>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> This past week we saw two of the Big 3 cloud providers present the latest update on their respective cloud visions, their business progress, their announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes, including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, AKA AI, end-to-end data platforms, collaboration software. They talked a lot about the future of work automation. And they gave us a little taste, each company of the Metaverse Web 3.0 and much more. Despite these striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms and that of AWS remains significant. With Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets and Google doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today's cloud innovation, which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We'll also quantify with ETR survey data the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors: cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software. Now one thing was clear this past week, hybrid events are the thing. Google Cloud Next took place live over a 24-hour period in six cities around the world, with the main gathering in New York City. Microsoft Ignite, which normally is attended by 30,000 people, had a smaller event in Seattle, in person with a virtual audience around the world. AWS re:Invent, of course, is much different. Yes, there's a virtual component at re:Invent, but it's all about a big live audience gathering the week after Thanksgiving, in the first week of December in Las Vegas. Regardless, Satya Nadella keynote address was prerecorded. It was highly produced and substantive. It was visionary, energetic with a strong message that Azure was a platform to allow customers to build their digital businesses. Doing more with less, which was a key theme of his. Nadella covered a lot of ground, starting with infrastructure from the compute, highlighting a collaboration with Arm-based, Ampere processors. New block storage, 60 regions, 175,000 miles of fiber cables around the world. He presented a meaningful multi-cloud message with Azure Arc to support on-prem and edge workloads, as well as of course the public cloud. And talked about confidential computing at the infrastructure level, a theme we hear from all cloud vendors. He then went deeper into the end-to-end data platform that Microsoft is building from the core data stores to analytics, to governance and the myriad tooling Microsoft offers. AI was next with a big focus on automation, AI, training models. He showed demos of machines coding and fixing code and machines automatically creating designs for creative workers and how Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA tooling, would combine with Microsoft Syntex to understand documents and provide standard ways for organizations to communicate with those documents. There was of course a big focus on Azure as developer cloud platform with GitHub Copilot as a linchpin using AI to assist coders in low-code and no-code innovations that are coming down the pipe. And another giant theme was a workforce transformation and how Microsoft is using its heritage and collaboration and productivity software to move beyond what Nadella called productivity paranoia, i.e., are remote workers doing their jobs? In a world where collaboration is built into intelligent workflows, and he even showed a glimpse of the future with AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta and Cisco with Teams of all firms. And finally, security with a bevy of tools from identity, endpoint, governance, et cetera, stressing a suite of tools from a single provider, i.e., Microsoft. So a couple points here. One, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS with silicon advancements and didn't really emphasize that trend much except for the Ampere announcement. But it's building out cloud infrastructure at a massive scale, there is no debate about that. Its plan on data is to try and provide a somewhat more abstracted and simplified solutions, which differs a little bit from AWS's approach of the right database tool, for example, for the right job. Microsoft's automation play appears to provide simple individual productivity tools, kind of a ground up approach and make it really easy for users to drive these bottoms up initiatives. We heard from UiPath that forward five last month, a little bit of a different approach of horizontal automation, end-to-end across platforms. So quite a different play there. Microsoft's angle on workforce transformation is visionary and will continue to solidify in our view its dominant position with Teams and Microsoft 365, and it will drive cloud infrastructure consumption by default. On security as well as a cloud player, it has to have world-class security, and Azure does. There's not a lot of debate about that, but the knock on Microsoft is Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday because Microsoft releases so many patches, it's got so much Swiss cheese in its legacy estate and patching frequently, it becomes a roadmap and a trigger for hackers. Hey, patch Tuesday, these are all the exploits that you can go after so you can act before the patches are implemented. And so it's really become a problem for users. As well Microsoft is competing with many of the best-of-breed platforms like CrowdStrike and Okta, which have market momentum and appear to be more attractive horizontal plays for customers outside of just the Microsoft cloud. But again, it's Microsoft. They make it easy and very inexpensive to adopt. Now, despite the outstanding presentation by Satya Nadella, there are a couple of statements that should raise eyebrows. Here are two of them. First, as he said, Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries. I had a conversation with Sarbjeet Johal about this, to make sure I wasn't just missing something and we were both surprised, somewhat, by this claim. I mean most certainly AWS supports more certifications for example, and we would think it has a reasonable case to dispute that claim. And the other statement, Nadella made, Azure is the only cloud provider enabling highly regulated industries to bring their most sensitive applications to the cloud. Now, reasonable people can debate whether AWS is there yet, but very clearly Oracle and IBM would have something to say about that statement. Now maybe it's not just, would say, "Oh, they're not real clouds, you know, they're just going to hosting in the cloud if you will." But still, when it comes to mission-critical applications, you would think Oracle is really the the leader there. Oh, and Satya also mentioned the claim that the Edge browser, the Microsoft Edge browser, no questions asked, he said, is the best browser for business. And we could see some people having some questions about that. Like isn't Edge based on Chrome? Anyway, so we just had to question these statements and challenge Microsoft to defend them because to us it's a little bit of BS and makes one wonder what else in such as awesome keynote and it was awesome, it was hyperbole. Okay, moving on to Google Cloud Next. The keynote started with Sundar Pichai doing a virtual session, he was remote, stressing the importance of Google Cloud. He mentioned that Google Cloud from its Q2 earnings was on a $25-billion annual run rate. What he didn't mention is that it's also on a 3.6 billion annual operating loss run rate based on its first half performance. Just saying. And we'll dig into that issue a little bit more later in this episode. He also stressed that the investments that Google has made to support its core business and search, like its global network of 22 subsea cables to support things like, YouTube video, great performance obviously that we all rely on, those innovations there. Innovations in BigQuery to support its search business and its threat analysis that it's always had and its AI, it's always been an AI-first company, he's stressed, that they're all leveraged by the Google Cloud Platform, GCP. This is all true by the way. Google has absolutely awesome tech and the talk, as well as his talk, Pichai, but also Kurian's was forward thinking and laid out a vision of the future. But it didn't address in our view, and I talked to Sarbjeet Johal about this as well, today's challenges to the degree that Microsoft did and we expect AWS will at re:Invent this year, it was more out there, more forward thinking, what's possible in the future, somewhat less about today's problem, so I think it's resonates less with today's enterprise players. Thomas Kurian then took over from Sundar Pichai and did a really good job of highlighting customers, and I think he has to, right? He has to say, "Look, we are in this game. We have customers, 9 out of the top 10 media firms use Google Cloud. 8 out of the top 10 manufacturers. 9 out of the top 10 retailers. Same for telecom, same for healthcare. 8 out of the top 10 retail banks." He and Sundar specifically referenced a number of companies, customers, including Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, John Hopkins, Prudential, Minna Bank out of Japan, ANZ bank and many, many others during the session. So you know, they had some proof points and you got to give 'em props for that. Now like Microsoft, Google talked about infrastructure, they referenced training processors and regions and compute optionality and storage and how new workloads were emerging, particularly data-driven workloads in AI that required new infrastructure. He explicitly highlighted partnerships within Nvidia and Intel. I didn't see anything on Arm, which somewhat surprised me 'cause I believe Google's working on that or at least has come following in AWS's suit if you will, but maybe that's why they're not mentioning it or maybe I got to do more research there, but let's park that for a minute. But again, as we've extensively discussed in Breaking Analysis in our view when it comes to compute, AWS via its Annapurna acquisition is well ahead of the pack in this area. Arm is making its way into the enterprise, but all three companies are heavily investing in infrastructure, which is great news for customers and the ecosystem. We'll come back to that. Data and AI go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of data talk. Google didn't mention Snowflake or Databricks specifically, but it did mention, by the way, it mentioned Mongo a couple of times, but it did mention Google's, quote, Open Data cloud. Now maybe Google has used that term before, but Snowflake has been marketing the data cloud concept for a couple of years now. So that struck as a shot across the bow to one of its partners and obviously competitor, Snowflake. At BigQuery is a main centerpiece of Google's data strategy. Kurian talked about how they can take any data from any source in any format from any cloud provider with BigQuery Omni and aggregate and understand it. And with the support of Apache Iceberg and Delta and Hudi coming in the future and its open Data Cloud Alliance, they talked a lot about that. So without specifically mentioning Snowflake or Databricks, Kurian co-opted a lot of messaging from these two players, such as life and tech. Kurian also talked about Google Workspace and how it's now at 8 million users up from 6 million just two years ago. There's a lot of discussion on developer optionality and several details on tools supported and the open mantra of Google. And finally on security, Google brought out Kevin Mandian, he's a CUBE alum, extremely impressive individual who's CEO of Mandiant, a leading security service provider and consultancy that Google recently acquired for around 5.3 billion. They talked about moving from a shared responsibility model to a shared fate model, which is again, it's kind of a shot across AWS's bow, kind of shared responsibility model. It's unclear that Google will pay the same penalty if a customer doesn't live up to its portion of the shared responsibility, but we can probably assume that the customer is still going to bear the brunt of the pain, nonetheless. Mandiant is really interesting because it's a services play and Google has stated that it is not a services company, it's going to give partners in the channel plenty of room to play. So we'll see what it does with Mandiant. But Mandiant is a very strong enterprise capability and in the single most important area security. So interesting acquisition by Google. Now as well, unlike Microsoft, Google is not competing with security leaders like Okta and CrowdStrike. Rather, it's partnering aggressively with those firms and prominently putting them forth. All right. Let's get into the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft and Google are positioned in four key markets that we've mentioned before, IaaS, BI analytics, database data platforms and collaboration software. First, let's look at the IaaS cloud. ETR is just about to release its October survey, so I cannot share the that data yet. I can only show July data, but we're going to give you some directional hints throughout this conversation. This chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the data, i.e., how pervasive the platform is. That's on the horizontal axis. And we've inserted the Wikibon estimates of IaaS revenue for the companies, the Big 3. Actually the Big 4, we included Alibaba. So a couple of points in this somewhat busy data chart. First, Microsoft and AWS as always are dominant on both axes. The red dotted line there at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated spending velocity and all of the Big 3 are above the line. Now at the same time, GCP is well behind the two leaders on the horizontal axis and you can see that in the table insert as well in our revenue estimates. Now why is Azure bigger in the ETR survey when AWS is larger according to the Wikibon revenue estimates? And the answer is because Microsoft with products like 365 and Teams will often be considered by respondents in the survey as cloud by customers, so they fit into that ETR category. But in the insert data we're stripping out applications and SaaS from Microsoft and Google and we're only isolating on IaaS. The other point is when you take a look at the early October returns, you see downward pressure as signified by those dotted arrows on every name. The only exception was Dell, or Dell and IBM, which showing slightly improved momentum. So the survey data generally confirms what we know that AWS and Azure have a massive lead and strong momentum in the marketplace. But the real story is below the line. Unlike Google Cloud, which is on pace to lose well over 3 billion on an operating basis this year, AWS's operating profit is around $20 billion annually. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud generated more than $30 billion in operating income last fiscal year. Let that sink in for a moment. Now again, that's not to say Google doesn't have traction, it does and Kurian gave some nice proof points and customer examples in his keynote presentation, but the data underscores the lead that Microsoft and AWS have on Google in cloud. And here's a breakdown of ETR's proprietary net score methodology, that vertical axis that we showed you in the previous chart. It asks customers, are you adopting the platform new? That's that lime green. Are you spending 6% or more? That's the forest green. Is you're spending flat? That's the gray. Is you're spending down 6% or worse? That's the pinkest color. Or are you replacing the platform, defecting? That's the bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now one caveat here, which actually is really favorable from Microsoft, the Microsoft data that we're showing here is across the entire Microsoft portfolio. The other point is, this is July data, we'll have an update for you once ETR releases its October results. But we're talking about meaningful samples here, the ends. 620 for AWS over a thousand from Microsoft in more than 450 respondents in the survey for Google. So the real tell is replacements, that bright red. There is virtually no churn for AWS and Microsoft, but Google's churn is 5x, those two in the survey. Now 5% churn is not high, but you'd like to see three things for Google given it's smaller size. One is less churn, two is much, much higher adoption rates in the lime green. Three is a higher percentage of those spending more, the forest green. And four is a lower percentage of those spending less. And none of these conditions really applies here for Google. GCP is still not growing fast enough in our opinion, and doesn't have nearly the traction of the two leaders and that shows up in the survey data. All right, let's look at the next sector, BI analytics. Here we have that same XY dimension. Again, Microsoft dominating the picture. AWS very strong also in both axes. Tableau, very popular and respectable of course acquired by Salesforce on the vertical axis, still looking pretty good there. And again on the horizontal axis, big presence there for Tableau. And Google with Looker and its other platforms is also respectable, but it again, has some work to do. Now notice Streamlit, that's a recent Snowflake acquisition. It's strong in the vertical axis and because of Snowflake's go-to-market (indistinct), it's likely going to move to the right overtime. Grafana is also prominent in the Y axis, but a glimpse at the most recent survey data shows them slightly declining while Looker actually improves a bit. As does Cloudera, which we'll move up slightly. Again, Microsoft just blows you away, doesn't it? All right, now let's get into database and data platform. Same X Y dimensions, but now database and data warehouse. Snowflake as usual takes the top spot on the vertical axis and it is actually keeps moving to the right as well with again, Microsoft and AWS is dominant in the market, as is Oracle on the X axis, albeit it's got less spending velocity, but of course it's the database king. Google is well behind on the X axis but solidly above the 40% line on the vertical axis. Note that virtually all platforms will see pressure in the next survey due to the macro environment. Microsoft might even dip below the 40% line for the first time in a while. Lastly, let's look at the collaboration and productivity software market. This is such an important area for both Microsoft and Google. And just look at Microsoft with 365 and Teams up into the right. I mean just so impressive in ubiquitous. And we've highlighted Google. It's in the pack. It certainly is a nice base with 174 N, which I can tell you that N will rise in the next survey, which is an indication that more people are adopting. But given the investment and the tech behind it and all the AI and Google's resources, you'd really like to see Google in this space above the 40% line, given the importance of this market, of this collaboration area to Google's success and the degree to which they emphasize it in their pitch. And look, this brings up something that we've talked about before on Breaking Analysis. Google doesn't have a tech problem. This is a go-to-market and marketing challenge that Google faces and it's up against two go-to-market champs and Microsoft and AWS. And Google doesn't have the enterprise sales culture. It's trying, it's making progress, but it's like that racehorse that has all the potential in the world, but it's just missing some kind of key ingredient to put it over at the top. It's always coming in third, (chuckles) but we're watching and Google's obviously, making some investments as we shared with earlier. All right. Some final thoughts on what we learned this week and in this research: customers and partners should be thrilled that both Microsoft and Google along with AWS are spending so much money on innovation and building out global platforms. This is a gift to the industry and we should be thankful frankly because it's good for business, it's good for competitiveness and future innovation as a platform that can be built upon. Now we didn't talk much about multi-cloud, we haven't even mentioned supercloud, but both Microsoft and Google have a story that resonates with customers in cross cloud capabilities, unlike AWS at this time. But we never say never when it comes to AWS. They sometimes and oftentimes surprise you. One of the other things that Sarbjeet Johal and John Furrier and I have discussed is that each of the Big 3 is positioning to their respective strengths. AWS is the best IaaS. Microsoft is building out the kind of, quote, we-make-it-easy-for-you cloud, and Google is trying to be the open data cloud with its open-source chops and excellent tech. And that puts added pressure on Snowflake, doesn't it? You know, Thomas Kurian made some comments according to CRN, something to the effect that, we are the only company that can do the data cloud thing across clouds, which again, if I'm being honest is not really accurate. Now I haven't clarified these statements with Google and often things get misquoted, but there's little question that, as AWS has done in the past with Redshift, Google is taking a page out of Snowflake, Databricks as well. A big difference in the Big 3 is that AWS doesn't have this big emphasis on the up-the-stack collaboration software that both Microsoft and Google have, and that for Microsoft and Google will drive captive IaaS consumption. AWS obviously does some of that in database, a lot of that in database, but ISVs that compete with Microsoft and Google should have a greater affinity, one would think, to AWS for competitive reasons. and the same thing could be said in security, we would think because, as I mentioned before, Microsoft competes very directly with CrowdStrike and Okta and others. One of the big thing that Sarbjeet mentioned that I want to call out here, I'd love to have your opinion. AWS specifically, but also Microsoft with Azure have successfully created what Sarbjeet calls brand distance. AWS from the Amazon Retail, and even though AWS all the time talks about Amazon X and Amazon Y is in their product portfolio, but you don't really consider it part of the retail organization 'cause it's not. Azure, same thing, has created its own identity. And it seems that Google still struggles to do that. It's still very highly linked to the sort of core of Google. Now, maybe that's by design, but for enterprise customers, there's still some potential confusion with Google, what's its intentions? How long will they continue to lose money and invest? Are they going to pull the plug like they do on so many other tools? So you know, maybe some rethinking of the marketing there and the positioning. Now we didn't talk much about ecosystem, but it's vital for any cloud player, and Google again has some work to do relative to the leaders. Which brings us to supercloud. The ecosystem and end customers are now in a position this decade to digitally transform. And we're talking here about building out their own clouds, not by putting in and building data centers and installing racks of servers and storage devices, no. Rather to build value on top of the hyperscaler gift that has been presented. And that is a mega trend that we're watching closely in theCUBE community. While there's debate about the supercloud name and so forth, there little question in our minds that the next decade of cloud will not be like the last. All right, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Sarbjeet Johal, and my business partner, John Furrier, for their input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does some wonderful editing. And check out SiliconANGLE, a lot of coverage on Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always get in touch with me via email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai, the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> From the cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> With Snowflake's, enormously successful IPO, it's clear that data warehousing in the cloud has come of age and a few companies know more about data and analytics than Google. Hi, I'm Paul Gillen. This is a cube conversation. And today we're going to talk about data warehousing and data analytics in the cloud. Google BigQuery, of course, is a popular, fully managed server less data warehouse that enables rapid SQL queries and interactive analysis of massive data sets. This summer, Google previewed BigQuery Omni, which essentially brings the capabilities of BigQuery to additional platforms including Amazon web services and soon Microsoft Azure. It's all part of Google's multicloud strategy. No one knows more about this strategy than Debanjan Saha, General Manager and Vice President of engineering for data analytics and Google cloud. And he joins me today. Debanjan, thanks so much for joining me. >> Paul, nice to meet you and thank you for having me today. >> So it's clear the data warehousing is now part of many enterprise data strategies. How has the rise of cloud change the way organizations are using data science in your view? >> Well, I mean, you know, the cloud definitely is a big enabler of data warehousing and data science, as you mentioned. I mean, it has enabled things that people couldn't do on-prem, for example, if you think about data science, the key ingredient of data science, before you can start anything is access to data and you need massive amount of data in order to build the right model that you want to use. And this was a big problem on-prem because people are always thinking about what data to keep, what to discard. That's not an issue in cloud. You can keep as much of data as you want, and that has been a big boon for data science. And it's not only your data, you can also have access to other data your, for example, your partner's data, public data sets and many other things that people have access to right? That's number one, number two of course, it's a very compute intensive operation and you know, large enterprises of course can afford them build a large data center and bring in lots of tens of thousands of CPU codes, GPU codes, TPU codes whatever have you, but it is difficult especially for smaller enterprises to have access to that amount of computing power which is very very important for data science. Cloud makes it easy. I mean, you know, it has in many ways democratize the use of data science and not only the big enterprises everyone can take advantage of the power of the computing power that various different cloud vendors make it available on their platform. And the third, not to overlook that, cloud also makes it available to customers and users, lots of various different data science platform, for example, Google's own TensorFlow and you have many other platforms Spark being one example of that, right? Both a cloud native platform as well as open source platforms, which is very very useful for people using data science and managed to open source, Spark also makes it very very affordable. And all of these things have contributed to massive boon in data science in the cloud and from my perspective. >> Now, of course we've seen over the last seven months a rush to the cloud triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. How has that played out in the analytics field? Do you see any longterm changes to, to the landscape? The way customers are using analytics as a result of what's happened these last seven months? >> You know, I think as you know about kind of a digitization of our business is happening over a long period of time, right? And people are using AIML analytics in increasing numbers. What I've seen because of COVID-19 that trend has accelerated both in terms of people moving to cloud, and in terms of they're using advanced analytics and AIML and they have to do that, right? Pretty much every business is kind of leaning heavily on their data infrastructure in order to gain insight of what's coming next. A lot of the models that people are used to, is no longer valid things are changing very very rapidly right? So in order to survive and thrive people have to lean on data, lean on analytics to figure out what's coming around the corner. And that trend in my view is only going to accelerate. It's not going to go the other way round. >> One of the problems with cloud databases, We often hear complaints about is that there's so many of them. Do you see any resolution to that proliferation? >> Well, you know, I do think a one size does not fit all right. So it is important to have choice. It's important to have specialization. And that's why you see a lot of cloud databases. I don't think the number of cloud databases is going to go down. What I do expect to happen. People are going to use interoperable data formats. They are going to use open API so that it's very, very portable as people want to move from one database to another. The way I think the convergence is going to come is two ways, One, you know, a lot of databases, for example, use Federation. If you look at BigQuery, for example, you can start with BigQuery, but with BigQuery, you can have also access to data in other databases, not only in GCP or Google cloud but also in AWS with BigQuery Omni, for example, right? So that provides a layer of Federation, which kind of create convergence with respect, to weighing various different data assets people may have. I have also seen with, for example, with Looker, you know creation of enterprise wide data models and data API is gives people a platform so that they can build their custom data app and data solutions on top up and even from data API. Those I believe are going to be the points of convergence. I think data is probably going to be in different databases because different databases do different things well, that does not mean people wouldn't have access to all their data through one API or one set of models. >> Well, since we're on the subject of BigQuery. Now this summer, you introduced BigQuery Omni which is a database data warehouse, essentially a version of BigQuery that can query data in other cloud platforms, what, what is the strategy there? And what is the customer reaction been so far? >> Well, I mean, you know as you probably have seen talking to customers more than 80% of the customers that we talk to use multiple clouds and that trend is probably not going to change. I mean, it happens for various different reasons sometime because of compliance sometimes because they want to have different tools and different platform sometime because of M and a, we are a big believer of multi-cloud strategy and that's what we are trying to do with BigQuery Omni. We do realize people have choices. Customers will have their data in various different places and we will take our analytics wherever the data is. So customers won't have to worry about moving data from one place to another., and that's what we are trying to do with BigQuery Omni you know, going to see, you know for example, with Anthos, we have created a platform over which you can build this video as different data stacks and applications, which spans multiple clouds. I believe we are going to see more of that. And BigQuery Omni is just the beginning. >> And how have your customers reacted to that announcement. >> Oh deep! They reacted very, very positively. This is the first time they have a major cloud vendor offering a fully managed server less data warehouse platform on multiple clouds. And as I mentioned, I mean we have many customers who have some of their data assets for example, in GCP, they really love BigQuery. And they also have for example, applications running on AWS and Azure. And today the only option they have is to essentially shuttle their data between various different clouds in order to gain insight across the collective pool of data sets that they have, with BigQuery, Omni, they all tended to do that. They can keep their data wherever it is. They can still join across that data and get insights irrespective of which cloud their data is. >> You recently wrote on Forbes about the shortage of data scientists and the need to make data analytics more accessible to the average business user. What is Google doing in that respect? >> So we strongly, I mean, you know one of our goals is to make the data and insight from data available to everybody in the business right? That is the way you can democratize the use of analytics and AIML. And you know, one way to do that is to teach everybody R or Python or some specific tools but that's going to take a long time. So our approach is make the power of data analytics and AI AML available to our users, no matter what tools they're comfortable with. So for example, if you look at a B Q ML BigQuery ML, we have made it possible for our users who like SQL very much to use the power of ML without having to learn anything else or without having to move their data anywhere else. We have a lot of business users for example, who prefer X prefer spreadsheets and, you know, we've connected sheets. We have made the spreadsheet interface available on top of BigQuery, and they can use the power of BigQuery without having to learn anything else. Better yet we recently launched a BigQuery Q and A. And what Q and A allows you to do is to use natural language on top of big query data, right? So the goal, I mean, if you can do that that I think is the Nevada where people, anyone for example, somebody working in a call center talking to a customer can use a simple query to figure out what's going on with the bill, for example, right? And we believe that if we can democratize the use of data, insight and analytics that not only going to accelerate the digital transformation of the businesses, it's also going to grow consumption. And that's good for both the users, as well as business. >> Now you bought Looker last year, what would you say is different about the way Google is coming out the data analytics market from the way other cloud vendors are doing it. >> So Looker is a great addition to already strong portfolio of products that we have but you know, a lot of people think about Looker as a business intelligence platform. It's actually much more than that. What is unique about Looker is the semantic model that Looker can build on top of data assets, govern semantic model Looker can build on top of data assets, which may be in BigQuery maybe in cloud SQL maybe, you know, in other cloud for example, in Redshift or SQL data warehouse. And once you have the data model, you can create a data API and essentially an ID or integrated development environment on top of which you can build your custom workflows. You can build your custom dashboard you can build your custom data application. And that is, I think, where we are moving. I don't think people want the old dashboards anymore. They want their data experience to be immersive within the workflow and within the context in which they are using the data. And that's where I see Lot of customers are now using the power of Looker and BigQuery and other platform that we have and building this custom data apps. And what again, like BigQuery, Looker is also multi-platform it supports multiple data warehouses and databases and that kind of aligns very well with our philosophy of having an open platform that is multicloud as well as hybrid. >> Certainly, with Anthos and with BigQuery Omni, you demonstrated your commitment on P cloud, but not all cloud vendors have an interest in being multicloud. Do you see any, any change that standoff and are you really in a position to influence it? >> Absolutely. I think more than us it's a customer who is going to influence that, right? And almost every customer I talk to, they don't want to be in a walled garden. They want to be an open platform where they have the choice they have the flexibility and I believe these customers are going to push essentially the adoption of platforms, which are open and multicloud. And, you know, I believe over time the successful platforms have to be open platform. And the closed platform if you look at history has never been very successful, right? And you know, I sincerely think that we are on the right path and we are on the side of customers in this philosophy. >> Final question. What's your most important priority right now? >> You know, I wake up everyday thinking about how can you make our customer successful? And the best way to make our customer successful is to make sure that they can get business outcome out of the data that they have. And that's what we are trying to do. We want to accelerate time to value to data, you know, so that people can keep their data in a governed way. They can gain insight by using the tools that we can provide them. A lot of them, we have used internally for many years and those tools are now available to our customers. We also believe we need to democratize the use of analytics and AIML. And that's why we are trying to give customers tools where they don't have to learn a lot of new things and new skills in order to use them. And if we can do them successfully I think we are going to help our customers get more value out of their data and create businesses which can use that value. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. I mean, for example, if you look at Home Depot, they use our platform to improve the predictability of the inventory by two X. If you look at, for example HSBC, they have been able to use our platform to detect financial fraud 10 X faster. If you look at, for example Juan Perez, who's the CIO of UPS, they have used our AIML and analytics to do better logistics and route planning. And they have been able to save 10 million gallons of fuel every year which amounts to 400 million in cost savings. Those are the kind of business outcome we would like to drive with the power of our platform. >> Powerful stuff, democratize data multicloud data in any cloud who can argue with that. Debanjan Saha, General Manager and Vice President of engineering for data analytics at Google cloud. Thanks so much for joining me today. >> Paul, thank you thank you for inviting me. >> I'm Paul Gillen. This has been a cube conversation. >> Debanjan: Thank you. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE I'm in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios here with the quarantine crew, doing the remote interviews during this time of COVID. Of course, we want to check in with all of our great esteemed guests and CUBE alumni. We're here with Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock. Jerry, great to see you, it's been a while. Hope you're sheltering in place, nice camera, nice set up you got there at home, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. I set up all the cameras are just for you. Everybody needs their quarantine hobbies, and for me, I kind of dust off the audio visual playbook and set this up, just for theCUBE interviews. But it's good to see you. Glad you and the family are healthy and sane as well. >> Yeah, and same to you. Let's just jump into it, obviously, COVID-19 has caused the virtualization trend, virtual everything. You're no stranger to virtualization, and VMware back in the day really changed the game on server virtualization, but the whole world's becoming virtual. And it's very interesting because now people are feeling, but we in the industry have been talking about inside the ropes for a long time, which is, the future is there, it's going to be about interactions online, software, cloud scale, these things just got accelerated, and the disruption, the change of behavior, Zoom fatigue, Webexing, all this stuff that's happening, people are kind of like, "Wow! This is the future." This is a real impact, and it's mainstream, everyone's feeling about business, to personal, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft had this quote recently that they've seen two decade's worth of digital acceleration and transformation in just two months, and I think what we've seen the past four months, John is all the kind of first order effects of virtualization events, not just infrastructure, but like virtualization meetings and people, telemedicine, telehealth, online education, delivery of food, all those trends are just accelerated. We're buying stuff on eCommerce, and Amazon, and Instacart before hand, that's just accelerated. We're moving towards virtualized events, online education, online healthcare, that's just accelerated. So I think we're seeing the first order effects of changing not only how we work, how we communicate, but how we shop, interact, and socialize, it compress two decades within two, three months. And so I think that's changing both how you and I interact and how we build relationships, also how companies interact with their customers, and how companies interact with employees. and it's been exciting time, because one, when there's disruption, there's opportunity, but two is giving guys like you and me a chance to kind of dust off or try new skills, and you and I are both figuring out how to exist and thrive in this role where we're now interacting in this virtualized world. >> And it's still the same game personal relationships. Content is now data. This is stuff that we've been preaching on theCUBE. You've been on many times talking about, I going to get your thoughts as a venture capitalist, whether you're making bets on the future for investments, you have a 10 year horizon, and roughly speaking average on VC deals, enterprises and customers who are building a cloud and data centers, they got to make new bets or double down on stuff they've been doing, or cancel stuff that they had going on, and refactoring. So I want to to get your thoughts on one, first on the VC side, how have you guys refactored your thinking, your meetings, and your bets? >> Yeah, so I would say, three areas, one is how we operate as a VC firm what's changed? Number two, I'll talk about what we're investing in what's good or bad, and thirdly is like, what I think changes for our portfolio companies and how startups think. So first and foremost obviously, we've gone all virtual too, with shelter-in-place, our entire team is now working remotely, working from home, but we're still open for business and we're looking to find new investments, we are investing aggressively right now, and we're just doing things over Zoom. And so we're either A, doing video calls as a partnership, or doing video calls with startups that we're meeting and founders, but I'll be honest, one thing I've done John, is I've turned off the screen more or less, I've done more phone calls because I find that a video call is great for the first or second meeting, but with a founder or executive you have relationship with, it's just really nice to actually, go on a virtual walk where me and the founder of both put AirPods or take the phone to walk outside and kind of have a conversation, that's a little of a higher bandwidth. So, I think how we're operating has changed a little bit, but to your point, is the same business, connecting with a person one-on-one, reading the market, reading the founder, and making a bet. So that hasn't changed. I think on the stuff we're investing in, like you said, all the trends around cloud and APIs and SaaS, that's accelerated. So all the trends around the new workplace, SaaS companies, collaboration, going cloud that's accelerated faster, so some of our companies like Cato Networks that does software defined, wide area networks plus cloud security that just accelerated there in this market called secure access serves edge. We've seen kind of a nice tailwind from that, more and more data is going to cloud so companies like Rockset, that's a database company that you had on theCUBE, they're going to see a benefit from that because more and more data is now in the cloud. Then finally for the founders we work with, the way to go to market, the way to sell like no one's flying around selling one-on-one anymore, you're not meeting a CSO, or the CIO over steak dinner, or you're not going to a conference anymore. So a lot of our companies are figuring out how to do more online sales, bottoms ups adoption, that could be an API, that could be open source, we're trying to find a couple more of our line of business entry to the company and sell that way, versus go to a conference or for one-on-one meeting. So it's interesting, everything's moved faster, but then this slight curve ball on how you connect with your customer has changed. And so what's the Darwin line, it's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. So we're seeing the companies that founders that are most adaptable right now, they're going to thrive. >> It's interesting, we've always talked about from a tech standpoint with DevOps and cloud-native, integration or horizontally scalable has been that ethos of value creation, you've talked about moats in the past, but now it's more real life, is becoming immersed into software, and so I want to get your thoughts on this, and we have a phrase here in theCUBE team is that, every company will become a media company, that's something that we believe in, and you starting to see that people are doing more Zooms, doing more digital events, you mentioned some of the other things. Can you see any other examples where a company has to become blank? Because media is just one element of the new realities of life, right? You got to broadcast, and you got to share your stories and formats, that's media, is there other areas we're seeing, that things that weren't on the radar before with COVID, where companies have to become something like, every company will be blank? Fill in the blank. >> I would say, it's trite to say one, one, was every company is a data company, people have been saying that for a while, that's more true than ever. Number two, I'll be honest, every company now is a healthcare company, right? Because be it in health insurance for employees, the current pandemic is making the reality of both physical health, and emotional health, and mental health key for employees. And so if that was a top cost factor for hiring employees, this could be even more important going forward that every company is a health care company. And thirdly, like you said, every company becomes media company, I would say every company is also either one or two things, they're a Fintech company, because every company is now going online with their content. They wanting to create a one-to-one commercial relationship with a customer, right? That could be ads, could be transaction, could be selling something, so you're now doing business directly with your customer, so every company is a Fintech company, and I would say every company's now also, like you said, content company, right? It's the media creating, but also the data you're taking, the value you add on top of the data you're creating, and then how you share that back to your customer. So you as an enterprise company or a consumer company, you collect data from users, you're to use that data to improve your product, and this could be a SaaS offering, this could be an application, but then take that data through real time analytics, then make your product better and so because of that, if you're a data company, real time data, like our database company mentioned earlier, Rockset becomes more important. If you're a Fintech company, so all things around payments or commercial banking and relationship with your customer make sense. And if a you're a healthcare company because all your employees are now caring about healthcare, just thinking about how to make communication of healthcare with employees a lot more efficient, and a part of the reason why to work for theCUBE and work for a startup is important, so I think those three things are top of mind for all employees and all employers. I think things could change the next six or nine months, but right now I see those three being front and center. >> It's interesting. I wonder if you can add real estate company to that because if you look at the work from home, it's dynamic. >> Yeah >> I had a friend who was a fellow dad with my son's lacrosse team, he lives in Los Gatos, he's been involved in Google, Tesla, building up their facilities, and he had an interesting guest post on SiliconANGLE, and he was saying, it's not just give them some extra pay for their internet access, companies got to rethink the facilities question, right? Because do you pay rent for your employees? Do you provide the VPN, beyond VPN security, for instance? So again, you start to see these new opportunities or challenges, open up new thinking, this is going to be a wave of opportunity. >> Well, that virtualization between work and home has now been blurred like you said earlier, John and so if you're a technology company that enables remote access or distribute access, like Cato Networks when the portfolio comes and Greylock around our road office, home office, that is now how to right? So I had this conversation with Jason of Austin, askSpoke, one of our companies, there's like a mass of hierarchy for working out, and at the base of the mass of hierarchy is like good internet access, right? That's the how to, you need security, right? Because if you don't have secure access, you can't work, and then you have information management, knowledge management, how to communicate, right? And then collaboration, so, you have now this new hierarchy of what is required you to work in this new world, but also the tools and the technologies, be it secured access service edge like CATO or IT Helpdesk for all employees like askSpoke, both of those things become dial tone for any remote work. Just like videoconferencing, we couldn't do this in the same way, 10, 15 years ago, that's become kind of a must have, and so I think it'd be fascinating how we went from the office world where I gave you a laptop, or a computer, or a desk to this home office world, where maybe you now I have to pay for my fancy camera setup and my VPN. >> Well certainly you're getting good ROI on your setup and sure Greylock will take care of that plenty of dough big, billions of dollars under management. And by the way, must have hire things in our houses, ping and internet access, so we fight for that ping time, I got 12 I'm like what's going on? Who's gaming? We have to get the kids off of Twitch, and whatnot. but in all seriousness, this is what the reality is. So now for the average person out there, there's a lot of discussion around mental health, you mentioned taking it off the video conferencing and going for a walk, or just talking on the phone, this speaks to the humanization aspect of what's going on, mental health, social interaction, we're social creatures, collaboration has to be re-imagined. What's your view on all this? >> I think absolutely, look, humans are social creatures by nature, and I think part of the reason why I had this conversation with my founders early during COVID-19, that it's both a healthcare crisis. It's an economic crisis with all the million and millions of people unemployed, but it's also an emotional crisis because one, we're not connected to family, friends, and loved ones, and we're sheltering home with either ourselves or just a handful of people. And so we're trying to figure out ways to like, recreate social connections, and that's a phone call, it's a video call, it's Zoom dinners, it's Zoom dinners, the Zoom parties, is key. I think, going on socially just in walks is another thing to kind of like, play and experience things together. But my two cents is if you're a startup, right now, it can help connect people work-wise or socially, that's just going to be super critical for the new experience. And I think people are discovering new ways to use technology, so Zoom was never meant to be used the way it is today, I think that's amazing. I think how people think about voice video, and email, and chat are changing as well. So I'll finding new ways to like, play games online with my nieces, or communicate with them. And I think as an employer in these companies, like HR software, and how you like manage, and coach, and lead your employees is going to change as well. And so, you have this world where we're all in one building, and think about how you as a CEO, or as a leader now can actually coach, develop, and enable your employees across the world. >> I want to get your thoughts on cloud, we've had many conversations around cloud computing as to rise of AWS, I remember one it was a big Twitter conversation, I think about last year where what enabled Amazon and I think one of the things that came out of it was virtualization enabled them to have all these different servers. What do you see coming out of this virtualization of our lives with the COVID-19, as people start to figure out beyond the triage of stabilization, and as they get foundationally set up in COVID, coming out of it, companies and people have to have a growth strategy, whether it's life or business, people want to come out of this on the upside, whether it's emotional or with their business, what do you see being enabled? What needs to be in place? What kind of scale? What kind of environment? Because this is where I think the entrepreneurs are really going to sharpen their energy on their creativities looking at the expectations and experience needed coming out of this, it may look completely different than what we were talking about a year ago. What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think individually, people can use this time to prove their skills in different ways. So I think as an employee, as CEO, as a founder, you take the time to like invest in new skills, and that could be, "Hey, how do our community collaborate and manage my team remotely?" So I think CEOs and founders that can understand how to motivate, educate, train their employees in this new world, well, those are skills going forward. So communication has always been a great skill John, for any leader, any founder, it's 10X more important in this new virtualized work role, communication, motivation, and leading people over remote work is going to be a new skill that people have. Managing remote teams, managing fully distributed teams or half distributed, half headquarters, so understanding how to organize and lead your team in this kind of half in the office half out of the office role, that's going to be a challenge as well. So any tools, technology and tips there, but I think in terms of the founders that can now hire employees, find customers, sell customers, and manage a distributed team, those three things in this new world, even post COVID-19, we're not going back to the way we were, so the ability to actually use skills around email, creating content, Slack, Zoom, video chat, online conferences, what was that? "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first MTV Video. So, COVID-19, and Zoom, and video collaboration, what's that do to the old skills or the old founders? And what do they enable? So just like TV replaced radio as a medium, and now this virtualized world is going to replace kind of the medium we had beforehand, so, there'll be new generation of founders and investors coming out of this generation that would be for the next 10, 15 years, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Yeah, and it's super big opportunity, because you have these kind of medium changes, new protocols get developed, new responsibilities and roles emerge, value creation capture, equations change, right? So you're looking at things like online events, for instance, they don't happen anymore, and even when they do come back they'll probably be hybrid anyway. So you got virtual, hybrid, public it sounds like a cloud play to me, public events, hybrid events, and private events, I guess. >> Yeah, virtual private events, but the same thing holds, just like cloud internet increased the reach, right? So all of a sudden, you can reach a bigger audience than just radio, TV, or the newspaper. Now you have these virtualized events like say private events, public events, hybrid events, you as a company or a media property, like theCUBE can now reach a larger audience, right? It's global, you don't have to be there in person, you're going to have the remote audience as a first class citizen, now more than ever, it's just like the internet replacing newspaper and print, people really care about print and newspaper, but really the reach online is always a magnitude larger than print, so all of a sudden you thought more about the print, so the online audience more than print audience. So now going forward, you're going to think about the virtual audience that's remote versus the physical audience. And so you're going to have to create experiences that are their world class or both properties. So just like the cloud, you think about the big three cloud providers, private cloud, as a technology company, you think about all three venues, all three infrastructures as a first class citizen. It's not going to be all one cloud, it's not all going to be one note, if you will. So it forces everyone to think, not just kind of one path, but multiple paths, so like classic problems a lot of founders think, okay, I'm going to do an enterprise private cloud strategy only or I'm going to do a cloud only SaaS strategy. Now founders of this do both the same time, I got to address the private cloud on premise business at the same time as the cloud business, and not just one cloud, three or four clouds around the world. So it forces founders to be able to do more things at one time and the ability for a company to attack multiple venues or multiple territories at the same time, they'll be successful. And the days where I can just do one cloud or one venue, or one audience, those are gone, and so, folks like yourself, John, and what you've built here at theCUBE with everyone else, they can reach multiple audiences at the same time, that's going to be very powerful. >> And we're going to be marketing and doing a lot more online events, like you said, it's going to be easier to tap into our 7000 plus alumni to get people together to create great content. And again, content value to remote audience is interesting. So that shifts into the conversation that everyone talks about the remote worker. Well, what about the remote customer, the remote prospects? So this is going to change how companies have to be change of behaviors. And it's going to be driven by developers, because it's not like one app can solve it, 'cause you got to integrate, you got to have some integration points. So this is the question, are we moving away from that monolithic SaaS app? Or is it going to be some SaaS apps that need to integrate with others? Will there be an abstraction layer of innovation around? Because at the end of the day, these new workloads and new apps going to be built. If you're going to run an event, if I'm a SAP or a big company, I'm not going to rely or may not want to rely on a vendor. In fact, the CEO of SAP said, 'cause their site crashed for their event, "I'm not going to rely on a third party to run my business event." 'Cause their business model is the event, not just a supplier selection for a SaaS app. So interesting kind of new surge of online activity might tip the scales for the supplier side. >> I think you're right John, I think because now the, just like the IT technology is now your business, you're going to basically do one or two things, one, vet the IT technology provider that much higher or harder. But number two to your point, I think the way you sell and you reach companies is going to be through developers and yes, you're going to have these large monolithic SaaS apps before, but almost every SaaS app now has APIs for integration, and so to your point, is that integration and the ability to have multiple companies work together, and share data, and collaborate, that's going to be more important. And so really at Greylock and myself, I've been investing in developer-led technologies and developer-led adoption, or API, or open source-led adoption, for seven plus years now. And the truth of matter is, that's going to be even more powerful going forward. Nassim Taleb would say that's anti-fragile, right? So having one giant app is fragile, but having a bunch of small apps, or a bunch of APIs, or a bunch of developers using your open source technology, or using your API technology to build an application, that's anti-fragile, because at the end of the day, that's going to be more reliable for your customer than a single point of failure, which can be one giant application. So all the big apps like Salesforce, have now other platforms, right? They have APIs, they have extensibility, they understand that there's a long fat tail of solutions needed to build. And all the new startups are doing open source, or API-led adoption 'cause they understand that the fastest route to create value for the customer, is also the most robust technology stack that a customer can build upon. I think that's super insightful, in fact, that is, I think so compelling, because if you think about it, that's the formula for great investments from a startup standpoint. But now, because of COVID, you said, everything's been pulled forward and accelerated at the same time, there's a collision, not all the enterprises are that strong, they're not that developer-led. So I think, to the point about acceleration, now, the enterprises, and we've seen pockets of this with cybersecurity where they have their own, in-house teams doing a variety of different development. The customers have to be developer-led, because that's where the value is, so they have to have a supplier with the right stack and integration frameworks. Now, the customers who haven't really been developer-led, have to be developer-led, what's your take on that? >> Absolutely true. 20 years ago, the CIO of a company that used to be the monopoly supplier technology for the company, they decided what hardware to use, what servers, what stores to use, what applications to buy. And then all of a sudden, like Amazon came around and said, "Well, look, here's a set of APIs, go build what you want." And so the competition for kind of like the centralized decision making became Amazon. And guess what? CIOs reacted, they got better, they got smarter, and those that embrace kind of like an API developer-led adoption, became the CIOs you wanted to have in the company. So I think, CIOs in this cloud mobile era have adopted that philosophy that, look, my job now as the CIO is to enable my developers, my employees, which really the assets of the company is the people, to have the right tools. So you're asked a bunch of cloud APIs, like Rockset or whatever for data, or here's a bunch of resources, or open source technologies for you to pull. So like I invested in a company recently called Chronosphere, it's an open source technology around metrics and monitoring. So, "Hey, use this open source time series database for monitoring your cloud and build upon that," and they're not going to say, "We're going to pick one large vendor that's monolithic," we're going to say, "Here's an open source tech company or a cloud API, go build upon that." And the companies that are embracing that philosophy of API-led or developer-led, John, they're going to be far ahead the better CIOs, the better companies, because the rate of digital adoption has just gone exponential, so we were on this super fast path already, and with quarantine in COVID, we've accelerated all that digital transformation, so every brick-and-mortar retailer now has to be eCommerce retailer. So they're making a slow digital transformation to go from brick-and-mortar stores to online stores. Now like brick-and-mortar retail is pretty much not happening, and probably won't come back to the same levels for a while, they need to accelerate their move towards digital transformation, right? >> And IT certainly exposes the people who haven't really made those investments, because literally action and the mandate, now take action, make those changes, totally want to dig into this developer-led vision, because I think that's very real. And the new decision is going to be made on what to do. I'm happy to see the DevOps thinking, the agile, speed become the table stakes. So with that, this week, Google is having their nine-week digital event of 200 plus sessions, essentially, an asynchronous event, it's going to be sprinkled out, they've kind of pretty much released the videos, most of them today. Over the next eight, nine weeks, you're going to see a lot of videos. Google, one of the big three got AWS, Azure, Google, what's your assessment of the horses on the track relative to the cloud? >> I've been talking about this for seven, eight, nine years, I first met it, like in the first or second Amazon reinvent and what was the forecast? And we said, well, it's not a winner take all, but right now, it's a winner take most. Amazon's clearly the market share leader, Azure coming up quickly behind the enterprise, Google's a third but they're doing some smart things around technology. Google announced a bunch of things today, which I think are very smart. So for example, they announced BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery that's in query, their kind of a data warehouse, also query data and private cloud Azure or Amazon. And so strategically, if you're the number three player, you're going to push a multi-cloud agenda with BigQuery Omni, or Google Anthos, which is kind of a multi-cloud platform. And for Google, I think is the right strategy. I also think it's the right strategy for most customers to be multi-cloud, because you can't be dependent upon, a single point of failure in your applications. You can't be dependent on a single cloud as well. So I think multi-cloud is probably the direction we're headed as cloud matures. And I think Google's making a bunch of the right choices around embracing multi-cloud, and today they made that choice with BigQuery Omni, and so I think they're playing catch up but they're playing that game. I think Amazon's clue is still in the lead and still it blows my mind, and it's continuing to impress me what they've done over the past 10 years in terms of improving the cloud offering and the cloud services up and down the stack, and I think the past five, six years, what Azure has done, has been super impressive in terms of, Microsoft embracing, open source embracing, cloud as an ethos against their legacy business of operating systems and servers on premise, they've done a great job of embracing the next generation. But I do think, looking around the corner this new developer-led mindset is going to matter, right? So the cloud tomorrow will be APIs, like Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication. So I see the next evolution not just being VMs and containers, but also a bunch of cloud services around data, security, and privacy. And the cloud vendors can build this next generation of database APIs, or privacy APIs, security APIs, that they're going to be in the catbird seat for the next 10 years of applications are going to be built. >> And it'll be interesting to your developer-led position, our conversation around that, if the developer is going to be leading, is it going to be an abstraction layer across multiple clouds? Or do I have to have my Google developers, and my Amazon developers, and my Azure developers? How do you see that playing out? Because I do believe developer-led is the way, the question is, how do you avoid forking resources, right? So you might want to have an (mumbles) I get that, but if I'm going to go double down on say, a cloud, I'm going to go deep, I'm going to hire developers. >> It's interesting, history suggests you have multiple teams remember, we used to have a Unix team or a Sun team inside companies, right? You had a Windows team, you had a kind of a Solaris and Linux team, and there's a Microsoft team, and a non-Microsoft team, in most companies and they didn't really work well together and they had kind of two groups in most companies. I think that was an okay way to get started, but ultimately, to your point, that was not cost effective at all, it was defeating, you see now you had to like have to rethink it, what was my data backup strategy? Okay, I have a Windows backup strategy, and a Unix Solaris backup strategy. So I think we're not going to make the same mistake again, right? I think what will happen, we'll going to have multiple clouds, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then on premise private cloud, so call it, three, four, or five clouds. And then you're going to have a set of tools that can abstract away, not 100% of the clouds, but I think the best developer tools, the best APIs will be multi-cloud. So I can get 80% or 90% of what I want to be done through this developer-led layer of APIs, be it databases or analytics. And then, 10 to 20% of the code, you can write will be able to take care of what's unique to Amazon, what's unique to Azure, what's unique to Google or what's unique to your own private cloud. But I think we're seeing a layer of technology and that's true to all the startups. With back and true to all the startups I see that lets you get most of the way done with a single platform, seamlessly AI technologies, and that's what customers want, right? They don't want to create modal fiefdoms, they want-- >> They want choice. The want choice, but the reality is they don't always get it. I want to go through a throwback to 2010 when Paul Maritz, head of the VMware our first CUBE gig, he said, there's a hardened top. Okay, the hardened top was, you don't worry about what's underneath the top, we're just going to focus on top of the stack that was classic kind of, the stack would develop and you'd had standardization. You mentioned you had Windows teams and Unix teams, but also you could argue that, back then you had Cisco and Wellfleet vendors, but you didn't have two teams of routers, you had one standard that ran the remote interoperability, and OSPF routing, or whatever you had going on, so you had some standardization, how do you view that? Because you want some standardization to have the interoperability, the SLAs and the security, at the same time you want to have flexibility, kind of above what may be called a hardened top, is there a hardened top in multi-cloud? >> I'd say hard top doesn't exist in same way. I think back in the day, you had proprietary technologies, operating systems and firmware, right? So windows was closed, a lot of the network operating systems were closed source. Now you can't get away with that. So you have open source technologies today and public APIs. And so the pressure of both one, competition, two, public APIs that people can read, copy, adjust, three, open source, and it's just customer demand not to be locked into a hard top anymore, that's largely going to go away. So I think most of the major vendors success will try to kind of more or less lock you in and keep you stuck on their platform, their technology, and that's fine, right? Every successful company should be able to do that. But I think the ability to lock you in through proprietary software or operating systems, that's not going to happen anymore. I see through cloud and open source, what we've seen is kind of interoperability, and flexibility is the default, if you can't meet those needs, customers will go other ways. There'll be proprietary technologies, proprietary extensions along the way, but 60, 70% of what you want is going to be compatible with most technologies and most clouds. If you're not going to offer choice and freedom to our customers, they'll go elsewhere. If you don't offer a flexible solution, John, someone else will, and the customers will choose a more flexible solution. >> I would agree with you. Outside of latency, which is laws of physics, value is the lock in, if you're creating value, that's really what the customers want, they get to capture that value. Well, Jerry, great to have you on. I love the new setup. We're going to have to make this more of it. We can bring you in on the podcast when we get Zooms over the weekend, maybe put a panel together. Let's get Carl Eschenbach some VMware alarms to come on, give the perspective, what's going on. And I thank you for taking the time and great to see that you're healthy and doing well. Thanks. >> Me too. Thanks, john. Anytime, I love to be on theCUBE, so I look forward to my next trip. >> All right, Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, our first interview over nine years ago, he brought that up. That was at the second reinvent, boy has the world changed, and it's only going to accelerate even faster. Everything's changing new bets are being made, decisions have to be evolving quickly and faster. If you're not fast, you will be in the pile of dead companies and not making it. So, Jerry Chen breaking it down as venture capitalist for Greylock. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)