(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, I'm Lisa Martin. This is day four for theCUBE. We have two live sets, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Dave two live sets, 100 guests on theCUBE for AWS Re:Invent 2021. >> Not all at the same time. >> Not all-- That's a good, he brings up a good point, not all at the same time, we are pleased to welcome Gretchen Peri who's going to be sitting down and chatting with Dave with me next. She is from Slalom, at the US State Local and Education, SLED leader. We're going to be talking about Slalom and AWS digital innovation in the public sector. Gretchen, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> For the audience that might not be familiar with Slalom before we dig into AWS and SLED in particular, talk to us about Slalom and what it is that you guys do. >> I'd love to. So Slalom's a modern business and technology consulting firm. We're headquartered in Seattle Washington, we have about 11,000 employees across 40 markets globally. And what's different about Slalom is we're local model firm, so our consultants live and work in the same locale, which means we're personally invested in our client's outcomes because they impact us directly in the communities in which we live. >> And you've been in a leader in SLED for a long time, talk to us about what's going on on SLED these days. Obviously the last 18, 22 months have been quite dynamic, but what's going on in the market? >> Absolutely. What we're seeing is an extra emphasis on data data data, obviously, data is king and data is queen right now, right? So when the pandemic hit, we saw a ton of digital innovation, as our SLED clients needed to get their services online. That had been going on for a long time but it absolutely accelerated when then pandemic it and then it was a public health hazard, to ask people to come into the location. So what we saw was for constituents, we saw just absolute blast of omni-channel service delivery, so we saw the advent of SMS and chat bots and the more tech services, right? Leveraging AWS Lex and Transcribe and other services of AWS really helped our SLED clients react to the pandemic and respond to make sure that their constituents were receiving the digital services they needed, and their employees were able to be productive at home. >> Well, that was one of the keys the employee productivity, the student productivity, when everything's went remote overnight, one of the most challenging things was the demand for collaboration tools. Then of course, there's security challenges, there was concerns there, but talk to us about, and we've seen so much innovation out of AWS in the last, I mean always, but even what they announced the last couple of days, the innovation flywheel of AWS is probably stronger than ever enabling organizations like SLED, FED, private sector, public sector to be data-driven. >> Absolutely. One thing that's really exciting right now is to see the evolution of how our SLED customers are thinking about data. So we've been working on like integrated visions in SLED for a long time, integrated justice, integrated health care, integrated eligibility, how do we bring all this information together so that we can supply the right information to the right people at the right time to deliver the right outcomes? And AWS has been a huge part of that. It's not the journey to get to the cloud, it's the destination once you get there, right? Because then you can leverage all their AIML tools, IOT, edge, container, blockchain. And so our customers, who have already made that switch to AWS, they're able to take advantage of that. It's not what you can do in the cloud anymore is what you can't do without it really, right? So we're seeing tons of advances, intelligent document processing is one area I'm really excited about for our SLED clients, and working very closely with AWS to make sure that we see our clients adopt that and achieve the value out of it. >> AWS is dominating the IT space, although what five to 15% of IT is in the cloud, which means the vast majority is still on premises. So there's a huge potential for growth. In this sort of wild, wild west that we're in, there are all sorts of different kinds of services and consultancy partners, that are seeking to bridge the gap between the technology that AWS delivers and the outcomes that customers desire. >> Right. >> Now I've had a couple of experiences actually with Slalom folks, that were very, very positive. And what I saw was that the Slalom people were embedded in a way that you don't see some other consultancies embedded. You mentioned that something that piqued my interest, you talked about the local nature, is that your superpower? Because it sure seemed to be powerful to see this person where some of these very, very large global companies had no idea who Slalom was, until they realized that Sally was the one who had the best relationship with the customer. So Sally's a fictitious name that I just came up with, but I want to hear a little more about Slalom and your superpower and your differentiation. 'Cause it's a crowded space, you've got global systems integrators, you got all kinds of people. What makes you special? >> It's really the breadth of professional services that we provide, combined with AWS's cloud technologies and services. What we do I think a little bit differently is whereas AWS works back from the customer, we work back from our customer's vision. And so what we do with our, especially with our SLED clients, but with all of our commercial clients, is we say, what is your business strategy and your business vision, and how do we design the technology solutions, working back from that. So you're able to answer the business questions through data-driven tech technology, that's really important to you. And when we look at that, it's not just generating data to create information to then garner insights, but let's go one step further. And how do we create knowledge and how do we create wisdom this space, right? Where we understand situational awareness, common operating pictures, that's really what we want to do. When we talk about criminal justice and public safety, I love how we're thinking about joining data in new and different ways. It's not necessarily applications anymore, right? How do we create data as a service? How do we create documents as a service? Where we're pulling out the exact information that we need from semi-structured, structured and unstructured data and providing it to the right people to make the right decisions. >> Talk to us about intelligent document processing, a lot of buzz going on with that. What is it? Where are public sector agencies in terms of embracing it, adopting it and having it be part of that vision? >> Yeah, the promise is huge for IDP. What IDP is basically is leveraging AWS AI services to create intelligent automation solutions that help extract information from printed documents, digital documents, paper documents, right? So leveraging AWS services like Amazon Textract, Comprehend, Augmented AI, things like, and Kendra. What that does in combination, is it helps our clients unlock the data from, you can imagine government, it's heavy, heavy documents, and in criminal justice and public safety in particular, these documents represent key milestones and processes, right? So we're never going to get rid of documents in SLED, they're going to be used in perpetuity, it's important for accessibility and practicality and everything else. But what this does is it lets us unlock the data from those kind of stale documents and create it into usable formats for so that people can make decisions. >> That's critical because there's, I mean, we talk about in Amazon, AWS been this week have been talking about it and Dave, we have too. Every company, public sector, private sector, it needs to be a data-driven company, but they need to be able to extract that value from the data and the data isn't just digital. And that's something that, to your point, that's going to be persistent within SLED, they have to be able to extract the value from it quickly. >> Yes. >> To be able to see what new products and services can we deliver? What directions should we be going? And what outcomes should we be driving based on that visibility? And that visibility is critical. >> Exactly. And right now we absolutely have to support our communities. And we have a lot of our slide clients who are talking about this is a time where we don't just respond in a way that helps people kind of navigate this pandemic, we have to build resiliency as well in our communities and we do that through helping people through these hard times and making sure that we're moving our services to places where people can access them, in any language from wherever they are, right? We're having to actually go into people's homes on their couches, to deliver government services. Where we used to bring them into a single location. >> Right. >> Typically public sector has often been seen as lagging behind the private sector in some ways, the pandemic, as I'm sure ignited a fire with, especially with federal acknowledgement of things that need to happen, budgets flowing, are you seeing even more of an awakening from a cloud perspective within public sector? >> We are, we are and we're seeing really interesting initiatives pop up like, behavioral health initiatives, that are meant to address some really serious concerns in our country like nationwide 988 suicide prevention projects, right? And the federal government is providing a lot of funding to states and local governments so that they can help take care of our communities and also make sure that we're moving our services online so everyone can access them. >> I'm curious about that point, the funding. >> Yeah. >> Do you find yourself almost in the position of prize patrol? Where were some of the state local governments aren't necessarily as aware as Slalom might be of programs that are coming down immediately. Is that part of the conversation? >> It is part of the conv-- That's a great point because what we do is we look at what's coming down from the federal government, how is it going to flow to the states? How is it going to land ultimately, and then helping governments come up with a strategy for how to spend that money in the right way is really important, right? And we saw with some of the funding that come out, that there were delays on getting like eviction prevention funding out to folks. And so making sure that we have the technology to support those outcomes. >> It's all about outcomes. >> Yes. >> Speaking of outcomes, something I want to congratulate Slalom on is winning the first ever National Essay Partner of the Year for the US. >> Yes. >> Nice. >> That's awesome, congratulations. >> What does that mean for Slalom and what direction can we expect the Slalom and AWS partnership to go? >> Up and up. >> To the right? >> Yes. For us it's about validating the relationship that we have, right? It's really, when we walk into a client conversation, what we want to do is develop trust that our clients know we're looking for their best interest and their best outcomes. We're not trying to sell them something we're trying to solve their problems together. And it validates that for us, our partnership with AWS obviously is so important. And what we're doing in terms of making sure that we have a strong bench full of certifications and we can go to market together in the right way for our clients. This is a huge award and the recognition is very powerful for us. >> Well, congratulations. And so last question, you mentioned AWS and we always talk about when we talk with them at their event, we talk about their customer obsession, right? They work backwards, as you said, from the customer. And you guys from customer vision. Talk to me about when you go in jointly together, work with the customer, what does that alignment look like? >> Absolutely. So what we typically do is, Slalom will focus on what is the business outcome that we want to generate? And we will help design, how are we going to go about solving that problem? And how is AWS going to help support us with enabling technology? And so we will go into client conversations together, say, what is the outcome we want from this initiative together? And how are both partners going to get aligned to support the client in that conversation, in that product. >> That alignment is (indistinct). Gretchen, thank you for joining Dave and me today, talking about Slalom, what you guys are doing, how you're really helping organizations in SLED transform and not just survive challenging time but really thrive and be data-driven. We appreciate your insights and congratulations again on the National Essay Partner of The Year. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (lively music)

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Systems. The future is crystal clear with security in SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, my name is Dave Valanti and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We are covering the Open Systems networking event. They're here as part of the two Gartner events here this week. On the heels of AWS Reinvent, a lot of action going on in Las Vegas. Steve Garson is here, he's the president and founder of SD-WAN experts consultancy in this space. Steve, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit more about your background. >> Okay. I've been in the networking space since about 2007. Initially, my company was called MPLS Experts, when companies were migrating to MPLS and not understanding, well, what carriers should I use. I helped companies re-engineer their WAN back then. As that developed, the WAN optimization came into the scene and I helped companies evaluate the right WAN optimization solution. Then I had the foresight to see the potential of SD-WAN. I pivoted the business, called it SD-WAN Experts and started writing for network world and blogging on my own sites and with a number of other websites. I've been helping enterprises worldwide re-engineer their network, make a WAN transformation that's secure and supports easy management and save a lot of money. >> So, awesome. So you have a practitioners background, right? >> Exactly. >> That's fair to say. So you know your stuff, let's get into it. So let's talk trends, I mean. At a high level we always talk at theCUBE about the cloud and how that's affecting network traffic. Going from North South to East West has a major impact on security and performance. What are the big trends in the market space that you see, that are relevant? >> Well, we see consolidation obviously. (coughs) Obviously moving to the cloud is a big driver. The WAN has been designed for a data center with an MPLS network. That's a hub and spoke architecture that really doesn't make sense anymore. Companies are moving to Office 365, they're using Salesforce.com, they're using all kinds of softwares and service. That just doesn't work with a data center. So what companies have traditionally done is they have regional secure gateways and they're sending the traffic from an office to a secure gateway and now they're going through the internet. It just is convoluted, the traffic is tromboned and the latency is higher than it has to be. They're spending more money for these expensive circuits that, ultimately, they're going to the internet anyways. >> So, there's a lot of technical debt out there. How does a company go from point A to point B without spending a zillion dollars or bringing in, you know, a huge SI to re-architect everything. Is there a path that you can advise customers, or is it just every situation is a snowflake? >> You could probably define a half-dozen different basic situations that are snowflakes. Essentially you're moving to, you know, if you have an MPLS network companies typically will need more bandwidth and instead of getting more MPLS bandwidth they'll add internet connectivity. Using SD-WAN they'll root traffic over the internet that's supposed to go to the internet. The things that are still required on their MPLS network will stay in play. When those MPLS contracts expire, then there's a question of, do I need MPLS? That's a complicated question to answer. I will not say that you can eliminate MPLS, I'll always say it depends. It depends on the latency between paths on your network. I presented a paper at O-NUG a few weeks ago in New York, in which I analyzed with a lot of empirical data. Latency, packet-loss, and standard deviation of that latency between paths like from Tokyo to New York. You might a have 200 millisecond latency. But your standard deviation over the internet might be 200 milliseconds. So that means, potentially, if you're using only the internet, you might have 400 milliseconds latency. Can your application work appropriately? >> If you need 200 guaranteed, you've got a problem. Right? >> Right, exactly. In a situation like that, you might want to use MPLS or there's a new category of connectivity called SDCore which is an MPLS network in the Cloud that you access through an IPSec VPN to pops that are typically within 20 milliseconds. So you get that stability, but you cut the cost dramatically. >> Now the Edge just confuses us even further, right? IOT, The Edge, I mean certainly a trend everybody's talking about. From your standpoint, how real is it? Is it here today? Is it coming? What is the effect going to be on all these trends? >> You mean, the Edge? >> Yeah, the Edge, IOT. >> I mean it's a complicated thing. I mean the Edge. >> The industrial internet. >> Yeah, I mean, when people talk about the Edge today the Edge used to be their router and SD-WAN devices are supplanting the router. Gartner has indicated that by 2023 nobody is going to be buying routers. Everybody is going to be using an SD-WAN device which will route. >> Amazon, we were at Reinvent last week, they might even look at the data center as the Edge. But, I digress. Let's talk about the horses on the track. Lay out the competitive environment right now. We're here at the Open Systems event. Where do they fit in the market landscape? >> Open Systems is a very unique company where people will say, who's Open Systems competitor. They really don't have a competitor because they're unique. Open Systems is a company that has a secure SD-WAN which means there's a full security stack with SD-WAN. So you have the benefits of SD-WAN, but instead of having to deal with all these different security applications like HASBY, Data-loss Prevention, and IPSIDS, authentication, VPN integration with active directory. They do all of that and it's all managed. It's a very unique offering. >> So the competition is Do-It-Yourself, right? >> The competition is Do-It-Yourself or use a managed service provider who probably doesn't have all the pieces that work together. Open Systems has been doing this for 25 years. They have developed what the customers want. I went to one of their global customer meetings. They called a cap meeting last year. Each year they get input from the customers as far as what kind of enhancements they want to see. They actually take that input and the following year the customers, I was amazed, the customers just are thrilled that the company listens and the company implements what they ask. >> Again, I've mentioned there's a couple of Gartner shows going on this week. Sounds like Open Systems wouldn't really fit cleanly into a magic quadrant. >> They don't. They don't because they're not an Edge device. They're a complete Edge security solution that's managed. >> We talked about this at theCUBE, John Ferrs has brought up several times that the magic quadrants will have to evolve as these managed services, the Cloud certainly affects that. As more and more things get co-opted by the services, you know, economy. But, your thoughts on magic quadrants, how customers are using them. My understanding is, today, you heard a talk from a Gartner analyst that was helping people understand the do's and don'ts of a magic quadrant. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, well what Gartner was talking about today is how many people use the magic quadrant inappropriately. They think this tells us which companies we should look at and really what it's telling you is how that customer's strategy fits in with the market place. But you really have to look at what your requirements are. You can't just say, okay I'm going to look at quote the top three SD-WAN vendors. What are your requirements? That's what my firm does as a consultant is we help companies figure out what their requirements are to find out what's the right solution. A story I love to tell is a company that spent a year evaluating SD-WANs. They were about to make a decision and the CIO basically told the committee after a year of evaluations hey before we sign a contract, let's get an independent sanity check that we've made the right decision. I met with the company, spent a couple weeks assessing their requirements, and I know all of the major technologies and I knew that what they had selected wasn't correct. But you can't tell a client that they've made a mistake. So we set up a meeting with the vendor, which was a carrier, and their technology provider and the committee and I asked the hard questions that the vendor couldn't answer. Which made it really clear to the client that this is the wrong solution. They went a completely different direction. >> Saved them a lot of money. I love those stories. What's your website? >> SD-WAN-experts.com >> Alright, Steve thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sharing your knowledge. >> Thank you. >> Awesome stuff. Really appreciate it. >> Pleasure. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from Las Vegas Cosmo hotel. Open Systems networking event. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. (bright music) Covering Google Cloud Next 17. >> Hi, and welcome to the second day of live coverage here of theCUBE covering Google Next 2017. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley here at our 4,500 square foot new studio in Palo Alto. We've got a team of reporters and analysts up in San Francisco checking out everything that's happening in Google. I was up there for the day two keynote, and happy to have with me is the first guest of the day, friend of theCUBE, Marc Farley, Vulcancast, guy that knows clouds, worked for one the big three in the past and going to help me break down some of what's going on in the marketplace. Mark, it's great to see you. >> Oh, it's really nice to be here, Stu, thanks for asking me on. >> Always happy to have you-- >> And what a lot of fun stuff to get into. >> Oh my god, yeah, this is what we love. We talked about, I wonder, Amazon Reinvent is like the Superbowl of the industry there. What's Google there if, you know-- >> Well, Google pulls a lot of resources for this. And they can put on a very impressive show. So if this is, if Invent is the Superbowl, then maybe this, maybe Next is the college championship game. I hate to call it college, but it's got that kind of draw, it's a big deal. >> Is is that, I don't want to say, arena football, it's the up and coming-- >> Oh, it's a lot better than that. Google really does some spectacular things at events. >> They're Google, come on, we all use Google, we all know Google, 10,000 people showed up, there's a lot of excitement. So what's your take of the show so far in Google's positioning in cloud? >> It's nothing like the introduction of Glass. And of course, Google Glass is a thing of the past, but I don't know if you remember when they introduced that, when they had the sky diver. Sky divers diving out of an airplane and then climbing up the outside of the building and all that, it was really spectacular. Nobody can ever reach that mark again, probably not even the Academy Awards. But you asked the second part of the question, what's Google position with cloud, I think that's going to be the big question moving forward. They are obviously committed to doing it, and they're bringing unique capabilities into cloud that you don't see from either Amazon or Microsoft. >> Yeah. I mean, coming into it, there's certain things that we've been hearing forever about Google, and especially when you talk about Google in the enterprise. Are they serious, is this just beta, are they going to put the money in? I thought Eric Schmidt did a real good job yesterday in the close day keynote, he's like, "Look, I've been telling Google to push hard "in the enterprise for 17 years. "Look, I signed a check for 30 billion dollars." >> 30 billion! >> Yeah, and I talked to some people, they're a little skeptical, and they're like, "Oh, you know, that's not like it all went to build "the cloud, some of it's for their infrastructure, "there's acquisitions, there's all these other things." But I think it was infrastructure related. Look, there shouldn't be a question that they're serious. And Diane Greene said, in a Q&A she had with the press, that thing about, we're going to tinker with something and then kill it, I want to smash that perception because there's certain things you can do in the consumer side that you cannot get away with on the enterprise side, and she knows that, they're putting a lot of effort to transform their support, transform the pricing, dig in with partners and channels. And some of it is, you know, they've gotten the strategy together, they've gotten the pieces together, we're moving things from beta to GA, and they're making good progress. I think they have addressed some of the misperceptions, that being said, everybody usually, it's like, "I've been hearing this for five years, "it's probably going to take me a couple of years "to really believe it." >> Yeah, but you know, the things is, for people that know Diane Greene and have watched VMware over the years, and then her being there at Google is a real commitment. And she's talking about commitment when she talks about that business. It's full pedal to the metal, this is a very serious, the things that's interesting about it, it's a lot more than infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> The kinds of APIs and apps and everything that they're bringing, this is a lot more than just infrastructure, this is Google developed, Google, if you will, proprietary technology now that they're turning to the external world to use. And there's some really sophisticated stuff in there. >> Yes, so before we get into some of the competitive landscape, some of the things you were pretty impressed with, I think everybody was, the keynote this morning definitely went out much better, day one keynote, a little rocky. Didn't hear, the biggest applauses were around some of the International Women's Day, which is great that they do that, but it's nice when they're like, "Oh, here's some cool new tech," or they're like, oh, wow, this demo that they're doing, some really cool things and products that people want to get their hands on. So what jumped out at you at the keynote this morning? >> I'm trying to remember what it's called. The stuff from around personal identifiable information. >> Yeah, so that's what they call DLP or it's the Data Loss Prevention API. Thank goodness for my Evernote here, which I believe runs on Google cloud, keeping up to date, so I'm-- >> Data loss prevention shouldn't be so hard to remember. >> And by the way, you said proprietary stuff. One thing about Google is, that Data Loss Prevention, it's an API, they want to make it easy to get in, a lot of what they do is open source. They feel that that's one of their differentiations, is to be, we always used to say on the infrastructure side, it's like everybody's pumping their chest. Who's more open than everybody else? Google. Lots of cool stuff, everything from the TensorFlow and Kubernetes that's coming out, where some of us are like, "Okay, how will they actually make money on some of this, "will it be services?" But yeah, Data Loss Prevention API, which was a really cool demo. It's like, okay, here's a credit card, the video kind of takes it and it redacts the number. It can redact social security numbers, it's got that kind of machine learning AI with the video and all those things built in to try to help security encrypt and protect what you're doing. >> It's mind boggling. You think about, they do the facial recognition, but they're doing content recognition also. And you could have a string of numbers there that might not be a phone number, it might not be a social security number, and the question is, what DLP flagged that to, who knows, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that they can actually do this. And as a storage person, you're getting involved, and compliance and risk and mitigation, all these kinds of things over the years. And it's hard for software to go in and scan a lot of data to just look for text. Not images of numbers on a photograph, but just text in a document, whether it's a Word file or something. And you say, "Oh, it's not so hard," but when you try to do that at scale, it's really hard at scale. And that's the thing that I really wonder about DLP, are they going to be able to do this at large scale? And you have to think that that is part of the consideration for them, because they are large scale. And if they can do that, Stu, that is going to be wildly impressive. >> Marc, everything that Google does tends to be built for scale, so you would think they could do that. And I'd think about all the breaches, it was usually, "Oh, oops, we didn't realize we had this information, "didn't know where it was," or things like that. So if Google can help address that, they're looking at some of those core security issues they talked about, they've got a second form factor authentication with a little USB tab that can go into your computer, end to end encryption if you've got Android and Chrome devices, so a lot of good sounding things on encryption and security. >> One of the other things they announced, I don't know if this was part of the same thinking, but they talk about 64 core servers, and they talk about, or VMs, I should say, 64 core VMs, and they're talking about getting the latest and greatest from Intel. What is it, Skylink, Sky-- >> Stu: Skylake. >> Skylake, yeah, thanks. >> They had Raejeanne actually up on stage, Raejeanne Skillern, Cube alumn, know her well, was happy to see her up on stage showing off what they're doing. Not only just the chipset, but Intel's digging in, doing development on Kubernetes, doing development on TensorFlow to help with really performance. And we've seen Intel do this, they did this with virtualization with the extensions that they did, they're doing it with containers. Intel gets involved in these software pieces and makes sure that the chipset's going to be optimized, and great to see them working with Google on it. >> My guess is they're going to be using a lot of cycles for these security things also. The security is really hard, it's front and center in our lives these days, and just everything. I think Google's making a really interesting play, they take their own internal technology, this security technology that they've been using, and they know it's compute heavy. The whole thing about DLP, it's extremely compute heavy to do this stuff. Okay, let's get the biggest, fastest technology we can to make it work, and then maybe it can all seem seamless. I'm really impressed with how they've figured out to take the assets that they have in different places, like from YouTube. These other things that you would think, is YouTube really an enterprise app? No, but there's technology in YouTube that you can use for enterprise cloud services. Very smart, I give them a lot of credit for looking broadly throughout their organization which, in a lot of respects, traditionally has been a consumer oriented experience, and they're taking some of these technologies now and making it available to enterprise. It's really, really hard. >> Absolutely. They did a bunch of enhancements on the G Suite product line. It felt at times a little bit, it's like, okay, wait, I've got the cloud and I've got the applications. There are places that they come together, places that data and security flow between them, but it still feels like a couple of different parts, and how they put together the portfolio, but building a whole solution for the enterprise. We see similar things from Microsoft, not as much from Amazon. I'm curious what your take is as to how Google stacks up against Microsoft who, disclaimer, you did work for one time on the infrastructure side. >> Yeah, that's a whole interesting thing. Google really wants to try to figure out how to get enterprises that run on Microsoft technology moving to Google cloud, and I think it's going to be very tough for them. Satya Nadella and Microsoft are very serious about making a seamless experience for end users and administrators and everybody along managing the systems and using their systems. Okay, can Google replicate that? Maybe on the user side they can, but certainly not on the administration side. And there are hooks between the land-based technology and the cloud-based technology that Microsoft's been working on for years. Question is, can Google come close to replicating those kinds of things, and on Microsoft's side, do customers get enough value, is there enough magic there to make that automation of a hybrid IT experience valuable to their customers. I just have to think though that there's no way Google's going to be able to beat Microsoft at hybrid IT for Microsoft apps. I just don't believe it. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the not so secret weapons that Google has there is what they're doing with Kubernetes. They've gotten Kubernetes in all the public clouds, it's getting into a lot of on premises environment. Everything from we were at the KubeCon conference in Seattle a couple of months ago. I hear DockerCon and OpenStacks Summit are going to have strong Kubernetes discussions there, and it's growing, it's got a lot of buzz, and that kind of portability and mobility of workload has been something that, especially as guys that have storage background, we have a little bit of skepticism because physics and the size of data and that whole data gravity thing. But that being said, if I can write applications and have ways to be able to do similar things across multiple environments, that gives Google a way to spread their wings beyond what they can do in their Google cloud. So I'm curious what you think about containers, Kubernetes, serverless type activity that they're doing. >> I think within the Google cloud, they'll be able to leverage that technology pretty effectively. I don't think it's going to be very effective, though, in enterprise data centers. I think the OpenStack stuff's been a really hard road, and it's a long time coming, I don't know if they'll ever get there. So then you've got a company like Microsoft that is working really hard on the same thing. It's not clear to me what Microsoft's orchestrate is going to be, but they're going to have one. >> Are you bullish on Asure Stack that's coming out later this year? >> No, not really. >> Okay. >> I think Asure Stack's a step in the right direction, and Microsoft absolutely has to have it, not so much for Google, but for AWS, to compete with AWS. I think it's a good idea, but it's such a constrained system at this point. It's going to take a while to see what it is. You're going to have HPE and Lenovo and Cisco, all have, and Dell, all having the same basic thing. And so you ask yourself, what is the motivation for any of these companies to really knock it out of the park when Microsoft is nailing everybody's feet to the floor on what the options are to offer this? And I understand Microsoft wanting to play it safe and saying, "We want to be able to support this thing, "make sure that, when customers install it, "they don't have problems with it." And Microsoft always wants to foist the support burden onto somebody else anyway, we've all been working for Microsoft our whole lives. >> It was the old Dilbert cartoon, as soon as you open that software, you're all of a sudden Microsoft's pool boy. >> (laughs) I love that, yeah. Asure Stack's going to be pretty constrained, and they keep pushing it further out. So what's the reality of this? And Asure Pack right now is a zombie, everybody's waiting for Asure Stack, but Asure Stack keeps moving out and Asure Stack's going to be small and constrained. This stuff is hard. There's a reason why it's taking everybody a long time to get it out, there's a reason why OpenStack hasn't had the adoption that people first expected, there's going to be a reason why I think Asure Stack does not have the adoption that Microsoft hoped for either. It's going to be an interesting thing to watch over what will play out over the next five or six years. >> Yeah, but for myself, I've seen this story play out a few times on the infrastructure side. I remember the original precursor, the Vblock with Acadia and the go-to-market. VMware, when they did the VSAN stuff, the generation one of Evo really went nowhere, and they had to go, a lot of times it takes 18 to 24 months to sort out some of those basic pricing, packaging, partnering, positioning type things, and even though Asure Stack's been coming for a while, I want to say TP3 is like here, and we're talking about it, and it's going to GA this summer, but it's once we really start getting this customer environment, people start selling it, that we're going to find out what it is and what it isn't. >> It's interesting. You know how important that technology is to Microsoft. It's, in many respects, Satya's baby. And it's so important to them, and at the same time, it's not there, it's not coming, it's going to be constrained. >> So Marc, unfortunately, you and I could talk all day about stuff like this, and we've had many times, at conferences, that we spend a long time. I want to give you just the final word. Wrap up the intro for today on what's happening at Google Next and what's interesting you in the industry. >> Well, I think the big thing here is that Google is showing that they put their foot down and they're not letting up. They're serious about this business, they made this commitment. And we sort of talk and we give lip service, a little bit, to the big three, we got Asure, we got Amazon, and then there's Google. I think every year it's Google does more, and they're proving themselves as a more capable cloud service provider. They're showing the integration with HANA is really interesting, SAP, I should say, not HANA but SAP. They're going after big applications, they've got big customers. Every year that they do this, it's more of an arrival. And I think, in two years time, that idea of the big three is actually going to be big three. It's not going to be two plus one. And that is going to accelerate more of the movement into cloud faster than ever, because the options that Google is offering are different than the others, these are all different clouds with different strengths. Of the three of them, Google, I have to say, has the most, if you will, computer science behind it. It's not that Microsoft doesn't have it, but Google is going to have a lot more capability and machine learning than I think what you're going to see out of Amazon ever. They are just going to take off and run with that, and Microsoft is going to have to figure out how they're going to try to catch up or how they're going to parley what they have in machine learning. It's not that they haven't made an investment in it, but it's not like Google has made investment in it. Google's been making investment in it over the years to support their consumer applications on Google. And now that stuff is coming, like I said before, the stuff is coming into the enterprise. I think there is a shift now, and we sort of wonder, is machine learning going to happen, when it's going to happen? It's going to happen, and it's going to come from Google. >> All right, well, great way to end the opening segment here. Thank you so much, Marc Farley, for joining us. We've got a full day of coverage here from our 4,500 square foot studio in the heart of Silicon Valley. You're watching theCUBE. (bright music)