>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>>Oh, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. I'm John is the Cuba, David Nicholson, our cloud host analyst, and it's exciting to be back in person in event. So we're back. It's been two years with the cube con and Linux foundation. So scrape, it was a hybrid event and we have a great guest here, Cuban London, Nick Dirk, and CT field CTO of harness and harness.io. The URL love the.io. Good to see you. >>Thank you guys for having me on. I genuinely appreciate >>It. Thanks for coming on. You were a part of our AWS startup showcase, which you guys were featured as a fast growing mature company, uh, as cloud scales, you guys have been doing extremely well. So congratulations. But now we're in reality now, right? So, okay. Cloud native has kind of like, okay, we don't have to sell it anymore. People buying into it. Um, and now operationalizing it with cloud operations, which means you're running stuff, applications and infrastructure is code and it costs money. Yeah. Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, repatriated from the cloud. So there's a lot of, there's some cost conversations starting to happen. This is what you guys are in the middle of. >>Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is when you think about it today, we want to shift left. When you want to empower all the engineers, we want to empower people. We're not giving them the data they need, right. They get a call from the CFO 30 days later, as opposed to actually being able to look at what change I did and how it actually affected. And this is what we're bringing in. Allowing people to have is now really empowering. So throughout the whole software delivery life cycle from CGI continuous integration, continuous delivery feature flagging, and even bringing cost modeling and in cloud cost management. And even then being able to shut down, shut down the services that you're not using, how much of that is waste. We talk about it. Every single cloud conference it's how much is waste. And so being able to actually turn those on, use those accordingly and then take advantage of even the cheapest instances when you should. That's really what >>It's so funny. People almost trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the cloud business because they're so focused on innovation that they think, okay, we've got to just innovate at all costs, but at some point you can make it productive for the developers in process in the pipeline to actually manage that. >>That's exactly it. I mean, if you think about it to me in order to breach state continuous delivery, we have to automate everything. Right. But that doesn't mean stop at just delivering, you know, to production. That means to customer, which means we've got to make them happy, but then ultimately all of those resources in dev and QA and staging and UAT, we've sticker those as well. And if we're not being mindful of it, the costs are astronomical, right. And we've seen it time and time again with every company you see, you've seen every article about how they've blown through all their budgets. So bring it to the people that can affect change. That's really the difference, making it visible, looking at it. In-depth not just at the cloud level and all the spend there, but also even at the, uh, thinking about it, the Kubernetes level down to the containers, the pods and understanding where are the resources even inside of the clusters and bringing that as an aggregate, not just for visibility and, and giving recommendations, but now more importantly, because part of a pipeline start taking action. That's where it's interesting. It's not just about being able to see it and understand it and hope, right? Hope is not a strategy acting upon it is what makes it valuable. And that's part of the automate everything. >>Yeah. We'll let that at the Dawn of the age of DevOps, uh, there was a huge incentive for a developer just to get their job done, to seize control of infrastructure, the idea of infrastructure as code, you know, and it's, it's, you know, w when it was being born, it's a fantastic, I've always wondered though, you know, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of that responsibility? So we've got responsibility from a compliance and security perspective and of course cost. So, so where do we, where do we go from here, I guess is the question. Yeah. So >>When we look at building this all together, I think when we think about software delivery, everybody wants to go fast. We start with velocity, right? Everybody says, that's where I want to go. And to your point with governance compliance, the next roadblock to hit is weight. In order to go fast, I have to do it appropriately. I've got governing bodies that tell me how this has to work. And that becomes a challenge. >>It slows it down too. It doesn't, I mean, basically people are getting pissed off, right? This is, this general sentiment is, is that developers are moving fast with their code. And then they have to stop. Compliance has to give the green light sometimes days, correct? Uh, it used to be weeks now. It's days, it's still unacceptable. So there's like this always been that tension to the security groups or say it, or finance was like slow down and they actually want to go faster. So that has to be policy-based something. Yep. This is the future. What is your take on that? >>Take on, this is pretty simple. When everybody talks about people, process and technology, it's kind of bogus, right? It's all about confidence. If you're confident that your developers can deploy appropriately and they're not going to do something wrong, you'll let them to play all the time. Well, that requires process. But if you have tooling that literally guarantees your governance, make sure that at no point in time, can any of your developers actually do something wrong. Now you have, >>That's the key. That's the key. That's the key because you're giving them a policy-based guardrails to execute in their programs >>And that's it. So now you can free up all those pieces. So all those bottlenecks, all those waiting all those time, and this is how all of our customers, they move from, you know, change advisory boards that approve deployments. >>Can you give us some, give us some, give us some, uh, customer anecdotal examples of this inaction and kind of the love letters you get, or, or the customer you take us through a use case of how it all. >>So this is one of my favorites. So NCR national cash register. If you slide a credit card at like a Chick-fil-A or a Safeway, right? Um, traditional technology. But what was interesting is they went from doing PCI audit, which would take seven days to go to a PCI audit right now with harness, because, >>And by the way, when you and the seventh, six day, the things that you did on day one change. >>Exactly, exactly. And so now, because of using harness and everything's audited, and all the changes are, are controlled to make sure that developers again, can only do what they're allowed. They only get to broadcast two per production. If they've met all their security requirements, all their compliance, permits, all their quality checks. Now, because of that, they literally gave a re read only view of harness to their auditor. And in three hours it was over. And it's because now we're that evidence file from code commit through to production. Yeah. It's there for point of sale compliant. >>So what is the benefits to them? What's the result saves them time, saves the money. What's the good, the free up more times. I'll see the chops it down. That's the key. >>Yeah. It's actually something we didn't build in like our ROI calculators, which was, we talked to their engineers and we gave them their nights and their weekends back, which I thought was amazing. But Thursday night, when we're doing that deploy, they don't have to be up. Harness is actually managing and understanding, using machine learning to understand what normal looks like. So they don't have to, they don't have to sit and look at the knock or sit in the war room and eat the free pizza. Yeah. Right. And then when those things break, same concept rates aren't as good. So >>I got to ask you, I got you here. You know, as the software development delivery lifecycle is radically being overhauled right now, which people generally agree that that's the case, the old models are, are different. How do you see your vision around AI and automation playing into this? Because you could say, okay, we're going to have different kinds of coding styles. This batch has got an AI block here. It's very Lego block. Like yep. Okay. Services and higher level services in the cloud. What's your reaction to how this impacts automation and >>Sure. So throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job as Guinea dev ops person. If they love babysitting deployments, they don't harness handles that for them, ask your engineers that they love sitting there waiting for their tests to run. Every time they build, they go get coffee, right. Because we're waiting for all of our tests to run. Y yeah. Right. The reality >>Is sometimes they have to wait days and >>That's it. But like, if I change the gas cap on, uh, on your car, would you expect me to check every light switch and every electronic piece? No. Well, why do we do that with code? And so our AI, our ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's not to remove people's jobs. It's actually to make their jobs much better. >>How do you guys feed the data? What's the training algorithm for that? How does that work? Yeah, >>Actually, it's interesting. A lot of people think it's going to take a ton of time to figure this out. The good news is we start seeing this on the second deployment. On the second bill, we have to have a baseline of what good looks like, and that's where it starts. And it goes from there. And by the way, this isn't a lot of people say AI, and this AML, I teach a class on this because ML is not standard deviation. It's not some checks. So we use a massive amount of machine learning, but we have neural networks to think about things like engineers do. Like if we looked at a log and I saw the same log with two different user IDs, you and I would know, well, it's the same thing. It's just different users, but machine learning models. Don't so we've got to build neural networks to actually think like humans. So that, >>So that's the whole expectation maximization kind of concept of people talk about, >>Well, and that's it because at the end of the day, we're like I said, I'm not trying to take people's jobs. I want to meet. >>Yeah. You want to do the crap work out of the way. And I had to do other redundant, heavy lifting that they have to do every single time we use the cloud way. We've >>Built mechanical muscle in, in the early 19 hundreds. Right. And it made everyone's jobs easier, allowed them to do more with their time. That's exactly what we're doing here. >>I mean, we've seen the big old guys in the industry trying to evolve. You got the hot startups coming out. So you got, you know, adapt or die as classic thing. We've been saying for many years, David on the cube, you know that. So it's like, this is a moment of truth. We're going to see who comes out the other side. How do you, Nick, what would you be your, your kind of guess of when that other side is, when are we gonna know the winners and the losers truly in the sense of where we are now? >>So I think what I've found is that in this space specifically, there's a constant shift and this is something with software. And the problem is, is that we see them come in ebbs and flows, right. And very few times are there businesses that actually carry the model? And what you find is that when they focus on one specific problem, it solves it. Now, if I was working on VMs a few years ago, great, but now we're, we're here at coop con, right? And that's because it's eaten, uh, that side of the world. And so I think it's the companies that can actually grow the test of time and continue to expand to where the problems are. Right. And that's one of the things that I traditionally think about harness and we've done it. We cover our customers where they were, I think the old mainframes, if you had to, where they were, where they are at their traditional, their VM. >>I mean, if you think about it, Nick, it's one of those things where it's like, that's such a common sense way to look at it evolves with a problem. So I ride the right with tech ways. But if you think about the high order bit, here is just applications. We ended the day. Companies have applications that they want to write modern. The applications of their business is going to be codified so that you just work backwards from there. Then you say, okay, what is the infrastructure as code working for me? That's an ethos of dev ops. And that's where we're at. So that's why I think that the cloud need is kind of one already, but we still have the edge devices, more complexity. This is a huge next level conversation at one point is that we just put a hard and top on the complexity. When is that coming? Because the developers are clear. They want to go fast. They want to go shift left and have all that data, get the right analytics, the telemetry and the AI. But it's too complicated still. That is a big problem. >>It's too complicated. You ask for a full-stack developer to also know infrastructure, to also know edge computing. Like it's impossible, right? And this is where tooling helps, right? Because if you can actually parameterize that and make it to the engineers and have to care, they can do what they're best at. Hey, I'm great at turning code in artifact, let them do that and have tooling take care of the rest. This is where our goal is. Again, allow people >>We'll do what they love. And this is kind of the new roles that are changing. What SRE has done. Everyone talks about the SRE and some states just as he had dev ops guy, but it's not just that there's also, uh, different roles emerging. It's, it's an architectural game. At this point, we would say, >>I'd say a hundred percent. And this is where the decisions that you make on are architecturally. If you don't know how to then roll them out, this is what we've seen. Time and time again, you go to these large companies, I've got these great architectures on planning four years later, we haven't reached it because to that point process, >>The process killed them four >>Different new tools throughout the process. Well, yeah. >>So when do we hit peak Kubernetes peak >>Kubernetes? I think we have a bit to go in and I'm excited about the networking space and really what we're doing there and, and bringing that holistic portion of the network, like when Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things, uh, to truly come to it. And I think there's a vast space in networking. Um, and, and so I think in the next few years, we're going to see this, you know, turn into that a hundred percent utilized across the board. This will be that where everyone's workloads continue to exist. Um, somewhat like VMs we're in >>And, and, and no, no fear of developers as code in the very near future. You're talking about automating the mundane. Correct. Uh, there have been stories recently about the three-day workweek, you know, as a, as a fan of, um, utopian science fiction, myself, as opposed to dystopian. Absolutely. I think that, you know, technology does have the opportunity to lift all boats and, uh, and it's, it's not nothing to be afraid of. You know, the fact that I put my dishes in the dishwasher and they run by themselves for three hours. It's a good thing. It's a great thing. >>I don't need to deal with that. Yeah, I agree. No, I think that's, and that's what I said in the beginning. Right. That's really where we can start empowering people. So allow them to do what they're good at and do what they're best at. And if you look at why do people quit? We don't have to go so hard to find. Yeah. Why? Because they're secondary to babysit and implement and they're told everywhere they go, they're not going to have to >>That's the line. And that's all right. We got a break, but it's great insight to have you on the Q one final question for you. Um, I got to ask about the whole data as code something that I've been riffing on for a bunch of years now. And as infrastructures could we get that, but data is now the resource everyone needs, and everyone's trying to, okay, I have the control plane for this and that, but ultimately data cannot be siloed. This is a critical architectural element. How does that get resolved in the land of the competitive advantage and lock in and whatnot? What's your take on that? >>So data's an interesting one because it has, it has gravity and this is the problem. And as we move, as I think you guys know, as you move to the edge as remove, move it places there's insights to be taken at the edge there's insights to be taken as it moves through. And I think what you'll see honestly, going forward is you'll see compute done differently to your point. It needs to be aggregated. It needs to be able to be used together, but I think you'll see people computing it on its way through it. So now even in transport, you'll start seeing insights gained in real time before you can have the larger insights. And I see that happening more and more. Um, and I think ultimately we just want to empower that >>Nick, great to have you on CTO of field CTO of harness and harness.io is a URL. Check it out. Thanks for the insight. Thank you so much. Great comments. Appreciate it. Natural cube analysts right here, Nick, of course, we've got our, our analysts right here, David Nicholson. You're good on your own. I'm John for a, you know, we have the host. Thanks for watching. Stay with two more days of coverage. We'll be back after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering ESCAPE/19. >> Everyone, welcome to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the ESCAPE Conference 19. This is the inaugural event for multicloud, I think it's the first industry event for, really talking about multicloud and the impact to enterprises and public cloud. My next guest is Steve Mullaney, President and CEO of Aviatrix, storied career in tech, been there done that, seen many waves of innovation. Nicira, Palo Alto Networks, and now Aviatrix. You retired for a while, welcome back! >> I did, yeah, five years, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> It's nice to have you on because I think you have a good perspective on the multicloud because you've been in the industry since the 80s. We've both been broke in at the same time. And we've seen the waves. >> Oh, yeah. >> This wave is bigger than, I think, most of the other waves combined because it brings together so many things, infrastructure, software, cloud scale, and a new modern application environment. And then you complicate everything by throwing IoT out there, edges being pushed to their boundaries, securities equations changed, all this is going on right now, all at the same time. >> No, and that's why I was basically retired for five years, and I was at Nicira, we got bought by VMware, I stayed there for a couple years, and I just said, "Okay, that's it!" I've had a good career and I'm done. And about a year ago, the world changed. And it felt like on a Tuesday morning, I noticed enterprises really, we'd been talking about cloud for 12 years. And five years ago they said, "We're coming in, we're going to do it," but they didn't really mean it. But about a year ago, all in the same day, every enterprise said, "No, now we actually mean it." And I don't know why, I don't know if it was just people retired or just five years of talking about it, they all decided, we're comin' in, and enterprises all moved together. And this wave, as you said, is bigger than, I was around in 1992, in the early 90s, in the movement from mainframe to client server. This is 10 times bigger than that. And more importantly, it's going to happen 10,000 times faster. Because (fingers tapping). What's that? I just deployed 62 data centers around the world. Because if I can leverage the greatest infrastructure built, basic infrastructure of the hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, you name it. It's unbelievable the velocity at which you can now start deploying. >> Steve, I think you're onto something big here, and this is why I'm here at this event and why I'm excited, that a lot of the industry thought leaders and practitioners and leaders are doing this event. Small events, inaugural, but I think it has a lot of links. Because there's a lot of tell signs that I like to look at, one is cloud. I've been covering Amazon eight years now, with theCUBE, I've known AWS since it started, and I've done many startups in its launch using AWS. But I've had many conversations with Andy Jassy, one on ones, privately, I got an exclusive coming up for re:Invent with him. I've gotten to know him. It started out, "Everyone's moving to the cloud. "Every data center's not going to exist." And then, you know-- >> Oh, maybe not, yeah, yeah. >> Maybe not, we'll do an output. So I challenged him last year, I said, "Andy, come on, dude, like you were saying like a year ago that." >> Steve: Yeah, it's all AWS or nothing. >> And he said, "John, look I'm not, "I just listen to the customers." And I interviewed him when he did the VMware deal. And he's very customer focused. And when they make these moves with outpost, and I think it's going to be a hybrid message this year at re:Invent, you know it's real. >> Steve: Oh, yeah. >> I think this validates your point, so I got to ask you, what specifically do you see the formula being for multicloud, because certainly everyone's recognized that there's a huge benefit for AWS. But from a scale standpoint, so why not use that? What's going on on the Enterprise on-premise that's making this new thing work? >> I think it all starts with architecture, like anything else. I think right now, enterprises have said, "Okay, we've burned a boat, right? "Now, we're not going to get rid of our data centers, "but in terms of our strategic investment, "we are moving into the cloud. "We are going to leverage "the infrastructure of the hyperscalers. "And whether that is just one hyperscaler, or multiple." And I have not met an enterprise who thinks there only going to be one, right, every single one of them. Now, I don't think they're moving workloads across, I don't think that. I think they see that, I'm going to use Google for AI, I'm going to use AWS because it started there. I'm going to use Azure, for Office 365, and other different things, and everything in infrastructure is always multi. It's never homogeneous, right, it's always that. So I think is going to happen, and I think what people are begging for right now, is, I want to build an architecture that gives me the optionality to be able to deliver a common set of services whether I'm on AWS or multiple clouds. And I want them to be my services and I don't want to have understand the low level abstractions and constructs of each of those clouds, because their all different. One's metric, one's U.S., one's some other weird thing. And I don't have the time, the people, or the resources to be able to do that. Give me a common set of services, that are my services, that I can deploy and abstract away the details of those public clouds. >> Yeah, it's an interesting point there, in fact, I called BS on multicloud last year when it started to kind of rear it's head, I'm like, "Come on, multicloud is bullshit." And I said that on theCUBE. And here's what I meant. Multicloud as an operating model is directionally correct, but the architecture hasn't shown where there's true multicloud. Now, the fact of the matter is, people have Amazon, people have Office and Office 365, that's technically two clouds, >> They're siloed, yeah. >> If they give us Google, that's three clouds. >> I use two or three clouds. >> So, if he have three clouds, I guess they have multiple clouds. But you bring up an interesting point, and going back as a student of the history of tech industry, multi-vendor has been a big deal. >> It is a big deal. >> And like you said, there will be a multi-vendor world, that will happen. The question is how. How do you guys see it happening? >> Well I think what's-- >> Your company is attacking this Aviatrix. >> What's interesting is, so now you think about from a customer perspective which, I do the same thing, same thing with AWS. It's always outside in. Okay, I'm thinking as a enterprise IT person. I'm making the move. Do you believe that your basic infrastructure will lever the hyperscalers, or will you build an on-prem? Everyone says, "I believe that's the way I'm going to go." Great, how do I do that? So, I'm a IT architect, who do I go to to help me? Do I go to CISCO? No. The most shocking thing for me, of the six months I've been at Aviatrix, is that word's never used. It's like it was DEC or IBM in the conversation, when you were talking about client-server, no, why would you? CISCO, Juniper, Arista, any of the networking people, not even in the conversation. VMware, not really in the conversation. So, I don't have any incumbent vendor that I can go to that I used to go to. >> Why aren't they in the conversation? 'Cause of the commodity, they've been extracted away? >> I think it's just because it's the innovation of dilemma. Right, once you're selling a lot of stuff into on-prem, to then go and say, I mean you look at Palo Alto Networks, they're trying to make that transition. Acquiring a bunch of companies, VMware acquiring a bunch of companies. Why are they doing that? Because they know, I got to get off on-prem, everything's going in the cloud. >> So it's a legacy. >> It's a legacy thing, and I think what happens is, there is only one reason, and one reason only, an enterprise customer is not using Aviatrix. 'Cause they never heard of us. That's why, that's the only reason. Once they hear about what they're doing, my God. >> Well, give the plug, talk about the company, what do you guys do-- >> So we deliver, I mean it sounds like I made it up for this conference, but actually this conference was perfect for this. It's networking and security services for the multicloud enterprise. And we're building an architecture, that people can deploy, that will give them this common architecture across all the different clouds. So whether you're just using one cloud or multiple, it doesn't matter, it's the same set of security and networking services. And we do that by embracing and extending the basic constructs that AWS, Google, Azure, and Oracle, and all the other clouds will give you, and to deliver that real enterprise class. Because the other thing we've found is, everyone thinks that the cloud gives you everything and anything you will ever need from networking and security. Let's say AWS, they're going to do everything I need. What the enterprises are figuring out, is once they start going in, what they realize is, it's created for the low-level common basic constructs. And the enterprise starts at, well, I need these BGP feature because guess what, the data center is not going away. And I need more than a hundred route limitations, and I need, all of a sudden there's fifty different limitations AWS will give me. Well, they didn't talk about that! Well, of course they're not going to talk about that. They are just going to go check, check, check, we solve all your problems. As enterprises now move in, with mission critical applications, they're realizing, I need the same level of networking and security services that I had on-prem. I can't get that with the native constructs. So where do I go? That's what we do, so we fill in, we embrace what we can of those constructs, we fill in holes where there are fill in holes. And then we give you the mechanism to be able to orchestrate that across the global network. >> So you operationalize the hyperscale clouds for enterprise, >> Yes. >> that's basically what you do. >> Steve: Exactly, for the enterprise. >> Yeah, exactly. >> On the level that they need. >> So you get the benefits of the cloud, but all those nuances under the cover details like networking and other features you abstract that away and provide an operating model for enterprise compliments. >> And the beautiful thing about it is the velocity, at which we can, we're over the top, effectively over the top. We're integrated into the Cloud Suite, understand what cloud native, we understand all the constructs of accounts, and all the things we need to do. But what we expose to the customer, to the enterprise, is a set of over-the-top services that just work. >> Okay Steve, so I got to ask you, since we are at The Multi-Cloud Conference. What is multicloud, I mean how do you define it, you laid out a pretty compelling architecture of what needs are, levers in the cloud, and on-prem is what Aviatrix does. But what is the definition, how should people understand what is multicloud? >> I think for us, for networking and security in that base, so we're basic infrastructure. We get out there first, right? So, if you're going to build a city, you don't start putting people there first the first thing, if you do it right, is you get sewers, you get electricity, gas, roads, all that. Networking and security, infrastructure, is basic infrastructure goes out first. And you want to create an architecture that's going to live with you for twenty years. You don't want to have to rip up the roads and put the sewers in later. And that architecture needs to be multicloud because, even though you think maybe, most of our customers are 90% AWS right now. But every single one of them say, "But I'm moving to Azure, I'm moving to Google, "I've got retail customers that won't allow me "to put my infrastructure on AWS." Or, "I have machine learning, AI type apps on Google." They all say that same thing. But what they all then say to us, is, "You're going to be the mechanism "upon which I'm going to be able to deploy "this common set of services." So they don't need to know that. >> All right, give an example of a customer you guys have, name a name, we had a customer on stage here-- >> Steve: So, Jefferies. >> John: They did this for a use case. >> Yeah so, Jefferies. Financial Services Institution, lots of requirements, Mark Leon Soon is going to be on stage with me tomorrow. We started working with them about nine months ago. Exactly the same thing, they said, "Okay, you know what? "We need to start moving to the cloud, "we've got to start leveraging the cloud. "But, it's too complicated, right? "Even AWS, says 'Go Build.' "I don't want to go build, I want to consume services. "But they don't have all the service that I needed, "they're too low a level. "They're very high function, high enterprise requirements." So they start using us to orchestrate things, to provide transit networking, to provide egress filtering out to the Internet, we have high performance encryption, AWS will only offer it one gig. We can offer it to 10, 20, 30, 40 gig. So they start deploying, they start realizing all the things we do. Then they go and say, "I want to bring my Palo Alto Networks firewall "into the cloud." When you start looking at that, 'cause then guess what? All my policies, I want the same level that I have on-prem when I'm in the cloud. If I go try to bring in my VM series into AWS the construct that AWS give you, they cause you limitations in performance, in visibility, It's integration hassles, there's performance, sustainability, visibility issues, they force you to use SNAT. And there's all these issues, and they go, "Oh my God, this is a pain in the ass." We solved all that for them. We basically cloudify the VM series for them, so all those limitations go away. So that's just another use case that they use. Now they start looking, and they say, "Okay, now I'm going to start extending into other clouds and I want to use you as the common frame point, the common pane of glass. >> Well Steve, good luck in your venture, you're back in the saddle again. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Another ride here, you feel good about it? >> This is going to be the best, the biggest that I've been, and I was at Palo Alto Networks and VMware Nicira. And this one's going to be bigger than both of those. >> What's your vision for where this is going to be for you, where do you see the company in a few years, what are some of the outcomes you expect to happen? >> Our opportunity, and I look at it as, someone's going to take this opportunity, and the reason I came back is, why not us, someone's going to take it. And the opportunity, honestly, is to become, effectively, what Cisco was in the early 90's. To define the architecture, the networking and the security infrastructure architecture for enterprise customers. They are begging for that right now, that's our opportunity. >> Cloud Interoperability. >> Interoperability, yeah. And so there's so many things that we need to go and do. When you look at also the thing that people are going to say, the operations. So many people think, I want it the same as it was on-prem. I think with the cloud, and across multicloud you can do it right with us, and actually better. Because the visibility that you get is more, than what you get on-prem. >> Well, and the thing that's interesting that's different about this new world that we're talking about is that there is going to be constant improvements in new things which means that the functionality game is going to increase, which means the agility is even more important because the apps are going to have more things to do. >> Yeah. I mean in the end, why do you want to go to cloud? I want to go to cloud 'cause I want it to be self-service and I want agility. I want my developers, I want everybody to be able to do things quicker because all of the sudden they say, "Let's go roll this out", and you want to be able to do it. >> Well, good luck on the new venture, Aviatrix, check 'em out, hot multicloud startup, growing, how many people do you have, put the plug in, >> 100. >> what are you guys looking for, are you hiring, give me a quick plug. >> We just hired a new VP at World Wide Sales, James Winebrenner, who was Viptela CEO, VP Sales in Cisco, hiring a tremendous amount of sales guys right now, we're closing on a $40 million Series C round next week, and we're hiring a lot of people. >> Good luck, we'll be following you Steve, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Again, multicloud, this is a shift that's happening, multicloud is just another word for multi-vendor, in a new modern era, this is what it has been in the technology industry, but a whole new world. This is theCUBE coverage here in New York City, ESCAPE/19, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from New York. It's the Q covering Escape. 19. >>Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural multi cloud conference called Escape, where in New York City was staying in New York, were not escaping from New York were in New York. It's all about multi Cloud, and we're here. Lisa Marie Nancy, developer advocate for Port Works, and Eric Conn, vice president of Products Works. Welcome back. Q. >>Thank you, John. Good to see >>you guys. So, um, whenever the first inaugural of anything, we want to get into it and find out why. Multi clouds certainly been kicked around. People have multiple clouds, but is there really multi clouding going on? So this seems to be the theme here about setting the foundation, architecture and data of the two kind of consistent themes. What shared guys take Eric, What's your take on this multi cloud trend? Yeah, >>I think it's something we've all been actively watching for a couple years, and suddenly it is becoming the thing right? So every we just had ah, customer event back in Europe last week, and every customer there is already running multi cloud. It's always something on their consideration. So there's definitely it's not just a discussion topic. It's now becoming a practical reality. So this event's been perfect because it's both the sense of what are people doing, What are they trying to achieve and also the business sense. So it's definitely something that is not necessarily mainstream, but it's becoming much more how they're thinking about building all their applications. Going forward, >>you know, you have almost two camps in the world. Want to get your thoughts on this guy's Because, like you have cloud native and people that are cloud native, they love it. They born the cloud that get it. Everything's cracking along. The developers air on Micro Service's They're agile train with their own micro service's. Then you got the hybrid I t. Trying to be hybrid developer, right? So you kind of have to markets coming together. So to me, I see multi cloud as kind of a combination of old legacy Data center types of I t with cloud native, not just ops and dead. But how about like trying to build developer teams inside enterprises? This seems to be a big trend, and multi club fits into that because now the reality is that I got azure. I got Amazon. Well, let's take a step back and think about the architecture. What's the foundation? So that to me, is more my opinion. But I want to get your thoughts and reactions that because if it's true, that means some new thinking has to come around around. What's the architecture? What are you trying to do? What's the workloads behavior outcome look like? What's the work flows? So there's a whole nother set of conversations that happened. >>I agree. I think the thing that the fight out there right now that we want to make mainstream is that it's a platform choice, and that's the best way to go forward. So it's still an active debate. But the idea could be I want to do multi club, but I'm gonna lock myself into the Cloud Service is if that's the intent or that's the design architecture pattern. You're really not gonna achieve the goals we all set out to do right, So in some ways we have to design ourselves or have the architecture that will let us achieve the business schools that were really going for and that really means from our perspective or from a port works perspective. There's a platform team. That platform team should run all the applications and do so in a multi cloud first design pattern. And so from that perspective, that's what we're doing from a data plan perspective. And that's what we do with Kubernetes etcetera. So from that idea going forward, what we're seeing is that customers do want to build a platform team, have that as the architecture pattern, and that's what we think is going to be the winning strategy. >>Thank you. Also, when you have the definition of cod you have to incorporate, just like with hybrid I t the legacy applications. And we saw that you throughout the years those crucial applications, as we call them People don't always want them to refer to his legacy. But those are crucial applications, and our customers were definitely thinking about how we're gonna run those and where is the right places it on Prem. We're seeing that a lot too. So I think when we talk about multi cloud, we also talk about what What is in your legacy? What is it? Yeah, I >>like I mean I use legacy. I think it's a great word because I think it really puts nail in the coffin of that old way because remember, if you think about some of the large enterprises, these legacy applications, they've been optimized for hardware and optimize their full stack. They've been build up from the ground up, so they're cool. They're running stuff, but it doesn't always translate to see a new platform designed point. So how do you mean Containers is great fit for their Cooper names. Obviously, you know is the answer. We you guys see that as well, but okay, I can keep that and still get this design point. So I guess what I want to ask you guys, as you guys are digging into some of the customer facing conversations, what are they talking about? The day talking about? The platform? Specifically? Certainly, on the security side, we're seeing everyone running away from buying tools to thinking about platforms. What's the conversation like on the cloud side >>way? Did a talk are multiplied for real talk at Barcelona? Q. Khan put your X three on Sudden. Andrew named it for reals of Izzy, but we really wanted to talk about multiplied in the real world. And when we said show of hands in Barcelona, who's running multi cloud? It was very, very few. And this was in, what, five months? Four months ago? Whereas maybe our customers are just really super advanced because of our 100 plus customers. At four words, we Eric is right. A lot of them are already running multi cloud or if not their plan, in the planning stage right now. So even in the last +56 months, this has become a reality. And we're big fans of communities. I don't know if you know Eric was the first product manager for Pernetti. Hey, he's too shy to say it on Dhe. So yeah, and we think, you know, and criminal justice to be the answer to making all They caught a reality right now. >>Well, I want to get back into G, K, E and Cooper. Very notable historic moment. So congratulations, But to your point about multi cloud, it's interesting because, you know, having multiple clouds means things, right? So, for instance, if I upgrade to office 3 65 and I kill my exchange server, I'm essentially running azure by their definition. If I'm building it, stack on AWS. I'm a native, this customer. Let's just say I want to do some tensorflow or play with big table or spanner on Google. Now >>we have three >>clouds now they're not. So they have work clothes, specific objectives. I am totally no problem. I see that like for the progressive customers, some legacy be to be people who like maybe they put their toe in the cloud. But anyone doing meaningful cloud probably has multiple clouds. But that's workload driven when you get into tying them together and is interesting. And I think that's where I think you guys have a great opportunity in this community because if open source convene the gateway to minimize the lock in and when I say lock and I mean like locking them propriety respect if his value their great use it. But if I want to move my data out of the Amazon, >>you brought up so many good points. So let me go through a few and Lisa jumping. I feel like locking. People don't wanna be locked >>in at the infrastructure level. So, like you said, if >>there's value at the higher levels of Stack, and it helps me do my business faster. That's an okay thing to exchange, but it is just locked in and it's not doing anything. They're that's not equal exchange, right, So there's definitely a move from infrastructure up the platform. So locking in >>infrastructure is what people are trying to move away from. >>From what we see from the perspective of legacy, there is a lot of things happening in industry that's pretty exciting of how legacy will also start to running containers. And I'm sure you've seen that. But containers being the basis you could run a BM as well. And so that will mean a lot for in terms of how V EMS can start >>to be matched by orchestrators like kubernetes. So that is another movement for legacy, and I wanted to acknowledge that point >>now, in terms of the patterns, there are definitely applications, like a hybrid pattern where connect the car has to upload all its data once it docks into its location and move it to the data center. So there are patterns where the workflow does move the ups are the application data between on Prem into a public cloud, for instance, and then coming back from that your trip with Lisa. There is also examples where regulations require companies to enterprise is to be able to move to another cloud in a reasonable time frame. So there's definitely a notion of Multi Cloud is both an architectural design pattern. But it's also a sourcing strategy, and that sourcing strategy is more regulation type o. R. In terms of not being locked in. And that's where I'm saying it's all those things. I'd >>love to get your thoughts on this because I like where you're going with this because it kind of takes it to a level of okay, standardization, kubernetes nights, containers, everyone knows what that is. But then you start talking about a P I gateways, for instance, right? So if I'm a car and I have five different gateways on my device, I ot devices or I have multiple vendors dealing with control playing data that could be problematic. I gotta do something like that. So I'm starting. Envision them? I just made that news case up, but my point is is that you need some standards. So on the a p I side was seeing some trends there. One saying, Okay, here's my stuff. I'll just pass parameters with FBI State and stateless are two dynamics. What do you make of that? What, What? What has to happen next to get to that next level of happiness and goodness? Because Bernays, who's got it, got it there, >>right? I feel that next level. I feel like in Lisa, Please jump. And I feel like from automation perspective, Kubernetes has done that from a P I gateway. And what has to happen next. There's still a lot of easy use that isn't solved right. There's probably tons of opportunities out there to build a much better user experience, both from the operations point of view and from what I'm trying to do is an intense because what people aren't gonna automate right now is the intent. They automate a lot of the infrastructure manual tasks, and that's goodness. But from how I docked my application, how the application did it gets moved. We're still at the point of making policy driven, easy to use, and I think there's a lot of opportunities for everyone to get better there. That's like low priority loving fruitcake manual stuff >>and communities was really good at the local food. That's a really use case that you brought up. Really. People were looking at the data now and when you're talking about persistent mean kun is his great for stateless, but for state full really crucial data. So that's where we really come in. And a number of other companies in the cloud native storage ecosystem come in and have really fought through this problem and that data management problem. That's where this platform that Aaron was talking to that >>state problem. Talk about your company. I want to go back to to, um, Google Days. Um, many war stories around kubernetes will have the same fate as map reduce. Yeah, the debates internally at Google. What do we do with it? You guys made the good call. Congratulations on doing that. What was it like to be early on? Because you already had large scale. You were already had. Borg already had all these things in place. Um, it wasn't like there was what was, >>Well, a few things l say one is It was intense, right? It was intense in the sense that amazing amount of intelligence amazing amount of intent, and right back then a lot of things were still undecided, right? We're still looking at how containers or package we're still looking at how infrastructure kit run and a lot of service is were still being rolled out. So what it really meant is howto build something that people want to build, something that people want to run with you and how to build an ecosystem community. A lot of that the community got was done very well, right? You have to give credit to things like the Sig. A lot of things like how people like advocates like Lisa had gone out and made it part of what they're doing. And that's important, right? Every ecosystem needs to have those advocates, and that's what's going well, a cz ah flip side. I think there's a lot of things where way always look back, in which we could have done a few things differently. But that's a different story for different. Today >>I will come back in the studio Palop of that. I gotta ask you now that you're outside. Google was a culture shock. Oh my God! People actually provisioning software provisioning data center culture shock when there's a little >>bit of culture shock. One thing is, and the funny thing is coming full circle in communities now, is that the idea of an application? Right? The idea of what is an application eyes, something that feels very comfortable to a lot of legacy traditional. I wanna use traditional applications, but the moment you're you've spent so much time incriminates and you say, What's the application? It became a very hard thing, and I used to have a lot of academic debates. Where is saying there is no application? It's It's a soup of resources and such. So that was a hard thing. But funny thing is covered, as is now coming out with definitions around application, and Microsoft announced a few things in that area to so there are things that are coming full circle, but that just shows how the movement has changed and how things are becoming in some ways meeting each other halfway. >>Talk about the company, what you guys are doing. Take a moment. Explain in context to multi cloud. We're here. Port works. What's the platform? It's a product. What's the value proposition? What's the state of the company. >>So the companies? Uh well, well, it's grown from early days when Lisa and I joined where we're probably a handful now. We're in four or five cities. Geography ease over 100 people over 150 customers and there. It's been a lot of enterprises that are saying, like, How do I take this pattern of doing containers and micro service is And how do I run it with my mission? Critical business crinkle workloads. And at that point, there is no mission critical business critical workload that isn't stable so suddenly they're trying to say, How do I run These applications and containers and data have different life cycles. So what they're really looking for is a data plane that works with the control planes and how controlled planes are changing the behavior. So a lot of our technology and a lot of our product innovation has been around both the data plane but a storage control plane that integrates with a computer controlled plane. So I know we like to talk about one control plane. There's actually multiple control planes, and you mentioned security, right? If I look at how applications are running way after now securely access for applications, and it's no longer have access to the data. Before I get to use it, you have to now start to do things like J W. T. Or much higher level bearer tokens to say, I know how to access this application for this life cycle for this use case and get that kind of resiliency. So it's really around having that storage. More complexity absolutely need abstraction >>layers, and you got compute. Look, leading work there. But you gotta have >>software to do it from a poor works perspective. Our products entirely software right down loans and runs using kubernetes. And so the point here is we make remarries able to run all the staple workloads out of the box using the same comment control plane, which is communities. So that's the experiences that we really want to make it so that Dev Ops teams can run anywhere close. And that's that's in some ways been part of the mix. Lisa, >>we've been covering Dev up, going back to 2010. Remember when I first was hanging around San Francisco 2008 joint was coming out the woodwork and all that early days and you look at the journey of how infrastructures code We talked about that in 2008 and now we'll get 11 years later. Look at the advancements you've been through this now The tipping point. It's just seems like this wave is big and people are on it. The developers air getting it. It's a modern renaissance of application developers, and the enterprises it's happening in the enterprise is not just like the nerds Tier one, the Alfa Geeks or >>the Cloud native. It's happening in the >>everyone's on board this time, and you and I have been in the trenches in the early stages of many open source projects. And I think with with kubernetes Arab reference of community earlier, I'm super proud to be running the world's largest CNC F for user group. And it's a great community, a diverse community, super smart people. One of my favorite things about working for works is we have some really smart engineers that have figured out what companies want, how to solve problems, and then we'll go creative. It'll open source projects. We created a project called autopilot, really largely because one of our customers, every who's in the G s space and who's running just incredible application. You can google it and see what the work they're doing. It's all there publicly, Onda We built, you know, we built an open source project for them to help them get the most out of kubernetes. We can say so. There's a lot of people in the community system doing that. How can we make communities better halfway make commitments, enterprise grade and not take years to do that? Like some of the other open source projects that we worked on, it took. So it's a super exciting time to be here, >>and open source is growing so fast now. I mean, just think about how these projects being structured. Maur and Maur projects are coming online and user price, but a lot more vendor driven projects to use be mostly and used, but now you have a lot of vendors who are users. So the line is blurring between Bender User in Open source is really fascinating. >>Well, you look at the look of the landscape on the C N. C f. You know the website. I mean, it's what 400 that are already on board. It's really important. >>They don't have enough speaking slasher with >>right. I know, and it's just it. It is users and vendors. Everybody's in this community together. It's one of things that makes it super exciting. And it it's how we know this is This was the right choice for us to base this on communities because that's what everybody, you guys >>are practically neighbors. So we're looking for seeing the studio. Palo Alto Eric, I want to ask you one final question on the product side. Road map. What you guys thinking As Kubernetes goes, the next level state, a lot of micro service is observe abilities becoming a key part of it, Obviously, automation, configuration management things are developing fast. State. What's the What's the road map for you guys? >>For us, it's been always about howto handle the mission critical and make that application run seamlessly. And then now we've done a lot of portability. So disaster recovery has been one of the biggest things for us is that customers are saying, How do I do a hybrid pattern back to your earlier question of running on Prem and in Public Cloud and do a d. R. Pale over into some of the things at least, is pointing out that we're announcing soon is non series autopilot in the idea, automatically managing applications scale from a volume capacity. And then we're actually going to start moving a lot more into some of the what you do with data after the life cycle in terms of backup and retention. So those are the things that everyone's been pushing us and the customers are all asking for. You >>know, I think data they were back in recovery is interesting. I think that's going to change radically. And I think we look at the trend of how yeah, data backup and recovery was built. It was built because of disruption of business, floods, our gains, data center failure. But I think the biggest disruptions ransomware that malware. So security is now a active disruptor. So it's not like it after the hey, if we ever have, ah, fire, we can always roll back. So you're infected and you're just rolling back infected code. That's a ransomware dream. That's what's going on. So I think data protection it needs to be >>redefined. What do you think? Absolutely. I think there's a notion of How do I get last week's data last month? And then oftentimes customers will say, If I have a piece of data volume and I suddenly have to delete it, I still need to have some record of that action for a long time, right? So those are the kinds of things that are happening and his crew bearnaise and everything. It gets changed. Suddenly. The important part is not what was just that one pot it becomes. How do I reconstruct everything? What action is not one thing. It's everywhere. That's right and protected all through the platform. If it was a platform decision, it's not some the cattlemen on the side. You can't be a single lap. It has to be entire solution. And it has to handle things like, Where do you come from? Where is it allowed to go? And you guys have that philosophy. We absolutely, and it's based on the enterprises that are adopting port works and saying, Hey, this is my romance. I'm basing it on Kubernetes. You're my date a partner. We make it happen. >>This speaks to your point of why the enterprise is in. The vendors jumped in this is what people care about Security. How do you solve this last mile problem? Storage. Networking. How do you plug those holes in Kubernetes? Because that is crucial to our >>personal private moment. Victory moment for me personally, was been a big fan of Cuban is absolutely, you know, for years. Then there were created, talked about one. The moments that got me that was really kind of a personal, heartfelt moment was enterprise buyer. And, you know, the whole mindset in the Enterprise has always been You gotta kill the old to bring in the new. And so there's always been that tension of a you know, the shiny new toy from Silicon Valley or whatever. You know, I'm not gonna just trash this and have a migration za paying that. But for I t, they don't want that to do that. They hate doing migrations, but with containers and kubernetes that could actually they don't to end of life to bring in the new project. They can do it on their own timetable or keep it around. So that took a lot of air out of the tension in on the I t. Side because they say great I can deal with the lifecycle management, my app on my own terms and go play with Cloud native and said to me, that's like that was to be like, Okay, there it is. That was validation. That means this Israel because now they can innovate without compromising. >>I think so. And I think some of that has been how the ecosystems embrace it, right. So now it's becoming all the vendors are saying my internal stack is also based on community. So even if you as an application owner or not realizing it, you're gonna take a B M next year and you're gonna run it and it's gonna be back by something like awesome. Lisa >>Marie Nappy Eric on Thank you for coming on Port Works Hot start of multiple cities Kubernetes big developer Project Open Source. Talking about multi cloud here at the inaugural Multi cloud conference in New York City. It's the Cube Courage of escape. 2019. I'm John Period. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the first inaugural, Multi-Cloud Conference in New York City. It's called Escape/2019. I'm here with Brendan O'Leary, Senior Solutions Architect with GitLab. Is that right, Senior Solutions Architect? >> Brendan: Close enough, Manager, you know. >> Manager, architect, you work at GitLab, you're technical, so we'll have a good chat here. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> First Multi-Cloud Conference, really we love to go to the inaugural anything. >> Sure. >> Just in case it's not around next year, we can say we were here. It looks like it's got some legs, some interesting conversations I see in the hallways. You know, you guys are a big part of this revolution. GitLab, your company, you're providing opensource repositories, free, to get people to get started, as well you got paid stuff, as well. Hot area. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. Some say Microsoft's not going to meddle with that. We'll see, but still, a super-important part of the community that you guys are involved in. >> It's true. We're seeing this multi-cloud revolution, if you want to call it that, with a lot of our customers, right? It's no longer that you pick one cloud, and that's where everything's going to run. You're going to have acquisitions. You're going to have the desire to negotiate and have a negotiating position with your vendors. You're going to want to use functionality that's maybe only in one of the clouds. And so we're really seeing this multi-cloud become more of a norm. And that's why we think it's critical to have a DevOps platform that's independent from that, so that you can deploy everywhere. >> So what's the lock-in spec? I mean, basically the thesis is that if you want to negotiating leverage, you want to have multi-cloud. I get the whole, "there's multiple clouds," because, upgrade to Office 365, you got Azure, basically. So, multi-vendor, multi-cloud, totally buy it. But what's the lock-in spec that's getting people agitated, or thinking about multi-cloud? >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, because there's both, of course, the technical side. Like I said, you might have functionality that you want to run that's only available on one cloud. But, the finance folks, and everyone else gets concerned about, "Hey, are we going to get locked into some vendor, "where we don't have any ability to negotiate?" And so I think that is part of it, and I read, as part of prepping for my talk here, a 2019 state-of-cloud report that said 84% of enterprises, today, are using more than one cloud. So I think that's indicative of that desire to not-- You may have a primary cloud where you deploy things, but you're going to use more than one. >> I think that's a fair reality. I mean, probably more, I mean, if you count all these, how they're bundling apps in there. What's your talk going to be about? Is it today or tomorrow? >> So, I'm talking tomorrow, and I'm talking about a framework for making decisions about multi-cloud. 'Cause again, I think that a lot of the times we get bogged down in the technology, and picking features over what we're really looking for, which is the business value of being able to have a single view, a single application, a single platform for your developers to be able to deploy, kind of no matter where it's going to end up, in the end, right? We don't want the developer having to think about that, necessarily, when they're building the application. We want to deliver value to our customers, right? And so we want them to be doing that differentiated work. >> Me and Armon were talking earlier, HashiCorp, CTO of HashiCorp, and he was talking about workflows, and I was talking about, okay, workloads. So, if you just take those two concepts, workflows and workloads, and just strip out any other technical conversation, what's the framework? Because, these are real issues. Those are the--that's the continuity issue for the business, not the tech. So, fill in the blanks around that. How does that--how do I get multi-cloud out of making sure my workflows aren't disrupted, and my workloads are kicking ass and doing their job? >> Yeah, I would say that that's a great question, and we love HashiCorp and what they've done for our space, and for multi-cloud, in general. They're a great partner for us. But I think the key is, the workflow you generally want to be the same, no matter where you're deploying, right? You want to have confidence that the code your building is secure, it's going to work, it's been tested, and, no matter where it deploys in the end, you want to have that same kind of workflow for your developers. But you also want to have workload portability, right? So, when you're talking about the ability to have a negotiating position, or the ability to run in multiple clouds, the same application, you know, have disaster recovery, have not just this monolith--mono-cloud environment, you have to have workload portability, as well. >> Well, Brendan, I'm not sure if they're taping your interview. Hope they are. If they are, then we'll get those copies in our video on cloud. But, you've got a framework for multi-cloud, and with the reality that everyone wants, or has either inherited, or has, or will want a multi-vendor environment, what is that framework for negotiating, or setting up the foundation? Because the theme here, my interviews here, and the hallway conversations, two things: One is foundational discussions around multi-cloud, I mean, early, thought leaders laying out, here's some lines to think about. And then, two, data. So, two, interesting, common threads, here: foundational thinking and data. >> I think that foundational thinking's important, because I think that's really what my framework gets to is, hey, we want to look at not just the technology, and not those answers. We want to look at, what are the business metrics that we're driving towards, right? 'Cause, in the end, again, that's what we want to be driving in software is our businesses. And, so, what are the business metrics that we're going to use, and how can we make it efficient? How can we make it governed? And how can we make it visible across those clouds? I think those are the three things to be focused on. >> And is there a certain way? So is it more, situational, based upon the environment, because maybe there's weights of certain variables over others? >> I think so. I think, depending on your environment, right? You maybe in a more highly regulated environment where governance is the number one, it's the king. But I think everyone has those governance concerns, right? None of us want to wake up to a security call that we should have known about, right? >> How's things going on in your world? GitLab, you guys are doing great. Good to see you guys got a big round of funding, recently. >> Going great. >> GitHub just sold for billions of dollars. That's a nice comp. >> Yeah, no, I say it's nice when someone sells a house in your neighborhood for a lot of money, right? But, yeah, no, what we see from that is the industry moving toward this single tool for your DevOps lifecycle, for your DevOps tool chain, and your DevOps lifecycle. We want to be able to have one way that developers deploy code, and we're seeing that kind of consolidation in the market. And we've had great success with that, so far. Our stated pubic desire is to go public next year. And we're on track for that, right now. So, we're looking forward to it. >> You know what's interesting and I love is the subtext to all this plot, which is, there's a human equation in all this, right? The human capital, human resource, the people-side of the equation, the cultural shifts in these companies, your customers, now. Any observational commentary that you can share around how DevOps has kind of gone mainstream? Any cultural shifts around people and their behaviors and their affinity towards certain things? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. I saw an article yesterday about a CIO who was being promoted to CEO, as the current CEO stepped down, and how that was kind of a novel thing. But the article was actually talking about how we're going to see more of that, right? Businesses, eight years ago, Marc Andreesen said that software is eating the world. Well, I think software has eaten the world, and we're seeing that in our businesses, as every company becomes a software company. >> And open source, JJ would argue at OSS Capital, that there's new business models emerging, as well. And new opportunities, as well, for everyone involved. Open source software, cloud computing, multi-cloud, it's a great wave. >> It is a big wave, and, you know, GitLab's based on an open-source project, right? And so, just, we were founded only back in 2014, as a company, but we've come to find a business model that works, open-core, and we think there's a lot of opportunity in the market for folks to follow, and open source to have an even bigger impact than it's already had on the market. >> Final question for you, Brendan. What do you think about this conference, some of the hallway conversations, what's the vibe? For the folks that aren't here, what's it like? >> Oh, I mean, I think it's great. I think there's been a lot of great discussions, again, about very foundational things, about, hey, how do we look at this as a business leaders? But, then, I've also had great discussions about the technology and about Kubernetes, about those kinds of things that really enable us to have those kinds of conversations. >> Some good relationships being developed here. People know each other, too. >> Exactly, yeah, people I haven't seen in a long time, or people that I work with that I haven't seen 'cause we're all remote. >> It's great to see it in New York, too. >> Yeah, I love it in New York. So, I'm from DC, so it's a quick train ride up, but I love coming up, though. >> Not like us in California, big plane ride. Brendan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, great, thank you very much for having me. >> I'm John Furrier, here at the first, inaugural conference, Escape/19, back with more of that after this short break. (techno music)

>>from New York. It's the Q covering escape. 19. Hey, welcome back to the Cube coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural multi cloud conference called Escape. We're in New York City. Was staying in New York, were not escapee from New York were in New York. So about Multi Cloud. And we're here. Lisa Marie Nancy, developer advocate for report works, and Eric Conn, vice president of products. Welcome back with you. >>Thank you, John. >>Good to see you guys. So whenever the first inaugural of anything, we want to get into it and find out why. Multiplied certainly been kicked around. People have multiple clouds, but is there really multi clouding going on? So this seems to be the theme here about setting the foundation, architecture and data to kind of consistent themes. What's your guys take? Eric, What's your take on this multi cloud trend? >>Yeah, I think it's something we've all been actively watching for a couple years, and suddenly it is becoming the thing right? So every we just had a customer event back in Europe last week, and every customer there is already running multi cloud. It's always something on their consideration. So there's definitely it's not just a discussion topic. It's now becoming a practical reality. So this event's been perfect because it's both the sense of what are people doing, What are they trying to achieve and also the business sense. So it's definitely something that is not necessarily mainstream, but it's becoming much more how they're thinking about building all their applications Going forward. >>You know, you have almost two camps in the world to get your thoughts on this guy's because like you have a cloud native people that are cloud needed, they love it. They're born in the cloud that get it. Everything's bringing along. The developers are on micro service's They're agile train with their own micro service is when you got the hybrid. I t trying to be hybrid developer, right? So you kind of have to markets coming together. So to me, Essie multi Cloud as a combination of old legacy Data Center types of I t with cloud native not just optioned. It was all about trying to build developer teams inside enterprises. This seems to be a big trend, and multi cloud fits into them because now the reality is that I got azure, I got Amazon. Well, let's take a step back and think about the architecture. What's the foundation? So that to me, is more my opinion. But I want to get your thoughts and reactions that because if it's true, that means some new thinking has to come around around. What's the architecture, What we're trying to do? What's the workloads behavior outcome look like? What's the workflow? So there's a whole nother set of conversations. >>Yeah, that happened. I agree. I think the thing that the fight out there right now that we want to make mainstream is that it's a platform choice, and that's the best way to go forward. So it's still an active debate. But the idea could be I want to do multi club, but I'm gonna lock myself into the Cloud Service is if that's the intent or that's the design architecture pattern. You're really not gonna achieve the goals we all set out to do right, So in some ways we have to design ourselves or have the architecture that will let us achieve the business schools that were really going for and that really means from our perspective or from a port Works perspective. There's a platform team. That platform team should run all the applications and do so in a multi cloud first design pattern. And so from that perspective, that's what we're doing from a data plane perspective. And that's what we do with Kubernetes etcetera. So from that idea going forward, what we're seeing is that customers do want to build a platform team, have that as the architecture pattern, and that's what we think is going to be the winning strategy. >>Thank you. Also, when you have the death definition of cod, you have to incorporate, just like with hybrid a teeny the legacy applications. And we saw that you throughout the years those crucial applications, as we call them. People don't always want them to refer to his legacy. But those are crucial applications, and our customers were definitely thinking about how we're gonna run those and where is the right places it on Prem. We're seeing that a lot, too. So I think when we talk about multi cloud, we also talk about what what is in your legacy? What is your name? I mean, I >>like you use legacy. I think it's a great word because I think it really nail the coffin of that old way because remember, if you think about some of the large enterprises these legacy applications didn't optimized for harden optimize their full stack builds up from the ground up. So they're cool. They're running stuff, but it doesn't translate to see a new platform design point. So how do you continue? This is a great fit for that, cos obviously is the answer. You guys see that? Well, okay, I can keep that and still get this design point. So I guess what I want to ask you guys, as you guys are digging into some of the customer facing conversations, what are they talking about? The day talking about? The platform? Specifically? Certainly on the security side, we're seeing everyone running away from buying tools were thinking about platform. What's the conversation like on the outside >>before your way? Did a talk are multiplied for real talk at Barcelona. Q. Khan put your X three on son. Andrew named it for reals of busy, but we really wanted to talk about multiplied in the real world. And when we said show of hands in Barcelona, who's running multi pod. It was very, very few. And this was in, what, five months? Four months ago? Whereas maybe our customers are just really super advanced because of our 100 plus customers. At four words, we Eric is right. A lot of them are already running multi cloud or if not their plan, in the planning stage right now. So even in the last +56 months, this has become a reality. And we're big fans of your vanities. I don't know if you know, Eric was the first product manager for Pernetti. T o k. He's too shy to say it on dhe. So yeah, and we think, you know, And when it does seem to be the answer to making all they caught a reality right now. >>Well, I want to get back into G k e. And Cooper was very notable historical. So congratulations. But your point about multi cloud is interesting because, you know, having multiple clouds means things, right? So, for instance, if I upgrade to office 3 65 and I killed my exchange server, I'm essentially running azure by their definition. If I'm building a stack I need of us, I'm a Navy best customer. Let's just say I want to do some tensorflow or play with big table. Are spanner on Google now? I have three clouds. No, they're not saying they have worked low specific objectives. I am totally no problem. I see that all the progressive customers, some legacy. I need to be people like maybe they put their tone a file. But anyone doing meaningful cloud probably has multiple clouds, but that's workload driven when you get into tying them together. It's interesting. I think that's where I think you guys have a great opportunity in this community because it open source convene the gateway to minimize the locket. What locket? I mean, like locking the surprise respect if its value, their great use it. But if I want to move my data out of the Amazon, >>you brought up so many good points. So let me go through a few and Lisa jumping. I feel like locking. People don't wanna be locked in at the infrastructure level. So, like you said, if there's value at the higher levels of Stack and it helps me do my business faster, that's an okay thing to exchange. But if it's just locked in and it's not doing anything. They're that's not equal exchange, right? So there's definitely a move from infrastructure up the platform. So locking in infrastructure is what people are trying to move away from. From what we see from the perspective of legacy, there is a lot of things happening in industry that's pretty exciting. How legacy will also start to run in containers, and I'm sure you've seen that. But containers being the basis you could run a BM as well. And so that will mean a lot for in terms of how VM skin start to be matched by orchestrators like kubernetes. So that is another movement for legacy, and I wanted to acknowledge that point now, in terms of the patterns, there are definitely applications, like a hybrid pattern where connect the car has to upload all its data once it docks into its location and move it to the data center. So there are patterns where the workflow does move the ups are the application data between on Prem into a public cloud, for instance, and then coming back from that your trip with Lisa. There is also examples where regulations require companies to enterprise is to be able to move to another cloud in a reasonable time frame. So there's definitely a notion of Multi Cloud is both an architectural design pattern. But it's also a sourcing strategy and that sourcing strategies Maura regulation type o. R in terms of not being locked in. And that's where I'm saying it's all those things. >>You love to get your thoughts on this because I like where you're going with this because it kind of takes it to a level of Okay, standardization kubernetes nights containing one does that. But then you're something about FBI gateways, for instance. Right? So if I'm a car, have five different gig weighs on my device devices or I have multiple vendors dealing with control playing data that could be problematic. I gotta do something. So I started envisioned. I just made that this case up. But my point is, is that you need some standards. So on the A p I side was seeing some trends there once saying, Okay, here's my stuff. I'll just pass Paramus with FBI, you know, state and stateless are two dynamics. What do you make of that? What? What what has to happen next to get to that next level of happiness and goodness because Ruben is has got it, got it there, >>right? I feel like next level. I feel like in Lisa. Please jump. And I feel like from automation perspective, Kubernetes has done that from a P I gateway. And what has to happen next. There's still a lot of easy use that isn't solved right. There's probably tons of opportunities out there to build a much better user experience, both from operations point of view and from what I'm trying to do is an intense because what people aren't gonna automate right now is the intent to automate a lot of the infrastructure manual tasks, and that's goodness. But from how I docked my application, how the application did, it gets moved. We're still at the point of making policy driven, easy to use, and I think there's a lot of opportunities for everyone to get better there. >>That's like Logan is priority looking fruity manual stuff >>and communities was really good at the food. That's a really use case that you brought up really. People were looking at the data now, and when you're talking about persistent mean Cooney's is great for stateless, but for St Paul's really crucial data. So that's where we really come in. And a number of other companies in the cloud native storage ecosystem come in and have really fought through this problem and that data management problem. That's where this platform that Aaron was talking about >>We'll get to that state problem. Talk about your company. I wanna get back Thio, Google Days, um, many war stories around kubernetes. We'll have the same fate as map reduce. You know, the debates internally and Google. What do we do with it? You guys made a good call. Congratulations doing that. What was it like to be early on? Because you already had large scale. You already had. Borg already had all these things in place. Was it like there was >>a few things I'll say One is. It was intense, right? It was intense in the sense that amazing amount of intelligence, amazing amount of intent, and right back then a lot of things were still undecided, right? We're still looking at how containers are package. We're still looking at how infrastructure Kate run and a lot of the service's were still being rolled out. So what it really meant is howto build something that people want to build, something that people want to run with you and how to build an ecosystem community. A lot of that the community got was done very well, right? You have to give credit to things like the Sig. A lot of things like how people like advocates like Lisa had gone out and made it part of what they're doing. And that's important, right? Every ecosystem needs to have those advocates, and that's what's going well, a cz ah flip side. I think there's a lot of things where way always look back, in which we could have done a few things differently. But that's a different story for different >>will. Come back and get in the studio fellow that I gotta ask you now that you're outside. Google was a culture shock. Oh my God. People actually provisioning software. Yeah, I was in a data center. Cultures. There's a little >>bit of culture shock. One thing is, and the funny thing is coming full circle in communities now, is that the idea of an application, right? The idea of what is an application eyes something that feels very comfortable to a lot of legacy traditional. I wanna use traditional applications, but the moment you're you've spent so much time incriminates and you say, What's the application? It became a very hard thing, and I used to have a lot of academic debates wise saying there is no application. It's it's a soup of resources and such. So that was a hard thing. But funny thing is covered, as is now coming out with definitions around application, and Microsoft announced a few things in that area to so there are things that are coming full circle, but that just shows how the movement has changed and how things are becoming in some ways meeting each other halfway. >>Talk about the company. What you guys are doing. Taking moments explaining contacts. Multi Cloud were here. Put worse. What's the platform? It's a product. What's the value proposition? What's the state of the company? >>Yes. So the companies? Uh well, well, it's grown from early days when Lisa and I joined where we're probably a handful now. We're in four or five cities. Geography is over 100 people over 150 customers and there. It's been a lot of enterprises that are saying, like, How do I take this pattern? Doing containers and micro service is, and how do I run it with my mission? Critical business crinkle workloads And at that point, there is no mission critical business critical workload that isn't stable so suddenly they're trying to say, How do I run These applications and containers and data have different life cycles. So what they're really looking for is a data plane that works with the control planes and how controlled planes are changing the behavior. So a lot of our technology and a lot of our product innovation has been around both the data plane but a storage control plane that integrates with a computer controlled plane. So I know we like to talk about one control plane. There's actually multiple control planes, and you mentioned security, right? If I look at how applications are running way, acting now securely access for applications and it's no longer have access to the data. Before I get to use it, you have to now start to do things like J W. T. Or much higher level bear tokens to say I know how to access this application for this life cycle for this use case and get that kind of resiliency. So it's really around having that >>storage. More complexity, absolutely needing abstraction layers and you compute. Luckily, work there. But you gotta have software to do it >>from a poor box perspective. Our products entirely software right down loans and runs using kubernetes. And so the point here is we make remarries able to run all the staple workloads out of the box using the same comment control plane, which is communities. So that's the experiences that we really want to make it so that Dev Ops teams can run anywhere close. And that's that's in some ways been part of the mix. >>Lisa, we've been covering Jeff up. Go back to 2010. Remember when I first I was hanging around? San Francisco? Doesn't eight Joint was coming out the woodwork and all that early days. You look at the journey of how infrastructures code. We'll talk about that in 2008 and now we'll get 11 years later. Look at the advancements you've been through this now the tipping point just seems like this wave is big and people are on developers air getting it. It's a modern renaissance of application developers, and the enterprise it's happening in the enterprise is not just like the energy. You're one Apple geeks or the foundation. It's happening in >>everyone's on board this time, and you and I have been in the trenches in the early stages of many open source projects. And I think with kubernetes Arab reference of community earlier, I'm super proud to be running the world's largest CNC F for user group. And it's a great community, a diverse community, super smart people. One of my favorite things about working poor works is we have some really smart engineers that have figured out what companies want, how to solve problems, and then we'll go credible open source projects. We created a project called autopilot, really largely because one of our customers, every who's in the G s space and who's running just incredible application, you can google it and see what the work they're doing. It's all out there publicly. Onda we built, you know, we've built an open source project for them to help them get the most out of kubernetes we can say so there's a lot of people in the community system doing that. How can we make communities better? Half We make competitive enterprise grade and not take years to do that. Like some of the other open source projects that we worked on, it took. So it's a super exciting time to be here, >>and open source is growing so fast. Now just think about having project being structured. More and more projects are coming online and user profit a lot more. Vendor driven projects, too used mostly and used with. Now you have a lot of support vendors who are users, so the line is blurring between then their user in open source is really fast. >>Will you look at the look of the landscape on the C N. C. F? You know the website. I mean, it's what 400 that are already on board. It's really important. >>They don't have enough speaking slasher with >>right. I know, and it's just it. It is users and vendors. Everybody's in the community together. It's one of things that makes it super exciting, and it's how we know this is This was the right choice for us. Did they communities because that's what? Everybody? >>You guys are practically neighbors. We look for CNN Studio, Palo Alto. I wanna ask you one final question on the product side. Road map. What you guys thinking As Kubernetes goes, the next level state, a lot of micro service is observe. Ability is becoming a key part of it. The automation configuration management things are developing fast. State. What's the road for you guys? For >>us, it's been always about howto handle the mission critical and make that application run seamlessly. And then now we've done a lot of portability. So disaster recovery is one of the biggest things for us is that customers are saying, How do I do a hybrid pattern back to your earlier question of running on Prem and in Public Cloud and do a D. R fail over into a Some of the things, at least, is pointing out. That we're announcing soon is non Terry's autopilot in the idea of automatically managing applications scale from a volume capacity. And then we're actually going to start moving a lot more into some of what you do with data after the life cycle in terms of backup and retention. So those are the things that everyone's been pushing us, and the customers are all asking, >>You know, I think data that recovery is interesting. I think that's going to change radically. And I think we look at the trend of how yeah, data backup recovery was built. It was built because of disruption of business, floods, our games. That's right. It is in their failure. But I think the biggest disruptions ransomware that malware. So security is now a active disruptor, So it's not like it After today. If we hadn't have ah, fire, we can always roll back. So you're infected and you're just rolling back infected code. That's a ransomware dream. That's what's going on. So I think data protection needs to redefine. >>What do you think? Absolutely. I think there's a notion of how do I get last week's data last month and then oftentimes customers will say If I have a piece of data volume and I suddenly have to delete it, I still need to have some record of that action for a long time, right? So those are the kinds of things that are happening and his crew bearnaise and everything, it gets changed. Suddenly, the important part is not what was just that one pot it becomes. How do I reconstruct everything? Action >>is not one thing. It's everywhere That's right, protected all through the platform. It is a platform decision. It's not some cattlemen on the side. >>You can't be a single lap. It has to be entire solution. And it has to handle things like, Where do you come from? Where is it allowed to go? >>You guys have that philosophy? >>We absolutely. And it's based on the enterprises that are adopting port works and saying, Hey, this is my romance. I'm basing it on Kubernetes here, my data partner. How do you make it happen? >>This speaks to your point of why the enterprise is in the vendors jumped in. This is what people care about security. How do you solve this last mile problem? Storage, Networking. How do you plug those holes and kubernetes? Because that is crucial. >>One personal private moment. Victory moment for me personally, Waas been a big fan of Cuban, is actually, you know, for years in there when it was created, talked about one of moments that got me was personal. Heartfelt moment was enterprise buyer on. The whole mindset in the enterprise has always been You gotta kill the old to bring in the new. And so there's always been that tension of a you know, the shame, your toy from Silicon Valley or whatever. You know, I'm not gonna just trash this and have a migration is a pain in the butt fried. You don't want that to do that. They hate doing migrations, but with containers and kubernetes, they actually they don't end of life to bring in the new project they could do on their own or keep it around. So that took a lot of air out of the tension in on the I t. Side. Because it's a great I can deal with the life cycle of my app on my own terms and go play with Cloud native and said to me, I was like, That was to be like, Okay, there it is. That was validation. That means this is real because now they will be without compromising. >>I think so. And I think some of that has been how the ecosystems embraced it, right, So now it's becoming all the vendors are saying My internal stack is also based on company. So even if you as an application owner or not realizing it, you're gonna take a B M next year and you're gonna run it and it's gonna be back by something like >>the submarine and the aircon. Thank you for coming on court. Worse Hot started Multiple cities Kubernetes Big developer Project Open Source Talking about multi cloud here at the inaugural Multi Cloud Conference in New York City Secu Courage of Escape Plan 19 John Corey Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the first inaugural, Multi-Cloud Conference in New York City. It's called Escape/2019. I'm here with Brendan O'Leary, Senior Solutions Architect with GitLab. Is that right, Senior Solutions Architect? >> Brendan: Close enough, Manager, you know. >> Manager, architect, you work at GitLab, you're technical, so we'll have a good chat here. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> First Multi-Cloud Conference, really we love to go to the inaugural anything. >> Sure. >> Just in case it's not around next year, we can say we were here. It looks like it's got some legs, some interesting conversations I see in the hallways. You know, you guys are a big part of this revolution. GitLab, your company, you're providing opensource repositories, free, to get people to get started, as well you got paid stuff, as well. Hot area. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. Some say Microsoft's not going to meddle with that. We'll see, but still, a super-important part of the community that you guys are involved in. >> It's true. We're seeing this multi-cloud revolution, if you want to call it that, with a lot of our customers, right? It's no longer that you pick one cloud, and that's where everything's going to run. You're going to have acquisitions. You're going to have the desire to negotiate and have a negotiating position with your vendors. You're going to want to use functionality that's maybe only in one of the clouds. And so we're really seeing this multi-cloud become more of a norm. And that's why we think it's critical to have a DevOps platform that's independent from that, so that you can deploy everywhere. >> So what's the lock-in spec? I mean, basically the thesis is that if you want to negotiating leverage, you want to have multi-cloud. I get the whole, "there's multiple clouds," because, upgrade to Office 365, you got Azure, basically. So, multi-vendor, multi-cloud, totally buy it. But what's the lock-in spec that's getting people agitated, or thinking about multi-cloud? >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, because there's both, of course, the technical side. Like I said, you might have functionality that you want to run that's only available on one cloud. But, the finance folks, and everyone else gets concerned about, "Hey, are we going to get locked into some vendor, "where we don't have any ability to negotiate?" And so I think that is part of it, and I read, as part of prepping for my talk here, a 2019 state-of-cloud report that said 84% of enterprises, today, are using more than one cloud. So I think that's indicative of that desire to not-- You may have a primary cloud where you deploy things, but you're going to use more than one. >> I think that's a fair reality. I mean, probably more, I mean, if you count all these, how they're bundling apps in there. What's your talk going to be about? Is it today or tomorrow? >> So, I'm talking tomorrow, and I'm talking about a framework for making decisions about multi-cloud. 'Cause again, I think that a lot of the times we get bogged down in the technology, and picking features over what we're really looking for, which is the business value of being able to have a single view, a single application, a single platform for your developers to be able to deploy, kind of no matter where it's going to end up, in the end, right? We don't want the developer having to think about that, necessarily, when they're building the application. We want to deliver value to our customers, right? And so we want them to be doing that differentiated work. >> Me and Armon were talking earlier, HashiCorp, CTO of HashiCorp, and he was talking about workflows, and I was talking about, okay, workloads. So, if you just take those two concepts, workflows and workloads, and just strip out any other technical conversation, what's the framework? Because, these are real issues. Those are the--that's the continuity issue for the business, not the tech. So, fill in the blanks around that. How does that--how do I get multi-cloud out of making sure my workflows aren't disrupted, and my workloads are kicking ass and doing their job? >> Yeah, I would say that that's a great question, and we love HashiCorp and what they've done for our space, and for multi-cloud, in general. They're a great partner for us. But I think the key is, the workflow you generally want to be the same, no matter where you're deploying, right? You want to have confidence that the code your building is secure, it's going to work, it's been tested, and, no matter where it deploys in the end, you want to have that same kind of workflow for your developers. But you also want to have workload portability, right? So, when you're talking about the ability to have a negotiating position, or the ability to run in multiple clouds, the same application, you know, have disaster recovery, have not just this monolith--mono-cloud environment, you have to have workload portability, as well. >> Well, Brendan, I'm not sure if they're taping your interview. Hope they are. If they are, then we'll get those copies in our video on cloud. But, you've got a framework for multi-cloud, and with the reality that everyone wants, or has either inherited, or has, or will want a multi-vendor environment, what is that framework for negotiating, or setting up the foundation? Because the theme here, my interviews here, and the hallway conversations, two things: One is foundational discussions around multi-cloud, I mean, early, thought leaders laying out, here's some lines to think about. And then, two, data. So, two, interesting, common threads, here: foundational thinking and data. >> I think that foundational thinking's important, because I think that's really what my framework gets to is, hey, we want to look at not just the technology, and not those answers. We want to look at, what are the business metrics that we're driving towards, right? 'Cause, in the end, again, that's what we want to be driving in software is our businesses. And, so, what are the business metrics that we're going to use, and how can we make it efficient? How can we make it governed? And how can we make it visible across those clouds? I think those are the three things to be focused on. >> And is there a certain way? So is it more, situational, based upon the environment, because maybe there's weights of certain variables over others? >> I think so. I think, depending on your environment, right? You maybe in a more highly regulated environment where governance is the number one, it's the king. But I think everyone has those governance concerns, right? None of us want to wake up to a security call that we should have known about, right? >> How's things going on in your world? GitLab, you guys are doing great. Good to see you guys got a big round of funding, recently. >> Going great. >> GitHub just sold for billions of dollars. That's a nice comp. >> Yeah, no, I say it's nice when someone sells a house in your neighborhood for a lot of money, right? But, yeah, no, what we see from that is the industry moving toward this single tool for your DevOps lifecycle, for your DevOps tool chain, and your DevOps lifecycle. We want to be able to have one way that developers deploy code, and we're seeing that kind of consolidation in the market. And we've had great success with that, so far. Our stated pubic desire is to go public next year. And we're on track for that, right now. So, we're looking forward to it. >> You know what's interesting and I love is the subtext to all this plot, which is, there's a human equation in all this, right? The human capital, human resource, the people-side of the equation, the cultural shifts in these companies, your customers, now. Any observational commentary that you can share around how DevOps has kind of gone mainstream? Any cultural shifts around people and their behaviors and their affinity towards certain things? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. I saw an article yesterday about a CIO who was being promoted to CEO, as the current CEO stepped down, and how that was kind of a novel thing. But the article was actually talking about how we're going to see more of that, right? Businesses, eight years ago, Marc Andreesen said that software is eating the world. Well, I think software has eaten the world, and we're seeing that in our businesses, as every company becomes a software company. >> And open source, JJ would argue at OSS Capital, that there's new business models emerging, as well. And new opportunities, as well, for everyone involved. Open source software, cloud computing, multi-cloud, it's a great wave. >> It is a big wave, and, you know, GitLab's based on an open-source project, right? And so, just, we were founded only back in 2014, as a company, but we've come to find a business model that works, open-core, and we think there's a lot of opportunity in the market for folks to follow, and open source to have an even bigger impact than it's already had on the market. >> Final question for you, Brendan. What do you think about this conference, some of the hallway conversations, what's the vibe? For the folks that aren't here, what's it like? >> Oh, I mean, I think it's great. I think there's been a lot of great discussions, again, about very foundational things, about, hey, how do we look at this as a business leaders? But, then, I've also had great discussions about the technology and about Kubernetes, about those kinds of things that really enable us to have those kinds of conversations. >> Some good relationships being developed here. People know each other, too. >> Exactly, yeah, people I haven't seen in a long time, or people that I work with that I haven't seen 'cause we're all remote. >> It's great to see it in New York, too. >> Yeah, I love it in New York. So, I'm from DC, so it's a quick train ride up, but I love coming up, though. >> Not like us in California, big plane ride. Brendan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, great, thank you very much for having me. >> I'm John Furrier, here at the first, inaugural conference, Escape/19, back with more of that after this short break. (techno music)

[Announcer] - From New York, it's theCUBE! Covering ESCAPE/19. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural Multi-Cloud Conference called ESCAPE/2019. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Natalie Gholmieh who is the Manager of Data and Integration Services at the University of California San Diego campus/office- sprawling data center, tons of IT, a lot of challenges, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. >> So, thanks for taking the time out. You're a practitioner, you're here. Why are you at this conference? What are you hoping to gain from here? What interests you here at the Multi-Cloud Escape Conference? >> So, this conference is very much within the spirit of what we're trying to do. Our CIO has directives which is to avoid lock-in, to do multi-vendor orchestration, to go with containers first, and open-source wherever possible. So, this conference pretty much speaks to all of that. >> So, this is a really interesting data point, because it seems the common thread is data. >> Mhmm. >> The cloud is an integration of things, so people are trying to find that integration point so they can have multiple vendors, multiple clouds. It seems like the multi-vendor world back in the old days, where you had multiple vendors, heterogeneous environment, data seems to be the linchpin in all this. >> Right, yes. >> That's what you do. >> Right. >> How do you think about this? Because it used to be that the big database ran the world, now you have lots of databases, you have applications. >> Right, yeah. >> Databases are everywhere now. >> Data is born in multiple systems, but the data is also an asset right now to all of the organizations, including the university. So, what we want to try to accomplish is to get all of this data possibly in one place, or in multiple places, and be able to do analytics on top of this, and this is what the value-added processing over the data. >> What's exciting to you these days in the University? You guys try to change the business, could be technology? What are the cool things that you like, that you're working with right now, or that you envision emerging? >> Yeah. So, my team is currently building a platform to do all of the data integration and we are planning to offer this platform as a service to developers to streamline and standardize application development, as well as integration development, within the central IT at the University. So this is pretty much the most exciting thing that we're doing, is putting together this platform that is quite complex, it is a journey that we're taking together with the people who already operate the existing systems. So we're putting up this new thing that we're operating in parallel and then we will be migrating to that new platform. >> I'm sure containers are involved, >> Yes. >> Kubernetes is a key part of it. >> Yes, mhmm. So, the platform has two parts. There is the application publishing with Docker and Kubernetes, and we also have the streaming side of it, to build the data pipeline with open-source tools like Apache NiFi and Apache Kafka. So this is going to be wiring the data pipelines from source to target and moving the data in real time in order to- >> And you see that as a nice way to keep an option to move from cloud to cloud? >> Potentially, since the platform's role is to decouple the infrastructure from development. That way, you could spin a portion of the platform on any cloud, pretty much, and run your workload anywhere you want. >> So classic DevOps. >> Yeah. >> Separate infrastructure as code, provide a codified layer. >> Yeah. >> So, let me ask you a question. How did you get into all this data business? I mean, what attracted you to the data field? What's your story? Tell us your story. >> So, the data, you know, I personally started, I mean, I had more of a networking background. Then I became Sys Admin, then I got into the business of logging and log aggregation for machine data, and then I was, you know, using that data to create dashboards of system health and, you know, data correlation, and this is what exposed me, personally, first to the data world, and then I saw the value in doing all of this with data, and the value is even more impactful to the business when you're working with actual business data. So I'm very excited about that. >> So you were swimming in the first data lake before data lakes were data lakes. >> Yes, yeah, right, for machine data. >> Once you're in there, you see value, the data exhaust comes in, as we used to say back in the day, data exhaust! >> Yeah. >> So, now that you're dealing with the business value, is the conversation the same? Or are they different conversations? Or is it still the same, kind of, data conversation? Or is the job the same? Because you still have machine data, applications are throwing off data, you have infrastructure data being thrown off, you have new software layers. >> Yes, yeah. >> Is it the same, or is it different? Describe your current situation. >> You know, maybe the concepts are the same, but I think the logging machine data has more value to IT to give insights on how to improve your SLAs, within the scope of IT, but the business data really will impact the business, the whole entire university for us. So, one of the things that we're doing on the business side with the business data is to provide some analytics on the student data in order to increase their chances for success. So, getting all of that data, doing some reports and pattern analytics, and then coaching the students. >> Not a bad place to live, in San Diego, is it? >> Oh, it's excellent. >> Weather's always perfect? >> Oh, yeah. >> Marine layer's not as bad as L.A., but, you know. >> Yeah. >> Or is it? >> No, we do have- The university is right on the coast, so yeah. Sometimes it's gloomy the whole entire day. >> I love it there. I wish I could've gone to school at the University of San Diego. >> It is great. It's a great place to be. >> Love to go down, see my friends in La Jolla, Del Mar, beautiful areas. Great country. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights into multi-cloud and some of the thinking. It seems to be very foundational right now in its whole thinking. >> Mhmm. >> There's no master plan yet. People are really having good conversations around how to set it all up. >> Yeah. >> The architecture. >> Right. >> The role. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Do you see the same thing? >> Yes, architecture is actually a very essential piece of it because you need to plan before you go. If you go without planning, I think your bill is going to be off the roof. >> Huge bill. >> Yeah. >> And you'll sink in the quicksand and the data lake and you can be sucked into the data swamp. >> Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, architecture is a big piece of it, design, then build, and then continuous improvement, that's a huge thing at UC San Diego. >> You know what I get excited about? I get excited about real time, and how real time, time series data is becoming a big part of the application development, and understanding the context between good data and bad data. >> Mhmm. >> It's always a hard problem. It's a hard tech problem. >> Yeah, that is true, yeah. There are a lot of processes that should be set around the data to make sure the data's clean and it's a good data set and all of that. >> If data's an asset, then has it got a value? Is it on the balance sheet? Shouldn't we value the data? Some data's more valuable than others? It's a good question, huh? >> It is a good question, but I don't know the answer to that. >> No one knows. We always ask the question. I think that's a future state where at some point, data can be recognized, but right now it's hard to tell what's valuable or not. >> I think the value is in the returned services and the value-added services that you, as an organization, can bring to your customer base. This is where the value is, and if you want to put a dollar amount on that, I don't know, it's not my job. >> Thank you so much for coming on, special time of conversation. >> Thank you. >> CUBE Conversation here, the CUBE Coverage of the first inaugural Multi-Cloud Conference called ESCAPE/19, where the industry best are coming together. Practitioners, entrepreneurs, founders, executives, and finally, just talking about what multi-cloud really can be, foundationally what needs to be in place. And this is what happens here at these conferences, tons of hallway conversations. Natalie, thank you for spending the time with us. CUBE Coverage, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat techno music) >> Narrator: From New York, it's theCUBE, Covering Escape/19. >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural Multi-Cloud Conference called Escape/2019 as in gathering of industry thought leaders, experts, entrepreneurs, engineers, really having substantive conversations around what multi-cloud is, what it's going to look like, what are some of the thing, technical and business opportunities around that, really small intimate conference. Again first inaugural conference. I'm here with my next guest to talk about that Chris Smith, Vice President of Engineering, on Data Science at Ticketmaster. Chris, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much Don. >> Appreciate taking the time. >> Glad to talk to you. >> Practitioner out there, you know, we all go scar tissue. >> Yes we do. >> If you don't have scar tissue, if you're not breaking things and then the learning from it then you're not advancing. But sometimes you don't want to step too far forward right? >> Yep, yep. >> Can you get back it's like you know. So you guys have a great experience. Legacy business, I remember buying tickets when I was going to conference back in the day when I was in, you know, in college. >> Yep. >> Buy it at Ticketmaster. >> That's right, that was Ticketmaster then, Ticketmaster now. >> Now it's lot of online provisioning of all direct to consumer. So you guys are a journey, tell the story. >> Well certainly, the company Ticketmaster, has had an incredibly long journey, starting back our first concert was Electric Light Orchestra which kind of like puts that in in context. >> (laughs) I was in eighth grade, '79. >> Yeah, yeah that was back at ASU. And even then we were a very innovative technology company we were making ticketing platforms that performed better, got more capacity out of the hardware than anybody else could do, anything close to that. We were really pioneered that idea of the what was at the time called the electronic ticket. Which was the idea that, you know, you could go to any store that was selling tickets for an event and the same inventory would be available at each store instead of the old model of a bunch of tickets getting sent out to each place >> That was bad-ass back in the day. >> That was really cutting edge and we've been evolving ever since then for 40 years. We were also very early onto the web scene. We were selling tickets online before anybody else was and before most people were selling anything online really to a degree. So we've been pioneers in a lot of areas, we see ourselves as the technology partner for the live events business. That's really what we are. And as a consequence, we're always sitting on that edge right? Trying to innovate and move to new opportunities but at the same time trying to provide that quality of experience at scale. >> Yeah. >> That is so critical to the business. >> And there's a big business so it's not like it's your nimble start up but you got to be agile. What are the learnings? Take us through the cloud learnings as you guys pioneered and started to go into that pioneering mode which was okay, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what a cloud's going to do. So you guys probably said hey, we got to go look at this, let's go pioneer our impact, take us through that what happened? >> Yeah absolutely, and I think there's two interesting contexts that started that conversation right? One was we're one of the few online businesses that launches a denial of services attack against itself on a regular basis, basically every day, right? And so we have traffic patterns that are unusual even for a typical e-commerce site where we might see loads that are a hundred x, you know beginning of a Taylor Swift on sale. There's going to be traffic like no one's business. And then when all her tickets are sold, there's not going to be nearly as much traffic right? And so that is the nature of our business and cloud is very attractive for its elastic capacity. When we were running on prim, we have to provide all that capacity all the time, just to have it for that one peak moment that might literally be the highest traffic level we see all year, right? So that drew a lot of the interest in looking at the cloud in the first place. And then the other aspect was we'd been working on, you know we'd been running on prim for nearly 40 years at the time and there is a lot of technical debt that had accumulated in the system at that point. And so, there was an interest in maybe potentially being able to leverage cloud vendors' infrastructure, and migrate systems onto that and then sort of declare bankruptcy on some of that technical debt rather than trying to pay it off. And so that, those were the two thoughts that were driving that conversation. I think we got really excited by the possibility and we committed really heavily to the idea of a strategy of just moving aggressively into the cloud as fast as we possibly could. And we knew that in the process, that we would be breaking some things, we'd be you know discovering some challenges et cetera, and that's definitely what happened, right? >> (laughs) What was the big learning? >> I think the biggest learning was that, you know, we had been developing systems for decades literally, with our on prim environment and so the systems were actually very well tuned for that on prim environment and that on prim environment was very well tuned for them. >> Yeah, yeah exactly. >> And it clouds use-- >> On all levels, hardware, software. >> Yeah, all the way through 'cause it's a fully integrated, vertically integrated solution. We build a lot of this stuff custom ourselves. >> John: Yeah, and we would decompose all that. >> And so it was very difficult to migrate some parts of that to the cloud and more importantly we're pretty smart guys, we can figure out how to move stuff into the cloud. But then to do it in a cost effective manner. Required in a lot of cases, really dramatically changing the design and architecture even of the software at a pretty fundamental level that you just can't do overnight. And so ironically, you know, the technical debt that we had in our infrastructure didn't seem quite so huge once you start thinking about the technical debt of the entire stack, right? And so then we realized that we could be much more strategic about how we went after our cloud strategy and that's kind of where we are now. Where we are being smart about, there's a lot of new products that are being developed, that, you know, we can build from the get go with the idea of them being designed for the cloud. >> Cloud native. >> Exactly, so we have a lot of stuff like that, that's just being built, in fact, the bulk of our website now when you go to visit it as a consumer, the bulk of that is running in the cloud right now. But, there are some really critical systems that are core to that experience, that are still running on prim. >> So you guys had to essentially re-architect the operating environment to take into account hybrid operating. >> Yes. >> Decoupling the critical systems that can't be tampered with, maybe put some containers of Kubernetes move some services around. But for the most part treat Cloud Native as Cloud Native, Greenfield apps and nurture-- >> Yeah but there's also refactoring opportunities. So there's a lot of opportunities where you need to go in and change the product anyway and that can be an opportunity to make things a lot more cloud friendly and better take advantage of the capabilities that the cloud has, so it's actually a mix of both. >> Give an example of a good opportunity to refactory, 'cause this comes up a lot in my CUBE interviews. Like okay, 'cause it's all opportunity, opportunistic, but what are the characteristics for a great refactoring opportunity the tune up? >> So a lot of times when you want to refactor really what you want to do is take a set of capabilities that you may have in a much larger system and pull 'em out and manipulate them and play around with them and do things differently. So, our ticket purchasing process we're constantly looking at tweaking the process. Now the core pieces of it remain the same right? But we might want to change the experience and provide something more innovative that's different from what people used to do. And so one of the areas we're working on for this as an example is reserve-less checkout. Where you just buy the ticket without ever actually reserving the seat. That's a very small minor change in the flow, but to make that really work you have to pull out the pieces of the system anyway right? And grab, say I want these four pieces to rearrange differently, so that's a great refactoring opportunity. You can make all those pieces, what we actually did is we've made those pieces into lambdas that are sitting in AWS, they're basically not running most of the time which is great. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Really cheap when it's not running right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Very efficient. But then when we need them they run very efficiently and more importantly we can now manipulate the order of operations for this stuff. So breaking things out into those composable parts whenever you know you need to do that anyway, it's a great opportunity to change it. >> So great for work flow refactoring there. >> Absolutely. >> Final question for you, I know we got to break for lunch, but, then really appreciate you coming and sharing your insight. >> Absolutely. >> As a pioneer in data science and data you got machine learning certainly is the engine of AI. AI gets math and cognition are kind of coming into it. Learning machines, deep learning, bla bla bla, what's your, in your opinion, what are some pioneering areas that are ripe pioneering grounds to dig into in data science and data? When you think about CloudScale, Hybrid and just, in general what are the ripe opportunities for people to pioneer in daily. What's the next frontier in your mind? >> So I think the trend right now that's maybe not the frontier, but it's now where the main shift is, is to moving into what I would call real time learning, right? Where you're doing refactor, reinforcement learning, or online learning of some form. Where you're literally, the data's arriving in real time, transforming your model in real time, learning in real time, that's key to our strategy and it's very very common. But I think in terms of where the frontiers are it's actually kind of everywhere, in the sense that the name of the game is the cost of doing that work is getting lower and lower. You know, data's getting cheaper, computes' getting cheaper, and also the products for doing it are getting more productized, so you need less expertise and you can deploy them more quickly. So what you want to look at is businesses that are traditionally been too low margin right? To apply machine learning to but have large scale, right? Which is like the commodity, everything in that's commoditized, right? Now there's an opportunity to, there's the cost have gone so low-- >> To squeeze insight out of those areas. >> That you can now optimize that small margin and get value from it with you know, otherwise like 10 years ago it would have been so costly to build a machine learning infrastructure for it. You would've lost more money than you would've gained. >> So you could, what your saying is, these areas that were not attractive because of cost in the past, that have large scale, there's penetration opportunities to create value and insight that could-- >> Absolutely. >> Bring in new franchises and new capabilities. >> And that's why I think you know the Andreessen's software's eating the world thing, that's what that's really about is as those costs get lower, as the ability to deploy gets easier, suddenly businesses that before didn't make any sense to invest in this way, they totally make sense and in fact there's huge opportunities to completely transform the landscape by getting in. >> Chris you're a man of our world, we love you, thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> That's great insight. >> Look at this we're getting insider on the future of data, which I believe everything that he just said is totally relevant. You're an entrepreneur out there, you can attack big markets and get in there with a position with great IP, great intellectual property, again this is the modern world of computer science. >> It is. >> Don't ya think? >> It absolutely is. >> This is the benefit of scale and cloud. >> Absolutely. >> I wish I was 20 something years old again. (laughs) We've been through the ringer. >> Yes. >> Chris, thanks for coming on. Keep coverage here in New York for the first inaugural conference, Escape/2019, I'm John Furrier here, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering ESCAPE/19. >> Everyone, welcome to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the ESCAPE Conference 19. This is the inaugural event for multicloud, I think it's the first industry event for, really talking about multicloud and the impact to enterprises and public cloud. My next guest is Steve Mullaney, President and CEO of Aviatrix, storied career in tech, been there done that, seen many waves of innovation. Nicira, Palo Alto Networks, and now Aviatrix. You retired for a while, welcome back! >> I did, yeah, five years, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> It's nice to have you on because I think you have a good perspective on the multicloud because you've been in the industry since the 80s. We've both been broke in at the same time. And we've seen the waves. >> Oh, yeah. >> This wave is bigger than, I think, most of the other waves combined because it brings together so many things, infrastructure, software, cloud scale, and a new modern application environment. And then you complicate everything by throwing IoT out there, edges being pushed to their boundaries, securities equations changed, all this is going on right now, all at the same time. >> No, and that's why I was basically retired for five years, and I was at Nicira, we got bought by VMware, I stayed there for a couple years, and I just said, "Okay, that's it!" I've had a good career and I'm done. And about a year ago, the world changed. And it felt like on a Tuesday morning, I noticed enterprises really, we'd been talking about cloud for 12 years. And five years ago they said, "We're coming in, we're going to do it," but they didn't really mean it. But about a year ago, all in the same day, every enterprise said, "No, now we actually mean it." And I don't know why, I don't know if it was just people retired or just five years of talking about it, they all decided, we're comin' in, and enterprises all moved together. And this wave, as you said, is bigger than, I was around in 1992, in the early 90s, in the movement from mainframe to client server. This is 10 times bigger than that. And more importantly, it's going to happen 10,000 times faster. Because (fingers tapping). What's that? I just deployed 62 data centers around the world. Because if I can leverage the greatest infrastructure built, basic infrastructure of the hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, you name it. It's unbelievable the velocity at which you can now start deploying. >> Steve, I think you're onto something big here, and this is why I'm here at this event and why I'm excited, that a lot of the industry thought leaders and practitioners and leaders are doing this event. Small events, inaugural, but I think it has a lot of links. Because there's a lot of tell signs that I like to look at, one is cloud. I've been covering Amazon eight years now, with theCUBE, I've known AWS since it started, and I've done many startups in its launch using AWS. But I've had many conversations with Andy Jassy, one on ones, privately, I got an exclusive coming up for re:Invent with him. I've gotten to know him. It started out, "Everyone's moving to the cloud. "Every data center's not going to exist." And then, you know-- >> Oh, maybe not, yeah, yeah. >> Maybe not, we'll do an output. So I challenged him last year, I said, "Andy, come on, dude, like you were saying like a year ago that." >> Steve: Yeah, it's all AWS or nothing. >> And he said, "John, look I'm not, "I just listen to the customers." And I interviewed him when he did the VMware deal. And he's very customer focused. And when they make these moves with outpost, and I think it's going to be a hybrid message this year at re:Invent, you know it's real. >> Steve: Oh, yeah. >> I think this validates your point, so I got to ask you, what specifically do you see the formula being for multicloud, because certainly everyone's recognized that there's a huge benefit for AWS. But from a scale standpoint, so why not use that? What's going on on the Enterprise on-premise that's making this new thing work? >> I think it all starts with architecture, like anything else. I think right now, enterprises have said, "Okay, we've burned a boat, right? "Now, we're not going to get rid of our data centers, "but in terms of our strategic investment, "we are moving into the cloud. "We are going to leverage "the infrastructure of the hyperscalers. "And whether that is just one hyperscaler, or multiple." And I have not met an enterprise who thinks there only going to be one, right, every single one of them. Now, I don't think they're moving workloads across, I don't think that. I think they see that, I'm going to use Google for AI, I'm going to use AWS because it started there. I'm going to use Azure, for Office 365, and other different things, and everything in infrastructure is always multi. It's never homogeneous, right, it's always that. So I think is going to happen, and I think what people are begging for right now, is, I want to build an architecture that gives me the optionality to be able to deliver a common set of services whether I'm on AWS or multiple clouds. And I want them to be my services and I don't want to have understand the low level abstractions and constructs of each of those clouds, because their all different. One's metric, one's U.S., one's some other weird thing. And I don't have the time, the people, or the resources to be able to do that. Give me a common set of services, that are my services, that I can deploy and abstract away the details of those public clouds. >> Yeah, it's an interesting point there, in fact, I called BS on multicloud last year when it started to kind of rear it's head, I'm like, "Come on, multicloud is bullshit." And I said that on theCUBE. And here's what I meant. Multicloud as an operating model is directionally correct, but the architecture hasn't shown where there's true multicloud. Now, the fact of the matter is, people have Amazon, people have Office and Office 365, that's technically two clouds, >> They're siloed, yeah. >> If they give us Google, that's three clouds. >> I use two or three clouds. >> So, if he have three clouds, I guess they have multiple clouds. But you bring up an interesting point, and going back as a student of the history of tech industry, multi-vendor has been a big deal. >> It is a big deal. >> And like you said, there will be a multi-vendor world, that will happen. The question is how. How do you guys see it happening? >> Well I think what's-- >> Your company is attacking this Aviatrix. >> What's interesting is, so now you think about from a customer perspective which, I do the same thing, same thing with AWS. It's always outside in. Okay, I'm thinking as a enterprise IT person. I'm making the move. Do you believe that your basic infrastructure will lever the hyperscalers, or will you build an on-prem? Everyone says, "I believe that's the way I'm going to go." Great, how do I do that? So, I'm a IT architect, who do I go to to help me? Do I go to CISCO? No. The most shocking thing for me, of the six months I've been at Aviatrix, is that word's never used. It's like it was DEC or IBM in the conversation, when you were talking about client-server, no, why would you? CISCO, Juniper, Arista, any of the networking people, not even in the conversation. VMware, not really in the conversation. So, I don't have any incumbent vendor that I can go to that I used to go to. >> Why aren't they in the conversation? 'Cause of the commodity, they've been extracted away? >> I think it's just because it's the innovation of dilemma. Right, once you're selling a lot of stuff into on-prem, to then go and say, I mean you look at Palo Alto Networks, they're trying to make that transition. Acquiring a bunch of companies, VMware acquiring a bunch of companies. Why are they doing that? Because they know, I got to get off on-prem, everything's going in the cloud. >> So it's a legacy. >> It's a legacy thing, and I think what happens is, there is only one reason, and one reason only, an enterprise customer is not using Aviatrix. 'Cause they never heard of us. That's why, that's the only reason. Once they hear about what they're doing, my God. >> Well, give the plug, talk about the company, what do you guys do-- >> So we deliver, I mean it sounds like I made it up for this conference, but actually this conference was perfect for this. It's networking and security services for the multicloud enterprise. And we're building an architecture, that people can deploy, that will give them this common architecture across all the different clouds. So whether you're just using one cloud or multiple, it doesn't matter, it's the same set of security and networking services. And we do that by embracing and extending the basic constructs that AWS, Google, Azure, and Oracle, and all the other clouds will give you, and to deliver that real enterprise class. Because the other thing we've found is, everyone thinks that the cloud gives you everything and anything you will ever need from networking and security. Let's say AWS, they're going to do everything I need. What the enterprises are figuring out, is once they stop going in, what they realize is, it's created for the low-level common basic constructs. And the enterprise starts at, well, I need these BGP feature because guess what, the data center is not going away. And I need more than a hundred route limitations, and I need, all of a sudden there's fifty different limitations AWS will give me. Well, they didn't talk about that! Well, of course they're not going to talk about that. They are just going to go check, check, check, we solve all your problems. As enterprises now move in, with mission critical applications, they're realizing, I need the same level of networking and security services that I had on-prem. I can't get that with the native constructs. So where do I go? That's what we do, so we fill in, we embrace what we can of those constructs, we fill in holes where there are fill in holes. And then we give you the mechanism to be able to orchestrate that across the global network. >> So you operationalize the hyperscale clouds for enterprise, >> Yes. >> that's basically what you do. >> Steve: Exactly, for the enterprise. >> Yeah, exactly. >> On the level that they need. >> So you get the benefits of the cloud, but all those nuances under the cover details like networking and other features you abstract that away and provide an operating model for enterprise compliments. >> And the beautiful thing about it is the velocity, at which we can, we're over the top, effectively over the top. We're integrated into the Cloud Suite, understand what cloud native, we understand all the constructs of accounts, and all the things we need to do. But what we expose to the customer, to the enterprise, is a set of over-the-top services that just work. >> Okay Steve, so I got to ask you, since we are at The Multi-Cloud Conference. What is multicloud, I mean how do you define it, you laid out a pretty compelling architecture of what needs are, levers in the cloud, and on-prem is what Aviatrix does. But what is the definition, how should people understand what is multicloud? >> I think for us, for networking and security in that base, so we're basic infrastructure. We get out there first, right? So, if you're going to build a city, you don't start putting people there first the first thing, if you do it right, is you get sewers, you get electricity, gas, roads, all that. Networking and security, infrastructure, is basic infrastructure goes out first. And you want to create an architecture that's going to live with you for twenty years. You don't want to have to rip up the roads and put the sewers in later. And that architecture needs to be multicloud because, even though you think maybe, most of our customers are 90% AWS right now. But every single one of them say, "But I'm moving to Azure, I'm moving to Google, "I've got retail customers that won't allow me "to put my infrastructure on AWS." Or, "I have machine learning, AI type apps on Google." They all say that same thing. But what they all then say to us, is, "You're going to be the mechanism "upon which I'm going to be able to deploy "this common set of services." So they don't need to know that. >> All right, give an example of a customer you guys have, name a name, we had a customer on stage here-- >> Steve: So, Jefferies. >> John: They did this for a use case. >> Yeah so, Jefferies. Financial Services Institution, lots of requirements, Mark Leon Soon is going to be on stage with me tomorrow. We started working with them about nine months ago. Exactly the same thing, they said, "Okay, you know what? "We need to start moving to the cloud, "we've got to start leveraging the cloud. "But, it's too complicated, right? "Even AWS, says 'Go Build.' "I don't want to go build, I want to consume services. "But they don't have all the service that I needed, "they're too low a level. "They're very high function, high enterprise requirements." So they start using us to orchestrate things, to provide transit networking, to provide egress filtering out to the Internet, we have high performance encryption, AWS will only offer it one gig. We can offer it to 10, 20, 30, 40 gig. So they start deploying, they start realizing all the things we do. Then they go and say, "I want to bring my Palo Alto Networks firewall "into the cloud." When you start looking at that, 'cause then guess what? All my policies, I want the same level that I have on-prem when I'm in the cloud. If I go try to bring in my VM series into AWS the construct that AWS give you, they cause you limitations in performance, in visibility, It's integration hassles, there's performance, sustainability, visibility issues, they force you to use SNAT. And there's all these issues, and they go, "Oh my God, this is a pain in the ass." We solved all that for them. We basically cloudify the VM series for them, so all those limitations go away. So that's just another use case that they use. Now they start looking, and they say, "Okay, now I'm going to start extending into other clouds and I want to use you as the common frame point, the common pane of glass. >> Well Steve, good luck in your venture, you're back in the saddle again. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Another ride here, you feel good about it? >> This is going to be the best, the biggest that I've been, and I was at Palo Alto Networks and VMware Nicira. And this one's going to be bigger than both of those. >> What's your vision for where this is going to be for you, where do you see the company in a few years, what are some of the outcomes you expect to happen? >> Our opportunity, and I look at it as, someone's going to take this opportunity, and the reason I came back is, why not us, someone's going to take it. And the opportunity, honestly, is to become, effectively, what Cisco was in the early 90's. To define the architecture, the networking and the security infrastructure architecture for enterprise customers. They are begging for that right now, that's our opportunity. >> Cloud Interoperability. >> Interoperability, yeah. And so there's so many things that we need to go and do. When you look at also the thing that people are going to say, the operations. So many people think, I want it the same as it was on-prem. I think with the cloud, and across multicloud you can do it right with us, and actually better. Because the visibility that you get is more, than what you get on-prem. >> Well, and the thing that's interesting that's different about this new world that we're talking about is that there is going to be constant improvements in new things which means that the functionality game is going to increase, which means the agility is even more important because the apps are going to have more things to do. >> Yeah. I mean in the end, why do you want to go to cloud? I want to go to cloud 'cause I want it to be self-service and I want agility. I want my developers, I want everybody to be able to do things quicker because all of the sudden they say, "Let's go roll this out", and you want to be able to do it. >> Well, good luck on the new venture, Aviatrix, check 'em out, hot multicloud startup, growing, how many people do you have, put the plug in, >> 100. >> what are you guys looking for, are you hiring, give me a quick plug. >> We just hired a new VP at World Wide Sales, James Winebrenner, who was Viptela CEO, VP Sales in Cisco, hiring a tremendous amount of sales guys right now, we're closing on a $40 million Series C round next week, and we're hiring a lot of people. >> Good luck, we'll be following you Steve, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Again, multicloud, this is a shift that's happening, multicloud is just another word for multi-vendor, in a new modern era, this is what it has been in the technology industry, but a whole new world. This is theCUBE coverage here in New York City, ESCAPE/19, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for cubes. Coverage of Google next twenty nineteen. Hashtag Google. Next nineteen, Google's Cloud Conference, where their customers, developers all come together Cubes. Three days of coverage. Day one. I'm John forward, my Coast, Dave Aloft as well. Astute many men Who's out there doing some reporter? Next guess Allison. Wagon filled is the CMO of Google Cloud. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here, >> so I got to say, looking out on the floor here, we're in the middle of the floor. Great demographics. A lot of developers, lot of enterprise customers. A lot of you know, sea levels will also enterprise architects and cloud architects. So this is not just a developer fest. This is a business developer conference. >> Yes. So that's been a real change this year. Not only have we increase the numbers I think I mentioned earlier that we have thirty thousand people are actually able even more than that. We had a cap registration we sold out last week. But the composition is different this year because this year we have over seventy percent from enterprise companies and then within enterprise Cos it's Dev's decision makers, business leaders. And then we have a whole executive track of leader Circle program as well. So it's been a really great mix of different energy, different questions in different sessions. >> You guys do a great job in event kudos to the team original Google Io was a great event that continues to be the consumer side on Google. You guys have that same kind of grew swing going on a lot of sessions. Take him in to explain the theme of the show. What's going on around the events? Breakouts? What's the focus? >> Yes, so the focus? Well, there's a theme and a couple different levels. The broad theme is a cloud like no other, because we've introduced a lot of new, different features and products and programs. We introduced Antos this morning, which was really revolutionary way of using containers broadly multi cloud, high but cloud. So it's from a product standpoint, but it's also a cloud like no other, because it's about the community that's here, and it's truly a partnership with our customers and our partners about building this cloud together, and we see the community as a really key part of that. It's really corta Google's values around openness, open source technology and really embracing the broader community to build the cloud together. >> And I thought was interesting. The Kino was phenomenal. You had the CEO of Google come out Sundar Pichai and the new CEO on the job for ten weeks. T K >> Sommers. Korean. Yes. Lot of action >> going on a Google right now. >> Yeah, it's been great to have Thomas. Diane was phenomenal and building the business. It's wonderful. Have Sundar here. He's got a lot of commitment, really engaged with our customers. And so it's a lot of energy and a lot of excitement. A Google. >> I thought the vory class act of Thomas Curry and his first words on stage at the CEO was to give props. The Diane Green very, very respected, that was >> great, was very gracious of, Thomas >> said. Sorry, he said. The press, sir, that one of things I really like about Google is not afraid of hard problems, So I wanted to ask you a CMO I always asked the most about brand promise. What's the brand promise? That you want customers and the community to take away from an event like this? >> So the brand promise has a couple different areas. First and foremost, we want our customers to be successful with their customers. And so we think, really holistically about lessons. Make sure that we're delivering the cloud technologies so that customers can really serve everyone that they want to serve, whether it be a retailer that wants to create a wonderful, offline and online experience, whether it's a health care provider that wants to ensure that every doctor, it knows all of the right data about all the patients or within a hospital. And so that's the way we're always thinking is how do we ensure that we help our customers set up to be successful? >> So one of the big teams we heard this morning was the industry focus, and you just referenced that again. It seems to be an increasingly important part of the messaging and the technologies that you're creating, and it ties into digital transformation. You seeing every industry transform data is at the heart of that transformation. You're seeing big companies traverse different industries. So what if you could talk about the industry focus? Uh, where'd that come from? Where do you see it going? >> Yes, So there's really three core parts of what we've been talking about today. First and foremost is the infrastructure and ensuring that we have the world's best infrastructure. Then, on top of that, it's ensuring that we have all the right applications to help with digital transformation. And then, as part of that further, is the industry solutions. Because in our six focus industries, we want to make sure that we're really developing the right applications with the right solutions and half a deep expertise that companies are looking for so that we can really part with partner with them and really, truly be innovative. And we could feel much more comfortable being innovative. But we really understand our customer problems >> keep Part of that is the global s eyes. You look out here, you see all the big names I won't name because I'll forget one. But there's two obvious ones right there because once you start to see those guys come into the ecosystem, that's when you can partner and get really deep industry expertise globally, >> I agree. And so we do have a great partnerships that said here with Accenture in tow, Lloyd and Antos or three of them, many more that we were working really closely with. And there really are an extension of what we want to build because we know that we will not be able Teo create every single last mile industry solution and every single industry, and working with those companies really helps us. >> I was on the plane last night watching the game. Of course, I love you guys got to see it. You're probably appear busy, but I focused. Google was all over the this year, >> so this is our second year of our partnership with the law, and it's been great. There's a couple dimensions to that partnership. First and foremost, we help them analyze eighty years worth of data. And through all of that analysis, we've been working with him about making predictions about games in helping them understand players and coaches and teams better. Everything from creating brackets. Teo, how do you fan experience? And then as part of that, we also had opportunity to do some advertising within their games. So you may have seen some of the TV spots that we did, which was about analyzing that data. We put ourselves on the line by making predictions during the game about what we thought would happen based on all of our analysis. And then the Big Chef this year was we included students, so it was really studies. Last year we created all these models, but we did it within Google. We had Google, Debs and Google engineers creating prediction models. We said, like, What if we brought students in tow? Help us? So we recruited thirty or so all star students around the country from their schools, brought them together. They learned DCP like that. It was awesome. And then they started working together doing predictions. And so a lot of what you saw in the Games and on our hub was actually students using Google Claude platform to make predictions about the games. >> So just get this right. The reference on stage by T K students. So you had data from the that was exposed to the students. They had a hackathon. How much lead time that they have? What was that >> did everything with thirty days. So they hack it on was about two months ago or so. But within the last thirty days, they did all of these different projects and they were actually doing really creative things about trying to come up with new types of stats like explosiveness. What does that mean? Does that mean that you move in closer to the basket or does it mean that here they're coming up, the stats around pace of game and different elements of the place? It was really fun. >> How many slam dunk this, Miss Fowles? So >> question, Who do you who you're rooting for? I was >> writing from Virginia. You know, Let's say I >> was right for >> Virginia after my bracket got busted, so I was allowed to kind of change a little bit. And they're Michigan. Once they were gone, I was like, >> So I use no way. I but I hit ninety ninth percentile. So you go. I had Michigan in Michigan State rather in Virginia in my Final Four for Michigan State. Lost, but still, I would have been >> That's pretty good >> night, point nine. So what is with what kind of predictions were the students doing well, >> predictions about everything from, well, last night we had some predictions about the number two point last. We had about how many different times we're going to exchange like the ball will go back and forth between teams. We had predictions about three pointers and one game everything. So it's been really fun. Teo work with >> that kind of in game predictions. To see that a lot. >> You probably saw some stats real >> probability of, ah, victory, which of course, last night. Forget it. I mean, it's changed so quickly. >> Great program. One of those I want to ask you change gears is you have a book in the press room called customer Voices. So this has been a focus, and I think a lot of people have been Lego Google's great tact, but not a lot of customers, which you guys air debunking with. Not only this, but here to show shown the logo slide really kind of showing the traction from a customer's standpoint. >> Yes, about >> the focus on the customer. How does that change? How you doing your job? How is the tech rolling out? Can you share some insight into customer focused. >> Yeah, this has been a really big step change this year. We have over four hundred customers speaking throughout this event, and then we have a number of them that are on stage in the keynotes telling real stories. Two years ago, we had some customers speaking and they would say, I'm looking. I'm dabbling and this But now they're making rial kind of bet The company decisions using our technology. And so this customer voices is looking at those companies. We have something called the customer innovation serious this afternoon, where the CIA of HSBC will be talking about their evolution and Gogo Cloud. Two years ago, Darrell West was on stage talking about just kind of what they will be getting. Two Dio with Google Cloud Platform And now here we are two years later, when they've made a lot of progress and we'LL be sharing their stories that the custom innovation Siri's is one of my favorite parts. It next, >> you know, we cover a lot of events. David eyes were like two ESPN of tech or game day. We've gotten the shows, we see a lot of events and you kind of hear the key words over and over again. Soon these events here we're hearing scale, which we've heard all the time. Google scales, scales, scales solve all our problems. But we're hearing more about customers. OK, this has been a big focus. How have you guys shifted internally? Because this seems to been around for a while. Like you said, I think it's a step function from what we're seeing as well. What's going on internally. How you guys mobilizing, How you guys taking this to the mark? Because you've got great partition. So Cisco onstage VM wears even up there. You got an ecosystem developing a lot of momentum. >> So we're truly this year Enterprise ready to use a buzz word that comes up. So two years ago, we still had some holes in some of our technology stack, and we're still really building to go to market teams. We still vastly scaling that so absolutely growing there. But we're in a whole different place as a business where we are able to serve really large enterprises at scale. McKesson just announced sixth largest company that they are moving and working with us a Google cloud. I mean, so these air major companies that are making big decisions to work with us. And so it's at a whole different level this year, and we're really proud that the customers have chosen to work with us, and we're building the organization to ensure that their successful. So that's our customer success program. That's ensuring we have the right kind of customer engineers working hand in hand with our customers. So it's a big focus ever. Whole group. It's a focus where Thomas Kurian has a lot of background serving enterprise customers at Oracle for twenty years, bringing that expertise. So you'LL see that everywhere. So I'm glad you picked up on that and feel it because it's really permeates everything we're doing at Google clouds, >> and it's been a good, positive change. The results of their What's the focus for you As you look forward, It's a lot to do. You guys are a great opportunity. I always say Google's dark horse now Samson's got a good lead out there being first in, but you guys have a lot of tech. You got the customer focus. You got a lot of momentum on the tech side. Cloud native Open source. Partner ecosystem Developing customer ecosystem. So kind of ball's in your court, so to speak. >> You feel really well, position we It's early. So in the whole market, people seem to think that I like all these decisions, but it's really still eighty percent of workload Zoran data centers of these big enterprises, everybody who's here with us right now. And most companies were choosing a multi club strategy this morning. We announced a major product and those that really enables the multi cloud strategy so enables Google to really be at the center of that multi cloud and provide the services using containers and a lot of the biggest best advances right now. And so as we scale our go to market, we can really bring this technology that way here, over and over again, is the best technology in the business. Yeah, we had it really had to go to market in place to bring it to customers. And this is really where we're taking it so we can help get this awesome technology. It's so fun is a marketer to them, bring it to everybody. >> I always say it so early. The wave is just getting started more ways behind it. I'm very impressed. That intrigue also by the rebranding of the Google Cloud platform what you guys announced last kind of hybrid and those is interesting because it's a rebrand slash new set of integration points Sisco again on stage kind of integrating with your container platform is a key key story that I think is nuanced but kind of points to a whole new Google. What was behind the rebranding? Can you just share some insight that what the commerce she's like Google Cloud Platforms is descriptive. But I mean, >> sister, thanks >> Cloud Services platform when we chose that name last year is when we wanted to Alfa with a product and frankly, within the marketing team, he kind of knew was always a placeholder name. And then the debate was, What do we change the name when you go to Beta, which we did a couple months ago? Or when we go to went to Gaea and we decided this would be a great opportunity to change the name, so we always knew it was going to change the name. Picking a name is always complicated, and so we spent a lot of time thinking about what way wanted that name too mean and what we wanted to stand for. And we really liked Anthros. It's a Greek word. It is a nod to the Greek aspects of the history of the product. With Cooper, Netease, Andhis, Teo and other areas. It means the blossom it means to grow. It means all. And so you many words like Anthology and things like that. So we'd liked both what it meant, And we also liked that with all Namie decisions, it's easy to spell. It's easy to find. It's all great, >> and it's super >> booming in California. Here as we speak. Well, ironic. >> It has an international flavor to it. But you guys, you guys are taking this show overseas, right? They've got a big show in London in November, I know and yes, >> be in Tokyo in July at next and then London in November. And then we do it between all of these. What we call Clouds Summit Siri's, which are in country slightly smaller. But we bring a lot of the same technology, and speakers and sessions just have a slightly scaled down version. >> Intimate. We really appreciate your support. We love doing the Cube hearing a lot of Czech athletes, as we say here on the show floor. Lot of knowledge, good customer converses. Alison's Thanks for sharing the inside congratulates on the great >> show, so I left be here. Thanks >> for rebranding as the market shifts. Great time to have a rebrand, certainly when it means something more. Multi cloud hybrid cloud Google Cloud Platform now and those that cube bring you live coverage here from the floor at Google next twenty nineteen. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

(techy music playing) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc., also cohost of theCUBE. We're here for a CUBE Conversation on Thought Leader Thursday and I'm here with Chris Cummings, who's a senior manager, advisor, big-time industry legend, but he's also the Chasm Group, right now, doer, Crossing the Chasm, famous books and it's all about the future. Formerly an exec at Netapp, been in the storage and infrastructure cloud tech business, also friends of Stanford. Season tickets together to go to the tailgates, but big Cal game coming up of course, but more importantly a big-time influence in the industry and we're going to do some drill down on what's going on with cloud computing, all the buzzword bingo going on in the industry. Also, AWS, Amazon Web Services re:Invent is coming up, do a little preview there, but really kind of share our views on what's happening in the industry, because there's a lot of noise out there. We're going to try to get the signal from the noise, thanks for watching. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you so much for having me, glad to be here. >> Great to see you, so you know, you have seen a lot of waves of innovation and right now you're working with a lot of companies trying to figure out the future. >> That's right. >> And you're seeing a lot of significant industry shifts. We talk about it on theCUBE all the time. Blockchain from decentralization all the way up to massive consolidation with hyper-convergence in the enterprise. >> Mm-hmm. >> So a lot of action, and because of the day the people out in the marketplace, whether it's a developer or a CXO, CIO, CDO, whatever enterprise leader's doing the transformations. >> Chris Collins: We got all of them. >> They're trying to essentially not go out of business. A lot of great things are happening, but at the same time a lot of pressure on the business is happening. So, let's discuss that, I mean, you are doing this for work at the Chasm Group. Talk about your role, you were formerly at Netapp, so I know you know the storage business. >> Right. >> So we're going to have a great conversation about storage and impact infrastructure, but at the Chasm Group how are you guys framing the conversation? >> Yeah, Chasm Group is really all about helping these companies process their thinking, think about if they're going to get to be a platform out in the industry. You can't just go and become a platform in the industry, you got to go knock down problem, problem, problem, solution, solution, solution. So we help them prioritize that and think about best practices for achieving that. >> You know, Dave Alante, my co-CEO, copartner, co-founder at SiliconANGLE Media and I always talk about this all the time, and the expression we use is if you don't know what check mate looks like you shouldn't be playing chess, and a lot of the IT folks and CIOs are in that mode now where the game has changed so much that sometimes they don't even know what they're playing. You know, they've been leaning on this Magic Quadrant from Gartner and all these other analyst firms and it's been kind of a slow game, a batch kind of game, now it's real time. Whatever metaphor you want to use, the game has changed so the chessboard has changed. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So I got to get your take on this because you've been involved in strategy, been on product, you worked at growth companies, big companies, start-ups, and now looking at the bigger picture, what is the game? I mean, right now if you could lay out the chessboard, what are people looking at, what is the game? >> So, we deal a lot with customer conversations and that's where it all kind of begins, and I think what we found is this era of pushing product and just throwing stuff out there. It worked for a while but those days are over. These folks are so overwhelmed. The titles you mentioned, CIO, CDO, all the dev ops people, they're so overwhelmed with what's going on out there. What they want is people to come in and tell them about what's happening out there, what are their peers doing and what problems are they trying to solve in order and drive it that way. >> And there's a lot of disruption on the product side. >> Yes. >> So tech's changing, obviously the business models are changing, that's a different issue. Let's consider the tech things, you have-- >> Mm-hmm. >> A tech perspective, let's get into the tech conversation. You got cloud, you got private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, micro-machine learning, hyper-machine learning, hyper-cloud, all these buzzwords are out there. It's buzzwords bingo. >> Chris: Right. >> But also the reality is you got Amazon Web Services absolutely crushing it, no doubt about it. I mean, I've been looking at Oracle, I've been looking at Google, I've been looking at SAP, looking at IBM, looking at Alibaba, looking at Microsoft, the game is really kind of a cloak and dagger situation going on here. >> That's right. >> A lot of things shifting on the provider side, but no doubt scale is the big issue. >> Chris: That's right. >> So how does a customer squint through all this? >> The conversations that I've had, especially with the larger enterprises, is they know that they've got to be able to adopt and utilize the public cloud capabilities, but they also want to retain that degree of control, so they want to maintain, whether it's their apps, their dev ops, some pieces of their infrastructure on prem, and as you talked about that transition it used to be okay, well we thought about cloud was equal to private cloud, then it became public cloud. Hybrid cloud, people are hanging on to hybrid cloud, sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Right reasons are because it's critical for their business. You look at somebody, for instance, in media and entertainment. They can't just push everything out there. They've got to retain control and really have their hands around that content because they've got to be able to distribute it, right? But then you look at some others that are hanging on for the wrong reasons, and the wrong reasons are they want to have their control and they want to have their salary and they want to have their staff, so boy, hybrid sounds like a mix that works. >> So I'm going to be having a one-on-one with Andy Jassy next week, exclusive. I do that every year as part of theCUBE. He's a great guy, good friend, become a good friend, because we've been a fan of him when no one loved Amazon. We saw the early, obviously at SiliconANGLE, now he's the king of the industry, but he's a great manager, great executive, and has done a great job on his ethos of Bezos and Amazon. Ship stuff faster, lower prices, the flywheel that Amazon uses. Everything's kind of on that-- And they own Twitch, which we stream, too, and we love. But if you could ask Andy any questions what questions would you ask him if you get to have that one-on-one? >> Yeah, well, it stems from conversations I've had with customers, which was probably once a week I would be talking to a CIO or somebody on that person's staff, and they'd slide the piece of paper across and say this is my bill. I had no idea that this was what AWS was going to drive me from a billing perspective, and I think we've seen... You know, we've had all kinds of commentary out there about ingress fees, egress fees, all of that sort of stuff. I think the question for Andy, when you look at the amount of revenue and operating margin that they are generating in that business, how are they going to start diversifying that pricing strategy so that they can keep those customers on without having them rethink their strategy in the future. >> So are you saying that when they slide that piece of paper over that the fees are higher than expected or not... Or low and happy, they're happy with the prices. >> Oh, they're-- I think they're-- I think it's the first time they've ever thought that it could be as expensive as on-premise infrastructure because they just didn't understand when they went into this how much it was going to cost to access that data over time, and when you're talking about data that is high volume and high frequency data, they are accessing it quite a bit, as opposed to just stale, cold, dead stuff that they want to put off somewhere else and not have to maintain. >> Yeah, and one of the things we're seeing that we pointed at the Wikibon team is a lot of these pricings are... The clients don't know that they're being billed for something that they may not be using, so AI or machine learning could come in potentially. So this is kind of what you're getting at. >> Exactly. >> The operational things that Amazon's doing to keep prices low for the customer, not get bill shock. >> Chris: That's right. >> Okay, so that's cool. What else would you ask him about culture or is there anything you would ask him about his plans... What else would you ask him? >> I think another big thing would be just more plans on what's going to be done around data analytics and big data. We can call it whatever we want, but they've been so good at the semi-structured or unstructured content, you know, when we think about AWS and where AWS was going with S3, but now there's a whole new phenomenon going on around this and companies are as every bit as scared about that transition as they were about the prior cloud transition, so what really are their plans there when they think about that, and for instance, things like how does GPU processing come into play versus CPU processing. There's going to be a really interesting discussion I think you're going to have with him on that front. >> Awesome, let's talk about IT. IT and information technology departments formerly known as DP, data processing, information-- All that stuff's changed, but there were still guys that were buying hardware, buying Netapp tries that you used to work for, buying EMC, doing data domain, doing a lot of stuff. These guys are essentially looking at potentially a role where-- I mean, for instance, we use Amazon. We're a big customer, happy customer. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> We don't have those guys. >> Chris: Right. >> So if I'm an IT guy I might be thinking shit, I could be out of a job, Amazon's doing my job, so I'm not saying that's the case but that's certainly a fear. >> Chris: Absolutely. >> But the business models have to shift from old IT to new IT. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> What does that game look like? What is this new IT game? Is it more, not a department view, is it more of a holistic view, and what's the sentiment around the buyers and your customers that you talk to around how do they message to the IT guys, like, look, there's higher valued jobs you could go to. >> Right. >> You mention analytics... >> That's right. >> What's the conversation? Certainly some guys won't make the transition and might not make it, but what's the narrative? >> Well, I think that's where it just starts with what segment are you talking about, so if you look at it and say just break it down between the large enterprise, the uber enterprise that we've seen for so long, mid-size and smaller, the mid-size and smaller are gone, okay. Outside of just specific industries where they really need that control, media and entertainment might be an example. That mid-size business is gone for those vendors, right? So those vendors are now having to grab on and say I'm part of that cloud phenomenon, my hyper-cloud of the future. I'm part of that phenomenon, and that becomes really the game that they have to play, but when you look at those IT shops I think they really need to figure out where are they adding value and where are they just enabling value that's being driven by cloud providers, and really that's all they are is a facilitator, and they've got to shift their energy towards where am I adding value, and that becomes more that-- >> That's differentiation, that's where differentiation is, so non-differentiated labor is the term that Wikibon analysts use. >> Oh, okay. >> That's going down, the differentiated labor is either revenue generating or something operationally more efficient, right? >> That's right, and it's all going to be revenue generating now. I mean, I used to be out there talking about things like archiving, and archiving's a great idea. It's something where I'm going to save money, okay, but I got this many projects on my list if I'm a CIO of where I can save money. I'm being under pressure about how am I going to go generate money, and that's where I think people are really shifting their eyeballs and their attention, is more towards that. >> And you got IOT coming down the pike. I mean, we're hearing is from what I hear from CIOs when we have a few in-depth conversations is look, I got to get my development team ramped up and being more cloud native, more microservice and I got to get more app development going that drives revenue for my business, more efficiency. >> Chris: Right. >> I have a digital transformation across the company in terms of hiring culture and talent. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> And then I got pressure to do IOT. >> Chris: Right. >> And I got security, so of those five things, IOT tends to fall out, security takes preference because of the security challenges, and then that's already putting their plate full right there. >> That's right, that's real time and those people are-- >> Those are core issues. >> Putting too much pressure on that right now and then you're thinking about IT and in the meantime, by the way, most of these places don't have the dev ops shop that's operating on a flywheel, right? So you're not... What's it, Goldman Sachs has 5,000 developers, right? That's bigger than most tech companies, so as a consequence you start thinking about well, not everybody looks like that. What the heck are they going to do in the future. They're going to have to be thinking about new ways of accessing that type of capability. >> This is where the cloud really shines in my mind. I think in the cloud, too, it's starting to fragment the conversations. People will try to pigeonhole Amazon. I see Microsoft-- I've been very critical of Microsoft in their cloud because-- First of all, I love the move that they're making. I think it's a smart move business-wise, but they bundle in 365 Office, that's not really cloud, it's just SAS, so then you start getting into the splitting of the hairs of well, SAS is not included in cloud. But come on, SAS is cloud. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Well, maybe Amazon should include their ecosystem that would be a trillion dollar revenue number, so all companies don't look the same. >> That's right. >> And so from an enterprise that's a challenge. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Do I got to hire developers for Asger, do I got to hire developers for Amazon, do I got to hire developers for Google. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> There's no stack consistency across private enterprises to cloud. >> Chris: So I have-- >> Because I'm a storage guy, I've got Netapp drives and now I've got an Amazon thing. I like Amazon, but now I got to go Asger, what the hell do I do? >> I got EMCs here and I got Nimbles there and HP and I've still got tape from IBM from five decades ago, so, John, I got a great term for you that's going to be a key one, I think, in the ability. It's called histocompatibility, and this is really about... >> Oh, here we go. Let's get nerdy with the tape glasses on. >> It's really about the ability to be able to inter-operate with all this system and some of these systems are live systems, they're current systems. Some of it's garbage that should've been thrown out a long time ago and actually recycled. So I think histocompatibility is going to be a really, really big deal. >> Well, keep the glasses on. Let's get down in the weeds here. >> Okay. >> I like the-- With the pocket protector, if you had the pocket protector we'd be in good shape. >> Yep. >> So, vendors got to compete with these buzzwords, become buzzword bingo, but there are trends that you're seeing. You've done some analysis of how the positionings and you're also a positioning guru as well. There's ways to do it and that's a challenge is for suppliers, vendors who want to serve customers. They got to rise above the noise. >> Chris: That's right. >> That's a huge problem. What are you seeing in terms of buzzword bingo-- >> Oh, my goodness. >> Because like I said, I used to work for HP in the old days and they used to have an expression, you know, don't call it what it is because that's boring and make it exciting, so the analogy they used was sushi is basically cold, dead fish. (laughing) So, sushi is a name for cold, dead fish. >> Chris: Yeah. >> So you don't call your product cold, dead fish, you call it sushi. >> Chris: Right. >> That was the analogy, so in our world-- >> Chris: That was HP-UX. >> That was HP-UX, you know, HP was very engineering. >> Yes. >> That's not-- Sushi doesn't mean anything. It's cold, dead fish, that's what it is. >> Right. >> That's what it does. >> That's right. >> So a lot of vendors can error in that they're accurate and their engineers, they call it what it is, but there's more sex appeal with some better naming. >> Totally. >> What are you seeing in terms of the fashion, if you will, in terms of the naming conventions. Which ones are standing out, what's the analysis. >> Well, I think the analysis is this, you start with your adjectives with STEM words, John, and what I mean by that is things like histocompatibility. It could start with things like agility, flexibility, manageability, simplicity, all those sorts of things, and they've got to line those terms up and go out there, but I think the thing that right now-- >> But those are boring, I saw a press release saying we're more agile, we're the most effective software platform with agility and dev ops, like what the hell does that mean? >> Yeah, I think you also have to combine it with a heavy degree of hyperbole, right? So hyperbole, an off-the-cuff statement that is so extreme that you'd never really want to be tested on it, so an easy way to do that is to add hyper in front of all that. So it's hyper-manageability, right, and so I think we're going to see a whole new class of words. There are 361 great adjectives with STEMs, but-- >> Go through the list. >> Honestly. >> Go through the list that you have. >> I mean, there's so many, John, it's... >> So hyper is an easy one, right? >> Hyper is easy, I think that's a very simple one. I think now we also see that micro is so big, right, because we're talking about microservices and that's really the big buzzword in the industry right now. So everything's going to be about micro-segmenting your apps and then allowing those apps to be manifest and consumed by an uber app, and ultimately that uber app is an ultra app, so I think ultra is going to be another term that we see heading into the spectrum as well. >> And so histocompatibility is a word you mentioned, just here in my notes. >> Yep. >> You mentioned, so histo means historical. >> Exactly. >> So it means legacy. >> Chris: That's right. >> So basically backwards compatible would be the boring kind of word. >> Chris: That's right. >> And histocompatibility means we got you covered from legacy to cloud, right. >> Uh-huh. >> Or whatever. >> You bet. >> Micro-segmentility really talks to the granularity of data-driven things, right? >> That's right, another one would be macro API ability, it's kind of a mouthful, but everyone needs an API. I think we've seen that and because they're consuming so many different pieces and trying to assemble those they've got to have something that sits above. So macro API ability, I think, is another big one, and then lastly is this notion of mobility, right. We talk about-- As you said earlier, we talked about clouds and going from-- It's not just good enough to talk about hybrid cloud now, it's about multi-cloud. Well, multi-cloud means we're thinking about how we can place these apps and the data in all kinds of different spaces, but I've got to be able to have those be mobile, so hyper-mobility becomes a key for these applications as well. >> So hyper-scale we've seen, we've seen hyper-convergence. Hyper is the most popular-- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> Adjective with STEM, right? >> Chris: It's big. >> STEM words, okay, micro makes sense because, you know, micro-targeting, micro-segmentation, microservices, it speaks to the level of detail. >> Chris: Right. >> I love that one. >> Chris: Right. >> Which ones aren't working in your mind? We see anything that's so dead on arrival... >> Sure, I think there's a few that aren't working anymore. You got your agility, you got your flexibility, you got your manageability, and you got your simplicity. Okay, I could take all four of those and toss those over there in the trash because every vendor will say that they have those capabilities for you, so how does that help you distinguish yourself from anyone else. >> So that's old hat. >> It's just gone. >> Yeah, never fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton at EMC, now at Dell Technologies, said on theCUBE. I love that, so these are popular words. This is a way to stand out and be relevant. >> That's right. >> This is the challenge for vendors. Be cool and relevant but not be offensive. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what's your take on the current landscape for things like how do companies market themselves. Let's say they get the hyper in all the naming and the STEM words down. They have something compelling. >> Chris: Right. >> Something that's differentiated, something unique, how do companies stand out above the crowd, because the current way is advertising's not working. We're seeing fake news, you're seeing the analyst firms kind of becoming more old, slower, not relevant. I mean, does the Magic Quadrant really solve that problem or are they just putting that out there? If I'm a marketer, I'm a B2B marketer. >> Yeah. >> Obviously besides working with theCUBE and our team, so obviously great benefits. Plug there, but seriously, what do you advise? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, you know, you think about marketing as not only reaching your target market, but also enabling your sales force and your channel partners, and frankly, the best thing that I've found in doing that, John, is starting every single piece that we would come up with with a number. How much value are we generating, whether it's zero clicks to get this thing installed. It's 90% efficiency, and then prove it. Don't just throw it out there and say isn't that good enough, but numbers matter because they're meaningful and they stimulate the conversation, and that's ultimately what all of this is. It's a conversation about is this going to be relevant for you, so that's the thing that I start with. >> So you're say being in the conversation matters. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> What's the thought leadership view, what's your vision on how a company should be looking at thought leadership. Obviously you're seeing more of a real-time-- I call it the old world was batch marketing. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> E-mail marketing, do the normal things, get the white papers, do those things. You know, go to events, have a booth, and then the new way is real-time. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Things are happening very fast-- >> That's right. >> In the market, people are connected now. It's a global, basically, message group. >> That's right. >> Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and all this stuff. >> It's really an unfulfilled need that you guys are really looking to fill, which is to provide that sort of real-time piece of it, but I think vendors trip over themselves and they think about I need a 50 page vision. They don't need a 50 page vision. What they need is here are a couple of dimensions on which this industry is going to change, and then commit to them. I think the biggest problem that many vendors have is they won't commit, they hedge, as opposed to they go all in behind those and one thing we talk about at Chasm Institute is if you're going to fail, fail fast, and that really means that you commit full time behind what you're pushing. >> Yeah, and of course what the Chasm, what it's based upon, you got to get to mainstream, get to early pioneers, cross the chasm. The other paradigm that I always loved from Jeffrey Moore was inside the tornado. Get inside the tornado because if you don't get in you're going to be spun out, so you've got to kind of get in the game, if you will. >> Chris: That's right. >> Don't overthink it, and this is where the iteration mindset comes in, "agile" start-up or "agile" venture. Okay, cool, so let's take a step back and reset to end the segment here. >> Mm-hmm. >> Re:Invent's coming up, obviously that's the big show of the year. VMworld, someone was commenting on Facebook VMworld 2008 was the big moment where they're comparing Amazon now to VMworld in 2008. >> Chris: Right. >> But you know, Pat Gelsinger essentially cut a great deal with Andy Jassy on Vmware. >> Chris: Right. >> And everything's clean, everything's growing, they're kicking ass. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> They got a private cloud and they got the hybrid cloud with Amazon. >> Yeah, it's that VMcloud on Amazon, that really seems to be the thing that's really driving their move into the future, and I think we're going to see from both of those folks, you are going to see so much on containers. Containerization, ultra-containers, hyper-containers, whatever it may be. If you're not speaking container language, then you are yesterday's news, right? >> And Kubernetes' certainly the orchestration piece right underneath it to kind of manage it. Okay, final point, what's in store for the legacy, because you're seeing a few major trends that we're pointing out and we're watching very closely, which really I put into two buckets. I know Wikibon's a more disciplined approach, I'm more simple about that. The decentralization trend we're seeing with Blockchain, which is kind of crazy and bubbly but very infrastructure relevant, this decentralized, disrupting, non-decentralized incumbence, so that's one trend and the other one is what cloud's doing to legacy IT vendors, Oracle, you know, these traditional manufacturers like that HP and Dell and all these guys, and Netapp which is transforming. So you've got disruption on both sides, cloud and like a decentralized model, apps, what's the position, view, from your standpoint, for these legacy guys? >> It's going to be quite an interesting one. I think they have to ride the wave, and I'll steal this from Peter Levine, from Andreessen, right? He talks about the end of cloud computing, and really what that is is just basically saying everything is going to be moving to the edge and there's going to be so much more compute at the edge with IOT and you can think about autonomous vehicles as the ultimate example of that, where you're talking about more powerful computers, certainly, than this that are sitting in cars all over the place, so that's going to be a big change, and those vendors that have been selling into the core data center for so long are going to have to figure out their way of being relevant in that universe and move towards that. And like we were talking about before, commit to that. >> Yeah. >> Right, don't just hedge, but commit to it and move. >> What's interesting is that I was talking with some executives at Alibaba when I was in China for part of the Alibaba Cloud Conference and Amazon had multiple conversations with Andy Jassy and his team over the years. It's interesting, a lot of people don't understand the nuances of kind of what's going on in cloud, and what I'm seeing is it's essentially, to your point, it's a compute game. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Right, so if you look at Intel for instance, Alibaba told me on my interview, they don't view Intel as a chip company anymore, they're a compute company, right, and CJ Bruno, one of the executives there, reaffirmed that. So Intel's looking at the big picture saying the cloud's a computer. Intel Inside is a series of compute, and you mentioned that the edge, Jassy is building a set of services with his team around core compute, which has storage, so this is essentially hyper-converged cloud. >> That's right. >> This is a pretty big thing. What's the one thing that people might not understand about this. If you could kind of illuminate this trend. I mean, the old Intel now turned into the new Intel, which is a monster franchise continuing to grow. >> Mm-hmm. >> Amazon, people see the numbers, they go oh, my god, they're a leader, but they have so much more headroom. >> Chris: Right, right. >> And they've got everyone else playing catch up. >> Yeah. >> What's the real phenomenon going on here? >> I think you're going to see more of this aggregation phenomenon where one vendor can't solve this entire problem. I mean, look at most recently, in the last two weeks, Intel and AMD getting together. Who would've thought that would happen? But they're just basically admitting we got a real big piece of the equation, Intel, and then AMD can fulfill this niche because they're getting killed by NVIDIA, but you're going to see just more of these industry conglomerations getting together to try and solve the problem. >> Just to end the segment, this is a great point. NVIDIA had a niche segment, graphics, now competing head to head with Intel. >> Chris: That's right. >> So essentially what's happening is the landscape is completely changing. Once competitors no longer-- New entrants, new competitors coming in. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So this is a massive shift. >> Chris: It is. >> Okay, Chris Cummings here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier of CUBE Conversation. There's a massive shift happening, the game has changed and it's incumbent upon start-ups, venture capital, you know, Blockchain, ICOs or whatever's going on. Look at the new chessboard, look at the game and figure it out. Of course, we'll be broadcasting live at AWS re:Invent in a couple weeks. Stay tuned, more coverage, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE, for our exclusive coverage in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud Conference here, it's a Cloud Computing Conference. The entire city is a cloud. We're here at the Intel booth with Peter Chen, who's the general manager of Products and Technology, for Data Center Group Sales of Intel Corporation. Peter, AI is the hottest topic, IoT, Alibaba Cloud, I mean, a huge event here mixing, kind of a cultural shift, generational shift, young developers. >> Definitely lots of crowd, you can see people surrounding us, right? So, artificial intelligence is definitely a hot word here in China for the past 12 months. Everybody's trying to figure it out, what's going on, how they can really use them, so we're very excited as well to really partner with Alibaba to really explore some of the potentials. >> I had a chance to speak with some of the Alibaba executives, and obviously, a strategic partnership with Intel, pretty strategic, and it matters what's inside the Cloud. But it's not an Intel inside like a PC. The AI is showing that there's a little bit of Intel on everything, from IoT, industrial IoT to data center. It's a range of technology that's powering a new kind of software. This is where AI is shining. We're seeing that with machine learning and as data driven technology. So, I got to ask you. What is the view from Intel on AI? Obviously, we see the commercials, we see the technology from Intel. How does that translate to your view on AI? What's that view? >> So, essentially today's AI, artificial intelligence, is powered by three factors, the amount of data, the new algorithms, and lastly the compute power. And Intel has historically been the leader of create and compute. So, for the past many years, we has always been generating new compute powers into the cloud and data centers as well as PCs. But going forward as we look at applying AI to different usages like autonomous driving, for example, you cannot expect everything to be done just in the cloud because we need the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, all the cameras, all the sensors. So, we do definitely see a need of actually faster processors at the edge as well to constantly bring in the data back into the cloud, so they have an autonomous feedback loop, make sure there will be right decision making. >> Yeah, so Cloud drives this, right? So, it's not just Cloud though, it's software. There's exponential growth in open source software that's causing a Renaissance in the developer community. You're seeing it here in China, a lot of young demographics here. Software and data's tsunami going on. You need compute power. >> Yes, yes. I think, everybody knows Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort on engaging a software ecosystem. From the old days on engaging Linux, the cloud different software stack, and working with CSPs like Alibaba in China to really make sure they can create and write the new latest software AI framework and taking the most advantage of our hardware platform as well. So, that's something that we've been very focusing on. >> And one of the themes here is the IoT for traffic in China. Obviously, if you've been here, you know it's kind of congested. But Alibaba is giving a lot of talks on how they're using data in this cloud city for traffic, which is an example of IoT, Internet of Things, but applied to the real world. That's where the AI kind of connects with the data. Is that kind of where it's going? >> Yeah, so I think this is a great application, as you just mentioned. And Alibaba calls it City Brain. So, essentially, imagine a normal city like in China, can easily go five million, 10 million people. The amount of people and the amount of traffic that goes on the road every day. So, if the city is able to utilize all these videos' stream of data, feedback from different traffic intersections, and be able to direct traffics and control the traffic lights dynamically, using artificial intelligence, you'd actually solve a lot of the city's congestion problem. So, I think this is where we are seeing a lot of application being explored in China, they're using very innovative, different ways by Alibaba. >> Peter, I've got to ask you because one of the things we're seeing in theCUBE and Wikibon Research is the growth of new kinds of ecosystems. Karen Liu, who runs the America's, general manages for America's Alibaba, said to me that ecosystem is super important for Alibaba as an example. But a new kind of ecosystem is developing. Cloud service providers are becoming a new hot growth area because the specialty of building applications in the cloud is not like it was kind of in the old days. You got to have a little bit of a cloud native mindset, but yet, domain expertise, whether it's traffic or a certain vertical solution. So, it's a little bit of both. Always often scalable, yet specialism. This is going to create a lot of opportunities for cloud service providers. What's your view on that from Intel's perspective? How are you guys seeing that market? Do you agree? And what are you guys looking at, at that market? >> So, obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our fastest growing customer base over the past five years. And in the near future, we expect this trend to continue to grow. We definitely see CSPs as a leading edge of driving innovation because they are not just the leading edge of driving consumer usages but they also, like the City Brain project, they've been really close on solving the enterprise problem as well with public cloud. So, I think we're very excited to have the opportunity to be a close partner with a CSP like Alibaba to really help them, providing our latest hardware technology to allow them to drive innovation on top of this offer and with the programs and the algorithms. >> How are they, how are those big cloud service providers, or CSPs like Alibaba, they're a big one, they're the fourth cloud in the world, enabling their CSPs? Because I was just talking to someone on the floor here, an ISV in the old world, who was telling me that he's now a cloud service provider, so you have now this nice balance in the ecosystem developing. You guys see the same thing? How do you guys, looking at that? >> So, this is what we call a hybrid situation. So, while the big CSPs like Alibaba, they have a lot of competency and they have a lot of internal engineering, it may not make sense for them to create every single application in the world. So, there may be some legacy enterprise application, for instance, a CRM software in China, maybe it was really popular, for them to forge a collaboration with the leading company Alibaba to translate their on-prem software stack into a cloud solution. So, I think we definitely see a lot of that collaboration happening, to take the best of the best from the legacy as well as the new public cloud environment to really make the better service for the companies and the customers. >> Create ecosystem opportunity. Okay, so I got to ask. What is the Intel relationship that you guys are doing on your end with Alibaba Cloud? Obviously, they're taking names, they're kicking butt. They're doing well. They're going global. They're not just in China. They're the first cloud provider here in China to go outside the mainland. Obviously, they're in the US, they're in Silicon Valley, our backyard. What's the collaboration? Share the relationship. >> We work very closely with Alibaba. Like you said, they're now the leading cloud service provider in China. They're starting going abroad. And we as an ingredient, knowledge provider perspective, we have a very close collaboration with them, sharing with them our technologies on hardware roadmap as well as software enabling to make sure they can take full advantage of it. So, we're very excited to see the growth of Alibaba over the past few years, and we look forward to seeing them continue to expand their business together with us. >> Yeah, great company. So, I got to ask you, one of the collaborations that got my attention was the, I don't want to say hack-a-thon, it was a competition, it was the AI competition called Tianchi that you guys were a part of with Alibaba. What was Intel's role in that? I saw some of the winners earlier. I didn't get a chance to get the specifics, but take me through this AI competition that Alibaba did with these entrepreneurs. >> So, I'm very, actually very excited. I just talked to one of the winning team just now. So, what happened is, when we talk about artificial intelligence, today it's a lot about image recognition, voice recognition but that's just pure technology. So, what Alibaba decide to do, which in terms of partner, is we created a medical image contest. So, we pick a particular subject, for instance, lung cancer and we invited 16 local hospitals to provide some of the image data of the patients anonymously, and then we opened it up for the software ecosystem, the academia, professors, the schools, and say, hey, why don't you come in and try to compete on the image recognition accuracy based on those X-ray images, using these images? So, it takes about six, we have overwhelming turnout. We have about 3,000 teams from 20 different countries applying to join in the contest, and then we just select the winner yesterday. So, basically, the three winning teams, two of them are from the best universities here in China, one of them is from overseas. And again, Intel's role in this is we provide a lot of consultation help. First of all, we provide the hardware system based on our Xeon Phi clusters, and on top of that, we provide a lot of the software tools, Caffe, image recognition libraries, Intel material libraries to really help the contestant to be able to use the Intel hardware for the maximum to drive the best performance. >> And so, you guys provided the technology, Alibaba the Cloud, and let these guys just take. What was the results? Was there any success? Was there a winner? >> There was a winner. I think the big winner was Beijing University. But I think overall, we are not just excited just because of this specific winners but really the larger intent. If you can imagine in a country like China, there's a lot of people, meaning there's a lot of patients at different part of the country, and not every tier two, tier three city have the same resource or access of the best doctors. If we're able to simplify the lung cancer image recognition to be able to provide this as a tool for all the tier two, tier three cities of China, imagine how much this will change. >> It's a societal impact. >> Definitely. >> And you've got a collective intelligence. It's almost like an open source kind of thing, where the more people doing it. >> It gets better, it gets better. >> The fly wheel. >> And then, we have definitely a lot of hospitals who want to really take advantage of this as well. So, we're really glad on the results of this first round, and I think Alibaba will do a next round with a different subject as well, and we're looking forward to partnering with them again. >> That's inspirational. Okay, great to have you on. Thanks for the commentary. Exclusive coverage. Final thought, what's your thoughts on the event? Where's AI going? Where do you see this trajectory of Alibaba and Intel going? >> So, definitely the event's wonderful and great. This is my third year here. It gets just bigger and bigger every time. So, I'm looking forward to come back for the next couple of years again. Our collaboration with Alibaba has been very close. We work with each other deeply, with our engineers' collaboration, and I look forward to continuing to bring out more successful projects. >> And they're really bringing together, not just science and developers, but artists. You've got a music festival here, feels like South by Southwest meets a developer conference. Societal impact, traffic, solving problems, lung cancer, big data, and data is changing the world. Now, you need the compute power, you need the analytics. Of course, you need SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Wikibon, exclusive coverage here in China of the Alibaba Cloud Conference. Thanks for watching.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angle's theCUBE here on the ground, in Hangzhou, China. We're here at the Intel Booth as part of our coverage, exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud Conference here in the cloud city. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE. And I'm here with CJ Bruno, who is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel. That's a mouthful but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot of value to Intel Supplier to these big clouds. >> I do, John. We look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world. Amazing like Alibaba, edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting time to be in the business with these big customers. >> And there's no borders to the cloud so its not as easy as saying PC, like people might think of Intel in the old days. You guys have these major cloud providers, there's a lot of intel inside so to speak but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality. We're hearing it here at the show. >> You are. We work together with partners like Ali, in the area of such big artificial intelligence development, big data analytics and of course, the cloud. We've been working with them for over 12 years now and you can see the advancements and the services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically, here in China but on a global stage as well. >> Its interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years, what a journey, from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room, or an apartment for Jackie Ma, that he talks about all the time, to now the powerhouse. What's it like, because these guys have an interesting formula going on here. They're bringing culture and art, with science, kind of sounds like Steve Jobs, technology meets liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect. How far have they come? Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going. >> Its amazing, Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years ago. 120 people, John, we're standing amongst 60,000 or so, in this event today, just eight short years later. Its amazing what they've been able to do. They're driving innovation, this is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy. They invest, very high-degree of technical acumen. Willingness to break barriers, try things people have not. Fail fast and correct. Take risks. They're entrepreneurs at heart, they're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest to win. >> You guys are supplying. We talked to people who talk about Photonics, Deeraj Malik, who's really going deep on these pathways around. Some of the Intel innovations, some of it's like wow, mind-blowing. The other end is just practical stuff, making it easier, faster, simpler to run things. IoT, their big use case, I mean you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices, so what is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba? Talk about that journey because its not one thing, what is it? What is the magical formula? >> Sure, of course, first off we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their world-class cloud. And enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer, at the base level. But we really work together to solve societal problems. Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John. Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems, in a matter of days, instead of months. Just one example of the real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and have an amazing influence. We work on them with the Tenatchi Medical Imaging Competition. 3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest, and we have some winners selected, just this week. So these things are real, taking this technology, solving real life problems, and business problems, around the globe. >> And its not just the big, heaving lifting technology that moves the needle, like you were mentioning but its also the micro technologies, like FPGA, you guys have got lot of things. This is like the new Intel, so I'd love to get your thoughts, if you can just take a moment to share the journey that Intel is on right now because you gave a talk yesterday, a kind of a keynote, onstage. What is the Intel journey right now look like? >> We're transforming ourselves from a PC centric company to a company that runs the cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart-connected devices. That's a big journey we're on. We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John. Driving our data-center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business as you said, our friends from former Alterra are now two years inside Intel. Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs and of course new technologies that we're exploring, like drones and neuromorphic computing, making sure we never miss the next big thing. >> I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life, as an initial user-developer and now in the media. It's interesting, Intel has never done it alone, it's always been part of the ecosystem. You have brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's law and the list is endless. Now is an end to end game but you look at 5G for instance, you kind of connect the dots, put a radio frequency cloud over a city and you got to run the IoT devices like a city brain, they're showing here. You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, it's a hardware thing but now the software guys are doing it. You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps. You've got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge, this is a wide opportunity, how do you guys make sense of it to customers? Because its a complex story. >> It is John, look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier. We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that are just autonomous everything. Autonomous driving in particular. These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount to compute, storage, networking, connectivity and we're making the investments to make sure we're critical partners with our customers, in all those huge growth areas. Making us a big growth company now. >> I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud, he's on the Technology Steering Committee for Alibaba Group and yesterday they just announced a 15 billion dollar investment over three years for FinTech, across the board IoT, AI, collaborate with scientists as well as artisans. This is a big deal. >> It is John, this is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier. These guys invest to win and they have a will to win. And they want to pioneer and they want to innovate and they put their money where their mouth is, in that announcement, its pretty exciting. >> So the cloud serves quite a market, doing really well. Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia and People's Republic of China, PRC, as you guys call it, extremely well but now there's a Renaissance in cloud in general, so we're expecting to see a lot more cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba but Alibaba is going to start getting customers that become SaaS companies, that's technically a cloud service provider if you think about it, if they have an application, how do you look at that mark? >> We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US based and China based but then we've identified the next 60-70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe and there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting with. You're absolutely on point, an exploding area. Significant double-digit growth for years to come and just solving, big, big life and business problems. >> So at SiliconANGLE also silicon is in the name and Wikibon Research is really big in China, here, interesting dynamic that's happening here with the data and the software and was brought up with Dr. Wong about the IoTs, kind of a nuanced point but I want to get it out for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because data is now the currency of the future. It needs to flow, it's like water but at the edge it can be expensive, low latency that table stakes that everyone wants to get to. You're going to see a lot more compute or silicon at the edge of network. Internet of things coming, your view on that? >> There's no question John, that's exactly the way we see it. The time to get the data back to the long-haul data center, is very expensive and very challenging and requires an absolute redo of the network. We're moving to compute closer and closer to the data, of course, the cloud remains a vital, vital part of that but we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement those decisions at the edge. >> CJ, final question for you, obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going outside mainland China, obviously doing very well here, not to knock them there but great opportunity to go into the global marketplace, specifically North America. That's going to put more competition, competition was good but it's also going to require more growth. How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba? >> We work with Alibaba, not only on the technical front of course but on their go-to-market plans, on ecosystem development plans and even some business models. We do that across our entire customer and partner base, John. We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on all four of those fronts; technology development, ecosystem development, business model development, are obviously a benefit to both of us. >> Alibaba is going to need some help because you know its competitive, Amazon had a nice run for a while, Microsoft nibbling at the heels, Google and now Alibaba coming in. Competition is good. >> We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard everyday to earn their business. >> Final, final question, this one just popped in my head. What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not know about? Obviously they read what they read in the paper. They see the security hacks, they see the crypto-currency temporarily on hold but blockchain certainly has a lot of promise, but it's a dynamic market here. A lot of of opportunities. What should that audience know about the China market? >> I think the first thing they should know is that if they haven't come to experience it themselves they should. The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever seen before. As I said, the investments they're making-to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is breakthrough. You take that scale and that investment and this is a market to be reckoned with. >> Congratulations on the 12 year run with Alibaba, and now Alibaba Cloud. Looking really, really, strong, love the culture, got to unique twist; artistry and scientific cultures coming together, looking good. >> Absolutely John, thanks for letting us tell our story. >> CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager Global Accounts for Intel. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, thanks for watching.