 Welcome back to SuperCloud 3, kicking off day two. Got a great opening segment, industry impact of SuperCloud 3, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Vittorio B-Ringo's here, cross-cloud VP for VMware, industry expert, also his own video blogger, check him out online, get the best recipes. Always fun to see you, Vittorio. Thanks for coming on. And a musician. My pleasure. Great covers with the police, gotta say. SuperCloud 3 is here. We've got SuperCloud 4 on the schedule in October. It's going to be all about AI. This is security plus AI. It's the continuation of our early conversations. You were the first in the industry to spot the relevance of the SuperCloud conversation, which started out as a riff from re-invent from two years ago, Dave. When we started to identify this next generation, you were at VMware architecting the cross-cloud services, which is now cross-cloud services, early days. What was it about SuperCloud? Because the impact in the industry is significant. Now it's accelerating. You saw it early. What was it that got you seeing the SuperCloud trend? It's listening. So I've been lucky to have worked with some amazing technologists over the years, and they all have one thing in common. They're religious about listening to customers. So when we listened to customers like Ragu and the team back then in 2015, 16, we were hearing the first glimpse of cloud chaos. Developers and gone wild using multiple clouds because that's where the innovation was, the path of this resistance, and the operator started to feel the pain of like, how do I manage all this? And so that's where we launched VMware Cloud on AWS, and then all the other IPA scalars. So that was our first introduction into solving the multi-cloud pain. Then we realized customers already had applications in the cloud, and so we bought back Pivotal, and we built a complete portfolio to help our customers build application once using native Kubernetes construct and microservices and deploy it across multiple clouds. And the next step was how do we manage this? So we introduced ARIA. So a couple of years ago, we kind of came out and crystallized this vision into a portfolio that we call VMware Cloud Services that allows our customers to build, run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. And that now, as we can say, we called it here first, you guys called it, it started to cover it as become an industry-wide movement. But you know, when John and I first published on the SuperCloud back in the end of 2021, we got a lot of negative feedback. A lot of people were like, ah, why do we need another term, et cetera? But you saw it differently. You said, actually, there's something here. Forget the term for a moment. Actually, we liked the term. But what was it that led you to lean in in the face of all that criticism? I believe the College SuperCloud, College Cross Cloud Services, I believe the SuperCloud is IT history repeating itself. Since the dawn of IT, innovation and vendors products create sprawl. And sprawl gives you choice, but then gives you cost and complexity. So at some point, through the evolution of multiple platform over the years, there's always a set of open source for vendors that come in, create a higher level of abstraction that allows customers to simplify their environment, make some trade-offs, but then unleash the next level of growth. So we believe that the SuperCloud is now an industry-wide movement. I would argue every company out there in Silicon Valley is a cross-cloud service company that is gonna help customers have a unified way of building application, of managing application, above any clouds. NAI is yet another catalyst for that to happen. Yeah, one of the things, Dave, and I'll get your thoughts on this, Victoria, is that when we started talking about this, the early conversation was multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, maybe other, but it was about the hyperscalers. It ignored the emergence of on-premises hybrid, private cloud. It ignored the development of the edge clouds. And so you're starting to see cloud environments as a result of the cloud operations, which I think is this next IT revolution. So SuperCloud is not just the hyperscalers. It's all new environments. Because we talked about this earlier on, remember you were so adamant, John, SuperCloud, it's going to be big. It's not just AWS. This is the revelation. This is the reality now. It's not just the hyperscalers. It's multiple environments. Well, given our heritage and where we've been strong throughout our history, we always thought of the private cloud and the data center as part of the multi-cloud. And since actually in the last couple of years, what happened, actually I would say in the last six months, we have seen a resurgence of the private cloud because of three reasons. Number one, the pandemic is over and people cannot procure hardware again, so they're modernizing their infrastructure. Number two is cost. People are realizing that it's just moving the application to the cloud just for the sake of it. It's more costly and they're realizing, hey, I know how to run this very efficiently in my private cloud. Let's do more of that as some repatriation based on your data is coming. And three, AI. AI, now we see a lot of the buzz in the consumer space, but the huge value is going to be the enterprise and these enterprises will want to build a large language model where they're not going to put their data out there in the cloud. And so those three catalysts are making the private cloud even more relevant today. And Edge, of course, for the first time in 20 years, we see computing and the workloads, the way you describe it, moving closer to what the data is and the data increasingly is. I want to share some data on this because as you know, I've never been a repatriate, right? I've written a lot about the repatriation myth. However, there's a lot of debate in the industry about how much workload, how much of the workloads are actually in the cloud. Andy Jesse says it's 10%, 90% is on-prem. Forget about telco for a minute. The data suggests it's much, much higher in the cloud, more like 45 to 50% in the cloud. So while I'm not a repatriate, I do believe there's an equilibrium that's hitting. I'll give you another data point. When you do the surveys, look at the ETR data, only 14% of respondents say they're all in on public cloud. That's it, 14%. And when you ask them, what's it going to be in three years? 14%. Now there's one more data point. Charles Fitzgerald, Fitzie, our friend who was an antagonist to the super cloud. He was the most vocal about what the hell is super cloud? He'll come on board. And he did, but he did, you know, he did us a service because he forced us to do the homework. He has this funny thing called the repatriation index. And what it is, Victoria, I don't know if you've seen this, it's basically digital realty plus equinix revenue divided by AWS revenue. And for the past three years, it's been a downtrend. It just reversed a three year trend last quarter. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens this next quarter. Now, of course, Charles is such a snark. He had a little lake that you'd want a water ski on. He said, surfs up implying, well, this really isn't a trend. But again, I think it's an equilibrium that we're reaching. And the last point I'll make is to your point about AI and LLMs, still a lot of data on prem. That's where the AI is going to be applied, both on prem and in the cloud. Equilibrium is my- And I don't want to make this conversation about the private cloud only. We totally see and we started this way of the multicloud. Those worms, I'm not getting back into the can. The multicloud is going to keep going, but I think it's going to be a little more balanced approach. You're going to have on prem, you're going to have edge. And the customers are telling us, I do four or five customer briefing a week. And the first thing we do when we do customer briefing of VMware, we spend half an hour an hour listening to them first. And every single customer I talk to is telling us, is telling me and company, developers went wild, I have applications everywhere, and I don't even know where they are. And now with the pressure because of the economy, it's costing me too much. I need to do something. You got to rain in the chaos, as they say. Chaos, let chaos rain, rain in the chaos. It's an Andy Grove famous quote, legend in the valley. To your point about the repatriates, I think the data is proving the fact that it's not repatriation, it's rightsizing. And what I'm hearing from customers, I'd love to get your reaction is cloud spend is not necessarily dropping either. There's public activity, hybrid activity with cloud operations. So you're seeing rightsizing, not refactoring rightsizing. So spend management, obviously with the economy. People looking at their clouds saying, hey, you want to make it better and position themselves for growth because AI is coming around the corner, which by the way is not exactly a cost savings either. I mean, that's a whole nother animal. We're going to get into the whole AI costs and super cloud four, but people are spending tons of money on mismanaging their AI spend. I call it optimizing. That's really what they're doing in the, and that's a feature of the cloud. It's not a bug of the cloud. You can dial it down. It's like you dial it up. It's a benefit. And what we saw in the first half of this year was customers dialing it down a little bit. The data suggests it's starting to turn. It's coming back up. And again, I think equilibrium. On-prem is doing well. Cloud is doing well. It seems like tech is back in a big way. One thing that I hear about a super cloud sometimes overwhelm me, right? So where do I start? And what you just talked about gives customers a great place to start. First, you need to know where your stuff is. Right? Where is it? Okay, now I got an inventory over where my stuff is. What are you using? Aria from VMware or somebody else? Doesn't matter. It's an industry movement. Once you know what it is, how much is it gonna cost me? Right? It's costing me to run all these things. And next, once you know how much it's gonna cost you, so where do I optimize it and move it so that it makes sense? And then the next question is like, how do I secure it? Posture management. You know, the way you encrypt something on AWS is different from the way you encrypt something on Azure. So these are all very practical use cases that the super cloud will solve. And you cannot just rely on non-iperscanner by definition because if you encrypt on AWS, that doesn't give you any sort of security on Azure. Every single conversation here at super cloud three, security plus AI is supporting the notion that each cloud has its own agenda because that's their cloud. And that to have multi vendor, have interoperability, some of these things that provide choice, it's not necessarily that they have to go away. They can still do clouds. So there's going to be presence in all the clouds. We see that. I think this is why I think super clouds relevant on the industry side that we talk about on the impact is if you look at VM, VMware and your customers and the practitioners, there's a changeover. There's this cultural shift happening from operational VMware operations to cloud operations. You've been talking about that for years and talk to customers. But it's not just about just AWS or just Azure. They have their own stacks. So the VMware customer that we're hearing from on super cloud three and others is that we're getting inbound requests for people nominating speakers. They're VMware customers. They want to talk about multi cloud. They want to talk about a cross cloud because their job is becoming super cloud. In other words, they have to operate across multiple environments. This is the phenomenon that's going on for VMware because they don't think, okay, VMware is going to integrate just with AWS. They have that today. It's everything else. What's the, how do you hear from your customers around your persona? Because if I'm a VMware practitioner, my next 10 years is going to be spent where? Yeah, super cloud. So what else? The one constant in IT besides innovation, sprawling, obstruction, the thing that we talk about is the lack of talent. There's just not enough people to go around. So now you had a challenge to find people to run your private cloud. How are you going to find the talent and expertise across two, three, four clouds? And so one of the things that we've been working very hard on is to how to chart a path for our VI admin so that become multi-cloud expert. Now there will still be need for specialists that know how to tune the ML engine on Google, but you don't have to train the whole team on it. You just, the rest of the team that you have, that are trained on VMware can become expert as they get on a journey with us. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to really understand what developers do and then give operation the tools that allows them to fit in the developers workflow without getting in the way, but providing... This is exactly what you said earlier. I want to tie that back to your customer, because apps are everywhere. Operationalizing cloud operations across multiple environments is the top conversation that people are having right now. How do I integrate and operate my business, IT, if you will, that have cloud native services, guardrails, shift left for security? Now you got the tsunami of AI coming in over the top. So you have the perfect storm for the expert or your customer to take the reins and lead the next generation of operations because it's kind of mixed now. It's all both. It's kind of coming together. It's converging. Absolutely. And we have, I don't know, how many hundreds of thousands of these operators out there. And if they come on this journey with us, we are working to give them a pragmatic path to get there. Realizing that, yeah, there's still going to be some things that you need to do down at the hyperscaler. The hyperscaler, I'm not going to go away. But increasingly, and again, I want to bring it back to the industry conversation. It's not just VMware. We started this whole thing years ago, but every company that has been here over the last couple of days and is going to come to SuperCloud 4, they're all talking over the same, right? How do we help customers being able to have a single pane of glass across all this? So you mentioned sort of history of IT. I want to sort of get your opinion on this. As you were speaking, I think about muscle memory. The industry gets a muscle memory and the cloud wave started in 2008, 2009 when CFO said, we want to shift CapEx to OpEx. And that's when the muscle memory began. And when we came out of that downturn, the financial crisis, cloud really, really took off. When you think about the pandemic, that's when the real muscle memory started for digital transformation. Before then it was a lot of lip service, right? And that started. When the tech bubble burst, because people were spending like crazy during the pandemic, when the tech bubble burst, people started optimization. So it can be interesting to see as AI heard around the world to me, it completes your digital strategy. And that involves cloud, on-prem, hybrid, edge, AI and security all bundled in there. And that is what the SuperCloud vision is all about. So we're building to me new muscle memory that AI is disrupting a little bit. And the past is not going to be, the future is not going to be the same as the past. Past is not prologue. And we're entering a new era that's going to have new dynamics, new skills and some unknowns. But just another point to validate the advent of SuperCloud. If you look at AI, AI is a new type of applications, right? That is taking the world by storm. As these new applications are coming to market, there are now frameworks like Ray that are designed out of the box to work across multiple clouds. What does that tell you? That muscle memory is happening in the vendors and the open source. They're always at the edge, pushing the envelope. The early innovators, the people that were doing multi-cloud 10 years ago, and they're now becoming cloud smart. They say, oh yeah, I have all this. So innovation is all resources that I can use to build my models, run my models. And then it's an opportunity for the more of the laggards to see what these people are doing and avoid the pitfall and fast forward to becoming cloud smart and use whatever cloud makes sense for the need of their applications. I think that your point earlier about the growth and that abstraction layer, that's that evolution trend that you're talking about. It's like, oh hey, come out of this right sizing optimization. Now AI is going to have growth acceleration. There it is, that abstraction layer of super cloud enabling, because the innovation's coming. I mean, you have to enable innovation. Complexity and cost doesn't enable innovation. Abstractions do. Yeah, and if you look at AI, is the ultimate cross-cloud things because it's like hourglass. The data comes from everywhere, right? Then you build a model and then you want to be able to run the model anywhere. And that's one of the guiding principle. You're going to hear more about our AI announcement and strategy at Explorer in August, but what we're trying, our philosophy for AI workloads is to say, hey, bring your data from wherever cloud makes sense. Most cases from the private cloud, once that model is built, then you run it wherever it's cost-effective. And that's, I think, is going to unleash that optimization right off. And the edge, that incoming data essentially informs the state of your business. And data is the API through which you are going to program your business in the future. Yeah, connective tissue and having horizontal-scalable data is going to be huge. The data aspect of it impacts everything. And I think this is why SuperCloud 3 is exciting because it's security, it's operational. SuperCloud 4 will talk about AI, which is going to be a little bit more about growth and future applications. But you're seeing the impact already. And Victoria, I wanted to ask you because you had VMware Explorer coming up, will be there with two sets with theCUBE for the folks that are going to be there from your VExpress to all your customers, millions of people interested in VMware, you have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of customers. What does SuperCloud mean to them? If you had to talk to them right now and say to the camera, SuperCloud, this is what it means for you. What does SuperCloud represent to your customers? I think it represents two main things. One, an opportunity to unleash the power of every cloud at a sustainable cost. And two, it represents a career path for the next 10 years for them. Awesome, I think that's going to be an opportunity to enable new developers. I mean, you mentioned some of the AI apps that are coming. I mean, the announcements coming every day now. Co-pilot, auto writing code, maybe cross cloud code will be written on the fly. New databases, right? New models, new apps, it's amazing. I think the whole data piece is forcing the connective tissue. I think cross cloud vision was right from day one. I think SuperCloud is just an instantiation of the forcing function of the market, saying let's connect things together in a new way, not just connect networks, like networking, that's going to be in there, obviously abstracted away, but the connective tissue between environments is going to be rarely API, kind of very programmatic and smarter. I think the smart cloud concept is real and I think that's what we're seeing with SuperCloud is that the new developers, they don't want to wait, they want to write code. To the extent that there's augmentation, the humans will be driving the change. Yeah, I think that one of the main advantages of the SuperCloud for people to do it right is exactly that, remove friction from the system. Because developers, they don't want to talk to anybody, they want to just write code and deploy it, right? IT and operation in the business wants that code to be secure and managed at a lower cost, right? So the only way you're going to be able to do that in a world, if you assume that 87% of customers that are multi-cloud, is to enable the developers to do what they do, plug into their workflow without introducing friction. So last century, there was a big dig in Boston. We spent billions, went way over budget. And what it is, it expanded, built the Ted Williams tunnel to the airport and it was like, oh my God, today there's so much traffic. It's a choke point. So my point of this is, I predict more chaos, okay? But without the SuperCloud, it would bring everything to a grinding halt. And that's just the way this industry is because there's so much data. You have to expand that capacity and the industry will fill it with data and new apps and new innovation. So SuperCloud is an enabler in that sense. And I think that's why the edge is kind of huge piece of it because that's, you just start to see distributed computing paradigms emerge in the architecture. That's why I think it's an old way, new way. And Jay Chaudry from Zscaler, he's certainly not, he's been old school, but his adventure's all new school. They've been successful. It's the new way to doing things. And if you look at the historical perspective, and I love that data you shared and the IT perspective from old to new, every single inflection point where there's been growth, where there's been an abstraction layer where everyone can see clearly that there's a next wave here. The obvious, everyone goes, okay, I get it now. In every single historical inflection point, when that is visible, it's the simplest approach, the reducing the steps it takes to do something and ease of use and performance. And those becomes the table stakes. So you're going to start to see that in cloud where, okay, it's pretty obvious. How do I abstract it away? Faster, smaller, cheaper. That's where the action will be. So people who can reduce the complexity and reduce the frictions without sacrificing the performance and the value in every single inflection point, those were the winners. And for the skepticals out there, I can give you examples where when you are in the middle of the transformation, the majority of people don't see it. You just said, now it's all APIs. I connect to anything. Well, you take, so you go from like resisting it to like, yeah, of course. I take it for granted, right? So before we had APIs, we would literally go and say, the customer name in SAP is the 15 byte to the 17 byte or like what? And I'm gonna map it to Siebel. How hard was that? And there was a whole industry doing that, right? Then you go SOA, level of abstraction. It's a little slower. Who cares? Now I can actually call through Corba. Still pretty hard. And then you go to SOA and now JSON and APIs. Oh yeah, everything talks to everything. Okay, maybe it's a little slower. It's all built on text. You have to parse text. How efficient is that? Who cares? The machine gets faster. Supercloud is gonna be the same. No, you have to bring this level of abstraction or you cannot unleash the next level of growth as sustainable. And then it brings security challenges which the industry has to fill. They have to step up and build those. I mean that's a great historical perspective right there but I would say that what's awesome about that is that now we're in an era where there's unlimited compute. You got GPUs, you got performance. So you now have the speed, performance piece at table stakes and that innovation is abstraction. The industry has always optimized those abstractions and where it has it. VMware did it, mainframe did it. It's always, Kubernetes is doing it. And if it doesn't, it dies. Well, give you an example. 10, 15 years ago I was going around to customers and they were virtualized all their file and print server, all the crap that nobody cares about virtualized. And then the next wave was like applications and databases like, oh my, it's impossible to virtualize, it's too slow. Vittorio, thank you so much for being such a great industry expert and seeing it early, you were the catalyst that started the Supercloud wave with us, really appreciate your leadership in the industry and look what you started. The industry's adopted. It takes a village, it's not me. It's a village and thank you guys for starting to cover it so early. I thought that this was going to be our, you heard it first, high-five session of Supercloud. We have a consensus, the leading executives all over the industry, they're all on the site, all validating it. The first one in is always the hardest and they all jumped in right after you. What's the expression, first penguin? Penguin's off the iceberg. One penguin jumps in, they all jump in. Vittorio, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Supercloud three, Vittorio being your legend now in the industry here on theCUBE. Of course, great friend of theCUBE, really appreciate the support and Supercloud three. So before coming in October, we're right back with more Supercloud three, day two.