(soft music) >> Welcome back, everyone. theCube's live coverage. Day two here at VMware Explore. Our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference formally called Vmworld, now it's VMware Explore. Exploring new frontiers multi-cloud and also bearing some of the fruit from all the investments in cloud native Tanzu and others. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We have the man who's in charge of a lot of that business and a lot of stuff coming out of the oven and hitting the market. Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the modern applications and management group at VMware, basically the modern apps. >> Absolutely. >> That's Tanzu. All the good stuff. >> And Aria now. >> And Aria, the management platform, which got social graph and all kinds of graph databases. Welcome back. >> Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you in person, been since 2019 when you were on. So, a lot's happened since 2019 in your area. Again, things get, the way VMware does it as we all know, they announce something and then you build it and then you ship it and then you announce it. >> I don't think that's true, but okay. (laughs) >> You guys had announced a lot of cool stuff. You bought Heptio, we saw that Kubernetes investment and all the cloud native goodness around it. Bearing fruit now, what's the status? Give us the update on the modern applications of the management, obviously the areas, the big announcement here on the management side, but in general holistically, what's the update? >> I think the first update is just the speed and momentum that containers and Kubernetes are getting in the marketplace. So if you take the market context, over 70% of organizations now have Kubernetes in production, not one or two clusters, but hundreds of clusters, sometimes tens of clusters. So, to me, that is a market opportunity that's coming to fruition. Sometimes people will come and say, Ajay, aren't you late to the market? I say, no, I'm just perfectly timing it. 'Cause where does our value come in? It's enterprise readiness. We're the company that people look to when you have complexity, you have scale, you need performance, you need security, you need the robustness. And so, Tanzu is really about making modern applications real, helping you design, develop, build and run these applications. And with Aria, we're fundamentally changing the game around multicloud management. So the one-two punch of Tanzu and Aria is I'm most excited about. >> Isn't it true that most of the Kubernetes, you know, today is people pulling down open source and banging away. And now, they're looking for, you know, like you say, more of a robust management capability. >> You know, last two years when I would go to many of the largest customers, like, you know, we're doing good. We've got a DIY platform, we're building this. And then you go to the customer a year later, he's got knocked 30, 40 teams and he has Log4j happen. And all of a sudden he is like, oh, I don't want to be in the business of patching this thing or updating it. And, you know, when's the next shoe going to fall? So, that maturity curve is what I was talking about. >> Yeah. Free like a puppy. >> Ajay, you know, mentioned readiness, enterprise readiness and the timing's perfect. You kind of included, not your exact words, but I'm paraphrasing. That's a lot to do with what's going on. I mean, I'll say Cloud Native, IWS, think of the hyper scale partner, big partner and Google and even Google said it today. You know, the market world's spinning in their direction. Especially with respect to VMware. You get the relationship with the hyperscalers. Cloud's been on everyone's agenda for a long time. So, it's always been ready. But enterprise, you are customer base at VMware, very cloud savvy in the sense they know it's there, there's some dabbling, there's some endeavors in the cloud, no problem. But from a business perspective and truly transforming the VMware value proposition, is already, they're ready and it's already time now for them, like, you can see the movement. And so, can you explain the timing of that? I mean, I get enterprise readiness, so we're ready to scale all that good stuff. But the timing of product market fit is important here. >> I think when Raghu talks about that cloud first to cloud chaos, to cloud smart, that's the transition we're seeing. And what I mean by that is, they're hitting that inflection point where it's not just about a single team. One of the guys, basically I talked to the CIO, he was like, look, let's assume hypothetically I have thousand developers. Hundred can talk about microservices, maybe 50 has built a microservice and three are really good at it. So how do I get my thousand developers productive? Right? And the other CIO says, this team comes to me and says, I should be able develop directly to the public cloud. And he goes, absolutely you can do that. You don't have to come through IT. But here's the book of security and compliance that you need to enforce to get that thing in production. >> Go for it. >> Go for it. >> Good luck with that. >> So that reality of how do I scale my dev developers is turning into a developer experience problem. We now have titles which says, head of developer experience. Imagine that two years ago. We didn't talk about it. People start, hey, containers Kubernetes. I'm good to go. I can go get all the open source technology you talked about. And now they're saying no. >> And also software supply chains, another board that you're think. This is a symptom of the growth. I mean, open source is the software industry. That is, I don't think debatable. >> Right. >> Okay. That's cool. But now integration becomes vetting, trust, trusting codes. It's very interesting software time right now. >> That's right. >> And how is that impacting the cloud native momentum in your mind? Accelerating it? What inning are we in? How would you peg the progress? >> You know, on that scale of 1 to 10, I think we're halfway marked now. And that moved pretty quickly. >> It really did. >> And if you sit back today, the kinds of applications we're involved in, I have a Chicago wealth management company. We're building the next generation wealth management application. It's a fundamental refactoring of the legacy application. If you go to a prescription company, they're building a brand new prescription platform. These are not just trivial. What they're learning is the lift and shift. Doesn't work for these major applications. They're having to refactor them which is the modernization. >> So how specifically, are they putting some kind of abstraction layer on that? Are they actually gutting it and rewriting it? >> There's always going to be brownfield. Remember the old days of SOA? >> Yeah, yeah. >> They are putting APIs in front of their main systems. They're not rewriting the core banking or the core platform, but the user experience, the business logic, the AIML capability to bring intelligence in the platform. It's surrounding the capability to make it much more intuitive, much more usable, much more declarative. That's where things are going. And so I'm seeing this mix of integration all over again. Showing my age now. But, you know, the new EAI so is now microservices and messaging and events with the same patterns. But again, being much more accelerated with cloud native services. >> And it is to the point, it's accelerated today. They're not having to freeze the code for six months or nine months and that which would kill the whole recipe for failure. So they're able to now to fast track their modernization. They have to prioritize 'cause they got limited resources. But how are you guys coming up to that? >> But the practice is changing as well, right? Well, the old days, it was 12, 18 months cycle or anything software. If you heard the CVS CIO, Rohan. >> Yeah. >> Three months where they started to engage with us in getting an app in production, right? If you look at the COVID, 10 days to get kind of a new application for getting small loans going with Pfizer, right? These are dramatically short term, but it's not rewriting the entire app. It's just putting these newer experiences, newer capability in front with newer modern developer practices. And they're saying, I need to do it not just once, but for 100, 200, 5,000 members. JPMC has 50,000 developers. Fifty thousand. They're not a bank anymore. >> We just have thousands of apps. >> Exactly. >> Ajay, I want to get your thoughts on something that we've been talking about on our super cloud event. I know we had an event a couple weeks ago, you guys were one of our sponsors, VMware was. It was called super cloud where we're defining that this next gen environment's a super cloud and every company will have a super cloud capability. And underneath that is cross cloud capabilities. So, super cloud is like a super set on top of a multi-cloud. And little word play or play on words is, ecosystem partners versus partners in the ecosystem. Because if you're coming down to the integration side of things, it's about knowing what goes what, it's almost like building an OS if you're a coder or an operating systems person. You got to put the pieces together right, not just go to the directory and say, okay, who's got the cheapest price in DR or air gaping or something or some solution. So ecosystem partners are truly partners. Partners in the ecosystem are a bunch of people out on a list. How do you see that? Because the trend we're seeing is, the development process includes partners at day one. >> That's right. Not bolt-on. >> Completely agree. >> Share your thoughts on that. >> So let's look at that. The first thing I'm hearing from my customers is, they're trying to use all the public clouds as a new IS. That's the first API or contract infrastructures code IS. From then on they're saying, I want more and more portable services. And if you see the success of some of the data vendors and the messaging vendors, you're starting to see best of breed becoming part of the platform. So you are to identify which of these are truly, you know, getting market momentum and are becoming kind of defacto leaders. So, Kafka goes hand in hand with streaming. RabbitMQ from my portfolio goes with messaging. Postgres for database. So these are the, in your definition, ecosystem partners, they're foundational. In the security space, you know, Snyk is a common player in terms of scanning or Aqua and Prisma even though we have Carbon Black. Those become partners from a container security perspective. So, what's happening is the industry stabilizing a handful of critical players that are becoming multi-cloud preference of choice in this. And our job is to bring it all together in a all coordinated, orchestrated manner to give them a platform. >> I mean, you guys always had ecosystem, but I think that priority more than ever. It wasn't really your job at VMware, even, Dave, 10 years ago to say, hey, this is the strategic role that you might play one partner. It was pretty much the partners all kind of fed off the momentum of VMware. Virtualization. And there's not a lot of nuance there. There's pretty much they plug in and you got. >> So what we're doing here is, since we're not the center of the universe, unfortunately, for the application world, things like Backstage is a developer portal from Spotify that became open source. That's becoming the place where everyone wants to provide a plugin. And so we took Backstage, we said, let's provide enterprise support for Backstage. If you take a technology like, you know, what we have with Spring. Every job where developer uses Spring, how do we make it modern with Spring cloud. We work with Microsoft to launch a service with Azure Spring Enterprise for Spring. So you're starting to see us taking communities where they have momentum and bringing the ecosystem around those technologies. Cluster API for Kubernetes, for have you managed stuff. >> Yeah. >> So it's about standard. >> Because the developers are voting with their clicks and their code repos. And so you're identifying the patterns that they like. >> That's right. >> And aligning with them and connecting with them rather than trying to sell against it. >> Exactly. It's the end story with everyone. I say stop competing. So people used to think Tanzu is Kubernetes. It's really Tanzu is the modern application platform that runs on any Kubernetes. So I've changed the narrative. When Heptio was here, we were trying to be a Kubernetes player. I'm like, Kubernetes is just another dial tone. You can use mine, you can use OpenShift. So this week we announced support for OpenShift by Tanzu application platform. The values moving up, it's around outcomes. So industry standards, taking lead and solving the problem. >> You know, we had a panel at super cloud. Dave, I know you got a question. I'll get to you in a second. But the panel was the innovator's dilemma. And then during the event, one of the panelists, Chris Hoff knows VMware very well, Beaker on Twitter, said it should be called the integrators dilemma. Because the innovations here, >> How do you put it all together? >> But the integration of the, putting the piece parts together, building the thing is the innovation. >> And we come back and say, it's a secure software supply chain. It starts with great content. Did you know, I published most of the open source content on every hyperscaler through my Bitnami acquisition. So I start with great content that's curated. Then I allow you to create your own golden images. Then I have a build service that secures and so on and so forth and we bring the part. So, that opinionated solution, but batteries included but you can change it is been one of our key differentiator. We recognize the roles is going to be modular, come back and solve for it. >> So I want to understand sort of relationship Tanzu and Aria, John was talking about, you know, super cloud before we had our event. We had an earlier session where we help people understand that Aria was not, you know, vRealize renamed. >> It's rebranded. >> And reason I bring that up is because we had said it around super cloud, that one of the defining characteristics was, sorry, super PaaS, which is a specific purpose built PaaS layer designed to support your objective for multi-cloud. And speaking to a lot of people this week, there's a federated architecture, there's graph relationships, there's real time ability to ingest and analyze. That's unique. And that's IP that is purpose built for what you're doing. >> Absolutely. When I think what came out of all that learning is after 20 years of Pivotal and BA and what we learned that you still need some abstraction layer. Kubernetes is too low level. So what are the developer problems? What are the delivery problems? What are the operations and management problems? Aria solves all the operations and management problem. Tanzu solves a super PaaS problems. >> Yes. Right. >> Of providing a consistent way to build great software and the secure software supply chain to run on any infrastructure. So the combination of Tanzu and Aria complete the value chain. >> And it's different. Again, we get a lot of heat for this, but we're saying, look, we're trying to describe, it's not just IAS, PaaS, and SaaS of last decade. There's something new that's happening. And we chose the name super cloud. >> And what's the difference? It's modular. It's pluggable. It fits into the way you operate. >> Whereas PaaS was very prescriptive. If you couldn't fit, you couldn't jump down to the next level. This is very much, you can stay at the abstraction level or go lower level. >> Oh, we got to add that to the attribute. >> We're recruiting him right now. (laughs) >> We'll give you credit. >> I mean, funny all the web service's background. Look at an app server. You well knew all about app servers. Basically the company is an app. So, if you believe that, say, Capital One is an application as a company and Amazon's providing all the CapEx, >> That's it. >> Okay. And they run all their quote, old IT spend millions, billions of dollars on operating expenses that's going to translate to the top line called the income statement. So, Dave always says, oh, it's on the balance sheet, but now they're going to go to the top line. So we're seeing dynamic. Ajay, I want to get your reaction to this where the business model shift if everything's tech enabled, the company is like an app server. >> Correct. >> So therefore, the revenue that's generated from the technology, making the app work has to get recognized in the income. Okay. But Amazon's doing all, or the cloud hyperscale is doing all the heavy lifting on the CapEx. So technically it's the cloud on top of a cloud. >> Yes and no. The way I look at it, >> I call that a super cloud. >> So I like the idea of super cloud, but I think we're mixing two different constructs. One is, the cloud is a new hardware, right? In terms of dynamic, elastic, always available, et cetera. And I believe when more and more customer I talk about, there's a service catalog of infrastructure services. That's emerging. This super cloud is the next set of PaaS super PaaS services. And the management service is to use the cloud. We spend so much time as VMware building clouds, the problem seems, how do you effectively use the cloud? What problems do we solve around digital where every company is a digital company and the product is this application, as you said. So everything starts with an application. And you look at from the lens of how you run the application, what it costs the application, what impact it's driving. And I think that's the change. So I agree with you in some way. That is a digital strategy. >> And that's the company. >> That's the company. The application is the company. >> That's the t-shirt. >> And API is the currency. >> So, Ajay, first of all, we love having you in theCube 'cause you're like a masterclass in multiple dimensions. So, I want to get your thoughts on the abstraction layer. 'Cause we were also talking earlier in theCube here as well as before. But abstraction layers happen when you have major movements in markets that are game changing or major inflection points because you've reached a complexity point where it's working so great, this new thing, that's too complex to reign it in. And we were quoting Andy Grove by saying, "let chaos reign then reign in the chaos". So, all major industry moments go back 30, 40 years happen with abstractions. So the question is is that, you can't be a vendor, we've observed you can't be a vendor and be the abstraction. Like, if Cisco's running routers, they can't be the abstraction layer. They have to be the benefit of the abstraction layer. And if you're on the other side of the abstraction layer, you can't be running that either. >> I like the way you're thinking about it. Yeah. Do you agree? >> I completely agree. And, you know, I'm an old middleware guy. And when I used to say this to my CEO, he's like, no, it's not middleware, it's just a new middleware. And what's middleware, right? It's a thing between app and infrastructure. You could define it whatever we want, right? And so this is the new distributed middleware. >> It's a metaphor and it's a good one because it does a purpose. >> It's a purpose. >> It creates a separation but then you have, it's like a DMZ zone or whatever you want to call it. It's an area that things happen. >> But the difference before last time was, you could always deploy it to a thing. The thing is now the cloud. The thing is a set of services. So now it's as much of a networking problem at the application layer is as much as security problem. It's how you build software, how we design. So APIs, become part of your development. You can't think of APIs after the fact, right? When you build an API, you got to publish API because the minute you publish it and if you change it, the API's out of. So you can't have it as a documentation process. So, the way you build software, you use software consume is all about it. So to me, digital product with an API as a currency is where we're headed towards. >> Yeah, that's a great observation. Want to make a mental note of that and make that a clip. I want to get your thoughts on software development. You mentioned that, obviously software development life cycles are changing. I'll say open sources now. I mean, it's unlimited codes, supply chain issue. What's in the code, I get that verified codes going to happen. Is software development coding as much or is coding changing the notion of writing code? Or is it more glue layer you're writing. >> I think you're onto something. I call software developments composition now. My son's at Facebook or Google. They have so many libraries. So you don't no longer start with the very similar primitive, you start with building blocks, components, services, libraries, open source technology. What are you really doing? You're composing these things from multiple artifacts. And how do you make sure those artifacts are good artifacts? So someone's not sticking in security in a vulnerability into it. So, the world is moving towards composition and there are few experts who build the core components. Most of the time we're just using those to build solutions. And so, the art here is, how do you provide that set of best practices? We call them patterns or building blocks or services that you can compose to build these next generation (indistinct) >> It's interesting. >> Cooking meals. >> I agree with you a hundred percent what you're thinking. I agree about that worldview. Here's a dilemma that I'm seeing. In the security world, you've got zero trust. You know, Which is, I don't know you, I don't trust you at all. And if you're going to go down this composed, we're going to have an orchestra of players with instruments, say to speak, Dave, metaphor. That's trust involved. >> Yes. >> So you have two spectrums of issues. >> Yes. >> If software's going trust and you're seeing Docker containers getting more verifications, software supply chain, and then you got hardware I call network guys, love zero trust. Where's the balance? How do you reconcile that? Is it just decoupled? Nuance? I mean, what's the point? >> No, no. I think it all comes together. And what I mean by that is, it starts with left shifting it all the way to hands of the developers, right? So, are you starting with good content? You have providence of the stuff you're using. Are you building it correctly? So you're not introducing bad things like solar winds along the process. Are you testing it along the way of the development process? And then once in production, do you know, half the time it's configurations of where you're running the stuff versus the software itself. So you can think of the two coming together. And the network security is protecting people from going laterally once they've got in there. So, a whole security solution requires all of the above, a secure software supply chain, the way to kind of monitor and look at configuration, we call posture management or workload management and the network security of SaaS-e for zero trust. That's a hard thing. And the boundary is the application. >> All right. >> So is it earned trust model sort of over time? >> No, it's designed in, it's been a thing. >> Okay. So it's not a, >> Because it developed. >> You can bolt in afterwards. >> Because the developers are driving it. They got to know what they're doing. >> And it's changing every week. If I'm putting a new code out every week. You can't, it can be changed to something else. >> Well, you guys got guardrails. The guardrails constant is a good example. >> It stops on the configuration side, but I also need the software. So, Tanzu is all about, the secure chain is about the development side of the house. Guardrails are on the operational side of the house. >> To make sure the developers don't stop. >> That's right. >> Things will always get out there. And I find out there's a CV that I use a library, I found after the fact. >> Okay. So again, while I got here again, this is great. I want to get test this thesis. So, we've been saying on theCube, talking about the new ops, the new kind of ops that emerging. DevOps, which we believe is cloud native. So DevOps moving infrastructure's code, that's happened, it's all good. Open source is growing. DevOps is done deal. It's done deal. Developers are doing that. That ops was IT. Then don't need the server, clouds my hardware. Check. That balances. The new ops is data and security which has to match up to the velocity of the developers. Do you believe that? >> Completely. That's why we call it DevSecOps. And the Sec is where all the action is. >> And data. And data too. >> And data is about making the data available where the app meets. So the problem was, you know, we had to move the logic to where the data is or you're going to move the data where the logic is. So data fabrics are going to become more and more interesting. I'll give you a simple example. I publish content today in a service catalog. My customer's saying, but my content catalog needs to be in 300 locations. How do I get the content to each of the repos that are running in 300 location? So I have a content distribution problem. So you call it a data problem. Yes, it's about getting the right data. Whether it's simple as even content, images available for use for deployment. >> So you think when I think about the application development stack and the analytics stack, the data stack, if I can call it that, they're separate, right? Are those worlds, I mean, people say, I want to inject data and AI intelligence into apps. Those worlds have deployment? I think about the insight from the historical being projected in the operational versus they all coming together. I have a Greenplum platform, it's a great analytics platform. I have a transactional platform. Do my customers buy the same? No, they're different buyers, they're different users. But the insight from that is being now plugged in so that at real time I can ask the question. So even this information is being made available on demand. So that's where I see it. And that's most coming together, but the insight is being incorporated in the operational use. So I can say, do I give the risk score? Do I give you credit? It's based on a whole bunch of historical analytics done. And at the real time, processing is happening, but the intelligence is behind it. >> It's a mind shift for sure because the old model was, I have a database, we're good. Now you have time series database, you got graphs. Each one has a role in the overall construct of the new thing. >> But it's about at the end. How do I make use of it? Someone built a smart AI model. I don't know how it was built, but I want to apply it for that particular purpose. >> Okay. So the final question for you, at least from my standpoint is, here at VMware Explore, you have a lot of the customers and so new people coming in that we've heard about, what's their core order of operations right now? Get on the bandwagon for modern apps. How do you see their world unfolding as they go back to the ranch, their places, and go back to their boss? Okay. We got the modern application. We're on the right track boss, full steam ahead. Or what change do they make? >> I think the biggest thing I saw was with some of the branding changes well and some of the new offerings. The same leader had two teams, the VMware team and the public cloud team. And they're saying, hey, maybe VMware's going to be the answer for both. And that's the world model. That's the biggest change I'm seeing. They were only thinking of us on the left column. Now they see us as a unifying player to play across cloud native and VMware, the uniquely set up to bring it all together. That's been really exciting this week. >> All right, Ajay, great to have you on. Great perspective. Worthy of great stuff. Congratulations on the success of all that investment coming to bear. >> Thank you. >> And on the new management platform. >> Yeah. Thank you. And thanks always for giving us all the support we need. It's always great. >> All right Cube coverage here. Getting all the data, getting inside the heads, getting all the specifics and all the new trends and actually connecting the dots here on theCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more coverage from day two. Two sets, three days, Cube at VMware Explore. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the birthplace of theCUBE. In 2010, May of 2010 at EMC World, right in this very venue, John Furrier called it the chowder and lobster post. I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at RE:INFORCE 2022, Ed Walsh, CEO of ChaosSearch. Doing a drive by Ed. Thanks so much for stopping in. You're going to help me wrap up in our final editorial segment. >> Looking forward to it. >> I really appreciate it. >> Thank you for including me. >> How about that? 2010. >> That's amazing. It was really in this-- >> Really in this building. Yeah, we had to sort of bury our way in, tunnel our way into the Blogger Lounge. We did four days. >> Weekends, yeah. >> It was epic. It was really epic. But I'm glad they're back in Boston. AWS was going to do June in Houston. >> Okay. >> Which would've been awful. >> Yeah, yeah. No, this is perfect. >> Yeah. Thank God they came back. You saw Boston in summer is great. I know it's been hot, And of course you and I are from this area. >> Yeah. >> So how you been? What's going on? I mean, it's a little crazy out there. The stock market's going crazy. >> Sure. >> Having the tech lash, what are you seeing? >> So it's an interesting time. So I ran a company in 2008. So we've been through this before. By the way, the world's not ending, we'll get through this. But it is an interesting conversation as an investor, but also even the customers. There's some hesitation but you have to basically have the right value prop, otherwise things are going to get sold. So we are seeing longer sales cycles. But it's nothing that you can't overcome. But it has to be something not nice to have, has to be a need to have. But I think we all get through it. And then there is some, on the VC side, it's now buckle down, let's figure out what to do which is always a challenge for startup plans. >> In pre 2000 you, maybe you weren't a CEO but you were definitely an executive. And so now it's different and a lot of younger people haven't seen this. You've got interest rates now rising. Okay, we've seen that before but it looks like you've got inflation, you got interest rates rising. >> Yep. >> The consumer spending patterns are changing. You had 6$, $7 gas at one point. So you have these weird crosscurrents, >> Yup. >> And people are thinking, "Okay post-September now, maybe because of the recession, the Fed won't have to keep raising interest rates and tightening. But I don't know what to root for. It's like half full, half empty. (Ed laughing) >> But we haven't been in an environment with high inflation. At least not in my career. >> Right. Right. >> I mean, I got into 92, like that was long gone, right?. >> Yeah. >> So it is a interesting regime change that we're going to have to deal with, but there's a lot of analogies between 2008 and now that you still have to work through too, right?. So, anyway, I don't think the world's ending. I do think you have to run a tight shop. So I think the grow all costs is gone. I do think discipline's back in which, for most of us, discipline never left, right?. So, to me that's the name of the game. >> What do you tell just generally, I mean you've been the CEO of a lot of private companies. And of course one of the things that you do to retain people and attract people is you give 'em stock and it's great and everybody's excited. >> Yeah. >> I'm sure they're excited cause you guys are a rocket ship. But so what's the message now that, Okay the market's down, valuations are down, the trees don't grow to the moon, we all know that. But what are you telling your people? What's their reaction? How do you keep 'em motivated? >> So like anything, you want over communicate during these times. So I actually over communicate, you get all these you know, the Sequoia decks, 2008 and the recent... >> (chuckles) Rest in peace good times, that one right? >> I literally share it. Why? It's like, Hey, this is what's going on in the real world. It's going to affect us. It has almost nothing to do with us specifically, but it will affect us. Now we can't not pay attention to it. It does change how you're going to raise money, so you got to make sure you have the right runway to be there. So it does change what you do, but I think you over communicate. So that's what I've been doing and I think it's more like a student of the game, so I try to share it, and I say some appreciate it others, I'm just saying, this is normal, we'll get through this and this is what happened in 2008 and trust me, once the market hits bottom, give it another month afterwards. Then everyone says, oh, the bottom's in and we're back to business. Valuations don't go immediately back up, but right now, no one knows where the bottom is and that's where kind of the world's ending type of things. >> Well, it's interesting because you talked about, I said rest in peace good times >> Yeah >> that was the Sequoia deck, and the message was tighten up. Okay, and I'm not saying you shouldn't tighten up now, but the difference is, there was this period of two years of easy money and even before that, it was pretty easy money. >> Yeah. >> And so companies are well capitalized, they have runway so it's like, okay, I was talking to Frank Slootman about this now of course there are public companies, like we're not taking the foot off the gas. We're inherently profitable, >> Yeah. >> we're growing like crazy, we're going for it. You know? So that's a little bit of a different dynamic. There's a lot of good runway out there, isn't there? >> But also you look at the different companies that were either born or were able to power through those environments are actually better off. You come out stronger in a more dominant position. So Frank, listen, if you see what Frank's done, it's been unbelievable to watch his career, right?. In fact, he was at Data Domain, I was Avamar so, but look at what he's done since, he's crushed it. Right? >> Yeah. >> So for him to say, Hey, I'm going to literally hit the gas and keep going. I think that's the right thing for Snowflake and a right thing for a lot of people. But for people in different roles, I literally say that you have to take it seriously. What you can't be is, well, Frank's in a different situation. What is it...? How many billion does he have in the bank? So it's... >> He's over a billion, you know, over a billion. Well, you're on your way Ed. >> No, no, no, it's good. (Dave chuckles) Okay, I want to ask you about this concept that we've sort of we coined this term called Supercloud. >> Sure. >> You could think of it as the next generation of multi-cloud. The basic premises that multi-cloud was largely a symptom of multi-vendor. Okay. I've done some M&A, I've got some Shadow IT, spinning up, you know, Shadow clouds, projects. But it really wasn't a strategy to have a continuum across clouds. And now we're starting to see ecosystems really build, you know, you've used the term before, standing on the shoulders of giants, you've used that a lot. >> Yep. >> And so we're seeing that. Jerry Chen wrote a seminal piece on Castles in The Cloud, so we coined this term SuperCloud to connote this abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexities and primitives of the individual clouds and then adds value on top of it and can adjudicate and manage, irrespective of physical location, Supercloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What do you think about that concept?. How does it maybe relate to some of the things that you're seeing in the industry? >> So, standing on shoulders of giants, right? So I always like to do hard tech either at big company, small companies. So we're probably your definition of a Supercloud. We had a big vision, how to literally solve the core challenge of analytics at scale. How are you going to do that? You're not going to build on your own. So literally we're leveraging the primitives, everything you can get out of the Amazon cloud, everything get out of Google cloud. In fact, we're even looking at what it can get out of this Snowflake cloud, and how do we abstract that out, add value to it? That's where all our patents are. But it becomes a simplified approach. The customers don't care. Well, they care where their data is. But they don't care how you got there, they just want to know the end result. So you simplify, but you gain the advantages. One thing's interesting is, in this particular company, ChaosSearch, people try to always say, at some point the sales cycle they say, no way, hold on, no way that can be fast no way, or whatever the different issue. And initially we used to try to explain our technology, and I would say 60% was explaining the public, cloud capabilities and then how we, harvest those I guess, make them better add value on top and what you're able to get is something you couldn't get from the public clouds themselves and then how we did that across public clouds and then extracted it. So if you think about that like, it's the Shoulders of giants. But what we now do, literally to avoid that conversation because it became a lengthy conversation. So, how do you have a platform for analytics that you can't possibly overwhelm for ingest. All your messy data, no pipelines. Well, you leverage things like S3 and EC2, and you do the different security things. You can go to environments say, you can't possibly overrun me, I could not say that. If I didn't literally build on the shoulders giants of all these public clouds. But the value. So if you're going to do hard tech as a startup, you're going to build, you're going to be the principles of Supercloud. Maybe they're not the same size of Supercloud just looking at Snowflake, but basically, you're going to leverage all that, you abstract it out and that's where you're able to have a lot of values at that. >> So let me ask you, so I don't know if there's a strict definition of Supercloud, We sort of put it out to the community and said, help us define it. So you got to span multiple clouds. It's not just running in each cloud. There's a metadata layer that kind of understands where you're pulling data from. Like you said you can pull data from Snowflake, it sounds like we're not running on Snowflake, correct? >> No, complimentary to them in their different customers. >> Yeah. Okay. >> They want to build on top of a data platform, data apps. >> Right. And of course they're going cross cloud. >> Right. >> Is there a PaaS layer in there? We've said there's probably a Super PaaS layer. You're probably not doing that, but you're allowing people to bring their own, bring your own PaaS sort of thing maybe. >> So we're a little bit different but basically we publish open APIs. We don't have a user interface. We say, keep the user interface. Again, we're solving the challenge of analytics at scale, we're not trying to retrain your analytics, either analysts or your DevOps or your SOV or your Secop team. They use the tools they already use. Elastic search APIs, SQL APIs. So really they program, they build applications on top of us, Equifax is a good example. Case said it coming out later on this week, after 18 months in production but, basically they're building, we provide the abstraction layer, the quote, I'm going to kill it, Jeff Tincher, who owns all of SREs worldwide, said to the effect of, Hey I'm able to rethink what I do for my data pipelines. But then he also talked about how, that he really doesn't have to worry about the data he puts in it. We deal with that. And he just has to, just query on the other side. That simplicity. We couldn't have done that without that. So anyway, what I like about the definition is, if you were going to do something harder in the world, why would you try to rebuild what Amazon, Google and Azure or Snowflake did? You're going to add things on top. We can still do intellectual property. We're still doing patents. So five grand patents all in this. But literally the abstraction layer is the simplification. The end users do not want to know that complexity, even though they ask the questions. >> And I think too, the other attribute is it's ecosystem enablement. Whereas I think, >> Absolutely >> in general, in the Multicloud 1.0 era, the ecosystem wasn't thinking about, okay, how do I build on top and abstract that. So maybe it is Multicloud 2.0, We chose to use Supercloud. So I'm wondering, we're at the security conference, >> RE: INFORCE is there a security Supercloud? Maybe Snyk has the developer Supercloud or maybe Okta has the identity Supercloud. I think CrowdStrike maybe not. Cause CrowdStrike competes with Microsoft. So maybe, because Microsoft, what's interesting, Merritt Bear was just saying, look, we don't show up in the spending data for security because we're not charging for most of our security. We're not trying to make a big business. So that's kind of interesting, but is there a potential for the security Supercloud? >> So, I think so. But also, I'll give you one thing I talked to, just today, at least three different conversations where everyone wants to log data. It's a little bit specific to us, but basically they want to do the security data lake. The idea of, and Snowflake talks about this too. But the idea of putting all the data in one repository and then how do you abstract out and get value from it? Maybe not the perfect, but it becomes simple to do but hard to get value out. So the different players are going to do that. That's what we do. We're able to, once you land it in your S3 or it doesn't matter, cloud of choice, simple storage, we allow you to get after that data, but we take the primitives and hide them from you. And all you do is query the data and we're spinning up stateless computer to go after it. So then if I look around the floor. There's going to be a bunch of these players. I don't think, why would someone in this floor try to recreate what Amazon or Google or Azure had. They're going to build on top of it. And now the key thing is, do you leave it in standard? And now we're open APIs. People are building on top of my open APIs or do you try to put 'em in a walled garden? And they're in, now your Supercloud. Our belief is, part of it is, it needs to be open access and let you go after it. >> Well. And build your applications on top of it openly. >> They come back to snowflake. That's what Snowflake's doing. And they're basically saying, Hey come into our proprietary environment. And the benefit is, and I think both can win. There's a big market. >> I agree. But I think the benefit of Snowflake's is, okay, we're going to have federated governance, we're going to have data sharing, you're going to have access to all the ecosystem players. >> Yep. >> And as everything's going to be controlled and you know what you're getting. The flip side of that is, Databricks is the other end >> Yeah. >> of that spectrum, which is no, no, you got to be open. >> Yeah. >> So what's going to happen, well what's happening clearly, is Snowflake's saying, okay we've got Snowpark. we're going to allow Python, we're going to have an Apache Iceberg. We're going to have open source tooling that you can access. By the way, it's not going to be as good as our waled garden where the flip side of that is you get Databricks coming at it from a data science and data engineering perspective. And there's a lot of gaps in between, aren't there? >> And I think they both win. Like for instance, so we didn't do Snowpark integration. But we work with people building data apps on top of Snowflake or data bricks. And what we do is, we can add value to that, or what we've done, again, using all the Supercloud stuff we're done. But we deal with the unstructured data, the four V's coming at you. You can't pipeline that to save. So we actually could be additive. As they're trying to do like a security data cloud inside of Snowflake or do the same thing in Databricks. That's where we can play. Now, we play with them at the application level that they get some data from them and some data for us. But I believe there's a partnership there that will do it inside their environment. To us they're just another large scaler environment that my customers want to get after data. And they want me to abstract it out and give value. >> So it's another repository to you. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So I think Snowflake recently added support for unstructured data. You chose not to do Snowpark because why? >> Well, so the way they're doing the unstructured data is not bad. It's JSON data. Basically, This is the dilemma. Everyone wants their application developers to be flexible, move fast, securely but just productivity. So you get, give 'em flexibility. The problem with that is analytics on the end want to be structured to be performant. And this is where Snowflake, they have to somehow get that raw data. And it's changing every day because you just let the developers do what they want now, in some structured base, but do what you need to do your business fast and securely. So it completely destroys. So they have large customers trying to do big integrations for this messy data. And it doesn't quite work, cause you literally just can't make the pipelines work. So that's where we're complimentary do it. So now, the particular integration wasn't, we need a little bit deeper integration to do that. So we're integrating, actually, at the data app layer. But we could, see us and I don't, listen. I think Snowflake's a good actor. They're trying to figure out what's best for the customers. And I think we just participate in that. >> Yeah. And I think they're trying to figure out >> Yeah. >> how to grow their ecosystem. Because they know they can't do it all, in fact, >> And we solve the key thing, they just can't do certain things. And we do that well. Yeah, I have SQL but that's where it ends. >> Yeah. >> I do the messy data and how to play with them. >> And when you talk to one of their founders, anyway, Benoit, he comes on the cube and he's like, we start with simple. >> Yeah. >> It reminds me of the guy's some Pure Storage, that guy Coz, he's always like, no, if it starts to get too complicated. So that's why they said all right, we're not going to start out trying to figure out how to do complex joins and workload management. And they turn that into a feature. So like you say, I think both can win. It's a big market. >> I think it's a good model. And I love to see Frank, you know, move. >> Yeah. I forgot So you AVMAR... >> In the day. >> You guys used to hate each other, right? >> No, no, no >> No. I mean, it's all good. >> But the thing is, look what he's done. Like I wouldn't bet against Frank. I think it's a good message. You can see clients trying to do it. Same thing with Databricks, same thing with BigQuery. We get a lot of same dynamic in BigQuery. It's good for a lot of things, but it's not everything you need to do. And there's ways for the ecosystem to play together. >> Well, what's interesting about BigQuery is, it is truly cloud native, as is Snowflake. You know, whereas Amazon Redshift was sort of Parexel, it's cobbled together now. It's great engineering, but BigQuery gets a lot of high marks. But again, there's limitations to everything. That's why companies like yours can exist. >> And that's why.. so back to the Supercloud. It allows me as a company to participate in that because I'm leveraging all the underlying pieces. Which we couldn't be doing what we're doing now, without leveraging the Supercloud concepts right, so... >> Ed, I really appreciate you coming by, help me wrap up today in RE:INFORCE. Always a pleasure seeing you, my friend. >> Thank you. >> All right. Okay, this is a wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow. I'll be solo. John Furrier had to fly out but we'll be following what he's doing. This is RE:INFORCE 2022. You're watching theCUBE. I'll see you tomorrow.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's three day coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We have been here as I said for three days. Dave, we have had an amazing three days. The energy, the momentum, the number of people still here speaks volumes for- >> Yeah, I was just saying, you look back, theCUBE, when it started, early days was a big part of the Hadoop ecosystem. You know Cloudera kind of got it started, the whole big data movement, it was awesome energy, and that whole ecosystem has been, I think, just hoovered into the Snowflake ecosystem. They've taken over as the data company, the data cloud, I mean, that was Cloudera, it could have been Cloudera, and now they didn't, they missed it, it was a variety of factors, but Snowflake has nailed it. And now it's theirs to lose. Benoit talked about that on our previous segment, how he knew that technically Hadoop was too complex, and was going to fail, and they didn't know it was going to do this. They were going to turn their company into what we see here. But the event itself, Lisa, is almost 10,000 people, the right people, people are doing business, we've had a number of people tell us that they're booking deals. That's why people come to face-to-face shows, right? That's the criticism of virtual. It takes too long to close business. Salespeople want to be belly-to-belly. And this is a belly-to belly-show. >> It absolutely is. When you and I were trying to get into the keynote on Tuesday, we finally got in standing room only, multiple overflow rooms, and we're even hearing that, so this is day four of the summit for them, there are still queues to get into breakout sessions. The momentum, but the appetite for this flywheel, and what they're creating, but also they're involving this massively growing ecosystem in its evolution. It's that synergy was really very much heard, and echoed throughout pretty much all of our segments the last couple days. >> Yeah, it was amazing actually. So we like to go, we want to be in the front row in the keynotes, we're taking notes, we always do that. Sometimes we listen remotely, but when you listen remotely, you miss some things. When you're there, you can see the executives, you can feel their energy, you can chit chat to them on the side, be seen, whatever. And it was crazy, we couldn't get in. So we had to do our thing, and sneak our way in, and "Hey, we're media." "Oh yeah, come on in." And then no, they were taking us to a breakout room. We had to sneak in a side door, got like the last two seats, and wow, I'm glad we were in there because it gave us a better sense. When you're in the remote watching rooms you just can't get a sense of the energy. That's why I like to be there, I know you do too. And then to your point about ecosystem. So we've said many times that what Snowflake is developing is what we call supercloud. It's not just a SaaS, it's not just a cloud database, it's a new layer that they're creating. And so what are the attributes of that layer? Well, it hides the underlying complexity of the underlying primitives of the cloud. We've said that ad nauseam, and it adds new value on top. Well, what's that value that they're adding? Well, they're adding value of being able to share data, collaborate, have data that's governed, and secure, globally. And now the other hallmark of a cloud company is ecosystem. And so they're building that ecosystem much more rapidly than we saw at ServiceNow, which is Slootman's previous company. And the key to me is they've launched an application development platform, essentially a super PaaS, so that you can develop applications on top of the data cloud. And we're hearing tons about monetization. Duh, you could actually make money with data. You can package data into data products, and data services, or feed data products and services, and actually sell that in a cloud, in a supercloud. That's exactly what's happening here. So that's critical. I think my one question mark if I had to lay one out, is the other hallmark of a cloud is startup, startups come into that cloud. And I think we're seeing that, maybe not at the pace that AWS did, it's a little different. Snowflake are, they're whale hunters. They're after big companies. But it looks to me like they're relying on the ecosystem to be the startup innovators. That's the important thing about cloud, cloud brings scale. It definitely brings lower cost 'cause you're eliminating all this undifferentiated labor, but it also brings innovation through startups. So unlike AWS, who sold the startups directly, and startups built businesses on AWS, and by paying AWS, it's a little bit indirect, but it's actually happening where startups in the ecosystem are building products on the data cloud, and that ultimately is going to drive value for customers, and money for Snowflake, and ultimately AWS, and Google, and Azure. The other thing I would say is the criticism or concern that the cost of goods sold for cloud are going to be so high that it's going to force people to come back on-prem. I think it's a step in the wrong direction. I think cloud, and the cloud operating model is here to stay. I think it's going to be very difficult to replicate that on-prem. I don't think you can do cloud without cloud, and we'll see what the edge brings. >> Curious what your thoughts are. We were just at Dell technologies world a month or so ago when the big announcement, the Snowflake partnership there, cloud native companies recognizing, ah, there's still a lot of data that lives on-prem. Given that, and everything that we've heard the last couple of days, what are your thoughts around that and their partnerships there? >> So Dell is, I think finally, now maybe they weren't publicly talking like this, but certainly their marketing was defensive. But in the last year or so, Dell has really embraced cloud, not just the cloud operating model, Dell has said, "Look, we can build value on top of all these hyperscalers." And we saw some examples at Dell Tech World of them stepping their toe into supercloud. Project Alpine is an example, and there are others. And then of course the Snowflake deal, where Snowflake and Dell got together, I asked Frank Slootman how that deal came about. And 'cause I said, "Did the customer get you into a headlock?" 'Cause I presume that was the case. Customer said, "You got to do this or we're not going to do business with you." He said, "Well, no, not really. Michael and I had a chat, and that's how it started." Which was my other scenario, and that's exactly what happened I guess. The point being that those worlds are coming together. And so what it means for Dell is as they embrace cloud, as they develop supercloud capabilities, they're going to do a lot of business. Dell for sure knows how to sell, they know how to execute. What I would be doing if I were Dell, is I would be trying to substantially replicate what's happening in the cloud on-prem with on-prem data. So what happens with that Snowflake deal is, it's read-only data, you read the data into the cloud, the compute is in the cloud. And I should've asked Terry this, I mean Benoit. Can there be an architecture on-prem? We've seen at Vertica has one, it's called Vertica Eon where you separate compute from storage. It doesn't have unlimited elasticity, but you can grow, compute, and storage independently, and have a lot more. With Dell doing APEX on demand, it's cloudlike, they could begin to develop a little mini data cloud, or a big data cloud within on-prem that connects to the public cloud. So what Snowflake is missing, a big part of their TAM that they're missing is the on-prem. The Dell and Pure deals are forays into that, but this on-prem is massive, and Dell is the on-prem poster child. So I think again what it means for them is they've got to continue to embrace it, they got to do more in software, more in data management, they got to push on APEX. And I'd say the same thing for HPE. I think they're both well behind this in terms of ecosystems. I mean they're not even close. But they have to start, and they got to start somewhere, and they've got resources to make it happen. >> You said in your breaking analysis that you published just a few days ago before the event that Snowflake plans to create a de facto standard in data platforms. What we heard from our guests on this program, your mainstage session with Frank Slootman. Still think that? >> I do. I think it more than I believed it coming in. And the reason I called it that is because I am a super fan of Zhamak Dehghani and her data mesh. And what her vision is, it's kind of the Immaculate Conception, where she wants everything to be open, open standards, and those don't exist today. And I think she perfectly realizes the practicality of de facto standards are going to get to market, and add value sooner than open standards. Now open standards over time, and I'll come back to that, may occur, but that's clear to me what Snowflake is creating, is the de facto standard for data platforms, the data cloud, the supercloud. And what's most impressive, or I think really important, is they're layering applications now on top of that. The metric to me, and I don't know if we can even count this, but VMware used to use it. For every dollar spent on VMware license, $15 was spent in the ecosystem. It started at 1 to 1.5, 1 to 2, 1 to 10, 1 to 15, I think it went up to 1 to 30 at the max. I don't know how they counted that, but it's countable. Reasonable people can make estimates like that. And I think as the ecosystem grows, what Snowflake's doing is it's in many respects modeling the cloud, what the cloud has. Cloud has ecosystems, we talked about startups, and the cloud also has optionality. And optionality means open source. So what you saw with Apache Iceberg is we're going to extend to open technologies. What you saw with Hybrid tables is we're going to extend a new workloads like transactions. The other thing about Snowflake that's really impressive is you're seeing the vertical focus. Financial services, healthcare, retail, media and entertainment. It's very rare for a company in this tenure, they're only 10 years old, to really start going vertical with their go-to-market, and building expertise around that. I think what's going to happen is the GSIs are going to come in, they love to eat at the trough, the trough here is maybe not big enough for them yet, but it will be. And they're going to start to align with the GSIs, and they're going to do really well within those industries, connecting people, collaborating with data. But I think it's a killer strategy, but they're executing on it. >> Right, and we heard a lot of great customer stories from all of those four verticals that you talked about, and then some, that that direction and that pivot from a customer perspective, from a sales and marketing perspective is all aligned. And that was kind of one of the themes as well that Frank talked about in his keynote is mission alignment, mission alignment with customers, but also with the ecosystem. And I feel that I heard that with every customer conversation, with every partner conversation, and Snowflake conversation that we had over the last I think 36 segments, Dave. >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's the power of many versus the resources of one. And even though Snowflake tell you they have $5 billion in cash, and assets on the balance sheet, and that's fine, that's nothing compared to what an ecosystem has. And Amazon's part of that ecosystem. Azure is part of that ecosystem. Google is part of that ecosystem. Those companies have huge resources, and Snowflake it seems has figured out how to tap those resources, and build value on top of it. To me they're doing a better job than a lot of the cloud databases out there. They don't necessarily have a better database, in fact, I could argue that their database is less functional. And I would argue that actually in many cases. Their database is less functional if you just want a database. But if you want a data cloud, and an ecosystem, and develop applications on top of that, and to be able to monetize, that's unique, and that is a moat that they're building that is highly differentiable, and being able to do that relatively easily. I mean, I think they overstate the simplicity with which that is being done. We talked to some customers who said, he didn't say same wine, new bottle. I did ask him that, about Hadoop complexity. And he said, "No, it's not that bad." But you still got to put this stuff together. And I think in the early parts of a market that are immature, people get really excited because it's so much easier than what was previous. So my other question is, okay, what's somebody working on now, that's looking at what Snowflake's doing and saying, I can improve on that. And what's going to be really interesting to see is, can they improve on it in a way, and can they raise enough capital such that they can disrupt, or is Snowflake going to keep staying paranoid, 'cause they got good leaders, and keep executing? And then I think the other wild card is edge. Snowflake doesn't really have an edge strategy right now. I think they will develop one. >> Through the ecosystem? >> And I don't think they're missing the boat, and they'll do it through the ecosystem, exactly. I don't think they're missing the boat, I think they're just like, "Well, we don't know what to do today." It's all distributed data, and it's ephemeral, and nobody's storing the data. You know anything that comes back to the cloud, we get. But new architectures are emerging on the edge that are going to bring new economics. There's new silicon, you see what's happening with Apple, and the M1, the M1 Ultra, and the new systems that they've just developed. What Tesla is doing with custom silicon, and amazing things, and programmability of the arm model. So it's early days, but semiconductors are the mainspring of innovation in this industry. Without chips, you got nothing. And when you get innovations in silicon, it drives innovations in software, because developers go, "Wow, I can do that now?" I can do things in parallel, I can do things faster, I can do things more simply, and programmable at scale. So that's happening. And that's going to bring a new set of economics that the premise is that will eventually bleed into the data center. It will, it always does. And I guess the other thing is every 15 years or so, the world gets disrupted, the tech world. We're about 15, 16 years in now to the cloud. So at this point, everybody's like, "Wow this is insurmountable, this is all we'll ever see. Everything that's ever been invented, this is the model of the future." We know that's not the case. I don't know how it's going to get disrupted, but I think edge is going to be part of that. It could be public policy. Governments could come in and take big tech on, seems like Sharekhan wants to do that. So that's what makes this industry so fun. >> Never a dull moment, Dave. This has been a great three days hosting this show with you. We've uncovered a lot. Your breaking analysis was great to get me prepared for the show. If you haven't seen it, check it out on siliconangle.com. Thanks, Dave, I appreciate all of your insights. >> Thank you, Lisa, It's been a pleasure working with you. >> Always good to work with you. >> Awesome, great job. >> Likewise. Great job to the team. >> Yes, thank you to our awesome production team. They've kept us going for three days. >> Yes, and the team back, Kristin, and Cheryl, and everybody back at the office. >> Exactly, it takes a village. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We are wrappin' up three days of wall-to-wall coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 from Vegas. Thanks for watching guys, we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)