 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Well, the precise direction of VMware's future is unknown. Given the plan Broadcom acquisition, one thing is clear. The topic of what Broadcom plans will not be the main focus of the agenda at the upcoming VMware Explorer event next week in San Francisco. We believe that despite any uncertainty, VMware will lay out for its customers what it sees as its future. And that future is multi-cloud or cross-cloud services, what we call super cloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we drill into the latest survey data on VMware from ETR and we'll share with you the next iteration of the super cloud definition based on feedback from dozens of contributors and we'll give you our take on what to expect next week at VMware Explorer 2022. Well, VMware is maturing. You can see it in the numbers. VMware had a solid quarter just this week, which was announced beating earnings and growing the top line by 6%. But it's clear from its financials and the ETR data that we're showing here that VMware's Halcyon Glory days are behind it. This chart shows the spending profile from ETR's July survey of nearly 1500 IT buyers and CIOs. The survey included 722 VMware customers with the green bars showing elevated spending momentum, i.e. growth, either new or growing it more than 6% and the red bars show lower spending, either down 6% or worse or defections. The gray bars, that's the flat spending crowd and it really tells a story. Look, nobody's throwing away their VMware platforms. They're just not investing as rapidly as in previous years. The blue line shows net score or spending momentum and subtracts the reds from the greens. The yellow line shows market penetration or pervasiveness in the survey. So the data is pretty clear. It's steady, but it's not remarkable. Now, the timing of the acquisition quite rightly is quite good, you would say. Now, this next chart shows the net score and pervasiveness juxtaposed on an XY graph and breaks down the VMware portfolio in those dimensions, the product portfolio. And you can see the dominance of respondents citing VMware as the platform. They might not know exactly which services they use, but they just respond VMware. That's on the X axis. You can see it way to the right. And the spending momentum for the net score is on the Y axis, that red dotted line at 4%. That indicates elevated levels and only VMware cloud on AWS is above that line. Notably, Tanzu has jumped up significantly from previous quarters with the rest of the portfolio showing steady, as you would expect from a maturing platform. Only carbon black is hovering in the red zone. Kind of ironic, given the name. We believe that VMware is gonna be a major player in cross-cloud services. What we refer to as SuperCloud, for months, we've been refining the concept and the definition. At SuperCloud 22, we had discussions with more than 30 technology and business experts and we've gathered input from many more. Based on that feedback, here's the definition we've landed on. It's somewhat refined from our earlier definition that we published a couple of weeks ago. SuperCloud is an emerging computing architecture that comprises a set of services abstracted from the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds, e.g compute, storage, networking security and other native resources to create a global system spanning more than one cloud. SuperCloud has three essential properties, three deployment models and three service models. So what are those essential elements, those properties? We've simplified the picture from our last report and we show them here. I'll review them briefly. We're not gonna go super in depth here because we've covered this topic a lot but SuperCloud runs on more than one cloud creates that common or identical experience across clouds. It contains unnecessary capability that we call a super pass that acts as a cloud interpreter and it has metadata intelligence to optimize for a specific purpose. We'll publish this definition in detail. So again, we're not gonna spend a ton of time here today. Now we've identified three deployment models for SuperCloud. The first is a single instantiation where a control plane runs on one cloud but supports interactions with multiple other clouds. An example we use is Kubernetes cluster management service that runs on one cloud but can deploy and manage clusters on other clouds. The second model is a multi-cloud, multi-region instantiation where a full stack of services is instantiated on multiple clouds and multiple cloud regions with a common interface across them. We've used Cohesity as one example of this. And then a single global instance that spans multiple cloud providers. That's our Snowflake example. Again, we'll publish this in detail so we're not gonna spend a ton of time here today. Finally, the service models, the feedback we've had is IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS work fine to describe the service models for SuperCloud. NetApp's cloud volume is a good example in IaaS. VMware cloud foundation and what we expect that VMware Explorer is a good PaaS example and SAP HANA cloud is a good example of SaaS running as a SuperCloud service. That's the SAP HANA multi-cloud. So what is it that we expect from VMware Explorer 2022? Well, along with what will be an exciting and speculation filled gathering of the VMware community at the Moscone Center, we believe VMware will lay out its future architectural direction and we expect it will fit the SuperCloud definition that we just described. We think VMware will show its hand on a set of cross-cloud services and will promise a common experience for users and developers alike. As we talked about at SuperCloud 22, VMware kind of wants to have its cake, eat it too and lose weight. And by that, we mean that it will not only abstract the underlying primitives of each of the individual clouds, but if developers want access to them, they will allow that and actually facilitate that. Now we don't expect VMware to use the term SuperCloud but it will be a cross-cloud, multi-cloud services model that they put forth, we think, at VMworld Explorer. With IaaS, comprising compute storage and networking, a very strong emphasis we believe on security, of course, governance and a comprehensive set of data protection services. Now, very importantly, we believe Tanzu will play a leading role in any announcements this coming week as a purpose-built PAS layer specifically designed to create a common experience across clouds for data and application services. This, we believe, will be VMware's most significant offering to date in cross-cloud services and it will position VMware to be a leader in what we call SuperCloud. Now, while it remains to be seen what Broadcom exactly intends to do with VMware we've speculated, others have speculated, we think this SuperCloud is a substantial market opportunity generally and for VMware specifically. Look, if you don't own a public cloud and very few companies do in the tech business, we believe you better be supporting the build out of SuperClouds or building a SuperCloud yourself on top of hyperscale infrastructure. And we believe that as cloud matures, hyperscalers will increasingly eye cross-cloud services as an opportunity. We asked David Floyd to take a stab at a market model for SuperCloud. He's really good at these types of things. What he did is he took the known players in cloud and estimated their IS and PAS cloud services, their total revenue and then took a percentage. So this is a superset of just the public cloud and the hyperscalers. And then what he did is he took a percentage at the SuperCloud definition as we just shared above. He then added another 20% on top to cover the long tail of other. Other over time is most likely gonna grow to let's say 30%. That's kind of how these markets work. Okay, so this is obviously an estimate, but it's an informed estimate by an individual who has done this many, many times and is pretty well respected in these types of forecasts, these long-term forecasts. Now by the definition we just shared, SuperCloud revenue was estimated at about $3 billion in 2022 worldwide, growing to nearly 80 billion by 2030. Now remember, there's not one SuperCloud market. It comprises a bunch of purpose built SuperClouds that solve a specific problem, but the common attribute is it's built on top of hyperscale infrastructure. So overall cloud services, including SuperCloud peak by the end of the decade, but SuperCloud continues to grow and will take a higher percentage of the cloud market. The reasoning here is that the market will change and compute will increasingly become distributed and embedded into edge devices such as automobiles and robots and factory equipment, et cetera, and not necessarily be a discreet, I mean, it still will be of course, but it's not gonna be as much of a discreet component that is consumed by a services like EC2 that will mature. And this will be a key shift to watch in spending dynamics and really importantly computing economics, the things we've talked about around arm and edge and AI inferencing and new low cost of computing architectures at the edge. We're talking not the near edge, like lows and Home Depot, we're talking far edge and embedded devices. Now, whether this becomes a seamless part of SuperCloud remains to be seen. Look, that's how we see it. The current and the future state of SuperCloud and we're committed to keeping the discussion going with an inclusive model that gathers input from all parts of the industry. Okay, that's it for today. For today, thanks to Alex Morrison who's on production and he also manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well is on production in our Boston office. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoth is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle and does some helpful editing. Thank you all. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you gotta do is search breaking analysis podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at the Volante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. Please do check out ETR.ai. They've got some great enterprise survey research. So please go there and poke around and need any assistance, let them know. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.