 Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage coming to you from the Big Apple in New York City. We're talking all things AWS Summit, but right now I've got two powerhouses. You know them, you love them. John Furrier, Dave Vellante, going to be talking about SuperCloud, guys. We've been talking a lot about this. It's a big event coming up on theCUBE August 9th. And I got to start, Dave, with you, because we talk about it pretty much in every interview where it's relevant. Why SuperCloud? Yeah, so John Furrier years ago started a tradition, Lisa, prior to AWS, which was to lay down the expectation for our audiences of what they should be looking for at AWS re-invent, okay? John, when did that start? 2012, 2013? No, actually 2013 was our first, but 2015 was the first time when we'd get access to Andy Jassy, who wasn't doing any briefings. And we realized that the whole industry started looking at Amazon Web Services as a structural, forcing function of massive change. Some say an inflection point, we were saying complete redefinition. So you wrote the trillion dollar baby, right? Which actually turns into probably a multi-trillion dollar baby. We got it right on that one, surprisingly. It was pretty obvious. So every year since then, John has published the seminal article prior to re-invent. So this year, we were talking, we're coming out of the isolation economy, and John had written- Also, Adam Sileski was the new CEO, so we had our one-on-one with Adam. And then that's where the converges between Andy Jassy and Adam Sileski kicked in, which is essentially, those guys work together, even though he went off and boomerang back in, as they say in AWS. But what's interesting was is that, Adam Sileski's point of view, piggybacked Jassy's, but he had a different twist. Some, so, you know, people who didn't have a lot of thought into it said, oh, he's copying Microsoft, moving up the stack, we're like, no, no, no, no, no. Something structural is happening again. And so John wrote the piece, and he started sharing it, we're collaborating. He said, hey, Dave, take a look, add your perspectives. And then Jerry Chen had just written, Castles in the Cloud, and he talked about sub-markets, and we were sort of noodling. And then one of the other things was, in 2018, 2019, around that time, at AWS re-invent, there was this friction between like Snowflake and AWS because Redshift separated compute from storage, which was Snowflake's whole thing. Now, fast forward to 2021, after we're leaving the COVID economy. And by the way, everyone was complaining, asking Jassy, are you competing with your ecosystem, the classic trope? And then, remember, Jassy used to use cloud era as the example. I was like, dude, maybe pick a better example. Snowflake became that example, and what the transition was, it went from, hey, we're kind of competitive. For sure, there's a lot of examples, but it went from we're competitive, they're stealing our stuff to, you know what? We're making so much money building on top of AWS specifically, but also the clouds and cross clouds. So we said, there's something new happening in the ecosystem. And then just, it popped out. This term super cloud came up to connote a layer that floats above the hyperscale capex, not IS, it's not PAS, it's not SAS, it's the combination of those things on top of a new digital infrastructure. And we chose the term super cloud, we liked it better than multi-cloud, because multi-cloud can talk in one way. And Lisa, one other point too, I think four or five years earlier, Dave and I across, not just AWS, reinvent all of our other events, we were speculating that there might be a tier two cloud service provider model. And we were talking with Intel about this and others, just kind of like evaluating it, staring at it. And we met by tier two, like maybe competing against Amazon, but what happened was, it wasn't a tier two cloud, it was a super cloud built on the capex of AWS. Which means, initially was, a company didn't have to build AWS to be like AWS. And everybody wanted to be like AWS. So we saw the emergence of the smart companies saying, hey, let's refactor our business model in the category or industry scope and to dominate with cloud scale. And they did it. That then continued, that was the premise of Chen's post, which was kind of rift on the cube initially, which is you can have a moat and a castle in the cloud and have a competitive advantage and a sustainable differentiation model. And that's exactly what's happening. And then you introduce the edge and hybrid, you now have a cloud operating model that that super cloud extends as a substrate across all environments. So it's not multi-cloud, which sounds broken and like, put it back together. Disjointed, disparate, siloed. Hybrid cloud, which is the hybrid operating model at scale. And you don't have to be Amazon to take advantage of all the value creation since they took care of the capex. Now they went to on the other side because they're selling ECU and storage and ML and AI. And this is new and this is information that people don't might not know about internally at AWS. There was a debate, Dave. Okay, I heard this from sources. Do we go all in and compete and just own the whole category or open the ecosystem and coexist with Mongo? Why do we have these other companies or Snowflake? And guess what? The decision was, let's make it open ecosystem and let's have our own offerings as well and let the winner take all. Smart, because they can't hire enough people. And we just had AWS and Snowflake on the Cube a few weeks ago talking about the partnership, the co-operation, the value in it. But what's been driving it is the voice of the customer. And I want to ask you, paint the picture for the audience of the critical key components of SuperCloud. What are those? Yeah, so I think first and foremost, SuperCloud, as John was saying, it's not multi-cloud. Chuck Whitten had a great phrase at Dell Tech World. He said, multi-cloud by default. Right. Versus multi-cloud by design. And multi-cloud has been by default. It's been this sort of, I run in AWS and I run my stack in Azure or I run my stack in GCP and it works. Or I wrap my stack in a container and host it in the cloud. That's what multi-cloud has been. So the first sort of concept is, it's a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of all the clouds, all the primitives. It takes advantage of maybe Graviton or Microsoft tooling. Hides all that and builds new value on top of that. The other piece of SuperCloud is it's ecosystem driven. Really interesting story you just told because literally Amazon can't hire everybody, right? So they have to rely on the ecosystem for feature acceleration. So it also includes a Paz layer, a SuperPaz layer, we call it, because you need to develop applications that are specific to the problem that the SuperCloud is solving. So it's not a generic Paz, like OpenShift. It's specific to whether it's Snowflake or Mongo or Aviatrix so that developers can actually build on top of and not have to worry about that underlying complexity. And also there's some people that are criticizing what we're doing in a good way because we want to have an open conversation. But here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand. They're criticizing or trying to kind of shoot holes in our new structural change that we're identifying to comparing it to old. That's like saying mainframe and mini computers. It's like saying, well, the mainframe does it this way. Therefore there's no way that's going to be legitimate. So the old thinking, Dave, is from people that have no real foresight in the new model. And so they don't really get it. So what I'm saying is that you look at structural change, structural change is structural change. It either happens or it doesn't. So what we're observing is the fact that a Snowflake didn't design their solution to be multi-cloud. They did it all on AWS. And then said, hey, why would we, why are we going to stop there? Let's go to Azure because Microsoft's got a boatload of customers because they have a vertically stack and integration for their install base. So if I'm Snowflake, why wouldn't I be on Azure? And the same for GCP and the same for other things. So this idea that you can get the value of what Amazon did, leverage and all that value without paying for it upfront is a huge dynamic. And that's not just saying, oh, that's cloud. That's saying I have a cloud-like scale, cloud-like value proposition, which will look like an ecosystem. So to me, the asset test is if I build on top of, say, Mongo or say Snowflake or SuperCloud, by default I'm either a category leader, I own the data at scale or I'm sharing data at scale and I have an ecosystem. People are building on top of me. So that's a platform, so that's really difficult. So what's happening is these ecosystem partners are taking advantage, as John said, of all the hyperscale capex and they're building out their version of a distributed global system. And then the other attribute of SuperCloud is it's got metadata management capability. In other words, it knows if I'm optimizing for latency, where in the SuperCloud to get the data? Or how to protect privacy or sovereignty or how many copies to make to have the proper data protection or where the air gap should be for ransomware. So these are examples of very specific purpose-built SuperClouds that are filling gaps that the hyperscalers aren't going after. What's a good example of a specific SuperCloud that you think really articulates what you guys are talking about? I think there are a lot of them. I think Snowflake is a really good example. I think VMware is building a multi-cloud management system. I think Aviatrix and Virtual Private Cloud networking and for high performance networking. I think to a certain extent what Oracle is doing with Azure is definitely looks like a SuperCloud. I think what Capital One is doing by building on taking their own tools and moving that to Snowflake, now that they're not cross-cloud yet, but I predict that they will be. I think what Veeam is doing in data protection, Dell, what they showed at Dell Tech World with Project Alpine. These are all early examples of SuperCloud. Well, here's an indicator. Here's how you look at the example. So to me, if you're just lifting and shifting, that was the first jet of cloud, that's not changing the business model. So I think the number one thing to look at is, is the company, whether they're in a vertical like insurance or Dintec or financial, are they refactoring their spend, not as an IT cost, but as a refactoring of their business model? Like with Snowflake today, or they say, okay, I'm going to change how I operate, not change my business model per se, or not my business identity. If I'm going to provide financial services, I don't have to spend CapEx. It's operating expenses. I get the CapEx leverage, I redefine, I get the data at scale, and now I've become a service provider to everybody else, because scale will determine the power law of who wins in the verticals and in the industry. So we believe that Snowflake is a data warehouse in the cloud. They call it a data cloud. Now, I don't think Snowflake would like that data. I call them a data warehouse. No, I call it a super data cloud. But so, the other key here is, you know the old saying that Andreessen came up with, I guess, with every company's a software company? Well, what does that mean? It means every company's software company, every company's going digital. Well, how are they going to do that? They're going to do that by taking their business, their data, their tooling, their proprietary, you know, moat, and moving that to the cloud so they can compete at scale. Every company should be, if they're not, thinking about doing a super cloud. Walmart. I think Andreessen's wrong. I think I would revise and say that Andreessen and the brain trust at Andreessen Horowitz is that that's no longer irrelevant. Every company isn't a software company. The software industry is called open source. Everybody is an open source company and every company will be a super cloud that survives. So to me, if you're not looking at super cloud as a strategy to get value and refactor your business model to get advantage of what you're paying IT for, but you're paying now in a new way, you're building out value. So that's, you're either going to be a super cloud or get services from a super cloud. So if you're not, it's like the old joke, if you're at the table and you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you, right? So if you're looking at the marketplace, you're saying if I'm not a super cloud, I'm probably going to have to work with one because they're going to have the data, they're going to have the insights, they're going to have the scale, they're going to have the castle in the cloud and they will be called a super cloud. So in customer conversations, helping customers identify workloads to move to the cloud, what are the ideal workloads and services to run in super cloud? So I honestly think virtually any workload could be a candidate. And I think that it's really the business that they're in that's going to define the workload. I'll say what I mean. So there's certain businesses where low latency, high performance transactions are going to matter. That's kind of the Oracle's business. There's certain businesses like Snowflake where data sharing is the objective. How do I share data in a governed way, in a secure way, in any location across the world that I can monetize? So that's their objective. You take a data protection company like Veeam, their objective is to protect data. So they have very specific objectives that ultimately dictate what the workload looks like. Couch base is another one. They in my opinion are doing some of the most interesting things at the edge. Because this is where, when you really push companies in the cloud, including the hyperscalers, when they get out to the far edge, it starts to get a little squishy. Couch base actually is developing capabilities to do that. And that's, to me, that's the big wild card, John. I think you described it accurately. The cloud is expanding. You've got public clouds, no longer just remote services. You're including on-prem and now expanding out to the near edge and the deep, what do you call it? Deep edge or far edge? Low or far edge? You've got a sucer called the tiny edge. Right, deep edge. Well, I mean, look at Amazon's outpost announcement. To me, HPE is opportunity, Dell is opportunity. The hardware box guys, companies, they have an opportunity to be that gear. To be an outpost. To be their own outposts. They got better stacks. They have better gear. They just got to run cloud on it. Yeah, right. That's an edge node, right? So that would be part of the super clouds. This is where I think people that are looking at the old models like operating systems or systems mindsets from the 80s, they're not understanding the new architecture. What I would say to them is, yeah, I hear what you're saying, but the structural change is the nodes on the network distributed computing, if you will, is going to run hybrid cloud all the way across. The fact that it's multiple clouds is just coincidence on who's got the best CapEx value that people build on for their super cloud capability. So why wouldn't I be on Azure? If Microsoft's going to give me all their customers that are running Office 365 and Teams, great. If I want to be on Amazon's got a suite which is their ecosystem, why wouldn't I want to tap into that? So again, you can patch it all together in the super cloud. So I think the future will be distributed computing, cloud, architecture, end to end, and... And we felt it was different from multi-cloud. You know, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but frankly, sometimes we get criticized for not defining it tightly enough. We continue to evolve that definition. I've never really seen a great definition for multi-cloud. I think multi-cloud, by default, was the definition. Oh, I run in multiple clouds. You know, it works in Azure. It works. It's not a strategy. It's a broken name. It's a symptom, right? It's a symptom of multi-vendor is really what multi-cloud has been. And so we felt like it was a new term. What is the traffic rate of examples? Look at what we're talking about. Snowflake, Databricks, Capital One. Databricks is another good one. These are examples, Goldman Sachs. And we felt like the term immediately connotes something bigger, something that sits above the clouds. And it's part of a digital platform. You know, people poo-poo the metaverse because it's really not well-defined. But every 15 or 20 years, this industry goes through a transformation. Dave, let me ask you a question. So, Lisa, you too. If I'm in the insurance vertical and I'm an insurance company, I have company editors. My customers can go there and do business with that company. And they all know they go to the same conferences. But in that sector, now you have new dynamics. Your IT spend isn't going to keep the lights on and make your apps work. Your back-end systems and your mobile app to get your whatever. Now it's like I have cloud scale. So what if I refactored my business model, become a super cloud, and become the major primary service provider to all the competitors and the people that are the channel partners of the ecosystem. That means that company could change the category. Totally. Okay, and become the dominant category leader literally in two, three years. If I'm Geico, okay, I got business in the cloud because I got the app and I'm doing transactions on Geico. But with all the data that they're collecting, there's adjacent businesses that they can get into. Maybe they're in the safety business. Maybe they can sell data to governments. Maybe they can inform logistics and highway patterns. Roll up all the people that don't have the same scale they have and service them with that data and they get subscription revenue. And they can build on top of the Geico super cloud. Hey, Consumers Cloud. Right, yes, it's unlimited opportunity. That's why it's the multi-trillion dollar baby. So talk to us, you did an amazing job talking, which I knew you would. Why super cloud? What it is, the critical components, the key workloads, great examples. Talk to us in our last few minutes about the event, the Cube on super cloud, August 9th. What's the audience going to, who are they going to hear from? What are they going to learn? Yeah, so August 9th, live out of our Palo Alto studio, we're going to have a program that's going to run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. And we're going to have a number of industry luminaries in there. Kit Colbert from VMware is going to talk about their strategy, Benoit d'Ajaville from Snowflake is going to be there. A G written house of sky high security. I don't want to give it away, but I think Steve Mulaney is going to come on. Adrienne Cockroft is coming on. We have a lot of influence panels, we've got an analyst panel. Keith Townsend, Sanjeev Mohan will be on. So we'll be running that live and also we'll be bringing in pre-recorded interviews that we'll have prior to the show that we'll run post the live event. It's really a pilot virtual event. We want to do a physical event we're thinking, but the pilot is to bring our trusted friends together. They're credible, that have industry experience. To try to understand the scope of what we're talking about and open it up and help flesh out the definition, make it an open model where we can, it's not just our opinion, we're observing, identifying the structural changes, but bringing in smart people, our smart friends, and companies are saying, yeah, we get behind this because it has legs for a reason. So we want to zoom out and let people participate and let the conversation and the community drive the content. And that is super important to theCUBE, as you know, Dave, but I think that's what's going on, Lisa, is that it's a pilot. If it has legs, we'll do a physical event. Certainly we're getting phones and we're bringing out the hook for sponsors. So we don't want to gut and go all in on sponsorships right now because it's not about money making. It's about getting that super cloud clarity around to help companies. Yeah, we want to evolve the concept and bring in outside perspectives like John said. Well, the community is one of the best ways to do that. It's organic. It's an organic community where, I mean, people want to find out what's going on with the best practices of how to transform a business. And right now, digital transformation is not just getting digitized. It's taking advantage of the technology to leapfrog the competition. So all the successful people we talk to, Lisa, of the same company, I'm changing my game, but not changing my game to the customer. I'm just going to do it differently, better, faster, cheaper, more efficient, and have higher margins and beat the competition. That's the competition. Who doesn't want to beat the competition? Go to theCUBE.net. If you're not there already to register for theCUBE on SuperCloud August 9th, 9 a.m. Pacific, you won't want to miss it. For John Furrier and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin-Rogg. Coming at you from New York City at AWS Summit 22. We'll be right back with our next guest.