 Hello and welcome to SuperCloud 2. I'm John Furrier, host of the queue here. We're exploring all the new SuperCloud trends around multiple clouds, hyperscale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. But a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabhagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prusamo Keeb alumni. Ramesh, a legend in the industry. You've been around, you've seen many cycles. Welcome to SuperCloud 2. Thank you, you've been too kind. Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track, as they say. But now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event kind of we're doing to start the ball rolling around, unpacking this idea of SuperCloud, which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're SuperCloud. Cloudflare says this is their version. Someone says they're over there. Fitzy over there. And the blog is always challenging us on our definitions. But the consensus is though something's happening. Absolutely. And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? Absolutely. So if you just look at kind of this in layers, right? So you have hyperscalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities. And then you have enterprises adopting these technologies. There is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities by the hyperscalers. At the same time, one that actually spans let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of this SuperCloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyperscaler capabilities a lot faster. And at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity and so forth. What do you think the big driver of SuperCloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both or just evolution? What's your take? I would say it largely depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have an externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users, no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care about, right? So both are, I would say equally important problems to solve for. Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking and it's not really a debate anymore is hybrid. Hybrid happened, it happened faster than most people thought, but we were talking about this 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so as if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? So it wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage, the game is still the same, but the components are acting differently. It's really big on this. No, absolutely, that's a very key important point and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have more loads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you will make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have, right? Do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key important question and one that many of our customers are actually a great link with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models and slowly it'll shift over to one, but you're going to have to deal with a dual reality for a while. I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced, a big, big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend? Everyone's telling about IT's going, he goes, no, not really. IT's not going away from me. It's going everywhere in the company. So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible, which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? Absolutely, right? And so if you look at, what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is get speed of operations and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot? And how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements, right? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real, actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talked to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capabilities, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on SuperCloud 2. He said SuperCloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is, is SuperCloud a platform or an architecture review? Okay, that's a tough one, actually. I'm going to side on kind of the platform side, right? And the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And once you're in there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking SuperCloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Say, am I going AWS Azure, GCP, you make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. So who's responsible for the architecture as a platform? The vendor serving the platform? Or is the platform vendor agnostic? You know, this is where you have to kind of build the onion and layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say, I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like, I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now, who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS, I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application-centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS Azure GCP and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more super cloud, a little more multi-cloud. That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. I want to ask you the next question. Okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a super cloud narrative? Is it a single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance? Or do you have everything sync? So I would say the first layer of that super cloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyperscaler technologies. So each, the hyperscalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities. But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, those few holes start to show up. So first job of super cloud really is to plug those holes. Second is kind of get to an operating model so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be. So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined, right? Then you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region, right? You take a macro view and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region? What does it mean for instances? What does this mean for ease and so on and so forth? So you kind of have to go top to bottom. Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency. These are all questions. So what does the network super cloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. Yes, absolutely. This is what you guys do. Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack rate. So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app-native connectivity. How do I go from kind of East-West, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much. But can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're gonna have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is gonna be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. And am I gonna put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm gonna have places in Europe. I'm gonna have APAC, and I'm gonna have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path, but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the prosimo language, full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another? Because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the super cloud at the network layer? What's that look like? Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking and security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean, talking to a customer yesterday, he said, hey, I have my data like in one region that needs to talk to an analytic service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other. Which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things, right? Very simple, I have an analytic service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with. But then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath the cloud. The Mware calls that cloud chaos. Yes, exactly. And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart, cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart. And that's when you skip that whole step. And again, it's pick your strategy, right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyperscalers doing very, very well. And I love what their Amazon's do. And I think Microsoft, again, they had a little bit of downgrade, are catching up fast and they have their install base. So you got the land of the install bases. First and greater, better cloud, install base, getting better, almost as good as gifts, but close. Now you have them specializing, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. And Amazon Web Services, Adam Sileski's open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them, go ahead, go to town. So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices, now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that I would say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things, transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot. They exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that as a foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a Lambda application that serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to... What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by startups like you guys and the ecosystem? Because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software, SaaS app. And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. They're building on top of the cloud so you have that new hyperscale effect going on. Exactly. You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors, and ecosystems. What's that impact to that? Because it's a new dynamic. Exactly. So if you take kind of enterprises who want to make sure that their apps in the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself? Or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into and it's people involved, right? People process all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what we provide? And then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely chatty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams life really, really, really interesting. And that's why I love your background. And Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE and now he's at Red Hat, we used to rift about the network and how network folks are now that, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. Exactly, correct. It's a computer. Yep, absolutely. And case in point, right? Like say, we are in San Jose here or Palo Alto here and I think my application is sitting in London, right? Cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to London. It's gonna give me better performance, low latency, but I'm gonna have to incur some costs associated with that. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alto up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet which means all kind of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what it all kind of is driven by the applications? Well, we certainly want you back for SuperCloud 3, our next version of this virtual slash live event here in our Palo Alto studios. We appreciate you coming on. Absolutely. While you're here, give a quick plug for the company next minute. We take a minute to talk about the success of the company. And then you got a fresh financing this past year, plenty of money in the bank, gonna ride this new wave, SuperCloud wave, give us a quick plug. Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four, this calendar year, so it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that the technology product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also, I tend to see quite a few of kind of really large dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we're about three years old right now, was really about us educating them on this is what you need, this is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of it is pull, right? We've seen a good indication as much as I hate RFIs. A good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying, we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so, I think we are at an interesting point of that shift. RFIs though, it's like do all this work and hope for the best, pray for a deal. You guys on the right side of history, if a customer asks with respect to super cloud, multi-cloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Super cloud and multi-cloud because we customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud nature because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy because we have seen the story play out with many, many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies, they do a simple POC overnight and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for a hundred. You go down a certain path, you hit a wall. You hit a wall and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can't go around it. A lot of dead bodies laying around. Exactly, dead wall. And then I have to unravel around that and then they come talk to us and they say, okay, you know what, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that and then pick the right platform for that. I mean, you gotta have the talent, you gotta be geared up, you gotta know what you're getting into. Exactly. You gotta have the staff to do this. And cloud talent and skill set in particular, I mean, there's lots available, but it's in pockets, right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the green on the crop. They might be coming back. Exactly, exactly. With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to SuperCloud too. And again, I love your team, very technical team, and you're on the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Okay, this is SuperCloud too. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break.