>> Welcome back to Cube On Cloud. My name is Paul Gillin, enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE, and I'm pleased to now have as a guest on the show. Amit Zephyr, excuse me, general manager, vice president of business application platform at Google cloud. Amit is a formerly EVP and corporate officer for product development at Oracle cloud, 24 years at Oracle, and by my account a veteran of seven previous appearances on theCube. Amit welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Paul, it's always good to be back on theCube. >> Now you are... one of your big focus areas right now is on low-code and no-code. Of course this is a market that seems to be growing explosively. We often hear low code/no code used in the same breath as if they're the same thing. In fact, how are they different? >> I think it's a huge difference, now. I think industry started as low-code mode for many, many years. I mean, there were technologies, or tools provided for kind of helping developers be more productive that's what low-code was doing. It was not really meant, even though it was positioned for citizen developers it was very hard for a non technologist to really build application using low code. No-code is really meant as the word stands, no code. So there's really no coding, there's no understanding required about the underlying technology stack, or knowing how constructs works or how the data is laid out. All that stuff is kind of hidden and abstracted out from you. You are really focused as a citizen developer or a line of business user, in kind of delivering what your business application requirements are, and the business flows are, without having to know anything about writing any code. So you can build applications, you can build your interfaces and not have to learn anything about a single line of code. So that's really no-code and I think they getting to a phase now where the platforms have gotten much stronger and better where you can do very good productive applications without having to write a single line of code. So that's really the goal with no-code, and that's really the future in terms of how we will get more and more line of business users, or citizen developers to build applications they need for their day-to-day work. >> So when would you use one or the other? >> I think since low-code you would probably any developer has been around for eight, 10 years, if not longer where you extract out some of this stuff you can do some of the things in terms of not having to write some code where you have a lot of modules pre-built for you, and then when you want to mix a lot of changes, you go and drop into an ID and write some code or make some changes to a code. So you still get into that, and those are really focused towards semi-professional developers or IT in many cases or even developers who want to reduce the time required to start from, write and building an application. so it makes you much more productive. So if you are a really some semi-professional or you are a developer, you can either use use low-code to improve your productivity and not start from scratch. No-code is really used for folks who are really not interested in learning about coding, don't have any experience in it, and still want to be productive and build applications. And that's really when I would start with.. I would not give a low code to a citizen developer or a line of business user who has no experience with any coding. And that's not really.. It will only productive, They'll get frustrated and not deliver what you need, and not get anything out of it and many cases. >> Well, I've been around this industry long enough to remember fourth-generation languages and visual basic >> Yeah and the predecessors that never really caught on in a big way. I mean, they certainly had big audiences but, right now we're seeing 40, 50% annual market growth. Why is this market suddenly so hot? >> Yeah it's not a difference. I think that as you said, the 4G deal and I think a lot of those tools, even if you look at forms, and PLC and we kind of extracted out the technology and made it easier, but it was not very clear who they were targeting with that. They're still targeting the same developer audience. So the they never expanded the universe of users. It was same user base, just making it simpler for them. So, with those low-code tools, it never landed them getting more and more user base out of that. With no-code platforms, you are now expanding the user community. You are giving this capabilities to more and more users than a low-code tools could provide. That's why I think the growth is much faster. So if you find the right no-code platform, you will see a lot more adoption because you're solving a real problem, you are giving them a lot more capabilities and making the user productive without having to depend on IT in many cases, or having to wait for a lot of those big applications to be built for them even though they need it immediately. So I think that's why I think you're solving a real business problem and giving a lot more capabilities to users and no doubt the users love it and they start expanding the usage. It's very viral adoption in many cases after that. >> Historically the rap on these tools has been that, because they're typically interpreted, the performance is never going to be up to that of application written in C plus plus or something. Is that still the case? Is that a sort of structural weakness of no-code tools or is that changing? >> I think the early days probably not any more. I think if you look at what we are doing at Google Cloud for example, it's not interpreted, I mean, it does do a lot of heavy lifting underneath the covers, but, and you don't have to go into the coding part of it but it brings the whole Cloud platform with it, right? So the scalability, the security the performance, availability all that stuff is built into the platform. So it's not a tool, it's a platform. I think that's thing, the big difference. Most of the early days you will see a lot of these things as a tool, which you can use it, and there's nothing underneath the covers the run kinds are very weak, there's really not the full Cloud platform provided with it, but I think the way we seeing it now and over the last many years, what we have done and what we continue to do, is to bring the power of the Cloud platform with it. So you're not missing out on the scalability, the performance, security, even the compliance and governance is built in. So IT is part of the process even though they might not build an application themselves. And that's where I think the barriers have been lifted. And again, it's not a solution for everything also. I'm not saying that this would go in, if you want to build a full end to end e-commerce site for example, I would not use a no-code platform for it, because you're going to do a lot more heavy lifting, you might want to integrate with a lot of custom stuff, you might build a custom experience. All that kind of stuff might not be that doable, but there are a lot of use cases now, which you can deliver with a platform like what we've been building at Google cloud. >> So, talk about what you're doing at Google cloud. Do you have a play in both the low-code and the no-code market? Do you favor one over the other? >> Yeah no I think we've employed technologies and services across the gamut of different requirements, right? I mean, our goal is not that we will only address one market needs and we'll ignore the rest of the things required for our developer community. So as you know, Google cloud has been very focused for many years delivering capabilities for developer community. With technology we deliver the Kubernetes and containers tend to flow for AI, compute storage all that kind of stuff is really developer centric. We have a lot of developers build applications on it writing code. They have abstracted some of this stuff and provide a lot of low-code technologies like Firebase for building mobile apps, the millions of apps mobile apps built by developers using Firebase today that it does abstract out the technology. And then you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting yourself. So we do provide a lot of low-code tooling as well. And now, as we see the need for no-code especially kind of empowering the line of business user and citizen developers, we acquired a company called AppSheet, early 2020, and integrated that as part of our Google Cloud Platform as well as the workspace. So the G suite, the Gmail, all the technology all the services we provide for productivity and collaboration. And allowed users to now extend that collaboration capabilities by adding a workflow, and adding another app experience as needed for a particular business user needs. So that's how we looking at it like making sure that we can deliver a platform for spectrum of different use cases. And get that flexibility for the end user in terms of whatever they need to do, we should be able to provide as part of a Google Cloud Platform now. >> So as far as Google Cloud's positioning, I mean you're number three in the market you're growing but not really changing the distance between you and Microsoft for what public information we've been able to see in AWS. In Microsoft you have a company that has a long history with developers and of development tools and really as is that as a core strength do you see your low-code/no-code strategy as being a way to make up ground on them? >> Yeah, I think that the way to look at the market, and again I know the industry analyst and the market loves to do rankings in this world but, I think the Cloud business is probably big enough for a lot of vendors. I mean, this is growing as the amazing pace as you know. And it is becoming, it's a large investment. It takes time for a lot of the vendors to deliver everything they need to. But today, if you look at a lot of the net new growth and lot of net new customers, we seeing a huge percentage of share coming to Google Cloud, right? And we continue to announce some of the public things and the results will come out again every quarter. And we tried to break out the Cloud segment in the Google results more regularly so that people get an idea of how well they're doing in the Cloud business. So we are very comfortable where we are in terms of our growth in terms of our adoption, as well as in terms of how we delivering all the value our customers require, right? So, note out one of the parts we want to do is make sure that we have a end to end offering for all of the different use cases customers require and no-code is one of the parts we want to deliver for our customers as well. We've done very good capabilities and our data analytics. We do a lot of work around AIML, industry solutions. You look at the adoption we've had around a lot of those platform and Hybrid and MultiCloud. It's been growing very, very fast. And this one more additional things we are going to do, so that we can deliver what our customers are asking for. We're not too worried about the rankings we are worried about really making sure we're delivering the value to our customers. And we're seeing that it doesn't end very well. And if you look at the numbers now, I mean the growth rate is higher than any other Cloud vendor as well as be seeing a huge amount of demand been on Google Cloud as well. >> Well, not to belabor the point, but naturally your growth rate is going to be higher if you're a third of the market, I mean, how important is it to you to break into, to surpass the number two? How important are rankings within the Google Cloud team, or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about... we are not focused on ranking, or any of that stuff typically, I think we were worried about making sure customers are satisfied, and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we're signing up, a lot of the large deals they didn't... do we need to look at the announcement we'd made over the last year, has been tremendous momentum around that. Lot of large banks, lot of large telecommunication companies large enterprises, name them. I think all of them are starting to kind of pick up Google Cloud. So if you follow that, I think that's really what is satisfying for us. And the results are starting to show that growth and the momentum. So we can't cover the gap we had in the previous... Because Google Cloud started late in this market. So if Cloud business grows by accumulating revenue over many years. So I cant look at the history, I'm looking at the future really. And if you look at the growth for the new business and the percentage of the net new business, we're doing better than pretty much any other vendor out there. >> And you said you were stepping up your reference to disclose those numbers. Was that what I heard you say? >> I think every quarter you're seeing that, I think we started announcing our revenue and growth numbers, and we started to do a lot of reporting about our Cloud business and that you will start, you see more and more and more of that regularly from Google now. >> Let's get back just briefly to the low-code/no-code discussion. A lot of companies looking at how to roll this out right now. You've got some big governance issues involved here. If you have a lot of citizen developers you also have the potential for chaos. What advice are you giving customers using your tools for how they should organize around citizen development? >> Yeah, no, I think no doubt. If this needs to be adopted by enterprise you can't make it a completely rogue or a completely shadow based development capabilities. So part of our no-code platform, one thing you want to make sure that this is enterprise ready, it has many aspects required for that. One is compliance making sure you have all the regulatory things delivered for data, privacy, security. Second is governance. A lot of the IT departments want to make sure who's using this platform? How are they accessing it? Are they getting the right security privileges associated with that? Are we giving them the right permissions? So in our a no-code platform we adding all this compliance, and governance regulatory stuff as part of our underlying platform, even though the end user might not have to worry about it the person who's building applications shouldn't have to think about it, but we do want to give controls to IT as needed by the large enterprises. So that is a big part of how we deliver this. We're not thinking about this as like go and build it, and then we write it once you have to do things for your enterprise, and then get it to do it again and again. Because then it just a waste of time and you're not getting the benefit of the platform at all. So we bringing those things together where we have a very easy to use, very powerful no-code platform with the enterprise compliance as well as governance built into that platform as well. And that is really resonating. If you look at a lot of the customers we're working with they do require that and they get excited about it as well as the democratizing of all of their line of business users. They're very happy that they're getting that kind of a platform, which they can scale from and deliver the productivity required. >> Certainly going to make businesses look very different in the future. And speaking of futures, It is January it's time to do predictions. What are your predictions (laughs) for the Cloud for this year? >> No I think that I mean no doubt cloud has become the center for pretty much every company now, I think the digital transformation especially with COVID, has greatly accelerated. We have seen many customers now who are thinking of pieces of their platform, pieces of their workflow or business to be digitized. Now that's trying to do it for all of it. So the one part which we see for this year is the need for more and more of efficiency in the industry are verticalized business workflows. It's not just about providing a plain vanilla Cloud Platform but also providing a lot more content and business details and business workflows by industry segments. So we've been doing a lot of work and we expect a huge amount of that to be becoming more and more core part of our offering as well as what customers are asking for. Where you might need things around say know your customer kind of workflow for financial services, Telehealth for healthcare. I mean, every industry has specific things like demand management and demand forecasting for retail but making that as part of a Cloud service not just saying, hey, I have compute storage network. I have some kind of a platform go add it and go and build what you want for your industry needs, We want to provide them that all those kinds of business processes and content for those industries as well. So we identified six, seven, industries. We see that as a kind of the driving factor for our Cloud growth, as well as helping our customers be much more productive as well as seeing the value of Cloud being much more realistic for them versus just a replacement for the data center. I think that's really the big shift in 21 I think. And I think that will make a big difference for all the companies who are really trying to digitize and be in forefront of the needs as their customers require in the future. >> Of course all of this accelerated by the pandemic and all of the specialized needs that have emerged from that. >> And I think the bond, which is important as well, I think as you know, I mean, everybody talks about AIML as like a big thing. No doubt AIML is an important element of it, but if you make that usable and powerful through this kind of workflows and business processes, as well as particular business applications, I think you see a lot more interest in using it than just a plain manila framework or just technology for the technology sake. So we try to bring the power of AI and ML into this business and industry applications, where we have a lot of good technologists at Google who knows how to use all these things. You wanted to bring that into those applications and platforms >> Exciting times ahead. Amit Zavery thank you so much for joining us. You look just as comfortable as I would expect someone to be who is doing his eighth Cube interview. Thanks for joining us. >> (laughing) Thanks for having me, Paul. >> That's it for this segment of Cube On Cloud, I'm Paul Gillin, stay tuned. (soft music)

>> Welcome back to Cube On Cloud. My name is Paul Gillin, enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE, and I'm pleased to now have as a guest on the show. Amit Zephyr, excuse me, general manager, vice president of business application platform at Google cloud. Amit is a formerly EVP and corporate officer for product development at Oracle cloud, 24 years at Oracle, and by my account a veteran of seven previous appearances on theCube. Amit welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Paul, it's always good to be back on theCube. >> Now you are... one of your big focus areas right now is on low-code and no-code. Of course this is a market that seems to be growing explosively. We often hear low code/no code used in the same breath as if they're the same thing. In fact, how are they different? >> I think it's a huge difference, now. I think industry started as local mode for many, many years. I mean, there were technologies, or tools provided for kind of helping developers be more productive that's what low-code was doing. It was not really meant, even though it was positioned for citizen developers it was very hard for a non technologist to really build application using low code. No-code is really meant as the word stands, no code. So there's really no coding, there's no understanding required about the underlying technology stack, or knowing how constructs works or how the data is laid out. All that stuff is kind of hidden and abstracted out from you. You are really focused as a citizen developer or a line of business user, in kind of delivering what your business application requirements are, and the business flows are, without having to know anything about writing any code. So you can build applications, you can build your interfaces and not have to learn anything about a single line of code. So that's really no-code and I think they getting to a phase now where the platforms have gotten much stronger and better where you can do very good productive applications without having to write a single line of code. So that's really the goal with no-code, and that's really the future in terms of how we will get more and more line of business users, or citizen developers to build applications they need for their day-to-day work. >> So when would you use one or the other? >> I think since low-code you would probably any developer has been around for eight, 10 years, if not longer where you extract out some of this stuff you can do some of the things in terms of not having to write some code where you have a lot of modules pre-built for you, and then when you want to mix a lot of changes, you go and drop into an ID and write some code or make some changes to a code. So you still get into that, and those are really focused towards semi-professional developers or IT in many cases or even developers who want to reduce the time required to start from, write and building an application. so it makes you much more productive. So if you are a really some semi-professional or you are a developer, you can either use use low-code to improve your productivity and not start from scratch. No-code is really used for folks who are really not interested in learning about coding, don't have any experience in it, and still want to be productive and build applications. And that's really when I would start with.. I would not give a low code to a citizen developer or a line of business user who has no experience with any coding. And that's not really.. It will only productive, They'll get frustrated and not deliver what you need, and not get anything out of it and many cases. >> Well, I've been around this industry long enough to remember fourth-generation languages and visual basic >> Yeah and the predecessors that never really caught on in a big way. I mean, they certainly had big audiences but, right now we're seeing 40, 50% annual market growth. Why is this market suddenly so hot? >> Yeah it's not a difference. I think that as you said, the 4G deal and I think a lot of those tools, even if you look at forms, and PLC and we kind of extracted out the technology and made it easier, but it was not very clear who they were targeting with that. They're still targeting the same developer audience. So the they never expanded the universe of users. It was same user base, just making it simpler for them. So, with those low-code tools, it never landed them getting more and more user base out of that. With no-code platforms, you are now expanding the user community. You are giving this capabilities to more and more users than a low-code tools could provide. That's why I think the growth is much faster. So if you find the right no-code platform, you will see a lot more adoption because you're solving a real problem, you are giving them a lot more capabilities and making the user productive without having to depend on IT in many cases, or having to wait for a lot of those big applications to be built for them even though they need it immediately. So I think that's why I think you're solving a real business problem and giving a lot more capabilities to users and no doubt the users love it and they start expanding the usage. It's very viral adoption in many cases after that. >> Historically the rap on these tools has been that, because they're typically interpreted, the performance is never going to be up to that of application written in C plus plus or something. Is that still the case? Is that a sort of structural weakness of no-code tools or is that changing? >> I think the early days probably not any more. I think if you look at what we are doing at Google Cloud for example, it's not interpreted, I mean, it does do a lot of heavy lifting underneath the covers, but, and you don't have to go into the coding part of it but it brings the whole Cloud platform with it, right? So the scalability, the security the performance, availability all that stuff is built into the platform. So it's not a tool, it's a platform. I think that's thing, the big difference. Most of the early days you will see a lot of these things as a tool, which you can use it, and there's nothing underneath the covers the run kinds are very weak, there's really not the full Cloud platform provided with it, but I think the way we seeing it now and over the last many years, what we have done and what we continue to do, is to bring the power of the Cloud platform with it. So you're not missing out on the scalability, the performance, security, even the compliance and governance is built in. So IT is part of the process even though they might not build an application themselves. And that's where I think the barriers have been lifted. And again, it's not a solution for everything also. I'm not saying that this would go in, if you want to build a full end to end e-commerce site for example, I would not use a no-code platform for it, because you're going to do a lot more heavy lifting, you might want to integrate with a lot of custom stuff, you might build a custom experience. All that kind of stuff might not be that doable, but there are a lot of use cases now, which you can deliver with a platform like what we've been building at Google cloud. >> So, talk about what you're doing at Google cloud. Do you have a play in both the low-code and the no-code market? Do you favor one over the other? >> Yeah no I think we've employed technologies and services across the gamut of different requirements, right? I mean, our goal is not that we will only address one market needs and we'll ignore the rest of the things required for our developer community. So as you know, Google cloud has been very focused for many years delivering capabilities for developer community. With technology we deliver the Kubernetes and containers tend to flow for AI, compute storage all that kind of stuff is really developer centric. We have a lot of developers build applications on it writing code. They have abstracted some of this stuff and provide a lot of low-code technologies like Firebase for building mobile apps, the millions of apps mobile apps built by developers using Firebase today that it does abstract out the technology. And then you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting yourself. So we do provide a lot of low-code tooling as well. And now, as we see the need for no-code especially kind of empowering the line of business user and citizen developers, we acquired a company called AppSheet, early 2020, and integrated that as part of our Google Cloud Platform as well as the workspace. So the G suite, the Gmail, all the technology all the services we provide for productivity and collaboration. And allowed users to now extend that collaboration capabilities by adding a workflow, and adding another app experience as needed for a particular business user needs. So that's how we looking at it like making sure that we can deliver a platform for spectrum of different use cases. And get that flexibility for the end user in terms of whatever they need to do, we should be able to provide as part of a Google Cloud Platform now. >> So as far as Google Cloud's positioning, I mean you're number three in the market you're growing but not really changing the distance between you and Microsoft for what public information we've been able to see in AWS. In Microsoft you have a company that has a long history with developers and of development tools and really as is that as a core strength do you see your low-code/no-code strategy as being a way to make up ground on them? >> Yeah, I think that the way to look at the market, and again I know the industry analyst and the market loves to do rankings in this world but, I think the Cloud business is probably big enough for a lot of vendors. I mean, this is growing as the amazing pace as you know. And it is becoming, it's a large investment. It takes time for a lot of the vendors to deliver everything they need to. But today, if you look at a lot of the net new growth and lot of net new customers, we seeing a huge percentage of share coming to Google Cloud, right? And we continue to announce some of the public things and the results will come out again every quarter. And we tried to break out the Cloud segment in the Google results more regularly so that people get an idea of how well they're doing in the Cloud business. So we are very comfortable where we are in terms of our growth in terms of our adoption, as well as in terms of how we delivering all the value our customers require, right? So, note out one of the parts we want to do is make sure that we have a end to end offering for all of the different use cases customers require and no-code is one of the parts we want to deliver for our customers as well. We've done very good capabilities and our data analytics. We do a lot of work around AIML, industry solutions. You look at the adoption we've had around a lot of those platform and Hybrid and MultiCloud. It's been growing very, very fast. And this one more additional things we are going to do, so that we can deliver what our customers are asking for. We're not too worried about the rankings we are worried about really making sure we're delivering the value to our customers. And we're seeing that it doesn't end very well. And if you look at the numbers now, I mean the growth rate is higher than any other Cloud vendor as well as be seeing a huge amount of demand been on Google Cloud as well. >> Well, not to belabor the point, but naturally your growth rate is going to be higher if you're a third of the market, I mean, how important is it to you to break into, to surpass the number two? How important are rankings within the Google Cloud team, or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about... we are not focused on ranking, or any of that stuff typically, I think we were worried about making sure customers are satisfied, and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we're signing up, a lot of the large deals they didn't... do we need to look at the announcement we'd made over the last year, has been tremendous momentum around that. Lot of large banks, lot of large telecommunication companies large enterprises, name them. I think all of them are starting to kind of pick up Google Cloud. So if you follow that, I think that's really what is satisfying for us. And the results are starting to show that growth and the momentum. So we can't cover the gap we had in the previous... Because Google Cloud started late in this market. So if Cloud business grows by accumulating revenue over many years. So I cant look at the history, I'm looking at the future really. And if you look at the growth for the new business and the percentage of the net new business, we're doing better than pretty much any other vendor out there. >> And you said you were stepping up your reference to disclose those numbers. Was that what I heard you say? >> I think every quarter you're seeing that, I think we started announcing our revenue and growth numbers, and we started to do a lot of reporting about our Cloud business and that you will start, you see more and more and more of that regularly from Google now. >> Let's get back just briefly to the low-code/no-code discussion. A lot of companies looking at how to roll this out right now. You've got some big governance issues involved here. If you have a lot of citizen developers you also have the potential for chaos. What advice are you giving customers using your tools for how they should organize around citizen development? >> Yeah, no, I think no doubt. If this needs to be adopted by enterprise you can't make it a completely rogue or a completely shadow based development capabilities. So part of our no-code platform, one thing you want to make sure that this is enterprise ready, it has many aspects required for that. One is compliance making sure you have all the regulatory things delivered for data, privacy, security. Second is governance. A lot of the IT departments want to make sure who's using this platform? How are they accessing it? Are they getting the right security privileges associated with that? Are we giving them the right permissions? So in our a no-code platform we adding all this compliance, and governance regulatory stuff as part of our underlying platform, even though the end user might not have to worry about it the person who's building applications shouldn't have to think about it, but we do want to give controls to IT as needed by the large enterprises. So that is a big part of how we deliver this. We're not thinking about this as like go and build it, and then we write it once you have to do things for your enterprise, and then get it to do it again and again. Because then it just a waste of time and you're not getting the benefit of the platform at all. So we bringing those things together where we have a very easy to use, very powerful no-code platform with the enterprise compliance as well as governance built into that platform as well. And that is really resonating. If you look at a lot of the customers we're working with they do require that and they get excited about it as well as the democratizing of all of their line of business users. They're very happy that they're getting that kind of a platform, which they can scale from and deliver the productivity required. >> Certainly going to make businesses look very different in the future. And speaking of futures, It is January it's time to do predictions. What are your predictions (laughs) for the Cloud for this year? >> No I think that I mean no doubt cloud has become the center for pretty much every company now, I think the digital transformation especially with COVID, has greatly accelerated. We have seen many customers now who are thinking of pieces of their platform, pieces of their workflow or business to be digitized. Now that's trying to do it for all of it. So the one part which we see for this year is the need for more and more of efficiency in the industry are verticalized business workflows. It's not just about providing a plain vanilla Cloud Platform but also providing a lot more content and business details and business workflows by industry segments. So we've been doing a lot of work and we expect a huge amount of that to be becoming more and more core part of our offering as well as what customers are asking for. Where you might need things around say know your customer kind of workflow for financial services, Telehealth for healthcare. I mean, every industry has specific things like demand management and demand forecasting for retail but making that as part of a Cloud service not just saying, hey, I have compute storage network. I have some kind of a platform go add it and go and build what you want for your industry needs, We want to provide them that all those kinds of business processes and content for those industries as well. So we identified six, seven, industries. We see that as a kind of the driving factor for our Cloud growth, as well as helping our customers be much more productive as well as seeing the value of Cloud being much more realistic for them versus just a replacement for the data center. I think that's really the big shift in 21 I think. And I think that will make a big difference for all the companies who are really trying to digitize and be in forefront of the needs as their customers require in the future. >> Of course all of this accelerated by the pandemic and all of the specialized needs that have emerged from that. >> And I think the bond, which is important as well, I think as you know, I mean, everybody talks about AIML as like a big thing. No doubt AIML is an important element of it, but if you make that usable and powerful through this kind of workflows and business processes, as well as particular business applications, I think you see a lot more interest in using it than just a plain manila framework or just technology for the technology sake. So we try to bring the power of AI and ML into this business and industry applications, where we have a lot of good technologists at Google who knows how to use all these things. You wanted to bring that into those applications and platforms >> Exciting times ahead. Amit Zavery thank you so much for joining us. You look just as comfortable as I would expect someone to be who is doing his eighth Cube interview. Thanks for joining us. >> (laughing) Thanks for having me, Paul. >> That's it for this segment of Cube On Cloud, I'm Paul Gillin, stay tuned. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next OnAir '20. >> Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Google Next OnAir, nine weeks of cloud content. There was just a buffet of content. It started out with sort of industry trends, we got into productivity, infrastructure, deep dive in security analytics, database, app modernization, cloud AI and we're wrapping up the nine weeks with Business Application Platform. And with me is Amit Zavery, who's the general manager and vice president of the Business Application Platform at Google cloud. Amit, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Definitely, Thanks for having me Dave. You're welcome. So tell me more about this role and kind of your swim lane, if you will. >> Definitely. I think as you can imagine with especially all this digital transformation getting accelerated due to COVID, that's a huge amount of demand and interest from customers to be able to build applications, integrate them and modernize systems and automate all of them very quickly and easily in a cost effective manner. So that has been driving a lot of the thinking at Google for quite a few of years already. But I think that a little more accelerated with some of the work we've been doing previously with our stack around API management, no code app development, automation capabilities in our platform as well and we're bringing a lot of these things together in an offering so that customers can take advantage of a lot of the innovation in this space and improve the digital transformation and innovate quickly as well. So that's what we've done with Business Application Platform. We're providing capabilities for any kind of developers, be it the technical user who has a lot of programming experience as well as the other spectrum, which are the system developers who don't really have any kind of a software engineering background, but want be able to build applications and automate and there're processes very quickly and easily. So we want to provide them all the tooling and capabilities so that they can do that and be more effective than they would otherwise be. >> I want to ask you about digital transformation. I mean, obviously it's a word that's thrown around, a phrase that's thrown around a lot and there's a spectrum of what it means to people. I was talking to somebody the other day, and this obviously will resonate with you, with your background in enterprise apps but they were talking about an ERP system that was put in 15 years ago before Iphone, before cloud and it just says you know those systems are fossilized and the business has changed dramatically but the ERP system hasn't. To them, digital transformation was basically upgrading the system. And so, but obviously to Google and your role, it means something much different, doesn't it? >> I saw a lot more, right? I think no doubt having a digital application. No doubt is important, it's a good starting point. But you said some of the systems are pretty old and they're not connected together between different parts of the business. And this is huge amount of manual processes. and there's a lot of, I would say disparate pieces which never come together if you don't really put a well thought out digital transformation project or intimidation around it. So a lot of times all these businesses, when they're connecting things together, they do need a platform to kind of bring their business processes, their workflows, their applications, and the interaction between different users, be it external and internal into a more automated system. And that's really where digital transformation really shines and improves a lot of the ability for customers to compete as well as meet their customer demands and be more effective than otherwise they would be. >> And cloud is critical there but it's connecting to an ecosystem. So I want to ask you about your strategy of the Business Application Platform. And of course, Google is known for great tech. It's very open, a lot of downstream contributions, you think about Kubernetes and Anthos. So how would you describe your group strategy and how does it dovetail with Google cloud overall? >> Yeah no doubt, I think the cloud is kind of the central team underneath the covers, right? So it does run on a multicloud and hybrid mechanism. So that is available anywhere as well as you have choice of and flexibility of deployment. It's also a platform on top of Anthos so you have the advantage of multicloud as well as support for all the different systems. You might have both on-prem as well as in various other cloud providers as well. And the other things we are doing is we're taking advantage a lot of the AIML capabilities, a lot of our data analytics capabilities and bringing a lot of those underlying technologies and extracting it out to a SaaS based offering on Business Application Platform. So the customer's perspective, they want to build an application, They use, we recently acquired a company called AppSheet at the start of this year. So they can easily now use AppSheet to build those applications without writing a single line of code. And then if you create that application, it provides connectivity to also a lot of other systems out there be it applications like SAP, salesforce.com. But also a lot of legacy systems in house or custom systems you might have built and put connectors to that. And then allows you to now monetize and take systems and provide API so then you can now extend it and bring it out into the partner community, as well as customers to be able to build applications around that as well. So it connects all those things together, takes advantage of the Google cloud and the ecosystem we have built and provides customers and users a much easier way to kind of build and deliver applications and automation on it. >> Okay, so that makes sense in terms of why you acquired, made that acquisition. But I want to talk about no code development. It's something that you've been talking about quite a bit lately. Tell the audience, what is no code development? Why do we need it? >> Yeah, I think if you look at some of these report nowadays, there's a limited amount of capacity and capabilities IT can provide. And for complicated and very large systems, you of course need IT to kind of make your business efficient and implement a lot of the systems together. But there a lot of other applications which departments and line of business users want to use and build and they can't wait around for IT. And there, I think you look at some of the reports from Gartner, for example, they're going to be four times more developers outside IT than they are going to be in IT. And those folks are not going to be software engineers, they're not professional programmers but still they need efficiency and automation and application development tools. This is where no code really brings a lot of value. So tools like AppSheet, which we acquired, as market leading no code development platform makes it very easy for anybody without any experience writing any code and building applications. They can point click and start building an application and be effectively produce something which they can collaborate and use between different users inside the company or outside without spending a lot of money and time to deliver that. And that's why the no-code application platforms are becoming very popular because it does make your business more efficient, makes your business more automated, it's cost effective and it's very productive, right? So that has been the trend now more and more, and we speak a lot of, especially nowadays, if you look at telehealth, you look at say, if you want to do mortgage lending, you want to build an app easily quickly without having to wait around for it. You are interacting with a lot of people through digital mediums now and instead of people using a lot of digital tools. And that's why I think there's no-code a platforms become much more important, powerful and usable in this mechanism as well. >> Okay, I think it's important to point out. We're talking about no-code here, not low-code, no-code, there's a difference. >> There's a big difference. I think the low-code was kind of the interim stage where tools, which are coming out into the market were available to make it a little easier for development but not enough to kind of democratize it for everybody. With no-code, you are now allowing and opening it up to a lot more vaster community of users who can multiple build applications and take advantage of a lot of technology innovation happening in the platform like cloud and other things as well. Media reporting is another good example where you want to be able to build dashboards quickly and easily without again writing codes. So the no-code becomes a lot more important and usable for this kind of needs. >> So I wonder if we could stay on this for a minute. You've used the example of programming a VCR, many of us remember how difficult that was early on and now it's just you talk to it and it works. You used that as an example of what no code is like. Can you explain that a little bit more? >> I think, basically it should be natural, right? I think when we used to program a VCR, you'd read some manuals, you'd read some code, you have to kind of go through the whole process. I don't even know how many of our audience nowadays even know about that or even think about it anymore. makes us all very dated. But it was a very cumbersome process and then you would worry about whether you recorded it or not, and that you got it on the right time and did you get the right show? And then you'd up deleting the wrong things or whatever it may be the case. A Lot of those things are now getting extracted and simpler in terms of the no-code development where if you are looking for a particular application interface, if you're looking to build say a mortgage lending app, a lot of those building blocks are already available to you. You kind of making it specific to your need, but really using a lot of the building blocks and get you the final solution versus learning about wiring, everything yourself with a lot of pieces of code in there, right? So that's becoming a straightforward. We have customers like Solvay, for example, which is a large chemical automation company. And they are being able to build multiple applications with 400 plus users inside the company and deliver a lot more automation inside the organization than they would otherwise be. >> So you kind of touched on this with the different modules and capabilities and functions within an organization. But when I think about that VCR analogy, I mean, it's doing one thing and that's pretty simple. How does that apply? And again, you kind of touched on it, but it seems like IT is much or business is much more complicated but so this actually works? >> Yeah I think it's a works. We provide a lot of our kind of templates and system examples in the no-code tooling, as well as the a lot of complexity, which is built underneath the cover which is completely hidden from the user perspective, right? So when I'm building an application, I'm still getting the power of the cloud, I'm getting the power of our underlying platform, the scalability, reliability, the security, the integration, all that kind of stuff is brought into this tooling without you having to learn any of those things. And that really is where the power comes in and it's flexible enough that you can kind of pretty much do any kind of application deployment. I will not build a full blown eCommerce site with it, but I can do a lot of typical day to day kind of applications like vacation approval or things you might want to do for mortgage lending, understanding a telehealth app for doctors. And so we're seeing a lot of the, we had customers who were doing this for hospital bed tracking during the COVID current crisis going on, right? Where they want to know what kind of PPE is available? How many beds are empty? So tracking that at the hospital level, at the health care departments, all that kind of stuff we're done very quickly and powerfully than they otherwise would have. >> Is there a concern amongst your customers about privacy, governance, compliance, security with all these citizen developers? How do you ensure that those fundamental edicts of the organization are preserved? >> Yeah, I think this is a similar thing than any other system we will make available to our customers in the cloud. We guarantee that all the data is only available to the people who are allowed to based on the privileges and the security profiles and everything else. So there's no really any kind of fear from the system perspective that you will get access to something which you're not allowed to. You do log in, you do have to have an account, you do have to have all the relevant credentials before you get access to it. Same thing with privacy. We make sure that nothing is shared with anybody who's not allowed to. So we apply the same tenant, same kind of rules to any kind of data or information we keep in the cloud for any other application development. All we're doing is abstracting it out and making it easier so that everybody who wants to build things don't have to learn 20 other things to kind of get going. So the ability to do this in faster and quickly is there but all the underlying philosophy and principles still remain intact into our products as well. >> Right, makes sense. You guys obviously you have this API first mentality. I've heard about things like API gateway, Apogee, data capabilities, automating AppSheets. Can you bring us up to date on some of those innovations? >> You will see a lot of updates in this area. So we've been innovating very aggressively. Of course, we have a product called Apogee which is a market leading API management product in the industry today. It does the full life cycle of APIs, including testing, development, publishing, monetization, security, all that kind of stuff for API. And we have thousands of customers using it today. Beyond that, what we've done is we've added a lot of ability from that Stack to kind of expose APIs and consume them through AppSheet. So we have an API data source for AppSheet. So it's easy for you to find APIs and build an app is one. Second, we also released something called API gateway, which is a very high performance, low latency cloud native gateway running on serverless. So a lot of applications are built on serverless platform nowadays. And if you want to now manage that to an API layer, we provide a gateway on top of Google cloud. So anybody can also use it very quickly and easily as well. So that's another area which we added. And the third thing which we are announcing is something called actually AppSheet automation. So as I talked about AppSheet for app development, we're also now adding a lot of workflow and business process automation underneath the covers as part of AppSheet. That's something we're making available to our customers so they can automate a business process and connect things together very quickly but also get the value of the automation in their application as well. So those are new innovations, new releases we're adding to our platform as part of business application offering so that anybody can take advantage of it. >> I mean, I love this trend because to the extent you've been able, I mean, this is the Holy grail. If you can enable business users, they're closer obviously to what's going on, closer to the customer and they can respond much more quickly. Are you seeing, for instance a user builds an app using an AppSheet, are you seeing because of the API richness, are you seeing other innovation around those occurring? Are we at that point yet? Or are they still kind of islands of- >> No, i think The scope of usage is growing very fast, right? We have more than 400,000 users on AppSheet are building applications. Thousands of thousands of applications been built on it, millions of users kind of using it at the end from the logging in and using those applications as well. So I think the innovation is happening very fast, where they're connecting different things, as well as now building an ecosystem, even in Solvay as example, I was giving you. The multiple apps are built by multiple departments, and they're kind of bringing those ecosystem together into a reuse, be able to kind of find new use cases around it, those kinds of things as well. >> Are organization's coming back to say, hey, we love this? But remember when we first started spinning up VMs, it was so easy. Are you seeing organizations say, hey, we need better line of sight on it. It could be in a catalog of what we're doing or marketplace. Are you seeing demand for that? >> Yeah, so we seeing a lot. I think there's a lot of reuse. Like we have partners who also build a build applications and put that into our marketplace as well and then we're also seeing a lot of interest from solution providers who build applications on top of what you might have as modules and deliver to our end customers as well. So now there's a lot of interest in that regards and there's a lot of good examples coming out and we're seeing a lot of ways of bringing some of these things together as well. >> I mean, how does machine intelligence, AI, how does it fit into your whole agenda and strategy? And what does it mean for a customer? >> Yeah, I think as you know, Google has been innovating and has been one of the top AIML vendor out in the marketplace today. And we have definitely taken a lot of advantage of that innovation and experience in that. So for example, when I talked about automation, a lot of the automation in AppSheet is being done using AIML technologies Google has built in terms of predicting the way the customer is going to use the application, how they're going to be able to take a business process and connect them together. A lot of that things have been built using AIML technologies at Google cloud. Beyond that on API management for our operational dashboards and operational monitoring. So make sure that we can give you five nines of availability. We kind of really use lot of AIML technologies to understand anomalies, figure out where the issues might be and predict those things and make sure that we kind of fixing those things in advance before things go down, right? Same thing in security, abuse, usage, make any kind of DDoS kind of things or whatever may be the security issues as well. We use a lot of AIML capabilities to make sure we're monitoring and securing our systems as well. So we're in the middle of everything. >> Right. Has the pandemic, you know, the last 150 days, obviously it's changed things and we've talked about digital transformation being accelerated. How are you thinking about sort of the go forward as a result of the post isolation era? >> Yeah, I think this is probably going to be... I don't think this is good. Once we get out of the COVID situation whenever that happens, some of the way we work and where we operate will definitely change than what it used to be pretty much in a way. So I do expect a lot more of video conferencing, for example I do expect a lot of digitalization. I do expect a lot of automation requirements, everybody trying to be more efficient and sharing things and working remotely. Those kinds of things will continue as a trend. So from our perspective, the work we're doing around API management, around digitalization, around digital transformation, around AppSheet automation, all those things are probably right things for the right kind of future where these technologies and tech offerings we do in Google cloud as well as other things we are doing broadly will make a big difference for everyone. >> Yeah recently, I want to kind of end just to get your industry perspectives. Recently, I wrote a piece that a video just on the enterprise app space, kind of the systems of record. And, you know, these are entrenched companies and even you see some of the new SaaS startups, but they're large companies and done very well. I was trying to sort of noodle on where does the potential of disruption come? Where's the new innovation? And I think some of the things that we're talking about here, this no-code, cloud. I mean, obviously you guys play in the application space but it seems like a part of your strategy is to enable developers to really build new types of applications. And maybe that's where the next wave of disruption comes, perhaps in vertical industries, perhaps with this no code. What are your thoughts on that? >> I know, you're right. I think the productivity in the collaboration space, no doubt is going through a huge transformation and change. I mean, Google being in the forefront of it with G Suite. If you look at some of the numbers and the metrics in terms of video conferencing and this collaboration in general has been going through the roof in terms of usage. AppSheet combination with that, for example, right? So if you're building an application, you're doing video conferencing, I might be able to build a telehealth app very quickly and easily. So that's where the no-code and collaboration, for example and productivity becomes part that story. Similarly, as you said, the industry solutions where you probably heard some of the innovation we're doing in that area by specific industry with business processes. Again, adding an API layer underneath the covers to connect different systems together, and then publishing that to an application through AppSheet becomes, again, a very much a great thought out solution and very easy to kind of provide that to our customers as well. So changes in productivity and collaboration, changes in no code app development, having a platform to connect all these things and make it easy to adopt is really a big part of our story as we move forward. And that's the reason why we're kind of increasing our investment in the Business Application Platform and just kind of pour to a lot of things we're doing. We did an acquisition on Looker, for example, for business intelligence. And that's an important part as part of business application platform, to be able to provide intelligence to what people are doing, what data you have to be able to do self service reporting, and then publish that to on a dashboard as well, which might be created through AppSheet or custom doesn't matter. But we provide you that whole end to end onto it. And then technology like Anthos ties it together to give you multicloud as well as a hybrid kind of delivery mechanism. So you have flexibility of choice how you deliver and run those systems. >> Yeah, I love that Looker example for sure. We're basically seeing the democratization of business apps. Amit, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you. Hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face. >> Yeah. I look forward to it and thank you again for having me. >> And thank you for watching our continuous coverage on theCUBE with Google's Next OnAir nine weeks of coverage. Keep it right there. Be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live coverage here with theCUBE in San Francisco, California, Moscone South. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here at Google Next 2019 we have here in theCUBE for the first time as a Google employee, Cube alumni, Amit Zavery. Head of platform for Google Cloud. Great to see you. >> No, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you guys again. >> So you're just now on the job, not even two months. 25 years, 23? >> Amit: Close to 25, yes. >> Three years at Oracle. TK's over here as CEO, part of Google. They got a lot of action going on here. >> Oh definitely, it's very exciting times. I've spent some time kind of learning and hearing about what the vision at Google has been and it's very clear they're here to win it and we have the investment that they're making, the innovation which is going on is very attractive and very exciting, I think. >> Always love our conversations in the past in theCUBE around platform You got a deep technical background. Um you've been in the business. You've seen many waves of innovation up and down the stack. So it's not, I don't think there is a move you haven't seen in the business. But Cloud, there's some new things happening, it's going to, but it's all part of other things, kind of meshing together. Pun intended, service meshes. >> Yeah. >> But as customers move to the cloud from on prem, having cloud, multiple clouds, multiple dimensions of change. >> Yes. What's your take on this because, I think, you have a unique perspective in that 20 something years at Oracle, leader in databases and software? >> Yeah. >> Google's got great leadership in tech. >> Yep. >> But now they're standing up a whole new cloud business, at a whole 'nother level. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, yeah, I think if you look at what's going on and I talk to a lot of customers and developers and IT teams and clearly, I think, they are overwhelmed with different things, you said, going on in this space, so how do you make it simple? How do you make it open? How do you make it hybrid so you have flexibility of choices? It's becoming top of the mind for many of the users nowadays. The lock-in, which many vendors currently provide, becomes very difficult for many of this uh users who kind of keep moving around and meet the business requirements. So I think having a solution and a technology stack, which is really understanding the complexity around that and making it simple enough to adopt, I think is important. >> You know, one of these things, we watch these key notes very carefully. Especially when you have a new CEO, Thomas Kurian. We follow NetApp as well as his twin brother. But his first opening line was a little you know, tip of the cap to Diane Greene, which I thought was very classy. We hear all the other things. Scale, the multi-cloud piece. And then Jennifer Lynn gave a great demo, and she said something in her demo I want to get your reaction to. What are the business benefits of Anthos' negotiating contracts? Meaning choice. >> Yes. So lock-in's shifting. This means lock-in is not your grandfather's lock-in. You know, you worked at Oracle which has an amazing lock-in spec in databases. This is a whole new world, it's capabilities, the new lock-in. Or what is the new, I mean I guess lock-in is a function of-- >> Amit: No I mean, (mumbles) Again, it's not ideas. Lock-in is definitely not the right way of kind of looking at it. The way to kind of really make sure you attract users and attract customers, is to really make a value add capabilities in there. Right and then if the customers really love it they're going to keep on using it. In respective you call it lock-in or provide some propriotariness or not. >> Value. >> Right. Value is complete, exactly. I think it's important to really think about how you build some of the services and technologies which give this value. But also give you the choice of moving if you want to. That I think, if you start from the beginning that there's no choice, then the value doesn't come out, ever. >> John: So value's the new lock-in. >> It has to be, it has to be. >> Alright, talk about apogee. because you're one of the key piece of the platform is apogee. Talk about your focus, you're still learning, getting your feet wet. But again, you've got your running shoes on, you're experienced. What is that platform that you're handling. Give a quick description. >> Apogee, an acquisition, which Google made a few years ago. And I think it's a kind of center spaced offering which allows customers to really do the life cycle and digital transformation of the technology they have in the back end. Right and uh the apogee team has done a great job of keeping, being the market leader and keeping innovating. I think the next phase for us as we look forward is one is to make it very completely integrated and make it very seamless with all the rest of Google properties we have and the assets we have and second thing is to really add other capabilities around it so that customers depending on what they want to do like line of business or IT steams to be able to now unlock a lot of the application data they have and expose it to both the customer, spotners, as well as internal employees in a simple easy manner. So a lot of wantization can happen, monitoring, all these things can be really great for them. >> John: So there's a lot of head room in apogee. >> Very very much yes. >> By technology and business benefit. >> Dave: So head of platform. You know we in the industry we hear platform and we kind of understand what it's all about. People outside the industry maybe, some of an inmorphis concept to them. So my first question though before we get into this, what attracted you to Google? >> No I think that basically if I look at the strength Google brings as a organization, be it in terms of innovation, be it in terms of investment, the infrastructure and the willingness to invest in the long term. I think that is really really attractive. I think for me to kind of have the ability to kind of invest and grow a lot of the footprint we have to offer to a customer and solve the business problems in a little more longer term than short term oriented, I think is very very exciting. >> So let's talk more about platforms. You think of platforms as a set of capabilities steeped in sort of an architectural premise, there's maybe some dog mutt in there that you've got have have these capabilities then ultimately you're going to deliver value and turn into products and customer value. What is platform to you and what's that sort of how should we think about that fly wheel effect? >> Yeah in the way that I look at the platform is basically one is capabilities the customer require, one to build an application, integrate it, and be able to secure it and manage it right? So all the different capabilities you'd acquire instead of having to get piece meal of it and have to tie it all together yourself, you can now do it with a much easier fashion and one that provides you the capability as one integrated capability right? So that's really what I think of the platform. >> So your constituencies are obviously your internal developers, your external developers. Who are you serving with that platform? >> A few audiences. No doubt to others to be able to build an application. But I think the bigger audience if you go beyond that is really, apps IT and a line of business. So to them more and more line of business at doing extension to an application. The doing integration without having the right code. And if you can provide a powerful tool where any person who is not a professional developer can do that kind of tasks and get more power out of the application of the business systems they're running, the value is immense. And that's really I think the audience we need to be able to attract and be able to now cater to so that they have a lot more benefits from using the Google platform. >> Is that part technical capability, part you know, go to market? How do you view that? >> It's definitely a lot of work to be done from the product perspective to make it simple um make it more consumable by apps IT and line of business user where such professional developers but also in terms of how you design it and make it self service and attractive enough for an audience who is not really kind of having to do deal with a lot of this themselves. >> Okay so that's presumably what we should be expecting from you. Maybe talk about your priorities and give us a little you know, how should we be, sort of, judging you down the road, judging you not the right term but what milestones should we be looking for? >> A little too early, I mean this is four weeks at Google but I think uh, the way to look at this is are we basically catering to all the new requirements you see from a lot of the next generation users and I think uh, the ability for us to kind of expand that capability in a platform offering so it's not just catering to one kind of an audience but also new buyers which we seeing as users coming into the platform. So over the next six months or nine months we start seeing some of those things which you do. >> Is this a new role? Was it sort of by committee before or? >> No I think Google has been doing a lot of these things I think when you start to think about a rationalized skew of the areas and how do you keep on expanding. There's a lot of headroom for Google cloud to go and we continue to kind of look at where we need to be and how we can keep on expanding and meet those requirements. >> Amit talk about Thomas Kurian also known as TK onstage. He's been busy, he's going to come on the queue eventually. He's talking to a lot of customers we heard. Hundreds of customers been promoted. You worked in that oracle, what's he like? Share some color commentary on TK, he set the chops obviously in enterprise. What's he like? People, he's new CEO. >> Yeah, yeah I've worked with Thomas for 18 plus years and I think he's probably one of the smartest person I've worked with for sure. But I think it's very strategic vision and clear execution. I think combination is rare for a lot of people. We have a very clear vision but how do you execute and get operationally make those things possible? I think that really what Thomas brings to any any place he gets into. Right so he has a very clear idea where we should be going, he talks to a lot of customers, get you all the input and has a clear plan in terms of how we deli, what we should be doing. And then he gets very involved wit the execution operational work we should be doing right? So that is the unique thing to bring to the table. >> John: He can get down and dirty if you want him to do it. >> Yeah oh very much, yes yes. (laughs) He's fun to work with in that way. >> So I want to ask you a personal question I know we've been following your career, certainly you got a great, great technical background as well. As you look at the cloud, and having all that enterprise experience, you see many ways in innovation, hardware, software, evolution to the cloud. As you look at the modern enterprise, you mentioned IT apps, apps IT, it's a whole new app revolution renaissance happening. You got hybrid and multi cloud. What does it mean to be enterprise ready? If you could take all the learnings in your career, as you look at the new, you know, out in the new pasture, of the next ten years plus, you see changes happening, what's your vision? >> I think that enterprise ready for us, I mean I think that's what we are doing a lot, if you saw today from Thomas' announcements, there's a lot of things we are planning and we have been doing already and we need to do as well. But I think it's understanding the existing landscape of a customer. And enterprise, let's use them on and invest on many customers we've made and systems you can't rip and replace instantly. And to be able to understand how you operate in that kind of constrains as well as context is very important when you build new generational applications. So kind of having the connectivity and the tissue of kind of making it all work together, while you kind of modernize and digitally transform your offering, I think is a critical way of thinking. And I think that's what you'll start seeing a lot more of that from the product planning, product delivery perspective and understanding that yet many customers have to pay before they can move everywhere right? So you saw today with Thomas' announcement about hybrid which allows you to kind of inter operate with existing investments. Multicloud because you might be running into multiple environments. As well as you saw some the things we doing to really make it easy and simple to integrate with the existing portfolio that customers have. >> You know what's interesting is that you know, he also mentioned industries, which you guys at Oracle certainly you know every industry's got unique requirements. What's interesting and kind of validates on a queue we've, Dave and I have talked for years that the clouds horizontally scalable yet with data and AI you can be differentiated in the industry level so you can actually have best of both worlds now. That's what I see kind of coming together at the platform 'cause you have to have a platform that enables. How do you see that? Do you agree with that? Do you see that shaping out? How would you see that ability to take advantage of the horizontal scale, the ability, connective tissue, plus enabling this horizontal specialization for industry solutions? >> Yeah, no I think you saw again some of the announcements around that, with how do you make it not pertinent to a particular end user. Alright each industry has specific data models, specific use cases and you need to be able to provide and cater to that. So you have to have a horizontal platform which can cater to multiple, different things you want to do. But then you'd have to provide the main specific content and that's when you'll start seeing as you think that Oracle does some of the things that other companies do that and we will do some of that stuff as well. >> Well that's interesting point because you're in a point of a horizontal scaling because it creates this, uh, another disruption agenda. Yeah you can disrupts search and productivity software but you can also triverse industries with your partners. We were talking about apogee before with the API economy. You can see Google and its partners getting the healthcare, financial services, autonomist vehicles, I mean virtually every industry because it's data and that to me is the exciting part of platform. >> Oh no doubt. I think Google also brings a lot strength in terms of the modeling and the AI work they've been doing for many years and that can really exhilarate capabilities around these things in a much more easier way than it could be otherwise. >> And you kind of have a clean sheet of paper in the enterprise >> That's right. >> Amit great to see you, I'm glad we can get your first public appearance at Google here in theCUBE. Appreciate the commentary, I want to finally, final question is, personal question. If you were a cloud architect for a large enterprise that had complex to simple work loads and everything in between, what would you be doing in advising and setting up and architecting, what would you, what would you do? >> I think that the best thing to do I think is to identify different categories of applications. I don't think it's one thing fits all right? So define what are the categories of applications you have. Some of them are cloud ready and make sure that you can, status are ready and adoption and moving to more agile delivery model. Second on the application which you might want to now start thinking about rewriting and then having a road map associated with that so you're not trying to go and rip and replace because that has an impact on your business and capabilities right? And then third thing we might want to look at retiring some of the staff and then hey you have to modernize, I mean there's nothing, there's no way out of it. Just like software goes through cycles of innovation and changes every ten years you see a new stack of technologies come out and you have to remain competitive by adopting some of the states. So I think that's kind of in recognizing what you have and how you adopt is probably the number one thing. >> And you'll be probably driving containers throughout >> No doubt, I think the technologies out there now with the containerization, much much simpler to kind of go and run and write one's, run anywhere kind of thing. >> Those scenarios is kind of what the guy from Kohl's was saying today in the key note >> Yeah they're very similar yeah. >> He didn't say this, this one use case of just leave it there which was interesting to me. So, do nothing was not his strategy. It is, it is for some. >> Amit Zavery here on theCUBE. Great, great insight, thanks for sharing. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. Amit Zavery head of platform at Google Cloud here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. See us with more day one coverage. We're here for three days. Live, we'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's TheCUBE! Covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here live in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's TheCUBE. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signals and noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host, Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media and also the General Manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest, CUBE alumni Amit Zavery, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Oracle' Cloud Platform, heavily involved in the platform as a service, where all the action is, as well as the cloud platform. Amit, great to see you, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. It's always a pleasure to be here. >> A lot of buzz, we're on day three of wall-to-wall live coverage, we got you at the end, so we have the luxury of one, getting your opinion, but also to look at the shows. So first, as day three kicks in, the big party today with Sting and the concert, but then the workshops tomorrow, pretty much ends tonight for the most part. What's your takeaway from the show? What's your vibe this year, what are you seeing, what's popped up at you at the show this year? >> A lot of things, I think one thing is there's a lot of maturity into adoption of the cloud, right, so we're seeing a lot of customers I speak to nowadays are talking about next, broader implementations, adding more and more capabilities into their services, no more just trying to try out things, a lot of production workloads been moving to the cloud. So very, very interesting conversations. And also I'm seeing a lot of different kinds of customers, typically, of course Oracle being in the very large enterprise software player, used to have large companies as the couple of folks I used to meet on a regular basis. Over the last couple of years, I'm noticing a lot of smaller companies who are probably, a lot of times I have to look up who they are, but they are doing very interesting projects, and they are coming here and talking to us. So I'm also seeing a very different audience I'm speaking to than I used to before. >> We had Dave Donatelli on earlier, Executive Vice President one of the main leaders now on the go-to market for cloud and all the converged infrastructure, and it's very clear to his standpoint, he's overtly saying it, putting the stake in the ground that if you run Oracle on Oracle hardware, it will be unequivocally the fastest, and it's an unfair advantage, and they've got to lap the field is what he said. Okay. Same for Platform as a Service, you guys have some success now under your belt this year from last. >> Yes. >> But it's not clear that Oracle has won the developers' hearts and minds in the enterprise, and winning the developers in general, Amazon has had that up their sleeve right now, but yet, you guys have a ton of open source stuff. So Platform as a Service is really going to come down to integration and developers. >> Yes. >> What's you guys' strategy there, and how do you see that playing out, because you need to fortify that middleware, that integration, that's APIs, that's a developer-centric DevOps way. What's your strategy? >> A lot of things. The one thing which you see from our Platform as a Service, we have been from the day one building it on an Open Standards technology, which is again end-to-end very broad and deep functionality. And we had a lot of history building out a platform, and we have thousands and thousands of customers who successfully deployed that. So our strategy going forward and what you see some of the announcements recently, as well as some of the use cases you might have heard from our customers, are customers who are really trying to install a broader platform requirement, not just trying to build an application, but be able to integrate them, be able to make sure they have ability to kind of take the data from it and be able to do analysis with it in real time as well as batch, and be able to publish that information whenever they choose to, and then work that in conjunction with any infrastructure as well as with any services, Software as a Service, systems applications. So this plays very well with our Software as a Service customers, they need a platform extension, so that's the developers we go after, we go to developers who are really also building brand new applications and need a platform which is Open Standard-based, and which is broad and deep and well-integrated. So that's really what we are seeing a lot of success from. So Amazon no doubt has success on the infrastructure side, but we have customers in just one cloud source to move the hardware, of course then allowing them to move up in the platform space as well, but they have very limited set of things which they still offer. We've been doing this space for many, many years, and now we may be able to provide the similar kind of breadth, which is to have on prem in the cloud, cloud natively built, with the right kind of APIs, right kind of interfaces, but a little higher-level services, so it's not very granular where you have to go and compose 15 different services together and build your application. I provide you as a customer, to a customer a very ease of use, and much more solution-centric platform. And that's really the differentiation we have there. >> So less moving parts on the composability, if you will. >> No we can do as granular as you want, but we also have composed in a way which is like okay, if we are looking at integration, for example, right, what are different kind of patterns you need in integration? You might want to be able to it to a file, you might be able to do it B2B, EDI basic integration, you might be able to do it through a process, you might do it through a messaging, might do a data integration. So we provide you integration cloud, versus saying that 20 services go at it, and then tomorrow you might not still understand what to use, what not to use. Customers can consume what they like in the integration cloud, and pay as they go in terms of what functionality they pick up. But as a developer, I don't have to go waste my time to figure out and learn the different tools, different stuff, and figure out how to make all these things work together. >> So the palette is becoming more enterprise-friendly. >> Sure. >> And on top of that, you're also providing a set of capabilities in the past platform that kind of replicates the experience developers have enjoyed certainly in the open source and the other world by making it easier to find stuff, to discover stuff, and then exploit and use stuff through the variety of different services. So as you look forward, how are developers going to change the way they spend their time? Moving from code, moving from composition. As we move forward, where will developers be spending more of their time? >> I think that over time, they should be spending time just writing either the code, or kind of extending the application they have. They shouldn't have to worry about DevOps, they shouldn't have to worry about all the underlying technologies required to build an application. They shouldn't have to worry about all the testing and the QA, which should be all part of the development life cycle, which we provide automated in the functionality. So developers, they should worry about what language they want to use, or what platform they want, what kind of framework I like, and who I'm trying to cater to, and what my user interface should be. And beyond that, all other things should be provided from the platform in terms of automation, in terms of simplicity, backup recovery, patching, upgrade, all that stuff should be automated as part of the platform provider. And that's a service we provide as part of our platform as well so that developers can focus on writing that application. And we make sure that we give you the choice, where you can pick languages you want, you can pick the standards you want. Open source and all the different things you might want to pick from, or something we have provided as well. But we give you that choice, it's not one or the other, and tomorrow if you want to move somewhere else, we'll make sure you can do that, because we are not locked into one way of doing things. >> So I know Oracle is historically very focused on professional development, but business people, well development is starting to happen elsewhere in the organization, >> Amit: Yes. >> not just in the professional developer community. So what used to be like building a spreadsheet, now has implications for some of the core digital assets that the business might run. How do you anticipate the definition of the developer evolving? The role of the developer, being able to provide these services to folks who historically might not have been developer, have them also be relevant, and at the same time collaborate with those pros. >> No, that's a very interesting point you raise, because I think more and more this idea of citizen developer, no code developers, a low code developer, whatever you want to use in industry. Many, many of them who want to be able to do quick and easy web building, their functional requirements and deliver that without having having to call an IT somebody to code it for you, or having to learn anything to code. And we have really made sure in a Platform as a Service we offer, there's lot of ease of use and quick drag-and-drop kind of tooling, we recently announced a visual code project, which is based on our application builder, composer kind of a service where you can drag and drop and create a very simple, easy to use application without having to write any code. Similarly, the integration side we do the same thing. We provide recipe-based integration, where if an event happens in one application I want to move that information to another application. As a developer I don't have a right to any single line of code. We provide the recipe or you can build your own recipe. I've shown it to my 13-year-old daughter. She was impressed, she did something from Instagram to Twitter by just using this application on a mobile phone. So similar, that's the kind of people we're going after from the line of business and business analyst, who don't want to write code but they have a business requirement and how can I make it easy and simple to use. So we're doing a lot of that work as well, and that's a very important part of our development community. >> Amit, talk about the competition, I mean obviously Amazon web services is clearly up there. We're kind of like thinking that it's more of a red herring the way it's talked about, because you have certainly the fundamentals with stall base, and you guys haven't really started moving your stall base over yet. When that comes, I'm sure that Wall Street's going to love that, but you have some time, some building blocks are being built out, but how do you guys have that conversation with customers, with AWS and Microsoft specifically, or even Google. How do you guys differentiate and where will you differentiate in the pass layer going forward? >> I think many things. One thing is of course our customers want to make sure they can preserve their investment while they move to the cloud. So we want to provide a platform which is hybrid in a way that they can take some of the information, they can run some of the things on premise, while they transition some of their workloads or move their applications to the cloud very easily without having to rewrite many of the step or retest anything. So that's something. Services we provide, we've created a lot of tooling around that to make it easy for them to do it. And the differentiation we provide to them is that, one, we will protect your investment. Second, the tools that are easy to use are out of the box. And third thing we do is to really make it compatible. We have commercial terms as well, which makes it easy for them take their work loads and move that without having to keep on reinvesting lot of the cost they put in place. >> One of the things that's not being hyped up at the show that's certainly popping out at us is integration and data sharing. We talked to the marketing cloud folks, we talked to the financial cloud folks, we talked to the retail, hospitality folks. Those once-traditional vertical apps still need big data to be differentiated at the domain level, machine learning and AI, and whether it's an IOT impact or not, same thing, but they also need to have access to other databases from other databases. >> Sure, sure. >> Retail, I didn't know if someone bought something over here, so how do you balance the horizontal play with still maintaining the integrity of the app level. >> Amit: Yeah. >> Seems like the past is the battleground for this architecturally. >> Yes, yes. No, I think you're right. I mean, if you look at typically every application customers we talk to nowadays, they have many data sources and data targets, systems underneath the covers, very very heterogeneous. And when we build our platform, we wanted to make sure that it is a heterogeneous support. Alright, so I can write from any database. >> John: That's built into the design. >> Into the design and it's already supported today. I can write from Oracle, DB2, Sequel Server, Hadoop, No Sequel, into again similar kind of back ends. Again Oracle or non-Oracle, we don't care really. We want to be able to support your infrastructure, the way you have invested in, and be able to move the data. So when the application should be gnostic of in terms of what you're using underneath the covers. And the platform extracts that out for you. So we have products and services. Today we have offering in the cloud something we call big data preparation, right, which allows you to take data sources from any kind of sensors, spreadsheets, databases, process that, do the data wrangling, prepare that information and write it into a big data lake, could be running Hadoop, could be running Oracle database or the data warehouse, could be running Amazon if they want to, and we don't really care then. >> So you're strategies offer services, >> Yes. >> On top of the core functional building blocks. At the same time, differentiating on extracting away component-level complexity. >> Yes. No doubt. Yes. And then we want to make it as simple as possible. There are things which we want to expose, we want to provide APIs for anybody who wants to really play around with things. We want to provide them also low-level capabilities if they want to get into that level, but we do also extract it out for, as you were talking about developers, we don't want to have to learn everything every time new capabilities and we provide that abstraction. >> Do you see tooling drives a lot of innovation. Do you see certain toolings becoming standard, not being abstracted away? Could you comment on that and share some color on what tooling will always be around. >> I think the tooling, what I've noticed over time and I think it's probably good to remain the same, every developer has a favorite tool, and we want to give them the choice to pick their favorite tool. I don't think that they should be, from the tooling perspective we have to make sure we can support every kind of program or developer in terms of how they want to write their code. As long as I can provide the interface to it, an API, or some kind of abstraction, and then the developer can go at it. I was a developer and I had my favorite tool, and I still use VI. >> Some will say I'm a VI guy, EMAX, world will go crazy. >> It's okay! >> John: Did you see that VI got an upgrade after how many years, 35 years. >> Amit: It's still amazing, right, I mean people use it and that's fine. (laughs) >> We may get into the VI EMAX war. Amit, final question, just we've got to wrap up here. Thanks so much fitting the time to share the insights. We'd be able to do a whole segment on VI versus editors. >> Peter: Please. >> The plans going forward, can you share any insight in the priorities, what you're looking at from a product and P and L perspective, obviously the revenue growth, you want to drive more of that, but what are some of the fundamental priorities for you, any adventure doing, where you investing your development and marketing dollars? >> A few things, right, so I think one is you probably heard some of the things we're doing for helping developers learn how to use a platform, right, so we're doing a lot of training and code samples, as well as developer-centric content globally. So that is one. Second thing you'll hear about us, the ability to kind of run our platform both on premise and in the cloud, so we have the customers can choose where they want to run it, be able to run it on their data center of choice, as well as they can get the benefit of running in the public cloud. Depending on regulation requirements, whatever it is. So you see evolution of that, but all of the platform we have in the public cloud also, we let the customer to choose. The flexibility's the big, big important part for a lot of enterprise customers, so they're getting to choose. >> John: You're going to continue to do that. >> 100 percent. I think it's very very important that they should not be tied into one, and they should be able to move away if they choose to, not be locked into one way of doing things. And third thing we're doing is we're really bringing together lot of infrastructure, platform, and Software as a Service offerings. Very close and close together as an integrated platform cloud, right, which makes it very easy for customers to consume what they want, but don't have to keep on making it all work together themselves. >> So integrate at will, however they want to compose. >> Yes, so that way at least we'll see lot of functionality, you heard a lot of this this week, we can't keep up with the amount of announcements we've made, and you'll see >> I'll rephrase the question, so first of all great answer but I was looking for something else. How about next year when we interview you, looking back, what would you view as a successful year for your group? >> I think the success for us and the way I measure it is continue customer adoption and use cases evolution right. So today we have around 10,000 plus customers. I would expect by next year we are growing at a very very rapid rate and that another four or five thousand customers more who are doing interesting use cases and going live with it. >> John: Great. >> That a big success. >> Customers ultimately. >> Keeping them happy and as long as I deliver the right things, they will be happy. >> I always say look at the scoreboard in sports, and that's ultimately the differentiation, so that's going to be the benchmark. The KPI is the number of customers, happy customers. >> Yes. >> I'm sure Mark Hurdle will have that on his next earnings report. This is TheCUBE bringing you Amit Zavery's commentary, also analysis of Oracle OpenWorld. With more after this short break, we're going to wrap up. Live, here at Oracle OpenWorld 2016. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, you're watching TheCUBE. (light music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The next 10 years of cloud, they're going to differ dramatically from the past decade. The early days of cloud, deployed virtualization of standard off-the-shelf components, X86 microprocessors, disk drives et cetera, to then scale out and build a large distributed system. The coming decade is going to see a much more data-centric, real-time, intelligent, call it even hyper-decentralized cloud that will comprise on-prem, hybrid, cross-cloud and edge workloads with a services layer that will obstruct the underlying complexity of the infrastructure which will also comprise much more custom and varied components. This was a key takeaway of the guests from theCUBE on Cloud, an event hosted by SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this episode, we'll summarize the findings of our recent event and extract the signal from our great guests with a couple of series and comments and clips from the show. CUBE on Cloud is our very first virtual editorial event. It was designed to bring together our community in an open forum. We ran the day on our 365 software platform and had a great lineup of CEOs, CIOs, data practitioners technologists. We had cloud experts, analysts and many opinion leaders all brought together in a day long series of sessions that we developed in order to unpack the future of cloud computing in the coming decade. Let me briefly frame up the conversation and then turn it over to some of our guests. First, we put forth our view of how modern cloud has evolved and where it's headed. This graphic that we're showing here, talks about the progression of cloud innovation over time. A cloud like many innovations, it started as a novelty. When AWS announced S3 in March of 2006, nobody in the vendor or user communities really even in the trade press really paid too much attention to it. Then later that year, Amazon announced EC2 and people started to think about a new model of computing. But it was largely tire kickers, bleeding-edge developers that took notice and really leaned in. Now the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, really created what we call a cloud awakening and it put cloud on the radar of many CFOs. Shadow IT emerged within departments that wanted to take IT in bite-sized chunks and along with the CFO wanted to take it as OPEX versus CAPEX. And then I teach transformation that really took hold. We came out of the financial crisis and we've been on an 11-year cloud boom. And it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon, cloud has really disrupted the on-prem model as we've reported and completely transformed IT. Ironically, the pandemic hit at the beginning of this decade, and created a mandate to go digital. And so it accelerated the industry transformation that we're highlighting here, which probably would have taken several more years to mature but overnight the forced March to digital happened. And it looks like it's here to stay. Now the next wave, we think we'll be much more about business or industry transformation. We're seeing the first glimpses of that. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research summed it up at our event very well I thought, he basically said the cloud is the big winner of COVID. Of course we know that now normally we talk about seven-year economic cycles. He said he was talking about for planning and investment cycles. Now we operate in seven-day cycles. The examples he gave where do we open or close the store? How do we pivot to support remote workers without the burden of CAPEX? And we think that the things listed on this chart are going to be front and center in the coming years, data AI, a fully digitized and intelligence stack that will support next gen disruptions in autos, manufacturing, finance, farming and virtually every industry where the system will expand to the edge. And the underlying infrastructure across physical locations will be hidden. Many issues remain, not the least of which is latency which we talked about at the event in quite some detail. So let's talk about how the Big 3 cloud players are going to participate in this next era. Well, in short, the consensus from the event was that the rich get richer. Let's take a look at some data. This chart shows our most recent estimates of IaaS and PaaS spending for the Big 3. And we're going to update this after earning season but there's a couple of points stand out. First, we want to make the point that combined the Big 3 now account for almost $80 billion of infrastructure spend last year. That $80 billion, was not all incremental (laughs) No it's caused consolidation and disruption in the on-prem data center business and within IT shops companies like Dell, HPE, IBM, Oracle many others have felt the heat and have had to respond with hybrid and cross cloud strategies. Second while it's true that Azure and GCP they appear to be growing faster than AWS. We don't know really the exact numbers, of course because only AWS provides a clean view of IaaS and passwords, Microsoft and Google. They kind of hide them all ball on their numbers which by the way, I don't blame them but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues on growth rates. And we have other means of estimating through surveys and the like, but it's undeniable Azure is closing the revenue gap on AWS. The third is that I like the fact that Azure and Google are growing faster than AWS. AWS is the only company by our estimates to grow its business sequentially last quarter. And in and of itself, that's not really enough important. What is significant is that because AWS is so large now at 45 billion, even at their slower growth rates it grows much more in absolute terms than its competitors. So we think AWS is going to keep its lead for some time. We think Microsoft and AWS will continue to lead the pack. You know, they might converge maybe it will be a 200 just race in terms of who's first who's second in terms of cloud revenue and how it's counted depending on what they count in their numbers. And Google look with its balance sheet and global network. It's going to play the long game and virtually everyone else with the exception of perhaps Alibaba is going to be secondary players on these platforms. Now this next graphic underscores that reality and kind of lays out the competitive landscape. What we're showing here is survey data from ETR of more than 1400 CIOs and IT buyers and on the vertical axis is Net Score which measures spending momentum on the horizontal axis is so-called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. The key points are AWS and Microsoft look at it. They stand alone so far ahead of the pack. I mean, they really literally, it would have to fall down to lose their lead high spending velocity and large share of the market or the hallmarks of these two companies. And we don't think that's going to change anytime soon. Now, Google, even though it's far behind they have the financial strength to continue to position themselves as an alternative to AWS. And of course, an analytics specialist. So it will continue to grow, but it will be challenged. We think to catch up to the leaders. Now take a look at the hybrid zone where the field is playing. These are companies that have a large on-prem presence and have been forced to initiate a coherent cloud strategy. And of course, including multicloud. And we include Google in this so pack because they're behind and they have to take a differentiated approach relative to AWS, and maybe cozy up to some of these traditional enterprise vendors to help Google get to the enterprise. And you can see from the on-prem crowd, VMware Cloud on AWS is stands out as having some, some momentum as does Red Hat OpenShift, which is it's cloudy, but it's really sort of an ingredient it's not really broad IaaS specifically but it's a component of cloud VMware cloud which includes VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation. And even Dell's cloud. We would expect HPE with its GreenLake strategy. Its financials is shoring up, should be picking up momentum in the future in terms of what the customers of this survey consider cloud. And then of course you could see IBM and Oracle you're in the game, but they don't have the spending momentum and they don't have the CAPEX chops to compete with the hyperscalers IBM's cloud revenue actually dropped 7% last quarter. So that highlights the challenges that that company facing Oracle's cloud business is growing in the single digits. It's kind of up and down, but again underscores these two companies are really about migrating their software install basis to their captive clouds and as well for IBM, for example it's launched a financial cloud as a way to differentiate and not take AWS head-on an infrastructure as a service. The bottom line is that other than the Big 3 in Alibaba the rest of the pack will be plugging into hybridizing and cross-clouding those platforms. And there are definitely opportunities there specifically related to creating that abstraction layer that we talked about earlier and hiding that underlying complexity and importantly creating incremental value good examples, snowfallLike what snowflake is doing with its data cloud, what the data protection guys are doing. A company like Loomio is headed in that direction as are others. So, you keep an eye on that and think about where the white space is and where the value can be across-clouds. That's where the opportunity is. So let's see, what is this all going to look like? How does the cube community think it's going to unfold? Let's hear from theCUBE Guests and theCUBE on Cloud speakers and some of those highlights. Now, unfortunately we don't have time to show you clips from every speaker. We are like 10-plus hours of video content but we've tried to pull together some comments that summarize the sentiment from the community. So I'm going to have John Furrier briefly explain what theCUBE on Cloud is all about and then let the guests speak for themselves. After John, Pradeep Sindhu is going to give a nice technical overview of how the cloud was built out and what's changing in the future. I'll give you a hint it has to do with data. And then speaking of data, Mai-Lan Bukovec, who heads up AWS is storage portfolio. She'll explain how she views the coming changes in cloud and how they look at storage. Again, no surprise, it's all about data. Now, one of the themes that you'll hear from guests is the notion of a distributed cloud model. And Zhamak Deghani, he was a data architect. She'll explain her view of the future of data architectures. We also have thoughts from analysts like Zeus Karavalla and Maribel Lopez, and some comments from both Microsoft and Google to compliment AWS's view of the world. In fact, we asked JG Chirapurath from Microsoft to comment on the common narrative that Microsoft products are not best-to-breed. They put out a one dot O and then they get better, or sometimes people say, well, they're just good enough. So we'll see what his response is to that. And Paul Gillin asks, Amit Zavery of Google his thoughts on the cloud leaderboard and how Google thinks about their third-place position. Dheeraj Pandey gives his perspective on how technology has progressed and been miniaturized over time. And what's coming in the future. And then Simon Crosby gives us a framework to think about the edge as the most logical opportunity to process data not necessarily a physical place. And this was echoed by John Roese, and Chris Wolf to experience CTOs who went into some great depth on this topic. Unfortunately, I don't have the clips of those two but their comments can be found on the CTO power panel the technical edge it's called that's the segment at theCUBE on Cloud events site which we'll share the URL later. Now, the highlight reel ends with CEO Joni Klippert she talks about the changes in securing the cloud from a developer angle. And finally, we wrap up with a CIO perspective, Dan Sheehan. He provides some practical advice on building on his experience as a CIO, COO and CTO specifically how do you as a business technology leader deal with the rapid pace of change and still be able to drive business results? Okay, so let's now hear from the community please run the highlights. >> Well, I think one of the things we talked about COVID is the personal impact to me but other people as well one of the things that people are craving right now is information, factual information, truth, textures that we call it. But here this event for us Dave is our first inaugural editorial event. Rob, both Kristen Nicole the entire cube team, SiliconANGLE on theCUBE we're really trying to put together more of a cadence. We're going to do more of these events where we can put out and feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires of people making things happen, but it's often the people under them that are the real Newsmakers. >> If you look at the architecture of cloud data centers the single most important invention was scale-out. Scale-out of identical or near identical servers all connected to a standard IP ethernet network. That's the architecture. Now the building blocks of this architecture is ethernet switches which make up the network, IP ethernet switches. And then the server is all built using general purpose x86 CPU's with DRAM, with SSD, with hard drives all connected to inside the CPU. Now, the fact that you scale these server nodes as they're called out was very, very important in addressing the problem of how do you build very large scale infrastructure using general purpose compute but this architecture, Dave is a compute centric architecture. And the reason it's a compute centric architecture is if you open this, is server node. What you see is a connection to the network typically with a simple network interface card. And then you have CPU's which are in the middle of the action. Not only are the CPU's processing the application workload but they're processing all of the IO workload what we call data centric workload. And so when you connect SSDs and hard drives and GPU is everything to the CPU, as well as to the network you can now imagine that the CPU is doing two functions. It's running the applications but it's also playing traffic cop for the IO. So every IO has to go to the CPU and you're executing instructions typically in the operating system. And you're interrupting the CPU many many millions of times a second. Now general purpose CPU and the architecture of the CPU's was never designed to play traffic cop because the traffic cop function is a function that requires you to be interrupted very, very frequently. So it's critical that in this new architecture where does a lot of data, a lot of these stress traffic the percentage of workload, which is data centric has gone from maybe one to 2% to 30 to 40%. >> The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning you don't have the next generation of analytics applications that helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in order to have that insight in order to have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today, it all starts from data. And I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data, about being instantly usable. Whereas in the past, it might've been a backup. Now it's part of a data Lake. And if you can bring that data into a data lake you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications it's really what does your application do for your business and how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business? >> We are actually moving towards decentralization if we think today, like if it let's move data aside if we said is the only way web would work the only way we get access to various applications on the web or pages to centralize it We would laugh at that idea. But for some reason we don't question that when it comes to data, right? So I think it's time to embrace the complexity that comes with the growth of number of sources, the proliferation of sources and consumptions models, embrace the distribution of sources of data that they're not just within one part of organization. They're not just within even bounds of organizations that are beyond the bounds of organization. And then look back and say, okay, if that's the trend of our industry in general, given the fabric of compensation and data that we put in, you know, globally in place then how the architecture and technology and organizational structure incentives need to move to embrace that complexity. And to me that requires a paradigm shift a full stack from how we organize our organizations how we organize our teams, how we put a technology in place to look at it from a decentralized angle. >> I actually think we're in the midst of the transition to what's called a distributed cloud, where if you look at modernized cloud apps today they're actually made up of services from different clouds. And also distributed edge locations. And that's going to have a pretty profound impact on the way we go vast. >> We wake up every day, worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and to absolutely make sure we dealt with the best in the first attempt that we do. So when you take the plethora of products we've dealt with in Azure, be it Azure SQL be it Azure cosmos DB, Synapse, Azure Databricks, which we did in partnership with Databricks Azure machine learning. And recently when we sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data governance solution and Azure overview, I would, I would humbly submit to you that we are leading the way. >> How important are rankings within the Google cloud team or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about we are not focused on ranking or any of that stuff. Typically I think we are worried about making sure customers are satisfied and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we are signing up a lot of the large deals we did doing. If you look at the announcement we've made over the last year has been tremendous momentum around that. >> The thing that is really interesting about where we have been versus where we're going is we spend a lot of time talking about virtualizing hardware and moving that around. And what does that look like? And creating that as more of a software paradigm. And the thing we're talking about now is what does cloud as an operating model look like? What is the manageability of that? What is the security of that? What, you know, we've talked a lot about containers and moving into different, DevSecOps and all those different trends that we've been talking about. Like now we're doing them. So we've only gotten to the first crank of that. And I think every technology vendor we talked to now has to address how are they are going to do a highly distributed management insecurity landscape? Like, what are they going to layer on top of that? Because it's not just about, oh, I've taken a rack of something, server storage, compute, and virtualized it. I know have to create a new operating model around it in a way we're almost redoing what the OSI stack looks like and what the software and solutions are for that. >> And the whole idea of we in every recession we make things smaller. You know, in 91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year, 2000 windows the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards we moved from Unix servers to Wintel windows and Intel x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again, we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lib servers. And that's what we did in 2008, 2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There's nothing in the physical world that actually even lives but we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade. They're going to make it even smaller not just in space, which is size, with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. >> So I think the right way to think about edges where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have but much data is encrypted between the original device say and the application. And so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze it in the care. >> When I think of Shift-left, I think of that Mobius that we all look at all of the time and how we deliver and like plan, write code, deliver software, and then manage it, monitor it, right like that entire DevOps workflow. And today, when we think about where security lives, it either is a blocker to deploying production or most commonly it lives long after code has been deployed to production. And there's a security team constantly playing catch up trying to ensure that the development team whose job is to deliver value to their customers quickly, right? Deploy as fast as we can as many great customer facing features. They're then looking at it months after software has been deployed and then hurrying and trying to assess where the bugs are and trying to get that information back to software developers so that they can fix those issues. Shifting left to me means software engineers are finding those bugs as they're writing code or in the CIC CD pipeline long before code has been deployed to production. >> During this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as they have the right requirements. So that goes back to people making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people and then the change management aspects right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how this change is going to be how it's going to affect, and then the adoption and an engagement, because adoption is critical because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective. But if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, what is a digital transformation or innovation? It still comes down to understand the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow our reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Okay, so look, there's so much other content on theCUBE on Cloud events site we'll put the link in the description below. We have other CEOs like Kathy Southwick and Ellen Nance. We have the CIO of UI path. Daniel Dienes talks about automation in the cloud and Appenzell from Anaplan. And a plan is not her company. By the way, Dave Humphrey from Bain also talks about his $750 million investment in Nutanix. Interesting, Rachel Stevens from red monk talks about the future of software development in the cloud and CTO, Hillary Hunter talks about the cloud going vertical into financial services. And of course, John Furrier and I along with special guests like Sergeant Joe Hall share our take on key trends, data and perspectives. So right here, you see the coupon cloud. There's a URL, check it out again. We'll, we'll pop this URL in the description of the video. So there's some great content there. I want to thank everybody who participated and thank you for watching this special episode of theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante and I'd appreciate any feedback you might have on how we can deliver better event content for you in the future. We'll be doing a number of these and we look forward to your participation and feedback. Thank you, all right, take care, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Hi, everyone; I am thrilled to personally invite you to a special event created and hosted by "theCUBE." On January 21st, we're holding "theCUBE on Cloud," our first editorial event of the year. We have lined up a fantastic guest list of experts in their respective fields, talking about CIOs, COOs, CEOs, and technologists, analysts, and practitioners. We're going to share their vision of Cloud in the coming decade. Of course, we also have guests from the big three Cloud companies, who are going to sit down with our hosts and have unscripted conversations that "theCUBE" is known for. For example, Mahlon Thompson Bukovec is the head of AWS's storage business, and she'll talk about the future of infrastructure in the Cloud. Amit Zavery is one of Thomas Kurian's lieutenants at Google, and he'll share a vision of the future of application development and how Google plans to compete in Cloud. And J.G. Chirapurath leads Microsoft's data and analytics business. He's going to address our questions about how Microsoft plans to simplify the complexity of tools in the Azure ecosystem and compete broadly with the other Cloud players. But this event, it's not just about the big three Cloud players. It's about how to take advantage of the biggest trends in Cloud, and, of course, data in the coming decade, because those two superpowers along with AI are going to create trillions of dollars in value, and not just for sellers, but for practitioners who apply technology to their businesses. For example, one of our guests, Zhamak Dehghani, lays out her vision of a new data architecture that breaks the decade-long failures of so-called big data architectures and data warehouse and data lakes. And she puts forth a model of a data mesh, not a centralized, monolithic data architecture, but a distributed data model. Now that dovetails into an interview we do with the CEO of Fungible, who will talk about the emergence of the DPU, the data processing unit, and that's a new class of alternative processors that's going to support these massively distributed systems. We also have a number of CXOs who are going to bring practical knowledge and experience to the program. Allen Nance, he led technology transformation for Phillips. Dan Sheehan is a CIO, COO, and CTO and has led teams at Dunkin' brands, Modell's Sporting Goods and other firms. Cathy Southwick has been a CIO at a large firm like AT&T and now is moving at the pace of Silicon Valley at Pure Storage. Automation in the Cloud is another theme we'll hit on with Daniel Dines, who founded and heads the top RPA company. And of course, we'll have a focus on developers in the Cloud with Rachel Stevens of RedMonk. That's a leading edge analyst firm focused exclusively on the developer community. And much more that I just don't have time to go into here, but rest assured, John Furrier and I will be bringing our thoughts, our hard-hitting opinions, along with some special guests that you don't want to miss. So click on the link below and register for this free event, "theCUBE on Cloud." Join us and join the conversation. We'll see you there.

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBEConversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in theCUBE Studios here with Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CUBE alumni. Great to see you again. I think this is your eighth time on theCUBE chatting. Always great to get the update. Thanks for spending the time. >> My pleasure, and it's a joy to drive down to your actual studios. >> (laughs) This is where all happens Wednesdays and Thursdays when we're not on the road doing CUBE events. I think we'll have over 120 events this year. We'll certainly see you at a bulk of them. Cloud Foundry, give us the update. Yeah, we took 'em joking before we came on camera. Boy this cloud thing is kind of working out. I mean, I think IBM CEO calls it chapter two. I'm like, we're still in chapter one, two, three? Give us the update Cloud Foundry, obviously open-source. Things are rocking. Give us the update. >> I do feel like we're moving into chapter two. Chapter one was a really long chapter. (laughs) It spanned about 10 years. But I do think we're starting to see actual growth and actual usage. And I think a lot of people are like, no, there's actually been usage for a while. Me, no no no not on a real scale. And we haven't seen any of the workloads for organizations running at massive scale. At the scale that we know that they can run at. But we're starting to see interesting scale. Like 40, 50 thousand applications, you know. Billions of transactions now passing through. A lot of cloud native technology. So we're starting to see real interesting volume. And so that's going to actually dictate how the next five years unfold because scale is going to dictate how the technologies unfold, how they're used. And they're going to feed into this virtuous cycle of how the technologies unfold, and how they're going to be used, which feedback into how enterprises are using them, and you know, and the cycle continues. >> Give us the update on the foundation. What's going on with the foundation, status, momentum, clouds out there. Obviously open-source continues to drive however we saw a lot of acquisitions and fundings around people who are using open-source to build a business around that. >> I love that. >> Your favorite conversation. But, I mean you know the technical challenges with open-source allow for technical challenges but also the people side is they're learning. What's the update with the foundation? >> Well open-source is really tricky, and I think there is a lot of people that are really enthusiastic as it is a because model. I mean last year 2018 was a pretty substantial year for open-source. The year ended with Red Hat's acquisition by IBM. One of their biggest acquisitions, $34 billion. But we saw in December alone, we also saw Heptio get picked up by VMware which is a services company which is really based on Kubernetes on an open-source technology. But we also saw HashiCorp get another round of funding. And then earlier in the year, Pivotal IPO'd. And so if you look at 2018 at a bigger level, you saw a lot of momentum around open-source and how it's actually being commercialized. Now you and I were talking a little bit prior and I'm a big believer that open-source has the potential and is going to change fundamentally how technology is used and consumed. But at the end of the day for the commercial aspects of it you still have to have a business around that. And I think there's always going to be that fine line. And that line is actually always be going to be moving because how you provide value in, around, and on top of open-source, has to evolve with both the market and your customer needs. >> Yeah and where you are on that wave, whatever wave that is, is it an early wave or is it more mature so the metrization certainly matters? >> Sure. >> You could be early on setting the table or if it's growing when there's some complexity. So it kind of depends, it's always that depends is it the cloud air or is it the Red Hat? There's different approaches and people kind of get confused on that and your answer to that is just pick one that works for, that's a good business model. Don't get hung up on kind of the playbook if you will, is that kind of what you're saying? >> Well I think we're seeing this play out this week with AWS's Elastic announcement, right? And there's been a lot of conversation around how do we think about open-source. Who has access to it? Who has the right to commercialize it? What does commercialization look like? And I think, I've always cautioned people that are proceeding down the path to open-source is really be thoughtful about why you're doing open-source. Like what is your, what are you hoping to achieve? There's a lot of potential that comes with open sourcing your technology. You gain ecosystem, community, momentum. There's a lot of positives that come with that but there's also a lot of work that comes with that too. Managing your community. Managing a much more varied share of stakeholders and people that are going to have thoughts and opinions around how that technology unfolds. And then of course it's because it's open-sources there's more opportunity for people to use that and build their own ideas and their own solutions on top of that. And potentially their own commercial products. And so really figuring out that fine line and what works best for your business. What works best for the technology. And then what your hopes are at the end of the day with that. >> And what are some of the momentums or points for the Foundation, with Cloud Foundry, obviously seeing Pivotal went public, you mentioned that VMWare, I talk to Michael Dell all the time, the numbers are great coming from that operation. Pat Kelson near the Amazon deal think that clear and where VMWare was. But still you have a lot more cloud, multi-cloud conversations happening than ever before. >> Well, for sure I mean at Cloud Foundry, we've actually been talking about multicloud since 2016. We saw that trend coming based on user behavior. And now you've seen everyone is multicloud, even the public clouds are multicloud. >> I think you had the first study out on that, too on multicloud. We did. We were we were firm believers in multicloud. Last year we've actually moved more broadly to multi-platform. Because at the end of the day there isn't one technology that solves all of these problems. Multicloud is you know is pervasive and at the end of the day multicloud means a lot of different things to a lot of people. But for many enterprises what it gives is optionality. You don't want to be locked into a single provider. You don't want to be locked into a single cloud or single solution because you know if I'm an enterprise, I don't know where I'm going to be in five years. Do I want to make a five year or a 10 year or a 20 year commitment to a single infrastructure provider when I don't know what my needs are going to be. So having that optionality and also being able to use the best of what clouds can provide, the best services, the best outcomes. And so for me, I want to have that optionality. So I'm going to look at technologies that give me that portability and then I'm going to use that to allow me to choose the best cloud that I need for right now for my business and maybe again a different one in the future. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. I just doubled down on this conversation because I think there's two things going on that I'm saying we'll get your reaction to. One is I've heard things like pick the right cloud for the right workload and I heard analogies. Hey, if you got an airplane you need to have two engines. You have one engine if it works for that plane, but your whole fleet of planes could be other clouds. So, pick the right cloud for the right workload. Meaning workload is defined spec. >> Yeah. >> I've also heard that the people side of the equation, where people are behaving like they are comfortable with API's tooling is potentially a lock-in, kind of by default. Not a technical lock-in, but people are comfortable with the API's and the tooling. >> Yeah. >> And the workloads need a certain cloud. Then maybe that cloud would be it. That's not saying pick that cloud for the entire company. Right, so certainly that the trend seems to be coming from a lot of people in the news saying hey, this whole sole-cloud, multi-cloud thing argument really isn't about one cloud vs. multiple clouds. It's workload cloud for the use case in the tooling, if it fits and the people are there to do it. Then you can still have other clouds and that's in the multi-cloud architecture. So is that real? What's your thoughts on that? >> Let's dissect that 'cause I think that's actually solving for two different outcomes. Like one multi-cloud for optionality's purpose and workload specific. I think it's a great one. There's a lot of services that are native to certain clouds that maybe you really would like to get greater access to. And so I think you're going to choose the best. You know that's going to drive your workload. Now also factoring in that you know you're going to have a much more mediated access to cloud based on what people are comfortable with. I do think it's at some point as an organization you want to have a better control over that. You know historically over the last decade what we've seen. Shadow IT really dictates your Cloud spend right. You know everyone's got a credit card. I got I've got access to AWS. >> And they got most of that business. Amazon did. >> Yes and that served them quite well. If I am an organization that's trying to digitally transform, I'm also trying to get a better handle on what we're spending, how we're spending it and frankly, now if I have compliance requirements, where's my data? These are going to be important questions for you when you're starting to run production workloads at scale on multiple clouds and so, I predict we're going to see a lot more tension there in internal organizations. Like, hey I'd love for you to use cloud, you know? Where this no longer needs to be a shadow thing, but let's figure out a way to do it that's strategically and intentional versus just random pockets. Choosing to do cloud because of the workflow that they like. >> Well you bring up a good point. The cost thing was never a problem, but then you have sprawl and you realize there's a cost to Optimizer component which means you might be overpaying because as you think about the system aspects, you got networking and you got Cloud management factors. So you start as you get into that Shadow IT expansion. You got to realize, wait a minute, I'm still spending a lot of cash here. >> This adds up really really quickly. I mean, I think the information piece a couple weeks ago where they talked about the Pinterest bill, this stuff, it starts adding up. And for organizations, this is like not just thousands of dollars. It's now hundreds of thousands of dollars. If not you know, tens of millions of dollars. And so, if I'm trying to figure out ways to optimize my business and my scale, I'm going to look at that because that is not an insignificant amount of money. And so if I'm in it, that's money that could be better invested in more developers, better outcomes, a better alignment with my business, then that's where I want to spend my time and money, and so, I'm going to spend more time being really thoughtful about what clouds we're using, what infrastructure we're using, and the tools we're using to allow us to have that optionality. >> So you would agree with the statement if I said, generally, multi-cloud is here, it already exists. >> Yes. >> And that multi-cloud architecture thinking is really the conversation that needs to be had. Not so much cloud selection, per say. It's not a mutually exclusive situation. Meaning, I'm not all in on Amazon. I'm going to have clouds plural? >> Well, yeah you are. Like we have already seen as of early last year over half of our users. Which right now over half the Fortune 500 are multi-cloud already, and that number has gone up since last year I'm for sure. Some workloads were on-prem and some are in a public cloud. Be it GCP, AWS, Azure, or AliCloud. And so that is a statement of fact. And I have every executive that I've talked to with every enterprise has been like, yes, we're doing multi-cloud. >> Yeah, they're going to have some kind of on-prem anyway, So we know that's there. That's not going to go away. >> No, PRIM is not going to go away. >> Then an IOT edge, and an Enterprise Edge, SDWAN comes back into vogue as people start using SAS across network connections. >> Yeah. >> I mean, SDWAN is essentially the internet basically. >> I feel like the older I get the more I'm like, wow, didn't I have this conversation like, 20 years ago? (laughs) >> I was talking about something earlier when I came in. The old becomes the new again. It's what's happening, right? Distributor computing now goes to cloud, you got the Enterprise. What are the big players doing? Google Next is coming up next month, big event. >> It is the week after Cloud Foundry Summit. >> They got Amit Zavery, big news over there they poached from Oracle. So Thomas Kurian brought in his Oracle, who is Cube alumni as well. Really smart guy. Diane is not there. What do you expect from Google Next for the week? What are we going to see there? What's the sentiment? What's the vibe? What do you see happening? >> Well, I think it's going to be all about the Enterprise right. That's why Thomas was brought in. And then I think they really give Google that Enterprise focus and say, how do we end up? As it's not just about I'm going to sell to enterprises. That's not, you know, when you're selling to an enterprise there is a whole different approach and you have to write how to the teams, the sales teams. You have to write how to the ecosystem, the services, the enablement capabilities, the support, the training, the product strategy? All of that takes a very different slant when you're thinking about an enterprise. And so I'm sure, that's going to be front-and-center for everything that they talk about. >> And certainly he's very public about, you know, the position Oracle Cloud, he knows the Enterprise Oracle was the master of enterprise gamesmanship for sure. >> Yes, for sure. You don't get a whole lot more enterprising than Oracle. >> What's going on in the CNCF any news there? What's happening on the landscape? What's the Abby take on the landscape of cloud? >> Well, speaking as someone that does not run CNCF. >> Feel free to elaborate. >> Cloud Native Computing Foundation, for those of you that aren't aren't, you know, aren't familiar is a sister open-source organization that is a clearing house or collective of cloud made of technologies. The anchor project is the very well-known Kubernetes, but it also spans a variety of technologies from everything from LINKerD to SEDA to Envoy, so it's just a variety of cloud-native technologies. And you know they're continuing to grow because obviously cloud-native is becoming you know it's coming into its own time right now. Because we're starting to really think about how to do better with workloads. Particularly workloads that I can run across a cloud. I mean and that seems pretty pedantic but we've been talking about Cloud since 2007. And we were talking about what cloud brings. What did cloud bring, it brings resiliency. You can auto-scale. You can burst into the cloud, remember bursting? Now all the things we talked about in 2007 to 2008 but weren't really reality because the applications that were written weren't necessarily written to do that. >> And that's exactly the point. >> So now we're actually seeing a lot more of these applications written we call them microservices, 12 Factor apps, serverless apps. What have you but it's applications written to run and scale across the cloud. And that is a really defining point because now these technologies are actually relevant because we're starting to see more of these created and run and now run at scale. >> Yeah, I think that's the point. I think you nailed it. The applications are driving everything And I think that's the chapter two narrative. In my opinion, chapter one was, let's get infrastructures code going. And chapter two is apps dictating policy and then you're going to see microservices start to emerge. Kind of new different vibe in terms of like what it means for scale as less of about, hey, I'm doing cloud, I got some stuff in the public cloud. Here the conversation is around apps, the workloads and that's where the business value is. It's not like people who is trying to do transformation. They're not saying hey I stood up a Kubernetes Cluster. They're saying I got to deploy my banking app or I got to do, I got to drive this workload. >> And I have to iterate now. I can't do a banking app and then update it in a year. That's not acceptable anymore. You are constantly having to update. You're constantly having to iterate, and that is not something you can do with a large application. I mean the whole reason we talk a lot about monolithic vs 12 factor or cloud in a box is because it isn't that my monolithics are inherently bad, it's just they're big and they're complex. Which means in order to make any updates it takes time. That's where the year comes in, the 18-months come in. And I think that is no longer acceptable you know. I remember the time and I'm going to date myself here, but I remember the time when you know banks would or any e-commerce site would be down. They'd have what they call the orange page. But the orange page would come up, site down tonight 'cause we're doing maintenance for the weekend, right? >> Under construction. >> Under construction. Okay, well I'll just come back on Monday. That's fine. And now, you're like, if it's down for 5 minutes you're like what is actually happening right now. Why is this not here. >> Yeah like when Facebook went down the other day. I was like, what the hell? Facebook sucks. >> You know, the internet blows up if Instagram is down. Oh my God, my life is over and I think our our expectation now is not only constant availability. So you know always available. But also our expectation is real-time access to data transparency and a visibility into what's actually happening at all times. That I've said something that a lot of organizations are really having to figure out. How to develop the applications to expose that. And that takes time and that takes change. And there's a ton of culture change. it has to happen and that is the more important thing if I'm a business I care more about how do I make that a reality and I should care a lot less about the technologies that you use. >> It's interesting you mention about the monolith versus the decomposed application of being agile. Because if you don't have the culture and the people to do it it's still a monolithic effort in the sense of the holistic thinking and the architectural, it's a systems architecture. You have to look at it like a system and that's not easy either. Once get that done the benefits are multifold in terms of like what you can do. But its it's that systems thinking setup is becoming more of an architectural concept that's super important. >> For sure if I have a microservice app, but it takes a 150 people to get that through change management and get it into production well that will still take me a year. Does it matter if there's maybe 12 lines of code in that application? It doesn't matter and so, you know I spend a lot of time. Even though I run Cloud Foundry, I spend a lot of time talking about culture change. All the writing I do is really around cultural change and what does that look like. Because at the end of the day if you're not willing to make those changes, you're not willing to structure your teams and allow for that collaboration and if you're doing iterative work, feedback loops from your customers. If you're not willing to put those pieces into place there is no technology that's going to make you better. >> I totally agree, so let me ask you a question on that point, great point, by the way. Most followed your you're writing your blog posts in the links, but I think that's the question. When do you know when it's not working? So I've seen companies that are rearranging the deckchairs, if you will, to use an analogy with all the culture rah, rah! And then nothing ever happens right? So they've gone into that paralysis mode. When do you look at a culture? When does the executive, what should they be thinking about because people kind of aspire to do this execution that you said is critical? When do you know it's not working or what should they be doing? What's the best practice? How does someone say hey you know what I really want is to be more holistic in my architecture. I don't want to spend two years on that the architecture and then find out it's now just starting. I want to get an architecture in place. I want to hit the ground running. >> I mean it's twofold, one, start small. I mean you're not going to change you know if you're an 85 year old company with 200,000 people you're not going to change that overnight and you should expect that's going to be an 8 to 10 year process now what that's also going to mean is you're going to have to have a really clear vision and you're going to have to be really committed like this is going to be a hard road but conversely when someone says what does success look like, when you're looking at a variety of companies how do you know which ones which ones you think are going to be the most successful at the end of the day because no one's ever actually done any of this before there's no one that's ever gone through this digital transformation and it should have come out on the other side no one. There isn't and so I think what does success look and I said well for me, what I look for are companies that are investing and re-skilling their workforce. That's what I'm looking for. I get real excited when companies talk about their internal boot camps or their programs to rescale or upscale their teams because it's not like you're going to lay off 20,000 people and hire 20,000 cloud native developers, they don't exist and they're certainly not going to exists for thousands of companies to go and do that so you know how are you investing in re-skilling because-- >> It's easy to grow your own internally from pre-existing positions. >> Well sure, they know your business. >> Rather than go to a job board that has no one available. >> And you know at the end of the day that needs to be your new business model what is digital transformation actually it's just a different way of working and there isn't, there is no destination to the digital trend. This isn't a journey that has an end and so you need to really think about how are you going to invest differently in your people so that they can continuously learn continuously learning needs to be part of your model and your mantra and that needs to be in everything you do from hiring to HR to MBO's to you know how do you how do you structure your teams like how do you make sure that people can constantly learn and evolve because if that's not happening it doesn't you know everything else is going to fall by the wayside >> Is the technology gap easy to fill? Lot of tech out there. Talent gap hard to fill. >> For sure. >> That's the real challenge. >> If you have all the best tech in the world but you don't have the right people or the right structure are you going to be successful, probably not. >> Yeah, that's a challenge. Alright, so final question for you where are you going to be, what's your schedule look like, where can people find you, what events going to be at? You guys have an event coming up? >> April 2nd through 4th in Philly. We're going to have a summit you want to see some people that are actually running cloud at scale that's the place to go >> April 5th? >> 2nd through 4th. First week of April Philly, fingers crossed good weather lots of cloud talk and it's a great way. >> City of Brotherly Love >> Yes, we're bringing it. >> Philadelphia. The Patriots couldn't make it to the playoffs last year but love the Philly fans down there Paul Martino and friends down there. Abby thanks for coming on. Appreciate it-good to see you. Thanks for the update. We'll see you around the events, I won't be able to make your event I'll be taking the week off skiing. >> Well one of us has to. >> First vacation of the year, two years. Thanks for coming in. >> You should do that. >> Abby Kearns here inside theCUBE for CUBEConversation I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching (funky music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience, 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> John: Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, this is SiliconANGLE's The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, joined with my co-host Peter Burris with SiliconANGLE's Wikibon.com, head of research. Our next guest is Aaron Schidler VP of Cloud Industry Product Development. A lot there. Cross-industry, horizontally scalable product development. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Aaron: Thank you. >> So, I mean there's a lot going on at this show, modern CX is the hashtag, it also is the theme. It's not modern marketing, cloud experience show. It's an integrated message with one clear message: Customer experience. Everything's -- that's the end game of this platform. It's hard. Take a minute to just talk about, in context, to set the table -- What's happening? Why is all this the focus now? >> I think it's interesting, over the past, 10 years, we went from everyone having structured, on-premise applications, that took a year to two years to manage and upgrade. Then all of a sudden, all these great cloud innovations started coming into the picture, and the question was: How do we introduce them? So the business made buying decisions. They bought the great capabilities and now they're trying to figure out: How do we move more to the cloud? For the agility that we get, but more importantly: How do we start standardizing, creating a platform for taking these capabilities forward for our customers? >> John: We did an earlier segment today it felt like a history class, because we're all like historians talking about the old days. But if you think about the role of software over the years -- Shrink wrapped software, download it from the internet, SaaS, and now, going to the next level is a new, kind of modern version of SaaS, whether you call it infrastructure, service platforms, (mumbles), services and SaaS. But basically, it's in the cloud. All cloud all the time. On premise or in the public cloud, which you guys have. This requires more intelligence. This adaptive, machine-learning, AI, augmented intelligence thing is happening. This is making smarter customer experiences. (chuckling) What does that actually mean? Because this is your wheelhouse. >> Yeah. No, and smarter, it's a great question. It's probably the talk of the hallways throughout the course of the week. Is how do we make our applications smarter? And I think there are two parts to it. One is, you have to make it simpler. So we just talked about the platform and trying to identify what are those key processes. For me, from an industry perspective, it's what are the key processes in manufacturing? What are the key processes in pharmaceuticals? What are the key processes in automotive? And how do we deliver a solution there? But just doing the transactional stuff was yesterday's news. The question is really: How do we start to take data and information that we have along with some science and create a different experience? Create one that we take the learnings from old and apply them so that the next best offer that we make is one that's based on you and other people like you and the products that you've bought. So we're really looking at just baking in that intelligence along the way so that sales reps and service reps don't have to figure it out themselves. They leverage the power of the company and the data. >> It sounds easy but it's not. But I want to ask a specific question because one of the ethos of the cloud is horizontally scalable. And that's a nice way to think about data, and we've heard that throughout the show so far. But in the industries, in vertical industries, there's unique things, that require some specialism. >> Aaron: Yeah, that's right. So you have a kind of notion of, I need horizontally scalable, but also I got to have some specialty differentiation for the apps. So this is a key part of the platform that you guys are building. How do you talk to customers? Because in the old days it was full vertical stack. Here's your software. Retail industry, health, human services, whatever it is. How is that different now? >> We're leveraging the same horizontal capabilities so that we don't have to redefine it. I would argue that we've started from a smarter place based on our history at Oracle, we understand that companies want to work with customers, customers may work with partners, and customers may also be a contact that's part of a household. So as you start to build that horizontal set of capabilities for the platform, those things were taken into mind. But your points are spot on in that, at the end of the day, nobody cares whether you have a great horizontal platform, what they care about is, as an automotive manufacturer: Can by OEM's talk to the dealer's in a way that makes sense? Can we help pass leads that come in from customers to the manufacturer efficiently, to the right company to be able to support them? So it requires us to address, I call it three areas >> - excuse me -- six areas. The data model: How do we define data for the industry? The business policies and processes: How do you take those leads and get them to the right people and contacts to the industry requirement. The next piece is user experience. A branch banker has a completely different view than a person that's doing your financial wealth advising across the table, is different than me using my mobile application from my home to transact. Integrations are also important. Oracle comes with a little bit of requirement around: How do I complete end-to-end? Because we provide end-to-end capabilities. So if I'm a bank; How do I integrate my front-end applications, my CX apps, into my core banking platform applications? If I'm a communications company; How do I tie into OSS and BSS systems? So integration becomes a key requirement. >> Two more left, come on! >> Aaron: I'm getting them. (laughing) Analytics, different measurements and metrics for each industry, as to how you're going to adapt and perform and then finally, we are talking about cloud, and cloud means that we're taking on some of the responsibility of making sure that regulatory and compliance requirements for the data centers that we support and manage are also supported. >> And also how they consume the software. >> Aaron: That's exactly right. >> And that's now moving to a subscription model. >> I think there's a seventh, which you may want to add, which is semantics. Especially as you start thinking about AI; What do things mean? It's more than just the measurements. I want to tie this back to the whole concept of CX though. >> Aaron: Yep. >> The historical orientation of vertical industry was, these businesses are common or similar because they have similar assets. Retail had a store, had a warehouse, had, you know, point of sale. Those types of things. Digital transformation reduces the specificity of those assets. >> Aaron: Yeah. >> Amazon's a retail company as much as Walmart is. They're competing >> Aaron: Yeah. >> But they have a very very different arrangement of assets. >> Does CX now become, or is the new vertical orientation now, not your arrangement of assets but the customers you serve? Where these customers have common characteristics and the companies that are in transportation serve customers in this moment, in this way. Companies that are in retail serve customers in this moment, in this way. And that's what's really driving so much of the CX. Is the vertical orientation moving from an asset focus to a customer focus, a need focus, a moment focus. What do you think? >> No, I think it certainly makes it easier. And in fact, you used the one word that's sort of binding all of them together, which is digital. And maybe the second word would be real-time. And so whether I'm talking to a SIC code of retail, meaning traditional retailer, or a bank that wants to have a better retail experience. All of those are about; Do you know me? Can you provide me a personalized journey through the process? And can you do it without necessarily engaging with people through the entire experience? Now, omni-channel is certainly important. But I can't tell you the last time I went into a branch bank location. All of my work's really been done on a digital channel. With that said, the processes are still unique. So when I talk about my cellular phone, and management of the cellular phone, the minutes make more sense to me than if I'm talking to my banking application and the dollars make sense to me. So the ingredients that I highlighted before in terms of an industry solution are still relevant. Some of the themes that you highlighted around digital transformation and real-time are definitely new to this new world that we're in around customer engagement. >> Which industries are you guys supporting? Because again, you know, industries have unique requirements. But you have a platform, so, conceptually, you should be able to spin up these industries pretty quickly. Which ones do you guys have supported? And what are coming? >> So I think there are two parts that I'd highlight. One is, it is easy to set up because we set the platform up in the beginning, knowing we wanted to deliver industry-specific capability. So I think that's a differentiator that Oracle's providing. But I think the second piece is, there are several industries that, in fact, customers can use our capabilities horizontally to support. We've got about 20 industries that customers are purchasing our products to use in. With that said, we've put specific investment into areas like communications, banking, consumer goods and retail, and there's some synergies there that you highlighted where consumer goods companies want to get to know their customers more directly. So lots of synergies there. We just announced and released a higher ed set of capabilities as well. And a roadmap for several others. So those are the key primary targets that we had with more to come this year. >> John: That's super, super awesome. What's unique -- share with the folks, take a minute to explain what's unique going on in your job, that they may not know about that you could share. Is it the data that you watch? As a product developer, you've got to look at, I mean you got to, to use cloud terms, "stand up" solutions fast. Your customers have to now do that. Whether it's an app, it should be agile, you know, three weeks, innovation's complete. That's kind of the cycle which we're seeing in cloud. Three week development, that's it. Not three years or three months, three week. >> Aaron: Yeah. >> I mean, imagine that. So imagine a three week development cycle. What does it take? What are the most important things that people should know about that you're working on and that make that happen? >> Yeah I think the, and I've met with a dozen customers already here this week, and I think the most common discussion is, we've got a lot of the capabilities, we need to define what our vision is. So while you've got some on-premise capabilities still, now you're augmenting it with things like data science and other ingredients. The question is, what's the vacation you're going on? What are the stops along the way that take you ten days to 30 days? And how do we start to create a vision that goes end-to-end from the time we engage with our customers for the first time to the time we engage with them for the hundredth time. So I would say most of that is really around helping customers strategically think about how these solutions are going to tie together, what business values and benefits they're going to be delivering, and how do we leverage the assets that they have today in order to do that? >> So is it the vision of Oracle to the customer, or the customer's vision of how it's going to use technology, and how it's going to be reflected back in Oracle? Or a combination of both? >> It's a little bit of both. We've had several customer advisory boards this week where we gather feedback from customers. But the reality is, if you have an advisory board with all automotive manufacturers where we had about 25 companies come together this week, they all have great ideas, but what's interesting is when you bring a retailer in to talk to them and have them highlight some of the things that they're doing that are working in their industry that are leading edge and may generate some new ideas. So I think a lot of the customers are looking really for Oracle to sum up all of the engagements that we have with these companies, come up with those key things that we think could transform their industry, and then deliver it as a simplified solution so that they can uptake it in ten to 30 days. >> So they're kind of pulling you in the direction of Oracle becoming a digital capabilities company. >> Aaron: Yeah, that's right. In terms of; How can you A. Help us with vision, and then B. Help us deliver the pieces that make sense for Oracle? We've got a rich set of partners as well. It's hard to leave them out, in terms of digital agencies, and/or implementation partners. We also have partners that have built and developed innovative capabilities for industry that we've integrated into these solutions. But I think in terms of the total vision, we have a unique perspective that an individual customer, or company, or industry might not have. >> My final question for you is, Everyone likes to know, what's the hallway conversion? And that's where you hear a lot of the commentary on, Oh great keynote. But I want to ask specifically around what customers are saying. You've been doing a lot on customer activities in the hallways and meetings. We're hearing some. What's your take on the hallway customer conversations? What are they talking about in the halls? >> Yeah, automation, I think, in terms of, and the AI portions of what we're discussing. How can we make the resources that we have smarter? Make them more intelligent about the learnings that we have as an overall company, and then be able to parlay that into the processes, not as a separate set of flows, but into the processes that we educate today. And it's interesting, you could highlight a buzz word bingo card with things like IoT, and AI -- >> And ML and VR and AR and machine learning, virtual reality, augmented reality... >> But the question isn't; Can you do those things? The question is: Can you do it in context to the customer experience to change the game? And that's really the fun part of this for me. >> John: I had a conversation with Robert Scoble who's a futurist and a friend, and he's really been talking about this Mixed Reality and he's talking about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, but if you think about what you guys are doing here with modern CX is the mixed reality from the consumer perspective is, wherever they are. (laughing) I'm shopping. Or, I have a wearable, or maybe someday a headset or some sort of augmented experience. You've got to be ready for it. >> Aaron: Yeah. You're the guy who has to build the products and lay the architecture down. So what's the roadmap look like for you guys? Without giving away the secrets, you know, for a customer that's maybe watching; What's the arc for the product development team? What are the top priorities? >> I think there are two big things that I would highlight. One is simplification. I think all of the cloud choices that customers had for a long period of time gave them access to innovations that they hadn't had before. The question was the practicality and how can we start pulling those together, so Oracle really has a responsibility to simplify that set of discussions. And the second part is we've got to innovate, we've got to show people that there's a path to leverage all of those buzzword bingo items in your day to day job to deliver business value. So I think you'll see out of us, taking some of the themes that you're hearing about as individual conversations and start baking them into the DNA and fabric of the solutions. >> John: Oh well I've seen Amit Zavery, a Cube alumni who's been on multiple times, great executive, super smart, big fan of his work, trying to get developer oriented around cloud native, Siddhartha Agarwal, was also on The Cube in our offices. And there's movement within Oracle to be cloud native. Is there a developer plan, or is that just groping for relevance in the outside of Oracle world, is there a dot to be connected in the cloud native world where Oracle is now playing with public cloud? How do you talk to those customers? Because you don't see a lot of Oracle developers out there outside of Oracle. You've got a lot of Oracle developers, doing DBA's and systems work, how about that developer, app developer, how do you get them? Is there a plan? >> You know, I think it's the innovation and the discussion about innovation. There are probably people other than me that will highlight some of the details but you may have seen some press releases recently that talk about how we're introducing some innovation centers for us to recruit the types of people that you're highlighting, and change the perception, if you will, on some of the things that Oracle's done in the past to highlight some of the innovations that we're delivering now in cloud. >> John: I mean you've got a lot of platform value to potentially share. >> Aaron: That's right. >> To some app developers out there on iOS. So there is a plan? >> Aaron: Absolutely a plan. >> Okay Aaron, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate the insight. Vice President of Cross-Industry Product Development here at Oracle and Cloud's Customer Modern CX, hashtag modern CX. Its the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris from Wikibon. We'll be right back with more after this short break.