(upbeat orchestral music) >> Hello and welcome to this special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube, here in our Palo Alto studios. We're going to across the pond, across the United States, then the pond to Bill Mew, who is the founder of MEW ERA consulting. We're going to talk privacy. We're going to talk about, you know, the challenges with cloud, cloud scale, and also privacy. With the recent report Facebook behaving like digital gangsters, as the report from The Parliament came out. The huge focus on this big-tech data problem around privacy and user rights. So, Bill, welcome, good to see you. Thanks for coming on camera. I know you're in London area, so you're in the UK, so, great to see you. >> Well, it's really great to join you, and I'm glad the technology's allowing us to chat from this great distance. >> Well, we love to bring the conversations, which are very robust on Twitter, obviously, at @furrier, your @billmew. And all our friends Sarbjeet, Tim Crawford, Stu Minimin. The whole set of Cloud influencers, has been really talking a lot, lately, around digital transformation. You know, it's the classic, you know, cliché, oh digital transformation, blah-blah-blah-blah. It's really about Cloud. It's about Cloud scale, but data. But now, as people start to realize, the scale and some of these immediate benefits of DevOps and agile development. In comes the privacy conversation. In comes the, where's the data? Moving data around is expensive. Managing data and privacy is hugely expensive, and there are consequences. And one of the most obvious news stories, just from the past, you know, 24, 48 hours, is The Parliament report that says Facebook has been acting like digital gangsters. Now this puts it on the main stage. Unpack this for us. >> Well, I come from a Cloud background, and I'm not a sort of rabid privacy campaigner, by any stretch of the imagination. I've been passionate supporter of Cloud and worked with UKCloud, who've been almost unique, being a company that took on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in the cloud market. And beat them all at their own game. Here, in the UK, we have a procurement framework that the government hosts called, G-Cloud for public sector technology, and UKCloud captured something like 30, 35% of the market with Amazon way down on 12%. So, it was almost a unique instance. I can't think of a single other market anywhere in the world, where these guys are being beaten at their own game. Sort of in the public cloud market, with a very specific niche. And a niche that the cloud focused on, was differentiating themselves around data sovereignty, higher levels of assurance and security, and making sure that the really sensitive government data, be it your tax records, or possibly your criminal record, if you have one, or medical records, or whatever. All this data is kept safe, and it's really, it's been really interesting to see the news recently, and some of the hysteria around privacy. I've seen, as all of us have, the tech revolution of the cloud, and how all this has come to fruition and enabled so much. And now we are seeing the tech backlash, and I think that's at it's full force at the moment. >> One of the trends that we're seeing, and I want to get your thoughts on this, is that, you know, on the one extreme, is users own their own data and you got to see things, like Blockchain, and some interesting progressive solutions around the supply chain of users owning their own data. And then, just the natural trend of Edge Computing, where the data is closest to the, whether it's the people or the devices, you call it the Internet of Things or Edge Computing. It's now becoming part of cloud, and with the global distributed nature of how the cloud is built, the emphasis on regions. So, you see, you know, certain every country has, might have their own characteristics. How is this changing the digital transformation equation? Because, you know, on one hand, you see people saying, look at, you know, you picked the right cloud for the right job. And then the other one saying, no, it should be all vendor procurement decision, not so much a cloud decision. So, there's kind of like two camps going on here. One's saying, let procurement drive the decision. And the other one saying, let the apps or the workloads drive the architecture and cloud decision. Your thoughts on this kind of mega trend of data at the edge, ownership of data, cloud selection. It's kind of a nightmare, kind of confusing. Your thoughts. >> I think, I think we're definitely seeing an acceptance that we're in a multicloud world. I think there are hardly any companies out there that don't have an element of cloud in a number of different places and that. You may have dictated a strategic alignment about one particular cloud vendor, but you're bound to have some legacy stuff, as well. You may well have some SaaS applications. You may have Salesforce or any other things. And, therefore, by almost by default, almost every organization is in some form of a multi-cloud environment, anyway. And they're all ready to accept that as a reality. And as what we've seen is a cloud migration, and people taking various different workloads to the cloud. People have naturally started with the easy stuff. The low-hanging fruit. So, typically, you're taking virtualized workloads to easy the environments like a VMware Cloud or something like that. You're taking new, the sort of Greenfield developments into sort of cloud native environments. And those are the sort of places, where you're really breaking ground with all of this, and this is going to be leaving behind certain legacy applications, which is the sort of, the really difficult stuff that you'll leave till later. And a lot of people have already cracked, much of the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit, and they're now having to face up to the more difficult stuff. But, I think one of the things you would need to be worried about, here, is that it's not just about a focus on applications and workloads. One of the things you find is that typically you may have a few new applications that you're developing. You may sort of have the odd so change, from time to time. But, typically, the number of applications you use, and the nature of those applications, doesn't actually change enormously. What does change, is the data volume. So, whilst, people are overly focused on, well, which applications are we going to be moving and in which order. And not enough companies are actually thinking really seriously about, well what are we going to do with the data? People have budgets that are either stationary or possibly in decline, and they have data volumes that are going through the roof. And the moment we have Edge, and the moment we have 5G, this is going to come home, to really haunt them. And you'd actually need to have a really sensible data strategy to get ahead of this problem, otherwise, you're going to be facing big ingress and egress charges, because getting data in and out of the cloud isn't cheap. And also, you're going to have integration problems. But on top of that, you have the privacy issue, because a large chunk of that data is going to be sort of personally identified, viable data. It's going to be the type of data covered by GDPR and possibly new regulations, or whatever is coming up next in the US. A lot of the data won't be covered this, because it will be data that isn't privacy sensitive. But, if you don't have a really sensible data strategy, first of all, you're not going to be able to deal with the massive growing volumes of data, which are just going to get worse with 5G and Edge, but, also, you're face real problems with privacy, if suddenly people say, I want this removed, or I want that taken down, or something like that. And you go, whoa, where the heck is it? How do I do that? >> Yeah, where's it stored? On what servers is it on? So, Bill, I got to get your thoughts on this. You mentioned migration tool. In the news today, Google acquired cloud migration platform, Alooma, which has only raise 15 million in funding, shows that Google is trying to catch up. Amazon pelts highly their migration tool for moving off Oracle. So, you're seeing migration is a big part of it. So, I want to get your thoughts on the cloud players. You got Google, nipping at the heels of Azure. Azure nipping at the heels of AWS. And, you got IBM and Oracle kind of in the back falling behind. I wanted to get your thoughts on the top three, and then IBM and Oracle. Do they have a shot? And your thoughts about IBM Think was just last week. Lot of conversations around IBM and the cloud with their, with their cloud private solution. Your thoughts. Amazon, Azure? >> Okay. >> Google, and then, >> I think >> IBM and Oracle. >> I'm going to take this in two different ways. First of all I'm going to say, well, here's what we're seeing in a general market level. And, secondly, I'm going to say, well, what have I seen on the ground? On the ground, maybe I'll start with that. I worked in the UK public sector and we've been out there competing and winning a lot of business, and doing really very well. One of the things that we've seen is that having established a lead in this market at a point we're the people everyone are gunning for, which is strange to be ahead of the big hyperscalers in this market. We've found that Amazon, and certainly Azure, are all over our accounts. We almost never see a competition or any sort of competitive bids from companies like Oracle or IBM. They're just not in the market. We don't see them at all. And, certainly for IBM, in the UK, the finance sector and the public sector are meant to be the main markets they're focused on, and we're not seeing them. We just got to worry about how credible they are in those markets. Now if you look at sort of a global scale. >> Hold on, just to interrupt. We lost you for a quick second. Got a little glitch in the screen on the connectivity. But, did you mention Oracle, I mean, Google? What's Google like out there on the ground, anything? >> Okay. From a global perspective, there's obviously AWS, who are way ahead. You've got Azure, who are a very credible second player, and they got a lot of strength. I mean, they got a foot both in the public cloud, but also in the hybrid cloud. I think, you shouldn't overlook the strength of the Geostack offering. And, also, they've got an enormously strong partner ecosystem, with CSPs and MSPs. There they're going to take a lot of their technology forward. So, I think, they're going to be credible across the space. Google are in an interesting position. I think they're investing heavily. They have deep pockets. They are some distance behind. I'm not seeing them in any competitive bids that we're entering into. So, you got to worry about how much traction they're really getting in the market, but they've certainly got very deep pockets, and you shouldn't dismiss them. The likes of Alibaba, who, you know, they may not be present in this market at the moment, but, again, you can't dismiss them. The companies that you possibly might dismiss as serious cloud players, are maybe Oracle, and IBM, 'cause we're not seeing them in any of the shortlists that we're up against. We're not seeing them in the market. We're not seeing them put in the level of investment, the billions of infrastructure investment that you need to have to keep up in this market. And I actually think IBM are in a very strong position. When I said, earlier, we've moved a lot of low-hanging fruit, and then we're now getting onto difficult stuff. IBM have the services business to help the big companies with the complex migrations and the really challenging stuff. But I think that's where IBM is going to play, and I think they have a very strong role to play there. I just don't seem them as a cloud player. And, maybe we should just be describing them as a services company. >> I want to get your thoughts on, this might be a little bit tangent to the cloud, but it's kind of related, with multi-cloud on the horizon, or actually here, everyone has a lot of different clouds, when you put the connective tissue together for the multi-cloud, you can't help but ignore Cisco and VMware. Both have presence in enterprises. Thoughts around, you know, the network layer, get NSX on VMware, and you got, also, Cisco moving up the stack with their DevNet program, developer program. We're seeing a lot of action going on around the software-defined data center, as it relates to on-premise and multi-cloud. Your thoughts on that market? Can you share any insights there? >> Yeah, I mean, I've come from a company that was hosting possibly the largest VMware Cloud in Europe, and we're very familiar with some of these technologies, and I think VMware has had a very good position in the market. I'm not sure that they are going to be able to sustain that. We're seeing a lot of people who saw the ability to move virtualized workloads to, sort of VMware Cloud environment as a compelling proposition, but that's a one-off shift. And the moment they have the opportunity to go cloud native, they're going to take it off. And I don't see Vm are really holding the control point now, but that you certainly got VMware on all the different platforms, and it's being controlled by the likes of AWS and others, who can sort of assist their customers to get on to whichever environment within their estate that they want. I think Cisco are coming from an interesting position. Where they got some really great security portfolio, and, in fact, we've used a lot of their hardware, but I don't see them actually, again, having a particular control point in the market. >> Talk about, before we get close out here, I want to get your thoughts on what's going on on Twitter. Obviously, you're highly engaging, you're an influencer on Twitter, subject matter expert, great on camera, obviously, here at the Cube remote. What's the sentiment going on around digital transformation? Sarbjeet and the crowd, all talking, Stu Miniman and I, and Dave Vellante and the Cube team, and the whole community has really been chirppin', obviously 'cause IBM Think was last week, around the context of cloud on-premise, digital transformation. What's the general sentiment in the social media channels, that you're hearing. What's the top story? What's the most important story that's being discussed? >> You can't, you can't get away from the whole privacy debacle. I mean, we have seen the tech revolution. We're now seeing the, sort of, tech backlash, where certain companies, who have made big mistakes and many, many mistakes, I mean, Facebook, you can't avoid mentioning them. And, there are others, but Facebook are front and center. I think they have. >> Looks like we lost you little bit there, Bill. Okay, you're back. >> Yup. >> You're back. (Bill speaking faintly) So, the final question, final question for you. So, if Facebook's the digital gangster on social networking, is there a cloud gangster? >> I'm not sure. (John and Bill laugh) I don't want to point any fingers anywhere. (John laughs) I think there are companies that are the particularly muscular in the market and have a particular market position, and you can't avoid looking at Amazon, there. But, I think that there are some, there's going to be an enormous fragmentation and one side, if we're talking typically about a hybrid environment. You're talking about a mixture of public cloud and private cloud on perimeter age and whatever. In the public cloud, it's going to be concentrated down to possibly three players. And, therefore, they're going to have enormous control. Then you look on the other side of the hybrid equation to the private legacy whatever. That's going to be massively fragmented. I mean, I believe it's like IBM, who are going to be doing some of the complex migrations for some of the big organizations, using their massive services army may have a control on some of the big instances, but there's going to be a massively long tail with all sorts of MSPs and CSPs, providing bespoke solutions and value right down the chain. >> Yeah. >> And that's where I think the channel ecosystems come into play. And those companies that are cloud players also have a strong channel ecosystem? That they're going to be the ones that come out at the end of the day. >> I think the ecosystem is right on, great point. Bill, thanks for spending the time joining us here on the Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto for a conversation with the influencers, experts around cloud, privacy. This is the big deal. What are you doing with all that data coming in? How's it being managed? How's the value being created? This is the digital transformation challenge. It's the Cube Conversation, in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (upbeat orchestral music)