 Hello, welcome to SuperCloud 3. This is our third installment of SuperCloud, our coverage where we talk about the next generation of cloud, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Dave, a third installment. We're doing these SuperClouds, we're going to have a big event maybe coming up. Great to see you. Hey, John, great to be here in Palo Alto, live in the studio. So this is security plus AI. This is a different focus on SuperCloud this year, this segment, security and AI, two big things going on together. You know, at 2021, John, you and I sort of lay down this concept of the SuperCloud. It was kind of interesting. It was sort of tongue-in-cheek at the time. We got a lot of heat for it. But then in last August, we did SuperCloud 1. It was really to define the concept, really try to flesh out the definition and test the validity of it, which we did. And then of course, this January, we kicked off SuperCloud 2, which was all about the practitioners. We had Walmart, we had Saks, we had Western Union and a number of others. It was all about sharing data across the cloud. And of course, this is the year of AI. So you got to talk about AI meets security. It's just in the gender of AI story that's totally impacted our agenda across the world. I think we're going to have an AI component in every SuperCloud conversation. It's just accelerated onto the scene so big. It's changed the game, it's changed the makeup, even the conversation around the physical layer all the way up to the applications we've covered on our QBOD and many other conversations. And it's been very interesting how that's changed the cloud scale next-gen conversation because now you see the cloud players talking about GenAI, in addition to the higher level services, they've been adding on. So that's going to change the conversation. And again, this SuperCloud 3 continues the tradition momentum. We have great names, we have the co-founder of Cloudflare, Doug Merritt's going to keep opening Kino, he's going to come out of retirement. He's now the CEO of Aviatrix, a very new company position for the multi-cloud, multiple environment. We've got George Kurtz from Crowdstrike, Zscaler, VMware, Dell, Cisco, Snowflake, Laceworks, Octa, the list goes on and on. These are the industry leaders and practitioners coming in to talk about what this next generation is about. And it's not just about being an IT person with a vendor. SuperCloud's an environment now, Dave, where people are looking at their careers and saying, this is next generation IT, this is next generation data, this is next generation infrastructure, next generation cloud, next generation data, next generation applications. And people's careers are going to be involved in SuperCloud and we're going to unpack that this week. So SuperCloud is off the course all about taking advantage of the best of breed of services across clouds, creating that abstraction layer and simplifying the complex. And now you inject AI into the equation and it opens up a whole new realm of possibility. Almost to affirm, John, when we talk to organizations out there, whether they're buyers or sellers, virtually everybody's saying, well, we've been doing AI for a long, long time. And so one of the things that we like to do here in theCUBE is try to squint through, okay, what's really AI? What's machine learning? What's true AI? What's AI washing? I mean, everybody literally is using AI in some way, shape, or form. And then what's the right application for AI? We talked to Jeff Jonas last week and we said, look, if you're using generative AI and you want to get the same answer week after week, day after day and explainability, you're using it wrong. You should be using it for ideation and other things. Okay, so there's a lot. We're just getting started. There's so much more to open up. So today we're going to really dig into it today and tomorrow, the application of AI and security. I mean, I'm curious to know what people think. Who's going to ultimately benefit more from AI? Is it going to be the attackers or the defenders and how that's all going to play out? That's one of the many questions that we have today. And what's interesting too, in all the conversations we've had coming into this, it's the offense versus the defense. The offense meaning the adversaries are pushing hard. They're winning the game and everyone's playing defense. And so as the best offense, a better defense, you have to put more points on the board, as we say in football, all excellent, David. And the other thing is the growth side too. If you look at the market and I want to get your thoughts as we unpack this before we kick off is the growth side for enterprises and startups and the financial market says, who's got the right equation in the super cloud in this new market? You kind of have winners and losers. We kind of got a tailwind on one hand with AI and the super cloud. And you got a headwind with the old models of IT and technology. And you're seeing the capital market startups running out of runway. You got funding environments tight right now. And one hand you got great funding. On the other hand, you don't. So that's growth issue. How do you grow this market? Well, in, you know, pre the generative AI chat GPT the super cloud looked like a great opportunity and it still is for people. But the equation has now changed because to your earlier point, you had Amazon kind of in the lead with SageMaker and all of these other AI tools. And then Microsoft basically cut the line with the open AI deal that it did. And so it sort of bought its way into the lead. And of course you got Google and the whole code, code red thing. But the point is the, the hyperscalers have all dominated in the AI conversation. And they put a lot of investments in there. And he had other guys like Databricks and some other specialists like hugging face and anthropic sort of, you know bounce around, but the, but the hyperscalers have a lot of momentum in AI. We're going to show some data. You know, AI kind of during the pandemic was one of the top four in terms of spending momentum, momentum according to the ETR data. We'll show some of that a little later. And then it sort of died down, you know as the macroeconomic headwinds hit. Well, boy, it's back up into the right again. And, and so it, but the, but the positions have changed. You know, it was AWL, all tides are rising or rising all ships, but the positions have changed. AWS was kind of number one. Now it's like Microsoft and sort of narrative in the industry, AWS is playing a little defense and then going on the offense. I mean, you've talked about, we had Matt Garmin tomorrow and an exclusive. And so there's really interesting changing dynamics in the chess board. Yeah. And tomorrow we got a video exclusive with Matt Garmin who formerly ran EC2. So he knows his tech. He knows what's going on on the compute side. He's running sales and market for AWS. They have a master plan. We're going to hear from them. They're definitely still in the lead. No doubt about, they get the best cloud right now. Amazon is in the head. Azure's catching up. But are they heading AI? AI, they're, they're on their heels because they, they're losing the narrative battle. Microsoft absolutely destroying them. In my opinion, the PR side is no, no contest. I mean, they just with open AI, they've been surging ahead. Amazon's playing catch up and they're going to slowly chip away at it. But I think the market for the cloud we'll get into it later, but the market for the cloud for AI is coming. The builders are the coders right now. They're building the apps, the hosting providers, AKA the hardware, Amazon will probably kick into gear once we have a tsunami of real customers coming in. And I would say right now, not in revenue terms, but in mind share terms, I would say open AI is by far number one. And of course you've got Microsoft and open AI as you know, in bed together. So really those two have sort of catapulted themselves and believe, but as we said earlier, it's really early days and Amazon has a great story from silicon all the way up, you know, through the stack. Well, let's kick this off. Let's get into some of the data. I know you got some stuff to share on super cloud three to kick this off, to set the foundation as we get this agenda going. What's the analysis? What is the security plus AI story? So we have a data partner called Enterprise Technology Research. And if you bring up the, the slide that shows the sector positions here, this is their entire taxonomy. So it ranges from, you know, every sector from storage to servers. And you can see here on this slide, you could see that the, the, during the pandemic, there were four categories that were top in terms of spending momentum. So it's a measurement of the percent of customers that are spending more on a technology platform. So you had AI, containers, cloud and RPA. And you look at what's happened here. It sort of bottomed, hit the nadir in, in 2022. And then the month before chat GPT was announced that hit the bottom. And then all of a sudden it's shot up to the right. So AI is now number one. You can see cloud computing is still, you know, super high. Now look on the right here, you see information security. It's very penetrated. This, this horizontal axis is penetration in the market. So you can see security is highly penetrated. AI not so much, but the vertical axis is all spending momentum. And so now you've got AI meets security. So you have a big market that's mature and you got a new market that's immature and hot coming together to solve problems. Yeah. And, and we, and one thing about super clouds we said from the first edition of our session, now we're on our third, is data has been the consistent theme of all of our super clouds. Of course it's been, you know, multiple environments, but that abstraction layer across environments really is not just compute and workload, but it's data underneath it. At the end of the day, the security is a data problem. And you're starting to see kind of data fusion came up a lot in our pre conversations going at the event. And as you said, Dave, data and chat GPT showed the world that AI and generating AI capabilities will have an impact on the low hanging fruit for use cases and security. So, you know, I'm expecting that the security to accelerate on the platform side and in the point solutions as well, but mostly on the platform side with security. So another quick data point here that we can show you which is this ETR is a methodology called net score that just shows the granularity, essentially who's spending more, who's spending less. And so you can see here in this slide that the greens are spending more, the gray is flat spending, the reds are spending less. And you can see again, where AI bottomed an October of 2022 right before chat GPT and look at the line, that blue line is spending momentum up into the right, right after chat GPT is announced, that yellow line is market penetration again up into the right. So, you know, this data doesn't surprise you, but it does quantify the market impact and open AI is top of mind for everybody as is Microsoft. Of course, Google and Amazon, it's rising their penetration as well, even though the positions of the leaders have changed. It's funny, people have been calling it closed AI because open source has gotten so much momentum since open AI and chat GPT, a lot more open source modules and LLMs happening. So interesting, interesting dynamic there. What does that data tell you, what's your takeaway? So I think that people, you know, normally when you see markets enter a hype cycle, normally adoption and spending comes way after the hype, but it seems like with AI, the hype and the spending are aligned. I don't think I've ever seen that before. And so you've got the hype cycle and you've got people now, I think there's still a lot of experimentation, but people are rushing. It's like a gold rush. Wow, we're going to get cut out if we don't invest. It's interesting, they'll be covering digital transformation that buzz words, become cliche. It's now called business transformation, but if you believe that digital transformation is digitizing business in the world, then everything's data. And if everything's data, then you're going to have a data challenge. If you have a data challenge, AI helps solve that. So to me, I think the confluence of next generation cloud scale applications and generate AI is hit the lucky strike here. And I think that's a growth curve combined with a hype curve. So you got hype and growth at the same time, just the timing of the perfect storm of innovation. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. And you got the power plays with the cloud, fully available, full elasticity on resource. So if you got elasticity of resource, a robust developer environment with open source combined with now automation and generative AI, you have the perfect storm for innovation. This is the super cloud. This is why I like this multiple environment. We haven't gone through the intelligent edge. If you look at the industrial IoT market from critical infrastructure, Dave, to just wearables, you're going to have an edge that's going to completely be transformed by AI and data. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the scale of this takes off. So I want to give you one more data point. We have AI meets cloud security. So we cut the ETR data amongst 574 firms that are AI accounts. Okay, and we said, right, give us anybody with the mentions over a hundred and cross that with security. So the vertical axis here is spending momentum. The horizontal axis is penetration. That red dotted line is highly, highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see here, look at Microsoft up and to the right, as it always is in these things, but you got Zscaler, Octa, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto networks. All of those guys are coming on super cloud all above that 40% mark. And you see Cisco, which is quite a bit to the right, but doesn't have that spending momentum. John, we're going to have G2 Patel and Tom Gillison. They got some work to do, but it's still, they got a $4 billion business there. I got into a little kerfuffle with Keith Townsend during Cisco Live. He goes, oh, they're not a security vendor. I guess they have a $4 billion security business. A quarter per year. But a billion dollar quarter, but they don't have the spending momentum of those others that we mentioned. And then of course, a little below that, you see Cloudflare, we're going to have Matthew Prince on, okay, she's very outspoken, loves to talk about, you know, how they're clouded, their super cloud, he calls it, is the winning formula. So a lot of the winners that you see here, and if you reduce that end to folks less than a hundred mentions, this chart becomes impossible to read because there's so many security vendors out there at such a crowded market. It's interesting, you know, we hear all kinds of hype. You got to be data first, you know, all this kind of beat, you know, cloud first. If you're not a networking and security company, I don't think, or data company, you're not going to be in business. I think, you know, the network is the security. I think what a security company looks like is going to be extinguished soon. I think that's going to be a scene where everyone has to be a security company from day one. And think about it. I mean, Cisco, okay, four billion, but the network is secure. So let's, you know, we got Cloudflare coming in, talking about the network is security. The future lies with AI-enabled security and analysis from CrowdStrike. And, you know, and Cisco's got a golden opportunity. So I think from a revenue standpoint, yeah, they might be low, but network, data are two areas that are hot for security right now. One of the things I want to explore today and tomorrow is how people are using AI, how they're applying it. And what about generative AI? I mean, I see generative AI as a great way to get ideation as to how to hack a network. You know, if you're a bad guy, but how are you using generative AI? Are organizations using generative AI to defend? And if so, how? Because it's generative. So the answers change, it hallucinates, you know, you hear all about that. So there are other forms of AI, I think that security companies and networking companies are applying, and I want to learn more about that, to really understand how practitioners can take advantage of it. Are they actually going to actually even see it? Is it going to be buried inside? Obviously they can use AI to help prioritize, you know, to help remediate, to help identify flaws in the network and their security, which is not up to date, et cetera, et cetera. So we want to dig into that a little bit and really learn where the value is for the customers. Yeah, and I'm interested in learning more about how security can be democratized, because right now, like data science in the early days, to do security really well, you got to be kind of alpha, you got to be totally peaked on the technology. You really can't kind of wade yourself into the shallow end of the pool here. You got to really know your stuff. You can't not know security from day one because the adversaries are strong. And then the application market's going to be interesting to watch how the applications and platforms emerge. So platforms versus tools always comes up, board level conversations, culture, security and data is going to be really interesting. I think the other thing that we really want to explore is this notion of zero trust. Everybody talks about it, it's the big buzzword. Every CISO is on a path, he or she to zero trust architecture, but it's hard, right? It's been a difficult journey. Why has it been so hard? And will AI make it easier and accelerate that journey? I don't even know what zero trust means these days. It means so many different things that'd be interesting to get the perspective. Okay, SuperCloud three, we've got a great lineup. Again, two days of wall-to-wall coverage with live performances coming into the studio here in Palo Alto, it's theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're going to have ongoing coverage live here in Palo Alto. Stay with us for our next guest, Doug Merritt. Coming out of retirement, now the CEO of AVH is going to come on theCUBE and tell us what he's up to. Looking forward to talking to him.