 Welcome back to SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a live performance in studio, bringing all the thought leaders around this concept of SuperCloud, which is a consortium of the smartest people in the industry, the cloud of Roddy, some say, or just people in the field building out next generation cloud technologies for businesses, for the industry. You know, software meets infrastructure at scale and platforms, all great stuff. We have an expert here, CUBE alumni and friend of ours, Howie Shue, VP of machine learning and AI at Zscaler, hugely successful company, SAAS platform, whatever you want to call it, they're definitely super-clouding in their own. Howie, great to see you. Thanks for spending time with us to unpack and grok the direction of the industry that we see we call in SuperCloud. Hey John, great to be back. I'm expecting a very educational and interesting conversation here again. Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I love talking with you about is you're deep on the technology side, as well as you got the historian view like we do. We've seen the movies before, we've seen the patterns, and now we're seeing structural change that has happened. That's cloud. Thank you very much AWS, Azure, GCP and others. Now we're seeing structural change happening in real time and we want to talk about it as it's happening. And this is the purpose of this event. And that is that cloud is one, okay, great cloud operations on premises and Edge are emerging, software is open source. It's the perfect storm for innovation and new things are emerging. You're seeing companies like Snowflake and Databricks and Zscaler all building great products. But now it's not one thing anymore. It's a lot of things going on. So what is your take on SuperCloud? How do you see this evolving? What is some of the structural change that's happening in your mind? Yeah, so when you first reached out a few weeks ago about this event, I was like, hey, what is SuperCloud? I know you tweeted a little bit here and there but I never really double clicked. So I actually listened to some of your episodes that the previous conversations. I would say the way you define SuperCloud is, it's not just the multi-cloud. The multi-cloud is probably one aspect of it. It's actually more beyond that. A little bit towards the past, a little bit more towards the flexibility and then including, and also you want to include the on-prem, the edge, not just the big three cloud, right? So there is a lot of the, let's say hybrid, more inclusive, right? So the way I look at it is, it's not very different from my imagination of what the cloud should be 10, 12 years ago. Because at that time it was on-prem dominant and then we say, hey, let's go cloud. I never for a second thought, we would ditch the on-prem completely. On-prem has its own value, it's its own kind of characteristics we wanted to keep. But the way we went for the last 10 years is, hey, cloud, the cloud everywhere, we embrace cloud. The way I look at the architectures is always very much like a pendulum. We swung from the centralized, in the mainframe days, back in the days, to more distributed, right? PC, kind of architecture, servers in your own data center, and then to the now the cloud, the big three cloud in particular, right? I think in the next 10, 15, 20 years, it will swing back to more decentralized, more distributed architecture again. Every time you have a swing, because there is some fundamental reason behind that, we all knew the reason behind the current swing to the cloud. It's because, hey, the on-prem data center was too complex, right? You know, too expensive, right? It would take at least six months to get any business application going, right? So it's compared to cloud, the swipe of credit card, friction list, pay as you go, it's so great. But I think we are going to see more and more reason for people to say, hey, I need the architecture, the other way around, because of the decentralized use case, right? Web three is one example, even though web three is still emerging, right? Very, very early days, but that could be one reason, right? You mentioned the Zscaler is kind of a super cloud of its own, right? We always embrace public cloud, but a lot of the workloads is actually on our own, you know, within our own data center. We take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud, right? But we also get a value, get a performance of our private cloud. So I want to say a company like Zscaler, taking advantage of the super cloud already, but there will be more and more use cases, taking advantage. And that's the use cases are key. Let me just go back and share something we had on the panel. Earlier in the day, the Clouderati panel, back in 2008, a bunch of us were getting together and we kind of were riffing, oh yeah, the future is going to be web services and clouds will talk to each other. Workloads can work across this. There'll be an abstraction layer, APIs is going to be talking to each other a little bit early, but we tried to think about it in terms of the preferred architecture. Okay, way too early. AWS was just getting going and they were really kind of pumping, pumping on all cylinders there, getting that trajectory up, but it was use case driven. The Nirvana never happened. I mean, we were talking super cloud back then with the Clouderati group and we were thinking, okay, hey, this is cool, but it was just an evolutionary thing. So I want to get your reaction. Today, the use cases are different. It's not just developers deploying on public cloud to get all those greatness and goodness of the cloud. To your point about Zscaler and others, there's on-premises use cases and edge use cases emerging. 5G is right there, that's going to explode. So the use cases now are all cloud based. Again, this is an input into what we're seeing around super cloud. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that and how do you see that evolving so that the methodologies and all the taxonomies are in place for the right solution? Right, I mean, some of the use cases are already here, have been here for the last few years. And again, I mentioned the Zscaler. The reason that Zscaler needs the on-prem version of it is because it's impossible to route all the traffic to the big three cloud because they are still far away. Sometimes you need the presence much closer to you in order for you to get the level of the performance, latency you want, right? So that's why Zscaler has so many data center of our own instead of leveraging the public cloud for most part. However, public cloud is still super important for Zscaler. I can tell you a story, right? Two years ago, at the beginning of the pandemics, everyone started working from home suddenly, right? You are talking about fortune 500 companies with 200,000 employees suddenly having 200,000 employees working from home. Their VPN architecture is not going to support that kind of the workload, right? Even Zscaler's own architecture or the work, the presence is not enough. So overnight, we just having so many new workloads to support this work from home, the zero trust network for our customers, literally overnight. So it wouldn't have happened without public cloud. So we took advantage of the public cloud. Yet at the same time for many, many use cases that Zscaler is paying attention to in terms of the zero trust architecture. The latency, the latency guarantee aspect, the cost is so important. So we kind of take advantage of both. Yeah, definitely. Today you may say, hey, Zscaler is one of the, not a majority of the companies in terms of the cloud adoption or public cloud adoption, right? But I can say that, yeah, that's because it's more infrastructure, security infrastructure. It's a little bit different for some of the communication applications, right? Why not just to put everything on the public cloud? That's doable today. However, moving forward, next five, 10, 15 years, we expect to see web three kind of the use cases to grow more and more. In those kind of the decentralized use cases, I can totally see that we, you know, the unprimed presence is very important. Yeah, one of the things we're seeing with SuperCloud that we're kind of seeing clarity on is that there's a lot of seamless execution around less friction and around areas that require a PhD or hard work. And you're seeing specialty SuperClouds, apps, identity, data security. You're also seeing vertical clouds, Goldman Sachs doing financial applications. I'm sure there'll be some insurance. People in these, building on top of the CapEx on one cloud really fast and moving to others. So that's clearly a trend. The interesting thing I want to get your thoughts on how we, on architectural basis, is in cloud, public cloud generally, SaaS depends on IaaS. So there's an interplay between SaaS and the infrastructure as a service and SaaS as well. But SaaS and IaaS, they solve a lot of the problems you mentioned, latency. How do you see the interplay of these SuperClouds that utilize the SaaS, IaaS relationship to solve technical problems? So in architecturally, that's been a tight integration on these clouds. But now as you get more complexity with SuperCloud, how do you see SaaS applications changing? Yeah, I view the SuperCloud as actually reduced the complexity. The reason I'm saying that is, think about it in the world where you have predominantly public cloud, kind of the architecture, right? 10 years ago, AWS has probably 20 services. Now they probably have more than a thousand services. Same thing with Azure, same thing with GCP. I mean, who can make sense out of it, right? If you just consume the IaaS or the big three cloud services as is, you need a PhD these days to make sense all of them. So the way I think about SuperCloud or where it is going is it has to provide a more simplicity, better way for people to make sense out of it, right? Because if I'm an architect and I have to think, hey, this is a public cloud, this is a multi-cloud. And by the way, certain things need to be run on the on-prem. And how do I deal with the uniform nature of it? My mind would blow up. So I need a higher level abstraction. That higher level abstraction will hide the complexity of the where it is, which vendor. It will only tell me the service level, right? We always say the cloud is like electricity. I only wanted to know, is that like 110 volt or 220, 240, whatever that is. I don't really want to know more than that, right? So I want to say a key requirement for the SuperCloud is it's reduced the complexity, higher level abstraction. It has to be like that. And operational consistencies at the bottom. How we have one minute left. I want to get your thoughts. I'd like you to share what you're working on that you're excited about. There's nothing to be with Zscaler. As you see the SuperCloud trend emerging, this is the next generation cloud, cloud 2.0, whatever we want to call it, it's happening, it's changing, it's getting better. What are you excited about? What do you see as really key inflection point variables in this big wave? Yeah, one of the things I really like what I heard from you in the past about SuperCloud is that SuperCloud is not just one cloud, one vendor. It's almost like every company should have its own SuperCloud, right? You're talking about JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs of the world that they need to have their own SuperCloud. Zscaler and the security vendors, they may have their own cloud. So I think every Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 companies will have its own SuperCloud. So I'm excited about that. So why that's important? We also say that in the next 10, 20 years, AI machine learning is going to take advantage, it's going to help us a lot, right? So without SuperCloud, it's very hard to do AI machine learning because if you don't have a place that you know where the data is, and then it's pretty hard. And in the context of SuperCloud, I totally foresee that the AI model will follow the data. If the data is in the cloud, it will go there. If the data is on-prem, it will go there. And then the SuperCloud will hide the complexity of it. So if you ask me, my passion is leveraging AI machine learning to change the world, but SuperCloud will make that easier, right? If you think about why Google, Facebook of the world are able to leverage AI better than 99% of the rest of the world because they figure out the SuperCloud for themselves, right? And I think now it's time for the rest of the Fortune 500 of Fortune 2000 company to figure out its own SuperCloud strategy. What is my SuperCloud? I need to have my own SuperCloud. Each company needs to have its own SuperCloud. That's how I see it. How we always great to have you on. Thanks so much for spending the time and weighing in on this really important topic. We're going to be opening this up. It's not over. We're going to continue to watch the change as it unfolds and get an open community perspective. Thank you so much for being a great expert in our network and community. We really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. Okay, okay, that's it. We'll be up with more coverage here of SuperCloud event after this short break. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.