 Welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto for this next ecosystem segment. We have Moodu Sudhakar, who's the co-founder and CEO of Acera, friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni, serial entrepreneur, multiple exits, been on multiple times with great commentary. Moodu, thank you for coming on and supporting us. Thank you for having me, John. Yeah, thank you. Great handshake there. I love to do it. One, I wanted you here because two reasons. One is congratulations on your new funding. Thank you. $20 million, series D funding? Series D funding. So huge validation in this market. I did. You've experienced so much more, so it's a real testament to your team. But also you're kind of in the SuperCloud kind of vortex. This new wave that SuperCloud is part of is, I call it the pretext to what's coming with multicloud. It's the next level. That's right. Structural change and we've been reporting on it, Dave and I, and we're being challenged. So we decided to open it up. Very good, I love it. Rather than waiting eight months to prove that we're right, which we are right, but that's one of those stories. You're always right. What do you think of SuperCloud that's going on? What is the big trend? Because it's public cloud is great. So there's no conflict there. It's just, it's got great goodness. It's integrated. I asked to Sass and Paz in the beginning, on the middle, all that's all good. Now you have on premise hybrid cloud. Edge is right around the corner, exploding in new capabilities. So complexity is still here. That's right. So I think you nailed it. We talk about hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. SuperCloud is kind of elevates the message even better because you still have to leave for some workloads, public clouds. There'll be some workloads will be still running on the edge. That's where the edge cloud comes in. Some will be still on-prem. So the SuperCloud is a concept is beyond hybrid and multi-cloud. To me, I'll run some workloads on Amazon. Some could be on Azure. Some could be running only on edge, right? And we still have what we call the remote executors. Remember in the early days of service now, you have what we call the mid-server, I think it was called, where you put in a small code in Rumm-India. So I think all those things will be running on-prem environments and a VMware cloud, et cetera. And if you look back at, I think it's been five years now, maybe four or five years, since Andy Jassy at Reinvent announced outposts. I think that was the moment in time that Dave and I took us pause back and said, okay, that's Amazon who listens to their customers, acknowledging hybrid. Then we saw the rise of snowflakes, the data bricks, specialty clouds. You start to see people who are building on top of AWS, but go at MongoDB. It's a database. Now they're a full-blown, large-scale data platform. These companies took advantage of the public cloud to build, as Jerry Chen calls, castles in the cloud. That seems to be happening in all areas. What do you think about that? What is that? I'll tell you why it's, I mean, first of all, what is driving the cloud? To me, we talk about machine learning and AI, right? First is cloud adoption. We used to talk lift and shift, the outpost and lift and shift. Initial days was to get the data into the cloud. I think if you see the vendor that I like the most is, I'm not picking any favorite, but Microsoft and Azure, they're thinking like you're super cloud, right? Amazon is also thinking, but Azure is a lot more because they run on-prem. They're also in Azure cloud, Amazon cloud. So I think Azure and Amazon are doing a lot more in this area of super cloud. What is really helping is the machine learning environments need super clouds because I'll be running some on the edge, some compute, some will be running on the public cloud, some could be running on my data center. So I think the super cloud really is suited for AI and automation really well. Yeah, it's a good point about Microsoft too. And I think Microsoft's existing install base saved Azure. They brought Office 365. That's right. It's equal server because their customers weren't leaving Microsoft. They had productivity thing nailed down as well as the ability to catch up to AWS. So natural extension to on-premise with Microsoft. Exactly. Your super cloud is what Microsoft did, right? Azure, if you think of it like they had an Office 365, that SharePoint, their Dynamics, taking all those properties running on the Azure and still giving the migration path from into a data center is super cloud. So the early days of super cloud is came from Azure. Well, that's a great point. We'll certainly debate that. I will also say that Snowflake built on AWS. That's right. Okay, became a super powerhouse with the data business as did Databricks. That's right. Then went to Azure. So you're seeing kind of the playbook. Go fast on cloud native. And then go hard on cloud. Get that flywheel going. Then get going somewhere else. It is. And to that point, I think earlier you and me are talking, right? If you were to start with one cloud and go to the other cloud, the amount of work as a vendor for us to even implement, like today we're on all three clouds, including the cloud, it's a lot of work. So what will happen? The next toolkit will be even services like Elastic. People will not, the word commoditize is not the word, but people will create an abstraction layer, even for S3. Explain that, explain that in detail. So Elastic, Elastic search or Elastic. What do you mean by that? Yeah, what I mean is today Elastic search, if you take out is like, if I write to Elastic search on Amazon, if I go to Azure, I don't want to write it to under Elastic search layer. Ideally, I want us to write it to an abstracted search layer so that when I move my services into a different clouds, I don't want to recompute and recalculate everything. That's a lot of work. Particularly, once you have a production customers, if you have to shift the workloads, even to the point of infrastructure, take S3. If I write my infrastructure to S3 and tomorrow I go to Azure, Azure will have its own object store. I don't want to re-invalidate that. So what will happen is individual component, Kubernetes is already there. We want storage, we want network layer, we want VPN services, Elastic, as well as all these fundamentals, including MongoDB, should be abstracted to run on the super clouds. Okay, well that's a little bit of a unicorn fantasy, but let's break that down. Do you think that's possible? It is, because I think if I'm MongoDB, I should be able to give me a horizontal layer through MongoDB that's optimized for all three of them. I don't want MongoDB. First of all, everyone will buy that. I'm skeptical that that's possible, given where we're at right now. So you're saying that a vendor will provide an abstraction layer. Either vendor comes in. No, I'm saying that either MongoDB itself will do it or a third-party layer will come as a service, which will abstract all these layers so that we will write to an API layer. So what are you guys doing? How do you handle multiple clouds? You guys are taking that burden on, because it makes sense. You should build the abstraction layer, not rely on a third-party vendor, right? We are doing it because there's no third-party available today, but if you offer a third-party tomorrow, I'll use that as a super cloud service. If they're 100% reliable. That's right. That's exactly it. I think I do the work. They have to do the work, because if today I'm doing it because nobody else is offering it. Okay, so what people might not know is you're also an angel investor, and as well as an entrepreneur, have been very successful. So you're rich, you have a lot of money. If I was a startup and I said, Manu, I want to build this abstraction layer, what would be funding advice would you give me as an entrepreneur, as a company, to do that? I would do it like you guys remember the company called Apigee that Google acquired? You should create an Apigee-like layer for infrastructure or for services. I think there's a very good opportunity. And you think that's viable? It's very much viable. Would that be part of super cloud architecture, in your opinion? It is, right? And that will abstract all the clouds to some level. Like it's like Kubernetes abstracted so that if I'm running on Kubernetes, I can transfer to any cloud. But that should go from compute into other infrastructures. It seems to me, Manu, I want to get your thoughts about this whole super cloud de facto standard opportunity. It feels like we're waiting for a moment where there's some sort of de facto unification, whether it's an abstraction layer or a standards body. There's no W3C here going on. I mean W3C was for web consortium, for web worldwide web. The super cloud, it seems to be having that same impact that web had, transformative, disruptive, refactoring business operations. Is there a standards body or an opportunity for a de facto? Like Kubernetes was a great example of a unification around something for orchestration. Is there a better version in the super cloud model where we need a standard? Yes and no. The reason is by the time you come to the stand, you'll take time, look at what happened. First we started with VMs, then became Docker and containers, then became Kubernetes. So it goes through a journey. I think the first next few years will be, stood up the enough services on super cloud, let's make customers happy, let's make enough services going, and then the standards will come. Standards will be almost two, three years later. So I don't think standards should happen now right now. Right now all we need is, we need enough startups to create the super layer abstraction with the goal in mind of AI and automation. The reason AI is, AI workloads need to be able to run that. Automation, because running a workflows, I can run the workflow in the cloud services, I can run it on on-prem, I could run Oracle database. So you have two good applications. Take AI and automation with super cloud, make enough noise on that, make enough applications. I think then the standards will come. On this project we've been with super cloud, this past day we've heard a lot of people talking. The themes that's coming out is developers are okay. They're doing great. Open source is booming. Cloud native has got major traction. Developers are going fast and they love it. Shifting left, all these great things. They put a lot of data, the ops and the security teams, they're the ones who are leveling up. We're hearing a lot of conversations around how they can be faster. What's your view on this as relative to that super cloud nirvana getting there? How are ops and security teams leveling up to devs? A couple of things. I think in the world of devs and cops and security ops, there isn't the security is important for us, given what's going on. But you don't need to do the security in a manual way. I think the whole new operation that you and me talked about, AI ops should happen. Whether AI ops is for service operation, for performance, for incident, or for security. Nobody think of AI ops for security. So if the dev ops people should more think in the world of AI ops, so that I can predict, prevent things before they happen, then the security will be much better. So AI ops for super cloud will be probably the nirvana, but that's where the world should happen. In the AI side of things, what you guys are doing, what are you learning on scale relative to data? Is there a, you said machine learning needs data and needs scale, automation? What's your view on the automation piece of all this? I think to me, the data is the single underrated or whatever unsunk and hero in the whole machine learning. Everybody talks about AI and machine learning algorithms. Algorithms are, is important, but even more important is data. Lack of data, I can't create algorithms. So my advice to customers is don't lose your data. That's why I see Frank, my old boss, setting up everything into data cloud in Snowflake. Data is so important. Store the data, analyze the data. Data is a new oil. You and me talked so many times. It's underrated. People are not anticipating how important it is, whether the data is coming from logs, events, whether there's knowledge documents, any data set of any form. I think keep the data, analyze the data, data patterns, and then things like super cloud can really take advantage of that. So in the super cloud equation, one of the things that's come up is the native clouds do great there. I asked the SAS, there's interactions that solve a lot of problems. There's integration that's good. Now when you go off cloud, get regions, get latency issues. You have more complexity. So what's the trade off in the super cloud journey? If you had the guests and just thinking out loud here, what would be some of the architectural trade offs of how you do it? What's the sequence? What's the order of operations to get super clouding going? Yeah, no, very good questions here. I think once you start going from the public cloud, the cloud scale to let's say even to a regional data center onto an edge, latencies will kick in. The computer infrastructure, lack of computer infrastructure will kick in. So there I think everything should become asynchronous. And you have to run the application in a limited environment. You should anticipate for small memories, small compute, long latencies, but store forward network should happen. So some operations should become the old store forward. It's like the email. I send an email, it's an asynchronous thing. I may respond. I think most of the message passing distributed system should go back to the store forward architectures, or they should go become asynchronous where things can rely. I think as long as algorithm can take that account into edge, I think super clouds can really bridge between the public cloud to the edge. Manu, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your insights here. You've always been a great friend, great commentator. If you weren't the CEO and a famous angel investor, we'd certainly love to have you as a Q analyst here on theCUBE. I'm always the one for you man. When you retire, you can come back. A final point, we'll hope we're not done yet. We'll give you a chance to talk about the company. I'm really intrigued by the success of your $90 million financing round because we're in a climate where people aren't getting those kinds of finance. It's usually down rounds. 409 adjustments, people are struggling. You got an up round and you got a big number. Why the success? What's going on with the company? Why are you guys getting such great validation? Goldman Sachs, Thomas Bravo, Zoom. These are big names. These are the next-gen winners. Why are they picking you? Why are they investing in you? I think it's not one thing, many things. First of all, I think it's a four-year journey for us where we are right now, right? So a company started late 2017. It's getting the right customers, partners, employees, team members. So it's a lot of hard work went in. So a lot of thanks to the ISRA and ISRA community for where we are. Why customers and where we are? Why the investors chose is, look, I guess we are doing some, fundamentally there's a problem to solve. Like what ISRA is trying to solve is, can we automate customer service? Whether internal employees, external customer support, do it for IT, HR, sales, marketing, all the way to ops, like you talk about DevSecOps, I don't want 1,000 tuners for DevOps. If I can make their job better, I want to do any repetitive job I want to automate. I call it elevate the human, right? And that's the reason why I look at it. Because you're saying people have to learn specialty tools and there's consequences to that. And to me, people should focus on doing more important tasks and let use AI as a tool to automate those things, right? It's like thinking of offering Apple, Siri or Alexa as a service. That's all we are trying to do in customer service like, right? And if we can do that consistently and reduce costs, cost is a big reason why customers like us a lot. We eliminate the cost. And this down economy, I will amplify our message even more, right? I'm going to take a bite out of their expense, whether it's in tool expense, it's in resources. Second is user productivity and finally experience. Like people want experience. Final question, folks out there, first of all, what do you think about SuperCloud? And as someone asked you, what is this SuperCloud thing? How would you answer? SuperCloud is to me is beyond multi-cloud and hyper-cloud. It is to bridge applications that are built in SuperCloud can run on all cloud seamlessly. You don't need to compile them. You don't need to recreate them. SuperCloud is one place to build, develop and deploy. Great. Madhu, thank you for coming on. SuperCloud 22 here, breaking it down with the ecosystem commentary. We have a lot of people coming together, a small group of experts in our network, bringing you an open conversation around the future of cloud computing and applications globally. And again, it's all about the next generation cloud. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.