>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco on the ground floor here. Day 3 of Three Days of Wall to Wall Coverage, Cube coverage of Google Cloud Next 2019. I'm John Furman, co host Steve Alante. Steve looking good here. >> Thank you, John. I'm feeling good! >> Day three we're getting energy. Our next guest, Ulku Rowe, who is the technical director for financial services for Google Cloud. Thanks for joining us! >> Well thanks for having me, good to be here today. >> So, obviously all the verticals, the big theme here is that all the industries have opportunities with Anthos and all the data driven activities and open source greatness. But financial services is always kind of an early tell-sign. All the trends kind of happen in financial services because the data, whether its algorithmic trading or whatever, is clearly a competitive advantage. From fraud detection to competitive advantage revenue, big driver. That's your sweet spot. What's going on there? What's the signals from the marketplace? How is Google Cloud Next here impacted fina-- What's the big news? What's the big stories? >> It's a very exciting time in financial services. You know Google Cloud is enabling financial services customers across the globe, across all the sub-sectors. Whether you are in retail bank, in capital markets, or asset manager, or a hedge fund, insurance, FinTax. Cloud is enabling all of our customers to transform their businesses to reduce their cost, and to create better and new products. And it is very exciting for them. They're using our, you know, our data platforms to be able to look at the data that they have and understand their customers better to be able to create better experiences for them. Whether it's through chat box, or our contact centers, or better online experiences. They are able to provide more customized products for them. Especially on the trading site, on the retail banks and hedge funds, they're using our high performance compute environments, that our HPC offerings to be able to create better risk management systems to look at their portfolios and understands the risk. Whether it's a credit risk or a market risk, or fraud, or if they use it for anti-money laundering. We're seeing customers in the insurance space to create personalized products, they are streamlining their actual aerial processes. FinTex, obviously are using, you know they're Cloud native. It's very exciting for them to have this opportunity to challenge the big players. >> Don't forget blockchain. It's coming right around the corner, too. So you're a technical director. What does that mean? What is your job? What's your focus? >> It's a number of things. I sit mostly on the engineering side of the house to make sure that our product offering works for financial services. And it includes things like making sure our security offerings, or our compliance works, our data platforms, our computational platforms, higher level services, they do what financial services customers need them to do. I also have the privilege of spending a lot of time with our clients across the globe. And I get a view into what they're thinking about, how Cloud is changing their businesses. >> So we spend a lot of time in New York and 10 years ago when we started the Cube, when you talked to financial services company there were two narratives. One was "Cloud is evil, we're never going to go to Cloud." And the other was "Well we have global scale, "we're going to build on our own Cloud". A couple things have happened, as you know. They're obviously, going hard into Cloud. But they are building their own global Clouds, they're just building it on top of your Cloud. So, talk about that change, and what are some of the big trends that you're seeing today in terms of their adoption? >> Yeah, that has changed quite a bit, the narrative. You know it used to be that "We're never going there" to "Well, maybe we'll go there". And now it's, "How quickly can we get there". And customers are now using, now they're seeing the Cloud as a place to innovate and actually change their businesses. Initially they started maybe as a cost-play because they had big legacy platforms and Cloud came in and the ability to be able to reduce that cost-space especially under the competitive pressures they're in. It initially started with a cost-play. But then it very quickly turned into "This is now my innovation play". "This is how I can change my business. This is how I can stay competitive. This is actually how I can up level my security and compliance". So, it has become very much a partnership between us and our customers to actually think about how the future in financial services is going to be. >> Again, we've been in New York a lot. Back in my (mumbles) late 80s early 90s, I covered a lot, sold and did some system engineering with all the banks, all the financial institutions and other in New York. They're good customers but also they're tough customers. They buy a lot, early adopters on everything new, but they're tough customers. They're very demanding because the stakes are high, money. >> I used to be one of those customers. >> Also risk management. So, they're pushing the envelope, with the RND, buying early. They have stringent demands in terms of performance, also risk and security all kind of come together. So how does that boil into today? What are they looking at? What tires are they kicking here at Google Cloud? What are some of their tough questions and requirements? And obviously security has got to be big then. Your thoughts. >> Exactly. I think financial services is a business of trust. So usually the conversation starts there. And trust is established through security and compliance and privacy and transparency. And that happens to be one of our differentiators. Our security offering actually allows them to create a product for them that is actually even more secure than our on premise settings. The second thing is Hybrid and Multi-Cloud. Especially if you are a financial services institution that's been around a while. You're carrying a lot of legacy. You've got a lot of technical debt. You want to be able to also have flexibility to be able to run your workloads wherever you want. So, Anthos, if I were to pick a word that dominated the conversations with our financial services customers over the last couple of days, it has been Anthos, our Multi Hybrid Cloud solution. The ability to run workloads on-premise, on Google Cloud and on other Clouds at the same time and have that flexibility to be able to choose where to put your workloads depending on your needs has been very exciting for them. >> What specific questions were they asking? Were there certain technical attributes of Anthos that was interesting to them? What was some of that, when they started to look under the hood, what are the conversations like there? >> Well I think the most commonly asked question is how soon can we start? >> So there's demand. >> There is definitely demand. There is definitely demand and excitement. And for the reasons that I've just laid out, to give them the flexibility that they want and the reality that the Prem set up is going to live for a while. So for them to be able to manage this across a single pane, no matter where their workloads are working, it's a big interesting proposition. >> I want to get your reactions on that. We've been doing a lot of customer digging into the requirements around on Prem, Hybrid, Multi-Cloud, and Pure Cloud, and there's a debate around cloud selection. And I was going to read a quote from one of my article that I'm writing right now. I won't say the customer name, we are currently over 500 existing planned cloud efforts across the company, and we're going to support. We've got thousands of networks, data centers, and more than 500 cloud efforts with lead industry leaders. But we want to manage it individually. So, the trend is hey I got a workload. This workload look works great on "X" cloud. This workload works great on "Y" cloud. This workload works great on this other cloud. So (mumbles) we multi-cloud. The workloads are dictating cloud selection. And they still want to manage themselves. So a little bit of control-freak action going on there. But also flexibility on cloud selection. So it's not a one cloud rules the world but, if the one cloud (mumbles) serve the workload. The workloads are driving it. Do you agree with that, are you seeing the same thing? Yeah, I think what's important to financial services clients is to be able to have skill and reliability. And they've started on this journey first with standardization and that standardization was offered by (rambles) containerization. So they already started taking their legacy workloads and started containerizing them so that they can actually now put them no matter where they want. And now, on top of that (rambles) and containerization availability, the services that Anthol springs, observability and security and a single control plane, is now, I think, an extension of the desire for standardization. Which brings the security and reliability across the board. >> Sounds like an operating system to me. Cloud operating system maybe? >> It is, yes. >> We talk about an operating-- >> Yes, yes. >> (rambling) clouds, its operating (rambling) clouds. >> No, it used to be Unix was the operating system, Anthos is the operating system of the Cloud. >> What's the disruption conversation like? Cause banking really hasn't been highly disrupted, but I've certainly heard CIO's in the banking world ask the question, "Well, do banks need physical bags?" and "We're becoming "a software company". But the industry itself hasn't been highly disrupted. The leaders are still really strong, lots of disruption scenarios but, is there a paranoia? Is there, they're obviously aggressive people, are they getting out ahead of the disruption? What's that like? >> Financial services is an industry that's been slow to move to the Cloud in many ways cause it is a very heavily regulated industry, it's got a lot of legacy. But disruption happened, right? FinTex have started happening everywhere. It's a reality of today. I don't think it's whether disruption is going to come, it's here. And I think it's actually creating a very healthy environment in the financial services sector because initially I think that financial services firms were saying, "Wait a minute, I need to "stay competitive." Then it turned into, "Wait a minute, maybe we can be collaborative." So now we're seeing the big players collaborating more and more for FinTex, and now we're seeing a lot more open systems where we've got open banking, open API's, where we're seeing a very healthy ecosystem being created in financial services. >> So I was going to ask you, do you think traditional banks will lose control of the payment systems, or do you feel like this new mindset is going to allow them to maintain their hold on that? >> I don't have a crystal ball, but I think it's going to be more of a collaboration. I think there's going to be more players, I think there's going to be healthy competition and also healthy collaboration across board. >> You mentioned blockchain before. We've had Nick Cucuru from Mastercard on many times. He's talked about their blockchain initiatives. But the other thing that's interesting is, they're actually, as they said, becoming a software company, providing services and becoming more marketing oriented, not just to consumers, but to other businesses. It's fascinating changes. >> One thing that I wanted to ask you is that you mentioned earlier ecosystems open, more collaborative, which we agree. We see that a hundred percent as well. But the interesting dynamic of these big financial institutions is they've had a huge build-out on data centers over the years. Just go back a couple decades, all they've been is gearing up and building out. And now in comes the Cloud, they're not going to just let that on-prem go away, I get that. But now you got new white spaces emerging with Cloud. What Cloud is operating in is not so much knock the big guys off their perch, it's more of white space opportunities for point solutions that could be funded and grow by just being creative. Whether its slinging API's together, or using glue layer software, or some sort of connective tissue around data. >> Yes. >> How does that evolve? Cause New York's got a new renaissance around its entrepreneur ecosystem. >> Yes, New York's becoming the next home of FinTex. >> What are these white space opportunities? Do you see that either service providers, either global service providers, or ecosystem partners could take advantage of. Cause white space is where the opportunities are that's where the ecosystem will develop. Your thoughts? >> So I think you're absolutely right. I think as financial services providers are using Cloud to be able to bring their cost down and handle their legacy, now they have more resources than they can use to create new products, new solutions, new opportunities to be able to reach maybe different kinds of clients that they haven't considered in the past or weren't able to address. Because I think it's all about using their data. Whether its data about their customers to be able to create new products for those customers. Or using market data, I mentioned market data, cause financial services has always been a very data heavy industry looking at the market data to create new trading opportunities, to create new portfolios to understand how the market behaves. What are the correlation differences between different instruments. All of those capabilities, now they can build on Google Cloud with our Cloud partners as well. >> I want to get your thoughts on (rambles) an interview with Apache earlier. Mitt Zavy came on, he's new to the company, only a couple months in, but clearly Apache is going to be a real interesting opportunity because API marketplace is going to evolve from just connecting API (rambles), it'll be much more programmable. This is going to be a big part of it. How do you see that playing into your role, because you're brokering API's now, you're adding more codability to it. Coding API's is now the next level up. What's your thoughts on that? >> Exactly, API is becoming the connective tissue between all the players and the financial services market. I mean, that's how you create the ecosystem. You need a language to talk to each other. And the API's are the ones that are creating that language. And I think it's helping in two ways. One, it is creating this universal language for the providers, and the consumers, and the different players to talk to each other. It is also enabling financial institutions now to expose some of their Legacy systems without having to completely re-engineer them. But to put a veneer on it, containerize them, put an API layer on them so that they can actually be agile in this new world without having to rewrite everything. >> And the business model opportunities or having new business models are emerging from this. We saw AccuWeather came on, was talking about this. This is potentially a money-making opportunity. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> We're not just (mumbling) partners. >> Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. >> What are some of the harder technical problems that maybe ten years ago were unsolvable that you've helped customers solve, or that Google is in a best position to solve that you're working on? >> When you think about Google's differentiators one of the places is data analytics NAI. As we talked about it, financial services is a very data heavy business, but unfortunately the data had been sitting in different silos for a very, very long time. And Google's data analytics tools to be able to take all of that data, put it together, and then put that data in front of business people that doesn't necessarily have to have a computer science degree. And to be able to get insights from that data is creating a massive shift in the market. And of course the next stage from that is using our AI and email capabilities to create new insights from that data. At Google we've been using ML and machine learning and I've been embedding them into our products for a very long time. And now our focus is to be able to make it as easy for our customers to do the same in their systems. Everything from how you source that data, how you process that data, and then how do you build the models, how do you train them, how do you execute them and how do you create control over those models? And those are the places that are very attractive to financial services because as you've rightly said, it is a data business and it's important to the core of their business. >> One of the things I want to get your thoughts on. This may or may not be in your wheelhouse, but given your experience I think you might have a comment on this because technology's a big part of the shift. Culture is a big part of the shift. In terms of either mindset, whether its not an age thing, it's more of a mindset thing. But one of the things we're seeing from customers telling us that slowing down adoption on the innovation curve is procurement, and that a lot of these companies have 1995 procurement rules. That's client server, that was before the web started. So procurement, how do you procure a modern Apache API marketplace programmability (rambles) infrastructure's code completely different application renaissance is happening. So you got modern application, multi-cloud, hyper-cloud. There's no rules on procurement. There's no, "Well, split the deal amongst three vendors." You can't do that anymore. Google's great for this Cloud, why even look another cloud, or Amazon. Or Amazon for this, Google for that. So procurement has lagged. >> Yes. >> And so does that get in the way? Do you (rambles) into that? Just generally, what's your comment? How does your procurement evolve? >> I think especially in financial services like procurement takes a long time. In some cases rightly so because you got to make sure you have the right security, you got the right processing in place. But I think it's probably time for us to modernize our procurement processes as well. >> Make it faster. I mean, a lot of the times its on the customer too, not just you guys. Self-services changed the game, certainly. But even just the procurement rules. Well, we're running out of time. Thanks for coming out, I appreciate the insights. >> Great interview. >> Final question. What is the biggest learnings of the past couple of years, now you're starting to see complete visibility into programmability networking layer. Now you get (rambling) service, (rambling) right around the corner. What's the big revelation in your mind of where we are? >> Well, I think, especially for financial services, we've been on this journey for a while. I think the conversation has shifted, I think that was the very first question that you have asked. And I think we are now at the place where it's no longer just experimentation or just doing proof release systems. We now have the customers that are doing mission critical, global systems on Google Cloud. HSBC has been on us with the stage, Scotia Bank, (mumbles), some of the biggest customers. So what have we learned from that experience? I think one, you got to start. You got to start getting your hands dirty. Because it is a different paradigm and it does take a while to learn that. And it is not just a technical paradigm shift, it is a cultural paradigm shift. If you don't start early, its going to take you a while to bring the entire organization with you. Start the technology early, start the cultural transformation early as well. >> Ulku, thank you for come sharing the insights. Congratulations, good work. Financial service, it's a tough business. You guys do a good job, thanks. >> Thank you very much, thanks for having me. >> Live Cube Coach here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more live coverage after the short break. Day three, of Three Days of Wall to Wall Coverage here on The Cube in San Francisco, stay with us.