>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco for coverage of Google Cloud Next 18, #GoogleCloudNext18 I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Your next guest, Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Data Services Business Unit at NetApp. Yes, Business Unit at NetApp, storage in the cloud. Anthony, welcome to theCUBE, Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. nice to see you guys again. >> Great to have you on, we have been, first of all, very complimentary of NetApp over the years. We've had some critical analysis, but one thing I will say that you guys were early on cloud. I remember talking to Tom Georgans years ago, >> Yup. >> You listened to the customers, and you saw cloud, and there was some work going on. Now, you're here at Google Cloud, you're in Amazon, kind of not conventional wisdom for a storage company selling boxes to be living in a cloud where there's serverless, and, some would argue, storageless soon. >> Well, you know-- >> How did this happen? How did this business unit happen? (mumbled speech) >> Well, I think George Kurian, our CEO, probably now about five years ago, I think saw that cloud computing had just too much, I think, going for it not for us to pay attention to it. And he took the top ten engineers at NetApp, and said, you know our flagship operating system ONTAP that runs on our engineered systems, he said, port it to Amazon. And so we spent time porting the operating system over directly to Amazon and today, now, it's a real business. Fully funded, staffed, growing, and you know to your point, you know, who'd have thought NetApp would be calling the cloud. Google chose us. >> Big announcement today, in the keynote-- >> Yup. >> Right >> Oh yeah. >> I mean it's-- >> Key partner >> Turns out that enterprises need enterprise level files, whether that's NFS or SMB, and we're the best in the business to do it. >> So talk about that a little more, because a lot of people get confused, and they say, well wait a minute, why do I need NetApp on Google Cloud or AWS? Why don't I just use whatever object store the cloud provider gives me? Explain that. >> So I think there's a number of use cases, certainly if you look at legacy, there's a lot of applications, databases, that need and demand file. And customers would rather not have to do all the work to translate them over to something like object. Now, you know, object is a very descriptive storage protocol, but it's not as fast as file. So, there are distinct advantages to file that I think the cloud companies have realized they need, to win the enterprise business, whether it's the lift-and-shift business, there's a lot of applications. If you look at oil and gas, all that seismic data is in a file in a volume. You look at CAD-CAM, all of those applications demand file. Oracle database runs incredibly fast on file, so file is certainly not to be discounted, and I think it's very much now a hot topic in public cloud. >> And there's more to this story than just running in the public cloud. THere's a whole business model around the economics, >> Yup. >> the pricings, can you explain that? >> The way we think about cloud is we think that we can build a business that's just in the cloud. We basically monetize a service, a set of services that we offer to our customers to help them manage their data, protect their data, secure their data, integrate and orchestrate their data. Whether it's on one cloud or many. Whether it's a combination of onprem and cloud. And we charge very, very simply based on capacity or API call. We provide a full service. And that's what I think the cloud has done is democratized and empowered many, many people to consume technology that, prior to these big public clouds, you'd have to go to IT and wait six months and get charged a lot of money. The clouds make everything instantly available. It's wonderful. >> You guys have a great history, and again we've been, not critical but complementary of NetApp. You listen to customers, got a very loyal customer base. No matter what the trend is against you, by the pundits, you guys persevere as a company. And it's been great to watch, classic Silicon Valley success story. But you got Solify, you got Flash, you've been doing some kicking the tires early in cloud, now you created a business unit out of it. As you listen to customers, you see DevOps, you see (mumble) Infrastructures go, massive amounts of new proliferation, there's going to be a renaissance in software development, it's coming very fast. You almost see it coming very, very fast. What are the use cases for NetApp in the cloud, what are some of the things that customers are talking to you about, what are the top use cases, and where do you think they're going to be? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so people have been very ... in Google we've been in preview phase onboarding customers to test the system out, sort of flush water through the pipes. And we've been very lucky at Google, we've had really every use case that we wanted to test tested. At the low end, it can be as simple as just home directories shared across ... whether it's POSIX or Windows, people need access to those file systems and NetApp is the only company that offers that sort of dual protocol access. So we have home directories at the low end, all the way up to genome sequencing databases, big data, relational databases, data warehouses at the high end. And what's nice about our service is we have service level objectives. So we, for the first time, have actually put a performance guarantee on the volumes. And what's nice about that is the customer knows that that's something that we stand to. What's really nice is the customer can dial up or dial down, either the capacity that they want or the performance that they want. So they may say, Monday through Friday we want to run the volumes at this basic service level, and then over the weekend, through an API, we're going to crank them up and make them run at 128 MB/sec. So, we really are, I think, providing incredible value for all workload types. >> You just described what I consider chew software, defined strategy, programmable through an API, I mean that's something that is nuanced but dramatically simplified-- >> Oh, you know, I'm an application developer. >> I was going to say. >> And I can tell you the last thing application developers want to do is talk to IT. Second to last thing application developers want to do is mess around with UI's. So, you know, the cloud, where there are lots of pretty demos of Google Console, which is a very, very, I think, well written user interface. What we really want is the API. We want the code or application code to tell the cloud what to do and how to do it. And so, everything behind our cloud business is API first. >> The programmable aspect is critical. >> Yup. >> And this is where we're starting to see microservices >> Absolutely. >> Become interesting phenomenon. Because now you can have pure application developers, >> Yup. >> Never talking to anyone but other developers in collaboration space. They just collaborate, and they go play in open source communities, and they're-- >> Absolutely. >> Happy as a clam. >> We've now got NFS persisting in containers, so we've done ... we worked on a project called Trident. Which is an open source project and we contribute to that. On Google, you'll be able to mount file systems directly into containers. And persist storage now, with all the cool, new (mumble) things that Google brings. So, you know, the files are a very integral part, I think, of technology and strategy. And we seem to have, according to Google, the best one. What are the go-to-market aspects of your relationship with Google? Well that's the other thing I tell you I'm incredibly pleased with is Google sells our product. Google supports our product. Google bills the customers for our product. >> That's good. >> Google has kind of chosen us, and Google wants it to be part of Google. So, the experience is completely native to the console. We encapsulate all of the permissions, access control lists, it looks and feels exactly like any native Google service. >> And what's next now, obviously great relation with Google. You're almost embedded/operationalized with them. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> What's next, what's going on, what's the agenda for you guys? >> For us it's really increased investment in two dimensions. I think the first dimension is now the roll-out. We've got a very aggressive schedule to roll this out to all the major Google data centers to support all their major regions. And that's probably a never ending task, cause Google ups its ante and increases its data centers, so that keeps us busy, making the service available. The second thing then is sort of integrating that service with more of our own services. And integrating our service into some of the other Google services like BigQuery, or Spanner, or obviously there's a huge opportunity for people to bring file based data into Google Cloud and take advantage of AI and ML. (overlapping voices) >> That's interesting, integration into Spanner, I mean you've pointed out, Anthony, that Oracle runs really well on file. You guys, decade ago or so, made that happen. We had a conversation yesterday with a customer that basically moved from Oracle to Spanner. So that level of integration is one to really watch, from a transaction/database in the cloud standpoint. >> Our mission is to make file a first class protocol. >> It was interesting, also, about this, and George Kurian was talking about this on the scene, I haven't yet interviewed him yet, I'll do that next time on theCUBE, but I've heard him speak publicly, I've seen comments, software is critical. You're a software company, >> Yeah, exactly. >> you happen to have hardware here and there. So this is actually ... >> We don't make the hardware, you know. >> You don't bend the metal. >> Right. >> Google loves software. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting, so you have a lot of range, potentially, looking out in the future. >> I tell you, you know, George asked me to come to NetApp, and he gave me a blank canvass, and told me to paint whatever picture I wanted. And so, as an application developer, I wanted to have a rich set of services to help me manage my data, and I wanted to be able to do it in the cloud. >> And you want to do it without storage. >> Yeah, I mean at the end of the day ... >> You're a developer, you just want it to be there working. >> Exactly right. You expect it to be like dial tone. When you pick up the phone, at home, you don't ask yourself, how does it work? >> Nor do you want to ask the operator to connect it for you. >> Exactly right. >> And that's what's been unique, I've been following NetApp since they took on Auspex. Early on, we realized that this is a company who, basically, has storage services, and makes calls to those storage services as required, like a software developer would. >> Exactly. >> Not things that are locked into some piece of hardware. >> No, I tell you, I think what the other thing that I'm particularly proud of is I think that all of those loyal customers who have built their careers on NetApp and ONTAP, we've now given them the next part of their journey. >> Yeah. >> We've now made all of their skills relevant for Google. >> That's another 20 year lease. >> Well, the other thing ... >> It's a beautiful thing. >> The other thing you've done is, by integrating with the cloud, you bring scale that has always been a challenge for clustered systems that the cloud resolves. It was a barrier to the adoption of the cluster concept. >> I tell you the other thing that customers say more than anything else is, you know, NetApp really provides probably the industry's best insurance. I mean, any customer that makes an onpremise decision, of which there are still many, are choosing NetApp onpremise because NetApp is in the cloud. >> That's interesting, because you see Oracle's marketing with same/same but Oracle's storage products are deficient. So (laughs) >> Well, when are we start to see storage functions and terms like storageless? We have serverless. I mean ... (laughs) >> We have some, let me tell you, we have some pretty cool tricks up our sleeve. We're not going to show our hand just yet, but the stuff we're doing with the Google guys, you know, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of work the teams have put into this. This is a amazing collaboration at the development level. It's something that I don't think Google has ever done before. And I think Google, like NetApp, we see each other as very, very strong partners at a very, very deep level. >> So you're talking about engineering resources that you're providing. Can you help us understand that? Or quantify that in any way? >> Oh yeah, so ... >> Couple of guys and a laptop, or we talking about ... >> It's a very large team, and a growing team. You know, my team at NetApp, just building software on the cloud, is six-seven hundred people strong now, all product managers and developers. I mean, we take this business very, very seriously. >> This is the future of NetApp. This is a competitive strategy for you guys. >> I think NetApp is cloud first. Just imagine, did you ever think you'd hear NetApp say we're a cloud first company? Because that's what we are. >> We don't hear your competitors saying that, I can tell you that right now. >> This is NetApp's fifth life. Like I said, I've been following this company a long time. It started with workstations, you brought file to dot-com. Then you went hard after that, dot-com blew up. You went hard into the enterprise. Bet the farm on virtualization. Now you're betting the farm on cloud. >> You know, I tell you the one thing that I've been at NetApp, as I said, for about 18 months. And the company has passion and conviction and belief. And what it does so amazingly well is it leans into the things that people think are going to kill it. >> Yeah. And there ... >> And you've met Dave, right? He's a wonderful guy. He founded the company, he's still involved in the company. He's here, he's learning cloud, and he loves it. >> We saw him last night, he's a great entrepreneur. And again, that's the kind of leadership, when the founders stay around, companies succeed. I've always said that, I wrote about it. And it statistically is proven. Lean in to anything you think will probably kill you, you'll probably come out stronger. And that's really an entrepreneurial lesson. >> I tell you, the other thing that I would say, more than anything else, and it was really the biggest part of my decision to join NetApp, is a technical CEO. >> Yeah. >> You have to have a technical CEO. No disrespect to sales guys that become CEO's, or finance guys that become CEO's, they're just not as good as the technical ones. And George is an engineer. >> Yup. And he gets it. He's very passionate and committed about the product. And that, that to me, I think-- >> More than ever now in a changing tide where technology decisions, the bets can be company killing or company making, about little things, how you deal with service meshes, >> Exactly right. >> How you deal with provisioning storage through software now, these are new things. >> You know, this stuff doesn't happen overnight, right. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Software engineering, you know, is something that takes time. >> Well Anthony we really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCUBE. We love covering NetApp, we've been following your journey again, we see you at all the events, you guys are part of theCUBE community. We really appreciate that. And more than ever, we want to follow what you guys are doing in the cloud. We think it's competitive advantage vis-a-vis the competition. And want to see how it turns out. So... >> We're having so much fun. >> Let's keep in touch. >> So much fun. Thanks guys very much. >> Storageless is a big trend coming, trust me you heard it here first on theCUBE. I don't think they use that term yet, Dave. We'll be back with more live coverage, Day Two is coming to a close. Couple more segments, stay with us, for our three days of coverage of Google Cloud Google Next 2018. Be right back. (techno music)