 Welcome back to SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante with the opening keynote conversation with Victoria Varingo. He's the vice president of CrossCloud at VMware, CUBE alumni. Victoria, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure. So you're kicking off the SuperCloud event, again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around SuperCloud? What's your perspective? Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT over the last ever. It's, I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of resistance and they create innovations. And then the entire stack moves around. And if you look at developers over the last 15 years, they're being going to the cloud. And the reason they're going to the cloud is, now they say, software is eating the world. It's really, who builds software? It's developers. So I think it's developers that are eating the world. And so, initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually we got the multiple clouds. And now, the reality is that the applications, that it's how we make money, how we save money, they're running on multiple clouds. 75% of the company's running on multiple clouds today. And so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next 10 years, 15 years. And we need to, I think, that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges. And it's primed to a simplification. And that's where we're trying to do it. And one of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So, when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, than we had in the 2010s, where there was really one main cloud. Now you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a, started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now you still have to be a C++ developer, but now with a one line of code, you can instantiate, open the yellow world, and start to build your applications. But it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now we get five millions developers building applications that 20 years later, we're still using, right? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus, and say, okay, this is the customer, so we're going to map it to SAP, and then we went one level higher with SOA, and web services, and the rest of history, and then a leash, tremendous growth, and look at how we now be able to, through APIs, integrate anything. And so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers, and networking, and storage looked like one, and now, and the business never cares if you're running SAP, back on-prem, on HP, or some other piece of hardware, they care that it runs, right? And so I think that now we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only obstructs the low-level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms, and unified the APIs, and the way to management and security across multiple clouds. Let's unpack that, because I think the virtualization angle's interesting, because with virtualization enabled AWS, if you look at AWS's success, virtualization, the hypervisor got them going, and that established that value. Now the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is SuperCloud in your mind? So in our mind, SuperCloud is a set of cloud-native services that, first of all, let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem, and it's no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingua franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden, it's down there, it just does its thing. The lingua franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer. And the one would think, okay, now we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just deploy on Kubernetes, well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution. And so to us, the SuperCloud is the ability to factor out the common things that you can do across clouds and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application, a single pipeline so you can build the application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then basically factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. What are the trade-offs of abstraction? You go back to the mainframe, they had to squeeze out the performance overheads, VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we gonna see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call SuperCloud? Are you gonna see a trade-off? What trade-offs do you see that the industry technically has to attack? Obstructions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. I'm writing C++ code, it goes really fast for scale. Now I have five million developers writing applications. But I think eventually what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for more valuable skills. And if I had a dollar every time I heard, oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization, whoa, or the JVM is too slow. But guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java applications are running out on the JVM? So I think eventually there will be trade-offs but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like, how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off that they were making on the Deloitte level? On the evolution of hybrid cloud, because right now hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, on-premise and edge is right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? Because by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed, it's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen. Multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? So there's a lot on pack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-premise cloud. So the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, you're multi-cloud. So 75%, 85%, go into 85%. Private cloud on-premise cloud operations. Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. Assuming the experience is identical, right? That's the assumption. No, well, initially it's not identical. That's why you need a super-cloud, right? Yeah, exactly. And most customers, though, are in denial. Meaning that, I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want. And then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realized that the security share responsibility model to build with. They realized that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them. And then they go into like, holy, okay. Now we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal. And then you end up with the enlightenment, right? Now we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal. And within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, okay, I have an application here, an application there, okay, great, big deal. The next level is, okay, I have an application here. The user's a piece of a service of another application over there. Okay, now I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices. And then the third stage is like, okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud. Isn't part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? So we have seen this coming four or five years ago. That's why we acquired Pivotal and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that, well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering product management at the company that I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen and I sweat with those engineers and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together, work together and deliver value. And so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs. And so over the last five years we built, we will believe a very comprehensive portfolio that unifies how you build, you run, manage, secure and access any application across any cloud. No hypervisor required. That's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do you need to rely on partners because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well? So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you gonna need help from the ecosystem? First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and a multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the super cloud. So that to me is success already. And of course there are tremendous companies that are gonna deliver fantastic value for management like HashiCorp or security and development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform. And I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull it off. Okay, you saw Keith Townsend here, they're very cool blackboard and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the super cloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. Is it when, when is this gonna be real? I think it's absolutely real today for in some of the pieces, right? There's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary. And so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud and we invested in the first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud, using Townsend. So with Townsend, we can build application, manage Kubernetes clusters, secure creating the service mesh. So that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just at, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at both the app advisor, if you're using app app advisor, you're looking at east-west traffic with NSX and cross-cloud networks. And so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're gonna make more announcement around the super cloud, which we call the cross-cloud services. That's where I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship and you're running on the cloud on AWS, VMware. And you look at what's happened since, and this is where the super cloud conversation starts to kick in, where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon that the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are gonna be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it the super pass. This area of platform as a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with super cloud? Because if you have a private cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds technically, as you pointed out, how does that change the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and pass had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? Well, I think that that's where the innovation and the ability to aggregate a common, because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features. Like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the past level, when you are orchestrating these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How do you look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, these group of developers can only use this many resources, but also at runtime, that you don't run out of like, you get that build shock. And so those are the areas where I think that there's more ability to, for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level, it's taken by the... So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off, it's game over, right? Because you're trying, you have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value-added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers if in fact they want access to those primitives, right? That's a bold, that's a bold aspiration. Well, we want to have the cake, eat it and lose weight. But seriously, I think going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we're doing it alone, there's no, it's not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value. And I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. And you're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourselves in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. You know, it's great to tour. We've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of cube coverage, watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level. It's been fun to watch. And the developers have had a great run. I mean, open source is booming. Developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left. A lot of great stuff going on with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now. And I think it's only going to get better. But developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done, move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, Hey, we love this too, but we got to align with the developer level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, Hey, I got to run this with automation, with the higher level services. So there seems to be a focus around the super cloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that? And what's the message cross cloud brings to and super cloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and or faster? I think if you go back to what we were started, right, developers run the show. And I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the ops side and the security side, in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like S&P Global, one of our customers, Ben, who runs their operation, basically told me, I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind. And then, or Cernar, one of our partners and customers, same thing, they say, okay, we sat down, we realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those gall rails. All right, these are the Kubernetes environment you want to use. Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security that we have a single pipeline that feeds that. And Cernar, using our technology, was able to, they made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, who's going to go on name to another hyperscaler, who's going to go on name, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the SuperCloud, being able to say, hey, developers do whatever you want, but these are the gall rails, and we're going to be able to stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also make sure that operation and security, as a saying- Shift left, shield right, they say. Awesome stuff, we got 15 seconds. What is SuperCloud? What's the bumper sticker? The SuperCloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. And it's inclusive of on-prem, I'll just throw that. All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have an industry panel to talk about the debate. SuperCloud 22 will be right back after this break.