 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Last year we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multicloud. We've said for years that multicloud is really not a strategy, but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term super cloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds that interconnects whether it's on-prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that super cloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual cloud, rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers and does things irrespective of location, adds value, and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR and this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about super cloud from the many cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of super cloud, is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there a business case for it? We'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their super cloud build out. And as you can see, I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studio is shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori McVitty is entitled super cloud, the 22 answer to multi-cloud challenges. What a great title of course, we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called. Who cares? Super cloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it meta cloud recently and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist, she's a developer by background. She works at F5 and she's partial to the super cloud definition that was put forth by Cornell and you can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera, et cetera. And that the super cloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources, dot, dot, dot and can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course we would take that as well to the edge. So sure, that sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was kind of our initial premise when we put this forth last year. Now, we want to dig deeper and hear from the many cube guests that we've interviewed recently, probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan many years down the road, hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he also, he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today, including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CAPEX. That's an important concept that's fundamental to super cloud. Now, Ashash Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it, but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allen. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and can get super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to super cloud and he describes what a super cloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is super cloud technically feasible and is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clark. Jeff Clark is the co-COO and vice chairman of Dell Super Experience Individual. He lays out his vision of super cloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple of times. And Jeff Clark has a drop the mic moment where he says, if we can do this X, you'll describe what X is, it's game over, okay? So of course we want to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors. And Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clark's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees super cloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne, is it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He kind of threw a curve ball at the super cloud concept and he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on, it's right. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is super cloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real super cloud is today and where it is. Run the sizzle. Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default. That's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds, on-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for a customer's clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge clouds. So it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default, we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. Really, really great question. Actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time, you know, sort of noodling just over that, right? And you're right, right? There's probably some terminology, something sort of, you know, that will get developed, you know, either by us or, you know, in collaboration with industry. You know, we sort of almost have the next, almost like a meta-cloud, right? That we're sort of working our way towards. So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the super cloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual to cloud to another cloud back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. You know, there are things that we do when we go between clouds. Some use BIOS, some use UEFI. But we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs. But we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. And your catalog is in control of that, is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? That is 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave? The catalog is inside the backup. Yes, so here's what's interesting about the edge. Two things, on the edge, you don't want to have any state if you can help it. And so containers help with that, right? You can have stateless environment, some persistent data storage. But we not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true, if you go to the cloud and you're using, say, EKS with relational database services, RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift on premises. And so that's why I call this the super cloud. We have all of this data, actually, I think you termed the term super cloud. Yeah, but thank you for, I mean, I'm looking for confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. It is technically feasible and you can do it today. You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. Platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that, they plumb up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in Green Lake. So it's a reality, right? We have a number of platforms that support that. We're gonna have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover, right? So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're provided today. Green Lake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the Green Lake platform itself, right? Everything from security, single sign-on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proof point. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. Usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application so that you can use the cloud provider services that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOps toolchain, the runtime environment which tends out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value, right? And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements. Number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise, right? And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we, we are still I would say in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these green field applications and there is an entire ecosystem and merging around Kubernetes. That is still Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu application platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time, be entirely secure, et cetera, et cetera? Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together, your data is siloed, it's locked up, and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So, you know, I think the word you and I were batting around before this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we started starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area, you see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of super clouds, Dave calls them. And that's where you can innovate on a cloud, then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes one, we see a lot of examples of super clouds. Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean, it's real. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? I think it is. So for example, Caitlyn Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly part of the, it's rational, the rational of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the Apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. Okay, let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an XY graph you've seen in a number of times on breaking analysis. It plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X axis. It used to be called market share. I think that term was sort of off-putting to some people. But anyway, it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line, that's kind of rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right, GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. Okay, they're not necessarily building SuperCloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so and Kubernetes of course is not a company, but we put them in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for SuperCloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're very highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a SuperCloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the sort of public, the early part of its SuperCloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS. It connects its on-prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi Corp as an enabling infrastructure as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix, they're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy, but it's doing so in a way that we think is SuperCloud-like. Now, Veeam, we were just at Veeam on and this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than Dell in the space. We'll see, you know, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that, but Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allen's view on SuperCloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell. That's clearly where they're headed. Project Alpine was an early example from Dell Technologies World of SuperCloud in our view and HPE with GreenLake. You're finally beginning to talk about that cross-cloud experience. I think initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe, we'll be at HPE Discover later on this spring, actually end of June, and we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events, but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR dataset that's on the X axis. Now, the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy, which is not something that we commonly show, but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that has had better be building out a SuperCloud in our view where they're going to be left behind and I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. Okay, so we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is taking shape, SuperCloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view is the future of cloud, but there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke SuperClouds. Now, one SuperCloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor, one for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad, but to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source as well. And this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions changing the economics of the data center. The edge in fact could evolve on its own independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floyer sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allen. Floyer says he sees a requirement for distributed, stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful, ephemeral, stateful ephemeral, isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different but back to Floyer's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michela recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and R&D and CapEx and it was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders and while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research. Alex Meyerson is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex, we're all remote this week. Kristen, Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out. So thank you, Rob Hope is our editor-in-chief. Don't forget to check out ETR.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com if you want to get in touch or DM me at dvolante. You can always hit me up and or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. So thank you for watching this episode of Break Analysis. Stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time.