 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, SuperCloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this breaking analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around SuperCloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on SuperCloud that we're gonna try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out SuperClouds? We'll try to answer why the term SuperCloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that SuperClouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a SuperCloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so. And we'll explain why in this breaking analysis. Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of a SuperPaz. Well, isn't a plain vanilla Paz already a SuperPaz? Again, we don't think so and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building SuperClouds? What workloads and services will run on SuperClouds? And 8A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of SuperCloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on SuperCloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re-invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't gonna suck, the hyperscalers weren't gonna suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of SuperCloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers, CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. And it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and Paz and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the SuperCloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catchphrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation, Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocessor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Michela who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Michela saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, C8 and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Michela put out in his 2018 book called Seeing Digital, which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Michela posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rows like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Michela pointed out that whereas historically industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And super cloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or super cloud and we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about super clouds relative to hyperscale clouds. You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious I think hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments the better control, security, cost and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the less of margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically what problems super clouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part, why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work, it's hard to secure and govern data, it's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Super cloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward but non-trivial which is why I always ask a company CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out super clouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differentiable value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of super cloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of super cloud? So first and foremost, a super cloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Super clouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud but they're optimized for a specific objective and aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, it might be optimized, super cloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A super cloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native paths layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a very, in the most efficient manner meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency or bandwidth or recovery or data sovereignty or whatever unique value that super cloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a super cloud comprises a super pass capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the super cloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure related. They could be application services. They could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed in package to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is, yeah, yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0 if you want. If you want to use a kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design is different than multi-cloud by default, meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud-native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. SuperCloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAP-X that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it SuperCloud. Okay, so at this point, you may be asking, well, isn't PAS already a version of SuperCloud? And again, we would say no, that SuperCloud and its corresponding SuperPAS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that SuperCloud and will vary by each offering. You know, OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a SuperPAS, but in and of itself isn't a SuperPAS, it's generic. A SuperPAS might be developed to support, for example, for instance, ultra low latency databases work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example is unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency SuperPAS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is SuperCloud and its inherent SuperPAS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection and ransomware or data sharing or data governance, highly specific use cases that the SuperCloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a SuperCloud today and who's building a SuperCloud and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building SuperClouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X-axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the SuperCloud mix and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building SuperClouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Michelle's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match an outdated SAS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't gonna solve and the hyperscalers aren't gonna solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of SuperCloud after being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services, you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically every large company we see either pursuing SuperCloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a SuperCloud Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their SuperPas, our term of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, couch-based, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Octa, Zscaler, all of those guys. And yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidel Maruso said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omar Assad, he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider SuperCloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emerging, merchants of companies, smaller companies like AVA Tricks and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of SuperClouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to, UiPath, they seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building SuperClouds that look a lot like Michelle's matrix with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud capex. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're gonna answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in SuperClouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud in our view. It's a SuperCloud optimized for data sharing and governance and query performance and security and ecosystem enablement when you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL Server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converged databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what couch base is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer friendly platform that with Atlas is moving toward a super cloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what AVatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see Capital One, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake super cloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart, working with Microsoft to create an on-prem to Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a super cloud. And we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling and other capabilities to AWS. So for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a super cloud in healthcare with its CERNR acquisition. Super cloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation and we welcome all points of view. Positive, negative, multi-cloud, super cloud, hyper cloud, all welcome. So the cube on super cloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, G-Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, Cloudflare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on, from industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail. We're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're gonna have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Meyerson, who handles production and manages the podcast for breaking analysis. And I wanna thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoef is our editor-in-chief or at Silicon Angle who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on Silicon Angle, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, all you gotta do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.bulante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dbulante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data and the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Belante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis.