>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

(upbeat funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier. Co-host of the Cube. We got two special expert guests here talking multi-cloud, Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. And Fabio Gori, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Multi-cloud is the topic. Guys are in the throes of it. Jonathan, you're in the front wave of a massive shift. Cisco powers networks for all companies these days, so guys multi-cloud is a reality. It's here. I want to get your thoughts on that, have a conversation. Thanks for joining us. >> Great, glad to be here. >> So multi-cloud is not really been debated. I mean people generally now step back and say multi-cloud is a reality. It's here, people have multiple clouds. Should only have data center on premise. But this idea of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are somewhat getting mixed up, but multi-cloud is certainly more realistic in the reality sense than anything else. What's your take on multi-cloud, Jonathan? >> So I think we're at a point where there's a growing acceptance of multi-cloud as the architecture of the future. And when you arrive at that point it also means that multi-cloud is the architecture for today. Because if you see your competitors, you see new entrants in your space, moving in a rapid digital pace to meet their business needs, and you're not on the same kind of architecture. The same footing. Then you're going to be left behind. So, used to debate private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The way we see it is that we're in this multi-cloud world. And multi-cloud embraces an end-to-end imperative. How am I getting my apps and my development teams building those apps closer to my business and meeting my needs more rapidly? And then how am I connecting my entire business, my data, my network, all of it, to meet that needs. So multi-cloud architecture's really an imperative. It doesn't mean it's the only thing. There's other elements in terms of having a clear digital strategy. Thinking about how you're going to modernize your infrastructure. Of course, thinking about how you're transforming your security. All four of those elements really comprise a enterprise architecture. Multi-cloud being a core part of it. >> Fabio, Cisco, you guys have seen the waves of innovation, internet, connecting companies together through networking etc. Multi-cloud's a big part of your focus. Certainly at Cisco Live we covered that. What's the definition of multi-cloud now, because I've heard, it's been debunked, but I've heard people say, oh multi-cloud's an application workload moving across multiple clouds. Some say, no, it just means I have two clouds. So what is the definition? Baseline us here. >> So it's interesting because you can go Wikipedia and actually read the definition of multi-cloud, but what I'm really interested in is exactly what Jonathan was saying a moment ago. This is one of those rare cases where what you hear architecture is actually a technology architecture and the business architecture really coincide. People want to use innovation wherever it comes from. And because you can't allow yourself to be just restricted your choice, people want to have choice. Multiple choices. And that's why we're seeing adoption of multiple cloud services. Multiple SaaS solutioning for structure service solutions and the likes. So this is really what multi-cloud means. You're satisfying a business need. And while cloud computing was born, as we know, around 10 years ago, and it probably started with a kind of cost connotation, the speed and agility that you can get out of it now overwhelm the other parameters. And people are ready to spend anything it takes to become faster than their competitor, because that ultimately will really determines your destiny in the marketplace. >> And I want to drill into the tech side and have some specific pointed questions I'd love to ask you. Jonathan, first, talk about the relationship that WWT, World Wide Technology, has with Cisco, and your credibility in multi-cloud. You guys have a unique view First of all you work with Cisco, you guys partner together. A big part of your business. But you guys are in the middle of a lot of the action. Talk about the company. What kind of deals you guys are doing? What visibility do you guys have? Is it a landscape? Give an example of some of the work that you guys do, and then talk about the relationship with Cisco. >> Yeah so, the Cisco is a very strategic partner of ours. They have been for a long time. And we have the benefit of being at scale with Cisco. For repeatable waves of technology roll outs. In repeatable domains of technologies. So, customers come to us and look for our help as a trusted advisor to help them with their architectural decisions. And to help them often with knowledge gaps. So, architecture is a challenge. Especially when you're dealing with rapid change. So you have a pace of change externally. You cover this space. I mean every day, right? We were sitting here there's some kind of new thing going on. And, that change, I mean even companies who know what they're doing, and have deep benches of talent, have architectural challenges. But you take it to an enterprise or a government agency. How are they going to keep up? Well that's really our job and the value we bring is. We are constantly watching, talking to partners, talking to customers. And there's almost no one we're that as closely with as we are with Cisco, in terms of how we're watching trends, looking what's happening. And from a multi-cloud standpoint, in answer to your question there, it's a bit of a thought experiment. So if you define multi-cloud as really just, oh it's just between Amazon, Azure, Google. Multi-cloud is just multi public cloud. We do not see it that way, our clients don't see it that way. Our clients see it as a bigger domain. That multi-cloud includes how you're connecting to SaaS. How you're, there's multiple public clouds, a bigger definition there. But then it's also the edge, the cloud edge, the different edges that are out there are are being deployed in a cloud architecture. Your core data center has a private cloud. All of that we see as multi-cloud. And when you define it that way, you start to look at it. Companies are saying who do I turn to to help me with a multi-cloud architecture? Do I turn to someone that was born in the cloud. Who just really knows AWS. They know it really well. But that's what they know. Or a similar consulting company who's over here. The credibility that we have, we have those capabilities. But we also have depth and breadth, and history, and knowledge, and contracts and relationships. An incredible ecosystem. And important with Cisco, it's not just a one-way relationship. We have an ecosystem around us, collectively, that Cisco benefits because we have that ecosystem. And that's really what companies look for. It puts us in a very unique position because we see this AND world. It's not an OR world. And I think even the investments and movements that the public clouds have made recently. The hybrid offerings that they're bringing, and where Kubernetes is going to enable portability. All these things really are about a multi-cloud world, and we're just excited about where we are. >> It's interesting, there's the first wave, Amazon, I call it the Amazon wave because they really did take out the beach. And then public cloud. It kind of showed the way, the economics and the value creation piece. And you mentioned a few things that point at this next wave. That next big wave I see it is about people and technology. This holistic view around multiple architectures is a systems concept so it's not unproven. And Fabio we've seen this movie before in systems. Operating systems. You need networking. You got to connect things together. So this next wave of thinking about workloads and applications in context to an architecture see to the next narrative that people are starting to talk about. Versus. >> Absolutely >> Public cloud, because the people equation, who's going to run it, who's going to service it, who's the coders, what tools and APIs do I use. People behave in certain ways, and they like their favorite cloud, so it's a whole different ball game. You're thoughts. What's driving all this? >> I would say, look, we could talk about this forever. But I think we're seeing a pretty dramatic shift into an architectural model, right? I mean, if you remember a few years ago, we had networking specialists in the data center, storage specialists and compu-specialists, well guess what, people moved to full-stack type of expertise, right? And now we even have systems that are completely converged. Or hybrid converged. Well, we're seeing the same movie in the cloud. Where we're seeing the rise of cloud architectures, enterprise architectures, which become really determinable of the business. And these people, especially in the companies that are ahead of the game, in terms of cloud adoption and expertise. These guys are issuing the new guidance and guardrails for the entire organization in terms of what governance role you need to take, right? And the other groups actually execute this kind of strategy. This is, some people say this is finally SOA coming alive. The SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. That's exactly what it is without probably some of the kind of propriety underpinnings, or driven by certain market players in the past. This is a true, so if you think about microservices in containers, that's exactly what it is. And also we're seeing a lot of companies that are starting getting even organized by microservices. Which is the ultimate demonstration that the technology architecture and the business architecture are really converged. It's a fairly complicated concept, but in the end it's about really connecting the business to the underlying technology. >> And it's a shift that's happening in front of our eyes. And we're covering a lot of the news. Some notable news that we've been covering lately, the Department of Defense JEDI contract. That's in the public sector and military. CNCF, Amazon re:Invent. Google Nexus coming out. You're starting to see the formation where it's not about the cloud vendor or the cloud supplier anymore, as much as it is about the workload. So, there's been a debate of sole sourcing the cloud, that's certainly, we're seeing that on the DOD side 'cause it's more a military procurement thing. But that's not the right answer anymore, we're seeing that whole, spread the multi-vendor love around. It's not so much like it used to be. It's different now, there's new architecture. So, Jonathan, I want to go back to your multi-cloud architecture because I think the strategic question that I'd like to get to is. It might not be a bad thing to pick a cloud, a sole cloud for workload. But that's not meaning you're going to not use other clouds. This is a whole different thinking. So I can pick Amazon for this workload or pick Azure for that workload and Google for that workload. And holistically connect them all together. Seamlessly, this is not a bad thing. Your thoughts. >> There's a somewhat of a paradox when you talk about multi-cloud architecture and then you talk about moments in time where it makes architectural sense to pick one cloud, right? That particular decision there's issues around people and training and technology, and time to market, and API coverage. So there's all these things that you're trying to get a job done or a mission done and the amount of time that you have to achieve that job or that mission. What path am I going to choose? What engine am I going to put on the plane to get me there? Now that doesn't mean that that's the only engine you're going to put on your fleet. It just means that particular plane is going to have that kind of engine. And then the next time, you got another engine, you got a different kind of plane. You're thinking about how you're doing these things in waves and modules, and you're trying to build your aggregate velocity, 'cause really if you strip it all down. You know earlier we were talking about multi-cloud and people and talent, we're in a distributed computing land rush. And businesses of all sizes, government agencies, companies are trying to figure out how do we, you know. Electricity came along, now cloud has come along, right over the horizon cognification's coming along. How am I as an enterprise getting digitally ready, and getting on a footing to be able to do what I need to do in that domain? And really, it's about velocity and movement, so. Now that means that, that's why architecture is so important, because you have to make, you want a, people talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. So you want stop and think about, am I going through a one-way door or am I going through a two-way door? Meaning, do I have a way to come back? Is this a decision that I'm going to live with? If so how long? Is this a decision I can go through and I can come back? These kinds of approaches let you look across it. So an example would be networking. So networking is a foundation to every multi-cloud strategy. So you have to think, today my network in many enterprises is still a campus branch architecture. Well traffic patterns have changed. Even if you've just done nothing your customers have moved. Like all of a sudden, you know we talk to customers. We work with retailers, we work with all kinds of people, and it is like Global Climate Change. It's like global network change. The scale at which the clouds have arrived have changed the network patterns. So, if you start to look at it, you're saying, well what is a multi-cloud networking strategy? How do I need to rethink, well, guess what, the campus, my headquarters, is no longer the hub it used to be. The hub is now at the cloud edge, where all the other clouds are geographically aggregated. I need to move my network closer to that location. So we do a lot of work with Equinix in that context, right? So they have and have built a business around >> Sort of re-architecture's happening, and it's being driven by value creation, value shifting. >> Yes. >> Moving everything around. >> And that's where from a cloud networking standpoint, you look at that's a discussion where Cisco's so uniquely situated, because they are the networking company. They've been through the generations and they've been through different changes of generations. You know Wi-Fi, didn't used to be Wi-Fi. Now it is, right, it's here. And now we're in this next paradigm, where cloud networking didn't used to be here. Now it is, so. >> What's the new thought process for cloud networking. Because it makes a lot of sense, you have to connect clouds, obviously networking latency, SLAs around moving things around from point a to point b, storing stuff as well. Fabio, what's the equation look like? What's changed? Where do your customers go in this new architecture? >> Well, just building on top of what Jonathan was saying before, first of all the way we architect the networks, enterprise networks were networks in the past. Of course this is coming to an end. We need to rethink them, right? The fact that users now are going to use an enormous amount of software as a service applications that don't sit in your data center, means that constricting all the software in a single place doesn't make any more sense. But there's not just the traffic element. Think about all the intrusion detection and prevention, firewalling capabilities. Because you're moving away from that model, you need to start visualizing also those security functions and distributing them all the way to the edge of the network. In some cases, you need to have them in the cloud as well. We believe that the best way is a fully distributed model. Where you have a choice. Whether you keep it in your data center, or you put into the cloud, or even the to edge of the network. Again, you got to be ready for any kind of scenario. It's interesting how, you know, we're going to distributed computing as you said. But everything else is getting distributed as well. >> Oh yeah. >> Your entire infrastructure needs to follow your application and data. Wherever they go. And that's actually something unprecedented that we're seeing right now. >> And you brought up cloud architecture earlier, Jonathan. You mentioned it briefly. And this comes back to some of that this nuanced point around cloud architecture. The procurement standards aren't driving what you buy, its architectural workload dynamics are now telling procurement how we're buying. So the world shifting from, oh, I'm going to buy these servers. I'm going to buy this gear, the approved vendors. When you think about architecture the way you pointed it out, it's a completely different decision making process. So what's happening is old ways of procuring and buying and consuming technology are now shifting to. Still not going to stand up a cloud with a credit card if I'm doing dev ops, but now you start thinking holistically. The decision making on what that will look like has changed. This is probably impacting the cultural people side as well. What's your thoughts on this dynamic between cloud selection, security, architecture, and procurement? >> The example I normally give is, it's changing but it's also evolving, right? Because you're dealing with patterns that are there, and they're not going to go away, right? Money still has to be paid. Processes have to be followed and respected. The examples that I give would be, I've run large clouds in my past. Different platforms. And one thing you always watch out for when you're running a cloud is capacity. How much money do I have in the bank, so to speak, right? Am I going to have a run on the bank? So if you're running that cloud, either, and this is true if you're a service provider or you have your own private cloud. You're very concerned about you don't want to run out of capacity. Because bad things happen. Even unrecoverable bad things happen. Well in the public cloud, hey, I'm free and clear, I no longer have a capacity management team, I don't need to worry about them anymore. No, no, no no. 'Cause, you know, we just saw some press recently of a company that had a big overage. In cloud, what used to be capacity management is now cost optimization. 'Cause if you don't have it, you're going to have a similarly bad outcome. It's those kinds of things, right? How do you go, and it's those things, right? >> Once a benefit, now it's a challenge. So this could back down to the billion dollar question on the table in the industry is, how do I manage all this? I know how to connect it. Cisco could help me there. I understand multi-cloud, I totally buy into the architecture. I think this is clearly the direction. The management piece is kind of a fuzzy area. Can you guys help unpack cloud management? What are the table stakes? How should people be thinking about it? Because you mentioned security and intrusion detection. Not just moving packets around. We were talking before you came on about Kubernetes. There's all new sets of services moving up the stack, inside this dynamic. How do I manage it all? What single pane of glass is going to do it for me? >> Well, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned there. We've talked a lot about almost like an East West type shift you can think of where, multi-cloud is this thing that goes this way. Well, there's an equally crazy paradigm that's happening in a very fast period of time where it's almost like a North South North shift. Which is, Kubernetes, containers, service meshes. These architectures that are abstracting and lifting everything up. And in some ways, coming underneath as well, at the same time. Because now you've got a return of bare metal. You have these concepts architecturally where the VM is here to stay, it ain't going anywhere. It's still, the tooling around is insanely valuable. But you have now another benefit layer at a container orchestration layer, where there's portability, speed. There's all these benefits that come. And you just look at the stats of how fast containers are growing as a share. You're approaching a billion containers out there right now. And therein lies the challenge. Is that it'd be enough of a difficulty if you were saying I need to go from managing my private cloud, the stuff I have at a cloud edge, edge location, and the stuff I have in multiple public clouds. That's not all we're saying. We're saying also, you have a new tooling and a new set, and it's all software defined, and there's security, network, there's data. It just it's -- >> Complex. >> Exploding, it's complex. So the area that we're working on and want to hear more from Fabio is were innovating with Cisco on, we have great offerings and capabilities around cross cloud and VM orchestration. We're also looking now at that Kubernetes layer. >> Absolutely. >> What's real on that, the complexity he just pointed out is an opportunity at the same time because it just validates the shift that's going on. >> Absolutely. >> Management is an opportunity. >> Jonathan almost went through the entire set of needs. And what you take away from this is that fundamentally you have to instrument this incredibly distributed environment multiple sources and sourcing of this. In fact I love the analogy that you did with the planes, because there's a lot of kind of similarities to a supply chain management kind of business model, right? Where you want to supply different services. But a bottom line is that you're now moving away from what you have. It's a journey. And so this instrumentation, whether it's networking, security, analytics, management, these are actually the four pillars of our company multi-cloud strategy. They need to work across the old and the new. You can't afford to build another silo and maybe leveraging a bunch of open stores like-- >> So a data plane strategy is critical. >> It's, yeah, and it has to-- >> Across the hybrid and multi-cloud. >> East West, North South, and across the old and the new. It sounds very complex, but in reality the-- >> But you could build a taxonomy around this. And we've seen some research come out certainly from Wikiban and others. If it fits into the architecture that seems to be the question. So Jonathan, where does that fit in to the multi-cloud architecture in your opinion? >> So we, there's, you get into different terminology. We think about every company needs a cloud services strategy. So there's a taxonomy of services that we've developed. Where companies have to think about their application services strategy. Their operation strategy, governance strategy, foundation strategy. And this is, it's sort of coming what I teased upon earlier about moving from capacity planning when you own the cloud to cost optimization when you're running the cloud, right? It's the same, but different. And a lot of that difference gets down to services. I am going from a model of running my own product in an information technology modality to now I'm consuming services. So, I used to architect, and design, and build. Now I have to architect and really understand those differences. And so that's our cloud services strategy portfolio. And what we often see is we also have a dev ops portfolio. And we short-hand it, you could call it cloud native, right? Where we're looking at solutions around infrastructures code, around CICD pipelines, around cloud foundation capabilities that connect back-- >> Are they best practices or actually implementation? >> So both, we have content and workshops that we've developed, and then we have. Helping clients on projects very actively. And, you know, that's where it gets back to that architectural gap and knowledge gap. Is companies are looking for, hey, what's the pattern, what are the best practices. And then they don't expect, 'cause there's so many elements that change for a given company. And that change in the market, that there's a shelf-life to this. And it's like fresh produce. >> I love your example of engine in a plane. Do you have it for a single plane or fleet of planes? Does your company have two three big planes. It depends really, I mean, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, here, right? How you build and architect cloud, there's no boilerplate. It really is comes down to figuring it out. >> Where you are. >> So, with that, I want to go to my final point I want to dig into on the people side. So technology shift, business shift, check. You guys did a great job there. Great insight. Comes up every time I have to go to a Cube event and talk about cloud, is the cultural people skills gap problem. One, our company doesn't have the culture and/or we don't have the skill and we don't have the people to run it. So, automation certainly can help there but at the end of the day, if you don't have the people to do this. How do you solve the people problem? How are you guys helping companies? What is some of the state-of-the-art techniques? What's out there? >> So, I'll say a little. I appreciate Fabio's perspective, too. I think for us, really, you know, the old saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture's more important than ever. Because really, you're now moving to a mode where siloed organizations implementing siloed technology is enormously challenging. You have to move, and that's where dev ops and other patterns come in, where the people who build the app are doing the operations. Storage and networking and compute and apps and the business, they're all talking to each other. So culture really is foundational so that a culture where you're not making boundaries more rigid, you have to get to a point, and there's different ways to do this. I already recommend if people haven't already read the Phoenix Project. Hard to believe but it's an excellent book. And it's a fictional work about tech. It's like a novel about tech. >> I haven't read it yet, I'm going to get that. >> It's awesome. And it really gets you in the mindset of an organization going through change with the net. And it really, I mean I'm a geek, so I like it, but I've had other non-Geeks read it and they like it. But that's the key, it's a-- >> So you really got to set the table and invest in culture, making sure it's >> Culture's foundational. >> appropriately aligned. >> Culture's foundational. And then there's other best practices that always apply, right? So, what is your business vision? What is your mission? What are your values? What are the objectives you're trying to achieve in this space and time relationship? How are you prioritizing? These are all things because then if you have the right build around all that. Then what you drive to is an outcome at a certain point of time. And time's critical. We're in a market that's competing on time. So if you are not hyper aware of time. And what you're doing in a set point of time. And the trade-offs in making changes if your assumptions are wrong. These are all things that are foundational. >> Fabio, I want to get your thoughts. Chuck Robbins talks about solving the tech problems just because a tech company can solve tech problems all day long. He's also behind the people skillset. I've heard him publicly talk about it. But you guys at Cisco have actually had a great transformation with the DevNet Create community, where you harness the culture, and everyone's engaged around cloud, cloud native, and you have a kind of cloud DNA developing out of the core network. Your thoughts and Cisco's view on culture and people solving the problem. Because we need an army of cloud architects out there. There's not enough people. >> So that's true, but we carry an enormous responsibility in the marketplace as a vendor. We have to make things simple, right? There's still, you know, most of the IT infrastructure's still very complex to program and automate and the likes. That's why we're putting an enormous amount of RnD efforts, right? DevNet is like the tip of the spear. It's showing fundamentally our very loyal CCIEs and everybody else there's a better way to do things, right? Where you can actually really automate things together. You can get access to the APIs and simplify your life. You can simplify your life and the life of the business 'cause you can get faster. So making things simple, automating them, I don't know, if you think about, for instance, our cloud management orchestration philosophy. With the cloud center, we have a patent where we can actually model the application at once. And deploying it to wherever you want. We can deploy that application on-prem, on a VM, or like viralize kind of infrastructure. You can put it into AWS, you can put it into Azure, whatever you want. Kubernetes is kind of target on-prem. That is simplicity, right? We have to drive simplicity. And for me, it's all about automation, and sometimes you hear things like, in 10-base architecture and infrastructure all of that means simplicity and security. And that's the complexity of the whole thing for us is trading off, of course some of the complexity, richness, and flexibility. But it's got to be simple. If we don't make it simple, we are actually failing our goals. And that's where we're putting an enormous amount of RnD effort. >> And Jonathan, you guys at WWT have a unique aperture, view of the marketplace. You see a lot of the landscape, knowing what you guys do. Every vendor says they it, but you're really customer focused, so you're in you're digging in with the customers, it's a real value added service. I got to ask you the question with multi-cloud it sounds easy just to connect them all, right? It's like a subnet plug it in the coax, put a hub there. Put some adapter cards on a PC. The old days of connecting things. It just metaphorically seems easy What's the opportunity for connecting multi-cloud? So, as people realize when they wake up tomorrow or today. And they go, hey, you know what, I got lot of multi-cloud around. How do I connect them together? What's the opportunity, what's the opportunity for Cisco. 'Cause that seems to be the first order of business. I can connect things together in the architecture. And then what happens next? What's the opportunity to connect these clouds. >> The opportunity is gigantic. If you look at just the growth of the public clouds themselves. The CAGRs that they're representing. They're growing the rate their growing on very big numbers already. And it often gets overlooked, but Gartner will tell you also that the co-location, that cloud edge space, is also growing at a good CAGR. So you have just more and more going there. All of that needs to be connected. All of it needs to be protected. So networking is not just networking. Networking is security. A critical pillar of any security practice is really understanding and knowing in-depth your network. The introspection of it all. And at the same time, we're moving from a physical world. And we've moved and virtualized, but now the virtualization of the network now with SD-WAN coming, you're moving to a programmable model, where everything needs to be programmed. So it's not humans. So it's almost like every arc. Just in terms of the amount of data, the amount of traffic, that's all growing. Now, it's not just humans, it's machines doing things. And then also it's not just physical connections. It's software. So it's a three dimensional plot and it's growing on every axis. >> It just not in every device, it's software as a device. Software device connections. Service connections. What's Cisco's opportunity? How positioned are they that can do this? Because there's a lot of conversation around edge. Now you just mentioned a few of them, 5G. What's Cisco's opportunity in all this? >> Well I mean I think Cisco's shown recently and then through generations that they have a unique ability to lead and move with the market. And they're demonstrating that now. So, I think the importance of where the network sits, and not just the network, but again there's an adjacency of security. There's an adjacency of orchestration and management. Their global presence, their global operation. The sophistication of their channel business. All those things put them in a really strong place, we feel. >> You mentioned SD-WAN in a previous comment around talking about edge and stuff. If you think about Office 365, when companies roll that out. That basically takes SD-WAN from a little niche industry to all the internet. SD-WAN is basically the internet now. Your old grandfather's SD-WAN was over here, now everything's SD-WAN. That's basically the internet. So talk about the SD-WAN impact in this because with edge, that's super important too. Your thoughts. >> Well, it was back when we were talking about that traffic patterns are changing. So you're moving to no longer really this campus branch closed network. There's still an important need for that, of course. But now you're doing your business where your customers are. On their phone, in their car. Which means you're having to traverse and work and scale in a very different way. It's part where you have to put the network. And then, it's how you have to run and connect the network in your retail store or in these other things. Part of it is doing what we've always done in a better way. And then probably every day, more of it is about doing things in a new way that you couldn't do in the past to achieve a new business objective. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming on theCUBE conversation. I'd love to have you back on. Great insight. We could also do remotes. So when you go back to the home branch in St. Louis we can bring you in. >> Tells you Silicon Valley and St. Louis, man. Silicon angle, Silicon Valley, St. Louis. >> Let's do it. And I'll say congratulations on your success with Cisco. Fabio, it's been great to see you. Final word, Fabio, just bring it all together. Multi-cloud, it's here, kind of that's the reality. >> Yeah, I want to go back really to where we started the conversation, right? We can't forget the multicloud is still like a mean to and end. The end is, companies want to become and need to become innovative and fast. And that's actually why all this interest in multicloud. It's a business engine. That's why we're all so excited. Because it's a business issue. It's not so much a brand new technology that probably in two years is going to be out of fashion. My personal prediction, we're going to be talking about multicloud for several years. On the contrary of other trends. >> And just to real quickly bring in what we talked about before we came on camera. This is a CEO issue of companies, not CIO. >> Absolutely. >> This is showing the culture and the urgency, really, in all this. >> That's right. >> Absolutely. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Great insight. Multi-cloud conversation, fantastic. Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. Also Fabio Gori, friend of theCUBE, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Thanks for coming on. This theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCube. Covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, exclusive coverage with theCube at Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. We're breaking down the new foray into the open source world with a big presence. Cisco expanding their DevNet core developer classic program and creating an open source model with collaboration, 90% of that activity is non-Cisco, really a good formula. And to help us this down is Krish Subramanian, Principal Analyst at Rishidot Research, formerly of Red Hat, formerly of a start up that was recently sold. Can't talk about it because it's not released yet. Friend of theCube, Cube alumni, part of the Clouderati, going way back. Krish, we've seen a lot of the waves of how cloud has evolved from the early days. I remember when EngineYard was a startup, Haruku was a couple guys, we were having our meetups. >> And the AWS was still like people who weren't able to make money. >> They were poo-pooing the hell out of it. It was EC2 and S3 with a couple different, I mean RightScale did everything back then, so think about the changes. And now Cisco here with the formula, they have the right formula, I got to give them props for that, doing it right. They're not trying to come in and do a land grab and sort of, "Ahh, we're Cisco", throwing their elbows around. Really doing it right, your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely, come back to what some other legacy companies tried to do. Cisco didn't try to jump in and say, "Hey, we are going to run public cloud, compete with Amazon", and sort of take them down. They sort of waited for right moment, they initially started with the InterCloud, which will go much further, but when IoT came into picture, they were there right for that and they were there taking advantage of that. And with the increasing focus on developers, they are going right to capture the minds of developers. Especially for IoT, that is critical for Cisco to go-- >> Well, I'm really glad you're on with Peter. We have two analysts here who know the industry up and down, from every dimension. Of course, I'll add my color, but I want to ask both of you guys a couple questions. One, do you think Cisco's making the right moves by coming out and really focusing on their core competency, which is the network? They also bought AppDynamics, so that is a big purchase. So, you got apps meets infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, which means infrastructure as code. You really can't have infrastructure as code unless Cisco gets behind it, they're the leader. So, with IoT looming, this seems like a good move for Cisco. What do you think? >> Yeah, definitely, they are going in the right direction, so it's really like IoT's still in the early stages and we have to wait and see how it is going to evolve, but Cisco is very persistent. Especially I like the AppDynamics acquisition because they are clearly telling the world that we understand that applications are the future and developers need the right tools if they are to develop their apps on Cisco infrastructure. And with the emphasis on programmability, Cisco is taking right steps towards capturing developer attention and I hope with successful events like this, they will be able to get there. >> Peter, I want to go to you for a second because we just found out, in talking to Suzy, I did not know this, but in your previous life, when you ran research at META Group, folks may not know what that was, it was a big research firm at the time, you did some really similar work around the infrastructure developer. >> Yeah >> Okay, and our comment was, "What is old is now new". I got a degree in operating systems and computer science and that seems to be the model. What is this notion of an infrastructure developer? It was mentioned in the keynote today. Does that exist in this new scenario? Do you see it being viable? It seems like the messaging is tight. What is your reaction to this notion? You've done a lot of work on that. >> Well, as a way of answering the question John, and I'll play off of something you just said, when we talk about the degree with which this is relevant to Cisco, here's what I say. Everybody's always looking for what is it that's different from today, relative to yesterday? And there's a lot of things that are different. One of the most important ones is that yesterday's computing industry emphasized a priority set of models about how you do things. So, if you thought about the network, the network had a modeled structure. You sat there and you designed a network to be as relevant to as many things as possible. Same with the database. You sat there and you designed the database to be as relevant to whatever notion of applications. When we start talking about the new world, now what we're discovering is the data is going to force a reconfiguration. That's what big data is. In many respects, it's non-structured, non-modeled data, but we still want to do analytics. Same thing with the network. We want the network to evolve and emerge, have emerging characteristics that allow us to do things that we never really anticipated when we first put this stuff down. And so, the thing that an infrastructure developer, at least as we conceived it, and we were way ahead and probably wrong for that reason, but the way we conceive it is someone has to take some degree of responsibility for starting to characterize, fill that gap, characterize the services in the infrastructure that need to be made available to application developers in a way that makes coherent and consistent sense so that an application written to an infrastructure, in fact, may become a service to another application at some point in time in the future, because they make consistent assumptions about where they operate within that margin between the application and the infrastructure. >> John: Does that environment exist today, in your opinion? >> It does in certain places. It does in certain places. I think the whole notion of containers is making, in Kubernetes for example, is making some very powerful presumptions about how applications are going to interact with each other in the future. Now, we had SOA, but we also talked about Conway's law, it just never happened because the structure of the organizations that were using SOA just guaranteed you end up with monolithic, crap applications anyway. >> Explain Conway's law real quick for people who didn't-- >> Yeah, Conway's law is, it's been mentioned in theCube a couple times, basically, it's a suggestion that the structure of the application is a reflection of the structure of the organization that created it. And so, if you have a silo-based application development organization that's looking at the application for the finance group, or the marketing group, you are going to get a structured, siloed-oriented application, no matter what underlying technology you use. And that's been that way forever. >> And so, Krish, I want to get your thoughts because let's take that to the next level. So, one of the benefits of cloud was horizontally scalable model. That really kind of, to me, was the big ah-ha moment around software. And with DevOps, which is now called cloud native, which is the same thing, infrastructures code was, hey, I'm not not an infrastructure person. I just want it to be available for me and help me configure it out and programmable, as Suzy was saying. Okay, so if you take what Peter's saying about data, you've lived through the infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, SAS wars or evolution, however you want to look at it. And, now you see that kind of coalescing into SAS and infrastructure and PAS kind of folding away and kind of becoming less of a contentious conversation. But, now that same thing's happening with data, we believe. I mean I think, maybe he may disagree, but now data's now the new data layer. What's your thoughts on that? Because now, if you inject data into what was the old cloud stack, new things are really possible. >> Yeah, the thing is, data brings in a new dimensionality to what we are seeing right now. Everything from infrastructure to application, everything requires a mindset change in terms of seeing them as services. So, even if it is a physical hardware you are dealing with, you have to make it more service-like by putting an API in front of it. So, it's changing the way how we consume these services. But, data is the one that is bringing business value to customers. When you make data easily, sort of like, inter operate with the services, let's say call it, for lack of a better term, a services ocean kind of IT model you have in your enterprise. So, when you offer to bring data into it, it offers you a lot of opportunities which didn't exist in the past. It opens up new avenues in which you could manipulate data, make sense out of it and probably get more value than what you were getting in the past. >> What's interesting, if you bring micro services, if you think about Docker and Kubernetes, as you were saying, and you bring data now into the equation and the notion of microservices, you can apply all that microservices knowledge to data. That's what you were saying, from what I hear. Or concepts of-- >> Sort of like you will bring data close to take, earlier as Peter pointed out, data was in silos, representative of the organizational structure. So, by taking a more services approach and spreading the services across these siloed, PAS, siloed organization, you are bringing the entire organization into one single umbrella, sharing the data and thereby benefiting much more than what they were getting in the past. >> So John, in the opening, one of the things we talked about, and I'll repeat it here because he's probably going to see it and I'd love to hear your comments on it, is that we went to hardware-defined networking. And then we went to software-defined networking. And, Wikibon's working on a proposition and I'm sure we'll find reasons why it's not going to play out, but again, I'd like to hear your position, is what I'll call data-defined infrastructure. So, we were on theCube last week at Informatica and we heard a lot about the role that metadata's going to play in discovery of data resources and whatnot. I can imagine adding metadata when we start talking about dependencies and time and location and things that are relevant to how a network or how an infrastructure might configure itself to serve the data, becoming a feature of the programmability of the underlying infrastructure so that we end up, in five years, we do talk about data-defined infrastructure. Just as today, we're talking about software-defined infrastructure, where the infrastructure, literally, responds to the needs of the data because that, ultimately, is the most flexible way of think about this. What do you think? >> Yeah, I fully agree with you. In fact, data brings in a new dimensionality to the equation where applications, it's a morph based on what is there in the data. So, on-the-fly, the infrastructure needs to be modified. So, data sort of brings in a new way of doing infrastructure from what we have done in the past. I fully agree with the role of data in that and how, through the application, that influences how we deal with infrastructure. It does change completely. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question. Journeys, is journey to DevOps, journey to digital transformation, certainly has a lot of cloud, has a lot of open source involved with it. We're seeing the Ford CEO get fired, he hasn't been on the job for four years, right? So, you guys both work with end users and advise them, so what's your advise to CXOs where, hey the clock now is, I thought four years was short. It really should be seven to 10 on the transformation scale, but people are getting axed in their third year, so they got to show results. How does an executive make all this stuff happen in such a short time? Or should they just reset expectations? >> When the executive comes in, he, or she, not only should look at their core business, they should also think that they are a technology business and change the mindset completely. That mindset change needs a push from the top that's going to accelerate the change down the lane and I think the executive should think that they are becoming a CEO, or CXO, of a technology company, rather than a manufacturing company or a automobile company kind of thing. >> I think that's true, but look, we haven't studied what happened at Ford in detail because I'm sure there's some subtleties in there that we just don't fully understand, but on the surface, it sounds like he might have gotten a little bit of a raw deal, just from the pure standpoint of-- >> Well the stock was down 39%, so my guess is total Wall Street hatchet job, but -- >> Peter: Exactly. >> We don't know a lot of the politics, but Val Bercovici, who was on earlier, who has a lot of experience in organizations that net app since 97, or late 90s, brought an interesting point, you were saying earlier. Tesla creates a car that's a service. And so, to me, I hate to use the cliche, "Everything as a service", but essentially, that's what software's going to. So, where you make up a day, that's why I'm kind of poking at the data thing because I think you're on to som-- >> But it's the end of the day, Tesla still has to have a shop that bends metal, there's still some car manufacturing things that have to happen. And, in many respects, whether the old CEO is saying, well the value proposition is, someday this autonomous vehicle is going to happen, but right now, we still got to build cars that can compete in the world market. There's a lot of subtleties here. There are-- >> Yeah, but Tesla does upgrade with software over the network. >> For an 80 to $100,000 price point and there's about four billion people that are going to buy cars in the next five years that may, or may not, be able to buy a 80,000 to $100,000 car. So anyway, coming back to your core point, I think what it really means is that if you're in a situation where you don't have visibility in a how, some of these new, digital approaches are going to create value for your business, you're doomed. So, I think the first thing you got to do is you got to be very explicit. This is how digital technology's going to create value for my business, that's number one. And, be able to articulate that to, virtually, anybody that's capable of understanding it, including Wall Street. But, to do that, you have to step back and say, and what is it about that digital technology that's going to create value for my business. And the thing that's going to do it, or not, is the data. >> And the asset configuration around, the work around the assets. >> Especially the asset configuration, as it's defined by the data. And, increasingly, there's an economics terms, what we're going to see happen over the next 10 years is the asset specificities are going to go down dramatically. In other words, the ability to which, or the degree to which an asset can only be configured to a specific purpose. Software's going to change that dynamic dramatically. And that, in many respects, is one of the fundamental, underlying things that's going on here. But, at the end of the day, you have to say, what role is data going to play in my business? How am I going to articulate that role by saying that I'm going to incorporate digital in this way? And then, put in place a plan that demonstrates that you're competent about some of these things. And, if your shareholders don't like it, they're not going to like it from anybody, not just you. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. Why it's so successful. Why, in your opinion, do you think, there just booming with vendors, a lot of cash infusion, a lot of activity, projects went from one, three, 10. We had Dan on earlier, a lot of growth in the cloud native. And then, also, Kubernetes as a, kind of as an emerging, really interesting dynamic, vis-a-vis multicloud. So why cloud native is so popular and the impact of Kubernetes. >> Cloud native is popular because of late, developers are understanding that the role we are building applications is not going to work in cloud. When containers came into picture, that really made it easy for developers to develop cloud native apps. It got them to take advantage of the more distributed nature of the underlying infrastructure. So, the containers are the main reason why cloud native has become the household term, even in the enterprises. That could be one of the reason why Cloud Native Foundation is popular. Because they came at the right time to host all these development projects and evangelize with the developers and take steps in that. As far as Kubernetes is concerned, it worked at Google's CE. If it can work at Google's CE and then solve Google's problem, it should be able to help-- >> If it's good for Google, it's good for me. That's their strategy. >> And also, people are slowly realizing that as more and more enterprises go to cloud, they are realizing that going with a single cloud provider may not solve all their problems because different cloud providers have different set of services. So, they want to take advantage of all that. But, they want a single pane of glass to manage everything. Kubernetes is this general to be that at the cloud-- >> Krish, thanks for coming on. Peter, thanks for the comments, I'll just wrap up the analyst segment by saying, in my opinion, I think Cisco's making a good move here because, to your point about Google and Kubernetes is, and that's one of many examples of great software being contributed to open source. And open source, for all the times I've been involved with it since I was in college, is this more great software coming to the table now than ever before and that's creating great innovation. So, combined with the cloud and cloud native and Kubernetes, a perfect storm of innovation is coming. And it's coming, not from vendors, it's coming from open source. And, so the smart vendors are putting their toe in the water and really figuring it out. And again, the-- >> Peter: It is coming from vendor support though. >> Well the vendors are smart by putting their people in open source as a proxy for contribution. That's the open source model. That, to me, is the new R&D. It's a new innovation strategy, coupled with some proprietary R&D. Not saying they should be going all open source. >> I agree with it completely. In fact, I would even go one step further and say open source is completely disrupting the traditional enterprise software in modern business. Think about someone like Capital One putting critical software as open source and disrupting all the vendors in the space, so it's-- >> Well, let's continue the conversation in studio or tomorrow. Again, open source is horizontally scaling as well. Great stuff, great projects. More exclusive coverage from the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNet Create after this short break. (up-tempo music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy--

>> Computer Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015. Brought to you by Mirantis. Now, your hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick. (upbeat music) >> Okay welcome back everyone. We are here live, broadcasting. This is SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick this week. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage live in Silicon Valley for OpenStack Silicon Valley or #OpenStackSV or the hashtag for this event today, #OSSV15. Join the conversation. Join our crowd chat, crowdchat.net/OSSV15. Our next guest is Craig McLuckie, who's with Google. He's on the Google Cloud team, CUBE Alum. Welcome back to theCUBE. Got a keynote there, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, great to be with you again. >> So Silicon Valley house leads center of the innovation engine house a lot of investment capital here, a lot of big players, you guys, Facebook, VMware, Intel, you name it. It's the giants of the technology industry. And the bubble conversation's happening. China's going down in terms of economics, and seeing the stock market crash there. But yet, underlying infrastructure change is happening. Cloud certainly is floating, that wealth-creation engine, you guy are a big part of it here in Silicon Valley. Just talk about the state of the Cloud. OpenStack has momentum, you have some stability in the core compute side with OpenStack, virtualization is not going away. New things like Kubernetes, Containers, fast on the scene, rising very fast. What's your take on this innovation engine in the Cloud? >> So I think there's a couple of things that are really exciting and interesting that are happening right now, as we speak. The first is a transition to open. It's a way of rethinking about how you evaluate, acquire, and integrate your software. And I think that OpenStack has established a legitimacy as a technology that's really bringing the value proposition of traditional infrastructure service to everyone everywhere. And we're really starting to see a convergence to that community, a set of technologies that are consistent, of high simatic consistency, is really becoming a thing, which is phenomenal. At the same time we're also seeing another disruption happening. And it was really a disruption that was triggered by the emergence of Docker as a technology to support a new way of thinking about packaging and deployment. And it's really part of a bigger story around a move towards Cloud -Ntive computing. This is a computing set of patterns that was really inspired by the internet giants by the Google's, the Facebook's, the Twitter's. But it's really been cracked open and been accessible by folks like Docker who have opened up those container technologies and now we're seeing a lot of the players start to really focus on this and look at bringing the value proposition of that new style of computing to enterprises everywhere. >> You know you start to see maturity in a market specially when platforms are involved, platform wars, whatever the bloggers want to put the headline out there, when you see abstraction layers develop. And one of the things that you talked about in your keynote I'd like you can elaborate on is ending the distinction between what's under the hood. Containers you mentioned bring out this notion that, "I'm a developer I want interoperability." >> Right. >> "I want cross platform API's." This is the economy so I want you to explain that. What is this disruption with containers and Kubernetes? Do, for this abstraction, do we care about the features any more? And that's one of the signals of maturity. Is that you're not talking speeds and feeds and infrastructure to service, platform as a service. When those conversations go away you know things are moving. >> Right. >> Or is that true, what's your take on all that? >> I think that's a very good observation. I think that one of the things we as a community have looked for for a while is a separation between the world of tools and infrastructure that people interact with on a day to day basis to build applications and in the systems that actually take those built applications and run them for you. And a big part of our focus has been to make the set of subsystems that are actually responsible for the operations of applications, transparent to the end developer. And we're looking to formalize that interface that exists between how you create an application, how you package up it's dependencies and how you offer up the infrastructure and then how you run it. One of the most exciting and energizing things for me is to see the emergence of a standard set of abstraction that interface between these two worlds so it creates massive opportunities for innovation. By standardizing that interface you have incredible innovation in the tooling area with technologies like Docker or continuous integration of delivery frame works. You know new development environments that are producing an artifact that can be universally consumed everywhere else. And then on the infrastructure side you have a lot of innovation around running that artifact for the developer, the end enterprise efficiently and intelligently whether it's being deployed into a virtual machine on OpenStack with being deployed into a main-source cluster running on the metal or whether it's been deployed into a next generation Kubernetes cluster running in one of those environments or somewhere else. We're looking to create this common abstraction and it's going to drive a lot of innovation at every level of the stack. >> You know at Wikibon research one of the things that they're putting out, some cutting edge research around the innovation around some of the technologies under the hood. Conversion infrastructure, cloud technologies, flash, storage, software defined networking all that stuff under the hood is evolving as fast as well. So you have underlying core technology and tooling exploding. >> Right. >> So some really good stuff coming out Wikibon.com. And with that and your comment I want to ask, kind of a pointed question which is: Does hybrid cloud really exist? Is it a concept or is it a category? Do people buy hybrid-cloud? Do they buy into it? It seems to be that's the conversation people are talking about now. But I just don't see hybrid-cloud existing other than being part of private and public. >> Right. >> And talk about that. >> It's a great question. I love that question. It exists but not the way that people think of it existing. Right so you can think about it this way when you are building an application on your laptop and deploying it into a cloud it's kind of hybrid-cloud right? But it's not the way that people think about hybrid-cloud. When you want to run a continuous integration server for your company and have it hosted in the cloud and have it create artifacts that are deployed into you on-prem production clusters. That's hybrid-cloud but it's not the way people have come to think about it. And so what I think about it is really about the ecosystem. About establishing a common set of tools and capabilities so that first and foremost people can choose the destination for an application based solely on the technical merits of the infrastructure that they're ruing on. Google offers some very high quality, robust, fast, affordable cloud infrastructure. But we recognize and embrace the fact that for some customers you have very legitimate regional requirements. For some of the applications you might really want to run them on premises. And so the first step toward achieving legitimacy for hybrid-cloud is establishing a common set of patterns and tools and capabilities that exist in both places. The next step is going to be around creating a common services abstraction that let's you start to access things from other environments. And then over time you might actually see people deploy these sort of cloud bursting scenarios et cetera. But the path to get there is really through infrastructure. You know like a common set of abstractions, a common set of tools, a common set of pattern, and making those available to people everywhere. And then over time we will start building these fused together, legitimately hybrid solutions. >> So hybrid-cloud then is a paradigm, it's a concept that highlights the common tooling interoperability so developers can actually work in these environments without having to do anything. That's where Docker comes in, that's where Kubernetes come in? >> Exactly. And it's really, hybrid needs to be first and foremost about being able to use a common set of technologies to build an application for A or B. >> So let's take it forward. So let's put the brainstorming hat on. Let's talk about the future and let's kind of play with some scenario's. Internet of things opens up a huge can of worms and challenges, engineering challenges around: How do I manage the data? How do I drive workloads to these devices? Whether their wearables or cars or stacks or devices? Anything that's on the edge of the network is now considered a device. PC, mobile, internet of things. So for a developer to work in that kind of environment they need these toolings. Is that how you see it? >> Absolutely, I think that's a great way to think about it. You know it's an interesting thing you raise. Because if you think about it Cloud-Native has really been the domain of internet companies, right? It's really been something that Google's done because it's the only way to practically achieve a certain level of scale. We've seen co-evolution of this, of these patterns inside Twitter, eBay, Facebook, Netflix. Everyone's been doing it on their own terms. Now the reality is when IoT happens every enterprise has to kind of become a internet company right? And what we've seen consistently across, you know all of the internet companies that exist today is there's one pattern that really works well to actually deploy computational infrastructure, at scale efficiently. And that's this pattern around container package, dynamically schedule, microservices oriented computing. And so our mission is really to bring these technologies in a democratized way to enterprises so that they can actually tackle problems that were previously only really solved by the internet giants. Without having to make Google level investments or Facebook level investments in technology. >> Yeah. When we hear that Internet companies, just clarify like a hyperscaler like with Yahoo and Google did. Building large scale systems in a seamless way that's kind of abstract to the user. >> Right. >> Just pure performance all, everything is running and it's kind of a brilliant concept. That brings up the point of Google envy. I mean you hear this all the time in the enterprise. "I want to be more like Google." "I want to be more like Facebook." And what they really are saying is: "I want to have Ops." Right so. >> Right. >> DevOps, Cloud-Native do you hear hat often? And when you hear that: "I want to be more like Google." What does that really mean from your stand point? How do you guys internalize that? >> Right. >> How do you talk back to customers? >> So I think you know when I say I want to be more like Google I think there's a lot of different sort of angles that you might have there. I've heard people coin this phrase GIFEE to describe what we're trying to do: Google Infrastructure for Everyone else. But I think the heart of it is really this: If you're a Google engineer, it's like you have a superpower, right. You have access to this amazing almost unlimited mass of infrastructure that's just at your disposal immediately. At very little cost or overhead. And you don't have to worry about the mechanics of actually where the thing I built is run, right. Operations is just a function of the platform. The developer gets to focus on their application and their application operations and what they get for free is this cluster environment where cluster operations is handled for you. The process of actually mapping an atom of code into a distributors systems environment. The ability to use some very powerful services that make it trivial to build distributable systems. The fact that I'm not paged all the time because what I deploy is understandable by some very smart subsystems, they can watch it, they know what it's supposed to be doing. They can tell when it's not doing that and they know how to fix it, right. And so traditionally when you go out of operating parameters in a traditional system you get paged. And for me a lot of what this operate like Google really means is one is I want to be able to Access Compute at an unprecedented level easily and two is I don't want to get paged by my applications that are doing that. >> Yes so let's bring that up, the API economy. Let's bring this to the next level. Today applications are either Legacy or their Cloud-Native so and I ask everyone the question, even on our own Wikibon team we have a debate. And I ask Dave Alante: "Dave name the Cloud-Native Apps that are out there?" I don't think there are any Cloud-Native apps out there. I mean who has a Cloud-Native App? Now that's a trick question because he goes: "Amazons an App, Google has Cloud-Native." Well they're already hyperscaled. >> Right. >> So the question is what, where are the Cloud-Native apps? Where are the examples? Now Facebook's a Cloud-Native App because they built it from the ground up to be Cloud-Native. >> Sure. >> Google same way. So as an enterprise, what is the Cloud-Native App to the enterprise and how do they get there? And what Legacy do they have to throw away because its synchronous and API interactions is fundamental. >> Right. >> How do you ease that out? >> This is actually a fascinating topic and I think one of the most dangerous things people assume is that to accomplish Cloud-Native you have to go fully along the API-Fication path, right. Now the reality is that of you look at they way that people access data today the fast majority of business data's stored in relational database's. People have great tools to access data in relational databases. They want to be able to move that forward. And to me if you force API-Fication, if you force a protocol specific approach to actual integration, if you force people to use a specific authentication scheme you're going to alienate a very broad array of your customers and you're going to create this cognitive hurdle that's very hard for people to get over. So when I think about Cloud-Native, I think about it as providing a different paradigm for deployment management, activation et cetera. But it has to make allowances for integration with your existing systems. And so I think at the forefront of this is the notion of a service or a microservice. And a microservice has to be a minimal atom of software consumption, the easiest way to find and consume something and you can't force an opinion around how people project that, right. So if you build something that runs in a cluster you should be able to access an Oracle database as if it were a microservice running inside your cluster. You should be able to access a sales force SAS endpoint as if it were a microservice running inside your cluster. And so as I think about my mission and Google's mission around the move towards Cloud-Native computing, you can't create this experiential cliffs, you can't create these artificial boundaries to your system. You have to make natural allowances where, look there's some stuff that just works better in a vertically scalable VM. If you want to run a big database with a Dune Kernel and a few other things, by all means put it in a VM. And we are absolutely committed to the idea of creating a natural set of experiences when you want to go from that to some portion of the application that's doing stateless, front and serving. Or a portion of the application that's running in a cloud-friendly, distributed scaled out database. You shouldn't have to take the pull and be stuck in this world. You should be able to mix these. >> So you're saying it's dangerous to force API-Fication, if that's a term I can't even spell it, It's too may I's at the end there, I like that hyphen in there. But if you force API-Fication or movement, you can foreclose future performance and functionality by alienating existing apps. >> By alienating the existing system. It is a very dangerous, there's a lot of. It's very attractive to drive API-Fication but it has to be, you have to create this pressure grading that attracts people up it by adding value at every stage of the game. And you can't build your management systems around a predicated, sort of, opinionated API framework. We saw this with, in the world of SOA, I mean I don't know if you remember the SOAP and SOA stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You know way back when. >> That was just another way of describing API-Fication and we've saw where it went. The problem was that. >> It wasn't ready, the market wasn't ready for web services at that time. >> And it was, but it was beyond that, it was like, no one's willing to make a massive infrastructure investment to get you to ground zero, where you can actually start building. >> So let's look at that web services back in 2000, 2001 when you saw SOAP, XML, SAM all those things emerging. At that time who did take advantage of that? It was the hyperscalers. It was internet companies cause they needed it, right. So the mainstream market now is adopting that kind of concept around microservices. Explain that. >> But it wasn't, the interesting thing is when you look at what the adoption was around microservices, it wasn't around interoperable SOAP, it was around discrete, highly optimized RPC protocols. It was around relatively closed systems at that time. And it worked well, right? The challenge. >> It was controlled. >> It was controlled and it worked well inside a closed ecosystem. Now what, the thing that really held people back is that to get there you had to do a big ESP deployment. You had to then go and SOA-fy a bunch of your components and it required a huge investment in terms of sort of infrastructure and capabilities to get, before you started realizing value. And it was inaccessible to most people and it alienated technologies that didn't fit well into that model. Right like how do you take your database and put it into that model? It was purely optimized around a certain portion of it. And so now we're in a world where we make it available to everyone. We reduce barriers to entry and you get immediate value without having to make huge investments. So let's take microservices and let's unpack that for the audience out there. You're seeing DockerCon, ContainerCon, KubeCon, MasosCon. All these conferences are around developers. And this is all about scale right? >> Right. >> Operating a scale, abstraction layers. I think it's, we need to be careful not to pigeonhole this as about operating at scale. It is the only practical way to operate at internet scale but the value proposition is just as applicable if you're running something in five virtual machines, at a more humble scale. >> So let's talk about development versus operation team. >> Right. >> Where does the Kubernetes, where does the microservices model fit in? And how do companies avoid the trap of alienating existing apps? How do they get the system up and running? What is the roadmap? And differentiate from a Dev standpoint and an Ops standpoint. >> I think one of the most important things you're going to start seeing is a specialization of the operations function. Today it's all kind of glum together and if you ask a developer to actually run an application they have to be cognizant of which virtual machine it's in. You force them into the ugly world of infrastructure Ops. And sort of common services Ops. And what we're going to start seeing, and what I hope to help companies achieve, is a specialization of the operations function. So Infrastructure Ops should be relegated to a set of people that actually understand the physical infrastructure. They will create an optimal physical environment surround your application. There'll be a small number of specialized people that know how to do that and they will rack and stack and wire and configure and do what ever needs to be done to tune the infrastructure. Above that you're going to see this Cluster Operations. So a common Services Operation team that provide a basic operational platform and common services to everyone. So these are a highly specialized set of people that provide you the tools you need to be able to autonomously run a distribute system. They are unlikely to be involved in the day to day operations because most of these systems will be autonomous but they're there to answer the call if something happens in, in that system. So it becomes a very specialized function. And Google does this with our SRE folks that actually manage our, like the Boar clusters that run all our infrastructure. Small number of highly specialized people providing a very valuable service to a lot of folks. And then at the top level you're going to have Application Operations. And that really just becomes the developers function. And it should really be about understanding and managing your code and you should never have to think about: Where it's running? How it's running? You never, should never have to SSH into an instance to try and debug it. All that should be presented to you through your tools. So the developer's experience becomes one of of using logical infrastructure. And so I think what we're going to start seeing is companies making investments in these clustering technologies. Offering up these simple, clustered service environments for their departments. And then having portfolio's of container package applications that can be easily taken, adjusted and run in these environments. And we'll naturally see the specialization of operations emerge. >> So we're running out of time. Jeff didn't get one question in but maybe next time. >> He has a role in that. >> Brendan Burns, Brendan Burns I think on your team. >> Yeah. >> Brendan, so he brought up something. He brought up the hybrid-cloud is kind of the way, meaning the way you described it, not as a category. But he also brought up the different aspects of Google Cloud in our last crowd chat last month. How do customers mix and mach with the cloud? I mean you guys offer Linux, you guys offer Windows. I mean if I want to work with Google Cloud what are the touch points? How do people ingratiate in? How do they engage with Google? What are some of the use cases? Can you share just put the plug in for Google Cloud what you guys have up and running that's mature, stable, >> Right >> Shipping. And how do customers get into the Google Cloud? >> So we've really seen Google Cloud, it needs to be in all of the above sort of capabilities. The operating characteristics. The thing that make Google Cloud unique is the quality of the basic infrastructure. We offer by far the most price performing basic infrastructure out there. It's an innovative clouds, you know it's driving and active in a lot of the sort of disruptions we're seeing around the container space. It's an open cloud. It's a cloud that's invested in making sure that we engage and connect with the OpenSource community. So if you want to work with Google Cloud there's a lot of different ways to do it. One is you can go and just buy beautiful, clean, pristine, powerful, affordable infrastructure in large chucks through Google compute engine. And we're seeing a tremendous amount of adoption. You don't have to make massive capex down payments to get our best price. We really focus on doing that. You can also come in if you just want to write a bit of code, have it run, we have a wonderful Pass product called Google App engine that's becoming very naturally integrated into the container ecosystem and is a natural sort of path. It's a great entry point for people that just want to operate on a higher level and want to take some code and then have it easily deployed and run on your behalf. And then we're also, another entry pointy that isn't obvious to people is, you can help us build the Google Cloud. What we're building with our next generation set of offerings with technologies like Google Container Engine, is an opensource cloud. It's been built in public. Come join our community, work with us. Try it out. Give us feedback and be part of actually building the next generation of clouds. >> Okay so the question I have for you is, let's just say I'm an Amazon customer and I want to go to Google Cloud, do you have like an elastic Beanstalk application containers an App Engine, how do I get I there? I mean there are some things that Amazon has you might have some things. How do you talk to that, Beanstalk particulars. >> That's a great question. So Beanstalk you know provides the ability to you know deploy and run applications. The closest analogy is App Engine. So Beanstalk traditionally was a Java base platform that you could provide your Java code and it would run it for you. App Engine gives you that equivalent capability. And with the new generation of App Engine we actually provide the ability to deploy into directly into VM. So that it feels a lot, it feels a lot like the Beanstalk experience. But it comes with a lot of other high value services. And so that's a natural starting point. And App Engine it self is being rebased on a lot of the Kubernetes concepts. So that you have this immediate, easy, accessible experience for code but when you reach an edge and you want to actually integrate it naturally with a vertically scaled database that runs in a VM, we have compute engine waiting for you and all very natural, it will feel natural to actually just integrate those two things together and snap together these more holistic solutions. >> You guys have a, final question. I now you guys have a lot of track record with developers certainly Google's history and OpenSource, everything is great. But other competitors, more commercial IBM and Amazon, they're providing marketplaces for distribution, where people can make some cash and some cabbage. >> Right. >> What's the plans Google? Is there anything there? How do I make money if I'm a developer with Google? Or is there plans there, what's the state of that? >> It's a great question and obviously we have aspirations in that space. I can't go into all the details right now. But you know the we are obviously investing in that area. And one of the things that we're really like though is looking at containers as a standard distribution framework, let's you plug into everyone's market places. So one of the things that I see around marketplaces historically is that they offer immediate value in connecting a producer and consumer of software but they're not offering steady state value. So once those two have been connected the marketplace isn't adding significant ongoing value. So when you think about what we want to do, we want to make sure that one is, we become a market maker, we let lost of different market places emerge and that we support those. But then in our own efforts we actually add legitimate value to both the producer and the consumer of the software. And the we're not just taking a cut off the top. So but that's, it will become much more clearer in the face of time. >> Craig, thanks for spending some time and congrats on a great keynote. Good to see you again. Thanks for jumping in and sharing the data here on theCUBE, really appreciate it. We are live here in Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE at OpenStackSV, join the conversation #OSSV15. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)