 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. The term super cloud is somewhat new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years. Early last decade, when NIST put forth a definition of cloud computing, it said services had to be accessible over a public network, essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the cloud conversation. Now a guy named Chuck Hollis, who was a field CTO at EMC at the time, and a prolific blogger, objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. Now in that post, he showed a workload running both on-premises and in a public cloud, sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner. What later became known more broadly as hybrid cloud. That vision, as we now know, really never materialized, and we were left with multi-cloud, sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is what Hollis laid out, i.e. the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience is what SuperCloud is all about. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share what we hope to learn from SuperCloud 22 next week. Next Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific, the community is gathering for SuperCloud 22, an inclusive pilot symposium hosted by theCUBE and made possible by VMware and other founding partners. It's a one-day single track event with more than 25 speakers digging into the architectural, the technical, structural, and business aspects of SuperCloud. This is a hybrid event with a live program in the morning running out of our Palo Alto studio and prerecorded content in the afternoon, featuring industry leaders, technologists, analysts, and investors up and down the technology stack. Now, as I said up front, the seeds of SuperCloud were sown early last decade. After the very first re-invent, we published our Amazon Gorilla Post, that's seen in the upper right corner here, and we talked about how to differentiate from Amazon and form ecosystems around industries and data and how the cloud would change IT permanently. And then in the upper left, we put up a post on the old Wikibon Wiki, yeah, it used to be a Wiki, check out my hair, by the way, no gray, that's how long ago this was, and we talked about in that post how to compete in the Amazon economy. And we showed a graph of how IT economics were changing and cloud services had marginal economics that looked more like software than hardware at scale. And this would reset, we said, opportunities for both technology sellers and buyers for the next 20 years. And this came into sharper focus in the ensuing years, culminating in a milestone post by Greylock's Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. It was an inspiration and catalyst for us using the term SuperCloud in John Furrier's post prior to re-invent 2021. So we started to flesh out this idea of SuperCloud where companies of all types build services on top of hyperscale infrastructure and across multiple clouds. Going beyond multi-cloud 1.0, if you will, which was really a symptom, as we said many times, of multi-vendor, at least that's what we argued. And despite its fuzzy definition, it resonated with people because they knew something was brewing. Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor, even though he frankly wasn't a big fan of the buzzing nature of the term SuperCloud, posted this awesome blackboard on Twitter. Take a listen to how he framed it. Please play the clip. Is VMware the right company to make the SuperCloud work? Term that Wikibon came up with to describe the taking of discrete services, such as RDS from AWS, Cloud, compute engines from GCP and authentication from Azure to build SaaS applications or enterprise applications that connect back to your data center. Is VMware's cross-cloud vision, because it is just a vision today, the right approach, or should you be looking towards companies like HashiCorp to provide this overall capability that we all agree, or maybe you don't, that we need in the enterprise? Comment below your thoughts. So I really like that Keith has deep practitioner knowledge and lays out a couple of options. I especially like the examples he uses of cloud services. He recognizes the need for cross-cloud services and he notes this capability is aspirational today. Remember, this was eight or nine months ago and he brings HashiCorp into the conversation as they're one of the speakers at SuperCloud 22 and he asks the community what they think. The thing is, we're trying to really test out this concept and people like Keith are instrumental as collaborators. Now, I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that not everyone is on board with the SuperCloud meme. In particular, Charles Fitzgerald has been a wonderful collaborator just by his hilarious criticisms of the concept. After a couple of SuperCloud posts, Charles put up his second rendition of SuperCloud, a fragilistic XPL adosus. I mean, it's just beautiful. But to boot, he put up this picture of Baghdad Bob asking us to just stop. Bob's real name is Mohamed Saeed Al-Saaaf and he was the Minister of Propaganda for Saddam Hussein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he made these outrageous claims of US troops running in fear and putting down their arms and so forth. So anyway, Charles laid out several, frankly, very helpful critiques of SuperCloud which has led us to really advance the definition and catalyze the community's thinking on the topic. Now, one of his issues, and there are many, is we said a prerequisite of SuperCloud was a super Paz layer. Gartner's Lydia Leong chimed in saying, there were many examples of successful Paz vendors built on top of a hyperscaler, some having the option to run in more than one cloud provider. But the key point we're trying to explore is the degree to which that Paz layer is purpose built for a specific SuperCloud function and not only runs in more than one cloud provider, Lydia, but runs across multiple clouds simultaneously, creating an identical developer experience irrespective of a state. Now maybe that's what Lydia meant. It's hard to say from just a tweet and she's a sharp lady so and knows more about that market, that Paz market than I do. But to the former point, at SuperCloud 22, we have several examples we're going to test. One is Oracle and Microsoft's recent announcement to run database services on OCI and Azure, making them appear as one. Rather than use an off the shelf platform, Oracle claims to have developed the capabilities for developers specifically built to ensure high performance, low latency and a common experience for developers across clouds. Another example we're going to test is Snowflake. I'll be interviewing Benoit Dajaville, co-founder of Snowflake to understand the degree to which Snowflake's recent announcement of an application development platform is purpose built for the Snowflake data cloud. Is it just plain old Paz big whoop as Lydia claims or is it something new and innovative? By the way, we invited Charles Fitz to participate in SuperCloud 22. Any decline saying in addition to a few other somewhat insulting things. There's definitely interesting new stuff brewing that isn't traditional cloud or SaaS but branding it all SuperCloud doesn't help either. Well, indeed, we agree with part of that and we'll see if it helps advance thinking and helps customers really plan for the future. And that's why SuperCloud 22 is going to feature some of the best analysts in the business in the great SuperCloud debate. In addition to Keith Towns and Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research and Sanjeev Mohan from former Gartner analysts and principal at Sanjeev Mohan participated in this session. Now we don't want to mislead you. We don't want to imply that these analysts are hopping on the SuperCloud bandwagon but they're more than willing to go through the thought experiment and mental exercise and we had a great conversation that you don't want to miss. Maribel Lopez had what I thought was a really excellent way to think about this. She used TCPIP as an historical example. Listen to what she said. So if we think about what we're talking about with SuperCloud and what Keith just mentioned, remember when we went to see TCPIP and the whole idea was like, how do we get computers to talk to each other in a more standardized way? How do we get data to move in a more standardized way? I think that the problem we have with multi-cloud right now is that we don't have that. So I think that's sort of a ground level of getting us to your SuperCloud premise. And Sanjeev Mohan has some excellent thoughts on the feasibility of an open versus de facto standard getting us to the vision of SuperCloud, what's possible and what's likely. Now again, I don't want to imply that these analysts are out banging the SuperCloud drum. They're not necessarily doing that, but they do, I think it's fair to say, believe that something new is bubbling. And whether it's called SuperCloud or multi-cloud 2.0 or cross-cloud services or whatever name you choose, it's not multi-cloud of the 2010s and we chose SuperCloud. So our goal here is to advance the discussion on what's next in cloud and SuperCloud is meant to be a term to describe that future of cloud. And specifically the cloud opportunities that can be built on top of hyperscale compute, storage, networking, machine learning and other services at scale. And that is why we posted this piece on answering the top 10 questions about SuperCloud, many of which were floated by Charles Fitzgerald and others in the community. Why does the industry need another term? What's really new and different? And what is hype? What specific problems does SuperCloud solve? What are the salient characteristics of SuperCloud? What's different beyond multi-cloud? What is a super pass? Is it necessary to have a SuperCloud? How will applications evolve on SuperClouds? What workloads will run? All these questions will be addressed in detail as a way to advance the discussion and help practitioners and business people understand what's real today and what's possible with cloud in the near future. And one other question we'll address is who will build SuperClouds and what new entrance we can expect? This is an ETR graphic that we showed in a previous episode of Breaking Analysis and it lays out some of the companies we think are building SuperClouds or in a position to do so. By the way, the y-axis shows net score or spending velocity and the x-axis depicts presence in the ETR survey of more than 1200 respondents. But the key call outs to this slide in addition to some of the smaller firms that aren't yet showing up in the ETR data like Chaos Search and Snarburst and Aviatrix and Clumio. But the really interesting additions are industry players, Walmart with Azure, Capital One and Goldman Sachs with AWS, Oracle with Cernar. These we think are early examples bubbling up of industry clouds that will eventually become SuperClouds. So we'll explore these and other trends to get the community's input on how this will all play out. These are the things we hope you'll take away from SuperCloud 22 and we have an amazing lineup of experts to answer your question. Technologists like Kit Colbert, Adrian Cockroft, Mariana Tessel, Chris Hoff, Will LaForest, Ali Goatsey, Benoit Dajaville, Moudou Sudhakar and many other tech athletes, investors like Jerry Chen and Insik Ray, the analysts we featured earlier, Paula Hansen talking about go-to-market in a multi-cloud world, G Rittenhouse talking about cloud security, David McJanet, Baskar Gorty of platform nine and many, many more. And of course, you. So please go to thecube.net and register for SuperCloud 22. Really lightweight reg. We're not doing this for lead gen. We're doing it for collaboration. If you sign in, you can get the chat and ask questions in real time. So don't miss this inaugural event, SuperCloud 22 on August 9th at 9 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you there. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thank you to Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoef is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. He does some really wonderful editing. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvolante. Comment on my LinkedIn posts. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week in Palo Alto at SuperCloud 22 or next time on breaking analysis.