Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

In just over ten years, CrowdStrike has become a leading independent security firm. It has more than $2B in annual recurring revenue, nearly 60% ARR growth, a roughly $40B market capitalization, very high retention and a path to $5B in revenue by mid-decade. The company has joined Palo Alto Networks as a gold standard pure play cyber firm.It has achieved this lofty status with an architecture that enables it to go beyond point product. Combine this with outstanding go to market, solid financial execution, some sharp acquisitions and an ever-increasing total available market and you have the formula for a great company.In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Fal.Con, CrowdStrike’s user conference, we take a deeper look into the company, its performance, its platform and customer survey data from our partner ETR.

The negative sentiment in tech stocks, caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models and more tepid forward guidance, is easily measured by public market valuations. And while there’s lots of talk about the impact on private companies, their cash runways and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn’t as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies accentuate the good and hide the bad. Real data, unless you’re an insider, is hard to find. In this Breaking Analysis we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. We do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we’ve not previously exposed in Breaking Analysis. It’s called the ETR Emerging Technology Survey and is packed with sentiment and performance data based on surveys of more than 1,000 CIOs & IT buyers covering more than 400 private companies. The survey will highlight metrics on the evaluation, adoption and churn rates for private companies and the mindshare they’re able to capture. We’ve invited back our colleague Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data we’re going to cover in this post.

While the precise direction of VMware’s future is unknown, given the planned Broadcom acquisition, one thing is clear; the subject of what Hock E. Tan plans will not be the main focus of the agenda at the upcoming VMware Explore event next week in San Francisco. We believe that despite any uncertainty, VMware will lay out for its customers what it sees as its future. And that future is multi-cloud or cross cloud services; what we would call supercloud. In this Breaking Analysis we drill into the latest ETR survey data on VMware. We’ll share with you the next iteration of the supercloud definition based on feedback from dozens of contributors. And we’ll give you our take on what to expect at VMware Explore next week. 

Black Hat 2022 was held in Las Vegas last week, at the same time as theCUBE’s supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce, where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cybersecurity and openly discusses its hard truths. It’s a conference attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they’ve discovered and of course by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. In this Breaking Analysis we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, videos, session talks, Dark Reading interviews and data from a recent Black Hat attendees survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa. We’ll also share data from ETR in a recent post discussing how Zscaler became the last line of defense for a manufacturing firm.We’ll end with a discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the Supercloud.

At our inaugural Supercloud22 event we sought community input to evolve the concept of a supercloud by iterating on the definition, the salient attributes and examples of what is and is not a supercloud. We asked several technologists including experts from VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, Confluent, Intuit, Cohesity and others to help test the supercloud definition, operational models, service models and principles. In this Breaking Analysis we unpack our discussions with these technology leaders and apply their input to iterate the definition of supercloud. We then go in-depth to examine Snowflake’s Data Cloud architecture as a leading example of supercloud.

The term supercloud is relatively new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years. Early last decade when NIST put forth its original definition of cloud computing, it said services had to be accessible over a public network…essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the conversation. A guy named Chuck Hollis, a CTO at EMC and prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. In that post he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud, sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner – what later became more broadly known as hybrid cloud.That vision, as we now know, really never materialized and we were left with multi-cloud…sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is, what Hollis put forth – i.e. the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience – is what supercloud is all about.

The rapid pace of cloud adoption has changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Specifically, the cloud is increasingly becoming the first line of cyber defense. As such, along with communicating to the board and creating a security-aware culture, the CISO must ensure that the shared responsibility model is being applied properly. The DevSecOps team has emerged as the critical link between strategy and execution, while audit becomes the “free safety” in the equation – i.e. the last line of defense. In this Breaking Analysis we share our puts and takes from AWS re:Inforce with an update on the latest hyperscale IaaS market shares; and insights from ETR survey data. We’ll also dig deeper into some technical aspects of AWS Nitro, a system we believe is one of AWS’ secret weapons, with a focus on confidential computing and what it means for the future of systems architecture. 

After a two year hiatus, AWS re:Inforce is back on as an in-person event in Boston next week. Like the all-star break in baseball, re:Inforce gives us an opportunity to evaluate the cybersecurity market overall, the state of cloud security and what AWS is up to in the sector. In this Breaking Analysis, we’ll share our view of what’s changed since our last cyber update in May, we’ll look at the macro environment, how it’s impacting cybersecurity plays in the market, what the ETR data tells us and what to expect at next week’s AWS re:Inforce.

Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure or fundamental business model. You don’t need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency and intensity. Fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It’s called, Amp it Up, Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency and Elevating Intensity. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was invited to interview Frank on stage about his book. I’ve read it several times and if you haven’t picked it up, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis we’ll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and unpublished nuances of Frank’s philosophy. You’ll hear directly from Slootman himself with excerpts from my one on one conversation with him. 

As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis we address the ten most frequently asked questions we get on supercloud.