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

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

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