>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today I have a new guest, new to theCUBE, Madhuri Chawla. The Director of Strategic Partnerships for Enterprise Application Services, is joining me. Madhuri, it's nice to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, very excited to be here. And hello everyone. >> So different this year again, virtual like last year, we're going to talk about digital transformation. We saw this huge acceleration in 2020 the massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to to talk though about IBM Managed Services for SAP applications. So before we get into that, I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >> Absolutely Lisa, so good day everyone, I've been with IBM for over 23 years. And my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the ERP space. SAP being our primary strategic partner. I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements, talk to a lot of customers talk to our business partner SAP obviously, you know try to help them with come up with a solution for their transformation journey to the cloud. And hopefully today, you know we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact walk that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you Lucy. >> Sure, so we're going to dissect the IBM SAP relationship. I think you even worked at SAP before your 23-year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well, but help us understand, customers have so much choice, each day there's more and more choice. Why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey? >> Well, really IBM has been in this SAP business for many, many decades, as you know. We have many, many certified people in SAP, close to 40,000 people actually globally. And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So, you know, the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. You will need the advice. So you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on you know, what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our systems integration services called the Global Business Services in IBM. We can help them with their entire planning. We can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration. Well, not only just the SAP workloads, I mean SAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads than any of the major customers run, but surrounding SAP there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then, you know move it as well as in the interim, you know there's also another step which can be some customers that need to build net new, and you know, upgrade their applications to the latest technologies. So we can help them with that. And then once the build and move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment. That's where this key service that we have Managed Services for SAP applications helps them. So our certifications with SAP and the fact that we have consultants that are certified in all these different aspects of the journey, can really help your clients. The other part I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service the IBM Cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service. So if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure we can meet them there. So this is how, you know we can really help our customers with our expertise. Another data point to note that, you know, 70, 80% of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with COVID as you've seen what's happened. You know, customers now are really really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity. It's no longer something that a CEO and CIO can push to the right, right? This is something they have to act now. So IBM with all these various services specifically geared in the SAP area. And given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years we have the experience. We can truly help them with their journey. >> And as you said, that's so critical these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is there was no time like the present. It really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized, definitely were in some hot water. But talk to me so you talked about the IBM, SAP relationship being longstanding. Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >> Sure, so SAP and IBM, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years, that's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about, you know, a few of the different aspects where we've been partners. You know, the alliance initially obviously started you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we are one of the largest systems integrators in the world From a global business services point of view. As well as one of the largest application managed services providers. So that's, you know, part of the alliance. Then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where you know, 5, 6,000 plus SAP clients even today are still running their SAP applications on the power systems, whether it's on-premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically, we also had obviously the database Db2 alliance, but now with the SAP's move to HANA. That's kind of little bit of a mute point, obviously it still exists but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt SAP's latest S/4HANA. From the services standpoint, the other facet is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today, right? In the cloud services area, we have alliances with SAP, very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. As I said, we've been managing the production workloads for very, very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains HR financial systems are running on IBM, either in the old traditional hosting models or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years, right, as IBM has evolved. So we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with SAP to stay current. Many of these certifications are done either, you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know the SAP service marketplace website, which is owned by SAP you can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breadth in terms of certifications that IBM has done. And that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBM provides or obviously a combination as a single vendor, if the customer needs. So, you know we have the sets we have the credibility, we have decades of you know, delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune 100 customers actually are running their SAP workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. some cases we're actually providing services for customers that run their SAP workloads on-premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well. And then of course, others that are purely on our cloud, IBM cloud, as well as hyperscalers. Yeah. >> So long list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about. Talk to me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last, you know, 12 to 18 months in terms of how has IBM's focus changed for hybrid cloud with SAP? >> Yeah, so the focus changed, you know until last year, we were called the cloud and cognitive company. This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the Hybrid Cloud Company now, and that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer. That's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's, you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid in a cloud deployment model. So most customers in the SAP area you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for a Puppet cloud deployment or a combination. And some are because, you know their SAP's footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps you know the public cloud really isn't a good fit. Yet these customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyperscaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just SAP, but everything else, you know SAP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various deployments and hyperscalers available in that region, really the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit. Because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. We're saying you can deploy either on-premise, AWS, Azure IBM cloud, really what makes sense, you know, best sense for the types of workloads that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients you know, for what they're actually looking for. >> Talk to me a little bit about the go-to-market. So IBM and SAP, long-standing decades-old relationship lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical applications. You mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help, but think of how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the go-to-market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine, should we migrate to what hyperscaler and how and when? >> Yeah, so we can help them with that. So hybrid hyperscalers, obviously, you know IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020. And you know there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or IDC or Forrester Wave, and for many reasons. And you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from SAP over the years. How this helps the clients really determine is that you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyperscalers, you know including AWS Azure or GCP and so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer is doing. What sort of a business are they in? We have industry experts there's ERP strategy folks within IBM. So, you know, they go off for a certain industry. And when they let's say, you know, they've gone off to the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right roadmap for the client to be able to help them to move their workloads to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >> And I'm curious, Madhuri in the last year, with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions did you see any one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM, SAP for help on this transformation journey which hasn't been accelerated by a couple of years? >> Certainly the retail industry, for sure, right? I mean, in spite of the crisis I think the retail industry did pretty well right? Because people still had to buy stuff. Of course the whole buying behavior changed no question. You and I, don't know about you, Lisa but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper now I am, you know I buy just about everything. Previously it used to be select things here and there but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated no question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen the change in the last 12, 18 months is really for for example you know the banking industry and so on. IBM basically, you know launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. And I'm sure there's others, right. But these are the two that come to mind yeah. >> Yeah, two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly in addition to healthcare. Let me ask you one final question here, before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC Partner Managed Cloud SAP License resell model the advantages of using that and the benefits. >> Sure, so you know so far our discussion was really focused around, you know the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyperscalers and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time, you know talking about the operations model, right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC, Partner Managed Cloud is really some very limited partnerships that SAP does. And IBM is the lead on that one. In this space, what SAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the SAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license. And why is that beneficial to the client? Because now IBM can actually turn around the SAP license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an OPEX model where the customer is basically paying, you know a monthly fee as an example. So there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and then IBM pays SAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk, if you will, on behalf of the customer it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models, with choices you know, on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself IBM has this end-to-end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geographies right? So that's really the advantage behind it. >> Got it, excellent, thanks for breaking that down Madhuri. And joining me today, talking about what's new with IBM and SAP, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >> Thank you very much Lisa, I truly enjoyed it, thank you. >> Good me too. For Madhuri Chawla, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host lisa martin today. Have a new guest new to the cube moderate Tabla, the director of strategic partnerships for enterprise application services is joining me moderate. It's nice to have you on the program. >>Thank you lisa. Very excited to be here and hello everyone. >>So different this year. Again Virtual like last year we're going to talk about digital transformation and we saw this huge acceleration in 2020. The massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to talk though about IBM managed services for S AP applications. So before we get into that I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >>Absolutely lisa. So good day everyone. I've been with IBM for over 23 years and my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the E. R. P. Space S. A. P. Being our primary strategic partner, I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements. Talk to a lot of customers, talk to our business partner S. A. P. Obviously um you know, try to help them would come up with a solution. Well the transformation journey to the cloud and hopefully today, you know, we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact work that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you. >>Sure. So we're going to dissect the IBM s. A. P. Relationship. I think you even worked at S. A. P. Before your 23 year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well. But help us understand customers have so much choice each day. There is more and more interest why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey. >>Well really, IBM has been in this essay p business for many, many decades. As you know Um we have many many certified people in S. A. P. close to 40,000 people actually globally. Um And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So you know the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. Um You need the advice so you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on, you know what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our Systems integration services called the Global Business Business Services in IBM we can help them with their entire planning, we can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration or not only to see ASAP workloads. I mean ASAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads that any of the major customers run but surrounding SCP, there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then move it as well as in the interim. You know, there's also another step which can be some customers. They need to build net new and you know upgrade their applications to the latest technologies so we can help them with that. And then once the building move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment and that's where this key service that we have managed services for SCP applications helps them. So our certifications with S. A. P. And the fact that we have consultants that are certified and all these different aspects of the journey can really help your clients. The other part, I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service, the IBM cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service, so if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure, uh we can meet them left. So this is how, you know, we can really help our customers with our expertise. I know the data point to note that, you know, 70 80 of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with Covid, as you've seen what's happened, you know, customers now are really, really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity, It's no longer something that our Ceo and C I O can push to the right, right, this is something they have to act now. So I began with all these various services, you know, specifically good in the S A. P area. Um, and given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years, we have the experience, we can truly help them with their journey >>And as you said, that's so critical of these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is is there was no time like the present, it really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized definitely were in some hot water. Talk to me. So you talked about the IBM s, a P relationship being longstanding, Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >>Sure. Um so s. a. p. and idea, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years. That's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about you know a few of the different aspects where we've been partners um you know, the alliance initially obviously started, you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we have our one of the largest systems integrators in the world from a global business services point of view as well as one of the largest application planet services providers. So that's uh you know part of the alliance then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where um you know 5 6000 plus ASAP clients even today are still running um there? S a the applications on the power systems, whether it's on premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically we also had obviously the Database DB two alliance, but now with the S. A. P. S moved to Hannah um that's kind of a little bit of a mute point. Obviously it still exists, but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt S. A. P. S latest S four hana from the services standpoint. The other facet, you know, is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today right. Um in the cloud services area we have alliances with S. A. P very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. Um as I said we've been managing the production workloads for very very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains. HR financial systems are running on IBM either in the old traditional hosting models um or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years. Right as IBM has evolved, so we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with S. A. P. To stay current. Um many of these certifications are done either you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know, the S. A. P. Service marketplace website which is owned by S. A. P. You can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breath in terms of certifications that IBM has done and that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBMS provides or obviously a combination is a single vendor if the customer needs. So, you know, we have the sex, we have the credibility, we have decades of, you know, Delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune, 100 customers actually are running. Um there? S a p workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. Some cases were actually providing services for customers that run their SCP workloads on premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well and then of course others that are purely on our cloud. Um IBM cloud as well as hyper scholars. Yeah, so long >>list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last 12 to 18 months. in terms of how is IBMS focus changed for hybrid cloud with S. A. P. >>Yeah, so the focus changed if you know, you know, until last year we will call the cloud and cognitive company. Um This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the hybrid cloud company now. And that that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer, that's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and the IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid, another cloud deployment model. So most customers in the S. A. P. Area, you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for public cloud deployment or a combination and some are because, you know, there? S A. P. S. Footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know, and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps, you know, the public cloud really isn't a good fit yet. These customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them. Because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyper Scaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just ASAP, but everything else, you know, SCP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various um, deployments and hyper scale is available in that region. Really, the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. Um, we're saying you can deploy either on premise VWs as your idea of cloud. Really what makes sense? You know, best sense for the types of war clothes that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients, you know, for what they're actually looking for. Talk to me a >>little bit about the go to market so I B M and S A P longstanding decades old relationship, A lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical Applications, you mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help but think it how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the good market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine? Should we migrate to what Hyper Scaler and how and when? >>Yeah, so we can help them with that? Um, so hyper hyper scale is obviously, you know, IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020 and you know, there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, Right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or I. D. C. Or Horse or Wave. And for many reasons and you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from S. A. P. Over the U. S. How this helps the clients really determined is that, you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyper scholars, um you know, including Aws, Azure, G. C. P. And so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice, um, and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties, all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer wants is doing. What sort of a business are there in. We have industry experts, there's E. R. P. Strategy, um, folks within IBM. So, you know, they go after a certain industry and when they, let's say, you know, they've gone after the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right road map for the client to be able to help them to move their work clothes to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned. Right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >>And I'm curious moderate in the last year with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions, Did you >>see any >>one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM. S. A. P. For help on this transformation journey which has been accelerated by a couple of years. >>Suddenly the retail industry for sure, right. I mean in spite of the crisis, I think the retail industry did pretty well, right? Because people still have to buy stuff. Of course, the whole buying behavior change. No question. Um You and I don't know about two days of, but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper. Oh yeah. You know, I just about everything. Um previously it used to be select things here and there, but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated. No question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen. The change in the last 12, 18 months is really, for example, you know, the banking industry and so on. Um IBM basically, you know, launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. Um So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. Um and I'm sure there's others, right? But these are the two that come to mind. Yeah, >>two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly. In addition to health care. Let me ask you one final question here. Before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC partner managed cloud s a P license resale model. The advantages of using that and the benefits. >>Sure. Um so we, you know, so far our discussion was really focused around, you know, the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyper scholars and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time talking about the operations model. Right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC partner managed cloud is really some very limited partnerships that s A P does And the IBM is the lead on that one in this base. What ASAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the ASAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license and why is that beneficial to the client? Because now, um, IBM can actually turn around the S. A. P license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an apex model where the customer is basically paying, you know, a monthly fee as an example, so there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and IBM PS ASAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk if you will on behalf of the customer, it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities, better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models with choices on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself. IBM has this end to end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geography is right. So that's the advantage behind it. >>Excellent. Thanks for breaking that down moderate and joining me today talking about what's new with I B M and S A P, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >>Thank you very much, lisa truly enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Good. Me too. For moderate Tabla. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mm.

>> Welcome everybody, we're at the Flink Forward conference in San Francisco, at the Kabuki Hotel. Flink Forward U.S. is the first U.S. user conference for the Flink community sponsored by data Artisans, the creators of Flink, and we're here with special guest Kenneth Knowles-- >> Hi. >> Who works for Google and who heads up the Apache Beam Team where, just to set context, Beam is the API Or STK on which developers can build stream processing apps that can be supported by Google's Dataflow, Apache Flink, Spark, Apex, among other future products that'll come along. Ken, why don't you tell us, what was the genesis of Beam, and why did Google open up sort of the API to it. >> So, I can speak as an Apache Beam Team PMC member, that the genesis came from a combined code donation to Apache from Google Cloud Dataflow STK and there was also already written by data Artisans a Flink runner for that, which already included some portability hooks, and then there was also a runner for Spark that was written by some folks at PayPal. And so, sort of those three efforts pointed out that it was a good time to have a unified model for these DAG-based computational... I guess it's a DAG-based computational model. >> Okay, so I want to pause you for a moment. >> Yeah. >> And generally, we try to avoid being rude and cutting off our guests but, in this case, help us understand what a DAG is, and why it's so important. >> Okay, so a DAG is a directed acyclic graph, and, in some sense, if you draw a boxes and arrows diagram of your computation where you say "I read some data from here," and it goes through some filters and then I do a join and then I write it somewhere. These all end up looking what they call the DAG just because of the fact that it is the structure, and all computation sort of can be modeled this way, and in particular, these massively parallel computations profit a lot from being modeled this way as opposed to MapReduce because the fact that you have access to the entire DAG means you can perform transformations and optimizations and you have more opportunities for executing it in different ways. >> Oh, in other words, because you can see the big picture you can find, like, the shortest path as opposed to I've got to do this step, I've got to do this step and this step. >> Yeah, it's exactly like that, you're not constrained to sort of, the person writing the program knows what it is that they want to compute, and then, you know, you have very smart people writing the optimizer and the execution engine. So it may execute an entirely different way, so for example, if you're doing a summation, right, rather than shuffling all your data to one place and summing there, maybe you do some partial summations, and then you just shuffle accumulators to one place, and finish the summation, right? >> Okay, now let me bump you up a couple levels >> Yeah. >> And tell us, so, MapReduce was a trees within the forest approach, you know, lots of seeing just what's a couple feet ahead of you. And now we have the big picture that allows you to find the best path, perhaps, one way of saying it. Tell us though, with Google or with others who are using Beam-compatible applications, what new class of solutions can they build that you wouldn't have done with MapReduce before? >> Well, I guess there's... There's two main aspects to Beam that I would emphasize, there's the portability, so you can write this application without having to commit to which backend you're going to run it on. And there's... There's also the unification of streaming and batch which is not present in a number of backends, and Beam as this layer sort of makes it very easy to use sort of batch-style computation and streaming-style computation in the same pipeline. And actually I said there was two things, the third thing that actually really opens things up is that Beam is not just a portability layer across backends, it's also a portability layer across languages, so, something that really only has preliminary support on a lot of systems is Python, so, for example, Beam has a Python STK where you write a DAG description of your computation in Python, and via Beam's portability API's, one of these sort of usually Java-centric engines would be able to run that Python pipeline. >> Okay, so-- >> So, did I answer your question? >> Yes, yes, but let's go one level deeper, which is, if MapReduce, if its sweet spot was web crawl indexing in batch mode, what are some of the things that are now possible with a Beam-style platform that supports Beam, you know, underneath it, that can do this direct acyclic graph processing? >> I guess what I, I'm still learning all the different things that you can do with this style of computation, and the truth is it's just extremely general, right? You can set up a DAG, and there's a lot of talks here at Flink Forward about using a stream processor to do high frequency trading or fraud detection. And those are completely different even though they're in the same model of computation as, you know, you would still use it for things like crawling the web and doing PageRank over. Actually, at the moment we don't have iterative computations so we wouldn't do PageRank today. >> So, is it considered a complete replacement, and then new used cases for older style frameworks like MapReduce, or is it a complement for things where you want to do more with data in motion or lower latency? >> It is absolutely intended as a full replacement for MapReduce, yes, like, if you're thinking about writing a MapReduce pipeline, instead you should write a Beam pipeline, and then you should benchmark it on different Beam backends, right? >> And, so, working with Spark, working with Flink, how are they, in terms of implementing the full richness of the Beam-interface relative to the Google product Dataflow, from which I assumed Beam was derived? >> So, all of the different backends exist in sort of different states as far as implementing the full model. One thing I really want to emphasize is that Beam is not trying to take the intersection on all of these, right? And I think that your question already shows that you know this, we keep sort of a matrix on our website where we say, "Okay there's all these different "features you might want, "and then there's all these backends "you might want to run it on," and it's sort of there's can you do it, can you do it sometimes, and notes about that, we want this whole matrix to be, yes, you can use all of the model on Flink, all of it on Spark, all of it on Google Cloud Dataflow, but so they all have some gaps and I guess, yeah, we're really welcoming contributors in that space. >> So, for someone whose been around for a long time, you might think of it as an ODBC driver, where the capabilities of the databases behind it are different, and so the drivers can only support some subset of a full capability. >> Yeah, I think that there's, so, I'm not familiar enough with ODBC to say absolutely yes, absolutely no, but yes, it's that sort of a thing, it's like the JVM has many languages on it and ODBC provides this generic database abstraction. >> Is Google's goal with Beam API to make it so that customers demand a level of portability that goes not just for the on-prim products but for products that are in other public clouds, and sort of pry open the API lock in? >> So, I can't say what Google's goals are, but I can certainly say that Beam's goals are that nobody's going to be locked into a particular backend. >> Okay. >> I mean, I can't even say what Beam's goals are, sorry, those are my goals, I can speak for myself. >> Is Beam seeing so far adoption by the sort of big consumer internet companies, or has it started to spread to mainstream enterprises, or is still a little immature? >> I think Beam's still a little bit less mature than that, we're heading into our first stable release, so, we began incubating it as an Apache project about a year ago, and then, around the beginning of the new year, actually right at the end of 2016, we graduated to be an Apache top level project, so right now we're sort of on the road from we've become a top level project, we're seeing contributions ramp up dramatically, and we're aiming for a stable release as soon as possible, our next release we expect to be a stable API that we would encourage users and enterprises to adopt I think. >> Okay, and that's when we would see it in production form on the Google Cloud platform? >> Well, so the thing is that the code and the backends behind it are all very mature, but, right now, we're still sort of like, I don't know how to say it, we're polishing the edges, right, it's still got a lot of rough edges and you might encounter them if you're trying it out right now and things might change out from under you before we make our stable release. >> Understood. >> Yep. All right. Kenneth, thank you for joining us, and for the update on the Beam project and we'll be looking for that and seeing its progress over the next few months. >> Great. Thanks for having me. >> With that, I'm George Gilbert, I'm with Kenneth Knowles, we're at the dataArtisan's Flink Forward user conference in San Francisco at the Kabuki Hotel and we'll be back after a few minutes.