>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While the precise direction of VMware's future is unknown, given the plan Broadcom acquisition, one thing is clear. The topic of what Broadcom plans will not be the main focus of the agenda at the upcoming VMware Explore event next week in San Francisco. We believe that despite any uncertainty, VMware will lay out for its customers what it sees as its future. And that future is multi-cloud or cross-cloud services, what we call Supercloud. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we drill into the latest survey data on VMware from ETR. And we'll share with you the next iteration of the Supercloud definition based on feedback from dozens of contributors. And we'll give you our take on what to expect next week at VMware Explorer 2022. Well, VMware is maturing. You can see it in the numbers. VMware had a solid quarter just this week, which was announced beating earnings and growing the top line by 6%. But it's clear from its financials and the ETR data that we're showing here that VMware's Halcion glory days are behind it. This chart shows the spending profile from ETR's July survey of nearly 1500 IT buyers and CIOs. The survey included 722 VMware customers with the green bars showing elevated spending momentum, ie: growth, either new or growing at more than 6%. And the red bars show lower spending, either down 6% or worse or defections. The gray bars, that's the flat spending crowd, and it really tells a story. Look, nobody's throwing away their VMware platforms. They're just not investing as rapidly as in previous years. The blue line shows net score or spending momentum and subtracts the reds from the greens. The yellow line shows market penetration or pervasiveness in the survey. So the data is pretty clear. It's steady, but it's not remarkable. Now, the timing of the acquisition, quite rightly, is quite good, I would say. Now, this next chart shows the net score and pervasiveness juxtaposed on an XY graph and breaks down the VMware portfolio in those dimensions, the product portfolio. And you can see the dominance of respondents citing VMware as the platform. They might not know exactly which services they use, but they just respond VMware. That's on the X axis. You can see it way to the right. And the spending momentum or the net score is on the Y axis. That red dotted line at 4%, that indicates elevated levels and only VMware cloud on AWS is above that line. Notably, Tanzu has jumped up significantly from previous quarters, with the rest of the portfolio showing steady, as you would expect from a maturing platform. Only carbon black is hovering in the red zone, kind of ironic given the name. We believe that VMware is going to be a major player in cross cloud services, what we refer to as Supercloud. For months, we've been refining the concept and the definition. At Supercloud '22, we had discussions with more than 30 technology and business experts, and we've gathered input from many more. Based on that feedback, here's the definition we've landed on. It's somewhat refined from our earlier definition that we published a couple weeks ago. Supercloud is an emerging computing architecture that comprises a set of services abstracted from the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds, e.g. compute, storage, networking, security, and other native resources, to create a global system spanning more than one cloud. Supercloud is three essential properties, three deployment models, and three service models. So what are those essential elements, those properties? We've simplified the picture from our last report. We show them here. I'll review them briefly. We're not going to go super in depth here because we've covered this topic a lot. But supercloud, it runs on more than one cloud. It creates that common or identical experience across clouds. It contains a necessary capability that we call a superPaaS that acts as a cloud interpreter, and it has metadata intelligence to optimize for a specific purpose. We'll publish this definition in detail. So again, we're not going to spend a ton of time here today. Now, we've identified three deployment models for Supercloud. The first is a single instantiation, where a control plane runs on one cloud but supports interactions with multiple other clouds. An example we use is Kubernetes cluster management service that runs on one cloud but can deploy and manage clusters on other clouds. The second model is a multi-cloud, multi-region instantiation where a full stack of services is instantiated on multiple clouds and multiple cloud regions with a common interface across them. We've used cohesity as one example of this. And then a single global instance that spans multiple cloud providers. That's our snowflake example. Again, we'll publish this in detail. So we're not going to spend a ton of time here today. Finally, the service models. The feedback we've had is IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS work fine to describe the service models for Supercloud. NetApp's Cloud Volume is a good example in IaaS. VMware cloud foundation and what we expect at VMware Explore is a good PaaS example. And SAP HANA Cloud is a good example of SaaS running as a Supercloud service. That's the SAP HANA multi-cloud. So what is it that we expect from VMware Explore 2022? Well, along with what will be an exciting and speculation filled gathering of the VMware community at the Moscone Center, we believe VMware will lay out its future architectural direction. And we expect it will fit the Supercloud definition that we just described. We think VMware will show its hand on a set of cross-cloud services and will promise a common experience for users and developers alike. As we talked about at Supercloud '22, VMware kind of wants to have its cake, eat it too, and lose weight. And by that, we mean that it will not only abstract the underlying primitives of each of the individual clouds, but if developers want access to them, they will allow that and actually facilitate that. Now, we don't expect VMware to use the term Supercloud, but it will be a cross-cloud multi-cloud services model that they put forth, we think, at VMworld Explore. With IaaS comprising compute, storage, and networking, a very strong emphasis, we believe, on security, of course, a governance and a comprehensive set of data protection services. Now, very importantly, we believe Tanzu will play a leading role in any announcements this coming week, as a purpose-built PaaS layer, specifically designed to create a common experience for cross clouds for data and application services. This, we believe, will be VMware's most significant offering to date in cross-cloud services. And it will position VMware to be a leader in what we call Supercloud. Now, while it remains to be seen what Broadcom exactly intends to do with VMware, we've speculated, others have speculated. We think this Supercloud is a substantial market opportunity generally and for VMware specifically. Look, if you don't own a public cloud, and very few companies do, in the tech business, we believe you better be supporting the build out of superclouds or building a supercloud yourself on top of hyperscale infrastructure. And we believe that as cloud matures, hyperscalers will increasingly I cross cloud services as an opportunity. We asked David Floyer to take a stab at a market model for super cloud. He's really good at these types of things. What he did is he took the known players in cloud and estimated their IaaS and PaaS cloud services, their total revenue, and then took a percentage. So this is super set of just the public cloud and the hyperscalers. And then what he did is he took a percentage to fit the Supercloud definition, as we just shared above. He then added another 20% on top to cover the long tail of Other. Other over time is most likely going to grow to let's say 30%. That's kind of how these markets work. Okay, so this is obviously an estimate, but it's an informed estimate by an individual who has done this many, many times and is pretty well respected in these types of forecasts, these long term forecasts. Now, by the definition we just shared, Supercloud revenue was estimated at about $3 billion in 2022 worldwide, growing to nearly $80 billion by 2030. Now remember, there's not one Supercloud market. It comprises a bunch of purpose-built superclouds that solve a specific problem. But the common attribute is it's built on top of hyperscale infrastructure. So overall, cloud services, including Supercloud, peak by the end of the decade. But Supercloud continues to grow and will take a higher percentage of the cloud market. The reasoning here is that the market will change and compute, will increasingly become distributed and embedded into edge devices, such as automobiles and robots and factory equipment, et cetera, and not necessarily be a discreet... I mean, it still will be, of course, but it's not going to be as much of a discrete component that is consumed via services like EZ2, that will mature. And this will be a key shift to watch in spending dynamics and really importantly, computing economics, the things we've talked about around arm and edge and AI inferencing and new low cost computing architectures at the edge. We're talking not the near edge, like, Lowes and Home Depot, we're talking far edge and embedded devices. Now, whether this becomes a seamless part of Supercloud remains to be seen. Look, if that's how we see it, the current and the future state of Supercloud, and we're committed to keeping the discussion going with an inclusive model that gathers input from all parts of the industry. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Morrison, who's on production, and he also manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman, as well, is on production in our Boston office. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoffe is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle and does some helpful editing. Thank you, all. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @Dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. Please do check out etr.ai. They've got some great enterprise survey research. So please go there and poke around, And if you need any assistance, let them know. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (lively music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> After a two-year epic run in tech, 2022 has been an epically bad year. Through yesterday, The NASDAQ composite is down 30%. The S$P 500 is off 21%. And the Dow Jones Industrial average 16% down. And the poor holders at Bitcoin have had to endure a nearly 60% decline year to date. But judging by the attendance and enthusiasm, in major in-person tech events this spring. You'd never know that tech was in the tank. Moreover, walking around the streets of Las Vegas, where most tech conferences are held these days. One can't help but notice that the good folks of Main Street, don't seem the least bit concerned that the economy is headed for a recession. Hello, and welcome to this weeks Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our main takeaways from the first half of 2022. And talk about the outlook for tech going forward, and why despite some pretty concerning headwinds we remain sanguine about tech generally, but especially enterprise tech. Look, here's the bumper sticker on why many folks are really bearish at the moment. Of course, inflation is high, other than last year, the previous inflation high this century was in July of 2008, it was 5.6%. Inflation has proven to be very, very hard to tame. You got gas at $7 dollars a gallon. Energy prices they're not going to suddenly drop. Interest rates are climbing, which will eventually damage housing. Going to have that ripple effect, no doubt. We're seeing layoffs at companies like Tesla and the crypto names are also trimming staff. Workers, however are still in short supply. So wages are going up. Companies in retail are really struggling with the right inventory, and they can't even accurately guide on their earnings. We've seen a version of this movie before. Now, as it pertains to tech, Crawford Del Prete, who's the CEO of IDC explained this on theCUBE this very week. And I thought he did a really good job. He said the following, >> Matt, you have a great statistic that 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers. Now so this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two vastly different markets. We got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 wheeler. All right, based on, I mean, this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it. >> Don't put the boat in the water. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good luck if ya, yeah exactly. So a family has kind of this bag of money, and that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more, gadgets and consumer tech are not, you're going to use that iPhone a little longer. You're going to use that Android phone a little longer. You're going to use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately in ad spending. You've seen it in Meta, you've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very, it is tough. Enterprise tech, we haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be servers, whether that be commercial PCs as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. We have combined that with a component shortage, and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog, I mean that's really unheard of. >> And higher prices, which also profit. >> And therefore that drives up the prices. >> And this is a theme that we've heard this year at major tech events, they've really come roaring back. Last year, theCUBE had a huge presence at AWS Reinvent. The first Reinvent since 2019, it was really well attended. Now this was before the effects of the omicron variant, before they were really well understood. And in the first quarter of 2022, things were pretty quiet as far as tech events go But theCUBE'a been really busy this spring and early into the summer. We did 12 physical events as we're showing here in the slide. Coupa, did Women in Data Science at Stanford, Coupa Inspire was in Las Vegas. Now these are both smaller events, but they were well attended and beat expectations. San Francisco Summit, the AWS San Francisco Summit was a bit off, frankly 'cause of the COVID concerns. They were on the rise, then we hit Dell Tech World which was packed, it had probably around 7,000 attendees. Now Dockercon was virtual, but we decided to include it here because it was a huge global event with watch parties and many, many tens of thousands of people attending. Now the Red Hat Summit was really interesting. The choice that Red Hat made this year. It was purposefully scaled down and turned into a smaller VIP event in Boston at the Western, a couple thousand people only. It was very intimate with a much larger virtual presence. VeeamON was very well attended, not as large as previous VeeamON events, but again beat expectations. KubeCon and Cloud Native Con was really successful in Spain, Valencia, Spain. PagerDuty Summit was again a smaller intimate event in San Francisco. And then MongoDB World was at the new Javits Center and really well attended over the three day period. There were lots of developers there, lots of business people, lots of ecosystem partners. And then the Snowflake summit in Las Vegas, it was the most vibrant from the standpoint of the ecosystem with nearly 10,000 attendees. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Amazon re:Mars is the Amazon AI robotic event, it's smaller but very, very cool, a lot of innovation. And just last week we were at HPE Discover. They had around 8,000 people attending which was really good. Now I've been to over a dozen HPE or HPE Discover events, within Europe and the United States over the past decade. And this was by far the most vibrant, lot of action. HPE had a little spring in its step because the company's much more focused now but people was really well attended and people were excited to be there, not only to be back at physical events, but also to hear about some of the new innovations that are coming and HPE has a long way to go in terms of building out that ecosystem, but it's starting to form. So we saw that last week. So tech events are back, but they are smaller. And of course now a virtual overlay, they're hybrid. And just to give you some context, theCUBE did, as I said 12 physical events in the first half of 2022. Just to compare that in 2019, through June of that year we had done 35 physical events. Yeah, 35. And what's perhaps more interesting is we had our largest first half ever in our 12 year history because we're doing so much hybrid and virtual to compliment the physical. So that's the new format is CUBE plus digital or sometimes just digital but that's really what's happening in our business. So I think it's a reflection of what's happening in the broader tech community. So everyone's still trying to figure that out but it's clear that events are back and there's no replacing face to face. Or as I like to say, belly to belly, because deals are done at physical events. All these events we've been to, the sales people are so excited. They're saying we're closing business. Pipelines coming out of these events are much stronger, than they are out of the virtual events but the post virtual event continues to deliver that long tail effect. So that's not going to go away. The bottom line is hybrid is the new model. Okay let's look at some of the big themes that we've taken away from the first half of 2022. Now of course, this is all happening under the umbrella of digital transformation. I'm not going to talk about that too much, you've had plenty of DX Kool-Aid injected into your veins over the last 27 months. But one of the first observations I'll share is that the so-called big data ecosystem that was forming during the hoop and around, the hadoop infrastructure days and years. then remember it dispersed, right when the cloud came in and kind of you know, not wiped out but definitely dampened the hadoop enthusiasm for on-prem, the ecosystem dispersed, but now it's reforming. There are large pockets that are obviously seen in the various clouds. And we definitely see a ecosystem forming around MongoDB and the open source community gathering in the data bricks ecosystem. But the most notable momentum is within the Snowflake ecosystem. Snowflake is moving fast to win the day in the data ecosystem. They're providing a single platform that's bringing different data types together. Live data from systems of record, systems of engagement together with so-called systems of insight. These are converging and while others notably, Oracle are architecting for this new reality, Snowflake is leading with the ecosystem momentum and a new stack is emerging that comprises cloud infrastructure at the bottom layer. Data PaaS layer for app dev and is enabling an ecosystem of partners to build data products and data services that can be monetized. That's the key, that's the top of the stack. So let's dig into that further in a moment but you're seeing machine intelligence and data being driven into applications and the data and application stacks they're coming together to support the acceleration of physical into digital. It's happening right before our eyes in every industry. We're also seeing the evolution of cloud. It started with the SaaS-ification of the enterprise where organizations realized that they didn't have to run their own software on-prem and it made sense to move to SaaS for CRM or HR, certainly email and collaboration and certain parts of ERP and early IS was really about getting out of the data center infrastructure management business called that cloud 1.0, and then 2.0 was really about changing the operating model. And now we're seeing that operating model spill into on-prem workloads finally. We're talking about here about initiatives like HPE's Green Lake, which we heard a lot about last week at Discover and Dell's Apex, which we heard about in May, in Las Vegas. John Furrier had a really interesting observation that basically this is HPE's and Dell's version of outposts. And I found that interesting because outpost was kind of a wake up call in 2018 and a shot across the bow at the legacy enterprise infrastructure players. And they initially responded with these flexible financial schemes, but finally we're seeing real platforms emerge. Again, we saw this at Discover and at Dell Tech World, early implementations of the cloud operating model on-prem. I mean, honestly, you're seeing things like consoles and billing, similar to AWS circa 2014, but players like Dell and HPE they have a distinct advantage with respect to their customer bases, their service organizations, their very large portfolios, especially in the case of Dell and the fact that they have more mature stacks and knowhow to run mission critical enterprise applications on-prem. So John's comment was quite interesting that these firms are basically building their own version of outposts. Outposts obviously came into their wheelhouse and now they've finally responded. And this is setting up cloud 3.0 or Supercloud, as we like to call it, an abstraction layer, that sits above the clouds that serves as a unifying experience across a continuum of on-prem across clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, or Google. And out to both the near and far edge, near edge being a Lowes or a Home Depot, but far edge could be space. And that edge again is fragmented. You've got the examples like the retail stores at the near edge. Outer space maybe is the far edge and IOT devices is perhaps the tiny edge. No one really knows how the tiny edge is going to play out but it's pretty clear that it's not going to comprise traditional X86 systems with a cool name tossed out to the edge. Rather, it's likely going to require a new low cost, low power, high performance architecture, most likely RM based that will enable things like realtime AI inferencing at that edge. Now we've talked about this a lot on Breaking Analysis, so I'm not going to double click on it. But suffice to say that it's very possible that new innovations are going to emerge from the tiny edge that could really disrupt the enterprise in terms of price performance. Okay, two other quick observations. One is that data protection is becoming a much closer cohort to the security stack where data immutability and air gaps and fast recovery are increasingly becoming a fundamental component of the security strategy to combat ransomware and recover from other potential hacks or disasters. And I got to say from our observation, Veeam is leading the pack here. It's now claiming the number one revenue spot in a statistical dead heat with the Dell's data protection business. That's according to Veeam, according to IDC. And so that space continues to be of interest. And finally, Broadcom's acquisition of Dell. It's going to have ripple effects throughout the enterprise technology business. And there of course, there are a lot of questions that remain, but the one other thing that John Furrier and I were discussing last night John looked at me and said, "Dave imagine if VMware runs better on Broadcom components and OEMs that use Broadcom run VMware better, maybe Broadcom doesn't even have to raise prices on on VMware licenses. Maybe they'll just raise prices on the OEMs and let them raise prices to the end customer." Interesting thought, I think because Broadcom is so P&L focused that it's probably not going to be the prevailing model but we'll see what happens to some of the strategic projects rather like Monterey and Capitola and Thunder. We've talked a lot about project Monterey, the others we'll see if they can make the cut. That's one of the big concerns because it's how OEMs like the ones that are building their versions of outposts are going to compete with the cloud vendors, namely AWS in the future. I want to come back to the comment on the data stack for a moment that we were talking about earlier, we talked about how the big data ecosystem that was once coalescing around hadoop dispersed. Well, the data value chain is reforming and we think it looks something like this picture, where cloud infrastructure lives at the bottom. We've said many times the cloud is expanding and evolving. And if companies like Dell and HPE can truly build a super cloud infrastructure experience then they will be in a position to capture more of the data value. If not, then it's going to go to the cloud players. And there's a live data layer that is increasingly being converged into platforms that not only simplify the movement in ELTing of data but also allow organizations to compress the time to value. Now there's a layer above that, we sometimes call it the super PaaS layer if you will, that must comprise open source tooling, partners are going to write applications and leverage platform APIs and build data products and services that can be monetized at the top of the stack. So when you observe the battle for the data future it's unlikely that any one company is going to be able to do this all on their own, which is why I often joke that the 2020s version of a sweaty Steve Bomber running around the stage, screaming, developers, developers developers, and getting the whole audience into it is now about ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem. Because when you need to fill gaps and accelerate features and provide optionality a list of capabilities on the left hand side of this chart, that's going to come from a variety of different companies and places, we're talking about catalogs and AI tools and data science capabilities, data quality, governance tools and it should be of no surprise to followers of Breaking Analysis that on the right hand side of this chart we're including the four principles of data mesh, which of course were popularized by Zhamak Dehghani. So decentralized data ownership, data as products, self-serve platform and automated or computational governance. Now whether this vision becomes a reality via a proprietary platform like Snowflake or somehow is replicated by an open source remains to be seen but history generally shows that a defacto standard for more complex problems like this is often going to emerge prior to an open source alternative. And that would be where I would place my bets. Although even that proprietary platform has to include open source optionality. But it's not a winner take all market. It's plenty of room for multiple players and ecosystem innovators, but winner will definitely take more in my opinion. Okay, let's close with some ETR data that looks at some of those major platform plays who talk a lot about digital transformation and world changing impactful missions. And they have the resources really to compete. This is an XY graphic. It's a view that we often show, it's got net score on the vertical access. That's a measure of spending momentum, and overlap or presence in the ETR survey. That red, that's the horizontal access. The red dotted line at 40% indicates that the platform is among the highest in terms of spending velocity. Which is why I always point out how impressive that makes AWS and Azure because not only are they large on the horizontal axis, the spending momentum on those two platforms rivals even that of Snowflake which continues to lead all on the vertical access. Now, while Google has momentum, given its goals and resources, it's well behind the two leaders. We've added Service Now and Salesforce, two platform names that have become the next great software companies. Joining likes of Oracle, which we show here and SAP not shown along with IBM, you can see them on this chart. We've also plotted MongoDB, which we think has real momentum as a company generally but also with Atlas, it's managed cloud database as a service specifically and Red Hat with trying to become the standard for app dev in Kubernetes environments, which is the hottest trend right now in application development and application modernization. Everybody's doing something with Kubernetes and of course, Red Hat with OpenShift wants to make that a better experience than do it yourself. The DYI brings a lot more complexity. And finally, we've got HPE and Dell both of which we've talked about pretty extensively here and VMware and Cisco. Now Cisco is executing on its portfolio strategy. It's got a lot of diverse components to its company. And it's coming at the cloud of course from a networking and security perspective. And that's their position of strength. And VMware is a staple of the enterprise. Yes, there's some uncertainty with regards to the Broadcom acquisition, but one thing is clear vSphere isn't going anywhere. It's entrenched and will continue to run lots of IT for years to come because it's the best platform on the planet. Now, of course, these are just some of the players in the mix. We expect that numerous non-traditional technology companies this is important to emerge as new cloud players. We've put a lot of emphasis on the data ecosystem because to us that's really going to be the main spring of digital, i.e., a digital company is a data company and that means an ecosystem of data partners that can advance outcomes like better healthcare, faster drug discovery, less fraud, cleaner energy, autonomous vehicles that are safer, smarter, more efficient grids and factories, better government and virtually endless litany of societal improvements that can be addressed. And these companies will be building innovations on top of cloud platforms creating their own super clouds, if you will. And they'll come from non-traditional places, industries, finance that take their data, their software, their tooling bring them to their customers and run them on various clouds. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson, who is on production and does the podcast for Breaking Analysis, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out. And Rob Hoofe is our editor and chief over at Silicon Angle who helps edit our posts. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, (gentle electronic music) brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Dave, I think first time we've co-hosted this week. >> Yeah. >> Excited to be with you. >> Very excited. >> Live wall to wall coverage. Two and a half days, two days and one evening. I'd say 7,000 plus people here, so really good showing. Caitlin Gordon is here, she's the vice president of product management for cloud solutions and tech alliances at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. >> It is really good to be back in a physical cube, with three dimensional humans. >> Yeah, so unbelievable. >> And it was good to see you up on stage today, so fantastic job. I think the keynotes have been good. I think it's funny, coming out of COVID, it seems like the keynotes are really tight. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> This year, you know. And, so I think that's good. You have a lot to say, so that's why we love theCube, so you can come back and. >> Caitlin: Nice to have a live audience, get the feedback, yeah. Yeah, they were, I tell you, the audience was engaged today, right? I mean, lots of hooping and hollering, so let's talk about multicloud. You know, it's, pre-COVID, post-COVID, feels like things have changed. Maybe, maybe due to COVID, maybe not, but what are you seeing, the patterns in customers around multicloud? >> Well it's been interesting. I've been in a multicloud world tour here over the last six to nine months, and you know, one thing is clear, for the first time as an industry, we agree on something, (Dave laughing) And that's multicloud. We don't agree on what it means, but we do agree that multicloud is our reality. And customers are having a lot of challenges with what that means. That means today reality is multicloud most of the time just means multi contract, alright. I know what hyperscaler's my primary, I have secondary, I probably brought someone that brought someone else in. I've got SaaS providers, I got my on-prem partners. But there's not a lot of continuity and consistency across that. It's really operational silos, data silos, being able to predict that spend is the challenge. And there's a lot of people challenges in there. Whether it's developer velocity, as Jen talked about earlier today. Or even just simply having enough people with the right skills, is a real big challenge because no matter what definition you have of multicloud, it means distributed, and it means a lot of different places, and that's a big challenge. >> I tagged you in my Tweet today, when you were up on stage, I don't know if you saw it. But basically you know, we use this term super cloud, and it was pretty clear to me anyway, an example of what I think of as what multicloud should be. An experience that spans location, that is the consistent experience with all my policies, and my security, my governance. Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends that you see. >> You used my favorite phrase, consistent experience. And really what we're doing is two things. We're building a portfolio of software and services, and that's really targeted at that consistent experience. You can have your data, and your workloads in the right place, but you can have a consistent experience with what you already have on-prem. We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations. We overused that term and we ruined it, and then we didn't use it anymore. But that's what we're talking about. On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency. But that's not enough because this is just such a complex landscape. The second part of what we're building is really an ecosystem of cloud partnerships. So whether it's the hyperscaler, certainly. But also colocation providers like Equinix. Or SaaS providers like Snowflake. The more we can partner with the key providers in the multicloud landscape, the more we can simplify that across. >> Yes, so you mentioned something that's key. Most people when they think about multicloud, they're not going into that because they really want to do the same thing nine different ways. So that consistency. >> Caitlin: It's not the design point. >> No, exactly. >> Caitlin: No. >> It's like, I want multi something. But not multi everything you offer. So the concept of using this well worn, well proven set of storage intelligence software titles, and putting them out into a variety of cloud providers, linking them with a unified experience is obviously powerful. And that seems to be what's behind Alpine? Is that the strategy? >> Yeah, it's absolutely right. Because you want that consistency because you have established multi lots of things. But you want to be able to get the consistency. But you want to be able to get that across all your data types. You can't just have consistency for file. You can't not only have consistency for object. You want to have that flexibility in who the providers are, and what type of data. And yet have, still have that operational consistency not so matter what. So that's that, that's the tough combination. Keeping flexibility, but also that simplicity and consistency. >> So Project Alpine, tell us more about it, what it is, why is is called a project, when will it be a product. >> (laughing) All of the things. >> Dave: Yeah. So Project Alpine, if you've been tuned in this week, you've heard this a few times. But it is our initiative to bring our block file and object storage software, to all of the major public clouds. So that is all about being able to really break the barriers between your data, and native public cloud services. The key thing, that you started off with it, operational consistency. If I have a power store on-prem, I can run our block software in the cloud, have that operational consistency, so it's the same UI, it's the same API's. Why that really matters, the undercurrent of that comes back to people. If you have the same tools, the same API's, you don't have to learn anything new. You don't have to re-skill or re-hire any people. And eventually you can drive that even more efficiently all through API's. So it's all about that consistent operations. I'm not going to ignore your project questions so I'll get to that as well. >> Thank you. >> It's a project because for a number of reasons, it's something we're working towards, and it's going to have deliverables and milestones over a number of months and years, to be honest. We actually first announced Project Alpine back in January as you know. And we have already extended that now in May to say what we're talking about and any news, started to show you what that's looking like. So original announcement as a project in January. Technology preview here in May. And then we're going to start to have early access for some of these to customers later this year. And then availability into next year. >> Excellent. So the primary value proposition I've been hearing is that operational consistency. Is there another dimension of value, in terms of function? In other words, I get why I'm not going to get that operational consistency across clouds and on-prem from a public cloud provider. Are there functional capabilities that you bring, I mean yes, help us understand that gap. >> Yeah. >> Between what you can offer as a long term, you know, the leader in storage, versus kind of the new entrance in the public cloud. >> Yeah, two things come to mind. The number one is data mobility. So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility. Because what's the most efficient way to send data from an on-prem storage appliance? Use the native mobility services that are already built into that platform. They're already there, you already know how to use them, and they're very efficient. So they're going to be very smart about what data you send to, and what data you send back from the cloud. Which is critical from a people standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint. Which is the other piece of this. We've been talking about the technology, but as you well know, the business requirements are pretty important. So being able to also, not only have your software in the cloud, but transact that through a public cloud marketplace, and in one case will actually be delivered as a native cloud service, is critical. So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one of these hyperscalers, you can actually draw down against that credit to purchase these software and services, which is equally important to the technology value prop. >> Hence your expanding ecosystem kind of goes both ways. Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public clouds, I want to go into Alpine, and now I'm into a Dell experience. Is that correct? >> I talked about flexibility right, and choice. You have that consistency to say, if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscaler ecosystems, we'll inter-operate that through our API's. We're not going to force you into any single walled garden, but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working through, you can abstract out our value through API's and still leverage that underneath the covers, really at the data layer. So we are really all about that consistency at the data layer, but inter-operating with whatever control planes, and whatever ecosystems you are working with. Which is, I've said it five times, but API's are a critical part of this. We love UI's, and they're pretty in a nice demo, but the reality is probably API's is where this is mostly going to be consumed. >> So, I have a question for you as a marketer. You mentioned technology versus business value. Clearly, outcomes, the actual business value associated with what we do in technology, is key. However, as an old time storage guy myself, (Caitlin laughing) I realize that what you're talking about here is decades of development, focusing on things like data protection, resiliency, performance, built originally in an environment that wasn't instrumented for high availability. >> Caitlin: Hmm. >> You needed things like clusters. There wasn't the concept of just JBOD in servers, one server fails, you throw it away, and it automatically goes to another. How do you balance, this is a very long question here, how do you balance the fact that your underlying technology is so good, with the desire to communicate the business value? Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology as much anymore? Because there's so much impressive stuff there. >> Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself. Um, it is really interesting having been at this show for many, many, many years. Not as many as Dave probably. (Dave laughing) >> Old man Dave. (Caitlin laughing) >> What can I say. >> I would say, a number of those years we spend most of our time talking about speeds and feeds. How many IOPS? What's the latency? What's our HERO number of the day? And we still care about that right, and data protection, what's your BD braid? How much can we save you? Still important. But it's a secondary conversation. What are we talking about now? Cloud native app mobility, and that modernization, and the underlying infrastructure isn't always going to be Dell's anymore, it's going to by in the hyperscalers in some cases. So it's a completely different conversation and different people we're talking to. It's very exciting, it's a little bit foreign to us, but we welcome it, and it's also still important that we understand the infrastructure side too. Because ultimately, even if this is being delivered as a service, someone is still delivering and managing that infrastructure and that is still critically important. >> So okay, Project Alpine, is it multicloud? Is it Apex? Is it subscription? Is it as a service? >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> We should be thinking about it. >> Yeah, all those things. Yes, check. (Dave laughing) All of the things. >> So they're coming together is the. >> It's coming together, right. You hit all of the right buzz words, bingo. But multicloud, the value prop is Project Alpine, multicloud data, and yes subscription is going to really be the model from an economic standpoint, that's really the key. But ultimately it all comes together. >> What are you seeing with data architectures? Kind of up leveling a bit these days, where you know, customers generally, they'll shove everything into a big data warehouse, or a single store, or cloud. You you guys talked about the edge a lot. We just had a great conversation with Lowes, and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores. How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures? >> I think the Snowflake announcement was a really really really good example. And it came through as an announcement but it's a partnership, right. And what's really interesting is it's very clear that what we've kind of inherently understood as an on-prem, primarily an on-prem vendor traditionally, is that data has a ton of gravity, and between data privacy, and just governance regulations, there's a lot of reason the data is not going to move. And what that means from a modern cloud based analytics standpoint like Snowflake, is they need to be able to support the data no matter where it lives. That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud. Many customers including us will not do that. It means being able to access that data so that more distributed data architecture, but still being able to use those cloud based tools, is really where we're seeing, and why we've really announced this partnership this week. I think there's a ton more opportunity in that space. >> Well that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data, into the Snowflake data cloud, that's a first. >> Caitlin: Yup. >> Now there, I'm sure Snowflake is going to want to migrate it at some point. But to your point, you won't as a customer, a lot of customers to say, no. First of all, a lot of times, it's not a business case. If I don't have to move it, why should I move it? If it's cost effective, and it's protected. And then, there are constraints. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> To moving data, like legal constraints and so forth. >> Absolutely. And data regulations are not getting less stringent, right? >> Right. Alright, we got to go. Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. It was great to see you. Congratulations for all the announcements, and awesome to see you face to face. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're very welcome. >> Good to have you. >> Thank you for watching, this is Dave Vellante, for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin, and John Furrier. You're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (gentle electronic music)