(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, an open collaborative where we explore the future of cloud and data. Now, you might recall last August at the inaugural Supercloud event we validated the technical feasibility and tried to further define the essential technical characteristics, and of course the deployment models of so-called supercloud. That is, sets of services that leverage the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds, but are creating new value on top of those clouds for organizations at scale. So we're talking about capabilities that fundamentally weren't practical or even possible prior to the ascendancy of the public clouds. And so today at Supercloud 2, we're digging further into the topic with input from real-world practitioners. And we're exploring the intersection of data and cloud, And importantly, the realities and challenges of deploying technology for a new business capability. I'm pleased to have with me in our studios, west of Boston, Veronika Durgin, who's the head of data at Saks. Veronika, welcome. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. So excited to be here. >> And so we have to say upfront, you're here, these are your opinions. You're not representing Saks in any way. So we appreciate you sharing your depth of knowledge with us. >> Thank you, Dave. Yeah, I've been doing data for a while. I try not to say how long anymore. It's been a while. But yeah, thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, one of the highlights of this past year for me was hanging out at the airport with you after the Snowflake Summit. And we were just chatting about sort of data mesh, and you were saying, "Yeah, but." There was a yeah, but. You were saying there's some practical realities of actually implementing these things. So I want to get into some of that. And I guess starting from a perspective of how data has changed, you've seen a lot of the waves. I mean, even if we go back to pre-Hadoop, you know, that would shove everything into an Oracle database, or, you know, Hadoop was going to save our data lives. And the cloud came along and, you know, that was kind of a disruptive force. And, you know, now we see things like, whether it's Snowflake or Databricks or these other platforms on top of the clouds. How have you observed the change in data and the evolution over time? >> Yeah, so I started as a DBA in the data center, kind of like, you know, growing up trying to manage whatever, you know, physical limitations a server could give us. So we had to be very careful of what we put in our database because we were limited. We, you know, purchased that piece of hardware, and we had to use it for the next, I don't know, three to five years. So it was only, you know, we focused on only the most important critical things. We couldn't keep too much data. We had to be super efficient. We couldn't add additional functionality. And then Hadoop came along, which is like, great, we can dump all the data there, but then we couldn't get data out of it. So it was like, okay, great. Doesn't help either. And then the cloud came along, which was incredible. I was probably the most excited person. I'm lying, but I was super excited because I no longer had to worry about what I can actually put in my database. Now I have that, you know, scalability and flexibility with the cloud. So okay, great, that data's there, and I can also easily get it out of it, which is really incredible. >> Well, but so, I'm inferring from what you're saying with Hadoop, it was like, okay, no schema on write. And then you got to try to make sense out of it. But so what changed with the cloud? What was different? >> So I'll tell a funny story. I actually successfully avoided Hadoop. The only time- >> Congratulations. >> (laughs) I know, I'm like super proud of it. I don't know how that happened, but the only time I worked for a company that had Hadoop, all I remember is that they were running jobs that were taking over 24 hours to get data out of it. And they were realizing that, you know, dumping data without any structure into this massive thing that required, you know, really skilled engineers wasn't really helpful. So what changed, and I'm kind of thinking of like, kind of like how Snowflake started, right? They were marketing themselves as a data warehouse. For me, moving from SQL Server to Snowflake was a non-event. It was comfortable, I knew what it was, I knew how to get data out of it. And I think that's the important part, right? Cloud, this like, kind of like, vague, high-level thing, magical, but the reality is cloud is the same as what we had on prem. So it's comfortable there. It's not scary. You don't need super new additional skills to use it. >> But you're saying what's different is the scale. So you can throw resources at it. You don't have to worry about depreciating your hardware over three to five years. Hey, I have an asset that I have to take advantage of. Is that the big difference? >> Absolutely. Actually, from kind of like operational perspective, which it's funny. Like, I don't have to worry about it. I use what I need when I need it. And not to take this completely in the opposite direction, people stop thinking about using things in a very smart way, right? You like, scale and you walk away. And then, you know, the cool thing about cloud is it's scalable, but you also should not use it when you don't need it. >> So what about this idea of multicloud. You know, supercloud sort of tries to go beyond multicloud. it's like multicloud by accident. And now, you know, whether it's M&A or, you know, some Skunkworks is do, hey, I like Google's tools, so I'm going to use Google. And then people like you are called on to, hey, how do we clean up this mess? And you know, you and I, at the airport, we were talking about data mesh. And I love the concept. Like, doesn't matter if it's a data lake or a data warehouse or a data hub or an S3 bucket. It's just a node on the mesh. But then, of course, you've got to govern it. You've got to give people self-serve. But this multicloud is a reality. So from your perspective, from a practitioner's perspective, what are the advantages of multicloud? We talk about the disadvantages all the time. Kind of get that, but what are the advantages? >> So I think the first thing when I think multicloud, I actually think high-availability disaster recovery. And maybe it's just how I grew up in the data center, right? We were always worried that if something happened in one area, we want to make sure that we can bring business up very quickly. So to me that's kind of like where multicloud comes to mind because, you know, you put your data, your applications, let's pick on AWS for a second and, you know, US East in AWS, which is the busiest kind of like area that they have. If it goes down, for my business to continue, I would probably want to move it to, say, Azure, hypothetically speaking, again, or Google, whatever that is. So to me, and probably again based on my background, disaster recovery high availability comes to mind as multicloud first, but now the other part of it is that there are, you know, companies and tools and applications that are being built in, you know, pick your cloud. 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? >> So you kind of answered my next question, is do you see use cases going beyond H? I mean, the HADR was, remember, that was the original cloud use case. That and bursting, you know, for, you know, Thanksgiving or, you know, for Black Friday. So you see an opportunity to go beyond that with practical use cases. >> Absolutely. I think, you know, we're getting to a world where every company is a data company. We all collect a lot of data. We want to use it for whatever that is. It doesn't necessarily mean sell it, but use it to our competitive advantage. So how do we do it in a very smooth, easy way, which opens additional opportunities for companies? >> You mentioned data sharing. And that's obviously, you know, I met you at Snowflake Summit. That's a big thing of Snowflake's. And of course, you've got Databricks trying to do similar things with open technology. What do you see as the trade-offs there? Because Snowflake, you got to come into their party, you're in their world, and you're kind of locked into that world. Now they're trying to open up. You know, and of course, Databricks, they don't know our world is wide open. Well, we know what that means, you know. The governance. And so now you're seeing, you saw Amazon come out with data clean rooms, which was, you know, that was a good idea that Snowflake had several years before. It's good. It's good validation. So how do you think about the trade-offs between kind of openness and freedom versus control? Is the latter just far more important? >> I'll tell you it depends, right? It's kind of like- >> Could be insulting to that. >> Yeah, I know. It depends because I don't know the answer. It depends, I think, because on the use case and application, ultimately every company wants to make money. That's the beauty of our like, capitalistic economy, right? We're driven 'cause we want to make money. But from the use, you know, how do I sell a product to somebody who's in Google if I am in AWS, right? It's like, we're limiting ourselves if we just do one cloud. But again, it's difficult because at the same time, every cloud provider wants for you to be locked in their cloud, which is why probably, you know, whoever has now data sharing because they want you to stay within their ecosystem. But then again, like, companies are limited. You know, there are applications that are starting to be built on top of clouds. How do we ensure that, you know, I can use that application regardless what cloud, you know, my company is using or I just happen to like. >> You know, and it's true they want you to stay in their ecosystem 'cause they'll make more money. But as well, you think about Apple, right? Does Apple do it 'cause they can make more money? Yes, but it's also they have more control, right? Am I correct that technically it's going to be easier to govern that data if it's all the sort of same standard, right? >> Absolutely. 100%. I didn't answer that question. You have to govern and you have to control. And honestly, it's like it's not like a nice-to-have anymore. There are compliances. There are legal compliances around data. Everybody at some point wants to ensure that, you know, and as a person, quite honestly, you know, not to be, you know, I don't like when my data's used when I don't know how. Like, it's a little creepy, right? So we have to come up with standards around that. But then I also go back in the day. EDI, right? Electronic data interchange. That was figured out. There was standards. Companies were sending data to each other. It was pretty standard. So I don't know. Like, we'll get there. >> Yeah, so I was going to ask you, do you see a day where open standards actually emerge to enable that? And then isn't that the great disruptor to sort of kind of the proprietary stack? >> I think so. I think for us to smoothly exchange data across, you know, various systems, various applications, we'll have to agree to have standards. >> From a developer perspective, you know, back to the sort of supercloud concept, one of the the components of the essential characteristics is you've got this PaaS layer that provides consistency across clouds, and it has unique attributes specific to the purpose of that supercloud. So in the instance of Snowflake, it's data sharing. In the case of, you know, VMware, it might be, you know, infrastructure or self-serve infrastructure that's consistent. From a developer perspective, what do you hear from developers in terms of what they want? Are we close to getting that across clouds? >> I think developers always want freedom and ability to engineer. And oftentimes it's not, (laughs) you know, just as an engineer, I always want to build something, and it's not always for the, to use a specific, you know, it's something I want to do versus what is actually applicable. I think we'll land there, but not because we are, you know, out of the kindness of our own hearts. I think as a necessity we will have to agree to standards, and that that'll like, move the needle. Yeah. >> What are the limitations that you see of cloud and this notion of, you know, even cross cloud, right? I mean, this one cloud can't do it all. You know, but what do you see as the limitations of clouds? >> I mean, it's funny, I always think, you know, again, kind of probably my background, I grew up in the data center. We were physically limited by space, right? That there's like, you can only put, you know, so many servers in the rack and, you know, so many racks in the data center, and then you run out space. Earth has a limited space, right? And we have so many data centers, and everybody's collecting a lot of data that we actually want to use. We're not just collecting for the sake of collecting it anymore. We truly can't take advantage of it because servers have enough power, right, to crank through it. We will run enough space. So how do we balance that? How do we balance that data across all the various data centers? And I know I'm like, kind of maybe talking crazy, but until we figure out how to build a data center on the Moon, right, like, we will have to figure out how to take advantage of all the compute capacity that we have across the world. >> And where does latency fit in? I mean, is it as much of a problem as people sort of think it is? Maybe it depends too. It depends on the use case. But do multiple clouds help solve that problem? Because, you know, even AWS, $80 billion company, they're huge, but they're not everywhere. You know, they're doing local zones, they're doing outposts, which is, you know, less functional than their full cloud. So maybe I would choose to go to another cloud. And if I could have that common experience, that's an advantage, isn't it? >> 100%, absolutely. And potentially there's some maybe pricing tiers, right? So we're talking about latency. And again, it depends on your situation. You know, if you have some sort of medical equipment that is very latency sensitive, you want to make sure that data lives there. But versus, you know, I browse on a website. If the website takes a second versus two seconds to load, do I care? Not exactly. Like, I don't notice that. So we can reshuffle that in a smart way. And I keep thinking of ways. If we have ways for data where it kind of like, oh, you are stuck in traffic, go this way. You know, reshuffle you through that data center. You know, maybe your data will live there. So I think it's totally possible. I know, it's a little crazy. >> No, I like it, though. But remember when you first found ways, you're like, "Oh, this is awesome." And then now it's like- >> And it's like crowdsourcing, right? Like, it's smart. Like, okay, maybe, you know, going to pick on US East for Amazon for a little bit, their oldest, but also busiest data center that, you know, periodically goes down. >> But then you lose your competitive advantage 'cause now it's like traffic socialism. >> Yeah, I know. >> Right? It happened the other day where everybody's going this way up. There's all the Wazers taking. >> And also again, compliance, right? Every country is going down the path of where, you know, data needs to reside within that country. So it's not as like, socialist or democratic as we wish for it to be. >> Well, that's a great point. I mean, when you just think about the clouds, the limitation, now you go out to the edge. I mean, everybody talks about the edge in IoT. Do you actually think that there's like a whole new stove pipe that's going to get created. And does that concern you, or do you think it actually is going to be, you know, connective tissue with all these clouds? >> I honestly don't know. I live in a practical world of like, how does it help me right now? How does it, you know, help me in the next five years? And mind you, in five years, things can change a lot. Because if you think back five years ago, things weren't as they are right now. I mean, I really hope that somebody out there challenges things 'cause, you know, the whole cloud promise was crazy. It was insane. Like, who came up with it? Why would I do that, right? And now I can't imagine the world without it. >> Yeah, I mean a lot of it is same wine, new bottle. You know, but a lot of it is different, right? I mean, technology keeps moving us forward, doesn't it? >> Absolutely. >> Veronika, it was great to have you. Thank you so much for your perspectives. If there was one thing that the industry could do for your data life that would make your world better, what would it be? >> I think standards for like data sharing, data marketplace. I would love, love, love nothing else to have some agreed upon standards. >> I had one other question for you, actually. I forgot to ask you this. 'Cause you were saying every company's a data company. Every company's a software company. We're already seeing it, but how prevalent do you think it will be that companies, you've seen some of it in financial services, but companies begin to now take their own data, their own tooling, their own software, which they've developed internally, and point that to the outside world? Kind of do what AWS did. You know, working backwards from the customer and saying, "Hey, we did this for ourselves. We can now do this for the rest of the world." Do you see that as a real trend, or is that Dave's pie in the sky? >> I think it's a real trend. Every company's trying to reinvent themselves and come up with new products. And every company is a data company. Every company collects data, and they're trying to figure out what to do with it. And again, it's not necessarily to sell it. Like, you don't have to sell data to monetize it. You can use it with your partners. You can exchange data. You know, you can create products. Capital One I think created a product for Snowflake pricing. I don't recall, but it just, you know, they built it for themselves, and they decided to kind of like, monetize on it. And I'm absolutely 100% on board with that. I think it's an amazing idea. >> Yeah, Goldman is another example. Nasdaq is basically taking their exchange stack and selling it around the world. And the cloud is available to do that. You don't have to build your own data center. >> Absolutely. Or for good, right? Like, we're talking about, again, we live in a capitalist country, but use data for good. We're collecting data. We're, you know, analyzing it, we're aggregating it. How can we use it for greater good for the planet? >> Veronika, thanks so much for coming to our Marlborough studios. Always a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> You're really welcome. All right, stay tuned for more great content. From Supercloud 2, this is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, gang. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live on the show floor at Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Couple of guests joining us to unpack more of what we've been talking about today. George Fraser joins us, the CEO of Fivetran, and Veronika Durgin, the head of data at Saks Fifth Avenue. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Hello. >> George, talk to us about Fivetran for the audience that may not be super familiar. Talk to us about the company, your vision, your mission, your differentiation, and then maybe the partnership with Snowflake. >> Well, a lot of people in the audience here at Snowflake Summit probably are familiar with Fivetran. We have almost 2000 shared customers with them. So a considerable amount of the data that we're all talking about here, flows through Fivetran. But in brief, what Fivetran is, is we're data pipeline. And that means that we go get all the data of your company in all the places that it lives. So all your tools and systems that you use to run your company. We go get that data and we bring it all together in one place like Snowflake. And that is the first step in doing anything with data is getting it all in one place. >> So you've been considerable amount of shared customers. I think I saw this morning on the slide over 5,900, but you're saying you're already at around 2000 shared customers. Lots of innovation I'm sure, with between both companies, but talk to us about some of the latest developments at Fivetran, in terms of product, in terms of company growth, what's going on? >> Well, one of the biggest things that happened recently with Fivetran is we acquired another data integration company called HVR. And HVR specialty has always been replicating the biggest, baddest enterprise databases like Oracle and SQL Server databases that are enormous, that are run within an inch of their capabilities by their DBAs. And HVR was always known as the best in the business at that scenario. And by bringing that together with Fivetran, we now really have the full spectrum of capabilities. We can replicate all types of data for all sizes of company. And so that's a really exciting development for us and for the industry. >> So Veronika, head of data at Saks, what does that entail? How do you spend your time? What's your purview? >> So the cool thing abouts Saks is a very old company. Saks is the premier luxury e-commerce platform. And we help our Saks Fifth Avenue customers just express themselves through fashion. So we're trying to modernize very old company and we do have the biggest, baddest databases of any flavor you can imagine. So my job is to modernize, to bring us to near real-time data, to make sure data is available to all of our users so they can actually take advantage of it. >> So let's talk about some of those biggest, baddest hair balls that you've, and how you deal with that. So lot of over time, you've built up a lot of data. You've got different data stores. So, what are you doing with that? And what role does Fivetran and Snowflake play in helping you modernize? >> Yeah, Fivetran helps us ingest data from all of those data sources into Snowflake near real-time. It's very important to us. And like one of the examples that I give is within a matter of maybe a few weeks, we were able to get data from over a dozen of different data sources into Snowflake in near real-time. And some of those data sources were not available to our users in the past, and everybody was so excited. And the reason they weren't available is because they require a lot of engineering effort to actually build those data pipelines to manage them and maintain them. >> Lisa: Whoa, sorry. >> That was just a follow up. So, Fivetran is the consolidator of all that data and- >> That's right. >> Snowflake plays that role also. >> We bring it all together, and the place that it is consolidated is Snowflake. And from there you can really do anything with it. And there's really three things you were touching on it that make data integration hard. One is volume, and that's the one that people tend to talk about, just size of data. And that is important, but it's not the only thing. It's also latency. How fresh is the data in the locus of consolidation? Before Fivetran, the state of the art was nightly snapshots, once a day was considered pretty good. And we consider now once a minute pretty good and we're trying to make it even better. And then the last challenge, which people tend not to talk about, it's the dark secret of our industry is just incidental complexity. All of these data sources have a lot of strange behaviors and rules and corner cases. Every data source is a little bit different. And so a lot of what we bring that to the table, is that we've done the work over 10 years. And in the case of HVR, since the 90s', to map out all of these little complexities of all these data sources, that as a user, you don't have to see it. You just connect source, connect destination, and that's it. >> So you don't have to do the M word migrate off of all those databases. You can maybe allow them to dial them down over time, then create new value with using Fivetran and Snowflake. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Well, Fivetran, it's incredibly simple. You just connect it to whatever source, And then the matter of minutes you have a pipeline. And for us, it's in the matter of minutes, for Fivetran, there's hundreds of engineers, we're extending our data engineering team to now Fivetran. And we can pick and choose which tables we want to replicate which fields. And once data lands in Snowflake, now we have data across different sources in one place, in central place. And now we can do all kinds of different things. We can integrate it data together, we can do validations, we can do reconciliations. We now have ability to do point in time historical journey, in the past in transactional system, you don't see that, you only see data that's right now, but now that we replicate everything to Snowflake and Snowflake being so powerful as an analytical platform, we can do, what did it look like two months ago? What did it look like two years ago? >> You've got all that time series data, okay. >> And to address that word you mentioned a moment ago, migrate, this is something people often get confused about. What we're talking about here is not a migration, these source systems are not going away. These databases are the systems powering saks.com and they're staying right there. They're the systems you interact with when you place an order on this site. The purpose of our tool and the whole stack that Veronika has put together, is to serve other workloads in Snowflake that need to have access to all of the data together. >> But if you didn't have Snowflake, you would have to push those other data stores, try to have them do things that they have sometimes a tough time doing. >> Yeah, and you can't run analytical workloads. You cannot do reporting on the transactional database. It's not meant for that. It's supporting capability of an application and it's configured to be optimized for that. So we always had to offload those specific analytical reporting functionality, or machine learning somewhere else, and Snowflake is excellent for that. It's meant for that, yeah. >> I was going to ask you what you were doing before, you just answered that. What was the aha moment for realizing you needed to work with the power of Fivetran and Snowflake? If we look at, you talked about Saks being a legacy history company that's obviously been very successful at transforming to the digital age, but what was that one thing, as the head of the data you felt this is it? >> Great question. I've worked with Fivetran in the past. This is my third company, same with Snowflake. I actually brought Fivetran into two companies at this point. So my first experience with both Fivetran and Snowflake, was this like, this is where I want to be, this is the stack and the tooling, and just the engineering behind it. So as I moved on the next company, that that was, I'm bringing tools with me. So that was part. And the other thing I wanted to mention, when we evaluate tools for a new platform, we look at things in like three dimensions, right? One with cloud first, we want to have cloud native tools, and they have to be modular, but we also don't want to have too many tools. So Fivetran's certainly checks that off. They're first cloud native, and they also have a very long list of connectors. The other thing is for us, it's very important that data engineering effort is spent on actually analyzing data, not building pipelines and supporting infrastructure. In Fivetran, reliable, it's secure, it has various connectors, so it checks off that box as well. And another thing is that we're looking for companies we can partner with. So companies that help us grow and grow with us, we'll look in a company culture, their maturity, how they treat their customers and how they innovate. And again, Fivetran checks off that box as well. >> And I imagine Snowflake does as well, Frank Lutman on stage this morning talked about mission alignment. And it seemed to me like, wow, one of the missions of Snowflake is to align with its customer's missions. It sounds like from the conversations that Dave and I have had today, that it's the same with partners, but it sounds like you have that cultural alignment with Fivetran and Snowflake. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And Fivetran has that, obviously with 2000 shared customers. >> Yeah, I think that, well, not quite there yet, but we're close, (laughs) I think that the most important way that we've always been aligned with our customers is that we've been very clear on what we do and don't do. And that our job is to get the data from here to there, that the data be accurately replicated, which means in practice often joke that it is exactly as messed up as it was in the source. No better and no worse, but we really will accomplish that task. You do not need to worry about that. You can well and fully delegate it to us, but then what you do with the data, we don't claim that we're going to solve that problem for you. That's up to you. And anyone who claims that they're going to solve that problem for you, you should be very skeptical. >> So how do you solve that problem? >> Well, that's where modeling comes in, right? You get data from point A to point B, and it's like bad in, bad out. Like, that's it, and that's where we do those reconciliations, and that's where we model our data. We actually try to understand what our businesses, how our users, how they talk about data, how they talk about business. And that's where data warehouse is important. And in our case, it's data evolve. >> Talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the benefits to the end user, the consumer. Say I'm on saks.com, I'm looking for a particular item. What is it about this foundation that Saks has built with Fivetran and with Snowflake, that's empowering me as a consumer, to be able to get, find what I want, get the transaction done like that? >> So getting access to, our end goal is to help our customers, right? Make their experience beautiful, luxurious. We want to make sure that what we put in front of you is what you're looking for. So you can actually make that purchase, and you're happy with it. So having that data, having that data coming from various different sources into one place enables us to do that near real-time analytics so we can help you as a customer to find what you're looking for. >> Magic on the back end, delighting customers. >> So the world is still messed up, right? Airlines are out of whack. There's supply imbalances. You've got the situation in Ukraine with oil prices. The Fed missed the mark. So can data solve these problems? If you think about the context of the macro environment, and you bring it down to what you're seeing at Saks, with your relationship with Fivetran and with Snowflake, do you see the light at the end of that confusion tunnel? >> That's such a great question. Very philosophical. I don't think data can solve it. Is the people looking at data and working together that can solve it. >> I think data can help, data can't stop a war. Data can help you forecast supply chain misses and mitigate those problems. So data can help. >> Can be a facilitator. >> Sorry, what? >> Can be a facilitator. >> Yeah, it can be a facilitator of whatever you end up doing with it. Data can be used for good or evil. It's ultimately up to the user. >> It's a tool, right? Do you bring a hammer to a gunfight? No, but t's a tool in the right hands, for the right purpose, it can definitely help. >> So you have this great foundation, you're able to delight customers as especially from a luxury brand perspective. I imagine that luxury customers have high expectations. What's next for Saks from a data perspective? >> Well, we want to first and foremost to modernize our data platform. We want to make sure we actually bring that near real-time data to our customers. We want to make sure data's reliable. That well understood that we do the data engineering and the modeling behind the scenes so that people that are using our data can rely on it. Because it's like, there is bad data is bad data but we want to make sure it's very clear. And what's next? The sky's the limit. >> Can you describe your data teams? Is it highly centralized? What's your philosophy in terms of the architecture of the organization? >> So right now we are starting with a centralized team. It just works for us as we're trying to rebuild our platform, and modernize it. But as we become more mature, we establish our practices, our data governance, our definitions, then I see a future where we like decentralize a little bit and actually each team has their own analytical function, or potentially data engineering function as well. >> That'll be an interesting discussion when you get there. >> That's a hot topic. >> It's one of the hardest problems in building a data team is whether decentralized or decentralized. We're still centralized at Fivetran, but companies now over 1000 people, and we're starting to feel the strain of that. And inevitably, you eventually have to find a way to find scenes and create specialization. >> You just have to be fluid, right? And then go with the company as the company grows and things change. >> Yeah, I've worked with some companies. JPMC is here, they've got a little, I'll call it a skunk works. They're probably under states what they're doing, but they're testing that out. A company like HelloFresh is doing some things 'cause their Hadoop cluster just couldn't scale. So they have to begin to decentralize. It is a hot topic these days. And I'm not sure there's a right or wrong. It's really a situational. But I think in a lot of situations, it's maybe the trend. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think centralized versus decentralized technology is a different question than centralized versus decentralized teams. >> Yes. >> They're both valid, but they're very different. And sometimes people conflate them, and that's very dangerous. Because you might want one to be centralized and the other to be decentralized. >> Well, it's true. And I think a lot of folks look at a centralized team and say, "Hey, it's more efficient to have these specialized roles, but at the same time, what's the outcome?" If the outcome can be optimized and it's maybe a little bit more people expensive, or I don't know. And they're in the lines of business where there's data context, that might be a better solution for a company. >> So to truly understand the value of data, you have to specialize in that specific area. So I see people like deep diving into specific vertical or whatever that is, and truly understanding what data they have and how to taken advantage of it. >> Well, all this talk about monetization and building data products, you're there, right? >> Yeah. >> You're on the cusp of that. And so who's going to build those data products? It's going to be somebody in the business. Today they don't "Own the life cycle" of the data. They don't feel responsible for it, but they complain when it's not what they want. And so, I feel as though what Snowflake is doing is actually attacking some of those problems. Not 100% there obviously, but a lot of work to do. >> Great analysts are great navigators of organizations amongst other things. And one of the best things that's happened as part of this evolution from technology like Hadoop to technology like Snowflake is the new stack is a lot simpler. There's a lot less technical knowledge that you need. You still need technical knowledge, but not nearly what you used to. And that has made it accessible to more people. People who bring different skills to the table. And in many cases, those are the skills you really need to deliver value from data is not, do you know the inner workings of HDFS? But do you know how to extract from your constituents in the organization, a precise version of the question that they're trying to ask? >> We really want them spending their time, the technical infrastructure is an operational detail, so you can put your teams on those types of questions, not how do we make it work? And that's what Hadoop was, "Hey, we got it to work." >> And that's something we're obsessed with. We're always trying to hide the technical complexities of the problem of data centralization behind the scenes. Even if it's harder for us, even if it's more expensive for us, we will pay any costs so that you don't have to see it. Because that allows our customers to focus on more high impact. >> Well, this is a case where a technology vendor's R&D is making your life easier. >> Veronika: Easier, right. >> I would presume you'd rather spend money to save time, than spend your time, to save engineering time, to save money. >> That's true. And at the end of the day, hiring three data engineers to do custom work that a tool does, it's actually not saving money. It costs more in the end. But to your point, pulling business people into those data teams gives them ownership, and they feel like they're part of the solution. And it's such a great feeling so that they're excited to contribute, they're excited to help us. So I love where the industry's going like in that direction. >> And of course, that's the theme of the show, the world around data collaborations. Absolutely critical, guys. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about Fivetran, Snowflake together, what you're doing to empower Saks, to be a data company. I'm going to absolutely have a different perspective next time I shop there. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. >> Dave: Thank you, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22, from Vegas. Stick around, our next guest joins us momentarily. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat melody) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, here at theCUBE in Palo Alto, California, for our live stage performance all day for Supercloud2. Unpacking this next generation movement in cloud computing. Dave, Supercloud1 was in August. We had great response and acceleration of that momentum. We had some haters too. We had some folks out there throwing shade on this. But at the same time, a lot of leaders came out of the woodwork, a lot of practitioners. And this Supercloud2 event I think will expose and illustrate some of the examples of what's happening in the industry and more importantly, kind of where it's going. >> Well it's great to be back in our studios in Palo Alto, John. Seems like just yesterday was August 9th, where the community was really refining the definition of Super Cloud. We were identifying the essential characteristics, with some of the leading technologists in Silicon Valley. We were digging into the deployment models. Whereas this Supercloud, Supercloud2 is really taking a practitioner view. We're going to hear from Walmart today. They've built a Supercloud. They called it the Walmart Cloud native platform. We're going to hear from other data practitioners, like Saks. We're going to hear from Western Union. They've got 200 locations around the world, how they're dealing with data sovereignty. And of course we've got some local technologists and practitioners coming in, analysts, consultants, theCUBE community. I'm really excited to be here. >> And we've got some great keynotes from executives at VMware. We're going to expose some of the things that they're working on around cross cloud services, which leads into multicloud. I think the practitioner angle highlights my favorite part of this program, 'cause you're starting to see the builders, a term coined by Andy Jassy, early days of AWS. That builder movement has been continuing to go. And you're seeing the enterprise, global enterprises adopt this builder mentality with Cloud Native. This is going to power the next generation global economy. And I think the role of the cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba are going to be the source engine of innovation. And what gets built on top of and with the clouds will be a big significant market value for all businesses and their business models. So I think the market wants the supercloud, the business models are pointing to Supercloud. The technology needs supercloud. And society, from an economic standpoint and from a use case standpoint, needs supercloud. You're seeing it today. Everyone's talking about chat GPT. This is an example of what will come out of this next generation and it's just getting started. So to me, you're either on the supercloud side of the camp or you're on the old school, hugging onto the old school mentality of wait a minute, that's cloud computing. So I think if you're not on the super cloud wave, you're going to be driftwood. And that's a term coined by Pat Gelsinger. And this is really the reality. Are you on the super cloud side? Or are you on the old huggin' the old model? And that's going to be a determinant. And you're going to see who's going to be the players on that, Dave. This is going to be a real big year. >> Everybody's heard the phrase follow the money. Well, my philosophy is follow the data. And that's a big part of what Supercloud2 is, because the data is where the money is across the clouds. And people want more simplicity, or greater simplicity across the clouds. So it's really, there's two forces here. You've got the ecosystem that's saying, hey the hyperscalers, they've done a great job but there's problems that they're not solving. So we're going to lean in and solve those problems. At the same time, you have the practitioners saying we have multicloud, we have to deal with this, help us. It's got to be simpler. Because we want to share data across clouds. We want to build data products, we want to monetize and drive revenue and cut costs. >> This is the key thing. The builder movement is hitting a wall, and that wall will be broken down because the business models of the companies themselves are demanding that the value from the data with security has to be embedded. So I think you're going to see a big year this next year or so where the builders will accelerate through this next generation, supercloud wave, will be a builder's wave for business. And I think that's going to be the nuance here. And all the people that are on the side of Supercloud are all pro-business, pro-technology. The ones that aren't are like, wait a minute I used to do things differently. They're stuck. And so I think this is going to be a question of are we stuck? Are builders accelerating? Will the business models develop around it? That's digital transformation. At the end of the day, the market's speaking, Dave. The market wants more. Chat GPT, you're seeing AI starting to flourish, powered by data. It's unstoppable, supercloud's unstoppable. >> One of our headliners today is Zhamak Dehghani, the creator of Data Mesh. We've got some news around her. She's going to be live in studio. Super excited about that. Kit Colbert in Supercloud, the first Supercloud in last August, laid out an initial architecture for Supercloud. He's going to advance that today, tell us what's changed, and really dig into and really talk about the meat on the bone, if you will. And we've got some other technologists that are coming in saying, Hey, is it a platform? Is it an architecture? What's the right model here? So we're going to debate that a little bit today. >> And before we close, I'll just say look at the guests, look at the talk tracks. You're seeing a diversity of startups doing cloud networking, you're seeing big practitioners building their own thing, being builders for business value and business model advantages. And you got companies like VMware, who have been on the wave of virtualization. So the, everyone who's involved in super cloud, they're seeing it, they're on the front lines. They're seeing the trend. They are riding that wave. And they have, they're bringing data to the table. So to me, you look at who's involved and you judge it that way. To me, that's the way I look at this. And because we're making it open, Supercloud is going to continue to be debated. But more importantly, the results are going to come in. The market supports it, the business needs it, tech's there, and will it happen? So I think the builders movement, Dave, is going to be big to watch. And then ultimately how that business transformation kicks in, and I think those are the two variables that I would watch on Supercloud. >> Our mission has always been around free content, giving back to the community. So I really want to thank our sponsors today. We've had a great partnership with VMware, who's not only contributed some financial support, but also great content. Alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo, all phenomenal, allowing us to achieve our mission of serving our audiences and really trying to give more than we take from. >> Free content, that's our mission. Dave, great to kick it off. Kickin' off Supercloud2 all day, we've got some great programs here. We've got VMware coming up next. We have Victoria Viering, who's been on before. He's got a great vision for cross cloud service. We're getting also a keynote with Kit Colbert, who's going to lay out the fragmentation and the benefits that that solves, from solvent fragmentation and silos, breaking down the silos and bringing multicloud future to the table via Super Cloud. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. (bright upbeat music) (music fades)

>> Welcome back everyone to the closing remarks here before we kick off our ecosystem portion of the program. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special presentation of Supercloud 2. It's the second edition, the first one was in August. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here to wrap up with our special guest analyst George Gilbert, investor and industry legend former colleague of ours, analyst at Wikibon. George great to see you. Dave, you know, wrapping up this day what in a phenomenal program. We had a contribution from industry vendors, industry experts, practitioners and customers building and redefining their company's business model. Rolling out technology for Supercloud and multicloud and ultimately changing how they do data. And data was the theme today. So very, very great program. Before we jump into our favorite parts let's give a shout out to the folks who make this possible. Free contents our mission. We'll always stay true to that mission. We want to thank VMware, alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo for being sponsors of this great program. We will have Supercloud 3 coming up in a month or so, or two months. We'll see. Or sooner, we don't know. But it'll be more about security, but a lot more momentum. Okay, so that's... >> And don't forget too that this program not going to end now. We've got a whole ecosystem speaks track so stay tuned for that. >> John: Yeah, we got another 20 interviews. Feels like it. >> Well, you're going to hear from Saks, Veronika Durgin. You're going to hear from Western Union, Harveer Singh. You're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Nick Taylor. Brian Gracely chimes in on Supecloud. So he's the man behind the cloud cast. >> Yeah, and you know, the practitioners again, pay attention to also to the cloud networking interviews. Lot of change going on there that's going to be disruptive and actually change the landscape as well. Again, as Supercloud progresses to be the next big thing. If you're not on this next wave, you'll drift what, as Pat Gelsinger says. >> Yep. >> To kick off the closing segments, George, Dave, this is a wave that's been identified. Again, people debate the word all you want Supercloud. It is a gateway to multicloud eventually it is the standard for new applications, new ways to do data. There's new computer science being generated and customer requirements being addressed. So it's the confluence of, you know, tectonic plates shifting in the industry, new computer science seeing things like AI and machine learning and data at the center of it and new infrastructure all kind of coming together. So, to me, that's my takeaway so far. That is the big story and it's going to change society and ultimately the business models of these companies. >> Well, we've had 10, you know, you think about it we came out of the financial crisis. We've had 10, 12 years despite the Covid of tech success, right? And just now CIOs are starting to hit the brakes. And so my point is you've had all this innovation building up for a decade and you've got this massive ecosystem that is running on the cloud and the ecosystem is saying, hey, we can have even more value by tapping best of of breed across clouds. And you've got customers saying, hey, we need help. We want to do more and we want to point our business and our intellectual property, our software tooling at our customers and monetize our data. So you have all these forces coming together and it's sort of entering a new era. >> George, I want to go to you for a second because you are big contributor to this event. Your interview with Bob Moglia with Dave was I thought a watershed moment for me to hear that the data apps, how databases are being rethought because we've been seeing a diversity of databases with Amazon Web services, you know, promoting no one database rules of the world. Now it's not one database kind of architecture that's puling these new apps. What's your takeaway from this event? >> So if you keep your eye on this North Star where instead of building apps that are based on code you're building apps that are defined by data coming off of things that are linked to the real world like people, places, things and activities. Then the idea is, and the example we use is, you know, Uber but it could be, you know, amazon.com is defined by stuff coming off data in the Amazon ecosystem or marketplace. And then the question is, and everyone was talking at different angles on this, which was, where's the data live? How much do you hide from the developer? You know, and when can you offer that? You know, and you started with Walmart which was describing apps, traditional apps that are just code. And frankly that's easier to make that cross cloud and you know, essentially location independent. As soon as you have data you need data management technology that a customer does not have the sophistication to build. And then the argument was like, so how much can you hide from the developer who's building data apps? Tristan's version was you take the modern data stack and you start adding these APIs that define business concepts like bookings, billings and revenue, you know, or in the Uber example like drivers and riders, you know, and ETA's and prices. But those things execute still on the data warehouse or data lakehouse. Then Bob Muglia was saying you're not really hiding enough from the developer because you still got to say how to do all that. And his vision is not only do you hide where the data is but you hide how to sort of get at all that code by just saying what you want. You define how a car and how a driver and how a rider works. And then those things automatically figure out underneath the cover. >> So huge challenges, right? There's governance, there's security, they could be big blockers to, you know, the Supercloud but the industry's going to be attacking that problem. >> Well, what's your take? What's your favorite segment? Zhamak Dehghani came on, she's starting in that company, exclusive news. That was big notable moment for theCUBE. She launched her company. She pioneered the data mesh concept. And I think what George is saying and what data mesh points to is something that we've been saying for a long time. That data is now going to flip the script on how apps behave. And the Uber example I think is illustrated 'cause people can relate to Uber. But imagine that for every business whether it's a manufacturing business or retail or oil and gas or FinTech, they can look at their business like a game almost gamify it with data, riders, cars you know, moving data around the value of data. This is something that Adam Selipsky teased out at AWS, Dave. So what's your takeaway from this Supercloud? Where are we in your mind? Well big thing is data products and decentralizing your data architecture, but putting data in the hands of domain experts who can actually monetize the data. And I think that's, to me that's really exciting. Because look, data products financial industry has always been doing building data products. Mortgage backed securities is a data product. But why should the financial industry have all the fun? I mean virtually every organization can tap its ecosystem build data products, take its internal IP and processes and software and point it to the world and actually begin to make money out of it. >> Okay, so let's go around the horn. I'll start, I'll get you guys some time to think. Next question, what did you learn today? I learned that I think it's an infrastructure game and talking to Kit Colbert at VMware, I think it's all about infrastructure refactoring and I think the data's going to be an ingredient that's going to be operating system like. I think you're going to see the infrastructure influencing operations that will enable Superclouds to be real. And developers won't even know what a Supercloud is because they'll be using it. It's the operations focus is going to be very critical. Just like DevOps movements started Cloud native I think you're going to see a data native movement and I think infrastructure is critical as people go to the next level. That's my big takeaway today. And I'll say the data conversation is at the center. I think security, data are going to be always active horizontally scalable concepts, but every company's going to reset their infrastructure, how it looks and if it's not set up for data and or things that there need to be agile on, it's going to be a non-starter. So I think that's the cloud NextGen, distributed computing. >> I mean, what came into focus for me was I think the hyperscaler is going to continue to do their thing, you know, and be very, very successful and they're each coming at it from different approaches. We talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Amazon the best infrastructure, you know, Google's got its you know, data and AI thing and it's playing catch up and Microsoft's got this massive estate. Okay, cool. Check. The next wave of innovation which is coming from data, I've always said follow the data. That's where the where the money's going to be is going to come from other places. People want to be able to, organizations want to be able to share data across clouds across their organization, outside of their ecosystem and make money with that data sharing. They don't want to FTP it anymore. I got it. You take it. They want to work with live data in real time and I think the edge, we didn't talk much about the edge today is going to even take that to a new level real time inferencing at the edge, AI and and being able to do new things with data that we haven't even seen. But playing around with ChatGPT, it's blowing our mind. And I think you're right, it's like when we first saw the browser, holy crap, this is going to change the world. >> Yeah. And the ChatGPT by the way is going to create a wave of machine learning and data refactoring for sure. But also Howie Liu had an interesting comment, he was asked by a VC how much to replicate that and he said it's in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Now if you asked that same question how much does it cost to replicate AWS? The CapEx alone is unstoppable, they're already done. So, you know, the hyperscalers are going to continue to boom. I think they're going to drive the infrastructure. I think Amazon's going to be really strong at silicon and physics and squeeze every ounce atom out of every physical thing and then get latency as your bottleneck and the rest is all going to be... >> That never blew me away, a hundred million to create kind of an open AI, you know, competitor. Look at companies like Lacework. >> John: Some people have that much cash on the balance sheet. >> These are security companies that have raised a billion dollars, right? To compete. You know, so... >> If you're not shifting left what do you do with data, shift up? >> But, you know. >> What did you learn, George? >> I'm listening to you and I think you're helping me crystallize something which is the software infrastructure to enable the data apps is wide open. The way Zhamak described it is like if you want a data product like a sales and operation plan, that is built on other data products, like a sales plan which has a forecast in it, it has a production plan, it has a procurement plan and then a sales and operation plan is actually a composition of all those and they call each other. Now in her current platform, you need to expose to the developer a certain amount of mechanics on how to move all that data, when to move it. Like what happens if something fails. Now Muglia is saying I can hide that completely. So all you have to say is what you want and the underlying machinery takes care of everything. The problem is Muglia stuff is still a few years off. And Tristan is saying, I can give you much of that today but it's got to run in the data warehouse. So this trade offs all different ways. But again, I agree with you that the Cloud platform vendors or the ecosystem participants who can run across Cloud platforms and private infrastructure will be the next platform. And then the cloud platform is sort of where you run the big honking centralized stuff where someone else manages the operations. >> Sounds like middleware to me, Dave >> And key is, I'll just end with this. The key is being able to get to the data, whether it's in a data warehouse or a data lake or a S3 bucket or an object store, Oracle database, whatever. It's got to be inclusive that is critical to execute on the vision that you just talked about 'cause that data's in different systems and you're not going to put it all into some new system. >> So creating middleware in the cloud that sounds what it sounds like to me. >> It's like, you discovered PaaS >> It's a super PaaS. >> But it's platform services 'cause PaaS connotes like a tightly integrated platform. >> Well this is the real thing that's going on. We're going to see how this evolves. George, great to have you on, Dave. Thanks for the summary. I enjoyed this segment a lot today. This ends our stage performance live here in Palo Alto. As you know, we're live stage performance and syndicate out virtually. Our afternoon program's going to kick in now you're going to hear some great interviews. We got ChaosSearch. Defining the network Supercloud from prosimo. Future of Cloud Network, alkira. We got Saks, a retail company here, Veronika Durgin. We got Dave with Western Union. So a lot of customers, a pharmaceutical company Warner Brothers, Discovery, media company. And then you know, what is really needed for Supercloud, good panels. So stay with us for the afternoon program. That's part two of Supercloud 2. This is a wrap up for our stage live performance. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert here wrapping up. Thanks for watching and enjoy the program. (bright 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)

>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are chris Saks Ceo of think stack and Michael Matthews President Ceo at mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for the cube Natalie. Ehrlich of course. And we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>Terrific. Well delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of mutual credit union? >>It's kind of by chance, Natalie, we're sitting down, we're looking at uh, racks of equipment in our I. T. Room and trying to keep everything up to date, um software updated, become a full time job and all of my staff and sat around and it come to a point where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked we reached out the things that they were a network provider at the time and we said, hey, whatever, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was a W. S. And we explored it and uh we've not looked back. >>Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about think stack, how this uh collaboration happened specifically? >>Well, some of the major gaps that you have is, you know, we're in Vicksburg Mississippi and I would say it's probably not the I. T mecca of the United States and staffing. What was a huge requirement for us if you're gonna make a move such as this, you've got to have the staffing and then along with the staffing is okay if you go out and we hire all these individuals to help help with this journey, are they going to become bored and you know, if we uh personally, if if I asked think stack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us, but that's their job there, there there are parker vendor and so we went out, we asked other vendors that we use and what are the chances of us doing this and it was slim to none. And this type of technology you want, somebody who you can call and and all honesty, I want to be able to call chris and say chris, I'm having a problem versus, you know, one of my team called me and say we're having a problem, I'd rather call it and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gaps in staffing though, Natalie >>what about staffing? >>That was our major gap. >>Oh God, it got it. Well, chris let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain, you know, in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. >>Yeah, for sure. Thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union. They need to keep pace with organizations like Robin Hood and stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you as an organization generally, that's a small nonprofit organization. How do you build the technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw actually, be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at What do you expect. So if you take Michael, for example, you know, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like in? What goals do you have as a credit? You need to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks. Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How how do you work securely efficiently? Um, as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available. And then obviously with, with utmost security. So as we identify and build that picture, uh, we we generally do that with stick figures Natalie so we try to go in and and you know take um different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us uh literally paint a picture. Um and then from there we kind of back into that and say okay in order for you to accomplish these things into Have the organization that you want to have the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that. And that's where we start to then back into that design which typically would include some type of public cloud services like AWS among other technologies from a cyber security perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them To respond and react to whatever the world throws at him over the next 10 years. >>Terrific. Well Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus, that think stack uh you know, is known for >>I think that's what says things take apart. You know, we there's numerous vendors you can go direct, there's there's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, it's not about that, it's about sitting down with chris his team and saying chris this this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but we just this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software. The focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, you know, we're not arty people were in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. >>Yeah, well, chris uh, you know, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key feature set your business apart from the competitive landscape? >>So I think the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are our financial services, they're not technology experts, so you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand, and it can be uh somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems, um but when you boil it down back to that experience level, or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing, that they understand. How is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? It investments are, are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece uh and you know, it's one of those things that can be unappreciated, but its cybersecurity building, our infrastructure's with the tools and the processes and and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there is nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top uh topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you um what were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? >>Well, now we we we expected to have issues in the transition, which we really didn't um, I'll be honest with you, we we expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that this will not work in a W S. Um and we were very surprised that most everything worked on AWS and it worked even better. Um some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you we had were limited on Rackspace I T room is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent service, virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in uh and we would say, hey, we need a new server here. The specs we're putting on this vendor, this is our time frame and we will get an email back the next morning. The servers ready to go where before? We weren't we didn't have that. That that was not an option. The main delay for new projects was to build up time and we weren't expecting that speech. No longer was that we all we expected that hey, we're not in a rush, but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go as soon as you send the request in that we need this server is done uh and its speed up, speed up our time from uh, the idea our concept to going live with projects and we weren't that was something we had to get adjusted to. >>Yeah. And following up on that. What were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? >>All right too. Two things and I don't know if they meet their, meet your that answer your question directly. But so one item we had in in a call, it's been several weeks back is when is the last time that anyone had to call it? Said, hey, I'm not working. My my can't access the server or I can complete dysfunction. And it's not been that way. We we've seen significantly improved up time, not only externally for our members who are logging in to do home banking or any other, any other feature, but internally for our staff we saw and I think it's just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. What that was. I was as the metric we were seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now, it's a power. We had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare. Uh and we were down for a day. Um and if you lose internet today at any business you're down um The emotional side of I tell you, and it's been several years back on July four, we had a major major failure and our entire network was down and we this is prior to us moving to AWS and I'll just tell you I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night. And the last thing I'm worried about is my I. T. Network. I'm not worried about up time, I'm not worried about members, you know, going on facebook or any other social media and saying hey we can't we can't access your site what's going on and we don't have that anymore. And you know, I'm sure we could have had it any other way. But I leave that to the process of us moving from an in house holding everything on premise to moving to AWS, not only did it want to improve the results of those servers were able to back up to do different things, but it is to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I like I said I you can't put a dollar on this peace of mind and that is something I don't think there's any metric out there. You can measure, you can't measure that, but you know me and my team, we see it all the time. So >>Yeah, I agree, a peace of mind is certainly a priceless now Chris Let's move to you if you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide, some of your other clients as well. Just give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about, you know, 24/7 socks um services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience? >>Yeah, for sure. So so obviously we I like to think of us like we design so we come in and we like to help you design and and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network but also routing, switching. So Land Win S T Win various other networking projects equally. It's important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud, help with with productivity suite collaboration tools. Um and then finally, cyber security is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side. Very similar concept of what we do on the, on the cloud side, which is well design the tools and the infrastructure on the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments, um such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Uh look at active directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. Um and then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 x seven socks um with analysts watching that um that are all things that employees watching that board responding and reacting um using our our sin platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven uh network operations center or knocked. Um that is managing both the on site uh tools and network as well as any cloud uh networks that that they may have, keeping them up to date, doing all the routine maintenance, I will say from a cyber security perspective while it's not called the sock, the knock is just as important for cybersecurity as is the knock because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the knock and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. >>Yeah. Terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? >>Yeah, exactly. Um you know, I think that's true of all technology. Um the biggest thing that we can do his look at the systems that you have during that design phase, we not only look at what technology should be should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team, What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps if you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features? Uh Certainly you should keep that in house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in um where you need us. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, um you know, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact, you know, for the credit union industry? If others are not, you know, adopting the same kind of technologies um you know, to secure their cloud strategies. Mhm. >>I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Um Most of our newest vendors are all cloud based. Um And so yes, he's either do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable. It's more up time. It's easier to back up. A lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They try to find a local data center are somewhere secure. And, and we looked at is what's the difference? You know, we, we we don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today. And so what is the difference of movement out of town and move to AWS by moving out of town? I still on the servers. I still leased the space. I still have to go over there. We have to have somebody there at all the time. And I'll be honest with you, I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then, and then it's not working locally and there's a lot of data centers you can, you can move to um I think I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. >>Yeah. Well, Terrific. Do you have any insight or you know, perhaps advice for another credit union who will, you know, like to take the next step? But, you know, as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant, >>I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a, as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this um with chris and several people have so we we we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and and our data is out there in Netherland and who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my dad is higher is held. Um I think it makes people think about a little differently. And and so when when you're if you're thinking about moving, if your if your in house today and you're thinking about how I'm gonna start outsourcing evaluate the cost, what are your ongoing cost, You know, who's gonna service you, Who's going to provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, chris and his team have something unique that I found. Um I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated to chris we're still, we're one of his better customers. I assume, chris me tell you something different in a minute, but we're not just a number, so I wouldn't go into a cube. You know, everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where they're getting a lot bigger than we are now, but they're both small of companies where we're still, we we mean something to them, they care about moving to start versus just checking the box off. And so that's that's been our journey so far. Mhm. >>Yeah. Well, um, so, chris, uh, you know, first I want to know if Michael is one of your better customers, but uh, you know, really what I would I would really like to know is um, you know, what is your like, big sales pitch to? You know, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge. >>Michael is our best client of course because he's here doing this interview with us. No, um, you know, that that's something for us that are those, those human connections are, are, are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But, um, in, in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say at the beginning, which is, you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they, I can't move to the cloud that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's, that's not true. Um, so what we're trying to do in partnership with KWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. Um, one of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness and you know, unfortunately, I think Covid taught us that lesson, but there's, there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on Covid, I feel like that's all we talk about. Um, but if you look at any opportunity, whether it's a I machine learning, um, you know, Blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is, none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty, can tell me where your organization is going to be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess Because you have to build something and designed for something and if you're making that investment, then you're doing that for the next probably 5-7 years. Whereas if you move to amazon you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned or in some cases even scaling back because things have hit a recession, we don't know what the future holds. But if you're in an environment like AWS, then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is that is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are going to survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Yeah. >>Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was chris Saks Ceo of think stack as well as Michael Matthews, the president and Ceo at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks so much. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie or like thanks for >>watching. Mm.