>> Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our live coverage. It's The Cube here, exclusive coverage of Google Cloud, Google Next 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host with Dave Vellante, both co-founders of The Cube and SiliconANGLE, here with our special guest Diane Greene, who's the CEO of Google Cloud, legend in the industry, former CEO of VMware, among other great things. Diane, great to see you, great to have you on The Cube for the first time. >> Really fun to be here, I'm really happy to be here. >> One of the things about Google Cloud that's interesting that we've been observing is, you mentioned on stage, two years now in, you're starting to see some visibility into what Google Cloud is looking to do. They're looking to make things really easy, fast, and very developer-centric, an open source culture of inclusion, culture of openness, but hardcore performance. Talk about that vision and how that's translating as you're at the helms driving the big boat here. >> Yeah, sure. Obviously we had this amazing foundation with our modern enterprise company, Google Cloud. But what we've done with Google Cloud is we've realized that Google values engineering so much, and so do our customers. So one is, we're taking a very engineering-centric approach. People really love our open source philosophy. And then we're so double down on both security and artificial intelligence. So if you have this underlying, incredibly advanced, scaled infrastructure, high performance, security, availability, and all the goodness, and then you start taking people somewhere where they can really take advantage of AI, where they can be more secure than anywhere else and you have the engineering to help them really exploit it and to listen to the customer, it's about where they want to go, we're just getting incredible results. >> I've been following Google since the founders, Sergey and Larry, started it, it's been fun to watch. They really are the biggest Cloud ever to be built and Facebook certainly has built-- >> We have seven applications that have over a billion active users. >> Massive scale-- >> And actually, we're just this week on track to have the next one drive. >> 25 years of expertise. I've seen them move from buying servers to making their own, better airflow, just years and years of trajectory, of economies of scale, and then when Google started The Cloud a couple years ago, it's like, oh, great, everyone wants to be like Google so we'll just offer our Googleness to everyone and they're like wait, that didn't really work. People want to consume what Google has, not necessarily be Google, because not everyone can be Google. So there's a transition where Google's massive benefits are now being presented and sold, or offered as a service. This is a core strategy. What should people know about? Because people are squinting through all this market share, this company's got more revenue than that one, and if I bundle in AdWords and G Suite, you'd be the number one Cloud provider on the planet by far. So buyers are trying to figure out who's better for what. How do you talk to customers if someone says, are you behind, are you winning, how do I know if Google Cloud is better than the other Cloud? >> Well, the only way you're going to know is to kind of do a proof of concept and see what happens, you know, pull back the covers. But what we can explain to people is that we're so... One is that it's all about information. That's why I say Google's a modern enterprise company because we're about it. I said that in my keynote. We take information, we organize it, and we supercharge it. We give a lot of intelligence to it and that's what every business needs to do, and we're the best in the world at it. And then AI is this revolutionary thing going on where you can just apply it to anything. Someone made a joke about Cloud, they said it's like butter, it's better with everything. Well, The Cloud is better with everything. I think it's AI, actually. So when you combine our ability to manage data, our ability to do artificial intelligence, with our open source and then our security, not to mention the fact that the underlying infrastructure is, everybody pretty much acknowledges the most advanced technology in the world, it's a pretty unbeatable competition, I mean combination. But the thing is, we needed to bring it to market in a way that everybody could trust it and use it. One of the first things we did, which we hadn't had to do, is serving our internal customers. Have roadmaps, so customers can know what's going on, and what's coming when, that we won't ever turn something off, and all those things that an enterprise company expects and needs, for good reason. I have to say, our engineering team is loving working with external customers. Everybody said, you'll never get that engineering team caring about customers. And I knew we would because we had the same quality engineers at VMware and they loved it. And I knew it was just a matter of getting everybody to see how many interesting things that we-- >> And it's problems to solve, by the way, too. >> There's so many problems to solve and we're having even broader impact now, going to the enterprise, going to every company. >> You said in your keynote, IT is no longer a cost center, it's a key driver of business. Tech is now at the core of every product. You go back 15 years, I remember somebody said to me, have you seen what VMware can do and how fast it can spin up a server? That was cost, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about the enterprise today. When you talk to customers, what are those problems they're solving, what are those opportunities? >> There is a class of customers, typically the internet companies, they are looking for the best infrastructure, they are looking to save cost, but they're also looking, you know, are people realizing, why should I do it all? Why don't I concentrate on my core competence? It's well known we've had Snap from day one and we were in their prospectus when they filed to go public. Then we have Twitter, we recently announced Spotify, and so forth. So those are very technically sophisticated. People, they come, they use BigQuery, they use our data analytics and our infrastructure. But then you get into the businesses, and we've taken this completely verticals approach. So they're coming to solve whatever problems it is they have. And because we have these exceptional tools and we're building platform tools, a lot of them with applied AI in every vertical, they can come to us and we can talk to them in their language and solve their problems. I talked about it in my keynote, with IT driving revenue, everybody's re-engineering how they do business. It's the most exciting time I've ever seen in the enterprise. I mean, I've always though tech was interesting, but now, it's the whole world. >> It's everywhere. You have an engineeering background, you went to MIT, studied there. If you were the lead engineer of most of these companies that are re-architecting and re-engineering, they're almost re-platforming their companies. They're allowed to think differently, it's not just an IT purchase, because they're not buying IT anymore, they're deploying platforms. >> And they're digitizing their whole business. They're using their information, they're using their data. That changes so many business processes. It changes what they can do with their customers, how they can talk to them, it changes how they can deliver anything. So it's just a radical rethink of... It's so amazing when we work deeply with the customer because they might start out talking about infrastructure and how they're going to move to The Cloud and how we can help them, and then we start talking about all the things our technologies can do for them and what's possible. And they'll kind of pause and then they'll come back and they'll go, holy cow, we are rethinking our whole company, we are redefining our mission, we're much more, you know, it's very exciting. >> I had a chance to interview some of your employees and the phrase comes up, kid in the candy store a lot. So I've got to ask you, with respect to customers, is there more of an engineering focus? As you see some of the adoption, you mentioned Twitter, Spotify, these are internet companies, these are nerds, they love to geek out, they know large scale, so not a hard sell to get them over the transom into the scale of The Cloud. As you get to the enterprise, is there a makeup, is their an orientation that attracts Google to them, and why are you winning these deals? Is it the tech, the people, the process, obviously the tech's solid, but-- >> It's a combination of all of the above. What'll happen is we'll all come in and start pitching these companies, and what we do, we really understand what they're trying to do. And then we send in the appropriate engineers for what it is they're trying to do. You get this engineer-to-engineer collaboration going that lets us know exactly how to help that company. >> They give you a list and you go, check, I've done that. Okay, next, check, check, you go down the checkbox, or is it-- >> Well, we brainstorm with them, and companies like that, because they don't necessarily understand all the technology. I always like to think what an engineering orgs does is one, it gets requirements from the customers about what they need, and we call that all the table stakes, and we get it done, and some of it's pretty hard to do. But then, the engineers, after they get to know customers, they can invent things that the customer had no idea was possible, but that solves their problem in a much more powerful way. And so, that's the magic. And that's how we're going into the market. Wherever we can, we'll take things and make it available to everybody. We're very, you know, that open source philosophy of all technology is for everybody, and it's a very nice environment to work in. >> The number one sound John and I have been talking all day about in your keynote was, security's the number one worry, AI is the number one opportunity. >> I was writing my keynote and it hit me. I'm like, oh, this is how it is. >> So please, when you talk to customers, how are you addressing that worry, and how are you addressing the opportunity? >> We're pretty proud of our security because it really is, at every layer, very deeply integrated, thought through. We don't think in terms of a firewall because if you get inside that firewall, all bets are off. So it's really everything you do needs to be looked at and you've got to make sure, and that's why the Chromebook with the hardware based two-factor authentication, and G Suite. Google, which went to that, and since we did, not a single one of our 85,000 employees have been phished. Kind of amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because it's the biggest source of attack. >> Ear phishing is the easiest way to get in. >> Yeah, but you cannot do it once you have that combination. It's all the way up there, all the way down to proprietary chips that check that the boot hasn't been tampered with every time you boot. Our new servers all have it, our Chromebooks all have it, and then everything in between. We think we have an incredibly powerful, we had to add in enterprise features like fine-grain security controls, ways to let our users manage their own encryption keys. But anyhow, we have just at a really phenomenal, and our data centers are so bulletproof. We have those catchers that'll pick up a car. We even have one of those. We had a UPS truck try and tailgate someone and got picked up in it. >> The magic of the engineering at Google. This is the value that we hear from customers, is that, we get that the technology and the engineers are there, we see the technology. But you've been involved in transformative businesses, beyond where Dave was mentioning, certainly changed IT. And it was new and transformed. Cloud's transformational as well. We were just talking earlier about the metaphor of the horse and buggy versus the car, things get automated away, which means those jobs now are gone, but new functionality. You're seeing a lot of automation machine learning, AutoML is probably one of the hottest trends going on right now. AI operations seems to be replacing what was categorically an industry, IT operations. You're starting to see IT again being disrupted. And the shifting into the value up the stack. And this is developers. >> That's the point. Because I don't feel like, yes, all those really painful jobs are going away. >> That no one wanted to do. >> That no one wanted to do anyhow. VMware was the same way. We eliminated tons of drudgery. And AI is doing it systematically across every industry but then you repurpose people. Because we still need so many people to do things. I gave the example in my keynote about the dolphin fins and using AutoML to find them and identify them. Well, that was PhD researchers and professors were looking at that. Is that what they should be doing? I don't think so. You free them up and think of the discoveries they're going to make. I mean, humans are really smart. I think all humans are, we just have to do a better job at helping them realize their potential. >> I want to talk about that, that's a great point. Culture's everything. I also interviewed some of your folks. I just wrote an article on my Forbes column about the four most powerful women in Google that aren't Diane Greene. It was some of your key lieutenants. >> That was a great piece. >> The human story came up, where you have machines and humans working together. One of the conversations was, artistry is coming back to software development. We were on this thread of modern software developers is not just your software engineer anymore. You don't need three PhDs to write code. The aperture of software development engineering and artistry and craft is coming back. What's your reaction to that? Because you're starting to see now a new level of range of software opportunities for everybody. >> Yeah, my daughter is a computer science major and she just taught at coding camp this summer, and they started from kindergarten and went up. It was amazing to hear what those kids were doing. I think a lot of applications are almost going to be like assembling lego. You have all these APIs you can put in, you have all these open source libraries, you have Serverless, so you just plop it in these little containers, and everything is taken care of for you. You're right, it's like a new age in building applications. You will still need, Google needs systems engineers but-- >> Under the hood, you've got to fix engines, mechanics. >> You guys talked about this in your article, the shifts toward creativity becomes a much more important ingredient. >> And also the human computer interface and the UX. You heard from Target, I was talking to him, they do an agile workshop for six weeks for all their developers. Their productivity, he said, an order of magnitude higher. I think the productivity of developers, in The Cloud, with all these technologies, is across the board, an order of magnitude better, at a minimum. >> Mike McNamara, the CIO of Target, was up on stage with you today. >> Yeah, he's a really impressive person. >> So I want to ask you about differentiation. You talked about open source, and specifically your contribution to open source, that's different from most Cloud players. The other thing you talked about, and I want to understand it better, is that you provide consistency with a common core set of primitives. What do you mean, and why is that important? >> Right. So when we build out all our services, we want to have one uniform way of thinking about things. So, how do you do queueing? It's common across every service. How do you do security? It's common across every service. Which means it's very intuitive and it's easy to use this system. Now, it slows you down. Software development at that layer, when you have to do that, goes more slowly. And if you have to make a change, you know, in a core primitive, everybody's got to change, right? However, you take the other side, where everybody just builds a service vertically and with disregard for how things are done, and now you've got this potpourri of ways to do things and everybody has to have specialized expertise in every service. So it really slows down the operators and the developers. You get a lot of inconsistency. So it's super high value and I have to believe people are going to start appreciating that and it's really going to be-- >> I think that's a huge problem that people don't really understand. Just as an example, if you're building out a data pipeline and tapping all these different services, you've got then different APIs for every single service that you have to become an expert at. >> That's exactly right. >> That's a real challenge. Like you said, from a software development-- >> And it's annoying. >> Yes, users who really understand this stuff are getting annoyed with it. But it's an interesting trade-off and a philosophy that you've taken that's quite a bit different from-- >> Well, Google has such a high bar for how they do things. >> That sounds foundational though. It's slower, but it's more foundational. But doesn't that accelerate the value? So the value's accelerated significantly-- >> Oh yes. >> So you go a little slower down. >> Our going a little slower makes everybody else go way faster, at a higher quality. The trade-off, it wins. >> Diane, thank you for taking the time to join us in The Cube today. >> I want to ask one final question. Culture in Google Cloud, how would you describe the DNA within Google Cloud? A lot of energy, a lot of enterprise expertise coming in big time, a lot of great stuff happening. How would you describe the DNA of Google Cloud? >> I would say just tremendous excitement because we're just moving so fast, we're scaling so fast, we're sort of barely in control, it's moving so fast. But such good things happening and the customers are loving us. It's so rewarding and everybody's increasingly taking more and more ownership and really making sure that we do super high quality work for our customers. Everybody's proud, we're all really proud. >> What's the one thing that you want people to know about that they may not know about Google Cloud, that they should definitely know about? >> Geez, you know, it's worth coming to and giving it a try. The biggest thing is how early we are, and it's the right place to be because you want the highest quality, you want the most advanced technology. And AI and security are pretty important. >> Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud here inside The Cube, live in San Francisco. We're at the Moscone Center. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us for more from day one of three days of live coverage. We'll be right back.

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite it's faster growth and infrastructure as a service, relative to AWS and Azure, Google Cloud platform remains a third wheel in the race for cloud dominance. Google begins its Cloud Next online event starting July fourteenth in a series of nine rolling sessions that go through early September. Ahead of that, we want to update you on our most current data on Google's cloud business. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this session, we'll review the current state of cloud, and Google's position in the market. We'll drill into the ETR data and share fresh insights from our partner and the Cube community. So let's get right into it. You know, Google, if you think about it, was actually very early into the cloud game. Google's 2004 IPO was a milestone event for the tech industry, and in you know many ways, it really marked the end of the post-dotcom malaise. It signaled the beginning of a new era of innovation. During this time, Google was busy building out its massive, global cloud infrastructure, probably the largest in the world, with undersea cables, global data centers, and tools like the Google file system, and of course Bigtable. But it took many years for Google to pull its head out of its ad serving butt and realize the opportunity to sell its cloud services to global enterprises. Bigtable, Google's no-sequel database, for example, was released in 2005, but it wasn't until 2015 that Google made this service available to its customers. That was the same year Google brought in VMware founder, Diane Greene to begin its enterprise journey in earnest. Now Google, they have a dizzying array of services in compute, storage, database, networking, IT ops, dev tools, machine learning, AI, analytics, big data, security, on and on and on. Name a category and it's likely that Google has something in it as a cloud service. But Google, to this day, still hasn't figured out how to sell to the enterprise. It really struggles to find the right formula. So, as you know, Google brought in Thomas Kurian from Oracle, to figure this out. Of course Kurian is, he's going to go with Google's strengths like analytics and database, but it has to have differentiation, so it comes up with unique pricing models like sustained discounts, which automatically apply discount for heavy usage, as opposed to forcing users to buy reserved instances such as what AWS does. You know Google is more aggressive partnering around multi-cloud, for instance, with Anthos, and it's smartly open-sourced Kubernetes really to minimize the importance of, physically, where workloads run. The bottom-line, however, is that these moves are necessary for Google to compete because it lags behind the leaders. And it has a long way to go before it's going to be satisfied with its cloud business. Let's look at the IaaS market in context. Now, I don't want to say it's all gloom and doom for Google. Far from it. Earnings for Q2, they're going to start rolling out later this month, but this chart shows our latest estimates of IaaS and PaaS for the big three cloud players. Now, I got to caution you, as I did before, other than AWS, which reports very clean numbers each quarter on IaaS and PaaS, we have to estimate Azure and GCP revenue because they bundle in other things. I'll give an example. Google reports its overall cloud numbers which include G Suite. Microsoft reports a category they call intelligent cloud. Now that includes public, private clouds, hybrid, sequel server, Windows server, system center, GitHub, enterprise support and consulting services. And Azure, the IaaS and PaaS numbers are also in there too. So what we have to do is to squint through the earnings reports and the 10 Ks and try to get a clean IaaS and PaaS figure for these players, and that's what we show here. Now there's really two points that we want to stress with this data. First, on a trailing 12 month basis, the big three cloud players now account for nearly 60 billion dollars in IaaS and PaaS revenue. And this 60 billion dollars, on a weighted average basis, is growing in the mid 40% range. So well on its way to being a 100 billion dollar business. Just for these three firms. And as we've reported, that's eating directly into the on-premises infrastructure install base, which is a flat to declining market. And that trend is going to play out in a big way this decade. We've predicted that public cloud is going to out pace on-prem infrastructure by more that 1800 basis points over the next 10 years, from a spending standpoint. Now the second point that I want to make relates to Google IaaS and PaaS growth. We peg it at greater than 70%, based on public statements, reading the 10 Ks and ETR data, which we'll discuss in a moment. So, very healthy growth, but from a much smaller install base than, or base than AWS and Azure. But in our view it's not enough, because AWS and Azure are so large and strong still, growth wise, that we feel Google is going to remain a distant third, really indefinitely. Nonetheless, a lot of companies would be thrilled to have a four billion dollar cloud business and there's certainly good news in the data for Google. So let's look at some of that survey data. Now, as we've reported in the past, Google pushes G Suite very hard, as part of its cloud story, and it leads often times with G Suite in its messaging. You know, but to us that's never really been that compelling. So let me start with some anecdotal data from ETR. ETR runs a regular program, they call it VENN, and in the VENN they invite clients into a private session to listen to named CIOs talk about their experience with vendors and overall spending intentions. It's a facilitated session. And we've had ETR's Eric Bradley on as a guest who directs the VENN program, and does much of the facilitation, and here's a statement from a recent VENN session quoting a CIO at a midsize Telco, that I think sums it up nicely. He says Google's G Suite is fine and dandy, but I don't see that truly as an enterprise solution. And frankly, it's still not of the quality of an Office application, talking about Microsoft. All in all I really like the infrastructure-as-a-service and the platform-as-a-service components that GCP had. And I thought they were coming along very very well in that space. Now, the reason that I share this is because the IT buyers that we speak with, you know they're very serious about exploring Google. They want options other than Azure and AWS and they see Google as having great tech and as a viable alternative. So let's talk about GCP and the enterprise. We looking, when we look into the ETR data for the most recent survey, which ran in June and early July, GCP is showing strength in one really important bellwether category, the giant public and private companies. These are the largest firms in the ETR dataset and often point to secular trends. Now, before we get into that, let's look at the picture for GCP using ETR's net score up methodology. This is fundamental to the ETR approach, and remember, each quarter ETR goes out and asks its respondents, are you planning to spend more or less? In its July survey, ETR focuses on second half spending. The next chart captures results across Google's entire portfolio. So here's the breakdown for, for Google across all sectors. 14% of the respondents are adopting new, that's the lime green. 39% plan to increase spending in the second half versus the first half, that's the forest green. Then there's a big fat middle, that's flat, and you see that in the gray area. And the 7% are spending less, with 2% replacing, that's the pinkish and dark red, respectively. So, I would say this result is mixed, in my opinion. Yeah, it's not bad, don't get me wrong, and we've, we'll see once ETR comes out of its quite period, how this compares to Azure and AWR, so remember, I can only share limited data until ETR clients get the data and have time to act on it. But this calculates out to a net score of 44%, which is respectable, but frankly not overly inspiring. So let's look across the GCP portfolio using the ETR taxonomy and see what it looks like. This chart shows the net score comparisons across three different surveys, October 19, April 20, and July 20. So reading the bars left to right, you can see Google's strong suit really is machine learning and AI. Container platforms are also very strong, as are functions, or server-less, and databases, very solid, we'll talk more about that in a minute. You know, video conferencing was just added by ETR and sure it pops up with the work from home. Cloud is actually holding firm when compared to October of last year. But surprisingly, analytics is looking a bit softer. And ETR for the first time added G Suite with, it shows a 26% net score, first time out, which is pretty tepid. I mean not very impressive at all. But overall, the picture looks pretty good for Google. So let's dig further into the giant public and private sector, that bellwether I talked about. And let's peal the onion a bit and look closer at the results from the largest companies in the dataset. So this chart shows the giant public, plus private organizations. So it would include like monster public companies but also large companies like a Cargill or a Coke Industries, if in fact they responded in this survey. And you can see, in that all important sector, it's a story of a lot of green with hardly any red, so quite a positive sign for Google within those bellwethers. Here's what I think is happening here. Is these large, and often far flung organizations, have realized that they have multiple cloud vendors, and they're asking their senior IT leadership to bring some consistency and sanity to their cloud strategies. So they look at the big three and say, okay, what's the best strategic fit for each workload? So they might say for instance let's use AWS for core IaaS, let's use Azure for productivity workloads, and we'll sprinkle some Google in for machine learning and related projects. So we do see some real strength in some of the larger strongholds for Google, although interestingly ETR sort of tells me that there's softness in the midsize and smaller companies that have powered AWS for so many years. And of course this, with Google's base, but compare that to AWS and AWS is much stronger in those smaller companies, start-ups and the like, and of course COVID's the wild car in all this. You know, we have to take that into account, and we will with Sagar Kadakia, who's ETR's director of research in the coming weeks. But I want to look at Google in the all important database category. So before we wrap, let's look at database. You remember, Google's playing catch up in the cloud and its marketing takes a more open posture around partners and things like multi-cloud and you know you can contrast that with AWS for example, but look, make no mistake, Google wants you data in their cloud, and that's why database is so strategic and so important. Look, it's the mother of all lock specs. All you got to do is look at Oracle and their success. Now, as we've reported many times, there's a new workload emerging in the cloud around this idea of the modern data warehouse. I mean I don't even like that term anymore, data warehouse, because it sounds just so static. But anyway, any rate, I'm talking about workloads that bring database, machine learning, AI, data science, compute and storage along with visualization tools to deliver real-time insights and operational analytics. Database is at the heart of everything here. Win the database and everything else falls into place. Now, Google has six or seven database products and one of the most impressive, in my opinion, is BigQuery. I mean, for those who have followed me over the years you know I love the technology behind Google's banner, but BigQuery is where much of the action is around this new workload that I'm talking about. So, let's look at, deeper at Google's position in database. This chart shows one of my favorite views. On the Y axis is the net score, or spending momentum, and on the X axis is market share or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset. The chart plots various database companies and their position within the all important giant public plus private sector. So these are the companies in the ETR survey that are the largest, and oftentimes, again, are a bellwether. And you can see Microsoft and Oracle and AWS have very strong presence on the horizontal axis. Mongo, MongoDB looms large, MemSQL, they just raised 50 million dollars this past May, MariaDB just raised another 25 million this month. You can see Couchbase and Redis, they show up, and they're on my radar. I'm learning more about those companies. Folks, database is hot. VC's are pouring money in and it's something that's very important to the Cube community to look at. And of course you see Google in the chart, with a strong net score, you know, but not the type of market presence that you see from the other big cloud players. In fact, they've pulled back a little somewhat in this last ETR survey. So despite some bright spots in the enterprise in terms of spending momentum, just not quite enough presence yet. Oh, by the way, look who's right there with Google. I know I sound like a broken record, but Snowflake is everywhere. You'll find them in AWS, you'll find them in Azure and on GCP. Now remember, Snowflake is only about one tenth the size of Google's IaaS and PaaS business. But it has stronger spending momentum than all the big guys, and it continues to creep its way to the right in terms of market share or presence. You know, but Google has great database tech and BigQuery is at the heart of its strategy to support analytics at scale, and automate the data pipeline. BigQuery's very well designed, it started as a cloud native database, it's based on server-less, it's highly scalable, and it's very cost-effective. In fact, ESG, enterprise strategy group, wrote a report comparing the TCO of the cloud databases. Let me pull that up and show you. Now the report was commissioned by Google, so I got to caution you there. But it was very well done in my opinion by a guy named Aviv Kaufmann, and you can see here it compares BigQuery with the other cloud databases, and of course, you know, BigQuery wins, got the lowest TCO, but again I thought the report was really detailed and well researched. I have no doubt that Snowflake has an answer for the big brown bar, which is on-demand cloud cost. I think ESG was making certain assumptions, maybe worst case assumptions, about the need to over-provision resources for Snowflake, which I'm sure ESG can defend, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that Snowflake, you know, has an answer to that or a comeback. I'm going to ask them. But the point I want to make here is that BigQuery was designed from day one, again, as a cloud-native database. We've been talking about that a lot. It's very efficient and is going to be competitive. So you can see, there are some bright spots in the enterprise, for Google. Okay, let's wrap up. Now, having called out some of the positives, and there are many, Google is still not getting it done in the enterprise, in my opinion. I certainly would not say too little too late, but I would say they spotted the competition a huge lead, and the only reason is Google just didn't act on the opportunity staring them in the face, within the enterprise, fast enough, and they finally woke up. But enterprise sales are, they're really hard. Thomas Kurian, for all his experience, is coming from way, way behind with regard to the enterprise go to market, systems and processes, pricing, partnerships, special deals for the enterprise. Google's still learning how to sell the business outcomes and is relying far too much on its technology chops, which, while impressive, are not going to win the day without better enterprise sales, marketing, and ecosystem integration. Now I feel like for years, Google has said to the enterprise market, give me heat and I'll add the wood. Meaning we have the best tech, go ahead and use it. That strategy just doesn't work in the enterprise. Kurian knows it and I suspect that's why Google's showing some strength within these large, giant public and private companies. They're probably applying focused sales resources to nail customer success with some of its top accounts where they have a presence, and then once they nail that they'll broaden to the market. But they got to move fast. We'll learn more about Google's intentions and its progress over the next few, next few months as they try their online event experiment, and of course we'll be there providing our wall to wall coverage. Remember, these Breaking Analysis episodes, they're all available as podcasts. ETR is shortly exiting its quiet period, this week, and will be rolling out the data, so check out etr.plus. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siloconeangle.com and as always please comment on my LinkedIn posts, I really appreciate the feedback. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation run welcome to this cube conversation I'm John Fourier with the cube host the cube here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of covin 19 we're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio we got a great guest here from Google we'll Grannis managing director head of the office of the CTO with Google cloud thanks for coming on we'll appreciate you you spend some time with me Oh John's great to be with you and as you said in these times more important than ever to stay connected yeah and I'm really glad you came on because a couple things one congratulations to Google cloud for the success you guys had so a lot of big wins under your belt both on the momentum side on the business side but also on the technical side meat is available now for folks anthos is doing very very well partner ecosystem is developing got some nice used cases in vertical marker so I want to get in and unpack with you but really the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before was ready for it and that is the at scale challenge that the Cova 19 has shown everyone we're seeing you know the future has been pulled forward we're living in a virtualized environment it's funny to say that virtualization has a server virtualization is a tech term but that enabled a lot of things we're living in a virtualized world now because we have to but this is gonna set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many many years but now as a provider of Google cloud you guys have to operate at scale you have and now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal and so you guys have had some successes I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes I mean everyone's at home that's a disruption that was unfortunate whether it's under provisioning VPNs NIT to a surface area for security to just work and play and activities are now confined so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue what's your take on all this well I mean to your point just now the fact that we can have this conversation we can have it blue idli from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we say and for Google Cloud this is not a new thing and for Google this is not a new thing for Google cloud we add a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments and so many companies that we've been working with they've already been on the path to operating an environments that are digital that are fluid and you think about the cloud that's one of the great benefits loud is that scalability income with the business demand and it also helps the scale situation without having to you know do the typical what you need to find the procurement people we need to find server vendors we need to get the storage lined up it really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unfortunate situations whether that's customer demand or you know in this case the global endemic yeah one of the things I want to get in with you I want to get you have explained your job is there because I see Google's got a new CEO now for over a year Tom's Korean came from Oracle knows the enterprise up and down you had Diane Greene before that again another enterprise leader Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google cloud to be very enterprise centric you guys have great momentum and and this is a world where cloud native is going to be required I mean everyone now sees it the the tide has been pulled out there everything's exposed all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint it's kind of exposed and so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying double down on that let's kill that we don't want to pay that supplier they're not core to our business this is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud native reality whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever they're gonna have to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweek to come out of this crisis so it's gonna be very cloud native this is a big deal can you share your your reaction to that absolutely and so as you pointed out there are kind of two worlds that exist right now companies that are moving to become more digital and transform and you mentioned the momentum I mean in Google cloud just over the last year greater than 50 percent revenue growth and you know and I greater than 10 billion dollar run rate business and adding customers that are really quick flip you know including you know just yesterday slung and you know along the way Telecom Italia Major League Baseball Vodafone Lowe's Wayfarer Activision Blizzard's so this is not you this transformation and this digitization is not just for you know a few or just for any one industry it's happening across the board and then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across you know Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it you know already has a little bit of a head start of this transformation so you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation and then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider and you know Shopify is a really good example of how seeing you know drastic uptick in demand they're able to responding you know roughly half a million shops up and running you know during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or you can get online well what is your role at Google I see you're the managing director title is managing director ahead of the office of the CTO we've seen these roles before you know head of this CTO you're off see technical role is it partnering with the CEO on strategy is it you kick tire kicking new things are you overseeing any strategic initiatives what is what is your role so a little bit of all those things combined into one so I I spent the first couple decades of my career on the other side of the in the non-tech you know community no in the enterprise where we were still building technology and we were still you know digitally minded but not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley and so you know spending a couple decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem and when I came to Google five years ago yeah selfishly it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side and I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted the leverage that technology for problems that I was solving whether it was aerospace public sector manufacturing what-have-you and so it's been great it's the it's the role of a lifetime I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal and we do two things one is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path loud and 2 we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming we learned so much John about what we need to build as an organization so it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation yeah and I could I can attest that we didn't watching you guys from the from day one hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know so you getting the enterprise chops and staff and getting you seeing some progress I have to ask you though because I first of all a big fan of Google at the scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now the there was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers it was goes along the lines like this I want to be like Google because you guys had a great network you had large-scale you've had all these things that were like awesome and then they realized what we can't be like Google we don't have that sorry we don't have large-scale data centers so there was a little bit of a translation and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand and you guys had since realized that you didn't it wasn't just people gonna bang your doorstep and be adopting Google cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google then leveraging Google in their business as they transform so as you guys have moved from that what's changed they still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security got a great network you got that scale and it prizes a little bit slower to adopt that which you're focused on now what is that the story there because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing okay Google now understands me they know I'm not as fast as Google they got super great people we are training our people we're treating you know retrain them this is the transformation that they're going through so you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly but now they need to level up how do you respond to that well a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting you know over the last year plus and it comes in kind of three very operation or technical pillars that I think the first we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing themes you know three times what they were before because we need to be there we need to be in those situations we need to hear from the customer mean to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve so we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem we actually get very visceral understanding of what trying to solve but you have to be there the game that empathy and that understanding and so one is showing up and that you know has been mobilizing a much larger engine the customer facing out personnel from Google second it's also been really important that we evolve our own you know just as Google brought sre principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out for the world we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience so you've seen you know that evolution under on this as well with cloud changing you know moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience that white glove experience that our customers get our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through and then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across be priority industries for us and you know that's again that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industry and then developing the solutions that progress those companies so again not this isn't about taking you know a principle and trying to apply it blindly this is about adding that connection that really deep connections to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company the best support them over a long period some of these deals we've been announcing these are 10-year five-year multi-year strategic partnerships they go across the campus of you know all of you and you know those are the really exciting scaled partnerships but you know to your point you can't just take SR re from Google and apply it to company X but you can take things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of sree and you can apply them over the course of developing technology collaborating innovating together yeah and I think cloud native is gonna be a key thing and yeah I think what it's just my opinion but I think one of those situations where the better mousetrap will win if your cloud native and you have api's and you have the kind of services that people will will know beaded to your doorstep so I have to ask you with Thomas Korean on board obviously we've been following his career as well at Oracle he knows what he's doing comes in to Google it's being built out it's like a rocket ship at this point what bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers what's the if you have to boil it down to Google clouds big bet what is the bet on the technology side and what's the bet on the business side sure well I've already mentioned you know I've already Internet's you know the big strategy that Thomas is brought in and you know that is the that's again those three pillars making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization and making sure that we transitioned from you know a typical support mindset into more of customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries if I was to add you know more color to that I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving as he's been converting us to a partner LED is and a partner led organization and this means a lot of investments in large mobile systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte but this also means that like the Splunk announcement from yesterday that isn't just the cell >> this is a partnership it goes deep across go-to-market product and self do and then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a SATA or a rack space for migrations and as a result the already we're seeing really incredible lifts so for example nearly 200 percent year-over-year increase in partner influenced revenue Google cloud and almost like a 13 X year-over-year increase in new customers one-bite partners that's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper scale does it's just saying you mentioned Splunk I want to get that in a second but I also notice there was a deal with Dallas group on ECM subscriptions which kind of leads me into the edge piece there's a real edge component here with Google cloud and I think I'd Akashi edge with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google Network I mean a lot of the scuttlebutt around the valley and the industry is you know Google's got an amazing network store a software-defined networking is gonna be a hot program programmable area so you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security these are killer areas that need innovation could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree I'm out see with you have a killer Network and you're leveraging it what's the can you just give some insight into what's going on those those two areas network and then the edge yeah I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of an of the progression of cloud generally what do I mean by that you know started out as like get everything to the data center you know we kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and they could redistribute out the results and you know drive the latency down over time so we span the portfolio of applications and services that would be relevant over time and what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution >> more of a layered architecture and that layered architecture includes you know poor data centers that includes CDN capacity points of presence that includes edge and just in that list of customers over the last year I there were at least three or four telcos in there and you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from asks in recent announcements I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about how can we pick big technology like anthos for example and how could we orchestrate workloads create a common control play and you know manage services across those three shells if you will of the architecture and that's a that's a very strategic and important area for us and I think generally for the cloud industry easy it was expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens and you can look at you know Google Phi you look at stadia you can look at examples within Google they go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of creature all right so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google both groups and Microsoft well all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side that's a tailwind I get that but as it continues we're expecting post kovat some you know redistribution of development dollars and projects whether it's IT going cloud native or whatever new workloads we are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge and this is gonna create some lift so I want to get your thoughts on you guys strategy with go-to market as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with ai and data there seems to be a trend towards the vertical ization of whether its sales and go to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct value in these verticals so it really seems to be a I won't say ratification but in a way that seems to be the norm whether you come into a market you have specialization but the date is there so apps can be more agile do you are you guys seeing that and is that something that you guys are considering from from an organization standpoint and how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers yeah I I bring this to and where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well which is we've moved from you know here are storage offers for everybody and here's you know basic infrastructure everybody and now we've said how can we make sure that we have solutions that are tailored with very specific problems that customers are trying to solve and we're getting to the point now where your performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to compose very specific solutions and if you think about the substrate that has to be there you know we mentioned you have to have some really great partners and you have to have you know roadmap that is focused on priority solution area so for example at Google cloud you know we're very focused on six priority vertical areas so retail financial services health care manufacturing and industrials health care life sciences public sector and you know as a result of being very focused in those areas we can make more target investments and also align our entire go-to-market system and our entire partner ecosystem ecosystem around those beers specific priority areas so for example we worked with SATA and HDA Healthcare Rob very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal Berko vat19 and that's to help better inform communities and hospitals we can use looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance on nonprofit and that helps monitor patient system symptoms and risk factors so you know we're using you know a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem - you know ferry tailored solutions you know you can also look at I mentioned Shopify earlier that's another great example of how in retail they can use something like Google meat inherent reliability scalability security to connect their employees during these interesting times but then they can also use GCP at Google cloud platform to scale out and as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers for their shops they can rapidly deploy to your point and those you know those solutions and you know how the database performs and how those tiers perform you that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams yeah one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the kovat is that you know when the world gets back to normal it'll be hybrid and it'll be a hybrid between reality not physical and 100% virtual hybrid and that's going to impact events to media to everything every vertical will be impacted and I want to point out the Splunk team bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk to you and in context to Splunk has a cloud they got a great slogan data for every everywhere everywhere dated to everywhere I think it is but the cube we have a cloud every company will have a cloud scale at some level will progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data how are you guys powering those clouds because I think the Splunk deal is interesting their partner their stock price was up out on the news of the deal a nice bump their first Blunk shout out to those guys but they're a data company now they're cross-platform but they're not Google but they have a cloud so you know saying so they need to play in all the clouds but they need infrastructure they need support so how do you guys talk to that customer and that says hey the next pandemic that comes the next crisis that's going to cause some either social disruption or workflow disruption or work supply chain disruption I need to be agile I need have full cloud scale and so I need to talk to Google what do you say to them what's the pitch and as does a Splunk deal Samir some of those capabilities or tie that together for us the spunk deal and how it relates to sure for example proof themselves for the future sorry for example with the cloud deal you take a look at what Google is already really good at data processing at scale log analytics you take a look at what Splunk is doing you know with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest it a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google cloud not only they get highly performant infrastructure but they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools data analytics tools machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhance services so not just about acity going up and down your periods of band but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers and we see that you know it's a really big trend and you know this gets it something you know John a little bit bigger which is the two views of the world and we talked about very tailored focused solutions Splunk is an example of making a very methodical approach to a partnership developing a solution specifically you know with partners and you know in this case Splunk on the security event management side but we're always going to provide our data processing platform our infrastructure for companies across many different industries and I think that addresses one part of the topic which is you know how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing this deals back to the foundational elements of like AI infrastructure as a service and elasticity and we're gonna provide a platform infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of you know it's hard to forecast and/or demand may rise and fall you know in very interesting ways but then there's going to be funds where you know we we because they're not a necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution so for example like in the oil and gas industry we don't develop custom AI ml solutions the facility upstream extraction for example but what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out the but I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and so classic and able mint model where you're enabling your platform for your customers okay so I got to ask the question I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon you know has their own sass stuff but but really more of an tend the better products usually on the ecosystem side you guys have some killer sass cheap tree-sweet where customer if we use the g sqweep really deeply we also use some BigTable as well I want to build a cloud we have a cloud cube cloud but you guys have meat so I want to build my product on Google cloud how do I know you're not going to compete with me do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between you know the pure Google services which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are gonna be great markets potentially huge markets that are out there well this is the power of partnership I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas is made has been developing a sense of partners and it kind of blurs the line between traditional what you would call a customer what you would call a partner and so having a really strong sense of which industries were in which we prioritize Plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where you know our customers and partners want to add that value that's that's the foundational that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a you know here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle but one of the things Thomas has also done in the East rata jia is has been to make sure that you know the Google cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google and also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than you know having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank for example well I got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go I know you got some other things going I really appreciate you digging the time sharing this great insight and updates as a builder you've been on the other side of the table now you're at Google heading up the CTO I was working with Thomas understanding them go to market across the board and the product mix as you talk to customers and they're thinking the good customers are thinking hey you know I want to come out of this Cove in on an upward trajectory and I want to use this opportunity to reset and realign for the future what advice do you have for those enterprises there could be small medium sized enterprises to the full large big guys and obviously cloud native we talked some of that already but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize as some things are now exposed the collaboration the tooling the scale all these things are out there what have you seen and what advice would you give a CX o or C so or leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing how they should plan execute and move forward well I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job which is interacting with the c-suite and boards of you know companies and partners around the world and they're obviously very interested to learn or you know get a data point from someone at Google and the the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions out one collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is and I think you're seeing this right now across every industry and it you know whether you're a small medium-sized business or you're a large company if the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways to share information rapidly to do it securely with high reliability that that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to you know applications to build services to enable actually succeed in production and over the long haul is that culture of innovation and collaboration so absolutely number one is you're having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective a collaboration perspective and the and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else second piece of the you know advice especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty is where can you buy down uncertainty with vets that aren't you know that art you can you can learn without a high penalty and this is a this is why cloud I think is really really you know finding you know super scale it was our it was already on the rise but what you're seeing now and you know as you've linked back to me during this conversation we're seeing the same thing which is a high increase in demand of let's get this implemented now how can we do this more this is you know clearly one way to move through uncertainty and so look for those opportunities I'll give you a really good example mainframes one of the classic workloads of the you know on-premise enterprise and you know there's all sorts of there are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes but a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have performant workload maybe you start chunking at a part and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than you know just one thing but there are a lot of years and investments in a workload that might run on a mainframe and that's a perfect example of out you know biting off too much it might be a little bit dangerous but there is a path to and so for example like we brought in a company called cornerstone to help with those migrations but we also have you know partnerships with you know data center providers and others globally from us our own built infrastructure to allow even you know a smaller stuff per site or more like post proximity location in the workload it's great you know everything had as a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a Internet digitally connected world we're living in you know the notion of a digital business was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years but I think now kovat 19 you're seeing the virtual or digital it's really digital but you know virtual reality augmented reality is going to come fast to really get people to go WOW virtual virtualization of my business so you know we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke but it's really more about okay this is about a new world a new opportunity to think about when we come out of this we're gonna still go back to our physical world now the hybrid now kicks in this kind of connects all aspects of business in every verticals not leahey I'm targeting like the this industry so there might be unique solutions in those industries but now the world is virtualized it's connected it's a digital environment these are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a fringe lunatic fringe idea but now it's brought mainstream this is gonna be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and app application software this is gonna be we think a big thing what's your reaction to that which your based on your experience what do you see happening do you agree with it and you have any thing you might want to add maybe you know one kind of philosophical statement and then one more you know I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration first from a philosophical standpoint the greater the crisis the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get and so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing you know with all of the customers that I work with directly plus our partners you know Googlers everybody's rallying together to think about this world differently and so to your point you know a shift in mindset you know there are there are very few moments where you get this pronounced a change and everyone is going through it all at the same time so that creates a you know an opportunity a scenario where the old thinking new strategies creativity you know bringing people in in new ways collaborating a new way and offer a lot of benefits more you know practically speaking and from my experience you know building technology for a couple decades you this is a it has an interesting parallel to you know building like tightly coupled really large maybe monoliths versus micro services and debate around you know do we build small things that can be reconfigured and you know built out by others or built on by others more easily or do we credit Golden Path and a more understood you know development environment and I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better is that's what's still a raging debate and I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver the customer that one of our customers wants to deliver to their cost and thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in its what its power its core functions and then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions that is a you know that's a real opportunity and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where you know if you want to run across multiple clouds yeah this is the anthos conversation where you know recently g8 you know a global scale platform you know multi cloud platform that's a pretty big moment in technology and that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking you know an application service and making it real well I think you're right on the money I think philosophically it's a flashpoints opportunity I think that's going to prove to be accelerating gonna see people win faster and lose faster you can see that quickly happen but to your point about the monolith versus you know service or decoupled based systems I think we allow a live in a world where it's a systems of you now you can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems that's distributed computing I think this is that the trend it's a system it's not one thing or the other so I think the debate will continue just like you know VI versus Emacs we know you don't know right so you know if people gonna have this debate but it's just if you think about as a system the use case defines the architecture that's the beautiful thing about the cloud so great insight I really appreciate it and how's everything going over there Google Cloud you got meat that's available how's your staff what's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google cloud team tell us what's going on over there people still working working remote how's everyone doing well as you can as you can tell from my scenario here my my backdrop yes still hard at work and we take this as a huge responsibility you know these moments is a huge responsibility because there are you know educators loved ones medical professionals you know critical life services that run on services that Google provides and so I can tell you were humbled by the opportunity to provide you know the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help and I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investment in technology to help or people that really gets at the root of who we are so while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality what really fires us up and what really a chart is because is that this is a moment where what we do really well is very very important for the world in every geo in every vertical in every use case and every solution type so we're just take we're taking that responsibility very seriously and at the same time we're trying to make sure that you know all of our teams as well as all the teams that we work with our customers and partners are making it a human moment not just the technology moment well congratulations and thanks for spending the time great insight will appreciate will Grannis Managing Director head of Technology office of the CTO at Google cloud this certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time which is DevOps large-scale role of data and technology now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits and thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers so thank you so much for all that way effort and thanks for spending the time here in the cube conversation appreciate it thanks for having John okay I'm John Farah here in Palo Alto Studios for remote cube conversation with Google cloud get in the update really looking at the future as it unfolds we are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level cloud native and change not only the tech industry but society I'm John Fourier thanks for watching

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a special conversation with Michael Letschin who's the Director of Technical Advocacy at Cohesity, and John Troyer, Chief Reckoner at TechReckoning, also does a CUBE host, co-host's with us some events, certainly VMworld. Guys welcome to this conversation. >> Thank you. >> The title is Work-Life Balance: Is It Really That Simple? A topic that Cohesity, you guys are donating your session at VMworld on, to kind of give back and share data around, really an important issue, around work which is burnout, you know mental stability. There's always been a stigma, but that stigma now people are recognizing that, hey, you know what? if you need to take some time off, why not? >> Exactly. People are just getting just completely overworked at this point in IT. So we really talked about it about it and we thought it was a good thing to do something different than standard for tech companies nowadays sometimes. >> John, you and I have talked off-camera with The CUBE sets around the old IT adage, 'Do more with less!' Almost like banging people hard to do, and squeeze more profits out of it. You guys, VMware, certainly. When you were there, you had virtualization changed the game on the server landscape. But the old IT, they work hard. There's a lot of technical people working hard, and they're asked to do so many different things. And now as careers start to change, more pressure. >> Right, right. We're in a 24/7 world. The cloud is there. IT only really only gets noticed sometimes when things go wrong, and that's kind of a resume generating event. So people in our society, I think, there's a lot of pressure. >> So, tell about the session. I know it's a teaser, I wouldn't want to reveal too many cards here on the video, but what's going to be talked about in the session? What's the topic? What's some of the data? >> Well, we did a survey, we didn't even really promote it very much, out for IT professionals. We got 360 responses from IT professionals all over the world: North America, Europe, and beyond, from, ya know, people doing cabling in data centers, all the way to CEO's of companies, talking about IT burnout. And about what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, what symptoms they're having. And burnout is really not just being tired. Right, we think, ugh, I didn't get enough sleep, I'm burnt out. It is really a psychological disconnection from your work, from your purpose, from your coworkers. It's a feeling, I don't want to do this. It's really an F-U moment. Excuse me. [Laughing] >> You can, we're digital, you can say that. We have no FTC to worry about. Yeah, but this is important. I mean, people do want to do the good job, and we hear all this stuff, oh, 'admission driven companies,' but at the end of the day, if the work environment is not going to be conducive to people feeling good about themselves or being, ya know, kind of together, that's just huge. >> Exactly, and I think there's something to be said about getting that time. Not just enjoying what you're doing every day, but to keep doing that, sometimes you have to get away from that. And, I think that's a lot of what we found when we did the survey was people weren't always seeing that they could get away from it. They really felt pretty pressured to stay in. And sometimes it wasn't just from their management, either. We saw a lot of people that came back with comments even that some of the issues they had were, the community actually kind of pushed them into, they need to do more, they need to be out in the community. So, they were doing their day job, and now I've still got to do more, still got to go out and do more blogging, and I've got to do more training, I've got to do more certifications. Is it really helping your career? Is it helping your life? Is it helping your family? >> Work-Life balance has always been a topic, and you mentioned the community. Also, you add open source to that, too. There's more pressure there. That's like its own company. So you have the work-life balance, what are some of the pressure points you guys see? 'Cause I know living in Silicon valley, for me personally, the past 20 years, I know people personally, as well as stories from friends. This huge burnout, as entrepreneurs, CEO's, start up founders, they burn out a lot, there's failure involved, and you see depression and mental illness become a big topic, people are talking about it. And it's out in the open now, it's not hidden, it's not one those things. What's the IT equivalent, what's going on in the world that you guys have uncovered in the survey? >> Well, certainly some pretty similar, a lot of it is hours worked, right? You're on call a lot, you're traveling a lot. Pressures get worse as you get higher in the organization. We in the survey, we just saw, there's a lot of science to say you shouldn't be working more than 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, once you get over that you're actual overall work productivity plummets. And we saw a lot both in Europe and the U.S., people work not only more than 40 hours a week, but outside of business hours as well. And they are even connected on vacation. >> And, interestingly, a lot of them weren't because they had to. Like, it wasn't, they were oncall or a shift job. So, you kind of expect, you're going to work weird hours. If you're an early on help desk person, you're on call, you have that two weekends a month, or whatever, you kind of expect that it's kind of the norm. But a lot of these people are management, director level, VP level, that are still working all these extra hours and are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and feel like that's what they have to do. >> And often they don't feel like they're in control. So, even the executives, so it's a normal, right, if you're, again, if you're an individual contributor, a lot of stuff is out of your control, if you're a middle manager. But even the folks who are senior said 'I don't feel like I can control my work.' And that seems to be a big part of psychological fulfillment that you need to have the strength to keep, you know, to keep working hard every day. >> And the digital tools make us more connected, it's only compounds that I think. Because, you could be at the sideline of your kids soccer event or sport, you're still checking your email, still the distractions of the screen are there. >> Well, I think that was something, one of the things that came out of it was the number of people that do not disconnect, and are on 24/7, with their personal and their work, especially in North America, was incredibly high on it. You get into Europe, it was a pretty significant difference. Pretty much across the board, I think it was like 85% stay connected on their personal and everything 24/7. >> Instagram, Facebook... >> People aren't giving up their Instagram or their Facebook when they're on vacation. But, they definitely for work side, I mean we saw 70-80% of people that were still somewhat connected for, even when, especially in North America, whether it was just their email, or they check their email once a day. And that's if they even took the vacations, cause that was something that I thought was pretty shocking on how little people took vacation. I mean, I just saw another study that just came out the other day, that there was somewhere like, 270 billion dollars worth of vacation hours wasted last year in the U.S. >> Yeah >> You mean not used up? >> Not used. I think it was 270 billion, I think was the number I saw. Which is an absurd number of days off that people aren't using. >> It's a fascinating topic, and I think it's one of these cutting-edge societal challenges of the tech industry, needs to kind of put on the table. Because, you think about all the stuff we talk about in these conferences like DevOps. You automate away the heavy lifting, the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In life, you see that same kind of potential, I mean, if you can, if we can be more creative, you're seeing projects being more project based, less hourly work. So, is the working changing, does IT shift, what do you guys see there, what's the survey, is there any anecdotal data, or data around, how the types of jobs are changing? Is there more flex time, is there more project basis, more team oriented? Is there any shifts in, kind of, what you're seeing there? >> Well, in the survey we asked about are people talking about it at work? And are there programs? Are people acknowledging that this is happening? And for the most part people aren't really talking about it. I think there is more automation as we grow our data centers up and our cloud, but I don't see people, it just means people are doing more, which is where we started they're doing more with less. >> Well I do know that one of the things that we often see, from my previous shop as well as for here, with Cohesity it's the simplicity of what we can do, does tend to make those projects and those jobs easier, so it frees up some of that time that we weren't getting otherwise. I think, kind of going back, you mentioned a comment about the start up founders, and how quickly they burn out in Silicon Valley. I think it's not just the CEO, the people look at it and they see a startup founder and they think it's the CEO and the three people, but in all reality, if you're a startup that's 50 people and below, you're probably doing just as much time and you have that commit, like, it feels personal to you. I mean, it did to me. And I know for sure when I started at Nexenta, when it was pretty small when we there and as we grew, but also man, I felt some ownership in it. Which meant I did more, and I did more. I definitely got to a point where I was burnt out, I was very much burnt out and it became very obvious. I ended up on a, I hate to say it's a bender, but I was definitely on a bender for a nice long week for a vacation. >> Well, startups are kind of addicting but also so is the dopamine effect with digital and also work. Is there anything that you guys gleaned out of the surveys that were potential solutions to the problem on burnout? Were there any kind of unsolicited [Laughs], like, you know, this needs to change, was there any kind of obvious mandate that came out of the survey? >> So, I think there was some definites on management needs to be more prescriptive. That, that chaos is a big issue. If people don't know what they are there for and what they're doing it's a big issue on it. There was a lot of things about mindfulness, surprised we got quite a few comments on you just have to find that time to step away. There is going to be a little giveaway that I'm not going to give away at the session yet. But so if they are at the session, we have a little giveaway to help people with the mindfulness. >> What time is the session? What day? Where do they find the location? >> So it's on Wednesday at VMworld at 12:30. The location, I actually don't know the room yet because I don't think VMware has told us the room yet. >> Well, VMware World is moving back to Moscone from Vegas after the reconstruction is done out in San Francisco, so that's new. So check the location for the session Wednesday at 12:30. Any other burn out characteristics that we missed that you could share that's important? >> Well, I think the prescriptive thing, the management being more prescriptive is important. Taking, actually taking vacation. Unlimited vacation in some ways can backfire against you, because people don't take it, they don't have their two weeks. You know, the other thing is, I think, just, management has to build in enough profit to let people take some time off. >> It's an HR planning challenge too. >> Yes >> Did work at home come out at all on the survey? People working at home did that come into play? >> So I think it came more into play around the travel side of things than it did the work from home. We did see some interesting things on the travel, it seemed like if you did not travel at all those people tend to get burnt out at a higher rate. The people that travel all the time, really were pretty low on the ones that felt like they were getting burnt out. >> They were numb, they didn't know they were burnt out. >> I mean it could be because they didn't have the life part of the work-life balance, because they were always on a plane, I know that feeling, but I try to find the time. >> Yeah, people who work hard always have a spouse 'hey get off the computer,' or you know, there's paying attention to the things that are right in front of you like family for instance comes up a lot, that I see. >> Connecting to your purpose, whether that's your family purpose or your work purpose was a big part of it. Being able to kind of split your attention that way or get your attention back. >> Well, thanks for doing the survey, and that's a great service to the industry that Cohesity is doing, to use the session up rather than plugging the company's products and gear, to give back. >> Really I think it's super important for companies to have that social responsibility on it. And I think it's, it was a pleasure for me and our team to be able to talk to management and to be able to say, 'this makes sense,' and them agree. Which I don't think there's a lot of companies out there will, so I'm super excited to be able to have it. >> When you start getting the therapy going let me know I'll be the first customer. I need all the help I can get, everyone knows that here. Burnout's tough, it's an important issue to be talked about, and there shouldn't be a stigma associated with it. People can perform best if they are rested. That's well proven. So, congratulations on a great survey. While I've got you guys here I want to get your thoughts on VMworld 2019, it's theCUBE's 10th year covering it. John, you were working at VMWare, running the community, social media, podcasting, blogging, tweeting. >> Laughs: Some of those, yeah. >> When we there for the first year, you were there from the beginning, you've been with us the whole time, I want to personally thank you for being part of our journey, it's been great. A lot's changed in ten years and if you look back at the industry, two acquisitions today by VMWare, Paul Maritz took over the helm that year in 2010 from Diane Greene, laid out essentially Cloud, although it kind of didn't happen the way they thought it would happen, but, guys what's your take on ten years looking back at VMworld? What's the big moments of good, bad, and the ugly? >> To me, VMworld has been a great connecting point for the community. I don't think there has been another community and another network that has grown nearly like VM, where has done and what has happened with it. And VMworld's been a big part of that, I mean it was, whether it was VMworld in one part of the year and Partner Exchange in the other half, but it was that chance to actually see all those people that you talk to so often. I think it's been a world of difference for me. I think I've missed the first one, I think, is all I, maybe the first two. >> Yeah. >> If I remember right? So I've been at pretty much all of them along the way, but it's been unbelievable what VMworld has done for technology on making other companies realize how much bringing the network, your community together, really matters. >> The community piece, John, I want to give thoughts, was to me my observation in the past ten years has been, resiliency comes up, all the different changes in the landscape that we've seen, from the early days of theCUBE, now, to now, much different world. But you look at some of the things, the v0dgeball, the vBrownBags, the vundergrounds, all these things that were organic. VMworlds community when they find something that's good they double down on it, it hangs around, it doesn't really go away, you've got all these cool things happening. >> Well that's the secret of bringing people together both as a community of practice around their professional activity and raising the bar in their profession, their domain, and all that other good stuff happens. I think there's definitely some Vschool and PhD case studies to be written about the value of relationships and trust and ecosystem within VMware. Sure, Microsoft exists, there's other conversations going on in technology. But I think VMWare's is particularly interesting. I wanted to say though, from ten years, I mean ten years ago there was a lot of talk about private cloud, and true cloud, and all that sort of stuff, and you guys handle that at Wikibon, and SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. But, the funny thing is now there's still a conversation going on around how dumb multicloud is and hybrid cloud is for this certain set of people. On the flip side there's trillions of dollars, much of whom is showing up, will be showing up in San Francisco next week. Trillions of dollars of business, you know, this year, solving real world problems today and not being such a pure architecturally or, I don't know, it just seems like, it's just, I'm just mystified that there's still all this multicloud is bad conversation. >> Well I think you brought up a point. The survey we were just talking about really kind of highlights what is becoming a thousand flower blooming kind of enablement happening. The societal challenges that are out there are being solved by software. And if you look at the focus this year of applications, microservices, it's really an application conversation. And it's so much that the infrastructure has to enable that, so finally, maybe this next ten years will be not about the under pinnings. >> So you're saying the next ten won't be the year of VDI? >> Laughing: I think that already kind of happened didn't it? >> It's a huge success, it's called the internet, right, smartphones. Good stuff guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it, good survey. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> John, thanks for coming on. A special CUBE conversation here previewing VMworld 2019 and the survey that they are talking about on Wednesday at 12:30 looking at burn out, check it out, by Cohesity, and John Troyer, TechReckoning, great survey. It's theCUBE, CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. [upbeat music]

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the Special Cube conversation with remote gas. Steve, harried managing director of General Catalyst, is he's a venture capitalist. >> Former >> CTO of the M. Where? Cube alumni. Steve, welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto. You're right across town, but still grab you big news happening. And also get your thoughts on the emerald 2019. Welcome to our remote conversation. >> Yeah, we were close. And yet this makes it even more convenient. We >> love the new format. Bring people into no matter where they are, no matter. Whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that. And two important ones having. We know the emeralds coming next week. But congratulations. In order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX, another cube alumni from we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition. Bye, Splunk today for over a billion dollars. 60% in cash and 40%. And stop. Congratulations. You've been on the board. You've known these guys from VM. We're quite a team. Quite an exit It's a win win for those guys. Congratulations. >> Yeah, Great group of guys. Several, which were at being where, as you as you mentioned, and as you've had on your show, that's great. They were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it. And they're marrying it with spunk, stability to ingest logs and really understand operational >> data. And I think that combination will be very powerful. >> It brings kind of what we've been monitored. Calling Cloud 2.0, Suzie, monitoring 2.0, is really observe ability As the world starts moving into the kinds of service is we're seeing with Cloud on premises operations more than ever, that game has changed much more dynamic, and the security impact is significant. And certainly as as applications connect with its coyote or any I p device having that day, that scales really critical part of that. And I know signal left fax was one of those companies where you invested early, and I remember interviewing a couple of years ago in saying, Damn, these guys might be too early. I mean, they're so smart, they're so on it. But this is an example of skating to where the puck is As we increase, Key would say, These guys were just hitting their stride. Steve, can you Can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important? >> Well, they've been at this for a long time, and they're a great team. I've been involved. Is investor less time? Obviously. But it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world. And, you know, as you discovered, we're in a world of micro service's and containers, and that is definitely hitting its stride right now. And so they were in the right place knowing how >> to monitor this very fast moving >> information and make some sense out of it. So you're a really good job on their part, and it was a pleasure to be >> along for part of the ride with him. >> It's great to me, great founders that have a vision and stay the course because, you know it's always it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around their top micro surfaces and containers way back before became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises, it's easy to get distracted and man that fashion. We'll just jump on this trend of this way. They stayed the course. They stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observe ability. Which, to me is code word for monitoring. 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw Cummings going public companies filing the pager Duty dynatrace. Now you guys with your acquisition with Signal FX, This is an important sector this would normally be viewed in. I t. Rule is kind of list of white space, but it seems to be a much bigger landscape. Can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important? Why is observe ability so hot? Steve? >> Well, it's been this actually had a great market to be in for quite a while. They've been a large number of companies, continue to be both built up, and it's pretty simple. That amount of e commerce, or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the Web has gone up, and so anything that's not performing well or as downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company. And so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on >> Maur for revenue and for custom directions, >> you simply have to have better tools. And that's gonna be something that continues to evolve, that we got more complex, absent, more commerce is going >> to go through them. >> Complexity is actually something that people, a lot of people are talking about. I want to ask you something around today's marketplace, but I want you to compare and contrast it, similar to what your experience wasn't v m Where were you? The CTO virtual ization of all very, very quickly on ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure, and a lot of people were pooh poohing that initially at first, then all sudden became. We've got to kill the M where you know so the resiliency of the M, where was such that they continue to innovate on virtualization, and so that's been a part of the legacy of V M wear, and the embers will cover next next week. But when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud up opportunities with Micro Service's and other other cool things. The role of the application is being is important part of the equation. It used to be the standup infrastructure, and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of change that game. Now you don't need to stand up. Any infrastructure could just deploy an application, and the infrastructure can be code and be self form, so you can have unique requirements. As infrastructure driven by the application, the whole world seemed to have flipped around. Do you see it that way? Is that accurate assessment? What's your thoughts on that? >> I think you're right on a bunch of fronts. People have been calling a different things, but the beauty of the, um where and you know this is a while ago now, but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use. It sort of slid him underneath an added value. But at the same time applications evolved. And so the that path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications. You have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new service. Is that air in the cloud? And as you build up these as they're called cloud Native applications, it really is about the infrastructure. You know. It's job in life is to run applications. It sort of felt like the other way around. It used to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was. It shouldn't be like that anymore. It's about what you need to do to get the job done. And so we see the evolution of the clouds and their service. Is that air there? Certainly the notion of containers and a lot of the stuff that being where is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure Veum, where adds value to them, whatever type >> of application they are. >> It's interesting one of the exciting things in this way that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud in Public Cloud Now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there, done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0, you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud. Even early on, around 2012 2013 we were talking about that of'em world instantly pad Kelsey here, but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated. You got Outpost, you've got Azure stack, among other things. The reality is, if you are cloud native, you might not need to have anything on premise. Like companies like ours with 50 plus people. We don't have an I T department, but most enterprises have stuff on premise, so the nuance these days is around. You know, what's the architecture of of I T. These days, we add security into It's complicated. So these debates can there be a soul cloud for a workload? Certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jet I contract, where it's not necessarily a soul cloud for the entire Department of Defense. It's a soul cloud for the workload, the military application workload or app. The military. It's $10 million application, and it's okay to have one cloud, as we would say, But yet they're going to use Microsoft's cloud for other things. So the ODS having a multiple cloud approach, multiple environments, multiple vendors, if you will, but you don't have to split the cloud up. Her say This is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way, which was have a multi vendor environment split the things. What's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud? Is it okay to have a workload, have a single cloud for that workload and coexist with other clouds? >> It's funny. I've been thinking about this more lately. Where if you went back earlier in time, forgetting cloud, there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you >> can run on, whether it >> be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or Unix system or Olynyk system. And to some extent, people are choosing what would run where, based on the demands of the application, sometimes on price, sometimes on certifications or even what's been poured into the right one. So this is a beating myself, you know, that's that's a while ago. It's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud service is there out there, whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners. I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics. And it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run. And so for getting D'Amore exactly. But think of a virtualization layer that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds. Do you think that's where a lot of the the core software is head of these days really >> enable that toe work better >> as a >> 1,000,000 other use cases, but with storage being moved around >> for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might >> be? But that quarter flexibility reminds me a lot of choosing what application >> would want. Run would run where within your own company >> and the kubernetes trend in containers certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VM. Where's viens beams under the covers over Put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities that's exciting >> and you slap in a P I in front of them and micro service is sort of works in tandem with that so that you could really have your application composed >> across multiple environments. >> And I think the ob surveilling observe ability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way, which is monitoring. Make sure things are operating effectively and combining with data. And so when I heard about the acquisition of signal effects into Splunk, I'm like, There it is. We're back to data. So observe ability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring. But it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used, whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts >> s. So there's more data than ever, for sure, and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost, all that is a big part of our environment still working. The key thing is turning that into some actionable insight, and whether you're using no interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in. How do >> I avoid false false >> positives? How do I only alert people when needed, then that allows you to do what everyone's talked about for 30 years, which is automatic remediation. But for now, let's talk about it. Is how do I process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action? >> Do you want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation? You've been with us at the Cube since 2010. I think our first cube event was A M C. World 2010. That show doesn't existing longer because that folded into Del Technologies world. So VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the Cube. You've been around? Of course, you guys had VM worlds had their 10th anniversary was 2013 as a show. But this is our 10th year. Well, thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral. Appreciate all that. So I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you been with Doug, you've vm world. What's the most exciting moments? What are moments that you can say? Hey, that was an amazing time. That was a grind, but we got through it. Funny moments. Your thoughts. >> Boy, that's a tough question. I've enjoyed working with you, John and the Cube. There's been somebody really interesting things for me. The sum of the big acquisitions that we went through a V Um, where? Where? I think the NSX exposition. When we get a syrah, I think that really pushed us an interesting spots. But we have gone through, uh, I pose an acquisition ourself by the emcee begun Theo. It's a pretty vicious competition from Be Citrix Airs in or Microsoft. Yeah, that's just the joy of being a These companies is lots of ups and downs along the way that they almost kind of fit together to make an exciting life. >> What was some moments for you? I know you had left was the 2015 or 26 boys with your last day of >> the world. You go now, you know about six years. >> What do you miss about the end? Where >> the team is what everyone kind of cliche says. But it's totally true. The chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Koi is so I definitely missed that Miss Shipping products. You don't get to do that as much directly as a venture capitalist. But on the flip side, this is a great world to be, and I get to see enthusiastic. You're very optimistic founders all day long, pushing the envelope. And while that was existing at the end where, uh, it's it's what I see every single day here. >> You've been on The Cube 10 times at the M World. That's the all time spot you're tied for. First congratulates on the leaderboard. It's been a great 10 years. Going forward. We've seen are so good. Looking back, I would say that you know Palmer, it's taking over from Diane Greene. Really set the table. He actually laid out. Essentially, what I think now is a clearly a cloud SAS architecture. I think he got that pretty much right again. Or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time. There's some things that didn't materialize is fast, but ultimately from core perspective. You guys got that right, Um, and then went in Try to do the cloud. But then and this year it comes in for suffered to find, you know, line with Amazon. And since that time, the stock has been really kind of it on the right. So, you know, some key moments there for Of'em. Where from Self >> Somali. More stuff. It's fun to see Pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there. But I think you know, there's there's a hugely talented team of execs there. Pat L Singers come >> in and done a great job. I think, Greg, >> you and all these folks that Aaron, >> there are good thinkers. And so I >> think you'll consider just continue to see it evolved. Quite event and probably some cool announcements next week. >> Talk aboutthe roll Ragu and the team play because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight. He avoids it. I know he did talk to him privately that he won't come on the Q. I don't know what the other guys go on other guys in jail, so he's been instrumental. He was really critical in multiple deals. Could you share some insight into his role at bm bm were and why it's been so important. >> I'll push him to get on, especially now that you have remote. You can probably grab him now. He and Rajiv and Rayo Funeral Just all the guys air. I think he and Reggie basically split up half and half of the products. But Roger is very, very seminal in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working Well, he's a good friend in a very smart guy. >> Well, I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna get me in a headlock and tell him to come on the Cube this year. We want him on. He's a great, great great guest. He's certainly knowledgeable going forward. Steve, 10 years out, we still got 10 more years of great change coming. If you look at the wee that's coming, you're out investing in companies again. You had one big exit today with the $1,000,000,000 acquisition that was happen by Splunk and signal effects. Ah, lot more action. You've been investing in security. What's your outlook? As you look at the next 10 years is a lot more action to happen. We seem to be early days in this new modern era. Historic time in the computer industry as applications without dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do. What do you excited about? >> There's a million things I get to see every day, which are clearly where the world is headed. But I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure, which the job in life of infrastructure is to run applications. And so then you look at applications. How are they changing and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them? And if you look at the future of applications, it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter. It's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on. I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking, you could do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the back end. I kind of look at all these application patterns and really trying to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's gonna be needed to run them. I think we have plenty of head room of interesting ideas ahead. >> Stew, Dave and I were talks to Dave. Stupid Valenti student and I were talking about, you know, as infrastructure and cloud get automate as automation comes in, new waves are gonna be formed from it. What new waves do you see? Is it like R P ay, ay, ay, ay. Because as those things get sucked in and the ships and two new waves What? Oh, that's some of the key ways people should pay attention to. I'm not saying the industries is going away, but as it becomes automated, and as the shift happens, the value still is there. Where is those new waves? >> Well, then, today it looks like most applications they're gonna be composed of a lot of service is, um and I think they're gonna be able. They're going to need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as a headless 80. I front ends, and so again, I think at the end of the day, this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability after crunch do tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and predictability in the network and all those air very hard problems that we've been working on for a while. I think we'll keep working on them and new forms for the next 10 years at least. >> Awesome. Steve. Thanks for being a friend with us in the queue, but you're funny. Favorite moment of the Q. Can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences? Your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way, >> you go ugly, actually enjoyed it. I mean, it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on, but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the Cube like that was that was really cool. But now the fact that I'm on my laptop, you doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome. So think you're following the same patterns of the other, have the other applications moving the cloud and having good user experiences. >> Cube native here software native Steve. Thank you so much for stating the time commenting on the acquisition. I know it's fresh on the press. Ah, lot more analysis and cut to come next week. It's certainly I'll be co hosting at Splunk dot com later in the year. So I'm looking forward to connect with a team there and again. Thanks for all your contribution into the cube community. We really appreciate one. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks. You guys are awesome. Thanks for chatting. >> Okay. Steve Herod, managing director at general counsel, Top tier VC From here in Silicon Valley and offices around the world, I'm John for breaking down the news as well as a V Emerald preview with the former CTO of'em. Were Steve hair now a big time venture capitalists. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to the special cube conversation with a remote guest Steve Herod managing director of general kennel s he's a venture capitalist former CTO of VMware cube alumni Steve welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto you're right across town but still we're gonna grab you big news happening and also get your thoughts on the Emerald 2019 welcome to our remote conversation yeah hey Jon yeah we're close and yet this makes it even more convenient go we'd love the new format of bring people into no matter where they are no matter what whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that and and two important ones to having we we know vm world's coming next week but congratulations in order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX another cube alumni firm we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition by Splunk today for over a billion dollars sixty percent in cash and forty percent in stop congratulations you've been on the board you've known these guys from VMware quite a team quite an exit it's a win-win for those guys congratulations yeah great group of guys several of which were at VMware has you as you mentioned and as you've had on your show that's great they were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it and they're marrying it with spunks ability to ingest logs and really understand operational data and I think the combination will be very powerful it brings kind of what we've been monitoring cloud 2.0 essentially monitoring 2.0 is really observability as the world starts moving into the the kinds of services we're seeing with cloud and on-premises operations more than ever that game has changes much more dynamic and the security impact is significant and certainly as applications connect whether it's IOT or any IP device having that data at scale is really a critical part of that and I know signal FX was one of those companies where you invested early and I remember interview them a couple years ago and saying damn these guys might be too early I mean they're so smart they're so on it but this is an example of skating to where the as Wayne Gretzky would say these guys were just hitting their stride Steve can you can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important well they've been at this for a long time and they're a great team I've been involved as an investor less time obviously but yeah it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world and you know as you discovered we're in a world of micro services and containers and that is definitely hitting its stride right now and so they were in the right place knowing how to monitor this very fast moving information and and make some sense out of it so yeah really good job on their part and it was a pleasure to be along for part of the ride with them it's great to meet great founders that have a vision and stay the course because you know it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around ok we're talking micro services and containers way back before it became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises it's easy to get distracted and it's fashion well just jump on this trend or this wave they stayed the course they stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observability which to me is code word for monitoring 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw companies going public companies filing the pager Duty dynaTrace now the you guys with your acquisition with signal FX this is an important sector this would normally be viewed in the IT world as kind of lists of white space but it seems to be a much bigger landscape can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important why is observability so hot Steve well it's been this actually been a great market to be in for quite a while they've been a large number of companies continuing to be both built up and it's pretty simple the amount of e-commerce or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the web has gone up and so anything is not performing well or house downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company and so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on more for revenue and for customer interactions you know simply you have to have better tools and that's gonna be something that continues to evolve we have more complex apps and more commerce is going to go through them complexity is obviously something that people a lot of people are talking about I want to ask you something around today's marketplace but I want you to compare and contrast it similarly to what your experience was at VMware when you the CTO you know virtualization evolved very very quickly and ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure and a lot of people were pooh-poohing that initially at first and then all the sudden became we got to kill VMware and you know so the resiliency of VMware was such that they continued to innovate on virtualization and so that's been you know part of the legacy of VMware and VM roads will cover next next week but when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud opportunities with micro services and other other cool things the the role of the application is being is important part of the equation it used to be the stand up infrastructure and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of changed that game now you don't need to stand up any infrastructure you can just deploy an application then the infrastructure can be code and be self formed so you can have unique requirements as infrastructure driven by the application the whole world seems to have flipped around do you see it that way is that accurate assessment and what's your thoughts on that I think you're right on a bunch of fronts people have been calling it different things but the beauty of VMware and you know this is a while ago now but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use it sort of slid in underneath and added value but at the same time applications evolved and so the path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications you have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new services that are in the cloud and as you build up these as they're called cloud native applications it really is about the infrastructure you know it's job and life as to run applications and it's it sort of felt like the other way around it needs to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was it shouldn't be like that anymore it's about what what you need to do to get the job done and so we see the evolution of the clouds and their services that are there certainly the notion of containers and a lot the stuff that VMware is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure VMware adds value to them whatever type of application they are it's interesting one of the exciting things in this wave that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud and public cloud now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0 you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud even early on around 2012-2013 we were talking about that at VMworld you know certainly Pat Kelson here but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated you got outpost you got Azure stack among other things the reality is if you are cloud native you might not need to have anything on premise like companies like ours with 50 plus people we don't have an IT department but most enterprises have stuff on premise so the the nuance these days is around you know what's the architecture of IT these days when you add security into it's complicated so there's debates can there be a sole cloud for a workload certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jedi contract where it's not necessarily a sole cloud for the entire department of defense it's a sole cloud for the workload the military application workload or app the military it's 10 billion dollar application and it's okay to have one cloud as we would say but yet they're gonna use Microsoft's cloud for other things so the DoD's having a multiple cloud approach multiple environments multiple vendors if you will but you don't have to split the cloud up or say this is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way which was have a multi-vendor environment split two things what's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud is it okay to have a workload have a single clap for that workload and coexist with other clouds it's funny I've been thinking about this more lately where if you went back earlier in time forgetting cloud there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you could run on whether it be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or UNIX system or a Linux system and to some extent people are choosing what would run where based on the demands of the application sometimes on price sometimes on certifications or even what's been ported to the right one so this is I'm beating myself but you know that's that's a while ago it's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud services are out there whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics and it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run and so forgetting VMware exactly but think of a virtualization layer that that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds I do think that's where a lot of the you know the core software is head of these days to really enable that to work better and so a million other use cases with with you know storage being moved around for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might be but that core of flexibility reminds me a lot of you know choosing what application would one run would run where within your own company and the kubernetes trend in container certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VMware's on the ends beams under the covers or put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities so it's exciting and you slap an API in front of them and and micro-services sort of works in tandem with that so that you you could really have your application composed across multiple environments and I think the observable observability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way which is monitoring making sure things are operating effectively and combining with data and so when I heard about the acquisition of signal FX into Splunk I'm like there it is we're back to data so observability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring but it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts so there's more data than ever for sure and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost all that is a big part of our you know the environments we all work and the key thing is turning that into some actionable insight and whether you're using you know interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in do I avoid false false positives how do i only alert people when needed and then that allows you to do what everyone has talked about for 30 years which is automatic remediation but for now let's talk about it is how do i process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action see we want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation you've been with us at the cube since 2010 I think our first cube event was EMC world 2010 that show doesn't exist any longer because that folded into Dell technologies world so VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the cube cubes been around of course you guys had the VM worlds had their 10th anniversary I think was 2013 as a show but this is our 10th year I want to thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral appreciate all that so I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you've been with the cube VMworld what's the most exciting moments what are moments that you can say hey that was an amazing time that was a grind but we got through it funny moments your thoughts yeah boy that's a tough question I've enjoyed you know working with you John and the cube there have been so many really interesting things for me the some of the big acquisitions that we went through at VMware where I think the nsx acquisition when we get nasarah I think that really pushed us in an interesting spot but we had gone through IPOs and acquisition ourselves by EMC and we've gone through some pretty vicious competition from whether it be Citrix or Zin or Microsoft yeah that's just the joy of being at these companies it's lots of ups and downs along the way but they all kind of fit together to make an exciting life what were some moments for you I know you had left was a twenty fifteen or twenty six point eight vs world you go down there yeah about six years what do you miss about VMware the team is what everyone kind of cliche says but it's totally true the chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Co ideas so I definitely missed that miss shipping products you don't get to do that as much as a venture capitalist but but on the flip side this is a great world to be and I get to see enthusiastic you know very optimistic founders all day long pushing the envelope and while that was existing at the EM where it's it's what I see every single day here you've been on the cube ten times at vmworld that's the all time spot you're tied but first congratulations on the leaderboard well it's been a great ten years going forward we've seen more so go looking back I would say that you know Palmer it's taking over from Diane Greene really set the table he actually laid out essentially what I think now as a clearly a cloud SAS architecture I think he got that pretty much right again or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time though some things that didn't materialize as fast but ultimately from a core perspective you guys got that right and then went in try to do the cloud but then and this year it comes in for a software-defined you know line with Amazon and since that time the stock has been really kind of up to the right so you know some key moments there for VMware from small somalia more stuff it's fun to see pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there but I think you know there's there's a hugely talented team of executives there Pat Yeltsin jurors come in and done a great job I think Raghu and all these folks that are in there are good thinkers and so I think you'll consider to continue to see it evolve quite a bit and probably some cool announcements next week talk about the role Raghu and the team played because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight he avoids it I know he'd I've talked to him privately he won't come on the qoi let the other guys go on other guys and gals so he's been instrumental he was really critical in multiple deals could you share some insight into his role at VMware VMware and why it's been so important well I'll push them to get on especially now that you have remote you can probably grab him no he and Rajiv and andraia Ferrell just all the guys are I think he and regime basically split up half and half of the products but I know Raghu is very very similar in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working well he's good friend in a very smart guy well I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna give him in a headlock and tell him to come on the cube this year we want him on he's a great great great guest he's certainly knowledgeable going forward Steve 10 years out we still got 10 more years of great change coming if you look at the wave that's coming you're out investing in companies again you had one big exit today with the billion dollar acquisition that was happening by Splunk and signal affects a lot more action you've been investing in security what's your outlook as you look at the next ten years there's a lot more action to happen we seem to be early days in this new modern era historic time in the computer industry has applications of now dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do what are you excited about there's there's a million things I get to see everyday which are clearly where the world is headed but I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure which the job and life of infrastructure is to run applications and so then you look at applications how are they changing and and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them and if you look at the future of applications it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter it's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking you can do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the backend so I kind of look at all these application patterns and really try to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's going to be needed to run them I think we have plenty of headroom of interesting ideas ahead stew Dave and I were talks to Dave Stuben they want this too many man died we're talking about you know as infrastructure and cloud get automated as automation comes in new waves are gonna be formed from it what new waves do you see is it's like RPAs a I I mean because as those things get sucked in and they ships in to new waves what are the some of the key ways people should pay attention to I'm not saying the inverse tress is going away but as it becomes automated and as the shift happens the value still is there where is those new waves well I think today it looks like most applications are going to be composed of a lot of services and I think they're gonna be able they're gonna need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as headless api friends and so again I think at the end of the day this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability have to crunch through tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and ability in the network and all those are very hard problems that we've been working on for a while I think we're gonna keep working on them and new forms for the next ten years at least awesome see thanks for being a friend with us in the cube what's your funny favorite moment of the Q can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way you've come a long way actually I've enjoyed it I mean it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the cube like that was that was really cool but now the fact that I'm on my laptop you know doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome so I think you're following the same patterns of the other of the other applications moving to the cloud and having good user experience because cube native here software if the male native Steve thank you so much for staying the time commenting on the acquisition I know it's fresh on the press a lot more analysis and cut to come next week it's certainly I'll be co-hosting ATS plunks Kampf later in the year so I'm looking forward to connecting with the team there and again thanks for all your contribution into the cube community we really appreciate it one thank you for your time thanks John you guys are awesome thanks for chatting okay Steve Herod managing director at General Counsel top tier VC from here in Silicon Valley and they have offices around the world I'm Jean ferré breaking down the news as well as a VM real preview with the former CTO of VMware Steve hare now a big-time venture capitalist I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Cloud next nineteen Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone here. Live Cube coverage in San Francisco for Google Clouds Conference call Google Next twenty nineteen. Hashtag Google next nineteen. I'm John for us to meet him in and Dave along with a special Cuban sites. Guess Cory Quinn, Cloud a calm said Duck Bill Group will also be filling in as a host on the Cube at a variety of Cloud native shows. Corey, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming >> on. Great to see me again. Thank you for having me >> and still you looking beautiful. Brilliant is always Dave. You're handsome. Okay, we're here in the Cube, breaking it down our guys. Seriously, let's let's let's wrap this up real quick. And then we'LL get into some of the fun conversations around some of the observations. But Day one's over. Clearly, Anthos is not just the rebrand. Although the CMO clearly talked about how wow has done that, they want to add more stuff into it. So that's the big topic here. We saw the migration tool and those migrate and then a lot of sun apogee here. AP eyes thoughts on Day one. >> Yes, eso John Anthos. I'm still trying to squint through it a little bit, and it's it's more than just Cooper Netease. We know that Google has a strong position, and being the open cloud is they've been saying for a couple of years. But you know what? Air these services who? The partners, How is this different from the, You know, dozens of Cooper, Nettie says. Solutions that are out there. So there's great buzz here at the show, Really good attendance here. A lot of really smart people. So we expect that coming off Google show So good start Day one. It was really excited to dig with you on some of the answers stuff as well as some of the surveillance pieces, which I've got some commentary on >> our partner and Chan sent a lot of time on the state. Duggan Cory, I know you've been putting in your ear the ground. What's happening? What do you see what he reporting? What have you collected? The >> I think one of the biggest things that I'm seeing in this entire conference to date has been almost a mind shift change. I mean, this is conferences called Google Next, and for a long time that's been one of the biggest problems. They're focusing on what's next rather than what is today, and they're inventing the future to almost at the expense of the present. I think the big messaging today was both about reassuring enterprises that yes, they're serious about this and also building a narrative where there now talking about coming at this from a position of being able to embrace customers where they are and speak their language? I think that that's transformative for Google. And it's something I don't think that we've seen them do seriously, at least not for very long. >> Dave. We've been talking about this all the time. Do they have the enterprise? Charles. We've been following the new team. When Diane Greene came in here to put the pieces together, it was a tough job. She had. They put the pieces together. But as Cory's pointing out, some one's like they're growing up now, saying Okay, we gotta realize that customers matter, not just addict attack or the future. This has been an Amazon playbook, customer, customer, customer and build a product. Customers. It seems to be your thoughts on this. >> Well, so I think Corey made a good point is they're always looking at the future. And if you want to get beyond search male and maps, I got to solve a problem today. And I'm not sure exactly like you said Stew. What problem Anthos is solving. I think it may still be a little early for this multi cloud management, but I think it is coming, you know, look, to think about how Amazon talks. Well, we're gonna eliminate heavy lifting. Microsoft clearly is got a software, a state that they could help you connect, you know, Oracle. Same. Same who? Google. It's always been about the tech and the future, and they're starting to get there, but still about to me, the tech and the future. >> It's a tragic Corey. I remember. I believe you were quoted in ah. News article recently is that Amazon listens to customers and Google historically talks to customers and tells them this is the way you should be doing it with a new Google. Now, >> I don't know. I don't think you change anything. Is biggest Google overnight. I think that there's a long story tradition of the Google engineer being the smartest person in the room. Just ask them. I'm kidding. You won't have to ask them. They're going to tell you on prompted. And I think that has to change because fundamentally addressing developers is a great way of building traction. It's a great way of getting to where they tend to be. But developers generally do not sign fifty million dollar deals. Well, more than once anyway. >> Well, this is a good point. This pretty customer attraction, which I think they've shown chops for the work they're doing that cnc f with continued open source. Great. But then when you got to go support the open source when you got to start putting lays together, this is where you start to get into procurement. Some requirements operations, security, a whole new level of grinding it out. I mean, the enterprise is a grind it out game. Google now has to go down that road stew. Dave, Corey, do you think they're ready? You think they're ready to grind it out? >> Way talked about in our kickoff this morning. Partnerships are critical and they had a bunch of really good ones up on stage this morning. You know, Cisco, VM wear some good ones to hang your hat on. You know, I would like to see more from an application standpoint as to where they sent him then they But you >> know, there's no question. I mean, I think there's an emphatic yes. Why? Because they got the global scale. They got the world's biggest cloud. They get a ton of dough. You know, we always say, though the best tech doesn't always win, and that's true. But usually the best tech runs out of money or they give up. You know, I don't see that happening in, >> Well, it's in the >> midterm or even semi long term for Google. So So I do think they have the chops to grind it out. >> I mean, I think they have attack. I've always said that love some of their tech, but they try to force Google Tech down the enterprise throats over the years. And I think Diane Green realized that that was the start of seeing real product management shop start to come in some of the work that they know they gotta get down and dirty on But to me it's a story that matters. The story has to be there. I think we're starting to see here, at least from my observation story of customers. So get in salt, create value, think this whole positioning of we want to be the open cloud where they say, Oh, you want to negotiate your contracts Don't want lock in You want developer productivity and you want operations I think it's a smart play by Google Stew. I think that's a good move. And again there, the dark horse in this. They don't have a lot to lose by going changing the game, changing the rules. Amazon, certainly in the lead, has a lot to lose, but they're so far ahead. Google just kind of catch up pretty quickly if they make the right moves. >> T K is making a lot of the right moves, but there's only so much it can be done so quickly. When you wind up in a story like we're seeing right now with customers who are taking workloads and haven't really been touched in there on from environments since nineteen ninety eight and they're migrating them into a GP environment and GPS formal deprecation Policy says We'LL give you one year's notice before turning anything off once it goes, g et. That's no time at all For an enterprise. Wait, we might have to move again. Absolutely not. It's still a language >> A C enterprise's years just to figure out Should we move? And where do we dio >> exactly their enterprise to go out of business and some of their divisions wouldn't know for five >> years. So is Google. What's what's the reaction when you press them on this, >> uh, usually starts with well, actually, And then they breathe and they reach for a whiteboard to show me exactly why I'm wrong. And then I lose interest and wander off, at which point they realized, Wow, you have no attention span for anything. Would you like to work here? And so far no dice, but we'LL see. >> So that's it. Well, that's a good business model, right? I think. Still your reaction to that? I mean, yeah, I read that they support rail For what? A deck like zillions of years. Right. This is what an example of how an enterprise needs to behave. >> Well, right, John Thie question we've had for a number of years is, you know, can cos b'more googly on DH. You know, the message here seems to be more. We're going to meet you where we are. We're going to be able to work with you on that. But there's some of those underlying things that Cory brings out that that need to change here. So that's a big change for Google. >> So what is the story that we heard from from Thomas carrying today? He said, Hybrid cloud Mina multi cloud, consistent framework with standard infrastructure in a platform to secure and manage data across the enterprise. Okay, sounds good. A lot of work to be done there. If you think about I mean, look at Amazon hybrid guard. If you announce outposts doesn't shift till later this year, it's a one small slice. There's got to be partnerships. There's gotta be an ecosystem to deliver on those three components of the vision on the story, and I say there's a lot of work to be done there now. What I do like about it is I do think that that multi cloud is a problem. I don't think thus far from most enterprises, it's a strategy I think it's if in multi vendor and so it will become a problem. The question I have is who's going to be in the best position to solve that problem? And you pointed out today still, well, Google has got VM wears a partner. Sisko is a partner. Red Hat as a partner. You know, IBM and Red Hat sort of lining up on that. Maybe service now tries to get into that game, but it's a wide open space. It's jump ball. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that I worry a little about and, you know, love. Corey's opinion on this is, you know, Google. Absolutely. If you talk about the container space, clear leadership, you know, first time I heard about containers, Google was front and center. They're leading this Cooper Netease march, but communities isn't magic, and even their server lis move movement. John and I interviewed Polly today, and it's very much, you know, Kay Native, we're going to take your containers and Goober Netease and extended service. That's not what I hear from you know, customers that I talked to today that are doing survivalists according what? What? What? What's your take there. >> I think that you sort of see almost the same problem emerging both with that narrative and the current multi cloud approach. It's It's not the fact that I can take this arbitrary code and Ronit anywhere that makes something server. Lis. We have a restaurant to run code or a raspberry pie or a burning dumpster with enterprise logo on the side of it that does. That isn't what's interesting. That isn't what delivers value to customers. It's the event model for starters, and I think right now that's not quite there. A lot of stuff. It's been announced and is coming out as we speak. And various block Post is still http endpoint activated, which means that you're not quite to an event model separately. What we're seeing with Anthos and the current approach to multicloud is you can deploy this to any cloud provider you'd like. Well, yes, in so far is a cloud provider to you is a bunch of disc, a pile of VMs and a network, and that's about it. That's not a cloud in the modern sense that is effectively outsourcing your data center and you'll find it runs on money pretty quickly. Once you start down that path, it's the higher level services, these renovations. >> This brings up a good point and that I think what I'm seeing and this is what I think, A lot of people, it's very aspirational. Views on Google People love Google. They love. They know about Google and they hope that they're as good as Amazon tomorrow. And let's just face it, Amazon is way out front. So I think this expectations for Google that are a little bit to hide. I think what I'm hearing the executives, at least the positive side would be. They understand where they are. I mean, the fact that we're not home on edge and I ot and all these other things, it means that they're still in foundational mode, in my opinion. So I mean, think about it. They're just getting their act together, building that foundational things. So I think they're cautious because we're not hearing about the eye ot. We're not hearing about some of the more advanced challenges that the enterprise is air. Having heard a little bit about from the sigh from a group that came on about data migration, Sata, Gata so OK, they got database at the Big Cloud. Big table, Big queer. OK, great stuff. Ml So data, certainly in their wheelhouse. But outside of that, I mean they're still foundational. So >> tomorrow's product day, though. So you know he may be here more there. I'm surprised they didn't hear more about machine intelligence. Give it. No, they talked about a little bit. But this company is the leader in a >> way. Maybe that's part of the issue. And I think that there is no question that when you want something far future that looks like robots from space Bill, you go to Google. You know that. I think there's a lot less of an awareness that Okay, I just need a bunch of the EMS to run somewhere, and I feel like that is more or less. It's a story of today, >> and you know Google. I mean, like their story. You know, I love the code cloud code, cloud run, cloud building. They have all the right. Like Jeff Bob's like linguistic that gets my attention. You get is kind of like it feels like it feels like they're really close. It's getting so >> far away. Cultures also extremely hard. You have a bunch of execs that have just shown up from Oracle seemingly yesterday in these terms, and there's a lot of knee jerk reactions of, Oh, Google is now taking on a bunch of Oracle approaches, like hiring sales people and talking to customers. That's not a bad thing. Meanwhile, the executives who come Teo out of Oracle after decades there and are now working at Google. We're having to adjust to a more rapid pace of innovation to this new world in which they have customers that don't actively hate. Um, and it's turning into a very different story for everyone involved. I'm curious to see what comes out of it, but it's still very much earlier, >> and I think they could build fast. Like you said, they like Google's. The parties like him. What they don't like about Google is responsiveness and being, you know, the white gloves they need. They need to have that kind of service ability. >> And Google also, by having a single overarching brand in the term of the word Google is their consumer efforts do wind up playing into people's perception of through the clouds like yes, we want Google to listen to us? No, not through our thermostats. >> Well, they got a lot of Regis developing. They got the footprint. Guys, great job student. Final comments. >> I mean, just you talk about the customer you've heard there was. You know, my comment. My comment on Twitter this morning that got the most reaction is you no question to retail or why are you choosing Google Cloud? Answer is, you're not Amazon, and you know, the long and short being the alternative to a leader in the market today. Not a bad thing. So Google has, you know, a good position at the market. They we always knew that they had great tak es o >> Also thing on that comments do is that I think in watching Google, I think I personally in critical of what they need to do more obviously. But they know their people are doing the work. I mean, you've got to grind it out to me. This is a grind it out game. It's on ly early. You gotta get the discipline up there. They got the right product management type chops and there Can they get those things done that Thomas Curry and, um, it's Avery can bring to the table and kind of shed the Oracle and put the New Jersey on and fight the battle with the new Google Way. That's going to be the tell Signe. >> Well, the hard part for me is it. So it's hard to measure. You see some logo's. You don't know what they're really buy. I mean, with them is on, you know, it's it's infrastructures of service. Microsoft. Okay, I'm not sure. How much is there Oracle? Clearly not sure, you know, etcetera. But so lookit Proof was talking to customers, right? Huh? How much they're actually adopting this stuff for riel Business problems. >> Yeah, not multi cloud if your infrastructure runs on a different cloud provider. But you're using g sweet. I mean that that's not really what people think of when they say multi cloud. But that is what analysts chalk it up as something >> it's a battle at least accomplishes lining up. You got Amazon, Microsoft, Google lying it up. It's the cube coverage wrapping it up with the team here day one of three days of wall to wall coverage. Stay with us. Go to the cube dot net the check out all the video silken angle dot com. We have a special report and a lot of constant flowing there, and we're back with more coverage tomorrow day, too. Thanks for watching.

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

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco in Moscone South. We're on the ground floor here at Google Next, Google's Cloud conference. I'm chatting with Stu Miniman; Dave Vellante's also hosting. He's out there getting stories. Our next two guests: Dana Berg, Chief Operating Officer of SADA and Chris Lehman, Head of Engineering for SADA. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. We're here on the ground floor. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is exciting. I feel like a movie star right here. >> It's game day here. All the tech athletes are out, Dave. If you look at the show, look at the demographics, hardcore developers, lot of IT, leaders also here, cloud architects, a lot of people trying to figure it out. We heard the keynote. Google is bringing a lot to the table. So what's new with you guys? You guys recently sold your Microsoft business, going all-in on Google. Talk about that relationship. >> We are. This is a brand new day for SADA. The energy around this place, where we are in the market, and where we are with the expanded attendance here has actually reaffirmed our business strategy to go all-in with Google. I don't know if you are aware but SADA has been around for almost 20 years. Historically have always been leaders in bringing people to the cloud even before there was really much of a cloud. We were a you know a pilot partner within Microsoft and Google and had a great thriving Microsoft business but an even bigger Google business and you know, we looked at the tea leaves, we looked at where we wanted to be, and aligned with a company that shared our mission and values and it was a clear choice. We chose Google. We made a very specific and deliberate act to sell off our Microsoft business so that we could take the horsepower of all of our engineering staff and apply them to Google. >> It's interesting you know, we've been around for 10 years doing theCUBE, go to a lot of events, I mean Dave Vellante, Stu, and I have been around for 30 years covering the IT, you guys 20 years. You guys have seen many ways of innovation come and go. Now you're going all in on Google. What is it about this wave right now that made that decision? What do you guys see? You're seeing something early here. Expand on that. Give us some color commentary because there's a wave here, right? A lot of people try. It's a combination of things. I mean, we saw the client-server thing. We saw that movement. Also the internet, we saw the web, mobile, now it's cloud. What's the big wave? What are you guys riding? >> I think there's a couple of things and I think it's unique to, philosophically, how we think of our real special relationship with Google. There is a momentum, right, and not to quote like a Bernie Sanders, but, seems like there's a revolution going on here, right, and, you know, I think, you know, what we see when we look around and we hear conversations and even with our customers, the way that we're all winning together is because we're winning the hearts and minds of the people inside of our customer base that are actually the ones responsible for inventing and the ones responsible for building, so when we're in board rooms and we're selling and along with Google, we're talking with developers, we're talking with designers, we're talking about people that are actually driving the vision for these business applications. We're not always talking to the CIO down like some of our other competitors seems to have only been able to sell that way. We're talking about the people responsible for not only constructing it but maintaining it. So that revolution is there. These folks are bubbling that up and they're seeing the real value inside of Google and what is that value from our point of view, and why did we make such a bold statement just to stick with Google is, and we saw Thomas today echo this, I think there's very few cloud providers that are bold enough to actually lead with the fact that we want our customers to have full choice whether you're using GCP or not. We want to build, architect, and manufacture a product offering that allows you to keep your stuff in your data centers, move your stuff to AWS. That power of choice is really not like what we've never heard anywhere else. >> And then on top of that, too, you got an application renaissance, right? A whole new way of coding, infrastructure that's programmable and going away, I mean if you think about what that does to the existing infrastructures, they can now mix and match and rearchitect everything from scratch and accelerate the app movement. >> Well, that's absolutely true, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are managed services in the cloud which makes it dramatically easier to build applications of course, so there's no question about that. Some of the offerings on GCP are particularly attractive for our clients, particularly the managed Kubernetes service. That's where we're seeing perhaps most of the interest that we're seeing, like that's a very common theme. Also the ML stack is an area that our customers are very interested in. >> Chris, can you bring us in some of those customer environments, you know, one of the things you hear, you know, most customers, it's, "I've got my application portfolio." Modernizing that is pretty challenging. There are some things that are kind of easy, some things that take a lot more work, but, you know, migration is one of those things that makes most people that have been in IT a while cringe because there's always the devil in the details and something goes wrong once you've got 95 percent done. What are you seeing, what's working, what's not working, how's the role of data changing, and all of that? >> I think migrations are usually more complex than they at first appear and so even with best intentions thinking that customers can just move their workloads seamlessly to the cloud have actually in practice been more challenging. So some of the areas that we find challenges are around data migration, especially in the context of zero downtime. That's always more difficult than with applications. So that's definitely an area that were we're spending a lot of time working with our customers to deliver. >> Just to add to that, I have to keep reminding myself of the name, but obviously the Anthos announcement today sounds incredibly intriguing as a lower barrier of effort to actually migrate. Our customers have been trying to really absorb and take a hold of Kubernetes and can it containerize methods for a long time. Some are having a harder time doing it than others. I think Anthos promises to make that endeavor much, much easier, and I think about as we leave here this week and we go back and we reeducate our own engineering teams as well as our customers, I think we might see some highly accelerated project timelines go from here down to here. >> And the demo that Jennifer Lynn did was pretty impressive. I mean, running inside of containers, whether it's VMs, and then having service patches on the horizon coming to the table is going to change the implementation delivery piece too in a massive way. I mean, you've got-- >> Oh, absolutely. >> Code, build, run on the cloud side, but this this kind of changes the equation on your end. Can you guys share the insight into that equation, because Google's clearly posturing to be partner friendly. You guys are a big partner now. You're going all-in. This is an interesting dynamic because you can focus on solving customers' problems. All this heavy lifting kind of goes away. Talk about the impact to you as a partner when you look at Anthem, Anthem migrate in particular, some of these migration challenges with containers and Kubernetes seems like it's a perfect storm right now to kind of jump in and do more, faster. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's certainly very interesting. Well, we'll want to take a really hard look at it. I mean, a very, very cool announcement. Moving to containers in the source prior to the migration obviously solves a lot of challenges so for that reason, it's definitely a move forward. >> And I think... You know, we always talk about, in this industry, the acceleration for consumption, but really that's a poor way of saying... Probably what we should be saying is an acceleration of value. So we're constantly in this battle to try and deliver value to our customers faster. That's what our customers want, right, and in essence we see Anthos as being potentially a big game-changer there so that, you know, our CIOs that we're talking with can show to their various stakeholders that they are making very good proactive moves into the cloud at lower-caught barriers of entry, right? >> Yeah. So, you brought up the the ML piece of Google. Wondering if you could help share a little bit on that. When I think back two years ago, you know, data was really at the core of what a lot of what Google was talking about. I was actually surprised not to hear a lot of it on the main stage this morning, but you know, AI, ML, what are you doing, what are your customers doing, does Google have leadership in the space? >> Google certainly has leadership in the space. Our customers, I think, relatively universally, think that their ML stack is the strongest among the competitors, but I think in practice what we're finding is there's a lot more urgency as far as just literal data migrations off of their data centers into the cloud, and I foresee a lot more AI and ML work as more move in. >> John: Yeah. >> So you might, in our booth here, not to give a plug, but we've got a booth down at the end with a full-fledged racing car, just to talk about the art of the possible with AI and ML. Our engineering teams in the race teams that we sponsor, they're there, the driver's there, you should go down and talk to 'em. We've taken all the race telemetry data for the last six months and all of his races and practices, we've aggregated that data all into GCP, run AI and ML algorithms on it to provide his racing team some very predictive ways that he can get better and that team can get better, and so I'd invite just anybody that wants to go there and take a look at, even if you're in banking, or if you're in retail, or if you're in health care, take a look at some of how that was done, because it's a very, very powerful way, to answer your question, head and shoulders down why Google is actually accelerating and exceeding in AI. >> And one of the things that Thomas Kurian showed onstage was the recent Hack-a-Thon they had with the college students with the NCAA data of the game that just finished, and throughout that experience, this is a core theme of GCP, and now Anthos, which is getting data in and using it easily, and scaling at a scale level that seems unprecedented. So this team seems to be the application... The new differentiator. >> I think it is. I think that announcement, obviously the big three takeaways for us, certainly, scale, unmatched. Certainly speed and migration with Anthos. If I could highlight one other, I was incredibly pleased with, well I've been pleased since Thomas' arrival in general by bringing an enterprise class strategy within sight of Google that I think are going to respond well to our enterprise customers, and part of enterprise class is also making sure that their partner community has amazing enhancement programs that really incentivize those partners that are actually in the full managed services space from cradle to grave, lifetime customer value. So we're very excited about even further announcements this week that no doubt have been inspired by Thomas to try and really take advantage of their partner community that are in the business of cradle to grave support of customers. >> You feel comfortable with Thomas. He's taught a lot of customers, he knows the enterprise. >> We've had an opportunity to meet with him. We've had some shared customers that have had a great privilege of getting to know him and support us and collectively them. >> John: He knows the partner equation pretty well, and the enterprise. >> Without a doubt. >> It's about partnering, because there's a monetization, the shared go to markets together. Talk about the importance of that and what's it like to be a partner. >> Yeah, without a doubt, again, you know, his embrace of the open-source community that you saw today, really taking advantage of highlighting partner value is wonderful, but I think Thomas, above anything else, knows that Google needs to scale. They need to scale, and then they have to have breadth and they have to have depth, and, you know, to get to where Google needs to be over the course of the next two, three years, it's wonderful, it's refreshing, it's 100% accurate that Google knows and Thomas knows that the path to do that is via partners; partners that share in Google's vision, that are 100% aligned to the same things that Google is aligned with, and I think that's why I'm so thankful to be at SADA, large in part, because all of the things that we care about in terms of our customer success as well as Google's success, we all share that, so it's a great trifecta. >> It's a ground-floor opportunity. Congratulations. Guys, talk about your business. What's going on? You've got some new offices I heard you opened up. What's going on in the state of the business? Obviously the Google focus you're excited about obviously. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> There, at the beginning, I called Google the dark horse. I think with the tech that they have and the renewed focus on the enterprise, building on what Diane Greene had put foundationally, Thomas is meeting with hundreds of customers. He's so busy he doesn't have time to come on theCUBE, but he'll come on soon, but he's focused. This is now a great opportunity. Talk about your business. What's the state of the union there? Give an update. >> I can take that one if you don't mind. >> Go ahead. >> You can add poetic color if you want. (laughing) Yeah, so as I said, we're entering a new journey for SADA in light of renewed focus, renewed conviction to Google. We are investing more than we ever have into the common belief that Google is the one to beat in terms of momentum, drive, and ultimately winning the hearts and the minds of who we've talked about. So, over the last four months, we've opened five new offices in New York, Austin, Chicago, Denver. Our headquarters is in Los Angeles, and just recently, we just opened a brand new office in Toronto, so we can really help our Canadian customers really see the the same type of white-glove treatment we provide those customers in the States and so that's why, well, I wasn't earlier, but I'm walking around with a Canadian flag. We're very excited about the presence that we're going to have in Canada >> Its "Toronno." I always blow and I call it "Toron-to," being the American that I am. It's "Toronno." >> Dana: Glad you said it right. Good. >> Now, on the engineering side, so you guys are on the front lines as also a sales, development, there's also customer relationship, engineering side, so I'm sure you guys are hiring. There's some hard problems to solve out there. Can you guys share some color commentary on the type of solutions you guys are doing? What's the heavy? What solutions are you solving, problems that you're solving for customers, what are the key things that you got going on? >> Yeah. >> Well, a lot of cloud migrations, a lot of web and application development, custom development, and data pipelines. I'd say those are really the three key focus areas that we're working on at the moment. >> One other thing, too: so... we believe that we want 100% customer retention, always, and that goes above and beyond an implementation. So the other big area of investments that we're making is in a whole revamped technical account management team, so for those of our GCP customers that have had the privilege, we've had the privilege of working with and for, we are building out a team of individuals that will, well beyond the project, stay with that customer, work with them weekly, monthly, quarterly, and try to always find ways to expand and move workloads into the cloud. We think that provides stickiness. We think that provides ultimate value to try and help our customers identify where else they can take full advantage of the cloud, and it's a fairly new program, and large in part I just want to thank Thomas and the partner team for new programs that are coming out to help us so that we can actually reinvest in things that go you know throughout the lifecycle of the customer. So, very, very good stuff. >> Dana, Chris, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. We'll check out your booth, the car's there, with the data. Bring that data exhaust to the table, pun intended. >> Yes. >> Analyzing with Google Cloud, Anthos. Good commentary. Thanks for sharing. >> Really appreciate being on board. Thanks for having us. >> Alright, great. CUBE coverage here live on the floor in San Francisco. Google Next 2019. This is Google's cloud conference. Customers are here. A lot of developers. More action, live on the day one of three days of coverage after this short break. Stay with us. (theCUBE Theme)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Cloud next nineteen Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Run. Welcome to the Cube here, live in San Francisco on Mosconi South were on the floor at Google. Next twenty nineteen. Hashtag Google Next nineteen. I'm John for my co host this week for three days and wall to wall coverage of Google's cloud conference is with Dave. Alonso Has too many men. Guys day one of three days of wall to wall coverage. We got Thomas Curry in the new CEO on the job for ten weeks. Took the realm from Diane Green. Thirty five thousand attendees. It's packed. It's definitely a developer crowd. It feels a lot like a WS, not a corporate show like Microsoft or IBM or others or Oracle. It's really more about developers. We just heard the Kino. Google's making some moves. The new CEO is gonna put on a show. He saw two customers you see in the positioning. Soon DARPA Kai, the CEO of Google, came out really kind of. Ah, interesting keynote Feels like Thomas's that's gonna shake that Oracle off, but he's guns blaring. Some new announcements. Guys, let's do a round upon the keynote. >> Yeah. So, John, as you said, a great energy here that this place is bustling sitting here where we are, we could see everybody is going through the Expo Hall. As you said. Is Google serious about this? This whole cloud activity? Absolutely. There's no better way than to have your CEO up. There we go, The Amazon show. You don't see Jeff Bezos there into the Microsoft shows? You know, you don't usually see you know their CEO. There you have the Cloud Group does the cloud thing, but absolutely. Cloud is a critical piece of what Google is doing. And it's interesting because I actually didn't feel as geeky and his developer focused as I would expect to see at a Google show. Maybe they've heard that feedback for years that, you know, Google makes great stuff, but they're too smart in there, too geeky When you go to the Amazon show, they're announcing all of the different, you know, puting storage pieces and everybody's hooting and hollering. Here it was a little bit more business. It was high level. They had all these partners out on stage and customers out on stage. Many of them, you know, you talk about retail and health care and all these other ones where you say, Okay, Amazons, a major competitor there. So, you know, can Google stake their claim as to how they're going to move up from the number three position and gain more market share? You know, as they fit into the multi cloud, which we know we're going to spend a lot of time on, wears their position in this cloud space today. >> What your thoughts. >> Well, first of all, there's a big show. I mean, it's we're here at IBM thick in February. This feels like a much, much larger event, Number one Stew said. It's really much more developer heavy, I think. John, there's no question people don't question Googles Global Cloud Presence. Soon Dar talked about two hundred countries, ninety cloud regions fifty eight plus two new data centers. So no question there. But there are questions as to whether or not Google could move beyond search and maps and Gmail and really be a big cloud player for Enterprise Cloud that really is to the elephant in the room. Can Google innovate and attractive CEOs? They showed a number of customers, not nearly, of course, as many as what Amazon or even Microsoft would show. They're talking about ecosystem. To me, that ecosystem slide. It's got a cord truthful this year to really show some progress. But you've got new leadership as we talked about last year, John and love to get your thoughts on this. Google's playing the long game. They've got the best tech and you know they've got great data. Great. Aye, aye. I want to take >> into the new rebranding of the Google Cloud platform, which is now called Antos, which is a Greek word for flour. We kind of had visibility into This would kind of start coming. But before we get into that, I want to just kind of point out something that we've reported on looking angle, some that we've been saying on Twitter on DH about Diane Greene. It's been reported that she was fired from Google for missing on red hat. All these rumors, but interesting Thomas Koreans first words, a CEO on stage. It was a direct shout out to Diane Greene. I think this validates our reporting and our analysis that Diane Green absolutely helped hire curry and work with the boy workers Sundar And essentially, because she was the architect of rebuilding Google Clouds Enterprise chops the team there that she recruited we've been following and covering. Diane Green built that foundation. She passed the torch. Thomas Curry. This was not a Diane Green firing, so I think I think Thomas Carrion nice gesture on Diane Green kind of sets the table and validates and preserves her legacy as the rebuilder re architect of Google Cloud. >> Pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think this where there's some smoke, there's fire that don't think Diana Corning court fired. I think you know that she was under a lot of pressure. She was here for seven years. I think they probably felt like Okay, now it's time to really bring somebody in. Who wants to take this to the next level? And I'll die unnecessarily had the stomach for that >> John Really great points there. But it does talk about you know what is the culture of Google? You know, the elephant The room is what is Google? Google makes you know most of their money on advertising. That's not what Google Cloud is. It doesn't fit into the additional model. You know, Google's culture is not geared for the enterprise. As you know that the critique on Google for years has been We make really great stuff and you need to be Google E. And you need to do things the way we do Thomas Koreans out there. We need to meet customers where they are today. That's very much what we hear in the Enterprise. That that's what you hear. You know when you talk about Amazon or Microsoft, they're listening to their customers. They're meeting them at their business applications there, helping them build new environment. So, you know, will Google be a little less googly on DH? Therefore, you know, meet customers and help work them, and that leads to the multi clouding the anthros discussed. >> We heard a lot about that today. I mean, John, you've pointed out many, many times that Cooper Netease is the linchpin to Google strategy. It's really you know, that was the kind of like a Hail Mary relative Tae Ws and that's what we heard today. Multi cloud, multi cloud, multi cloud, where is with a W s. And certainly to a lesser extent, Oracle. It's Unit Cloud Multi Cloud is more expensive is what they tell us. Multi cloud is less secure. A multi cloud is more complex. Google's messaging is exactly the opposite of >> that. So, Dave, just to poke it that a little bit, is great to see Sanjay *** Inn up on stage with VM wear. But where we last cvm were to cloud show. It's an Amazon. They've got a deep partnership here. Cooper Netease is not a differentiator for Google. Everybody's doing it. Even Amazon is being, you know, forced to be involved in it. Cisco was up on stage. This guy's got a deep partnership with Amazon and a ks. So you know, Cooper Netease is not a magic layers. Good job, Ada said on the Cube. Q. Khan. It is something that you know Google, that management layer and how I live in a multi cloud environment. Yes, Google might be further along with multi cloud messaging, then say Amazon is, But you know, Amazons, the leader in this space and everybody that has multiple clouds, Amazons, one of them, even the keynote >> This morning aboard Air Force right eight, I was forced into Cooper days you're not CNW s run demos that show, you know, a target of the Google clouded the Microsoft. You saw that today from Google >> while we see how the Amazon demos with our oracle. But that's the result. Let's let's hold off on the partisan saying, Let's go through the Kino So the Diane Green comment also AOL came out. Who runs VP of Engineer. He's the architect. One. This Antos product. Last year, they announced on G. C. P s basically a hybrid solution G a general availability of Antos, which has security built in out of the box. Multi cloud security integrated for continues integration, confused development, CCD pipeline ing very key news and that was really interesting. This is such a their new platform that they've rebranded called Antos. This is a way for them to essentially start posturing from just hybrid to multi cloud. This is the shift of of Google. They want to be the on premise cloud solution and on any cloud, your thoughts. >> You know, the demo said it all. The ability to take V m movement two containers and move them anywhere right once and move anywhere and that, I think, is is the key differentiator right now. Relative to certainly eight of us. Lesser extent Microsoft, IBM right there with red hat. That's to me The interesting angle >> Here. Look, Google has a strong history with Ken Containers. If you if you scroll back to the early days of doctor twenty fourteen, twenty, fifty, Google's out there as to how many you know, it just so many containers that they're building up and tearing down. However you go to the Microsoft. So you go to the Amazon show. We're starting to talk a lot more about server list. We're gonna have the product lead for surveillance on today. I'm excited to dig into that because on a little bit concerned that Google is so deep in the containers and how you Burnett eases, they're looking for, like a native to connect the pieces, but that they are a little bit behind in some of the next generation architectures built on journalists for death. >> I want to make a point here if you're not the leader in cloud which, you know in Enterprise Cloud, which Google is not, you know, IBM is not or, you know, Oracle is not okay, fine, but if you don't have a cloud like Cisco or Dell or VM, where you have to go after multi cloud. Amazon's not in a rush to go after multi cloud. There's no reason down the road. Amazon can't go after that opportunity. To the extent that it's a real tam, it's There's a long way to go. Talk about early innings were like having started the game of Outpost >> hasn't even been spect out. Yes, sir, there has not been relieved. So we're seeing what Amazon's got knowing they are the clouds. So they're the incumbent. Interesting enough on Jennifer Lin. You mention the demo. Jennifer Lin Cube alumni. We gonna interview her later. She introduced on those migrate Kind of reminds me of some of the best shows we have the migration tools and that migrates work clothes from PM wears into containers running in containers. As you mentioned. A. This is an end and no modified co changes. That's a big deal, >> John. Exactly on Twitter, people are going. Is this the next emotion? You know, those of us who've been in the industry while remember how powerful that was able to seamlessly migrate? You know, the EMS and containers at, You know, I shouldn't have to think about Colin building it where it lives. That was the promise of has for all those years and absolutely things like uber Netease what Google's doing, chipping away at that. They're partnering with Cisco, there partner with pivotal parting with lots of companies so that that portability of code isa lot of >> Master Jack is a cloud of emotion. I mean, we know what the motion did in the Enterprise. >> To me, that's the star. The keynote is actually the rebranding associate positioning thing. But the star of the show is the Jennifer Lin demo, because if anthems migrate actually works, that's going to tell. Sign to me on how fast Google can take territory now. What's interesting also with the announcements, was, I want to get you guys thoughts on this because we cover ecosystems, we cover how Cloud and Enterprise have been pardoning over the years. Enterprise is not that easy. Google has found out the hard way Microsoft is done really well. They've installed base. Google had stand this up from the beginning again. Diane Greene did a great job, but now it's hard. It's a hard nut to crack. So you see Cisco on stage. Cisco has huge enterprise. Cloud the em Where comes on stage? David Gettler Gettler, the VP of engineering of Cisco, one of their top executives on stage. And he has Sanjay *** and keep alumni came on. Sanjay had more time. Francisco. So you have two companies who kind of compete? NSX. We have suffered a fine Cisco both on stage. Cisco, absolutely integrating into We covered on silicon angle dot com just posted it live where Cisco is actually laying down their container platform and integrating directly into Google's container platform to offer a program ability End to end. I think that's something that didn't get teased out on the keynotes doing, because this allows for Google to quickly move into the enterprise and offer true program ability of infrastructure. This is the nirvana of infrastructure is code. This is what Dev Ops has been waiting for. Still your thoughts on this because this could be a game changer. Hydro, what's an A C I. This could put pressure on VM, where with the containers running in platform and the Cisco relationship your thoughts. >> So John Cisco has a broad portfolio. When you talk about multi cloud, it's not just the networking components, it's the eyes, absolutely apiece. But that multi cloud management, uh, is a layer that Cisco has, you know, been adding two and working on for a lot of years, and they've got very key partnerships. So making sure, you know, seeing right seeing David vehicular onstage here. Proof, Cisco, lot of enterprise customers him where, Of course, six hundred thousand customers. They're So Google wants to get into these accounts. You look at, you know, Microsoft strength of their enterprise agreements that they have. So how will Google get into some of these big accounts? Get into the procurement, get into the environment? And there's lots of different methods and partnerships We said our credit >> David vehicular undersold the opportunity here. I mean, when it comes to he did at working Inter Cloud. Sisko is in the poll possession position to basically say we got the best network, the highest performance networks, the most secure networks, and we're in a position to connect all these clouds. And to me, that didn't come out today. So when you think about multi cloud, each of these companies is coming at it from a position of strength. Cisco. Very clearly dominant networking VM wear in virtual ization and I think that came through. And Sanjay *** ins, you know, keynote. I think again Gettler undersold it, but it's a great opportunity for Cisco and Google. >> Well, I think Google has a huge opportunity. It Cisco because if they have a go to market joint sales together, that could really catapult Google sails again. If I get really was kind of copy, we're we're Cisco. But Cisco look, a bm was on stage with them. I thought that was going to be a Hail Mary for for Sisko to kind of have bring that back. But then watching Sanjay Putin come on saying, Hey, we're okay, it's going to be a V m World And Pat Kelsey has been on the record saying, Coo Burnett eases the dial tone of the Internet stew. This is an interesting matchup between Cisco and BM, where your thoughts >> Yeah, so so right. There's so many pieces here, a cz to where their play way. No, there's competitive competition and, you know, partnerships. In a lot of these environments, Google actually has a long history of partnering. You know, I can't even think how many years ago, the Google and GM or Partnership and Cisco. If I can't actually, Dave, there's There's something I know you've got a strong viewpoint on. You know, Thomas Kurian left Oracle and it was before he had this job. Every he says, you know, is T. K going to come in here and bring, you know, oracles, you know, sales methodology into Google. You know, What does he bring? What's his skill set on? You know >> what exact community? I think it's the opposite, right? I think that's why you left Oracle because he didn't want every database to run in the Oracle, Cloudy realised is a huge opportunity out there. I think the messaging that I heard today is again it's completely I saw something on Twitter like, Oh, this is just like organ. It's nothing like Oracle. It's the It's the polar opposite opposite of what Oracle is doing. >> I think I think curry and can really define his career. This could be a nice swan song for him. As he takes Google with Diane Greene did builds it out, does the right deals if he can build on ecosystem and bring the tech chops in with a clear go to market. He's not going to hire the salespeople and the SCS fast enough. In my opinion, that's gonna be a really slow boat. Teo promised land. He's got to do some deals. He's gotta put Some Corp Devin Place has gotta make some acquisitions will be very in the sin. DARPA Kai, the CEO, said. We are investing heavily in cloud. If I'm Amazon, I'm worried about Google. I think they are dark horse. They have a lot of they have a clean sheet of paper. Microsoft, although has legacy install base. Google's got, I think, a lot more powder, if you will. Dave, >> what One little sign? I agree without John, I think you're absolutely right. The clean sheet of paper and deep pockets, you know, and the long game in the great tech. Uh, you have a son should be worried about Google. One little side note, it's still you. And I talked about this. Did you hear? Uh uh, Thomas asked Sanjay Putin about Dell, Dell Technologies, and Sunday is an executive. Dell was talking about the whole Del Technologies portfolio. I thought it was a very interesting nuance that we had previously seen from VM wear when they were owned by himself. >> Dave, you know, we see Delon Veum where are almost the same company these days that they're working together? But John, as you said, I actually like that. You know, we didn't have some big announcement today on an acquisition. Thomas Kurian says. He's got a big pocket book. He's going to be inquisitive, and it'LL be interesting to see, do they? By some company that has a big enterprise sales force. It can't just be old legacy sales trying to go into the cloud market. That won't work, but absolutely the lot of opportunities for them to go out. They didn't get get, huh? They didn't get red hat. So who will? Google Page? You >> guys are right on man. Sales Force is still a big question mark, And how can they hire that fast? That's a >> And again, he's only been on the job for ten weeks. I think is going to get his sea legs. I think it's him. He's going to come in. He's gonna ingratiating with culture. It'Ll be a quick decision. I think Google culture will accept or reject Thomas Curry and based upon his first year in operations, he's going to get into the team, and I think the Wall Street Journal kind of comment on that. Will he bring that Oracle? I thought that was kind of not a fair assessment, but I think he's got the engineering chops toe hang with Google. He kind of gets the enterprise mark one hundred percent been there, done that. So I think he's got a good shot. I think you could make the right moves. Of course we're here making the moves on the Cube here live for day, one of three days of wall to wall coverage. I'm sorry, David. Lock These two minute men here in Google, next in Mosconi in San Francisco Live will be back with more coverage after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversation. We're in Palo Alto, California, at theCUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the CUBE. We're here with Chris Yeh. He's the co-founder and general partner of Blitzscaling Ventures, author of the book Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a variety of other ventures, also a partner at Greylock Partners. Chris, great to see you. I've known you for years. Love the book, love Reid. You guys did a great job. So congratulations. But the big news is you're now a TV star as one of the original inaugural contestants on the Mental Samurai, just premiered on Fox, was it >> On Fox. >> On Fox, nine o'clock, on which days? >> So Mental Samurai is on Fox, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. right after Master Chef Junior. >> Alright. So big thing. So successful shows. Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. >> It's a new show, so it's got this kind of like Jeopardy vibe where they got to answer tough questions in what looks like a roller coaster kind of arm that moves you around from station to station, kind of jar you up. But it's a lot of pressure, time clock and hard questions. Tell us about the format. How you got that. Gives all the story. >> So the story behind Mental Samurai is it's from the producers of American Ninja Warrior, if you've ever seen that show. So American Ninja Warrior is a physical obstacle course and these incredible athletes go through and the key is to get through the obstacle course. If you miss any of the obstacles, you're out. So they took that and they translated it to the mental world and they said, okay, we're going to have a mental obstacle course where you going to have different kinds of questions. So they have memory questions, sequence questions, knowledge questions, all these things that are tapping different elements of intelligence. And in order to win at the game, you have to get 12 questions right in five minutes or less. And you can't get a single question wrong. You have to be perfect. >> And they do try to jar you up, to kind of scrabble your brain with those devices, it makes it suspenseful. In watching last night at your watch party in Palo Alto, it's fun to watch because yeah, I'm like, okay, it's going to be cool. I'll support Chris. I'll go there, be great and on TV, and oh my, that's pretty interesting. It was actually riveting. Intense. >> Yeah. You have that element of moving around from station to station and it's dramatic. It's kind of a theater presence. But what's it like in there? Give us some insight. You're coming on in April 30th so you're yet to come on. >> Yes. >> But the early contestants, none of them made it to the 100,000. Only one person passed the first threshold. >> Right >> Take us through the format. How many thresholds are there? What's the format? >> Perfect, so basically when a competitor gets strapped into the chair, they call it Ava, it's like a robot, and basically they got it from some company in Germany and it has the ability to move 360 degrees. It's like an industrial robot or something. It makes you feel like you're an astronaut or in one those centrifugal force things. And the idea is they're adding to the pressure. They're making it more of a challenge. Instead of just Jeopardy where you're sitting there, and answering questions and bantering with Alex Trebek, you're working against the clock and you're being thrown around by this robot. So what happens is first you try to answer 12 questions correctly in less than five minutes. If you do that, then you make it through to the next round, what they call the circle of samurai and you win $10,000. The circle of samurai, what happens is there are four questions and you get 90 seconds plus whatever you have left over from your first run, to answer those four questions. Answer all four questions correctly, you win $100,000 and the official title of Mental Samurai. >> So there's only two levels, circle of samurai but it gets harder. Now also I noticed that it's, their questions have certain puzzles and there's certain kinds of questions. What's the categories, if you will, what's the categories they offer? >> Yes, so the different categories are knowledge, which is just classic trivia, it's a kind of Jeopardy stuff. There's memory, where they have something on screen that you have to memorize, or maybe they play an audio track that you have to remember what happened. And then there's also sequence where you have to put things in order. So all these different things are represented by these different towers which are these gigantic television screens where they present the questions. And the idea is in order to be truly intelligent, you have to be able to handle all of these different things. You can't just have knowledge. You can't just have pop culture. You got to have everything. >> So on the candidates I saw some from Stanford. >> Yeah. >> I saw an athlete. It's a lot of diversity in candidates. How do they pick the candidates? How did you get involved? Did your phone ring up one day? Were you identified, they've read your blog. Obviously they've, you're smart. I've read your stuff on Facebook. How did you get in there? (laughs) >> Excellent question. So the whole process, there's a giant casting department that does all these things. And there's people who just cast people for game shows. And what happened with me is many years ago back in 2014, my sister worked in Hollywood when I was growing up. She worked for ER and Baywatch and other companies and she still keeps track of the entertainment industry. And she sent me an email saying, hey, here's a casting call for a new show for smart people and you should sign up. And so I replied to the email and said hey I'm Chris Yeh. I'm this author. I graduate from Stanford when I was 19, blah blah blah blah. I should be on your show. And they did a bunch of auditions with me over the phone. And they said we love you, the network loves you. We'll get in touch and then I never heard. Turns out that show never got the green light. And they never even shot that show. But that put me on a list with these various casting directors. And for this show it turns out that there was an executive producer of the show, the creator of the show, his niece was the casting director who interviewed me back in 2014. And she told her uncle, hey, there's this guy, Chris Yeh, in Palo Alto. I think would be great for this new show you're doing. Why don't you reach out to him. So they reached out to me. I did a bunch of Skype auditions. And eventually while I was on my book tour for Blitzscaling, I got the email saying, congratulations, you're part of the season one cast. >> And on the Skype interviews, was it they grilling you with questions, or was it doing a mock dry run? What was some of interview vetting questions? >> So they start off by just asking you about yourself and having you talk about who you are because the secret to these shows is none of the competitors are famous in advance, or at least very few of them are. There was a guy who was a major league baseball pitcher, there's a guy who's an astronaut, I mean, those guys are kind of famous already, but the whole point is, they want to build a story around the person like they do with the Olympics so that people care whether they succeed or not. And so they start off with biographical questions and then they proceed to basically use flash cards to simulate the game and see how well you do. >> Got it, so they want to basically get the whole story arc 'cause Chris, obviously Chris is smart, he passed the test. Graduate when he's 19. Okay, you're book smart. Can you handle the pressure? If you do get it, there's your story line. So they kind of look from the classic, kind of marketing segmentation, demographics is your storylines. What are some of the things that they said to you on the feedback? Was there any feedback, like you're perfect, we like this about you. Or is it more just cut and dry. >> Well I think they said, we love your energy. It's coming through very strongly to the screen. That's fantastic. We like your story. Probably the part I struggle the most with, was they said hey, you know, talk to us about adversity. Talk to us about the challenges that you've overcome. And I tell people, listen, I'm a very lucky guy. A lot of great things have happened to me in life. I don't know if there's that much adversity that I can really complain about. Other people who deal with these life threatening illnesses and all this stuff, I don't have that. And so that was probably the part I struggled the most with. >> Well you're certainly impressive. I've known you for years. You're a great investor, a great person. And a great part of Silicon Valley. So congratulations, good luck on the show. So it's Tuesdays. >> 9 p.m. >> 9 p.m. >> On fox. >> On Fox. Mental Samurai. Congratulations, great. Great to be at the launch party last night. The watch party, there'll be another one. Now your episode comes out on April 30th. >> Yes. So on April 30th we will have a big Bay area-wide watch party. I'm assuming that admission will be free, assuming I find the right sponsors. And so I'll come back to you. I'll let you know where it's going to be. Maybe we should even film the party. >> That's, well, I got one more question on the show. >> Yeah. >> You have not been yet on air so but you know the result. What was it like sitting in the chair, I mean, what was it personally like for you? I mean you've taken tests, you've been involved with the situation. You've made some investments. There's probably been some tough term sheets here and there, board meetings. And all that experience in your life, what was it compared to, what was it like? >> Well, it's a really huge adrenaline rush because if you think about there's so many different elements that already make it an adrenaline rush and they all combine together. First of all, you're in this giant studio which looks like something out of a space-age set with this giant robotic arm. There's hundreds of people around cheering. Then you're strapped into a robotic arm which basically makes you feel like an astronaut, like every run starts with you facing straight up, right? Lying back as if you're about to be launched on a rocket. And then you're answering these difficult questions with time pressure and then there's Rob Lowe there as well that you're having a conversation with. So all these things together, and your heart, at least for me, my heart was pounding. I was like trying very hard to stay calm because I knew it was important to stay clam, to be able to get through it. >> Get that recall, alright. Chris, great stuff. Okay, Blitzscaling. Blitzscaling Ventures. Very successful concept. I remember when you guys first started doing this at Stanford, you and Reid, were doing the lectures at Stanford Business School. And I'm like, I love this. It's on YouTube, kind of an open project initially, wasn't really, wasn't really meant to be a book. It was more of gift, paying it forward. Now it's a book. A lot of great praise. Some criticism from some folks but in general it's about scaling ventures, kind of the Silicon Valley way which is the rocket ship I call. The rocket ship ventures. There's still the other venture capitals. But great book. Feedback from the book and the original days at Stanford. Talk about the Blitzscaling journey. >> And one of the things that happened when we did the class at Stanford is we had all these amazing guests come in and speak. So people like Eric Schmidt. People like Diane Greene. People like Brian Chesky, who talked about their experiences. And all of those conversations really formed a key part of the raw material that went into the book. We began to see patterns emerge. Some pretty fascinating patterns. Things like, for example, a lot of companies, the ones that'd done the best job of maintaining their culture, have their founders involved in hiring for the first 500 employees. That was like a magic number that came up over and over again in the interviews. So all this content basically came forward and we said, okay, well how do we now take this and put it into a systematic framework. So the idea of the book was to compress down 40 hours of video content, incredible conversations, and put it in a framework that somebody could read in a couple of hours. >> It is also one of those things where you get lightning in a ball, the classic and so then I'd say go big or go home. But Blitzscaling is all about something new and something different. And I'm reading a book right now called Loonshots, which is a goof on moonshots. It's about the loonies who start the real companies and a lot of companies that are successful like Airbnb was passed over on and they call those loonies. Those aren't moonshots. Moonshots are well known, build-outs. This is where the blitzscaling kind of magic happens. Can you just share your thoughts on that because that's something that's not always talked about in the mainstream press, is that a lot of there blitzscaling companies, are the ones that don't look good on paper initially. >> Yes. >> Or ones that no one's talking about is not in a category or herd mentality of investors. It's really that outlier. >> Yes. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah, and one of the things that Reid likes to say is that the best possible companies usually sound like they're dumb ideas. And in fact the best investment he's been a part of as a venture capitalist, those are the ones where there's the greatest controversy around the table. It's not the companies that come in and everyone's like this is a no-brainer, let's do it. It's the companies where there's a big fight. Should we do this, should we not? And we think the reason is this. Blitzscaling is all about being able to be the first to scale and the winner take most or the winner take all market. Now if you're in a market where everyone's like, this is a great market, this is a great idea. You're going to have huge competition. You're going to have a lot of people going after it. It's very difficult to be the first to scale. If you are contrarian and right you believe something that other people don't believe, you have the space to build that early lead, that you can then use to leverage yourself into that enduring market leadership. >> And one of the things that I observed from the videos as well is that the other fact that kind of plays into, I want to get your reaction, this is that there has to be a market shift that goes on too because you have to have a tailwind or a wave to ride because if you can be contrarian if there's no wave, >> Right. >> right? so a lot of these companies that you guys highlight, have the wave behind them. It was mobile computing, SaaSification, cloud computing, all kind of coming together. Talk about that dynamic and your reaction 'cause that's something where people can get confused on blitzscaling. They read the book. Oh I'm going to disrupt the dry cleaning business. Well I mean, not really. I mean, unless there's something different >> Exactly. >> in market conditions. Talk about that. >> Yeah, so with blitzscaling you're really talking about a new market or a market that's transforming. So what is it that causes these things to transform? Almost always it's some new form of technological innovation, or perhaps a packaging of different technological innovations. Take mobile computing for example. Many of the components have been around for a while. But it took off when Apple was able to combine together capacitative touchscreens and the form factor and the processor strength being high enough finally. And all these things together created the technological innovation. The technological innovation then enables the business model innovation of building an app store and creating a whole new way of thinking about handheld computing. And then based on that business model innovation, you have the strategy innovation of blitzscaling to allow you to grow rapidly and keep from blowing up when you grow. >> And the spirit of kind of having, kind of a clean entrepreneurial segmentation here. Blitzscaling isn't for everybody. And I want you to talk about that because obviously the book's popular when this controversy, there's some controversy around the fact that you just can't apply blitzscaling to everything. We just talk about some of those factors. There are other entrepreneurialship models that makes sense but that might not be a fit for blitzscaling. Can you just unpack that and just explain, a minute to explain the difference between a company that's good for blitzscaling and one that isn't. >> Well, a key thing that you need for blitzscaling is one of these winner take most or winner take all markets that's just enormous and hugely valuable, alright? The whole thing about blitzscaling is it's very risky. It takes a lot of effort. It's very uncomfortable. So it's only worth doing when you have those market dynamics and when that market is really large. And so in the book we talk about there being many businesses that this doesn't apply to. And we use the example of two companies that were started at the same time. One company is Amazon, which is obviously a blitzscaling company and a dominant player and a great, great company. And the other is the French Laundry. In fact, Jeff Bezos started Amazon the same year that Thomas Keller started the French Laundry. And the French Laundry still serves just 60 people a day. But it's a great business. It's just a very different kind of business. >> It's a lifestyle or cash flow business and people call it a lifestyle business but mainly it's a cash flow or not a huge growing market. >> Yeah. >> Satisfies that need. What's the big learnings that you learned that was something different that you didn't know coming out of blitzscaling experience? Something that surprised you, something that might have shocked you, something that might have moved you. I mean you're well-read. You're smart. What was some learnings that you learned from the journey? >> Well, one of the things that was really interesting to me and I didn't really think about it. Reid and I come from the startup world, not the big company world. One of the things that surprised me is the receptivity of big companies to these ideas. And they explained it to me and they said, listen, you got to understand with a big company, you think it's just a big company growing at 10, 15% a year. But actually there's units that are growing at 100% a year. There's units that are declining at 50% a year. And figuring out how you can actually continue to grow new businesses quicker than your old businesses die is a huge thing for the big, established companies. So that was one of the things that really surprised me but I'm grateful that it appears that it's applicable. >> It's interesting. I had a lot of conversations with Michael Dell before, and before they went private and after they went private. He essentially was blitzscaling. >> Yeah. >> He said, I'm going to winner take most in the mature, somewhat declining massive IT enterprise spend against the HPs of the world, and he's doing it and VMware stock went to an all time high. So big companies can blitz scale. That's the learning. >> Exactly. And the key thing to remember there is one of the reasons why somebody like Michael Dell went private to do this is that blitzscaling is all about prioritizing speed over efficiency. Guess who doesn't like that? Wall street doesn't like because you're taking a hit to earnings as you invest in a new business. GM for example is investing heavily in autonomous vehicles and that investment is not yet delivering cash but it's something that's going to create a huge value for General Motors. And so it's really tough to do blitzscaling as a publicly traded company though there are examples. >> I know your partner in the book, Reid Hoffman as well as in the blitzscaling at Stanford was as visible in both LinkedIn and as the venture capitalist of Greylock. But also he was involved with some failed startups on the front end of LinkedIn. >> Yeah. >> So he had some scar tissue on social networking before it became big, I'll say on the knowledge graph that he's building, he built at LinkedIn. I'm sure he had some blitzscaling lessons. What did he bring to the table? Did he share anything in the classes or privately with you that you can share that might be helpful for people to know? >> Well, there's a huge number of lessons. Obviously we drew heavily on Reid's life for the book. But I think you touched on something that a lot of people don't know, which is that LinkedIn is not the first social network that Reid created. Actually during the dot-com boom Reid created a company called SocialNet that was one of the world's first social networks. And I actually was one of the few people in the world who signed up and was a member of SocialNet. I think I had the handle, net revolutionary on that if you can believe that. And one of the things that Reid learned from his SocialNet experience turned into one of his famous sayings, which is, if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late. With SocialNet they spent so much time refining the product and trying to get it perfectly right. And then when they launched it, they discovered what everyone always discovers when they launch, which is the market wants something totally different. We had no idea what people really wanted. And they'd wasted all this time trying to perfect something that they've theoretically thought was what the market wanted but wasn't actually what the market wanted. >> This is what I love about Silicon Valley. You have these kind of stories 'cause that's essentially agile before agile came out. They're kind of rearranging the deck chairs trying to get the perfect crafted product in a world that was moving to more agility, less craftsmanship and although now it's coming back. Also I talked to Paul Martino, been on theCUBE before. He's a tribe with Pincus. And it's been those founding fathers around these industries. It's interesting how these waves, they start off, they don't get off the ground, but that doesn't mean the category's dead. It's just a timing issue. That's important in a lot of ventures, the timing piece. Talk about that dynamic. >> Absolutely. When it comes to timing, you think about blitzscaling. If you start blitzscaling, you prioritize speed over efficiency. The main question is, is it the right time. So Webvan could be taken as an example of blitzscaling. They were spending money wildly inefficiently to build up grocery delivery. Guess what? 2000 was not the right time for it. Now we come around, we see Instacart succeeding. We see other delivery services delivering some value. It just turns out that you have to get the timing right. >> And market conditions are critical and that's why blitzscaling can work when the conditions are right. Our days back in the podcast, it was, we were right but timing was off. And this brings up the question of the team. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right team that can handle the blitzscaling culture. And you need the right investors. You've been on both sides of the table. Talk about that dynamic because I think this is probably one of the most important features because saying you going to do blitzscaling and then getting buy off but not true commitment from the investors because the whole idea is to plow money into the system. You mentioned Amazon, one of Jeff Bezos' tricks was, he always poured money back into his business. So this is a capital strategy, as well financial strategy capital-wise as well as a business trait. Talk about the importance of having that stomach and the culture of blitzscaling. >> Absolutely. And I think you hit on something very important when you sort of talk about the importance of the investors. So Reid likes to refer to investors as financing partners. Or financing co-founders, because really they're coming on with you and committing to the same journey that you're going on. And one of the things I often tell entrepreneurs is you really have to dig deep and make sure you do more due diligence on your investors than you would on your employees. Because if you think about it, if you hire an employee, you can actually fire them. If you take money from an investor, there's no way you can ever get rid of them. So my advice to entrepreneurs is always, well, figure out if they're going to be a good partner for you. And the best way to do that is to go find some of the entrepreneurs they backed who failed and talked to those people. >> 'Cause that's where the truth will come out. >> Well, that's right. >> We stood by them in tough times. >> Exactly. >> I think that's classic, that's perfect but this notion of having the strategies of the elements of the business model in concert, the financial strategy, the capital strategy with the business strategy and the people strategy, all got to be pumping that can't be really any conflict on that. That's the key point. >> That's right, there has to be alignment because again, you're trying to go as quickly as possible and if you're running a race car and you have things that are loose and rattling around, you're not going to make it across the finish line. >> You're pulling for a pit stop and the guys aren't ready to change the tires, (snapping fingers) you know you're out of sync. >> Bingo. >> Chris, great stuff. Blitzscaling is a great book. Check it out. I recommend it, remember blitz scale is not for anyone, it's for the game changers. And again, picking your investors is critical on this. So if you picked the wrong investors, blitzscaling will blow up in a bad way. So don't, don't, pick properly on the visa and pick your team. Chris, so let's talk about you real quick to end the segment and the last talk track. Talk about your background 'cause I think you have a fascinating background. I didn't know that you graduated when you're 19, from Stanford was it? >> Yes. >> Stanford at 19, that's a great accomplishment. You've been an entrepreneur. Take us through your journey. Give us a quick highlight of your career. >> So the quick highlight is I grew up in Southern California and Santa Monica where I graduated from Santa Monica High School along with other luminaries such as Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr., and Sean Penn. I didn't go at the same time that they did. >> They didn't graduate when they were 17. >> They did not, (John laughing) and Charlie Sheen also attended Santa Monica High School but dropped out or was expelled. (laughing) Go figured. >> Okay. >> I came up to Stanford and I actually studied creative writing and product design. So I was really hitting both sides of the brain. You could see that really coming through in the rest of my career. And then at the time I graduated which was the mid-1990s that was when the internet was first opening up. I was convinced the internet was going to be huge and so I just went straight into the internet in 1995. And have been in the startup world ever since. >> Must love that show, Halt and Catch Fire a series which I love reminiscing. >> AMC great show. >> Just watching that my life right before my eyes. Us old folks. Talk about your investment. You are at Wasabi Ventures now. Blitzscaling Ventures. You guys looks like you're going to do a little combination bring capital around blitzscaling, advising. What's Blitzscaling Ventures? Give a quick commercial. >> So the best way to think about it is for the entrepreneurs who are actually are blitzscaling, the question is how are you going to get the help you need to figure out how to steer around the corners to avoid the pitfalls that can occur as you're growing rapidly. And Blitzscaling Ventures is all about that. So obviously I bring a wealth of experience, both my own experience as well as everything I learned from putting this book together. And the whole goal of Blitzscaling Ventures is to find those entrepreneurs who have those blitzscalable opportunities and help them navigate through the process. >> And of course being a Mental Samurai that you are, the clock is really important on blitzscaling. >> There are actually are a lot of similarities between the startup world and Mental Samurai. Being able to perform under pressure, being able to move as quickly as possible yet still be accurate. The one difference of course is in our startup world you often do make mistakes. And you have a chance to recover from them. But in Mental Samurai you have to be perfect. >> Speed, alignment, resource management, capital deployment, management team, investors, all critical factors in blitzscaling. Kind of like entrepreneurial going to next level. A whole nother lesson, whole nother battlefields. Really the capital markets are flush with cash. Post round B so if you can certainly get altitude there's a ton of capital. >> Yeah. And the key is that capital is necessary for blitzscaling but it's not sufficient. You have to take that financial capital and you have to figure out how to combine it with the human capital to actually transform the business in the industry. >> Of course I know you've got to catch a plane. Thanks for coming by in the studio. Congratulations on the Mental Samurai. Great show. I'm looking forward to April 30th. Tuesdays at 9 o'clock, the Mental Samurai. Chris will be an inaugural contestant. We'll see how he does. He's tight-lipped, he's not breaking his disclosure. >> I've got legal requirements. I can't say anything. >> Just say he's sticking to his words. He's a man of his words. Chris, great to see you. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, kind of venture you want to talk to Chris Yeh, co-founder, general partner of blitzscaling. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem of partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are at CubeCon 2018 in Seattle, CloudNativeCon as well. We've been to every KubeCon and CloudNativeCon since inception. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Stu Miniman want to break down the three days of wall to wall coverage of the rise of kubernetes and the ecosystem and the industry consolidation and standardization around kubernetes for multi cloud, for hybrid cloud. We're here breaking down day one keynote, kicking everything off. Stu, it's fun to come here and watch words like expansion, Moore's law, expansive growth, doubling down. The attendance for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, hockey stick growth chart on Twitter. 1200, 4000, 8000 up into the right. Global phenomenon, the team at CNC at KubeCon, huge presence in China this year, total expansion all to save, hold the line on the cloud tsunami that is Amazon's web services. >> Yeah. >> This is the massive cloud game going on, your thoughts. >> Yeah, John first of all. You have to start out just expansive growth and you can just feel the energy here. We're in the middle of the show floor. You were here two years ago in Seattle when I think they said, they were, was it 16? There weren't that many sponsors here. There's 180 booths at this show. The joke in the keynote this morning was if you want to replace your entire T-shirt wardrobe that's what you can do here. Everybody's got fun stickers. It's a good crowd. Those alpha geeks, this is where they are. >> And Stu, you're sporting a new T-shirt. >> Yeah, John so I want to thank our friends. >> Make sure they can see that. >> Our friends here, Women Who Go. They do the GoLang languages, the gopher is what they're doing here. So love that, if you're at the show, come by. Get our stickers. If you look up Women Who Go on thread list. They actually have an artist shop. The CNCF has their logo up there. We have their logo. There is blockchain. There's docker, there's all these and you can buy the shirts and the money for buying these shirts actually goes to bring women and underserved people to events like this. We also love John when they're supporting this. The CNCF actually, I think it was a 130 or so people that they brought to this conference through charitable donations from many of the sponsors. >> And that's one of the highlights I want to get to later is the mission driven and the social responsibility, scholarships, the money that's being donated to fund diversity inclusion in all walks of life to make CloudNative, but Stu lets get back to the core thing that's going on here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. A couple years ago, I said, we said on theCUBE that the Tsunami, that is Amazon Web Service is just going to just hit ashore and just wipe out the industry in IT as much as it can go unless someone builds a seawall. Builds a wall to stop that momentum. Kubernetes and KubeCon specifically has had that moment. This is the industry saying look it. Cloud is awesome. It's full validation of cloud but there is more than just AWS. This is about multi cloud, hybrid cloud, and a lot of forces are at play competitively to make sure that Amazon doesn't run the table. >> Yeah, John, it's good to do a little bit of compare and contrast here because if you go back to OpenStack, it was OpenStack is the hail Mary against Amazon, and it's going to help you get off your VMware licenses. Well that's not what kubernetes is, if you look both VMware required Heptio, and Amazon have a big presence at this show. Amazon, their hands were forced to be able to actually work with kubernetes. I remember I read an article that said, there were about 14 different ways you can run kubernetes on Amazon before they supported it. Now they fully support it. They're going even deeper, AWS Fargate. I know you spend a lot of time at re:Invent digging into some of this environment here so this isn't, portability is a piece of kubernetes. Kubernetes won the orchestrator battles out there. It is the de facto standard out there, and we're seeing how this stack can really be built up on top of it. The thing that I've been keying in on coming into this year is how Serverless plays into it. You heard a big push for Knative on the keynote which is Google, who of course brought us to kubernetes. IBM, SAP, Red Hat all there but I don't see Microsoft or AWS yet embracing how we can match up Serverless and kubernetes today with the Knative. >> I think if I'm Amazon or Microsoft, I might be a little bit afraid of this movement because when, we went through the multi vendor days. You had multi vendoring decades ago. Now, multi cloud is the multi vendoring story, and what's interesting is that choice becomes the key word in all this and a real enterprise that's out there. They got Cisco routers, they got tons of stuff that's actually running their business, powering their business. They need to integrate that so this idea that one cloud fits all certainly has been validated. I think to me the winner takes most but what this community is doing Stu around kubernetes is galvanizing around a new stack configuration with kubernetes at the center of it, and that will disintermediate services at AWS and at Microsoft. Microsoft stock price has put that company in a higher value position than Google or Apple. What has Microsoft actually done to make them go from a $26 stock price to $100 and change? What did they actually invent? What did they actually do? What did they disrupt? Was it just go in a cloud? Is it Office 365? This begs the question is it just the business model shift so certainly there is business in the cloud and it's showing here at KubeCon. >> Yeah John, there was a major cultural shift inside of Microsoft I was really excited. One of the shows I got to go to this year was Microsoft Ignite, and in many ways it's interesting. That show has been around for decades and in many ways, it was the Windows admin just getting the latest and greatest. From my standpoint, I think it was Microsoft fully embracing the move to SaaS. They're pushing everybody to Office 365. They are aggressively moving to expand their cloud that that hybrid environment Microsoft has the applications, and they're not waiting for customers to just leave them or hold onto whatever revenue stream. They're switching to that writable model. They're switching to SaaS model. They're pushing really hard on Azure. They're here in force. They're really embracing developers, all the .NET folks, they were-- >> They're moving the ball inch by inch down the fields slowly to that cadence and that in totality with social responsibility and commencement of the cloud. I think has been, there's not one thing that's happened. It's just a total transformation for Microsoft, and the results and the valuation are off the charts. Google, the same way. Diane Greene has, I think was unfairly categorized by the press in terms of her exit. She's been wanting to retire for years Stu. She has turned Google around. You look at Google where they are right now verses where they were two years ago. Two years ago, they were slinging cloud the Google way. Now they're saying hey, you know what. We know the enterprise. Jennifer Lin, Sarah Novotny, Dawn Chen. All those people over there are leading the way real enterprise just with tech and they got some big moves to make, and they're doing it. So Diane Greene did not fail. So that was one thing that's interesting in the ecosystem and in Amazon as you know just kick it out. So given all that Stu, how does that relate to this? >> Yeah, let's bring it back here. So first of all, kubernetes. It was interesting the keynote this morning. We spent a lot of time talking about things that built on top of and around what's happening with kubernetes. Talking about things like how Helm is moving forward. Onvoy, Prometheus all of these projects. There are a couple dozen incubating projects and a few of them are graduating up to be full flanked projects. We talked about the ecosystem and how many partners are here. There's around 80 service providers and about 80 platforms that have kubernetes baked in. I want to point out an interesting distinction. Some people said, it's like oh they're 75 or 80 different distributions of it. I don't think that anybody thinks that they're going to make a differentiated platform that people are going to buy what I'm doing because I have the best kubernetes. Really what the CNCF has done a good job is saying you're fully supported. You're inoperable, you meet the guidelines to say, I am kubernetes and therefore it's baked into what we're doing. So why do we have so many of them? It's well, there's a lot of clouds out there. There's service providers and even the infrastructure players are making sure that they're in there. Everybody from Intel, all the way through. Servers and storage and networking all making sure that they're doing they're pieces to make sure that they work in the kubernetes environment. >> So Stu, I got to ask you a question on the keynote. You were in the front row. I was watching online here. Kind of distraction, sold out in the keynote. I didn't get the whole gist of it. How much of the keynote was vendor or project expansion verses end user traction? Can you give some color on that? >> Yeah, so a lot of it was the projects. What's really good is there's not a lot of vendors. Sure there is here's the logo slide. Let's everybody give a big round of applause and thank you. But when they put the projects up there, many of these projects came out of a group but some of that is well Lyft. Lyft created one of these projects and who's involved in that. One of the big news announcement was FCD is being donated to the CNCS, and well that came out of CoreOS to solve a really needed problem that they had to make sure that when you're rolling upgrades that you don't reboot the entire cluster all at once, and then your application isn't able to be there. So why are they donating? Well it has reached the maturity level, and while CoreOS is inside of Red Hat, there is a broad adoption. Lots of people contributing and it just makes sense to hand it over. Red Hat, everything they've done always is 100% open source, so them making sure that they have a good relationship with the foundation and who should have the governs of that. Red Hat has a strong track record on that. I know we'll be talking a lot-- >> All right so Stu get your perspective on the big players. We saw Google up on Saint-operno. We saw VMware. Cisco is here. I saw some of the Cisco executives here earlier. You got Red Hat, you got the big dogs here, Microsoft. What's the trend on the big players and then what's the trend on the hot startups either companies and or new wave in here? You mentioned Knative. So big companies, what's the general trend there and then what are you seeing on the interests around startups. >> So John, last year when I talked to users at this show. It was most of the people that were using kubernetes were building their own stack. The exception to that was oh if I'm a Red Hat customer, open shift makes sense for me. I can built it into what my model is. Azure had just come out with their AKS support. AWS had just been figuring out their ECS verse EKS and what they had. We're going to do before Fargate was down there. Today, what I hear is maturation of the platform so I expect Amazon and Microsoft to win more, and just I'm on those platforms. I'm using it, oh I want to use their kubernetes service that's going to make sense. So the rich get richer in this a lot way. Red Hat is going to do well, IBM is a strong player here, and of course sometime in 2019, we expect that acquisition of Red Hat to close. From a start up standpoint, there are so many niches that can be filled here. The question is how many of them are going to end up as acquisitions inside some of these big ones. How much of them can monetize because as I said with kubernetes John, I don't see a company that's going to say oh, I'm going to be the kubernetes company and monetize. Mirantis for a year or so ago was pivoting to be from the OpenStack company to the kubernetes company. Heptio was an early player and they had a quick exit. They're bringing strong skill set to the VMware team to help VMware accelerate their CloudNative activities. So in many ways John, this is an evolution more than a revolution so I do not see a drastic change in the landscape. >> Well evolution is cloud computing. We know that's going to yield the edge of the network and then on premise is complete conversions. This evolution is interesting Stu because this is an open source community vibe. You have now two other things going on around it. You have the classic open source community event, and you've got on the other spectrum, normal app developers that just want to right code. Then you got this IT dynamic. So what's happening and that will be interesting and we'll be watching this is how does the CNCF KubeCon, CloudNativeCon involve, and you start to cross pollinate app developers who just want our infrastructure as code. IT people who want to take over a new IT and then pure open source community players. This has now become a melting pot. Is that an opportunity or a challenge for the CNCF and the Linux Foundation? >> The danger is that this just gets overruned by vendors. It becomes another OpenStack that people get disenfranchised through what they're doing so absolutely there's a threat here. To their credit, I think the CNCF has done a really good job of managing things. They're smart is how they're doing. They're community focused. I have to say in the keynote John, if we noticed the diversity was phenomenal. Most of the speakers were women. They were one from end users. There are a couple of dozen end users that are now members of the CNCF. >> I think they're all CUBE alumnis too. >> Absolutely, and John, we've been here since the early days been tracking the whole thing. >> It's fun to watch. My opinion on the whole the melting pot of those personas is I think the CNCF and the Linux Foundation has a winning formula by owning and nurturing the open source community side of it. I think that's where the data is going to be, that's where the action is and I think as a downstream benefit, the IT market and developers will win. I would not try to get enamored by the money, and the vendor participation hype. I don't think they are. I'm just saying I would advise them to stay the course. Make this the open source community show of course, that's what we believe and of course we're CubeNative this week. We are here at the CloudNative and now we're CubeNative. This is the first day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman breaking down the analysis, talking to the smartest people we can find, and also talk about some of the key players that are sponsoring the show. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (uptempo techno music)

>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield's Venture Capital Headquarters for the People First Network. I'm here with Pradeep Sindhu, who's the co-founder of Juniper Networks and now the co-founder and CEO of Fungible. Thanks for joining me on this special conversation for the People First Program. >> Thank you, John. >> So I want to talk to you about entrepreneurship. You're doing a new startup, you've been so successful as an entrepreneur over the years, uh you keep building a great company at Juniper Networks, everyone kind of knows the success there, great success. We've interviewed you before on that, but now you got a new startup! >> I do. >> You're building a company I thought startups were for young people. (Pradeep laughs) Come on! We're nine years into our startup, we're still a startup. >> Well, I'm not quite over the hill yet. (John Laughs) One of the reasons I jumped back in to the startup world was I saw an opportunity to solve a very important industry problem and to do it rapidly and so, I took the step. >> Well, we're super excited that you shared your vision with us and folks can check that video out on theCUBE and deep dive on the future of that startup. So, it's exciting, check it out. Entrepreneurship has changed and one of the things that we're talking about here is how things have changed just since the last time you've done a round. I mean, you're now a couple years in, you've been stealth for a while building out this amazing chip, the the Data Processing Unit, the DPU. What's different about building companies now? I mean, are you a unicorn? You have a billion-dollar evaluation yet? I mean, that's the new bar, it's different. What are some of the differences now in building a company? >> You know, one thing, John, that I saw is a clear difference between when I started Juniper and started Fungible, is that the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork that one has to go through is tremendously larger. And this was disappointing because one of the things that the US does very well is to keep it light and keep it fast so that it's easy for people to create new companies. That was one difference. The other difference that I saw was actually reluctance on the part of Venture to take big bets. Because people had gotten used to the idea of a quick turn around with maybe a social media company or something. Now, you know, my tendency to work on problems is I tend to work on fundamental problems that take time to do, but the outcome is potentially large. So, I'm attracted to that kind of problem. And so, the number of VCs that were willing to look at those kinds of problems were far fewer this time around than last time. >> So you got some no's then? >> Of course, I got no's. Even from people that-- >> You're the Founder of Juniper Networks, you've done amazing things, like you created billions of dollars of value, you should be gold-plated. >> What you did 20 years ago only goes so far. I think what what people were reluctant, and remember, I started Fungible in 2015. At that time, silicon was still a dirty word. I think now there are several people who said, no, we're regretting because they see that it's kind of the second coming of silicon and it's for reasons that we have talked about in the other discussion that, you know, Moore's Law is coming to a close. And that the largest that it was distributing over the last 30, 40 years is going away so what we have to do is we have to innovate on silicon. You know, as we discussed, the world has only seen a few architectures for computing engines on silicon. One of the things that makes me very happy is that now people are going to apply their creativity to painting on this canvas. >> So, silicon's got some new life blood. What's your angle with your silicon strategy? >> So, our silicon strategy is really to focus on one aspect of computations in the data center and this aspect we call Data Centric Computing. Data Centric Computing is really computing where there's a lot more movement of data and lot less arithmetic on data. And today, giving scaled out architectures, data has to move and be stored and retrieved and so on as much as it has to be computed on. So, existing engines are not very good at doing these Data Centric Computations, so we are building a programmable DPU to actually do those computations much, much better than any engine can today. >> And that's great. And just a reminder, we got a deep dive on that topic, so check out the video on that. So, I got to ask you the question, why are people resistant at the silicon trend? Was it trendy? Was it the lack of information? You almost see people almost less informed on computer architecture these days as people Blitzscale for SASPA businesses. Cloud certainly is great for that , but there's now this renaissance. Why was it, what was the problem? >> I think the problem is very easy to identify. Building silicon is expensive. It takes very specialized set of skills. It takes a lot of money, and it takes time. Well, anything that takes a long time is risky. And Venture, while it likes risk, it tries to minimize it. So, it's completely understandable to me that, you know, people don't want to take, they don't want to put money in ventures that might take two, three years. Actually, you know, going back to the Juniper era, there are Venture folks, I won't name them, but who said, well, if you could do this thing in six months, we're in, but otherwise no. >> How long did it take? >> 2 1/2 years. >> And then the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> So, there's a lot of naysayers, it's just categorical kind of like, you know, courses for horses for courses, as they say, that expression. All right, so now with with your experience, okay, you got some no's, how did that, how did that make you feel? You're like, damn, I got to get out and do the rounds? >> Actually-- >> You just kind of moved on or? >> I just moved on because, you know, the fact that I did Juniper should not give me any special treatment. It should be the quality of the idea that I've come up with. And so, what I tried to do, my response was to make the idea more compelling, sharpen it further, and and try to convince people that, hey there was value here. I think that I've not been often wrong about predicting things maybe two, three years out, so on the basis of that people were willing to give me that credibility, and so, there were enough people who were interested in investing. >> What did you learn in the process? What was the one thing that you sharpened pretty quickly? Was it the story, was it the architecture message? What was the main thing that you just had to sharpen really fast? >> The thing I had to sharpen really fast was while the technology we were developing is disruptive, customers really, really care, they don't want to be disrupted. They actually want the insertion to be smooth. And so, this is the piece that we had to sharpen. Anytime you have a new technology, you have to think about, well, how can I make it easy for people to use? This is very, very important. >> So the impact to the architecture itself, if it was deployed in the use case, and then look at the impact of ripple effect. >> For example, you cannot require people to change their applications. That's a no-no. Nobody's going to rewrite their software. You also probably don't want to ask people to change their network architecture. You don't want to ask people to change their deployment model. So, there are certain things that need to be held constant. So, that was a very quick learning. >> So, one of the other things that we've been talking about with other entrepreneurs is okay, the durability of the company. You're going down, playing the long game, but also innovation and and attracting people and so you've done, built companies before, as with Juniper, and you've worked with a great team of people in your network. How did you attract people for this? Obviously, they probably were attracted on the merit of the idea, but how do you pick people? What's the algorithm? What's the method that you use to choose team members or partners? Because that's also super important. If you got a gestation period where you're building out. You got to have high quality DNA. How do you make that choice? What's the thought process? >> So John, the the only algorithm that I know works is to look for people that are either known to you directly or known to somebody that you trust because in an interview, it's a hit or miss. At least, I'm not so good at interviewing that I can have a 70, 80% success rate. Because people can fake it in an interview, but you cannot fake it once you've worked with somebody, so that's one very important test. The other one was, it was very important for me to have people who were collaborative. It is possible to find lots of people who are very smart but they are not collaborative. And in an endeavor like the one we're doing, collaboration is very important, and of course the base skill set is very important so, you know, almost half of our team is software because we are-- >> It's a programmable chip. >> It's a programmable chip. We're writing our own operating system, very lightweight. So, you need that combination of hardware and software skills which is getting more and more scarce regrettably. >> I had a chat with Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld and he and I had a great conversation similar to this, he said, you know, hardware is hard, software is easier, (laughs) and that was his point, and he also was saying that with merchant silicon, it's the software that's key. >> It is absolutely the key. Software, you know, software is always important. But software doesn't run on air. We should also remember that. And there are certain problems, for example, switching packets inside a data center where the problem is reasonably well-solved by merchant silicon. But there are other problems for which there is no merchant silicon solution, like the DPU that we're talking about. Eventually, there might be. But today there isn't. So, I think Apple is a great example for me of a company that understands the value of software hardware integration. Everybody thinks of Apple as a software only company. They have thousands of silicon engineers, thousands. If you look at your Apple Watch, there are probably some 20 chips inside it. You look at the iPhone. It won't do the magic that it does without the silicon team that they have. They don't talk about it a lot on purpose because-- >> 'Cause they don't want a China chip in there. >> Well, they don't want a China chip, but not only that, they don't know to advertise. It's part of their core value. >> Yeah. >> And so, as long as people keep believing that everything can be done in software, that's good for Apple. >> So, this is the trend, and this is why, Larry also brought this up years ago when he was talking about Oracle. He tried to make the play that Oracle would be the iPhone of the data center. >> Mm-hmm. >> Which people poo-pooed and they're still struggling with that idea, but he was pointing out the benefit of the iPhone, how they are integrating into the hardware and managing what Steve Jobs always wanted which was security number one >> Absolutely. >> for the customer. >> And seamlessness of use. And the reason the iPhone actually works as well as it does is because the hardware and the software are co-designed. And the reason it delivers the value that it does to the company is because of those things. >> So you see, this as a big trend, now you see that hardware and software will work together. You see cloud native heterogeneous almost server-less environments abstracted away with software and other components, fabric and specialized processors? >> Yes. >> And just application developers just programming at will? >> Correct, and edge data centers, so computing, I would say that maybe in a decade we will see roughly half of the computing and storage being done closer to the edge and the remaining half being done in these massively skilled data centers. >> I want to get geeky with you for a second, I want to ask you a question, I want to get your take on something. I've been thinking about and haven't really talked publicly about, kind of said on theCUBE a few times in a couple interviews, but I want to get your thoughts. There's been a big discussion about hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, all that stuff going on, and I was talking with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, and Diane Greene at Google and I'm like okay, I can buy all these definitions, I don't believe any of 'em, but, you know, what the hell does that mean, what I know. I said to Diane Greene, I said, well, if everyone's going cloud operations, if cloud operations and edge is the new paradigm, isn't the data center just a big fat edge? And she looked at me and said, hmm, interesting. So, is the data center ultimately just a device on this network? If the operating model is horizontally scalable, isn't it just a a big fat edge? >> So you can, so here's the thing, right, if we talk about, you know, what is cloud? It's essentially a particular architecture, which is scaled out architecture uh to build a data center and then having this data center be connected by a very fast network. To consumers anytime, anywhere. So, let's take that as the definition of cloud. Well, if that's the definition of cloud, now you're talking about what kind of data centers will be present over time, and I think what we observed was it's really important for many applications to come, and with the advent of 5G, with the advent of things like augmented reality, now, with the advent of self-driving cars, a lot of computing needs to be done close to the edge because it cannot be done, because of laws of physics reasons, it cannot be done far away. So, once you have this idea that you also have small scale out data centers close to the edge, all these arguments about whether it's a hybrid cloud or this cloud or that cloud, they kind of vanish because-- >> So, you agree then, it's kind of like an edge? >> It is. >> Because it's an operational philosophy if you're running it that way, then it's just what it is, it's a scale out entity. >> Correct. >> It could be a small sensor network or it could be a data center. >> Correct. So, the key is actually the operational model and the idea of using scaled out design principles, which is don't try to build 50,000 different types of widgets which are then hard to manage. Try to build a small set of things, tinker toys that you can connect together in different ways. Make it easy to manage, manage it using software, which is then centralized by itself. >> That's a great point. You you jumped the gun on me on this one. I was going to ask you that next question. As an entrepreneur who's looking at this new architecture you just mentioned, what advice would you give them? How should they attack this market? 'Cause the old way was you get a PowerPoint, you show a presentations of the VCs, they give you some money, you provision some hardware, you go on next generation, get a prototype, it's up and running, you got some users. Built it then you get some cash, you scale it (laughs). Now with this new architecture, what's the strategy of the eager entrepreneur who wants to create a valuable opportunity with this new architecture. What would you advise them? >> So I, you know, I think it really depends on what is the underlying technology that you have for your startup. There's going to be lots and lots of opportunities. >> Oh don't fight the trend, which is, the headwind would be, don't compete against the scale out. Ride that wave, right? >> Yeah, people who are competing against scale out by building large scale monolithic machines, I think they're going to have difficulty, there's fundamental difficulties there. So, don't fight the trend. There's plenty of opportunities for software. Plenty of opportunities for software. But it's not the vertical software stack that you have to go through five or six different levels before you get to doing the real work. It's more a horizontal stack, it's a more agile stack. So, if it's a software company, you can actually build prototypes very quickly today. Maybe on AWS, maybe on Google Cloud, maybe on Microsoft. >> So, maybe the marketing campaign for your company, or maybe the trend might that's emerging is data first companies. We heard cloud mobile first, cloud first, data first. >> Correct. We think that the world really, the world of infrastructure is going from compute centric to data centric. This is absolutely the case. So, data first companies, yes. >> All right, so final question for you, as someone who's had a lot of experience in building public company, multi-billions of dollars of value, embarking on a big idea that that we like, I love the idea. A lot of people struggle with the entrepreneurial equation of how to leverage their board, how to leverage their investors and advisors and service providers. What would you share to the folks watching that are out there that have struggled? Some think, oh the VCs, they don't add value. Some do, some don't. There's always missed reactions. There's different, different types out there. Some do, some don't. But in general, it's about leveraging the resources and the people involved. How should entrepreneurs leverage their advisors, their board, their investors? >> I think it's very important for an entrepreneur to look for complementarity. It's very easy to want to find people that think like you do. If you just find people that think like you do, you're not, they're not going to find weaknesses in your arguments. It's more difficult, but if you look to entrepreneurs to provide complementarity, you look to advisors to provide the complementarity, look to customers to give you feedback, that's how you build value. >> Pradeep, thanks so much for sharing the insight, a lot of opportunities. Thanks for sharing here on-- >> Thank you, John. >> The People Network. I'm John Furrier at Mayfield on Sand Hill Road for theCUBE's coverage of the People First Network series, part of Mayfield's 50th Anniversary. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)