's own administrative control, delivered as a service, that they can use to go- >> So on-premise hosting or in the cloud? >> Entirely in the cloud, delivered as a service, so they didn't need to take care of the maintenance and whatnot, but they just consume it from the cloud directly, okay? And so, where we are right now is essentially, I have a branch of repeatable use cases that many customers are employing us for. So again, building highways, many different ways to build highways, at the same time take care of the micro-segmentation requirements, and then importantly, this whole NetDevOps, right? This whole NetDevOps is a cultural shift that we have seen. So if you are a network engineer, NetDevOps seems like it's a foreign term, right? But if you are an operational engineer, then NetDevOps, you know exactly what to do. So bringing all those principles together, making sure that the networking teams are empowered to essentially embrace the cloud that I created, the single biggest thing that we have done, I would say done well, is we have built very well on top of the cloud provider. So we don't go against cloud-native services. They have done that really, really well. It makes no sense to go say, "I have a better transit gateway than you." No. Hands down, an AWS transit gateway, or an Azure V1 and whatnot, are some of the best services that they have provided. But what does that mean? >> How do you build software into it? >> Exactly, right? And so how can you build a layer of software on top, so that when you attach that into the applications, right, that you can actually get the experience required, you can get the security requirements and so forth. So that's kind of where we are. We're also humbled by essentially some of the mega partners that have taken a bet on us, sometimes to the extent that, we're a 70% company, and some of the partners that we are talking to actually are quite humbling, right? >> Hey, lot more resource. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And how many rounds of financing have you done? >> So we have done two rounds of financing, we have raised about 55,000,000 in capital, again, really great set of investors backing us up, and a strong sense of conviction, on kind of where we are going. >> Do you think you're early, or not? 'Cause, that's always probably the biggest scary, I can see the smile, is that what keeps you up at night? >> So, yeah, exactly, I go through these phases internally in my head. >> The vision's right on the money, no doubt about it. >> So when you win an opportunity, and we have like, a few dozen of these, right, when you win an opportunity, you're like, "Yes, absolutely, this is where it is," right, and you go for a week and you don't win something, and you're like, "Hey man, why are we not seeing this?" Right, and so you go through these cycles, but I'll tell you with conviction, the fact that customers are moving workloads into the public cloud, not in dozens but in like, the hundreds and the thousands, essentially means that they need something like this. >> And the cloud-native wave is driving big time. >> Exactly, right. And so, when the customer as a conversation with AWS, Azure, GCP, and they are privy to all the services, and we go in after that and talk about, "How do I put this together and help you focus on your outcomes?" That mentally moves them. >> It's a day zero opportunity, and then you got headroom beyond that. >> Exactly. So that's the positive side of it, and enterprises certainly are sometimes a little cautious about when they're up new technologies and so forth. It's a natural cycle. Fortunately, again we are humbled by the fact that we have a few dozen of the pioneering customers that are using our platform. That gives you the legitimacy for a start-up. >> You got great pedigree on clients. Real quick, final question. 30 seconds. What's the pain point, for people watching, when do they call you in? What's their environment look like, what are some of the things that give the signals that you guys got to get the call? >> If you have more than, let's say five or ten VPCs in the cloud, and you have not invested in building a networking platform that gives you the connectivity, the security, the observability, and the performance requirements, you absolutely have to do that, right? Because we have seen many, many customers, it goes from 5 to 50 to 100 within a week, and so you don't want to be caught essentially in the midst of that. >> One more final final question. Since you're a seasoned entrepreneur, you've been there, done that previous times, >> Yeah, I've got scars. (laughs) >> Yes, we've all got scar tissue. We've been doing theCube for 12 years, we've seen a lot of stuff. What's the difference now in this market that's different than before? What's exciting you? What's the big change? What's, in your opinion, happening now that's really important that people should pay attention to? >> Absolutely. A lot of it is driven by one, the focus on the cloud itself, right? That's driving a sense of speed like never before. Because in the infrastructure world, yeah you do it today, oh, you do it six months from now, you had some leeway. Here, networking security teams are being yelled at almost every single day, by the cloud guy saying, "You guys are not moving fast enough, fast enough, fast enough." So that thing is different. So it helps, going to shrink the sale cycle for us. So second big one is, nobody knows, essentially, the new set of use cases that are coming about. We are seeing patterns emerge in terms of new use cases almost every single day. Some days it's like completely on the other end of the spectrum. Like, "I'm only serverless and service mesh." On the other end, it's like, "I have a package application, I'm moving it to the cloud." Right? And so, we're learning a lot as well. >> A great time for Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> Do the cloud really well, make it super, bring it to other use cases, stitch it all together, make it easy to use, reduce the complexity, it's just evolution. >> Yeah. And our goal is essentially, enterprise customers should not be focused so much on building infrastructure this way, right? They should focus on users, application services, let vendors like us worry about the nitty-gritty underneath. >> Ramesh, thank you for this conversation. It's a great Cube conversation. In the middle of all the action, Supercloud, multi-cloud, the future is going to be very much cloud-based, IaaS, SaaS, connecting environments. This is the cloud 2.0, Superclouds. And this is what people are going to be working on. I'm John Furrier with theCube, thanks for watching. (soft music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante, with the opening keynote conversation with Vittorio Viarengo. He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud at VMware, Cube Alumni. Vittorio, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure. >> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event. Again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around supercloud? What's your perspective? >> Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever. I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of least resistance, and they create innovations, and then the entire stacks moves around, and if you look at developers over the last, you know, 15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right? And the reason they're going for the cloud is, you now, they say software is eating the world. Is really who builds software? Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world, and so initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually, we got the multiple clouds, and now, the reality is that the applications there, it's how we make money, how we save money. They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies running on multiple clouds today, and so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years, and I think that that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges, and it's prime to a simplification, and that's where we're trying. >> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, that we had in the 2010s, where there was really, you know, one main cloud. Now, you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? >> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a... I started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, you know, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now, you still have to be a C++ developer, but now, with a one line of code, you can initiate, open the yellow world and start to build your applications, but it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now, we get five millions developers building applications that are 20 years later, we're still using, okay? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say, "Okay, this is the customers, and we're going to map it to SAP," and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous, you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now, you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything, and so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers and networking and storage look like one, and now, you know, and the business never cares if you're running SAP back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive. They care that it runs, right? And so I think that now, we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms and unify the APIs and the way do management and security across multiple cloud. >> Let's unpack that because I think the virtualization angle is interesting 'cause with virtualization enabled AWS. If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor, got them going, and that established that value. Now, the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is supercloud in your mind? >> So in our mind, supercloud is a set of cloud native services that, first of all... Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem and is no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingo franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden. It's down there, it just does its thing. The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think, "Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just, you know, deploy on- Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution, and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take, to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application and single pipeline so you can build your application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then, basically, factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. >> One of the trade-offs of abstraction, you go back to the mainframe. They had to squeeze out the performance overheads. VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we going to see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. Are you going to see a trade-off? What trade-off do you see that the industry, technically, has to attack? >> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale. You know, now, I have five million developers writing applications, but I think, eventually, what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills, and if I had a dollar every time I heard, "Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization," well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java application are running out on the JVM? So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs, but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off you were making on the lower level. >> On the evolution of hybrid cloud, 'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge, right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? 'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed. It's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people are thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? (men laugh) >> So there is a lot of unpack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud, so 75%, 85% going to 85%- >> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations? >> Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. >> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right? That's the assumption you- >> Well, initially, it's not identical, right? That's why you need a supercloud, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want, and then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realize that the security share responsibility model to deal with. They realize that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them, and then they go into like, (indistinct). Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal, and then you end up with the enlightment, right? Now, we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal, and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, "Okay, I have an application here, an application there. Okay, great, big deal." The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here that uses a pieces of a service of an application over there. Okay, now, I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices," and then the third stage is like, "Okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud." >> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? >> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right? That's why we acquired Pivotal, and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that... Well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering, product management in the company then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers, and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and deliver value, and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs at the... And so over the last five years, we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. No Hypervisor required. >> So that's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do they need to rely on partners? Because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well. So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you going to need help from the ecosystem? >> First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the supercloud. So that to me is success already, and, of course, there are tremendous companies that are going to deliver fantastic value for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security and the development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform, and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull that off. >> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend. He had that very cool blackboard, and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the supercloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. When is this going to be real? >> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces. Right, there's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary, and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud, and we invested in first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu. So with Tanzu, you can build application, manage Kubernetes cluster, secure, creating this service match, and so that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at all the Hypervisor, if you're using Hypervisor. You looking at East-West traffic with NSX and cross cloud networks, and so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make more announcement around the supercloud, which we called cross-cloud services. >> Vittorio, I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship, and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware, and you look at what's happened since, and this is where the supercloud conversation starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon of the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are going to be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it, the super pass. This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud? Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out. How has that changed the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now, you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? >> So I think that that's where the innovation, the ability to aggregate common... Because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features, like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the PaaS level, you know, when you are orchestrated these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, this group of developers can only use this many resources, but also a run time that you don't run out of like, you know, you get that bill shock, and so those are the areas where I think there's this more ability for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level which is taken by the- >> So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right? You have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers, if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right? >> Yeah. >> That's a bold aspiration. >> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight. (men laugh) But seriously, I think, going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value, and I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. You're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourself in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. >> You know, it's great. That's where we've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage. Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level's been fun to watch, and the developers have had a great run. I mean, open sources booming, developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left, a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now, and I think it's only going to get better, but developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done. Move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, "Hey, we love this, too, but we got to align with the developer." Level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, "Hey, I got to run this with automation with the higher level services." So there seems to be a focus around the supercloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse, VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that and what's the message cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and/or faster? >> I think if you go back to what where we started, right? Developers run the show, and I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the op side and the security side in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global, one of our customers, their band runs their operation. Basically, told me I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers, same thing they say, okay, we sat down. We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those guard rails, right? These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use? Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security, that we have a single pipeline that feeds that, and Cerner, using our technology was able to... They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler, It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the supercloud, being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want, but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also, make sure that operation and security, as a saying." >> Shift left shield right, basically. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. We've got 15 seconds. What is supercloud? What's the bumper sticker? >> The supercloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. >> And it's inclusive of on-prem. I'll just throw that in. (John laughs) >> All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have a industry panel to talk about and debate Supercloud 22. We'll be right back after this break.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The term Supercloud is somewhat new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years, early last decade when NIST put forth a definition of cloud computing it said services had to be accessible over a public network essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the cloud conversation. Now a guy named Chuck Hollis, who was a field CTO at EMC at the time and a prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. Now, in that post, he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner. What later became known more broadly as hybrid cloud that vision as we now know, really never materialized, and we were left with multi-cloud sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is what Hollis laid out, IE the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience is what super cloud is all about. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR and this breaking analysis. We share what we hope to learn from super cloud 22 next week, next Tuesday at 9:00 AM Pacific. The community is gathering for Supercloud 22 an inclusive pilot symposium hosted by theCUBE and made possible by VMware and other founding partners. It's a one day single track event with more than 25 speakers digging into the architectural, the technical, structural and business aspects of Supercloud. This is a hybrid event with a live program in the morning running out of our Palo Alto studio and pre-recorded content in the afternoon featuring industry leaders, technologists, analysts and investors up and down the technology stack. Now, as I said up front the seeds of super cloud were sewn early last decade. After the very first reinvent we published our Amazon gorilla post, that scene in the upper right corner here. And we talked about how to differentiate from Amazon and form ecosystems around industries and data and how the cloud would change IT permanently. And then up in the upper left we put up a post on the old Wikibon Wiki. Yeah, it used to be a Wiki. Check out my hair by the way way no gray, that's how long ago this was. And we talked about in that post how to compete in the Amazon economy. And we showed a graph of how IT economics were changing. And cloud services had marginal economics that looked more like software than hardware at scale. And this would reset, we said opportunities for both technology sellers and buyers for the next 20 years. And this came into sharper focus in the ensuing years culminating in a milestone post by Greylock's Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. It was an inspiration and catalyst for us using the term Supercloud in John Furrier's post prior to reinvent 2021. So we started to flesh out this idea of Supercloud where companies of all types build services on top of hyperscale infrastructure and across multiple clouds, going beyond multicloud 1.0, if you will, which was really a symptom, as we said, many times of multi-vendor at least that's what we argued. And despite its fuzzy definition, it resonated with people because they knew something was brewing, Keith Townsend the CTO advisor, even though he frankly, wasn't a big fan of the buzzy nature of the term Supercloud posted this awesome Blackboard on Twitter take a listen to how he framed it. Please play the clip. >> Is VMware the right company to make the super cloud work, term that Wikibon came up with to describe the taking of discreet services. So it says RDS from AWS, cloud compute engines from GCP and authentication from Azure to build SaaS applications or enterprise applications that connect back to your data center, is VMware's cross cloud vision 'cause it is just a vision today, the right approach. Or should you be looking towards companies like HashiCorp to provide this overall capability that we all agree, or maybe you don't that we need in an enterprise comment below your thoughts. >> So I really like that Keith has deep practitioner knowledge and lays out a couple of options. I especially like the examples he uses of cloud services. He recognizes the need for cross cloud services and he notes this capability is aspirational today. Remember this was eight or nine months ago and he brings HashiCorp into the conversation as they're one of the speakers at Supercloud 22 and he asks the community, what they think, the thing is we're trying to really test out this concept and people like Keith are instrumental as collaborators. Now I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that mot everyone is on board with the Supercloud meme, in particular Charles Fitzgerald has been a wonderful collaborator just by his hilarious criticisms of the concept. After a couple of super cloud posts, Charles put up his second rendition of "Supercloudifragilisticexpialidoucious". I mean, it's just beautiful, but to boot, he put up this picture of Baghdad Bob asking us to just stop, Bob's real name is Mohamed Said al-Sahaf. He was the minister of propaganda for Sadam Husein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he made these outrageous claims of, you know US troops running in fear and putting down their arms and so forth. So anyway, Charles laid out several frankly very helpful critiques of Supercloud which has led us to really advance the definition and catalyze the community's thinking on the topic. Now, one of his issues and there are many is we said a prerequisite of super cloud was a super PaaS layer. Gartner's Lydia Leong chimed in saying there were many examples of successful PaaS vendors built on top of a hyperscaler some having the option to run in more than one cloud provider. But the key point we're trying to explore is the degree to which that PaaS layer is purpose built for a specific super cloud function. And not only runs in more than one cloud provider, Lydia but runs across multiple clouds simultaneously creating an identical developer experience irrespective of a state. Now, maybe that's what Lydia meant. It's hard to say from just a tweet and she's a sharp lady, so, and knows more about that market, that PaaS market, than I do. But to the former point at Supercloud 22, we have several examples. We're going to test. One is Oracle and Microsoft's recent announcement to run database services on OCI and Azure, making them appear as one rather than use an off the shelf platform. Oracle claims to have developed a capability for developers specifically built to ensure high performance low latency, and a common experience for developers across clouds. Another example we're going to test is Snowflake. I'll be interviewing Benoit Dageville co-founder of Snowflake to understand the degree to which Snowflake's recent announcement of an application development platform is perfect built, purpose built for the Snowflake data cloud. Is it just a plain old pass, big whoop as Lydia claims or is it something new and innovative, by the way we invited Charles Fitz to participate in Supercloud 22 and he decline saying in addition to a few other somewhat insulting things there's definitely interesting new stuff brewing that isn't traditional cloud or SaaS but branding at all super cloud doesn't help either. Well, indeed, we agree with part of that and we'll see if it helps advanced thinking and helps customers really plan for the future. And that's why Supercloud 22 has going to feature some of the best analysts in the business in The Great Supercloud Debate. In addition to Keith Townsend and Maribel Lopez of Lopez research and Sanjeev Mohan from former Gartner analyst and principal at SanjMo participated in this session. Now we don't want to mislead you. We don't want to imply that these analysts are hopping on the super cloud bandwagon but they're more than willing to go through the thought experiment and mental exercise. And, we had a great conversation that you don't want to miss. Maribel Lopez had what I thought was a really excellent way to think about this. She used TCP/IP as an historical example, listen to what she said. >> And Sanjeev Mohan has some excellent thoughts on the feasibility of an open versus de facto standard getting us to the vision of Supercloud, what's possible and what's likely now, again, I don't want to imply that these analysts are out banging the Supercloud drum. They're not necessarily doing that, but they do I think it's fair to say believe that something new is bubbling and whether it's called Supercloud or multicloud 2.0 or cross cloud services or whatever name you choose it's not multicloud of the 2010s and we chose Supercloud. So our goal here is to advance the discussion on what's next in cloud and Supercloud is meant to be a term to describe that future of cloud and specifically the cloud opportunities that can be built on top of hyperscale, compute, storage, networking machine learning, and other services at scale. And that is why we posted this piece on Answering the top 10 questions about Supercloud. Many of which were floated by Charles Fitzgerald and others in the community. Why does the industry need another term what's really new and different? And what is hype? What specific problems does Supercloud solve? What are the salient characteristics of Supercloud? What's different beyond multicloud? What is a super pass? Is it necessary to have a Supercloud? How will applications evolve on superclouds? What workloads will run? All these questions will be addressed in detail as a way to advance the discussion and help practitioners and business people understand what's real today. And what's possible with cloud in the near future. And one other question we'll address is who will build super clouds? And what new entrance we can expect. This is an ETR graphic that we showed in a previous episode of breaking analysis, and it lays out some of the companies we think are building super clouds or in a position to do so, by the way the Y axis shows net score or spending velocity and the X axis depicts presence in the ETR survey of more than 1200 respondents. But the key callouts to this slide in addition to some of the smaller firms that aren't yet showing up in the ETR data like Chaossearch and Starburst and Aviatrix and Clumio but the really interesting additions are industry players Walmart with Azure, Capital one and Goldman Sachs with AWS, Oracle, with Cerner. These we think are early examples, bubbling up of industry clouds that will eventually become super clouds. So we'll explore these and other trends to get the community's input on how this will all play out. These are the things we hope you'll take away from Supercloud 22. And we have an amazing lineup of experts to answer your question. Technologists like Kit Colbert, Adrian Cockcroft, Mariana Tessel, Chris Hoff, Will DeForest, Ali Ghodsi, Benoit Dageville, Muddu Sudhakar and many other tech athletes, investors like Jerry Chen and In Sik Rhee the analyst we featured earlier, Paula Hansen talking about go to market in a multi-cloud world Gee Rittenhouse talking about cloud security, David McJannet, Bhaskar Gorti of Platform9 and many, many more. And of course you, so please go to theCUBE.net and register for Supercloud 22, really lightweight reg. We're not doing this for lead gen. We're doing it for collaboration. If you sign in you can get the chat and ask questions in real time. So don't miss this inaugural event Supercloud 22 on August 9th at 9:00 AM Pacific. We'll see you there. Okay. That's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some really wonderful editing. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And you can email me at David.Vellantesiliconangle.com or DM me at Dvellante, comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out ETR.AI for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next week in Palo Alto at Supercloud 22 or next time on breaking analysis. (calm music)