 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us, they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best-of-breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time, connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications, which drive top-line revenue and bottom-line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-premise states has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear, and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called SuperCloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we give you a preview of SuperCloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks, that's right. SuperCloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away. 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from the Cubes Palo Alto studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the SuperCloud 2 lineup of guests. Whereas SuperCloud 22 in August was all about refining the definition of SuperCloud, testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models, SuperCloud 2 features practitioners, technologists, and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of SuperCloud. And we'll expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will, that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now, the example we'd use, if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities, they're choosing products, they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure, the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the SuperCloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data stores, databases, lake houses, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system, the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at SuperCloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Jamak Degani, the founder of DataMesh is a headliner. Kid Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first SuperCloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most common thinking on the topic. Veronica Durgan of Sacks will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of SuperCloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's SuperCloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union, Iona's Pharmaceuticals, WarnerMedia. We've got deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn, Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zook, the founder of Palo Alto Networks, focused on security, Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for SuperCloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend, Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan. It's so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail. Starting with the Walmart cloud native platform. They call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a SuperCloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. Quote, WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source. By the way, they do the same thing with open stack. And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a SuperCloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain. Along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its SuperCloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next let's take a look at how Veronica Durgan of Saks thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for SuperCloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? I work with data. This is what I do. So if I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy, I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think SuperCloud comes to me in my mind is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network and how we can easily share data with each other? Now, data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Jamak Degani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the SuperCloud. Now, one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for SuperCloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community SuperCloud definition. And he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time, he came up with the following definition that we're showing here, I'll read it. A SuperCloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition, he stressed that the SuperCloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider, e.g. Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now, interestingly, in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the SuperCloud definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai, who is actually building a SuperCloud, responded as follows to Bob's assertion. Quote, we need to avoid creating many SuperCloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how SuperCloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model? And how users will interact with SuperCloud. What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the latter may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail at SuperCloud too. And of course, we'd love to hear what you think. Platform, architecture, both? Now, one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at SuperCloud too is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO. And he's now working on a system to enable read-write data access to any user and any application in any data center or on any cloud, anywhere. So think of his company as a SuperCloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Floria and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the SuperCloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant, quote, what is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one, the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for SuperCloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications. So a couple of implications here that we'll be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First, we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture. And there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits, but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept, the further you move up the stack. So the further you move up the stack, the weaker the SuperCloud argument becomes because it's just becoming sass. And this is something we're going to explore to better understand his thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of sass is changing and whether or not a new breed of SuperCloud apps will emerge, which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I rift with ahead of SuperCloud too, Tristan Handys, the founder and CEO of DBT Labs. And he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, quote, one of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse, inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users, you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to. A lot of implications to the statement that we'll explore in SuperCloud too. First, Jamak Dagoni's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper-specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgan of Sax and her ideal state for data sharing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union, they got to deal with 200 locations around the world and data privacy issues, data sovereignty, how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical and not to blow your mind, but Thomas Hazel and Bob Mugley are posited to make data apps reality across the SuperCloud. You have to rethink everything. You can't just let in-memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather, you have to get down to really detailed levels, even things like how data is laid out on disk, i.e. flash, and think about rewriting applications for the SuperCloud and the ML AI era. All of this and more at SuperCloud too, which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR, Eric Bradley and Darren Brabham to see if they had any data on SuperCloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at SuperCloud too. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic. Here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling SuperCloud-like capabilities on the y-axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal axis is market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So net score versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted. Now, not to steal ETR's thunder, but the first point is you really can't have SuperCloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms, which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of SuperCloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik, VMware, Tensu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements is also showing momentum. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program, but they're clearly a player here and we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other callout that we drill down on at SuperCloud too is Cloudflare, which actually uses the term SuperCloud maybe in a different way. They look at SuperCloud really as serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at SuperCloud too, along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend SuperCloud too? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services, for monetizing data, how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a SuperCloud, you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment. There's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of SuperCloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them by the way are kind of throwing up their hands and saying, hey, we're going monocloud and we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that and also some of the benefits. You know there's a question, right? Is SuperCloud the same wine, new bottle, or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to supercloud.world. It's January 17th at 9 a.m. Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the SuperCloud support as VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor, Chaos Search, Prosimo, and Alcira as well for contributing to the effort. I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoef as our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, thank you all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, we really appreciate the support that you're giving. We just saw some stats from Buzzsprout who hit the top 25%. We're almost at 400,000 downloads last year so really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com or if you want to get in the hold of me you can email me directly at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvolante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai they've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at SuperCloud 2 or next time on Breaking Analysis.