As organizations build abstraction layers to create a more consistent cross-cloud experience and data governance, it’s impossible to ignore the major enterprises that are also following this path.

These include firms such as Walmart Inc., which has built a massive data repository that spans the retail giant’s global operations, and TransUnion LLC, a financial services business which manages a corpus of information for 1 billion consumers across 30 countries. Executives from both companies appeared on theCUBE’s Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform event on Tuesday.

“It’s interesting to me when you hear companies like Walmart and companies like TransUnion talk about how they’ve essentially built an abstraction layer to hide the underlying complexity of all these clouds and create a developer experience that’s consistent across those clouds, irrespective of the physical location,” said theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante (pictured, right). “To really take advantage of artificial intelligence, it needs supercloud — that’s going to be one of the superpowers.”

Vellante spoke during the closing session for the first day of the event. He was joined by theCUBE Research’s John Furrier (second form left), Savannah Peterson (second from right) and Rob Strechay (left), and they discussed key takeaways from day one at the Supercloud 7 event.

Need for managing horizontally scalable data

Two of the major supercloud players are Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc., data management companies whose platforms have fueled innovation around governance and data security in a multicloud world.

The CUBE analysts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson discuss data governance.

“We saw that in order to do multiple clouds or multiple environments, which is also called distributed computing … data has got to be horizontally scalable, that’s what we saw early on,” Furrier said. “But with the rise of Snowflake’s dominance early on when they started moving to other clouds, we can see the dots connecting. And then Databricks rose out.”

The Supercloud 7 event coincided with the release of new survey data from Enterprise Technology Research and SiliconANGLE. The latest survey results showed that more than 80% of respondents were using on-prem/hybrid data platforms such as MySQL or Mongo DB. Several executives during the first day of Supercloud 7 described the importance of leveraging multiple platforms at scale.

“That actually plays into the data that we collected,” Strechay noted. “How many are using Mongo and how many are using others? When you start to look at how all of these pieces really come together, it’s going to be a journey.”

Another consistent theme during the day’s discussion centered on leveraging open source and building platforms that could facilitate developer needs, while avoiding the pitfalls of overly complex systems.

“I love that a big backbone of what we talked about today was the developer experience,” Peterson said. “People are going to want it to be less complex, they’re going to want it to be easier, they’re going to want it to fit in. If smaller teams can do more, if some of this open-source stuff comes together, it’s going to be whoever optimized this experience for developers.”

Rapid innovation and disruption

Were there any surprises for theCUBE’s analysts that emerged from the event’s first day?

“I was surprised with Dipti Borkar from Microsoft and how much progress Microsoft has made on some of their data,” Furrier said. “They are well beyond where I thought they were in open data. [CEO] Satya Nadella has open source in his veins.”

TheCUBE also interviewed Jeff Denworth, co-founder of Vast Data Inc., whose company made its mark solving large storage problems and supporting advanced AI training.

“It was Jeff Denworth’s comment, ‘We tried very hard not to be disruptive,’” Vellante recalled. “I was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, you’re totally disruptive to the competitive landscape.’ But he meant disruption to the processes, to the experience of the customer. That was striking.”

TheCUBE’s Supercloud 8 event will be announced at a later date, yet the research analyst team is already forming expectations for what will be discussed, with AI and the rise of intelligent software agents a likely focus.

“I think people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around generative AI, and now we’re throwing agents at them,” Strechay said. “The whole taxonomy of this is to make it simpler because right now there’s a lot of confusion.”

What emerged from the first day of interviews during Supercloud 7 was that the pace of innovation has been moving fast. This will be one of the key trends to watch for Supercloud 8 as well, according to Peterson.

“That adoption curve is really interesting,” she said. “Part of our job here is market education as well as understanding what is going on. I’m curious to see for Supercloud 8 how much that’s changed. There’s a real sense of urgency right now in the market.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE