 Hello and welcome to the SuperCloud event preview. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE and with Dave Vellante, host of the popular SuperCloud events. This is SuperCloud 2 preview. I'm joined by industry leader and CUBE alumni, Vittorio Villaringo, vice president of CrossCloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you. We're here for the preview of SuperCloud 2 on January 17th virtual event, live stage performance but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're going to do a preview. Thanks for coming in. My pleasure, always glad to be here. It's holiday time. We had the first SuperCloud on in August prior to VMware explore North America, prior to VMware explore Europe, prior to re-invent. We've been through that but right now SuperCloud has gotten momentum. SuperCloud 2 has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is SuperCloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong. And I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance. But in any sizable company, this causes the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increases complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which you call the SuperCloud, we call it cross-cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud, lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since Dave Vellante and I introduced and rift on the concept of SuperCloud, as we talked about at re-invent last year, a lot has happened, SuperCloud one was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry, great conversation, people are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board with a position paper, they're kind of endorsing it, they call it something different, you call it cross-cloud services, whatever it is, it's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what cloud one was, or the first generation of cloud, now we have something different. This SuperCloud two in January, this event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sex Fifth Avenue, Warner Media, Mercury Financial, other big names are here, they're leaning in, they're excited. Why the traction in the customers, industry converts over to the customer traction, why is it happening, you get a lot of data. Well in SuperCloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where? From the customers. These stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us we now are in a place where the complexity is too much, the cost is ballooning, we're going towards a slowdown potentially in the economy, we need to get better economics out of our cloud. And so every single customer I talk to today, or any sizeable company, has this problem. The developers have gone off, built all these applications and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, what are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture and how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it's going to be unmanageable. I want to go to a clip, I pulled out from our video data lake in theCUBE. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Widdendale at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the industry. If we're going to roll that clip and I want to get your reaction to that. Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, on-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers, clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge clouds. So it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default, we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Okay, Vittorio, that's the head of Dell Technologies, president, and he obviously runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but he's the leader. This is an interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer clips we'll go to as well. But by default, it kind of happened, not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom-out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, it's multi-cloud by default. I would call it by accident. We really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multi-cloud for a reason because all these hyperscalar bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in IT especially, history repeats itself, right? And so if you look at the history of IT, it was always when a new level of abstraction, the simplified things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from C++ to Visual Basic, going from integrating application that the beats a wide layer to SOA and then web services, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of abstraction today. You know, you made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got to roll it out and operationalize it globally. Lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We've got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility and also moving to the clouds, kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that. At Reinvent this year, and at VMware Explorer, we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms. They have their own ecosystem. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO, both told me, we're not an ISV, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloud-like thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two. We're going to continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? I would pay attention to two things. If you're customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting out of control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we're going to have at super cloud too, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is a CIO that is telling me, we build all these applications and now for compliance reasons, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, he said, look, there are other customers. They're already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is a platform engineering team? It's an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds so that developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a CIO, as a as a as a government body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? Patero, you know, it's really encouraging and lovely to get your thoughts on this. As one is the general consensus of industry leaders I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was solve complexity with more complexity. The cloud demands simplicity. You mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's got to be simpler and it's got to be easy and it's got to be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity. They should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? Yeah, so I'll give you a few examples. One on the development side and runtime. You're one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems. Yeah, Kubernetes everywhere. Just look, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with Tanzu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment, but now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between these systems. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing and then apply policies to it as well? So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud, make that simple and put in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited. I want to get your thoughts into is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but I'll throw it out there. I think the new AI coming out, chat, GPT and other things like lens, that you see new kinds of AI coming. That's going to be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? Well, the one way to look at AI is one of the many main services that you would want out of a multicloud, right? And you want to eventually right now, Google seems to have an edge, but the competition creates innovation. So later on you want to use something from Azure or from Oracle or something like that. So you want at some point, that is going to be prone. Every single service in the cloud is going to be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I'm just excited about to see what- I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. What they do? They're doing it now. They do. Oh, the other day, somebody, you know, that I do these song parodies for fun sometimes. And somebody at the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multicloud. And so I have the lyrics on. Stay tuned. I should do that for my blog post. I might write a blog post on this. January 17th, Vitor, thanks for coming and sharing the preview. Bottom line, why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of take away, build board message? History repeats itself. IT goes to these major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind. They were not as competitive as the people that got on top of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you're a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to hear from other customers in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the mistakes and the shortfalls of this new wave and so that you can use multicloud to accelerate your business and kick a bot in the future. All right, kicking nays and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on January 17th, super cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. They'll be super cloud four. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open, we want more voices, we want more industry, we want more customers. It's happening, a lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.