The growth of superclouds, abstraction layers above and across hyperscale infrastructure, is leading to the creation of firms specifically designed to provide such services.

One of these is Prosimo.io, a company that built its business around supporting a multicloud infrastructure strategy for delivering applications. It is a prime example of how the supercloud is filling a need for more than just a standard cup of coffee in the information technology ecosystem.

“Cloud providers give you the nuts and bolts, but what you need is a latte,” said Ramesh Prabagaran (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Prosimo. “Vendors like us build capabilities on top of the hyperscalers. They give you raw sugar and a few other things, such as five different flavors of milk. But you’ve got to make your own latte. That’s what we do.”

Prabagaran spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at Supercloud 22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the need for augmented capabilities, the rise of specialty superclouds, interest in network as code, and tracking application outcomes.

Multicloud complexity

Prosimo is addressing an issue that has become increasingly more common in the enterprise world. Companies rely on cloud computing to help build applications, migrate datasets and communicate with on-premises infrastructure. That generally works fine when operating in a single cloud, but complexity rises swiftly as more clouds are added.

“The problem happens when you go from your first five EC2 instances to 50, to 100, then you have a few other things that you need to care about,” Prabagaran said. “You need augmented capabilities. That’s where supercloud capabilities start to come in.”

Those augmented capabilities can cover a multitude of needs. Snowflake Inc. has built a highly successful business around its Data Cloud, providing data networks and data sharing to its diverse customer base. A case can be made that Snowflake was simple a forerunner. Specialty superclouds offering capabilities in applications, identity, data security and networking are coming, according to Prabagaran.

“Those are slowly starting to brew,” Prabagaran said. “Supercloud is not like a conglomeration of multiple capabilities. It can be for a specific use case, for a specific functionality. That’s what enterprise customers care about.”

Network as code

Enterprise customers also care about improving operational efficiency and reliability in the network. Applying infrastructure as code concepts to the full network domain is becoming more appealing within organizations, and superclouds are well-positioned to deliver on this network as code opportunity.

“Network as code has already started to take shape,” Prabagaran said. “Enough CIOs have yelled at their networking teams to say: ‘My app people can get this done three or four times a day, and you get this done once a week.’ So that has actually driven quite a bit of innovation.”

The networking dynamic within the cloud ecosystem is also beginning to evolve in a new direction, according to Prabagaran. The cloud structure itself, based around regionally located operations, is beginning to change the networking conversation.

“It gets interesting when a customer goes from a single cloud in a single region to multiple regions,” Prabagaran said. “The more spread-out the regions are, you have requirements around application performance, application experience. The networking conversation starts to become an experience and performance conversation. It’s an interesting shift that’s happening.”

As superclouds gain more interest within enterprise IT, a natural question arises: How does an organization know whether a supercloud is making a genuine difference?

“A good leading indicator is they have staffed the team so there is bunch of people who understand what it means to have cloud-native capabilities,” Prabagaran said. “You don’t care about how the pipelining works underneath the covers. What you care about are the kind of outcomes.”

Tracking and monitoring outcomes offers a key differentiation between the major cloud providers and nascent superclouds. By focusing on cloud service delivery, the hyperscalers have opened an opportunity for other firms to address visibility into specific application results.

“Is the application delivering on the experience? Is it being used the way it’s supposed to?” Prabagaran asked. “Those are not areas that the cloud providers are solely focused on. You don’t see an AWS or Azure dashboard that shows that particular thing for the entirety of the application.”

In July, Prosimo announced general availability of its integration with Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Cloud WAN service, a way that cloud customers can deploy the Prosimo platform on top of AWS. It was another example of how superclouds are becoming more of a presence inside the IT world.

“Whether you call it supercloud or whether you call it the ‘care abouts’ on top of cloud-native, they’re all the same,” Prabagaran said. “It’s going to be here to stay.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 22 event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE