If you’re already part of theCUBE community, you’ll probably be familiar with the term supercloud.

In late 2021, theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante (pictured) introduced it in a special report on “What’s Next in Cloud.” Shortly afterward, Vellante and David Floyer, chief technical officer and co-founder of SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon Inc., coauthored a report titled “Defining Supercloud” that gave a detailed explanation of the concepts behind the term and its significance to the evolution of enterprise technology.

On Aug. 9, theCUBE continues to explore the rise of supercloud with a special event: “Supercloud 22.” Following the format of “theCUBE on Cloud” event, which aired in January 2021, “Supercloud 22” will bring together thought leaders, industry analysts and technological experts for a series of in-depth discussions around technology, ecosystems, data, monetization and supercloud.

“The term ‘supercloud’ came up to connote a layer that floats above the hyperscale CapEx. It’s not IaaS, it’s not PaaS, it’s not SaaS; it’s the combination of those things on top of a new digital infrastructure,” Vellante explained in a discussion during the recent AWS Summit New York event.

Supercloud is a technical feasibility

As 2021 became 2022, the term supercloud started to gain traction (although not without some controversy). While theCUBE’s analysts traveled around the world attending major enterprise technology conferences, they asked enterprise technology thought leaders and engineers for their opinions on the concept.

Although the terminology used differed, a clear trend emerged: The information technology industry requires a structural transformation to cope with the complex issues caused by multicloud, and companies are building on top of hyperscaler platforms to create it.

“Due to the lack of standards, the cloud ecosystem is too large for any organization to master. Supercloud services and standards are the next iterations of multicloud,” Keith Townsend, principal at The CTO Advisor, told theCUBE.

Townsend and others still regard supercloud as a buzzword, but whether it is known as supercloud, metacloud, multicloud 2.0, distributed cloud or multicloud services, the underlying concept and the problems addressed are the same: to give customers the choice to operate how they want so they can take advantage of a variety of different cloud services without getting lost in a complexity tangle.

This is why in just over six months the industry has gone from “What is supercloud?” to “We’re building one.”

The clearest acknowledgment that supercloud had made the transition from concept to technological reality happened during an interview with Veeam Inc. Chief Technical Officer Danny Allan at VeeamON 2022. When Vellante asked if Allan thought supercloud was a practical technological concept, he responded: “It is technically feasible, and you can do it today.”

Veeam’s portable data format abstracts the cloud layer, allowing companies to move operating systems “anywhere,” according to Allan.

“I can move [the OS] from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to,” he said.

Use-case examples of supercloud are increasing

Veeam is only one of many companies that are in the process of building a supercloud or seriously considering the concept. Snowflake Inc. is currently leading the race to offer supercloud abstraction to its customers, according to Vellante. The defining indicator of Snowflake’s progress is that the company has launched an application development platform (a super-PaaS) that allows Snowflake customers to build applications on top of its Data Cloud. Although Snowflake started solely based on Amazon Web Services, it has expanded out to become a multicloud platform that supports distributed data at scale.

Other examples that theCUBE’s industry analysts view as nascent examples of supercloud include the connection of Oracle Corp.’s Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft’s Azure cloud, Dell Technologies Inc.’s Project Alpine, and the evolution of HPE GreenLake.

Describing how Dell is building “multicloud by design,” Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer of Dell, told theCUBE: “You can create a common storage pool, a fabric if you will, that allows you to choose where you’re going to process your data and store it. And, more importantly, give your teams the same … tools, the same skill sets, the ability to operate on-premise or in the public clouds.”

The list of companies working on some form of supercloud can be extended to include projects underway at VMware, Skyhigh Security, Hashicorp and others. Representatives from these companies, along with Snowflake, Oracle, Aviatrix, Couchbase, Alteryx, Atlassian, Intuit and others with a stake in the supercloud game will be joining theCUBE’s industry analysts for “Supercloud 22” event.

Supercloud will define a new era in enterprise technology

TheCUBE’s industry analysts aren’t the only ones reporting the emergence of a new class of cloud infrastructure. Industry influencer Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist at cybersecurity company F5 Inc., recently wrote an article supporting the idea of supercloud as a fix to the current multicloud complexity chaos.

“Whether we call it supercloud or distributed cloud, it serves the same need: simplifying the reality of operating in a multicloud world and making it possible to realize the aspirational capabilities of cloud: seamless migration, consistent security and optimal performance,” MacVittie said.

MacVittie is one of several thought leaders joining theCUBE for “Supercloud 22” event. Also providing independent analysis will be Greylock partner and “Castles in the Cloud” author Jerry Chen, technology analyst Maribel Lopez, and regular CUBE contributors Sanjeev Mohan of Sanjmo and Keith Townsend of The CTO Advisor.

The term supercloud was originally mentioned in 2016 in a Cornell University study that included a demo of how a supercloud could allow content to be shared between cloud platforms and regions across the world and provided the definition: “Supercloud is a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers.”

The Matrix, a digital era architecture concept predicted by then International Data Corp. Senior VP David Moschella in 1987, was the first vision of what is being realized as supercloud, according to Vellante. Moschella expanded on the idea of ‘The Matrix’ in his 2018 book “Seeing Digital,” positing that a new digital platform of services was emerging built on top of the internet, hyperscale clouds. and other intelligent technologies that would define the next era of computing.

“Pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing … building superclouds,” Vellante stated in a recent Breaking Analysis column. “Many that look a lot like Moschella’s Matrix with machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and blockchains and virtual reality and gaming … all enabled by the internet and hyperscale clouds.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 22 event on August 9. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 22 event, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

During the “Supercloud 22” event, theCUBE analysts will talk with Kit Colbert, chief technology  officer of VMware; Adrian Cockcroft, former technology and strategy advisor at Netflix and AWS; Vittorio Viarengo, vice president of cross-cloud services at VMware; Benoit Dageville, co-founder and president of products at Snowflake; Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks; and Keith Townsend, principal at The CTO Advisor.

Stay tuned for a complete list of expert guests, and find out what you can expect from theCUBE’s coverage of Supercloud 22 in the sneak peek preview video below:

Photo: SiliconANGLE