(gentle synth music) (music ends) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, an open industry collaboration between technologists, consultants, analysts, and of course practitioners to help shape the future of cloud. At this event, one of the key areas we're exploring is the intersection of cloud and data. And how building value on top of hyperscale clouds and across clouds is evolving, a concept of course we call "Supercloud". And we're pleased to welcome our friends from Enterprise Technology research, Erik Bradley and Darren Brabham. Guys, thanks for joining us, great to see you. we love to bring the data into these conversations. >> Thank you for having us, Dave, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks. >> You bet. And so, let me do the setup on what is Supercloud. It's a concept that we've floated, Before re:Invent 2021, based on the idea that cloud infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous, incredibly powerful, but there's a lack of standards across the big three clouds. That creates friction. So we defined over the period of time, you know, better part of a year, a set of essential elements, deployment models for so-called supercloud, which create this common experience for specific cloud services that, of course, again, span multiple clouds and even on-premise data. So Erik, with that as background, I wonder if you could add your general thoughts on the term supercloud, maybe play proxy for the CIO community, 'cause you do these round tables, you talk to these guys all the time, you gather a lot of amazing information from senior IT DMs that compliment your survey. So what are your thoughts on the term and the concept? >> Yeah, sure. I'll even go back to last year when you and I did our predictions panel, right? And we threw it out there. And to your point, you know, there's some haters. Anytime you throw out a new term, "Is it marketing buzz? Is it worth it? Why are you even doing it?" But you know, from my own perspective, and then also speaking to the IT DMs that we interview on a regular basis, this is just a natural evolution. It's something that's inevitable in enterprise tech, right? The internet was not built for what it has become. It was never intended to be the underlying infrastructure of our daily lives and work. The cloud also was not built to be what it's become. But where we're at now is, we have to figure out what the cloud is and what it needs to be to be scalable, resilient, secure, and have the governance wrapped around it. And to me that's what supercloud is. It's a way to define operantly, what the next generation, the continued iteration and evolution of the cloud and what its needs to be. And that's what the supercloud means to me. And what depends, if you want to call it metacloud, supercloud, it doesn't matter. The point is that we're trying to define the next layer, the next future of work, which is inevitable in enterprise tech. Now, from the IT DM perspective, I have two interesting call outs. One is from basically a senior developer IT architecture and DevSecOps who says he uses the term all the time. And the reason he uses the term, is that because multi-cloud has a stigma attached to it, when he is talking to his business executives. (David chuckles) the stigma is because it's complex and it's expensive. So he switched to supercloud to better explain to his business executives and his CFO and his CIO what he's trying to do. And we can get into more later about what it means to him. But the inverse of that, of course, is a good CSO friend of mine for a very large enterprise says the concern with Supercloud is the reduction of complexity. And I'll explain, he believes anything that takes the requirement of specific expertise out of the equation, even a little bit, as a CSO worries him. So as you said, David, always two sides to the coin, but I do believe supercloud is a relevant term, and it is necessary because the cloud is continuing to be defined. >> You know, that's really interesting too, 'cause you know, Darren, we use Snowflake a lot as an example, sort of early supercloud, and you think from a security standpoint, we've always pushed Amazon and, "Are you ever going to kind of abstract the complexity away from all these primitives?" and their position has always been, "Look, if we produce these primitives, and offer these primitives, we we can move as the market moves. When you abstract, then it becomes harder to peel the layers." But Darren, from a data standpoint, like I say, we use Snowflake a lot. I think of like Tim Burners-Lee when Web 2.0 came out, he said, "Well this is what the internet was always supposed to be." So in a way, you know, supercloud is maybe what multi-cloud was supposed to be. But I mean, you think about data sharing, Darren, across clouds, it's always been a challenge. Snowflake always, you know, obviously trying to solve that problem, as are others. But what are your thoughts on the concept? >> Yeah, I think the concept fits, right? It is reflective of, it's a paradigm shift, right? Things, as a pendulum have swung back and forth between needing to piece together a bunch of different tools that have specific unique use cases and they're best in breed in what they do. And then focusing on the duct tape that holds 'em all together and all the engineering complexity and skill, it shifted from that end of the pendulum all the way back to, "Let's streamline this, let's simplify it. Maybe we have budget crunches and we need to consolidate tools or eliminate tools." And so then you kind of see this back and forth over time. And with data and analytics for instance, a lot of organizations were trying to bring the data closer to the business. That's where we saw self-service analytics coming in. And tools like Snowflake, what they did was they helped point to different databases, they helped unify data, and organize it in a single place that was, you know, in a sense neutral, away from a single cloud vendor or a single database, and allowed the business to kind of be more flexible in how it brought stuff together and provided it out to the business units. So Snowflake was an example of one of those times where we pulled back from the granular, multiple points of the spear, back to a simple way to do things. And I think Snowflake has continued to kind of keep that mantle to a degree, and we see other tools trying to do that, but that's all it is. It's a paradigm shift back to this kind of meta abstraction layer that kind of simplifies what is the reality, that you need a complex multi-use case, multi-region way of doing business. And it sort of reflects the reality of that. >> And you know, to me it's a spectrum. As part of Supercloud 2, we're talking to a number of of practitioners, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, US West, we got Walmart. And it's a spectrum, right? In some cases the practitioner's saying, "You know, the way I solve multi-cloud complexity is mono-cloud, I just do one cloud." (laughs) Others like Walmart are saying, "Hey, you know, we actually are building an abstraction layer ourselves, take advantage of it." So my general question to both of you is, is this a concept, is the lack of standards across clouds, you know, really a problem, you know, or is supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Or do you hear from practitioners that "No, this is really an issue, we have to bring together a set of standards to sort of unify our cloud estates." >> Allow me to answer that at a higher level, and then we're going to hand it over to Dr. Brabham because he is a little bit more detailed on the realtime streaming analytics use cases, which I think is where we're going to get to. But to answer that question, it really depends on the size and the complexity of your business. At the very large enterprise, Dave, Yes, a hundred percent. This needs to happen. There is complexity, there is not only complexity in the compute and actually deploying the applications, but the governance and the security around them. But for lower end or, you know, business use cases, and for smaller businesses, it's a little less necessary. You certainly don't need to have all of these. Some of the things that come into mind from the interviews that Darren and I have done are, you know, financial services, if you're doing real-time trading, anything that has real-time data metrics involved in your transactions, is going to be necessary. And another use case that we hear about is in online travel agencies. So I think it is very relevant, the complexity does need to be solved, and I'll allow Darren to explain a little bit more about how that's used from an analytics perspective. >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think any modern, you know, multinational company that's going to have a footprint in the US and Europe, in China, or works in different areas like manufacturing, where you're probably going to have on-prem instances that will stay on-prem forever, for various performance reasons. You have these complicated governance and security and regulatory issues. So inherently, I think, large multinational companies and or companies that are in certain areas like finance or in, you know, online e-commerce, or things that need real-time data, they inherently are going to have a very complex environment that's going to need to be managed in some kind of cleaner way. You know, they're looking for one door to open, one pane of glass to look at, one thing to do to manage these multi points. And, streaming's a good example of that. I mean, not every organization has a real-time streaming use case, and may not ever, but a lot of organizations do, a lot of industries do. And so there's this need to use, you know, they want to use open-source tools, they want to use Apache Kafka for instance. They want to use different megacloud vendors offerings, like Google Pub/Sub or you know, Amazon Kinesis Firehose. They have all these different pieces they want to use for different use cases at different stages of maturity or proof of concept, you name it. They're going to have to have this complexity. And I think that's why we're seeing this need, to have sort of this supercloud concept, to juggle all this, to wrangle all of it. 'Cause the reality is, it's complex and you have to simplify it somehow. >> Great, thanks you guys. All right, let's bring up the graphic, and take a look. Anybody who follows the breaking analysis, which is co-branded with ETR Cube Insights powered by ETR, knows we like to bring data to the table. ETR does amazing survey work every quarter, 1200 plus 1500 practitioners that that answer a number of questions. The vertical axis here is net score, which is ETR's proprietary methodology, which is a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity. And the horizontal axis here is overlap, but it's the presence pervasiveness, and the dataset, the ends, that table insert on the bottom right shows you how the dots are plotted, the net score and then the ends in the survey. And what we've done is we've plotted a bunch of the so-called supercloud suspects, let's start in the upper right, the cloud platforms. Without these hyperscale clouds, you can't have a supercloud. And as always, Azure and AWS, up and to the right, it's amazing we're talking about, you know, 80 plus billion dollar company in AWS. Azure's business is, if you just look at the IaaS is in the 50 billion range, I mean it's just amazing to me the net scores here. Anything above 40% we consider highly elevated. And you got Azure and you got Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, we'll get to them. And you got AWS, you know, right up there at that size, it's quite amazing. With really big ends as well, you know, 700 plus ends in the survey. So, you know, kind of half the survey actually has these platforms. So my question to you guys is, what are you seeing in terms of cloud adoption within the big three cloud players? I wonder if you could could comment, maybe Erik, you could start. >> Yeah, sure. Now we're talking data, now I'm happy. So yeah, we'll get into some of it. Right now, the January, 2023 TSIS is approaching 1500 survey respondents. One caveat, it's not closed yet, it will close on Friday, but with an end that big we are over statistically significant. We also recently did a cloud survey, and there's a couple of key points on that I want to get into before we get into individual vendors. What we're seeing here, is that annual spend on cloud infrastructure is expected to grow at almost a 70% CAGR over the next three years. The percentage of those workloads for cloud infrastructure are expected to grow over 70% as three years as well. And as you mentioned, Azure and AWS are still dominant. However, we're seeing some share shift spreading around a little bit. Now to get into the individual vendors you mentioned about, yes, Azure is still number one, AWS is number two. What we're seeing, which is incredibly interesting, CloudFlare is number three. It's actually beating GCP. That's the first time we've seen it. What I do want to state, is this is on net score only, which is our measure of spending intentions. When you talk about actual pervasion in the enterprise, it's not even close. But from a spending velocity intention point of view, CloudFlare is now number three above GCP, and even Salesforce is creeping up to be at GCPs level. So what we're seeing here, is a continued domination by Azure and AWS, but some of these other players that maybe might fit into your moniker. And I definitely want to talk about CloudFlare more in a bit, but I'm going to stop there. But what we're seeing is some of these other players that fit into your Supercloud moniker, are starting to creep up, Dave. >> Yeah, I just want to clarify. So as you also know, we track IaaS and PaaS revenue and we try to extract, so AWS reports in its quarterly earnings, you know, they're just IaaS and PaaS, they don't have a SaaS play, a little bit maybe, whereas Microsoft and Google include their applications and so we extract those out and if you do that, AWS is bigger, but in the surveys, you know, customers, they see cloud, SaaS to them as cloud. So that's one of the reasons why you see, you know, Microsoft as larger in pervasion. If you bring up that survey again, Alex, the survey results, you see them further to the right and they have higher spending momentum, which is consistent with what you see in the earnings calls. Now, interesting about CloudFlare because the CEO of CloudFlare actually, and CloudFlare itself uses the term supercloud basically saying, "Hey, we're building a new type of internet." So what are your thoughts? Do you have additional information on CloudFlare, Erik that you want to share? I mean, you've seen them pop up. I mean this is a really interesting company that is pretty forward thinking and vocal about how it's disrupting the industry. >> Sure, we've been tracking 'em for a long time, and even from the disruption of just a traditional CDN where they took down Akamai and what they're doing. But for me, the definition of a true supercloud provider can't just be one instance. You have to have multiple. So it's not just the cloud, it's networking aspect on top of it, it's also security. And to me, CloudFlare is the only one that has all of it. That they actually have the ability to offer all of those things. Whereas you look at some of the other names, they're still piggybacking on the infrastructure or platform as a service of the hyperscalers. CloudFlare does not need to, they actually have the cloud, the networking, and the security all themselves. So to me that lends credibility to their own internal usage of that moniker Supercloud. And also, again, just what we're seeing right here that their net score is now creeping above AGCP really does state it. And then just one real last thing, one of the other things we do in our surveys is we track adoption and replacement reasoning. And when you look at Cloudflare's adoption rate, which is extremely high, it's based on technical capabilities, the breadth of their feature set, it's also based on what we call the ability to avoid stack alignment. So those are again, really supporting reasons that makes CloudFlare a top candidate for your moniker of supercloud. >> And they've also announced an object store (chuckles) and a database. So, you know, that's going to be, it takes a while as you well know, to get database adoption going, but you know, they're ambitious and going for it. All right, let's bring the chart back up, and I want to focus Darren in on the ecosystem now, and really, we've identified Snowflake and Databricks, it's always fun to talk about those guys, and there are a number of other, you know, data platforms out there, but we use those too as really proxies for leaders. We got a bunch of the backup guys, the data protection folks, Rubric, Cohesity, and Veeam. They're sort of in a cluster, although Rubric, you know, ahead of those guys in terms of spending momentum. And then VMware, Tanzu and Red Hat as sort of the cross cloud platform. But I want to focus, Darren, on the data piece of it. We're seeing a lot of activity around data sharing, governed data sharing. Databricks is using Delta Sharing as their sort of place, Snowflakes is sort of this walled garden like the app store. What are your thoughts on, you know, in the context of Supercloud, cross cloud capabilities for the data platforms? >> Yeah, good question. You know, I think Databricks is an interesting player because they sort of have made some interesting moves, with their Data Lakehouse technology. So they're trying to kind of complicate, or not complicate, they're trying to take away the complications of, you know, the downsides of data warehousing and data lakes, and trying to find that middle ground, where you have the benefits of a managed, governed, you know, data warehouse environment, but you have sort of the lower cost, you know, capability of a data lake. And so, you know, Databricks has become really attractive, especially by data scientists, right? We've been tracking them in the AI machine learning sector for quite some time here at ETR, attractive for a data scientist because it looks and acts like a lake, but can have some managed capabilities like a warehouse. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. So in some ways I think you've seen sort of a data science driver for the adoption of Databricks that has now become a little bit more mainstream across the business. Snowflake, maybe the other direction, you know, it's a cloud data warehouse that you know, is starting to expand its capabilities and add on new things like Streamlit is a good example in the analytics space, with apps. So you see these tools starting to branch and creep out a bit, but they offer that sort of neutrality, right? We heard one IT decision maker we recently interviewed that referred to Snowflake and Databricks as the quote unquote Switzerland of what they do. And so there's this desirability from an organization to find these tools that can solve the complex multi-headed use-case of data and analytics, which every business unit needs in different ways. And figure out a way to do that, an elegant way that's governed and centrally managed, that federated kind of best of both worlds that you get by bringing the data close to the business while having a central governed instance. So these tools are incredibly powerful and I think there's only going to be room for growth, for those two especially. I think they're going to expand and do different things and maybe, you know, join forces with others and a lot of the power of what they do well is trying to define these connections and find these partnerships with other vendors, and try to be seen as the nice add-on to your existing environment that plays nicely with everyone. So I think that's where those two tools are going, but they certainly fit this sort of label of, you know, trying to be that supercloud neutral, you know, layer that unites everything. >> Yeah, and if you bring the graphic back up, please, there's obviously big data plays in each of the cloud platforms, you know, Microsoft, big database player, AWS is, you know, 11, 12, 15, data stores. And of course, you know, BigQuery and other, you know, data platforms within Google. But you know, I'm not sure the big cloud guys are going to go hard after so-called supercloud, cross-cloud services. Although, we see Oracle getting in bed with Microsoft and Azure, with a database service that is cross-cloud, certainly Google with Anthos and you know, you never say never with with AWS. I guess what I would say guys, and I'll I'll leave you with this is that, you know, just like all players today are cloud players, I feel like anybody in the business or most companies are going to be so-called supercloud players. In other words, they're going to have a cross-cloud strategy, they're going to try to build connections if they're coming from on-prem like a Dell or an HPE, you know, or Pure or you know, many of these other companies, Cohesity is another one. They're going to try to connect to their on-premise states, of course, and create a consistent experience. It's natural that they're going to have sort of some consistency across clouds. You know, the big question is, what's that spectrum look like? I think on the one hand you're going to have some, you know, maybe some rudimentary, you know, instances of supercloud or maybe they just run on the individual clouds versus where Snowflake and others and even beyond that are trying to go with a single global instance, basically building out what I would think of as their own cloud, and importantly their own ecosystem. I'll give you guys the last thought. Maybe you could each give us, you know, closing thoughts. Maybe Darren, you could start and Erik, you could bring us home on just this entire topic, the future of cloud and data. >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, two points to make on that is, this question of these, I guess what we'll call legacy on-prem players. These, mega vendors that have been around a long time, have big on-prem footprints and a lot of people have them for that reason. I think it's foolish to assume that a company, especially a large, mature, multinational company that's been around a long time, it's foolish to think that they can just uproot and leave on-premises entirely full scale. There will almost always be an on-prem footprint from any company that was not, you know, natively born in the cloud after 2010, right? I just don't think that's reasonable anytime soon. I think there's some industries that need on-prem, things like, you know, industrial manufacturing and so on. So I don't think on-prem is going away, and I think vendors that are going to, you know, go very cloud forward, very big on the cloud, if they neglect having at least decent connectors to on-prem legacy vendors, they're going to miss out. So I think that's something that these players need to keep in mind is that they continue to reach back to some of these players that have big footprints on-prem, and make sure that those integrations are seamless and work well, or else their customers will always have a multi-cloud or hybrid experience. And then I think a second point here about the future is, you know, we talk about the three big, you know, cloud providers, the Google, Microsoft, AWS as sort of the opposite of, or different from this new supercloud paradigm that's emerging. But I want to kind of point out that, they will always try to make a play to become that and I think, you know, we'll certainly see someone like Microsoft trying to expand their licensing and expand how they play in order to become that super cloud provider for folks. So also don't want to downplay them. I think you're going to see those three big players continue to move, and take over what players like CloudFlare are doing and try to, you know, cut them off before they get too big. So, keep an eye on them as well. >> Great points, I mean, I think you're right, the first point, if you're Dell, HPE, Cisco, IBM, your strategy should be to make your on-premise state as cloud-like as possible and you know, make those differences as minimal as possible. And you know, if you're a customer, then the business case is going to be low for you to move off of that. And I think you're right. I think the cloud guys, if this is a real problem, the cloud guys are going to play in there, and they're going to make some money at it. Erik, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'm going to revert back to our data and this on the macro side. So to kind of support this concept of a supercloud right now, you know Dave, you and I know, we check overall spending and what we're seeing right now is total year spent is expected to only be 4.6%. We ended 2022 at 5% even though it began at almost eight and a half. So this is clearly declining and in that environment, we're seeing the top two strategies to reduce spend are actually vendor consolidation with 36% of our respondents saying they're actively seeking a way to reduce their number of vendors, and consolidate into one. That's obviously supporting a supercloud type of play. Number two is reducing excess cloud resources. So when I look at both of those combined, with a drop in the overall spending reduction, I think you're on the right thread here, Dave. You know, the overall macro view that we're seeing in the data supports this happening. And if I can real quick, couple of names we did not touch on that I do think deserve to be in this conversation, one is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is the number one player in our infrastructure sector, with a 56% net score. It does multiple things within infrastructure and it is completely agnostic to your environment. And if we're also speaking about something that's just a singular feature, we would look at Rubric for data, backup, storage, recovery. They're not going to offer you your full cloud or your networking of course, but if you are looking for your backup, recovery, and storage Rubric, also number one in that sector with a 53% net score. Two other names that deserve to be in this conversation as we watch it move and evolve. >> Great, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we had both of those guys in the chart and I failed to focus in on HashiCorp. And clearly a Supercloud enabler. All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much for joining us, appreciate it. Let's keep this conversation going. >> Always enjoy talking to you Dave, thanks. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there for more content from Supercloud 2. This is Dave Valente for John Ferg and the entire Cube team. We'll be right back. (gentle synth music) (music fades)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 22, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. >> Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Towns along with Paul Gillon, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for Silicon Angle. Welcome Paul. >> Thank you Keith, pleasure to work with you. >> We're going to have some amazing people this week. I think I saw stat this morning, 65% of the attendees, 7,500 folks. First time KubeCon attendees, is this your first conference? >> It is my first KubeCon and it is amazing to see how many people are here and to think of just a couple of years ago, three years ago, we were still talking about, what the Cloud was, what the Cloud was going to do and how we were going to integrate multiple Clouds. And now we have this whole new framework for computing that is just rifled out of nowhere. And as we can see by the number of people who are here this has become the dominant trend in Enterprise Architecture right now how to adopt Kubernetes and containers, build microservices based applications, and really get to that transparent Cloud that has been so elusive. >> It has been elusive. And we are seeing vendors from startups with just a few dozen people, to some of the traditional players we see in the enterprise space with 1000s of employees looking to capture kind of lightning in a bottle so to speak, this elusive concept of multicloud. >> And what we're seeing here is very typical of an early stage conference. I've seen many times over the years where the floor is really dominated by companies, frankly, I've never heard of that. The many of them are only two or three years old, you don't see the big dominant computing players with the presence here that these smaller companies have. That's very typical. We saw that in the PC age, we saw it in the early days of Unix and it's happening again. And what will happen over time is that a lot of these companies will be acquired, there'll be some consolidation. And the nature of this show will change, I think dramatically over the next couple or three years but there is an excitement and an energy in this auditorium today that is really a lot of fun and very reminiscent of other new technologies just as they requested. >> Well, speaking of new technologies, we have Dave Cole, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. >> That's right. >> Chief Marketing Officer of Spectrum Cloud. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> So let's talk about this big ecosystem, Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> Solve problem? >> Well the dream is... Well, first of all applications are really the lifeblood of a company, whether it's our phone or whether it's a big company trying to connect with its customers about applications. And so the whole idea today is how do I build these applications to build that tight relationship with my customers? And how do I reinvent these applications rapidly in along comes containerization which helps you innovate more quickly? And certainly a dominant technology there is Kubernetes. And the question is, how do you get Kubernetes to help you build applications that can be born anywhere and live anywhere and take advantage of the places that it's running? Because everywhere has pluses and minuses. >> So you know what, the promise of Kubernetes from when I first read about it years ago is, runs on my laptop? >> Yeah. >> I can push it to any Cloud, any platforms. >> That's right, that's right. >> Where's the gap? Where are we in that phase? Like talk to me about scale? Is it that simple? >> Well, that is actually the problem is that today, while the technology is the dominant containerization technology in orchestration technology, it really still takes a power user, it really hasn't been very approachable to the masses. And so was these very expensive highly skilled resources that sit in a dark corner that have focused on Kubernetes, but that now is trying to evolve to make it more accessible to the masses. It's not about sort of hand wiring together, what is a typical 20 layer stack, to really manage Kubernetes and then have your engineers manually can reconfigure it and make sure everything works together. Now it's about how do I create these stacks, make it easy to deploy and manage at scale? So we've gone from sort of DIY Developer Centric to all right, now how do I manage this at scale? >> Now this is a point that is important, I think is often overlooked. This is not just about Kubernetes. This is about a whole stack of Cloud Native Technologies. And you who is going to integrate that all that stuff, piece that stuff together? Obviously, you have a role in that. But in the enterprise, what is the awareness level of how complex this stack is and how difficult it is to assemble? >> We see a recognition of that we've had developers working on Kubernetes and applications, but now when we say, how do we weave it into our production environments? How do we ensure things like scalability and governance? How do we have this sort of interesting mix of innovation, flexibility, but with control? And that's sort of an interesting combination where you want developers to be able to run fast and use the latest tools, but you need to create these guardrails to deploy it at scale. >> So where do the developers fit in that operation stack then? Is Kubernetes an AIOps or an ops task or is it sort of a shared task across the development spectrum? >> Well, I think there's a desire to allow application developers to just focus on the application and have a Kubernetes related technology that ensures that all of the infrastructure and related application services are just there to support them. And because the typical stack from the operating system to the application can be up to 20 different layers, components, you just want all those components to work together, you don't want application developers to worry about those things. And the latest technologies like Spectra Cloud there's others are making that easy application engineers focus on their apps, all of the infrastructure and the services are taken care of. And those apps can then live natively on any environment. >> So help paint this picture for us. I get AKS, EKS, Anthos, all of these distributions OpenShift, the Tanzu, where's Spectra Cloud helping me to kind of cobble together all these different distros, I thought distro was the thing just like Linux has different distros, Randy said different distros. >> That actually is the irony, is that sort of the age of debating the distros largely is over. There are a lot of distros and if you look at them there are largely shades of gray in being different from each other. But the Kubernetes distribution is just one element of like 20 elements that all have to work together. So right now what's happening is that it's not about the distribution it's now how do I again, sorry to repeat myself, but move this into scale? How do I move it into deploy at scale to be able to manage ongoing at scale to be able to innovate at-scale, to allow engineers as I said, use the coolest tools but still have technical guardrails that the enterprise knows, they'll be in control of. >> What does at-scale mean to the enterprise customers you're talking to now? What do they mean when they say that? >> Well, I think it's interesting because we think scale's different because we've all been in the industry and it's frankly, sort of boring old word. But today it means different things, like how do I automate the deployment at-scale? How do I be able to make it really easy to provision resources for applications on any environment, from either a virtualized or bare metal data center, Cloud, or today Edge is really big, where people are trying to push applications out to be closer to the source of the data. And so you want to be able to deploy it-scale, you want to manage at-scale, you want to make it easy to, as I said earlier, allow application developers to build their applications, but ITOps wants the ability to ensure security and governance and all of that. And then finally innovate at-scale. If you look at this show, it's interesting, three years ago when we started Spectra Cloud, there are about 1400 businesses or technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem, today there's over 1800 and all of these technologies made up of open source and commercial all version in a different rates, it becomes an insurmountable problem, unless you can set those guardrails sort of that balance between flexibility, control, let developers access the technologies. But again, manage it as a part of your normal processes of a scaled operation. >> So Dave, I'm a little challenged here, because I'm hearing two where I typically consider conflicting terms. Flexibility, control. >> Yes. >> In order to achieve control, I need complexity, in order to choose flexibility, I need t-shirt, one t-shirt fits all and I get simplicity. How can I get both that just doesn't compute. >> Well, that's the opportunity and the challenge at the same time. So you're right. So developers want choice, good developers want the ability to choose the latest technology so they can innovate rapidly. And yet ITOps, wants to be able to make sure that there are guardrails. And so with some of today's technologies, like Spectra Cloud, it is, you have the ability to get both. We actually worked with dimensional research, and we sponsor an annual state of Kubernetes survey. We found this last summer, that two out of three IT executives said, you could not have both flexibility and control together, but in fact they want it. And so it is this interesting balance, how do I give engineers the ability to get anything they want, but ITOps the ability to establish control. And that's why Kubernetes is really at its next inflection point. Whereas I mentioned, it's not debates about the distro or DIY projects. It's not big incumbents creating siloed Kubernetes solutions, but in fact it's about allowing all these technologies to work together and be able to establish these controls. And that's really where the industry is today. >> Enterprise , enterprise CIOs, do not typically like to take chances. Now we were talking about the growth in the market that you described from 1400, 1800 vendors, most of these companies, very small startups, our enterprises are you seeing them willing to take a leap with these unproven companies? Or are they holding back and waiting for the IBMs, the HPS, the MicrosoftS to come in with the VMwares with whatever they solution they have? >> I think so. I mean, we sell to the global 2000. We had yesterday, as a part of Edge day here at the event, we had GE Healthcare as one of our customers telling their story, and they're a market share leader in medical imaging equipment, X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, and they're starting to treat those as Edge devices. And so here is a very large established company, a leader in their industry, working with people like Spectra Cloud, realizing that Kubernetes is interesting technology. The Edge is an interesting thought but how do I marry the two together? So we are seeing large corporations seeing so much of an opportunity that they're working with the smaller companies, the latest technology. >> So let's talk about the Edge a little, you kind of opened it up there. How should customers think about the Edge versus the Cloud Data Center or even bare metal? >> Actually it's a... Well bare metal is fairly easy is that many people are looking to reduce some of the overhead or inefficiencies of the virtualized environment. But we've had really sort of parallel little white tornadoes, we've had bare metal as infrastructure that's been developing, and then we've had orchestration developing but they haven't really come together very well. Lately, we're finally starting to see that come together. Spectra Cloud contributed to open source a metal as a service technology that finally brings these two worlds together, making bare metal much more approachable to the enterprise. Edge is interesting, because it seems pretty obvious, you want to push your application out closer to your source of data, whether it's AI inferencing, or IoT or anything like that, you don't want to worry about intermittent connectivity or latency or anything like that. But people have wanted to be able to treat the Edge as if it's almost like a Cloud, where all I worry about is the app. So really, the Edge to us is just the next extension in a multi-Cloud sort of motif where I want these Edge devices to require low IT resources, to automate the provisioning, automate the ongoing version management, patch management, really act like a Cloud. And we're seeing this as very popular now. And I just used the GE Healthcare example of that, imagine a CAT scan machine, I'm making this part up in China and that's just an Edge device and it's doing medical imagery which is very intense in terms of data, you want to be able to process it quickly and accurately, as close to the endpoint, the healthcare provider is possible. >> So let's talk about that in some level of details, we think about kind of Edge and these fixed devices such as imaging device, are we putting agents on there, or we looking at something talking back to the Cloud? Where does special Cloud inject and help make that simple, that problem of just having dispersed endpoints all over the world simpler? >> Sure. Well we announced our Edge Kubernetes, Edge solution at a big medical conference called HIMMS, months ago. And what we allow you to do is we allow the application engineers to develop their application, and then you can de you can design this declarative model this cluster API, but beyond Cluster profile which determines which additional application services you need and the Edge device, all the person has to do with the endpoint is plug in the power, plug in the communications, it registers the Edge device, it automates the deployment of the full stack and then it does the ongoing versioning and patch management, sort of a self-driving Edge device running Kubernetes. And we make it just very easy. No IT resources required at the endpoint, no expensive field engineering resources to go to these endpoints twice a year to apply new patches and things like that, all automated. >> But there's so many different types of Edge devices with different capabilities, different operating systems, some have no operating system. I mean that seems, like a much more complex environment, just calling it the Edge is simple, but what you're really talking about is 1000s of different devices, that you have to run your applications on how are you dealing with that? >> So one of the ways is that we're really unbiased. In other words, we're OS and distro agnostic. So we don't want to debate about which distribution you like, we don't want to debate about which OS you want to use. The truth is, you're right. There's different environments and different choices that you'll want to make. And so the key is, how do you incorporate those and also recognize everything beyond those, OS and Kubernetes and all of that and manage that full stack. So that's what we do, is we allow you to choose which tools you want to use and let it be deployed and managed on any environment. >> And who's... >> So... >> I'm sorry Keith, who's responsible for making Kubernetes run on the Edge device. >> We do. We provision the entire stack. I mean, of course the company does using our product, but we provision the entire Kubernetes infrastructure stack, all the application services and the application itself on that device. >> So I would love to dig into like where pods happen and all that. But, provisioning is getting to the point that is a solve problem. Day two. >> Yes. >> Like you just mentioned HIMMS, highly regulated environments. How does Spectra Cloud helping with configuration management, change control, audit, compliance, et cetera, the hard stuff. >> Yep. And one of the things we do, you bring up a good point is we manage the full life cycle from day zero, which is sort of create, deploy, all the way to day two, which is about access control, security, it's about ongoing versioning in a patch management. It's all of that built into the platform. But you're right, like the medical industry has a lot of regulations. And so you need to be able to make sure that everything works, it's always up to the latest level have the highest level of security. And so all that's built into the platform. It's not just a fire and forget it really is about that full life cycle of deploying, managing on an ongoing basis. >> Well, Dave, I'd love to go into a great deal of detail with you about kind of this day two ops and I think we'll be covering a lot more of that topic, Paul, throughout the week, as we talk about just as we've gotten past, how do I deploy Kubernetes pod, to how do I actually operate IT? >> Absolutely, absolutely. The devil is in the details as they say. >> Well, and also too, you have to recognize that the Edge has some very unique requirements, you want very small form factors, typically, you want low IT resources, it has to be sort of zero touch or low touch because if you're a large food provider with 20,000 store locations, you don't want to send out field engineers two or three times a year to update them. So it really is an interesting beast and we have some exciting technology and people like GE are using that. >> Well, Dave, thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE, you're now KubeCon, you've not been on before? >> I have actually, yes its... But I always enjoy it. >> Great conversation. From Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(soft intro music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Brian Schwarz is here. We're going to stay on cloud. He's the director of product management at Google Cloud. The world's biggest cloud, I contend. Brian, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. >> Long time infrastructure as a service background, worked at Pure, worked at Cisco, Silicon Valley guy, techie. So we're going to get into it here. >> I love it. >> I was saying before, off camera. We used to go to Google Cloud Next every year. It was an awesome show. Guys built a big set for us. You joined, right as the pandemic hit. So we've been out of touch a little bit. It's hard to... You know, you got one eye on the virtual event, but give us the update on Google Cloud. What's happening generally and specifically within storage? >> Yeah. So obviously the Cloud got a big boost during the pandemic because a lot of work went online. You know, more things kind of being digitally transformed as people keep trying to innovate. So obviously the growth of Google Cloud, has got a big tailwind to it. So business has been really good, lots of R&D investment. We obviously have an incredible set of technology already but still huge investments in new technologies that we've been bringing out over the past couple of years. It's great to get back out to events to talk to people about 'em. Been a little hard the last couple of years to give people some of the insights. When I think about storage, huge investments, one of the things that some people know but I think it's probably underappreciated is we use the same infrastructure for Google Cloud that is used for Google consumer products. So Search and Photos and all the public kind of things that most people are familiar with, Maps, et cetera. Same infrastructure at the same time is also used for Google Cloud. So we just have this tremendous capability of infrastructure. Google's got nine products that have a billion users most of which many people know. So we're pretty good at storage pretty good at compute, pretty good at networking. Obviously a lot of that kind of shines through on Google Cloud for enterprises to bring their applications, lift and shift and/or modernize, build new stuff in the Cloud with containers and things like that. >> Yeah, hence my contention that Google has the biggest cloud in the world, like I said before. Doesn't have the most IS revenue 'cause that's a different business. You can't comment, but I've got Google Cloud running at $12 billion a year run rate. So a lot of times people go, "Oh yeah, Google they're third place going for the bronze." But that is a huge business. There aren't a lot of 10, $12 billion infrastructure companies. >> In a rapidly growing market. >> And if you do some back of napkin math, whatever, give me 10, 15, let's call it 15% of that, to storage. You've got a big storage business. I know you can't tell us how big, but it's big. And if you add in all the stuff that's not in GCP, you do a lot of storage. So you know storage, you understand the technology. So what is the state of technology? You have a background in Cisco, nearly a networking company, they used to do some storage stuff sort of on the side. We used to say they're going to buy NetApp, of course that never happened. That would've made no sense. Pure Storage, obviously knows storage, but they were a disk array company essentially. Cloud storage, what's different about it? What's different in the technology? How does Google think about it? >> You know, I always like to tell people there's some things that are the same and familiar to you, and there's some things that are different. If I start with some of the differences, object storage in the Cloud, like just fundamentally different. Object storage on-prem, it's been around for a while, often used as kind of like a third tier of storage, maybe a backup target, compliance, something like that. In the cloud, object storage is Tier one storage. Public reference for us, Spotify, okay, use object storage for all the songs out there. And increasingly we see a lot of growth in-- >> Well, how are you defining Tier one storage in that regard? Again, are you thinking streaming service? Okay. Fine. Transactional? >> Spotify goes down and I'm pissed. >> Yeah. This is true. (Dave laughing) >> Not just you, maybe a few million other people too. One is importance, business importance. Tier one applications like critical to the business, like business down type stuff. But even if you look at it for performance, for capabilities, object storage in the cloud, it's a different thing than it was. >> Because of the architecture that you're deploying? >> Yeah. And the applications that we see running on it. Obviously, a huge growth in our business in AI and analytics. Obviously, Google's pretty well known in both spaces, BigQuery, obviously on the analytics side, big massive data warehouses and obviously-- >> Gets very high marks from customers. >> Yeah, very well regarded, super successful, super popular with our customers in Google Cloud. And then obviously AI as well. A lot of AI is about getting structure from unstructured data. Autonomous vehicles getting pictures and videos around the world. Speech recognition, audio is a fundamentally analog signal. You're trying to train computers to basically deal with analog things and it's all stored in object storage, machine learning on top of it, creating all the insights, and frankly things that computers can deal with. Getting structure out of the unstructured data. So you just see performance capabilities, importance as it's really a Tier one storage, much like file and block is where have kind of always been. >> Depending on, right, the importance. Because I mean, it's a fair question, right? Because we're used to thinking, "Oh, you're running your Oracle transaction database on block storage." That's Tier one. But Spotify's pretty important business. And again, on BigQuery, it is a cloud-native born in the cloud database, a lot of the cloud databases aren't, right? And that's one of the reasons why BigQuery is-- >> Google's really had a lot of success taking technologies that were built for some of the consumer services that we build and turning them into cloud-native Google Cloud. Like HDFS, who we were talking about, open source technologies came originally from the Google file system. Now we have a new version of it that we run internally called Colossus, incredible technologies that are cloud scale technologies that you can use to build things like Google Cloud storage. >> I remember one of the early Hadoop worlds, I was talking to a Google engineer and saying, "Well, wow, that's so cool that Hadoop came. You guys were the main spring of that." He goes, "Oh, we're way past Hadoop now." So this is early days of Hadoop (laughs) >> It's funny whenever Google says consumer services, usually consumer indicates just for me. But no, a consumer service for Google is at a scale that almost no business needs at a point in time. So you're not taking something and scaling it up-- >> Yeah. They're Tier one services-- for sure. >> Exactly. You're more often pairing it down so that a fortune 10 company can (laughs) leverage it. >> So let's dig into data protection in the Cloud, disaster recovery in the Cloud, Ransomware protection and then let's get into why Google. Maybe you could give us the trends that you're seeing, how you guys approach it, and why Google. >> Yeah. One of the things I always tell people, there's certain best practices and principles from on-prem that are just still applicable in the Cloud. And one of 'em is just fundamentals around recovery point objective and recovery time objective. You should know, for your apps, what you need, you should tier your apps, get best practice around them and think about those in the Cloud as well. The concept of RPO and RTO don't just magically go away just 'cause you're running in the Cloud. You should think about these things. And it's one of the reasons we're here at the VeeamON event. It's important, obviously, they have a tremendous skill in technology, but helping customers implement the right RPO and RTO for their different applications. And they also help do that in Google Cloud. So we have a great partnership with them, two main offerings that they offer in Google. One is integration for their on-prem things to use, basically Google as a backup target or DR target and then cloud-native backups they have some technologies, Veeam backup for Google. And obviously they also bought Kasten a while ago. 'Cause they also got excited about the container trend and obviously great technologies for those customers to use those in Google Cloud as well. >> So RPO and RTO is kind of IT terms, right? But we think of them as sort of the business requirement. Here's the business language. How much data are you willing to lose? And the business person says, "What? I don't want to lose any data." Oh, how big's your budget, right? Oh, okay. That's RPO. RTO is how fast you want to get it back? "How fast do you want to get it back if there's an outage?" "Instantly." "How much money do you want to spend on that?" "Oh." Okay. And then your application value will determine that. Okay. So that's what RPO and RTO is for those who you may not know that. Sometimes we get into the acronym too much. Okay. Why Google Cloud? >> Yeah. When I think about some of the infrastructure Google has and like why does it matter to a customer of Google Cloud? The first couple things I usually talk about is networking and storage. Compute's awesome, we can talk about containers and Kubernetes in a little bit, but if you just think about core infrastructure, networking, Google's got one of the biggest networks in the world, obviously to service all these consumer applications. Two things that I often tell people about the Google network, one, just tremendous backbone bandwidth across the regions. One of the things to think about with data protection, it's a large data set. When you're going to do recoveries, you're pushing lots of terabytes often and big pipes matter. Like it helps you hit the right recovery time objective 'cause you, "I want to do a restore across the country." You need good networks. And obviously Google has a tremendous network. I think we have like 20 subsea cables that we've built underneath the the world's oceans to connect the world on the internet. >> Awesome. >> The other thing that I think is really underappreciated about the Google network is how quickly you get into it. One of the reasons all the consumer apps have such good response time is there's a local access point to get into the Google network somewhere close to you almost anywhere in the world. I'm sure you can find some obscure place where we don't have an access point, but look Search and Photos and Maps and Workspace, they all work so well because you get in the Google network fast, local access points and then we can control the quality of service. And that underlying substrate is the same substrate we have in Google Cloud. So the network is number one. Second one in storage, we have some really incredible capabilities in cloud storage, particularly around our dual region and multi-region buckets. The multi-region bucket, the way I describe it to people, it's a continent sized bucket. Single bucket name, strongly consistent that basically spans a continent. It's in some senses a little bit of the Nirvana of storage. No more DR failover, right? In a lot of places, traditionally on-prem but even other clouds, two buckets, failover, right? Orchestration, set up. Whenever you do orchestration, the DR is a lot more complicated. You got to do more fire drills, make sure it works. We have this capability to have a single name space that spans regions and it has strong read after write consistency, everything you drop into it you can read back immediately. >> Say I'm on the west coast and I have a little bit of an on-premises data center still and I'm using Veeam to back something up and I'm using storage within GCP. Trace out exactly what you mean by that in terms of a continent sized bucket. Updates going to the recovery volume, for lack of a better term, in GCP. Where is that physically? If I'm on the west coast, what does that look like? >> Two main options. It depends again on what your business goals are. First option is you pick a regional bucket, multiple zones in a Google Cloud region are going to store your data. It's resilient 'cause there's three zones in the region but it's all in one region. And then your second option is this multi-region bucket, where we're basically taking a set of the Google Cloud regions from around North America and storing your data basically in the continent, multiple copies of your data. And that's great because if you want to protect yourself from a regional outage, right? Earthquake, natural disaster of some sort, this multi-region, it basically gives you this DR protection for free and it's... Well, it's not free 'cause you have to pay for it of course, but it's a free from a failover perspective. Single name space, your app doesn't need to know. You restart the app on the east coast, same bucket name. >> Right. That's good. >> Read and write instantly out of the bucket. >> Cool. What are you doing with Veeam? >> So we have this great partnership, obviously for data protection and DR. And I really often segment the conversation into two pieces. One is for traditional on-prem customers who essentially want to use the Cloud as either a backup or a DR target. Traditional Veeam backup and replication supports Google Cloud targets. You can write to cloud storage. Some of these advantages I mentioned. Our archive storage, really cheap. We just actually lowered the price for archive storage quite significantly, roughly a third of what you find in some of the other competitive clouds if you look at the capabilities. Our archive class storage, fast recovery time, right? Fast latency, no hours to kind of rehydrate. >> Good. Storage in the cloud is overpriced. >> Yeah. >> It is. It is historically overpriced despite all the rhetoric. Good. I didn't know that. I'm glad to hear. >> Yeah. So the archive class store, so you essentially read and write into this bucket and restore. So it's often one of the things I joke with people about. I live in Silicon Valley, I still see the tape truck driving around. I really think people can really modernize these environments and use the cloud as a backup target. You get a copy of your data off-prem. >> Don't you guys use tape? >> Well, we don't talk a lot about-- >> No comment. Just checking. >> And just to be clear, when he says cloud storage is overpriced, he thinks that a postage stamp is overpriced, right? >> No. >> If I give you 50 cents, are you going to deliver a letter cross country? No. Cloud storage, it's not overpriced. >> Okay. (David laughing) We're going to have that conversation. I think it's historically overpriced. I think it could be more attractive, relative to the cost of the underlying technology. So good for you guys pushing prices. >> Yeah. So this archive class storage, is one great area. The second area we really work with Veeam is protecting cloud-native workloads. So increasingly customers are running workloads in the Cloud, they run VMware in the Cloud, they run normal VMs, they run containers. Veeam has two offerings in Google that essentially help customers protect that data, hit their RPO, RTO objectives. Another thing that is not different in the Cloud is the need to meet your compliance regulations, right? So having a product like Veeam that is easy to show back to your auditor, to your regulator to make sure that you have copies of your data, that you can hit an appropriate recovery time objective if you're in finance or healthcare, energy. So there's some really good Veeam technologies that work in Google Cloud to protect applications that actually run in Google Cloud all in. >> To your point about the tape truck I was kind of tongue in cheek, but I know you guys use tape. But the point is you shouldn't have to call the tape truck, right, you should go to Google and say, "Okay. I need my data back." Now having said that sometimes the highest bandwidth in the world is putting all this stuff on the truck. Is there an option for that? >> Again, it gets back to this networking capability that I mentioned. Yes. People do like to joke about, okay, trucks and trains and things can have a lot of bandwidth, big networks can push a lot of data around, obviously. >> And you got a big network. >> We got a huge network. So if you want to push... I've seen statistics. You can do terabits a second to a single Google Cloud storage bucket, super computing type performance inside Google Cloud, which from a scale perspective, whether it be network compute, these are things scale. If there's one thing that Google's really, really good at, it's really high scale. >> If your's companies can't afford to. >> Yeah, if you're that sensitive, avoid moving the data altogether. If you're that sensitive, have your recovery capability be in GCP. >> Yeah. Well, and again-- >> So that when you're recovering you're not having to move data. >> It's approximate to, yeah. That's the point. >> Recovering GCV, fail over your VMware cluster. >> Exactly. >> And use the cloud as a DR target. >> We got very little time but can you just give us a rundown of your portfolio in storage? >> Yeah. So storage, cloud storage for object storage got a bunch of regional options and classes of storage, like I mentioned, archive storage. Our first party offerings in the file area, our file store, basic enterprise and high scale, which is really for highly concurrent paralyzed applications. Persistent disk is our block storage offering. We also have a very high performance cash block storage offering and local SSDs. So that's the main kind of food groups of storage, block file object, increasingly doing a lot of work in data protection and in transfer and distributed cloud environments where the edge of the cloud is pushing outside the cloud regions themselves. But those are our products. Also, we spend a lot of time with our partners 'cause Google's really good at building and open sourcing and partnering at the same time hence with Veeam, obviously with file. We partner with NetApp and Dell and a bunch of folks. So there's a lot of partnerships we have that are important to us as well. >> Yeah. You know, we didn't get into Kubernetes, a great example of open source, Istio, Anthos, we didn't talk about the on-prem stuff. So Brian we'll have to have you back and chat about those things. >> I look forward to it. >> To quote my friend Matt baker, it's not a zero sum game out there and it's great to see Google pushing the technology. Thanks so much for coming on. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Our next guest will be up shortly. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at VeeamON 2022 and we'll be right back. (soft beats music)

(peaceful music) >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am delighted to welcome back to the cube, cube veteran, Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering from Google. Chen, welcome back to the cube. >> Hey Dave, super happy to be here. >> Absolutely delighted to have you here. Let's dive right into this conversation. There was a, there was a blog post this week, talking about Google Cloud putting a lot of weight behind this idea of principles for software development. What are those principles and why are they important? >> The three principles that we put in that blog post is open, easy, and transformative. And I think what's really important to recognize with the three principles that those are not new principles, not for Google Cloud, and definitely not for me. I joined Google about, a little bit over five years ago. Right when just Kubernetes started to lead Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes engine team. And we immediately recognized, the idea of open and the importance of flexibility and choice is a foundation to the idea of Kubernetes and portability workloads. But pretty early on, it was clear that it's not enough just to have portability and flexibility because it creates a lot of complexity. So how can we still have that without creating a trade-off or tension for our customers? So really making sure that everything is also easy. You know, and one of the things, I use, I like to say it's not just portability of workloads, but also portability of skills and you achieve that through consistent experience, right? A lot of automation. And when you bring all of those things together, what I love about Google Cloud is that, you know, I'm an infrastructure person. I've always been infrastructure person. And what excites me the most is seeing others take this innovation and, and really empowers developers to make amazing, or, you know, unique ideas, a reality. And that's really the foundation principles for Google Cloud. >> So how does that translate into, from a customer perspective? >> So I would just start with some customer examples, right? Starting from, their perspective. So when we think about open, this is actually part of the, our customers cloud strategy, right? You say cloud, you immediately think only about public cloud, but from our customer perspectives, right? They think about public clouds, right? Most of them have more than one cloud, but they also think about the private cloud, you know, IOT edge and having that openness and flexibility to choose where they can run their workload, is critical. It's critical for them. What I hear mostly is of course, innovation, managing costs, and also making sure that they are not locked out of innovation that happens for example, in any cloud or, or somewhere else. So that's a really a key consideration for our customers when they think about their cloud strategy. The second thing that open matters is that it's really hard to hire talent that is expert and has the right skills. And we see that by using a leveraging open source technologies, it actually makes it easier to our customers to hire the best talent there is in the industry. At one of the previous Google Cloud Next sessions, we had the Loblaw for example, which is the biggest grocery in Canada. And, you know, we were joking on stage, that even though at our hiring for grocery shop, they still can hire the best talent because they are using the best technologies out there in the industry. So that's one, if you think about the importance of easy, I would just call out Western Digital that we've just announced how they decided to standardize on Anthos for their cloud strategy, right? Both of course, Google cloud platform, but On Prem and the Edge. And for them what's important is that when they have all of their amazing developers and operators, how can they provide them reach experience, right. We don't want our developers or operators to spend time on things that can be automated or managed by others. So having a smooth, intuitive experience is really critical. And we we've been announcing some new stuff like a, a Google Cloud deploy and really integrating the entire experience, especially integration for managing, deploying directly to Google Kubernetes engine. And of course, one of my favorite is Jiechi autopilot, which really takes all the goodness with Kubernetes and automatically managing. And then transformative, this is like what I said before, unleashing innovation. And we see Wendy's, for example, right, they want to actually have AI machine learning at run time at their branches, which will allow them to create a new experience for their customers. So this is how we see customers really appreciate these three principles. >> So whenever the subject of Kubernetes and Google comes up, we have to talk Anthos. We're now into what year three of Anthos. How has adoption looked what's the latest on that front? >> That has been really great. We actually have been seeing a 500% growth on the end of Q2 of year over year. And it's important you know to mention that the journey with Anthos is not something new, but something that we have built with our customers when they really love the experience they have on GCP, but needed to innovate elsewhere and not just on Google Cloud. So we've been seeing that, you know, I mentioned the Western Digital, blah, blah, and Wendy's we also have customers like MLB, which is really exciting how they've changed their entire fans' experience using Anthos. And for them, again, it was both the easy part, right? How can I deal with that complexity of having compute and storage everywhere in every one of the stadiums, but also how can I use AI and machine learning, which is unique to Google Cloud in order to create unique experiences for the fans, at real time, of course. >> Yeah. Now you've, touched on this a bit already, if you had to, if you thought about someone reviewing Anthos, their Anthos experience, because we're in the midst of people adopting Anthos and becoming new to Anthos at this point. What does a delighted customers response sound like to you? What is that Yelp review that they would write? If they were telling people we, doubled down on Anthos and we are thrilled because, fill in the blank for a second. >> The first thing that comes to mind is that it works everywhere and the developer experience that comes with it, right? So we have, of course the platform and the infrastructure, but where Anthos really shine is that experience, on top of thinking about all developers and operators that can really work in every environment without paying too much attention to that. And just having that intuitive experience, right? If you go to the Google Cloud console, you see all your clusters, and now we're actually also going to add your VMs into that view, and you can use tools like Anthos config managers, and Anthos service mash to manage your security posture or the configuration in all of those environments. >> So we hear a lot about Multicloud. Multicloud is fantastic, but it sounds like, dealing with the complexity associated with Multicloud is something that Anthos definitely helps with. >> Yes, you know, Google is best with complexity at scale, we've been running containers and really large environments for many years. And some of those principles really, you know, have been fundamental to the way we've started with Kubernetes. So the idea of the declarative intent and automation is really critical in managing large environment and high complexity because in those environments, lots of things can change, but with the declarative approach, you don't have to anticipate everything that is going to change, but you need to know what is your desired state. And that's really one way that Anthos is leveraging the Kubernetes primitives and those ideas to manage different types of environments. In addition to that, it's actually really adding that layer that I talked about before, around the easy can I make sure that my tools, right, if it's, for example, a cloud hybrid build or cloud deploy or Anthos service manager, Anthos config manager, can I make sure that this UI, the CLI the API will be consistent in all of those environments? Can I view in one place, all of my clusters, all of my applications, and this is really where Anthos shines. >> So the cloud data foundation had a, had to get together at the same time as, Google Cloud Next. And there's been a lot of discussion around topics like security. I just like to get your thoughts on, you know, what what's at the forefront of your mind, working in engineering at Google, working in this world where people are deploying Anthos, working in a world where in a multi-cloud environment, you don't necessarily have control as vice president of engineering at Google over what's happening in these other clouds. So what are some of the things that are at the front of your mind is security one of them, what are your thoughts? >> Security is top of mine. Similar to all of our customers and definitely internally. And there are many things that we are very worried about or create some risks. You know, we've just started talking about the secure central supply chain, by building with open source, how can we make sure that everything is secure, right? Then we know what is the contribution that's from the software that we are delivering, how can we make sure that the security posture is portable, right? We talked about workloads portability. We talked about skills portability, and experience, but really I think the next phase for us as an industry is to think about security posture portability. Can I really apply the same policy everywhere and still make sure that I have the right controls in place, which will have to be different depending on the environment, and to make sure that that really is the case. So lots of work around that, and again, talking about the other things we talked about. We talked about open and flexibility, how can you make sure that it's easy? One of the areas that we are very excited about is really around binary authorization, for example. So when you use our tools like cloud build, cloud deploy, artifact, registry, you can get your container images automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and tools like onto service mesh, which allows you to actually manage your security posture, traffic management, who can access what without doing any changes to your applications. >> Fantastic stuff. As we, as we wrap up our time here, do you have any final thoughts on the direction of cloud where we are in the adoption curve? You know, by some estimates, something like 75% of IT is still happening on premises. There've been some announcements coming out of Cloud Next regarding the ability to run all sorts of Google goodness on premises. So we seem to all be acknowledging that we're going to be in a bit of a hybrid world, in addition to a multicloud world, moving forward. Do you want to place any bets on, on when we'll hit the 50, 50 mark or the 25% on premises, 75% cloud mark. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm not the best gambler to be honest, but I do have a thought about that. I think what's interesting is that customers started to talk, you know, few years back, it was, hey, I have my on-prem environment and I have the cloud. How can they, these two work together. And now what we see our customers talking, you know, they're on premises, their edge is part of their cloud strategy. It's not separated. And I think this is what we'll see more and more of, right? Regardless if this is your private cloud or public cloud, your edge, we would like to have a cloud like experience in that environment and consistency. And of course, we would love to leverage all the goodness of the cloud. If it's like machine learning, AI, and other capabilities, automation, everywhere we go. So I think this is the biggest change we're starting to see. And in addition to that, I think we will see, today everybody are already multicloud cloud, right? If it's recquisitions and just by cause of bottom up culture, you know, people choose different services. And I expect we'll see more strategic thinking about our customers multicloud strategy. Where do I deploy my workloads? What are the benefits? If it's latency, if it's specific services that are available, maybe cost, we'll see the customers becoming more intentional about that and this is really exciting. >> Well Chen, amazing insights. It's obvious why you're a cube veteran. It's obviously why we seek you out for your counsel and guidance on a variety of subjects. Thank you so much for spending time with us today in this cube conversation. With that I'd like to thank you for joining us. Until next time, I'm Dave Nicholson, thanks for joining (peaceful music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.

in the beginning there were mainframes a highly centralized secure command and control environment open systems brought a spate of innovation innovations that were powered by machines servers storage arrays networks that had to be configured deployed and managed by specialists virtualization that made that simpler but it was still a machine centric world the cloud devops and importantly containers created an inflection point in the industry where no longer do developers have to do a handoff to an infrastructure guru to deploy and often reconfigure systems which could cause other problems containers essentially codified the infrastructure to the point where developers could now be responsible for the full stack with consistency that allows stretching if you will of applications between on-prem to the cloud across clouds and out to the edge kubernetes in particular has enabled organizations to host applications and containers with automation so you can now deploy as many instances of your application as required and communicate between different services used by those applications in a consistent manner manner what this does is enables rolling updates security patches in a run anywhere environment that is changing how organizations build and manage their applications hello and welcome to this cube conversation and preview to kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2021 i'm pleased to welcome my friend and guest stu miniman director of market insights for cloud platforms at red hat stu man great to see you so good to see you dave thanks for having me you're very welcome so you heard my little spiel up front a little narrative what are the big trends that you're seeing that you're watching that you think people should know about they're important yeah well well dave i'm so glad you started out talking about the application because dave i mean you know my background your background very much too is started in infrastructure and for so long we talked about well let's dig different increments that we talk about the infrastructure but there was that huge divide between the people that run the infrastructure and the people that build and own the applications and when agile and devops came out we talked about not throwing things over the wall but when we look at containers and kubernetes really what it is is an application to build our application to modernize our application to run our application as you said they they have to be more that that right once go anywhere has been something we've wanted for a while and from a developer viewpoint i haven't wanted to think about the infrastructure so we want to enable that we want developers to be able to do their thing what we've done at red hat is try to have that consistency in every environment because kubernetes is only a single a very thin layer there's lots that needs to be done on top of that but one of the biggest trends is from an application standpoint the same thing that we've seen in other environments dave when you say okay well what apps did you have well you know it's great to say i have the cool micro service new stuff but what about older applications what about modernizing things can i lift things over can i have a broader spectrum of applications and yes that's where we are with kubernetes we don't just have stateless applications that are you know written in this new modern way we have a broad spectrum and there's another word that i really keyed off of in your intro talking about automation dave if you talk about scale and you talk about automation that's what container was built for if you look at what you know the the predecessor kubernetes was borg at google and if you think about just building things at scale and building things for with automation at their core that's what we've done and that's where this ecosystem is building towards so not saying everybody needs to be google but when you start talking about ai applications when you start talking about different ways to really have automation built into your environment this is where containers and kubernetes really shines because you know that's where we've really gone beyond human scale dave and we've gone to that machine scale so we need to make sure not just to remove humans to remove errors but to be able to have that agility and flexibility and scale which is what offers in this space so all the cool kids of course they want to develop in the cloud but i feel like for every app that's developed in the cloud there's like 10 on prem that are screaming to be modernized and we have a we have a chart on this but so what kind of applications are you seeing going in to containers and kubernetes yeah so so two two charts here for the survey we actually did for kubecon europe leading up to it the one on the left talks about the data is it stateless applications is it stateful applications well what do you know dave it's a mix of both of those right you'll remember dave in the virtualization days it took us about a decade to solve those storage and networking things how do we make sure that things really run at the virtual machine layer how do we have things like moving all over the place and still not break the connection that we had there that was a lot of hard work that we as an industry did well you know here we are six seven years into kubernetes we've solved a lot of those same issues so storage and networking work much better today in kubernetes environments than it did in the early days it started out oh stateless applications but if you look at the data on the second side what kind of applications are there the answer dave is yes you want your cool new modern databases absolutely ai and ml absolutely uh you know through kind of your isv you know more traditional applications the the answer is yes so customers are doing a whole lot of it when i'm meeting with customers one of the first questions we always have dave we've worked on silo busting for for many decades in this industry but if you talk to the infrastructure team and you ask them well what apps are you putting on there if they don't have a good answer the first thing we do is hey you really need to get the developers in the room you really need to understand this because if you stand up a platform just because kubernetes is cool and it's great it helps you build your resume you're not going to have success down the road you want to make sure they're involved up front understand what the requirements so you know kubernetes uh that one of the joke is you know containers and kubernetes add some magic and you know yippee you win it's like well there's a little bit more to that uh to actually have it work you mentioned it took decade plus to actually you know kind of work it out in the virtualization days i mean you remember the api you know stuff and we have the scars from their revenues right exactly but it's interesting when i look at this chart that you know because like you said it started off it's kind of stateless database yes all kinds of applications but database is number one and so you've got a lot of stateful applications enterprise apps security sensitive i mean everything's security sensitive today but hyper security sensitive so do you feel like that time frame relative to you know two decades ago is going to be compressed yes it seems like it's compressing quite rapidly absolutely the cncf always puts out a survey around the event as to where adoption is it's a little bit of a self-selecting for the community but containers and kubernetes broad adoption we've really not only crossed the chasm we're into the you know solid majority of of adoption here and yeah the the databases i mean dave you've covered things like the postgres uh world uh companies like crunchy data uh and some of these modern databases are really built for this type of environment and as you said they shouldn't have to think as much about okay i'm in a cloud or i'm in a different cloud this containerized platform that for applications can live in a lot of different places and that goes to kind of what we're seeing changing in the in the infrastructure world uh over the last couple years i'm glad to mention that a database i was interviewing josh uh at the postgres event and he was explaining to me how far kubernetes has actually come and and how much you know more trustworthy it is today still still some gaps but much different than even two or three years ago yeah i guess one of the highlights interesting at the kubecon europe uh there was the general availability of both the pipelines project and the get ops project it was it's argo cd is the project for for get ops and when that went ga for red hat we actually have that built into openshift at ga and not only was it ready to go we actually had a few customers that were ready to say hey we're using this and we're using the production so we had xa insurance one of the largest payers in the globe and the largest bank in turkey uh were two of the ones that we had saying hey we're using this for the audience if you're not familiar with git ops it's everything we use github as the repository of records so that this is kind of if you think about the old days we had the gold cd or the gold server well we do that for our entire stack that whole infrastructure's code that we've been talking about so many years but it will manage that for us so i patch it at the github level and it will enforce what i have in my environment so if somebody oh wait let me make a change no it's constantly validating things at github so it keeps it rather regimented so we've had uh as i mentioned a couple of customers we've seen a lot of interest in the public sector space because of course dave they're very concerned around security and patching and access and we want to keep that least access necessary so if we can keep that at the github level that's one of the things that will help your environment it really ties into the whole kind of git ops ai ops modern environment so it really ties all of it together as to kind of the the culture of the application and the infrastructure so your files your config files your policies same api same console that is how you get the scale yeah absolutely it's we we don't want the people to have to manage that as much you can let them focus on where they're going to add value to the business so let's talk about cloud cloud the definition of cloud is changing the cloud is expanding it's going on-prem there's hybrid connections to to a cloud or multiple clouds across clouds now as seems to be becoming more real we could talk about that and then maybe eventually out to the edge they're all real in their own right but how much is actually being connected together is something that i'm interested in but what are you seeing there what role is kubernetes playing yeah so first you talked about where applications live the latest data i've seen from kind of the the industry watchers is what are we dave 20 25 of applications are in the cloud that means there's a lot still in the data center if i look at open shift customers yes do we have a lot of them in the data center but then they are also using the public cloud so we have deep partnerships with amazon and azure to do public services in the cloud and our value is we give consistency across all of those environments so are using data center yes most customers still have data center do you have one or more clouds absolutely you know i used to love the andy jassy line um you know multi-cloud doesn't mean that you spread evenly across all the clouds most customers i talk to they have a primary provider that they partner with but things change over time we've seen plenty of customers go two or three years in and say well i have a strategic initiative sometimes they make an acquisition and they'll do another cloud or you know there's lots of factors why i might be doing more than one cloud there's certain industries where basically you have to have relationships with multiple vendors or there's there's regulations that you need to be concerned about so the answer is yes what we've been talking about more than a decade at red hat is open hybrid cloud and what does that mean today you might have not have planned it out but you're hybrid today and what are you going to be in the next decade you're going to be even more hybrid so edge if we talk about it everyone is talking about one of the biggest trends here is how does kubernetes go out to the edge even more that consistency message that i talked about where does openshift live openshift lives anywhere that red hat enterprise linux lives so rel am i going to have linux out of these small environments without a lot of resources what else are you going to have other than linux that's going to be the foundation of what you have so if i can have management and consistency that push out to all of those environments and we've been building out a portfolio something that you'll see us talking about more at kubecon in la is single node openshift so this is a really small footprint openshift but still have the consistency to work across all these environments and we've had different footprints basically to be able to do edge and remote offices whether you're talking from a service provider out to a full customer premise data center but there's there's a lot going on in the edge space we actually have we already have a public use case with verizon who's doing some of the ai use cases i'm sure you can picture with verizon being such a large telco the touch points that they have not only at the service provider but to their customer environments and openshift is the platform for enabling that innovation i mean if i had a big application portfolio on-prem you know legacy company with you know 100-year history obviously i'm going to be doing some stuff in the cloud i would be building some kind of abstraction layer that would could obviously modernize my on-premise state i would want to i would probably start with amazon i'd want to take advantage of aws cloud native tooling but i would absolutely be doing the same thing in azure and google and i would want to build my own cloud right and and and service my customers or or my company have people log into that cloud hide the underlying complexity of the technology and just simplify everything up level it and build a stack around that and probably build it on on openshift why not and of course kubernetes but there are alternatives there's there's eks anywhere for example which presumably is a competitor what do you how is that impacting the marketplace yeah so so dave as you said everybody is kind of extending beyond where they live so microsoft azure has their arc offering google has anthos and amazon was the last one i mean dave you'll remember this when we talked about hybrid and multi-cloud for a bunch of years it was like amazon doesn't talk about hybrid or multi-cloud and you know back when i sat on the analyst side i was like well you can't talk about hybrid and multi-cloud without talking about amazon so they've now uh eks anywhere something they announced back at re invent it just went generally available recently and so they have a distribution of kubernetes that you can use on your own so you could have completely disconnected in your data center running only on vmware is the only way that they support it today and they have in beta there's something called an eks connector so if you want it to be managed from the cloud and have someone more of that consistency they have the way to do that they've had eks which is their kubernetes service in amazon for a bunch of years but as a friend of the program corey quinn says there's actually 17 different ways to run containers in amazon today that's supported by amazon and you laugh at it but you know dave it's it's no different you know remember the storage world okay how many different storage products did emc have do you know how many compute and storage products amazon have they have a lot growing so one of those offerings that they have natively in the console is red hat openshift service for aws so is eksd a competitor well if you're an amazon customer and you want everything amazon and you want to use their environment in a hybrid environment yes you can do that part of the strategy for amazon is outpost we've got on our roadmap to be able to support openshift on outposts so you know we look at our our positioning is we are much more than kubernetes if you talk about the stack of tooling that we build on top of it we've done a real lot to make sure that developers have the tooling that they need from an amazon environment it's just the kubernetes piece it's a in the cloud it's a managed control plane in your own data center it's here's a kubernetes distribution good luck with it if you want monitoring and observability if you want more security if you want all these other pieces you need to build them on top of that as opposed to openshift gives you a full application development platform you know forrester wave we were you know far and away the top and to the right on on that uh spectrum with the leading position for both developers and operators so you know great to see amazon you know i i i hate to say they're like validating something that we do but look everybody's going to do it's true this is true i know that's the marketing line but and and i hate to do the the marketing line but um it's you will you see everyone rolls out their pieces and you say what is the game that they are playing it's amazon wants you to consume as much of their services as you can from a red hat standpoint it's well everywhere that rel can go we can go so openshift can live a lot of places we are going to give you the best experience in your data center in amazon in azure in google in your hosted in the edge we're going to work in all of those environments and we've got years of experience with thousands of production employments like in the data center eks anywhere sitting on top of vsphere as far as i know we have at red hat the most production kubernetes deployments on vmware are openshift actually at vmworld i'll be talking about i'm i'm on a panel talking about openshift on vsphere with vmware so long deep partnership that we've had there no one can speak to the breadth and depth of uh what we've done there uh what's the little line amazon always says there's no compression algorithm for experience well i like it okay but that's why i like your edge strategy because i've said many times the edge is going to be won by developers it's not going to be won by taking a you know x86 box throwing it over the fence and saying okay we got edge and i think you know that's tongue-in-cheek i think that the traditional enterprise hardware vendors are understanding that but they're not in a great position with developers you know maybe cisco a little bit with devnet but generally speaking you know vmware obviously uh it always has been struggling the edge is you know the challenge with the edge is you always have to look through it as to what your perspective is so we have a long and deep relationship with a lot of the telecommunications providers uh people will disparage openstack some but that's actually the solutions that we've sold the most into are network function virtualization for the telco and a lot of them have followed what they worked with us on openstack and continued that into openshift and verizon being one of those proof points you've seen my etr data and i tell you openstack keeps popping up and when you dig into it it's oh that's telco there may not be maybe there's not a region there and it's telcos developing their own cloud essentially and you know they're monetizing it so let's talk about um a cncf the ecosystem uh it's we have another slide on this if you guys wouldn't mind bringing it up i mean it's a complicated matter right you got here's the picture i mean it's like you can't read it because there's just so many people that wants to stop this from becoming you know kind of openstack too yeah that's a great question so chris wright our cto i thought really boiled it down really well one of the big problems with openstack is we were building a complete stack so when they said oh there's all these projects it's like okay well we're going to create a big tent and under that big tent you have to have all of these pieces and they all need to work together and while they were modular projects i needed to have that full stack validated and managing and maintaining that was a nightmare what is the cncf landscape it is you know what doesn't hundred more projects that are independent of what they had so yes kubernetes is the one that gets the most attention but takes something like service mesh service mesh has been around for a few years it's hot we're still early on the adoption trend service mesh works with kubernetes but it isn't limited to kubernetes it's one of those venn diagram it works with it but you can also work with my virtual environment it works in other places and that's true of a lot of these projects often they are complementary to kubernetes but i can adopt them standalone so the challenge is it is that paradox of choice when you go out there there are some people that want to go to the grocery store and buy all of their various pieces and put it all together well other people will come to us and say hey i just want my developers to get working i don't want them to spend all their time fighting over what they had and at red hat we say great we're going to have an opinionated platform and if you come down later and say oh there's a piece of it i don't want to use or i have some other tool i can have its batters are included they're optional and they're swappable so that's what's nice in this developer environment so you know we also work with you know companies like hashicorp a lot of our customers use vault for their secrets uh you know git lab is is another pure var in this industry that have a lot of developer tools they're not a kubernetes provider they usually sit higher up in the stack than we do so there's a lot of players there's a lot of room for activity and innovation yes we've seen a cambrian explosion of projects there and there has been some consolidation that's part of the job of the cncf is in the observability world they took uh i can't remember there were two projects that were kind of similar and they got them in a room and got them to agree to put them into a single project and put those together so we do see some consolidation over time but there's still room for a lot of growth standards are good but so is optionality i think is your point there so the event is october 11th to the 15th it's actually an in-person event you're planning on being there so i i am it's it's hybrid i know a lot of people will be online the other thing i'd point out there are a lot of day zero events so these are really awesome there's a git ops day there's security day there's so many different pieces i'll actually be for the day zero i'll be emceeing the openshift commons where we get a bunch of end users to just tell their stories projects they're working on deployments that they have have some good partner ecosystem discussion there it's usually a lot of fun we hope a bunch of people come to those in purses and then you know the day itself uh the the three days of the show itself are always hopping and lots of learning to be done uh whether you're there in person or online fantastic so i'm glad you pointed out it is a hybrid event that's kind of the nature of these things these days and i think we'll be for for some time i think potentially indefinitely i think people are realizing hey you know what as much of a pain in the neck as virtual events are we can reach a lot more people and it's a good on-demand experience so have at it stu thanks so much for for coming into the cube studios we miss you glad to see you're thriving and uh good luck at the show and uh we'll see you around the block thanks dave i know i'll be seeing john on the cube there too absolutely okay thanks for watching everybody this is dave vellante we'll see you next time you

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, this is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually, this is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante and DR is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCUBE for the fourth time now at the anchor desk, coming back, we love you. >> Well, it's been a busy day, it's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> John: Feeling good? >> Oh my God. >> You made the call. >> I've made the call. >> You did on your podcast what, months ago. >> Yeah, right? >> You made the call. >> Made the call. >> You're on the right side of history. >> Right, and people were like, it's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled, blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> Nope, I was just crazy, I'm okay with that, right? >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like I'm forward looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June and we're like, I think this is going to be the first event back. >> You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is cause we've been covering cloud we're cloud bigots, we love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here in theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals like Alfonzo, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive, we had their industry leader and the telecom, Microsoft and the Silicon all are validating, and it's like, surround sound to what you're saying here, and it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying it's coming. I called 2021, the year of Public Cloud and Telco. It helped that Erickson bailed. So thank you, Erickson people. >> It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> It was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth, I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go, let's start marching, and it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break, cause he had a hangover and, Cal Ripkin. >> Cal Ripkin? >> Yeah, what was that guy's name? >> Did that really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and uh- >> New guy stepped in. >> Yeah, and so well, not Cal Ripkin. >> No, no, so before, you want to know, who was it, Lou Gehrig? >> Lou Gehrig, yeah, Lou Gehrig. >> Right, so, Lou Gehrig was nobody, and we can't remember the guy's name, nobody knows the guy's name, what was that guy's name? Nobody knows, oh, there's Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. He sat out and Lou Gehrig replaced him and never hear of him again. >> Danielle: Love it, I'll take that. >> Never, never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Erickson did, they just okay, take a break. >> Yeah, but I mean, it's been great again. I had a great day yesterday, my keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth, we had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic and it was acoustic and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days, what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that's big and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. >> The post isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation, and I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses in my interview with Portal One in particular really brought it into focus for me, anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy, and I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, come on in, we want to open up. We want to innovate, to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three Telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys, whereas, maybe China's maybe on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner, and it's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenge or CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too, they move a little bit slow, and maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer, maybe you'll be able to transform and, and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud already for every Telco in every corner of the world, no. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with- there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges, you know, in some cases their data regulations and issues, right? And you can't right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers that are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, you know, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happened, your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it, and those points converge and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort and (claps) yeah. >> Dave: You know what's an interesting trend, DR and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this, is you just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in, in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series breaking analysis and the data Openstack was popping up. Like where does OpenStack come from, well, guess what, when you cut the data, it was Telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. >> It's a gap filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap filler, it's a bandaid. >> But I think this is where, like. outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right? They're not providing the staff, they're doing Anthos. So you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into their services. But I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler, not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud. And I'm like why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release, where they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack, and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> John: Yeah, one of the things that's come up on here in the interviews, in theCUBE and here, the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned this regulation reasons, and or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable, so I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outpost and wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge. >> Okay, that's a low latency, again, low-hanging fruit applications, real buys, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it. >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right, and you know, there's, there is a geopolitical US thing, I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you're still, you still have your Huawei kit installed. And there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost, and it's really hard to switch off of, so give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it, you're just making excuses, you're just afraid. What are you afraid of, the HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> Yeah, I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS, she's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector for this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a guess a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she's, did the CIA deal, the DOD, and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships, So it's not like just governments, you mentioned government and national security, and these things, you started to see the ecosystem not, not just be about companies, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this, kind of this, melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Danielle: Yeah, I mean. I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the Telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global Telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, right? You can say Netflix, UK. Right, and so can we have a global Telco, right. That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud start to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level Telco. And I can, I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> Dave: You're done, we're going to see it start this decade, it's already starting. We're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Yeah, it's crazy. >> I've got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you get so much experience, it's great to have you on theCUBE and chat about, riff about these things, but, the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up, and I think there's no doubt that the Telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access they need to access. >> Yeah. >> So, and you've got the edge, now applications are now running on it, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> Danielle: What we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean? >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do, right? And so, yeah I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that, that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do know when someone is going to be disrupted What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind, you look at the Telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced like? >> You know what they're ostriches, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it, la la la, I don't want to, I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this, and it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't, like, turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start, you take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones, pick some old ones that no one likes, and move that to the public cloud, play with it. Right, I'm not talking about moving a whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn, you have no, I mean, very little talent in the Telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring, start doing it, and you're going to start to learn about the compensation, and I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google, versus a Telco. Do you want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> Dave: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right, right? like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave was who at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry, and he was describing it, it was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain, it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? >> Danielle: Yeah yeah. >> And the Telco's actually the opposite, so that, you know, when, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, nah, let them have it, that's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, uh, when they got up to the high end. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The Telcos are the opposite. They're like, the, you know, in the, in the conductivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the, over the top players, right. >> It's being eaten away, and I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors, that's where the battle is, right? >> John: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards, you're there by yourself, like "Game of Thrones" and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> John: I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know, I was just watching. Cause I have a podcast, I have a podcast called "Telco In 20" and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes, I personally reviewed them, I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out, and I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment, it was really fun to do, but there's, I don't know if you guys are "Game of Thrones" fans. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> Right, but there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right. I'm on a quest. >> Dave: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slaves, it starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean, this to me. >> Easy. >> It definitely have made, made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud, this is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this going to be a cloud show? That's just Cloud City, it's a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google Azure, Ecosystem, startups, thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing why aren't we doing this? >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary, and how did, why do you think this will work, I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary, and like, these are the three best tech companies in the world, like, are, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And that we see 2022, you got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again, that was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th. Right, we're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. >> With Telco, I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype, in the early days, right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. It was just, plug into the internet. >> Danielle: It was just Skype, it was just WhatsApp. >> Well this is a great location, if you can get a shot guys of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching check out the scene here, It's winding down, a lot of people having happy hour. Now this is a social construct here at Cloud City, not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage, with Adam and the studio and the team, this is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships, the best of the best are here, they make the trek. So there's been a successful formula. Of course theCUBE is in the middle of all the action, which we love, we're psyched to be back. I want to thank you personally, while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys, and the crew, the crew has been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities, it's, our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's in Bristol, right? We're here, this was an experiment, we talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there, do the show but also theCUBE. >> You are a visionary, you said made for TV hybrid event with your team, produce television shows, theCUBE, we're digital, we love you guys, great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here, the show might end, they might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue, the content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, we were looking forward to it and- >> I'm super glad, super glad we did this. >> Awesome, well, any final moments that you would like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you, share something that people might not know, or a favorite moment? >> I think, I don't know that people know, we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture and they're 3d printing, coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on, everyone's happy and psyched. >> John: Well the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud, It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> You're making a great big wave, you're on the right side, we believe, of history, public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> I'm, like I said, in my keynote, it's go time let's do it. >> Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> After Togi's a hundred million dollar investment, you're the CEO of Togi that, let's follow that progress, and of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on with you. >> Thank you guys, it was super fun. >> This is theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante, we're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks, the team here. >> Woo! (audience applauding) >> I want to thank the team, everyone here, Adam is great, Chloe. >> Great working with you guys. >> Awesome, and what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE, here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE, stay tuned for tomorrow more action on the main stage, here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, we're back here in theCube. This is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually. This is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCube is here. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and D. R. is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCube for fourth time. now at the anchor desk, coming back. >> I don't know. It's been a busy day. It's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> Dave: Feeling good? >> Oh, my god. >> You made the call. >> I made the call. You finished your podcast, what months ago? >> Yeah. >> Made the call. >> Made the call. You're on the right side of history. >> Right? And people were like, "It's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled." Blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> And I'm like, nope. She's crazy. I'm okay with that. Right? But I'm like... >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like, I'm forward-looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June, and we're like, "I think this is going to be the first event back. We're going to be able to do it." >> You know, the crazy one's commercial that Apple ran, probably one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is, 'cause we've been covering cloud. We're cloud bigots. We love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here on theCube and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the Telecom Verticals like Alf, Alfonzo. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We had Google's top networking executive. We had their industry leader in the telecom, Microsoft, and the Silicon. All are validating, and it's like surround sound to what you're saying here. And it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying that it's coming. I called 2021, the year of public cloud and Telco. It helped that Ericcson bailed. So thank you, Ericcson people. >> Dave: It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> John: It really was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth. I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go. Let's start marching. And it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break 'cause he had a hangover and Cal Ripken. >> Cal Ripken, right, yeah, yeah. What was that guy's name? >> Did it really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and... >> The new guy stepped in? >> Yeah, and so we'll go to Cal Ripken. >> No, no, so before it was it? Lou Gehrig. >> Lou Gehrig, yeah. >> Right, so Lou Gehrig was nobody. And we can't remember the guy's name. Nobody knows the guy's name. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> What was that guy's name? Nobody knows. Oh, 'cause Lou Garrett, he got hurt. >> Danielle: And Lou Gehrig stepped in. >> He sat out, and Lou Gehrig replaced him. >> Danielle: Love it. >> And never heard of him again. >> Danielle: I'll take that. >> Never missed a game. Never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Ericcson did. They just okay, take a break and... >> But I mean, it's been great. Again, I had a great day yesterday. My keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth. We had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic, and it was acoustic, and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that is, that's big, and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, that's awesome. >> The post-isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation. And I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses. And my interview with Portaone, in particular, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> really brought it into focus for me, anyway. I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy. And I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, "Come on in. We want to open up." >> Danielle: Yeah. >> "We want to innovate." And to me that's to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys. Whereas, you know, China, may be using the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner. It's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenger CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too. They move a little bit slow. And maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer. Maybe it will be able to transform and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know, I'm playing the long game here, right? >> Dave: Yeah. >> Is public cloud ready for every telco in every corner of the world? No. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with, there are challenges, and I acknowledge there are challenges. You know, in some cases there are data regulations and issues, right? And you can't, right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happens. Your data regulations are eased or you a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it. And those points converge, and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort. And, yeah. >> You know what's an interesting trend, D. R., John? That is maybe a harbinger to this. You just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series "Breaking Analysis," and the data, OpenStack was popping up. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Like where does OpenStack come from? Well, guess what. When you cut the data, it was telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscaler. >> Where it didn't exist, yeah. >> So it's a-- >> Gap-filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap-filler. It's a Band-aid. >> But I think this is where like Outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting Outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right. They're not providing the staff. They're doing Anthos, so you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into those services. But I was talking to a CE, a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, "We have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler." Not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, "I'm going to build my own public cloud." And I'm like, "Why would you do that when you can just use Outposts?" And then when your data regulations release or there's a, they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> Yeah, and one of the things that's come up here on the interviews and theCube and here, the show, is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world. You mentioned this regulation reasons and/or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever. That's the corner case. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. >> Danielle: Yep. >> And that reality, I don't think, is debatable. So I find it. I've got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people steering 'ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned Outpost, and Wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon Cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge, yeah. >> Okay, that's a low latency again, low-hanging fruit applications, robotics, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. >> Yeah. >> Why aren't people getting it? >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought, and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world. Right? And you know, there is a geopolitical US thing. I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you still have your Huawei kit installed, and there's concerns with that, too. So, and you picked it because of cost. And it's really hard to switch off of. >> John: Yeah. >> So give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it. You're just making excuses. You're just afraid. What are you afraid of? The HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS. She's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader. In public sector there's been this weird little pocket of AWS where it's, I guess, a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she just did the CIA deal. The DOD and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships. So it's not like just governments. You mentioned government and national security and these things. You start to see the ecosystem, not, not just be about companies, government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecomm being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this kind melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix. Right? You didn't say Netflix, UK, right? And so can we have a global telco, right? That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud starts to enable that idea. Right? Elon Musk is going to get Mars. >> Dave: Yep. >> John: Yeah. >> You need a planetary level telco, and I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> You're done. We're going to see it start this decade. It's already starting. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But we're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Right, yeah. >> I got to ask you. You're a student of the industry and you got so much experience. It's great to have you on theCube and chat about, riff about, these things, but the the classic "Who's ready for disruption?" question comes up. And I think there's no doubt that the telcos, as an industry, has been slow moving, and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access. They need to access. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So and you've got the Edge. Now applications are now running on a, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> That's fast, whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> What would we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones? I mean. >> Dave: We would have been miserable. >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago. Those guys did not have mobile phones, and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do? Right? And so, yeah, I think, I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do you know when someone is going to be disrupted? What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind? You look at the telco landscape, what is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced look like? >> Know what? They're ostriches. Ostriches, how do you say that word right? They stick their head in the sand. Like they don't want to talk about it. La, la, la, I don't want to. I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this. And it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't like turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start. You take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones. Pick some old ones that no one likes. Move that to the public cloud. Play with it, right? I'm not talking about moving your whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn. You have no, I mean, very little talent in the telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring. Start doing it. And you're going to start to learn about the compensation. And I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, and they can bear AWS and Google versus a telco. You want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> John: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right? Right? And so you need to start. Like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new, valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave is we were at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry and he was describing it. It was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain. It started with rebar, like the lowest end. Right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> And the telco's actually the opposite. So, you know, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, "Nah, let them have it." >> Danielle: Let it go. >> "That's the low margin stuff." And then eventually when they got up to the high end, they all got killed. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The telcos are the opposite. They're like, you know, in the connectivity, and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the over-the-top players, right? >> It's being eaten away. And I'm like, "What is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors?" That's where the battle is, right? >> Dave: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards. You're there by yourself, the Game of Thrones, and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> I need a dragon. I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding on the dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know. I was just watching. 'Cause I have a podcast. I have a podcast called "Telco in 20," and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes. I personally review them. I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out. And I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment. It was really fun to do. But there's, I don't know if you guys are Game of Thrones fans. >> Dave: Oh, yeah. >> John: For sure. >> Right? But there's a great moment when Daenerys guts her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army. Right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden, the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right? I'm on a quest. >> John: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire. The unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slays and starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City Army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean to me... >> Easy. >> I definitely have made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud. This is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this be, going to be a cloud show? You know it's just Cloud City is a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google, Azure, Ecosystem, startups thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing, "Why aren't we doing this?" >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary. And how did, why do you think this will work? I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary? And like, these are the three best tech companies in the world. Like, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And do we see 2022, you get to start planning this the minute we get back. Right? >> John: Yeah. >> Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again. That was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th, right? We're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. (John and Dave talking at the same time) >> I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype in the early days? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> It was just plug into the internet, right? >> Danielle: It was just Skype. It was just WhatsApp. >> Well, this great location, and if you can get a shot, guys, of the people behind us. I don't know if you can. If you're watching, check out the scene here. It's winding down. A lot of people having happy hour now. This is a social construct here at Cloud City. Not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage with Adam and the studio and the team. This is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships. The best of the best are here. They make the trek, so there's been a successful formula. Of course theCube is in the middle of all the action, which we love. We're excited to be back. I want to thank you personally while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys and the crew. The crew has been amazing turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities. It's our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's at Bristol, right? We're here. This was an experiment. We talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCube there and do the show, but also theCube. >> You are a visionary. And you said, made for TV hybrid event with your team, reduced television shows, theCube. We're digital. We love you guys. Great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here. The show might end. They might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue. The content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So. >> We are looking forward to it and. >> Yeah, super-glad, super-glad we did this. >> Awesome. Well, any final moments that you would like to share? And the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you. Share something that people might not know or a favorite moment. >> I think, I mean I don't know that people know we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture, and there are three 3D printing coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super-thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona, and we're happy to be together even if it is with masks. It's hard to do business with masks on. Everyone's happy and psyched. >> The one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big waves. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud. It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> Okay, you're making a great big wave. You're on the right side, we believe, of history. Public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> And like I said, in my keynote, it's go time. Let's do it. >> Okay, thank you so much for all your tension and mission behind the cloud and the success of... >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> Ketogi's hundred million dollar investment. Be the CEO of Togi as we follow that progress. And of course, Telco D. R. Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you, guys. It was super-fun. Thank you so much. >> This is theCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks the team here. (Danielle clapping and cheering) I want to thank the team, everyone here. Adam is great. Chloe, great working with you guys. Awesome. And what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCube here on the last day, Wednesday, of theCube. Stay tuned for tomorrow, more action on the main stage here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it, we're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have Amol Phadke who's the Managing Director, Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring him in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is CLOUD CITY. We are in the CLOUD CITY. Amol, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC 21. >> Oh we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert and you're the only thing standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff so. >> A lot of people watching. >> Thanks for coming on. Seriously you guys got some big news first Ericsson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with anthesis as well as open O-ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge testament to the industry. Obviously Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you're no stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Ericsson news is so important. Let's start with the Ericsson announcement. >> Sure, so, John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Ericsson for the last few months, the partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. You in fact saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy. Because you will see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real team at the moment using Google Clouds solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos and Ericsson's cutting Edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can onboard this together at the CSPs, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point 1. Speed and agility is key John. But then point 2, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and so on. Which we are already starting to launch together with Ericsson. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuous wave of Cloud Native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really try and create this Cloud Native Application Suite for 5G over time. >> Talk about the innovations around Cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation and you know, I can be a little bit over the top and say, so the Telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, Cloud Native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that, encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replace, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the Telco's. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >> Spot on, John, spot on. We, we believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture, that we are trying to do, that's where the Cloud Native be really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with the operators at Telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to go create that again and again for every deployment. As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience everywhere. >> Yeah, John and I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the Edge. You're clearly doing that with your Distributor Cloud, building out a Telco Cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving and a lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about Edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >> Sure, so I think David first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the Edge, right? So we, we have realized that (connection disruption) is a very, very data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned, is definitely something that we can offload to the Edge? Why is that so important? In the pandemic era think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously, needing zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products and manufacturing. That's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the Edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google Cloud and Telecom Italia type of carrier, gives you that Edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run the AI influencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >> Great, thank you for that and now the other piece of the announcement of course is the open, Open RAN. We've been talking about that all week. And you know, you well remember when Cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course, now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the Telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually are pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component? Maybe first talk about the Open RAN piece, why that's important and how security fits? >> Sure, so first of all, Open RAN is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time. In the radio layer, we believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and desegregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spent globally is on radio across the entire infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution, that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware, software with open interfaces, is an extremely important cost dimension too. And on the revenue side, the things is that, the reason we got so excited with Open RAN was, you can now run a lot of API's on the radio net itself. That then suddenly brings a whole developer community on the radio layer. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level, from the cell tower. And so that really is what is driving us towards this Open RAN type announcement. >> John: Amol, we've only got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on Open Source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDr. She's a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone, 14 years ago was launched, okay. And you think about Open, and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G, and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure. Everyone wins, 'cause everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry, and Open Source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? >> Absolutely John and the parallel analogy that you raised is spot on. We believe in the Telco world Anthos multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation. Whether it's a radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere. That really allows you that whole CICD SRE type development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start, that would be for systems to come on. >> John: That's great stuff. And I was, just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amol, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Ran Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on theCUBE featured segments. So, watch that interview. >> Thank you John. Glad to be here. >> Thanks Amol. Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google, obviously player, he's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology to get the chops Dave, and we're going to now, bring on Danielle Royston, she's here, I want to bring her up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on, behind us, Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in CLOUD CITY. Dave, Bon Jovi is right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you have a mic. Great to see you. >> Oh, it's great to be here, awesome. >> We are going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. >> I know we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in CLOUD CITY. >> And Bon Jovi by the way. >> Day two, I mean really starting to get packed. >> And I mean, everyone's coming in, the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening. >> A lot of buzz about CLOUD CITY out there in the hallway. >> Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited >> Awesome. >> with how it's going, so yeah. >> Well, this is awesome, while we got you here, we want to put you to work being theCUBE analyst for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, so hard news Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually former Ericsson booth. They're not even here, it's now the TelcoDR booth. But that's and then Open RAN again, Open Source. You got 5G, you got Open Source all happening. What's your take on this, as you're seeing this? >> Yeah, I think, you know, there's two big, and I talked about in my keynote this morning, there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it--MWC 21 I certainly wanted to make it about the Public Cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is Open RAN, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. >> I loved your keynote, we were here live Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was going to do some research and getting some breaking stories. But you are on stage and, and we were talking, Chloe's like, these there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, that the money's in the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you onstage said there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You've got operators and builders trying to figure out, it feels like Dev Ops is coming in here. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's the, what do you? >> Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the Public Cloud, to double your ARPU without massive CapEx expenditure. And I think the CSPs has always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network, I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our ARPU, why not? We should do that absolutely. >> You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave. Got to ride the wave or become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the Telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the Edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the Edge and that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. But, obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have, they're going to have to embrace Cloud Native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. >> Well, I think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically they haven't had this opportunity. Historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented, it's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. And this might be the, the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. >> I think that's an important point because you've got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets, right? Those guys are going to be around. >> You think, I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. And like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. >> Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you've got to move fast. >> Yeah. >> That's the other piece of it. >> Yeah. >> You got to change your business model. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, you got to be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are, but now they're looking at other options. >> That is a great example, John. It really is, because there's a company that can move fast, but the same time they compete, but the same time they add incremental value. >> And so here you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering, Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well containers do, will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building CapEx and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle, love to get your thoughts on this, because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, >> Yeah. >> Then you can, don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or, what's your thought, I mean. >> Yeah, I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco, right. There, I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit and start to focus, and we heard Amol talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right, yeah. >> Well, you've talking about that many times that you exhibit, you're right. If the conversation has been, has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's got to be going to be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, ah great. >> Yeah. >> Tick that box. Right, it's those value added services that you're talking about. And it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in, and creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper. >> Well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right? We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did it? >> Facebook does? >> Right, Facebook. But you know who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother even, your Telco. >> Yeah. >> You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really great experience. >> And by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Totogi and the investment hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing and the there's a good, there's a whole new team, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I want to hold that, we're going to meet tomorrow. I want to, I want to, leave that here. >> Stay in the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That, it's that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now trillion dollar valuations. >> Yeah. >> It's all about the data and the Telco's have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >> I think there's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise, siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them, and you certainly do it without, and we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight , it's useless, right? And so to Totogi, we announced the launch of Totogi, I'll get a little to Totogi plug in there, right. Totogi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve it would have been solved already. But I think the key is leveraging the Public Cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue, right. And you know, we've heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, Telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? >> Yeah. >> Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they're happy to give you more money. >> Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. But one thing I will say, this Mobile World Congress, is that we've been having a lot of fun here in CLOUD CITY. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You have a spring to your step. CLOUD CITY is beautiful, spectacular here. >> Yeah. >> Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. >> Well number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered in and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes the attendance is reduced. You know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth. We're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the Public Cloud. >> Yeah, the pandemic helped. >> I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's Awesome. >> Do you think that, do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line, struggled and then winners. >> Yeah. >> Big time tale wind, booming. Obviously the Zooms of the world. Telco's did well. They were up and running, business was good. You think they might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >> Yeah, I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation. We're digital Telco, we're digitally enabled. And I think the pandemic really tested this, right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store, in person, to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of Telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver sims, and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. >> Agile. >> Right, agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big wake up call. >> Telemedicine booming. >> So If you were in a digital business during the pandemic. In general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a Telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh-oh, if we don't move. >> I mean, I am not kidding right. As an ex-CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, >> Facts. >> Right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and 2. And I'm like, how are you doing business, like that? That's like the dark ages. >> Yeah, this is where the crypto guys got it right, with know your customer. >> Yeah, right. >> 'Cause they have the data. >> Well, they had to, they had to. >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of things that's going wrong on crypto, we don't want to, we could do a whole show on that. But Danielle great to have you drop by, obviously Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy, Patriot's fan. >> Yeah. >> Dave, we love him. >> Fantastic. >> Well, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging like the way things have been done in Telco. Kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl, oh, so. >> Well we are punk rock. They're rock and roll. >> Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten The Clash, right. Black Flag, right. I'm a little bit older than you. >> Bon Jovi's good. >> Right, we'll go with Bon Jovi. >> We like both of them. >> Accessible, right. >> Once's more conservative rock and roll still edgy. >> Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met him before. And so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk, so yeah. >> Yeah, he's going to be inspiration he'll talk space, SpaceX, >> Oh yeah. >> And possibly Starlink. >> Talking about the edge. >> Starlink, right. >> Starlink. >> I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites and I think that's really interesting for rural. For rural right in Telco, right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower, I think. I mean, that's an interesting idea right there, yeah. >> It's exciting, he's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming in and saying why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. >> Yeah. >> I think eventually the generation shifts in time. >> It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it, yeah. >> Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >> Awesome team. >> I'm excited to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is, so thank you so much, yeah. >> TheCUBE, theCUBE's rocking inside the CLOUD CITY. The streets of the CLOUD CITY are hustling and booming. >> Packed. >> Packed in here. All stuff, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Yep, thanks so much. >> Bon Jovi is here, we got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? >> Yeah, there it is. >> There it is, yeah. >> Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE" stage here in cloud city, TelcoDr, Telco digital revolution. We had a chance to talk to Rob Haberman, CTO of Nokia software. Great interview as part of our hybrid program here, but we're still on the floor onsite. Let's go listen to my great interview with Ron and what he had to say about the power of the cloud. (upbeat digital music) And welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. It's an in-person and hybrid event and we're here in Palo Alto through remote interview as part of the hybrid, getting as much content as possible, is a great guest Ron Haberman, who is the CTO of Nokia Cloud Network Services known as CNS. Ron's an expert. He's going to come in and share with us his vision and his commentary on openness in the cloud, Telco cloud, the changes at the Edge, of so much going on, so much innovation that's changing the game, that's going to impact lives and society. Ron, thank you for coming on "theCUBE" for this Mobile World Congress special segment. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So the transformation in the cloud is so amazing with 5G. You've got cloud native developers, you've got enterprises changing their architectures, and cloud service probably going to the next level. 5G certainly is a great edge, but the strength of the cloud combined with the new modern applications really is going to be the power. And you start to see people starting to think differently around how developers are building apps and how companies are working together. It's not just one company ruling the world anymore, it's a lot of interoperability, interconnections, a lot of API's openness, kind of sounds like a network. It sounds like a network effect. This is a big deal. What's your take on this whole shift as 5G gets enabling a fast edge and cloud native go hand in hand. What's your take? >> I think 5G and the transformation to cloud native, generically speaking, go very nicely hand in hand. It's important to understand that 5G is not just another G, really because it's more intended for consumption by businesses and not just consumer. And what it means is that it would have a vast impact on how development is done, how the deployment is done and the type of features that would be required from the network. So when we went on our path to start developing for cloud native, primarily, for 5G, it went beyond just being cloud ready. And we started looking at how do we expand the operability with the ecosystems? How do we go into topics such as continuous delivery? How do we create collaboration between CSPs and cloud providers, such as we can provide the advancements. Now, there are quite a few subtopics in the transformation. For example, these might be obvious, but without automation there's really no ability to create a cloud native delivery process. If you're on the cloud, you're creating speed and ability to innovate as well as access, but you also are now required to create a better security system in ways to tie things back together. The multi-vendor environment and the path that it would enable to move to as a service model is again, a topic that can really be established as part of this transition to cloud native and has been greatly in focus for us. And finally there is a bit of a balancing act in some of the use cases in how do we use new technologies such as machine learning, in creating new use cases. For Nokia as a supplier of both the network functions, which are now getting distributed into public cloud in the private cloud, and on the Edges, as well as control systems of different types of OSS, BSS, including charging, enablement, IOP, et cetera, et cetera. It's really about how do we bring these things together in a way that creates use cases that the service providers can position, especially in their now quest to go after B2B, in leveraging their network. >> Yeah, and you guys bring huge strength there on the Nokia side. I want to ask you specifically, as CSPs are collaborating with you guys to leverage that strength of cloud native and open, the question comes up is how fast can they get to a modern, agile, open infrastructure and how fast can they enable value? And that's where this whole interoperability thing, or this interplay between cloud native and innovation hub comes together. Can you take us through how you see that? How cloud service providers are approaching cloud native today? Because that's really kind of where the focus is, how do I get the operating value, with the speed and agility of development, and obviously built in all the security and everything else? That seems to be the disruptor and let's face it, it's been a slow world in the telco place. So cloud has been a speed game with value, but it's an operator game too. What's your thoughts? >> That's right. And look, I'll take you maybe just a little bit into the history of this transition because only just a few years ago, most networks were really build purely with what we're now referring to as SPMS, physical network functions, really a equipment that was installed in a certain pop locations and created the network. We started this transition to virtualization in the world of VMS and then cloud ready and now cloud native. And it's been a few years for these things to come together. And maybe the most important thing that we must get right, is that as we dis-aggregate and in a way it complicates the deployment, if you would, by a few factors, we want to give the tools to indeed go fast, because the name of the game in moving to cloud native is to speed up innovation. So what we've been doing and in collaboration now with Google, is on the one hand, we need to make sure that all of the network functions, the operating models work, into this aggregated cloud. They can go all the way from a private data center through the Edge, into the central data center. Then on the Nokia side, we have to bring the capabilities to tie networks together, be able to migrate workloads between the locations. And maybe most importantly, as we release new versions of our software, as we enable new capabilities, we want to put it in the hands of the service providers and in turn the developers right away. So we need to enable true continuous delivery in the sense that is very familiar in the cloud world, but quite new to telco. So we have- >> You know. All right sorry- >> Go ahead. >> I'm sorry to interrupt, continue. >> Maybe just to give a very practical example of a customer that we share in Europe, Telenet we're starting with an on-premise Anthos based type of deployment, but keeping an eye on moving to the Edge and into the broader cloud, really enabling themselves to be in a multi region and with true Northbound open interfaces for new use cases to be implemented. >> Yeah, Ron, I want to get your thoughts on this. Dave Vellante, my cohost and I we're talking just in an earlier segment around how major inflection points have some characteristics. They all have characters in common. Usually it's proprietary to open shifts happen. And one in point we were looking at was like the nineties, the late eighties, early nineties, when you had proprietary networking protocol stacks, and then OSI stack came out. Obviously we know what happened from there TCP/IP created the best biggest wave of innovation in the computer history we've seen. Similar things happened here. And I won't say proprietary per se, but there were 5G and telcos stuff, that's kind of like operator centric legacy. Are you starting to see this openness come back and I'm not going to say a full stack, but new kinds of disruption and 5G is opening up the door because it's not just consumer technology. A lot of people like the CEO of Intel saying this is a business technology, commercial technology, more than consumer because of the characteristics. And you combine that with cloud native and say openness with scale with cloud services, but you mentioned Google, that's a public cloud. And so public cloud is going to be a disruption, 'cause it brings scale. So it reminds me of this inflection point where you have this new shift and you mentioned networks, these networks are connecting. So you've got a public cloud and Google's known for their networks and their cloud is being highly scalable and secure. But they're not the only network in town. You got a 5G and you got Backhaul, you got all kinds of new heterogeneous environments. What's your comment on that? Because this is what people are talking about. Where's the shift going to go? What wave is this? What's this going to look like? Is this a true disruption or is it more of the same? What's your thoughts? >> I think it's a true disruption. One of the biggest parts of 5G that would enable these new use cases is slicing. Now slicing is a big word describing something that most of us in networks know for quite some time, really the ability to create some kind of a piece of the network that is shared between partners for a particular purpose, with a particular SLA that contains bandwidth and licensing or requirements, locations, et cetera, et cetera. Now the ultimate goal is for an enterprise to be able to interface with the public cloud and with their operator and consume resources completely dynamically. Now, you talked about Google and public cloud. And obviously anybody that used GCP knows that at any point in time, you can go into a region, you can reserve what you need, use what you need, create results, and then either keep it move away, open new locations, et cetera, et cetera. One thing is missing, the connectivity over the mobile air interface to your user. And slicing allows us to combine the power of the true cloud with the ability to dynamically and programmatically, create a slice for a particular purpose. And for us, the ultimate goal is that really networks would become programmable and a developer or their user would be able to interface with the system and literally create network in code. Now there's going to be quite a lot of building blocks required to reach that goal, given that today, most of it is static. But it starts with at least being able to orchestrate resources out of the network, tie them into termination point that by themselves are annex, that are cloud native and potentially even running in the true public cloud and then attach them into a use case. Now you also mentioned openness and Nokia had been on this open path for quite some time in creating choice for our customers, but now with Google coming in with GCP for example, the interface that we create with technology such as Apogee enable openness, not just for our customer being the CSP, but also for the developer to come in from the outside and reside within the ecosystem that they chose and still be able to consume and even create services dynamically. And we enable it with products that interface with that on the other side, which we can get in there. >> Yeah, what's interesting. What you're saying is interesting, I would just call it out because I think it's important. We hear this all the time is that with the Edge and the devices, people are managing an end to end workflow from an application standpoint. But that's very difficult when you don't have networks that are being managed as a heterogeneous environment. So that's a key point you made. So the question I have for you is how can operators best manage this wave? Because this is the holy grail you're talking about here. We're talking about end to end visibility into the workflow as a developer, with the shift left security being built in. No one's debating that, everyone knows that. So as an operator, how do I starting today operate and manage through this? 'Cause I got to operate a large network. It's almost like swapping the engine out at 30,000 feet in the airplane. So how should operators think about taking this step? >> So the first thing to do is to really just accept the fact that there is going to be true legacy... And there are plenty of 3G networks today still operating around the world. There's going to be, to what is now starting to look like semi legacy. So VNX that have only been delivered to networks, maybe in the past couple of years and will carry 4G traffic and will stay in production for quite some time and manage this transition between PMS, VMs, running VNX, VMs running containerized workloads, and true cloud native, which may be bare metal. And as we're working with Google on Anthos, it literally enables this transition by creating a position for us to put the workload in each step of the path, as well as in multiple locations around the network. And what Nokia brings into this equation, it's also a unified view for the operator. So if you're an operator that today runs on VMs on prem, you have some workflows defined and you've been running them in a certain way, we want to keep that view as similar as possible with the tooling that you were enabled to use over the past few years, but create extensions that connects us into the containerized workflow and then a true cloudified workflow out of the same environment. And this is actually in part what we've been collaborating both with some CSPs, as well as with Google on enabling. >> Ron Haberman, CTO, Nokia Cloud Network Services Group, thank you so much for that insight, great commentary. Thank you for sharing your perspective on the future of telco, telco cloud, telco Edge, unifying those networks end to end. Great stuff, thank you for coming on "theCube." >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is Cube's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're in person and we're virtual, it's a hybrid event. Thanks for watching. >> John clearly the power of the public cloud in that interview. Great job, by the way, >> It was great to get Nokia and to hear the operator impact, and that's awesome. More to come. So back to the studio, Adam and the team back at the studio.