(intense music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with "SiliconANGLE News" and the host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, with coverage of MWC 2023. theCUBE is onsite in Barcelona, four days of wall to wall coverage. Here is a news update from MWC and in the news here is Google. Google Cloud targets cloud native network transformation for all the carriers or cloud service providers, and the communication service providers. They announced three new products to help communications service providers, also known as CSPs, build, deploy and operate hybrid cloud native networks, as well as collect and manage network data. The new products, when combined with Unified Cloud, enables the CSPs to improve customer experience, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. This is a big move, because 70% of communication service providers are expected to adopt cloud native network functions by the end of this year, making it a big, big wave. One of the key features of Google's products is the telecom network automation. This cloud service accelerates CSPs network and edge deployments through the use of Kubernetes based cloud native automation tools. It's managed by a cloud version of open source Nephio, project that Google founded in 2022. Of course, other key product announcements with Google, the Telecom Data Fabric, a tool that helps CSPs generate insights. That's the data driven piece, to target and optimize their network performance and reliability, works by simplifying the collection, normalization, correlation through an adaptive framework. This is kind of where AI shines. Finally, Google has telecom subscriber insights, a powerful AI tool that enables CSPs to extract insights from existing data sources in a privacy safe environment. Let's see if this is better than Bing search, we'll see. But CSPs are moving to the cloud across all channels. This is a really important trend, as cloud native scale, AI, data, configuration, automation all come to the edge of the network. That's an update from "SiliconANGLE News". Check out the coverage on siliconangle.com. Of course, thecube.net, four days, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are there. I'm here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (slow music) (upbeat music)

(Introductory music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress (MWC) and also SiliconANGLEs news coverage. Welcome to SiliconANGLEs news update for MWC. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE and reporter with SiliconANGLE News Today. Google showcasing new updates for Android and wearables at MWC. Kind of going after the old Apple-like functionality. Google has announced some new updates for Android and wearables at MWC and Barcelona. The new features are aimed at enhancing user productivity, connectivity and overall enjoyment across various devices for Chromebooks and all their Android devices. This is their answer to be Apple-like. New features include updates to Google Keep, audio enhancements, instant pairing of Chromebooks, headphones, new emojis, smartphones, more wallet options, and greater accessibility options. These features designed to bridge the gap between different devices that people use together often such as watches and phones or laptops or headphones. Fast Pair, another feature which allows new Bluetooth headphones to be connected to a Chromebook with just one tap. If the headphones are already set up with Android phone, the Chromebook will automatically connect to them with no additional setup. And finally, Google Keep taking notes for you that app - very cool. New features include widgets for Android screens, making it easier for users to make to-do lists from their mobile devices and Smartwatches phones. So that's the big news there. And it's really about Apple-like functionality and they have added things to their meat, which is new backgrounds and then filters that's kind of a Zoom clone. So here you got Android, Google adding stuff to their wallet. They are really stepping up their game and they want to be more mobile in at a telecom conference like this. They can see them upping their game to try to compete with Apple. And that's the update from from Google, Android and Chromebook updates. Stay tuned for more coverage. Check out SiliconANGLE.com for our special report on Mobile World Congress and Barcelona. Got theCUBE team - Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, the whole gang is there for four days of live coverage. Check that out on theCUBE.net (closing music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Greetings from the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. It's theCUBE Live Day two of our coverage of Palo Alto Networks, ignite 22. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, what can I say? This has been a great couple of days. The amount of content we have created and shared with our viewers on theCUBE is second to none. >> Well, the cloud has completely changed the way that people think about security. >> Yeah. You know at first it was like, oh, the cloud, how can that be secure? And they realized, wow actually cloud is pretty secure if we do it right. And so shared responsibility model and partnerships are critical. >> Partnerships are critical, especially as more and more organizations are multicloud by default. Right? These days we're going to be bring Google into the conversation. Josh Haslet joins us. Strategic Partnership Manager at Google. Welcome. Great to have you Josh. >> Hi Lisa, thanks for having me here. >> So you are a secret squirrel from Palo Alto Networks. Talk to me a little bit about your background and about your role at Google in terms of partnership management. >> Sure, I feel like we need to add that to my title. [Lisa] You should, secret squirrel. >> Great. Yeah, so as a matter of fact, I've been at Google for two and a half years. Prior to that, I was at Palo Alto Networks. I was managing the business development relationship with Google, and I was kind of at the inception of when the cash came in and, and decided that we needed to think about how to do security in a new way from a platform standpoint, right? And so it was exciting because when I started with the partnership, we were focusing on still securing you know, workloads in the cloud with next generation firewall. And then as we went through acquisitions the Palo Alto added it expanded the capabilities of what we could do from cloud security. And so it was very exciting, you know, to, to make sure that we could onboard with Google Cloud, take a look at how not only Palo Alto was enhancing their solutions as they built those and delivered those from Google Cloud. But then how did we help customers adopt cloud in a more easy fashion by making things, you know more tightly integrated? And so that's really been a lot of what I've been involved in, which has been exciting to see the growth of both organizations as we see customers shifting to cloud transformation. And then how do they deploy these new methodologies and tools from a security perspective to embrace this new way of working and this new way of, you know creating applications and doing digital transformation. >> Important, since work is no longer a place, it's an activity. Organizations have have to be able to cater to the distributed workforce. Of course, the, the, the workforce has to be able to access everything that they need to, but it has to be done in a secure way regardless of what kind of company you are. >> Yeah, you're right, Lisa. It's interesting. I mean, the pandemic has really changed and accelerated that transformation. I think, you know really remote working has started previous to that. And I think Nikesh called that out in the keynote too right? He, he really said that this has been ongoing for a while, but I think, you know organizations had to figure out how to scale and that was something that they weren't as prepared for. And a lot of the technology that was deployed for VPN connectivity or supporting remote work that was fixed hardware. And so cloud deployment and cloud architecture specifically with Prisma access really enabled this transformation to happen in a much faster, you know, manner. And where we've come together is how do we make sure that customers, no matter what device, what user what application you're accessing. As we take a look at ZTNA, Zero Trust Network Access 2.0, how can we come together to partner to make sure the customers have that wide range of coverage and capability? >> How, how do you how would you describe Josh Google's partner strategy generally and specifically, you know, in the world of cyber and what makes it unique and different? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. I think, you know, from Google Cloud perspective we heard TK mention this in the keynote with Nikesh. You know, we focus on on building a secure platform first and foremost, right? We want to be a trusted cloud for customers to deploy on. And so, you know, we find that as customers do one of two things, they're looking at, you know, reducing cost as they move to cloud and consolidate workloads or as they embrace innovation and look at, you know leveraging things like BigQuery for analytics and you know machine learning for the way that they want to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. They have to think about how do they secure in a new way. And so, not only do we work on how do we secure our own platform, we work with trusted partners to make sure that customers have you mentioned it earlier, Dave the shared security model, right? How do they take a look at their applications and their workloads and this new way of working as they go to CI/CD pipelines, they start thinking about DevSecOps. How do they integrate tooling that is frictionless and seamless for their, for their teams to deploy but allows them to quickly embrace that cloud transformation journey. And so, yes, partners are critical to that. The other thing is, you know we find that, you mentioned earlier, Lisa that customers are multicloud, right? That's kind of the the new normal as we look at enterprises today. And so Google Cloud's going to do a great job at securing our platform, but we need partners that can help customers deploy policy that embraces not only the things that they put in Google Cloud but as they're in their transformation journey. How that embraces the estates that are in data centers the things that are still on-prem. And really this is about making sure that the applications no matter where they are, the databases no matter where they are, and the users no matter where they are are all secure in that new framework of deploying and embracing innovation on public cloud. >> One of the things that almost everybody from Palo Alto Networks talks about is their partnering strategy their acquisition strategy integrations. And I was doing some research. There's over 50 joint integrations that Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks. Have you talked about Zero Trust Network Access 2.0 that was announced yesterday. >> Correct. >> Give us a flavor of what that is and what does it deliver that 1.0 did not? >> Well, great. And what I'd like to do is touch a little bit on those 50 integrations because it's been, you know, a a building rolling thunder, shall we say as far as how have we taken a look at customers embracing the cloud. The first thing was we took a look at at how do we make sure that Palo Alto solutions are easier for customers to deploy and to orchestrate in Google Cloud making their journey to embracing cloud seamless and easy. The second thing was how could we make that deployment and the infrastructure even more easy to adopt by doing first party integrations? So earlier this year we announced cloud IDS intrusion detection system where we actually have first party directly in our console of customers being able to simply select, they want to turn on inspection of the traffic that's running on Google Cloud and it leverages the threat detection capability from Palo Alto Networks. So we've gone from third party integration alone to first party integration. And that really takes us to, you know, the direction of what we're seeing customers need to embrace now which is, this is your Zero Trusts strategy and Zero Trust 2.0 helps customers do a number of things. The first is, you know, we don't want to just verify a user and their access into the environment once. It needs to be continuous inspection, right? Cause their state could change. I think, you know, the, the teams we're talking about some really good ways of addressing, you know for instance, TSA checkpoints, right? And how does that experience look? We need to make sure that we're constantly evaluating that user's access into the environment and then we need to make sure that the content that's being accessed or, you know, loaded into the environment is inspected. So we need continuous content inspection. And that's where our partnership really comes together very well, is not only can we take care of any app any device, any user, and especially as we take a look at you know, embracing contractor like use cases for instance where we have managed devices and unmanaged devices we bring together beyond Corp and Prisma access to take a look at how can we make sure any device, any user any application is secure throughout. And then we've got content inspection of how that ZTNA 2.0 experience looks like. >> Josh, that threat data that you just talked about. >> Yeah. >> Who has access to that? Is it available to any partner, any customer, how... it seems like there's gold in them, NAR hills, so. >> There is. But, this could be gold going both ways. So how, how do you adjudicate and, how do you make sure that first of all that that data's accessible for, for good and not in how do you protect it against, you know, wrong use? >> Well, this is one of the great things about partnering with Palo Alto because technically the the threat intelligence is coming from their ingestion of malware, known threats, and unknown threats right into their technology. Wildfire, for instance, is a tremendous example of this where unit 42 does, you know, analysis on unknown threats based upon what Nikesh said on stage. They've taken their I think he said 27 days to identification and remediation down to less than a minute, right? So they've been able to take the intelligence of what they ingest from all of their existing customers the unknown vulnerabilities that are identified quickly assessing what those look like, and then pushing out information to the rest of their customers so that they can remediate and protect against those threats. So we get this shared intelligence from the way that Palo Alto leverages that capability and we've brought that natively into Google Cloud with cloud intrusion detection. >> So, okay, so I'm, I'm I dunno why I have high frequency trading in my mind cause it used to be, you know, like the norm was, oh it's going to take a year to identify an intrusion. And, and, and now it's down to, you know take was down to 27 days. Now it's down to a minute. Now it's not. That's best practice. And I'm, again, I'm thinking high frequency trading how do I beat the speed of light? And that's kind of where we're headed, right? >> Right. >> And so that's why he said one minute's not enough. We have to keep going. >> That's right. >> So guys got your best people working on that? >> Well, as a matter of fact, so Palo Alto Networks, you know when we take a look at what Nikesh said from stage, he talked about using machine learning and AI to get ahead of what we what they look at as far as predictability not only about behaviors in the environment so things that are not necessarily known threats but things that aren't behaving properly in the environment. And you can start to detect based on that. The second piece of it then is a lot of that technology is built on Google Cloud. So we're leveraging, their leveraging the capabilities that come together with you know, aggregation of, of logs the file stitching across the entire environment from the endpoint through to cloud operations the things that they detect for network content inspection putting all those files together to understand, you know where has the threat vector entered how has it gone lateral inside the environment? And then how do you make sure that you remediate all of those points of intrusion. And so yeah it's been exciting to see how our product teams have worked together to continue to advance the capabilities for speed for customers. >> And secure speed is critical. We had the opportunity this morning to speak with Lee Claridge, the chief product officer, and you know one of the things that I had heard about Lee is that despite all of the challenges in cybersecurity and the amorphous expansion of the threat network and the sophistication of the adversaries he's really optimistic about what it's going to enable organizations to do. I see you smiling. Do you share that optimism? >> I, I do. I think, you know, when you bring, when you bring leaders together to tackle big problems, I think, you know we've got the right teams working on the right things and we understand the problems that the customers are facing. And so, you know, from a a Google cloud perspective we understand that partnering with Palo Alto Networks helps to make sure that that optimism continues. You know, we work on continuous innovation when it comes to Google Cloud security framework, but then partnering with Palo Alto brings additional capabilities to the table. >> Vision for the, for the partnership. Where do you want to see it go? What's... we're two to five years down the road, what's it look like? Maybe two to three years. Let's go. >> Well, it was interesting. I, I think neer was the one that mentioned on stage about, you know how AI is going to start replacing us in our main jobs, right? I I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think as we look forward, we see that our teams are going to continue to help with automation remediation and we're going to have the humans working on things that are more interesting and important. And so that's an exciting place to go because today the reality is that we are understaffed in cybersecurity across the industry and we just can't hire enough people to make sure that we can detect, remediate and secure, you know every user endpoint and environment out there. So it's exciting to see that we've got a capability to move in a direction to where we can make sure that we get ahead of the threat actors. >> Yeah. So he said within five years your SOC will be AI based and and basically he elaborated saying there's a lot of stuff that you're doing today that you're not going to be doing tomorrow. >> That's true. >> And that's going to continue to be a moving target I would think Google is probably ahead in that game and ahead of most, right? I mean, you guys were there early. I mean, I remember when Hadoop was all the rage like just at the beginning you guys like, yeah, you know Google's like, no, no, no, we're not doing Hadoop anymore. That's like old news. So you tended to be, I don't know, at least five maybe seven years ahead of the industry. So I imagine you using a lot of those AI techniques in your own business today. >> Absolutely. I mean, I think you see it in our consumer products, and you certainly see it in the the capabilities we make available to enterprise as far as how they can innovate on our cloud. And we want to make sure that we continue to provide those capabilities, you know not only for the tools that we build but the tools that customers use. >> What's the, as we kind of get towards the end of our conversation here, we we talk about zero trust as, as a journey, as an approach. It's not a product, it's not a tool. What is the, who's involved in the zero trust journey from the customers perspective? Is this solely with the CSO, CSO, CIOs or is this at the CEO level going, we have to be a data company but we have to be a secure data company 24/7. >> It's interesting as you've seen malware, phishing, ransomware attacks. >> Yeah. >> This is not only just a CSO CIO conversation it's a board level conversation. And so, you know the way to address this new way of working where we have very distributed environments where you can't create a perimeter anymore. You need to strategize with zero trust. And so continuously, when we're talking to customers we're hearing that as a main initiative, you know from the CIO's office and from the board level. >> Got it, last question. The upgrade path for existing customers from 1., ZTNA 1.0 to 2.0. How simple is that? >> It's easy. You know, when we take- >> Is there an easy button? >> So here's the great thing [Dave] If you're feeling lucky. [Lisa] Yeah. (group laughs) >> Well, Palo Alto, right? Billing prisma access has really taken what was traditional security that was an on-prem or a data center deployed strategy to cloud-based. And so we've worked with customers like Princeton University who had to quickly transition from in-person learning to distance learning find a way to ramp their staff their faculty and their students. And we were able to, you know Palo Alto deploy it on Google Cloud's, you know network that solution in very quick order and had those, you know, everybody back up and running. So deployment and upgrade path is, is simple when you look at cloud deployed architectures to address zero trusts network. >> That's awesome. Some of those, some of those use cases that came out of the pandemic were mind blowing but also really set the table for other organizations to go, yes, this can be done. And it doesn't have to take forever because frankly where security is concerned, we don't have time. >> That's right. And it's so much faster than traditional architectures where you had to procure hardware. >> Yeah. >> Deploy it, configure it, and then, you know push agents out to all the endpoints and and get your users provisioned. In this case, we're talking about cloud delivered, right? So I've seen, you know, with Palo Alto deploying for customers that run on Google Cloud they've deployed tens of thousands of users in a very short order. You know, we're talking It was, it's not months anymore. It's not weeks anymore. It's days >> Has to be days. Josh, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks in in addition to secret squirrel. I feel like when you were describing your background that you're like the love child of Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud, you might put that on your cartoon. >> That is a huge compliment. I really appreciate that, Lisa, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much, Josh. [Josh] It's been a pleasure being here with you. [Dave] Thank you >> Oh, likewise. For Josh Haslett and Dave, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live coverage for emerging and enterprise tech. (upbeat outro music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> This past week we saw two of the Big 3 cloud providers present the latest update on their respective cloud visions, their business progress, their announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes, including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, AKA AI, end-to-end data platforms, collaboration software. They talked a lot about the future of work automation. And they gave us a little taste, each company of the Metaverse Web 3.0 and much more. Despite these striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms and that of AWS remains significant. With Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets and Google doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today's cloud innovation, which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We'll also quantify with ETR survey data the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors: cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software. Now one thing was clear this past week, hybrid events are the thing. Google Cloud Next took place live over a 24-hour period in six cities around the world, with the main gathering in New York City. Microsoft Ignite, which normally is attended by 30,000 people, had a smaller event in Seattle, in person with a virtual audience around the world. AWS re:Invent, of course, is much different. Yes, there's a virtual component at re:Invent, but it's all about a big live audience gathering the week after Thanksgiving, in the first week of December in Las Vegas. Regardless, Satya Nadella keynote address was prerecorded. It was highly produced and substantive. It was visionary, energetic with a strong message that Azure was a platform to allow customers to build their digital businesses. Doing more with less, which was a key theme of his. Nadella covered a lot of ground, starting with infrastructure from the compute, highlighting a collaboration with Arm-based, Ampere processors. New block storage, 60 regions, 175,000 miles of fiber cables around the world. He presented a meaningful multi-cloud message with Azure Arc to support on-prem and edge workloads, as well as of course the public cloud. And talked about confidential computing at the infrastructure level, a theme we hear from all cloud vendors. He then went deeper into the end-to-end data platform that Microsoft is building from the core data stores to analytics, to governance and the myriad tooling Microsoft offers. AI was next with a big focus on automation, AI, training models. He showed demos of machines coding and fixing code and machines automatically creating designs for creative workers and how Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA tooling, would combine with Microsoft Syntex to understand documents and provide standard ways for organizations to communicate with those documents. There was of course a big focus on Azure as developer cloud platform with GitHub Copilot as a linchpin using AI to assist coders in low-code and no-code innovations that are coming down the pipe. And another giant theme was a workforce transformation and how Microsoft is using its heritage and collaboration and productivity software to move beyond what Nadella called productivity paranoia, i.e., are remote workers doing their jobs? In a world where collaboration is built into intelligent workflows, and he even showed a glimpse of the future with AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta and Cisco with Teams of all firms. And finally, security with a bevy of tools from identity, endpoint, governance, et cetera, stressing a suite of tools from a single provider, i.e., Microsoft. So a couple points here. One, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS with silicon advancements and didn't really emphasize that trend much except for the Ampere announcement. But it's building out cloud infrastructure at a massive scale, there is no debate about that. Its plan on data is to try and provide a somewhat more abstracted and simplified solutions, which differs a little bit from AWS's approach of the right database tool, for example, for the right job. Microsoft's automation play appears to provide simple individual productivity tools, kind of a ground up approach and make it really easy for users to drive these bottoms up initiatives. We heard from UiPath that forward five last month, a little bit of a different approach of horizontal automation, end-to-end across platforms. So quite a different play there. Microsoft's angle on workforce transformation is visionary and will continue to solidify in our view its dominant position with Teams and Microsoft 365, and it will drive cloud infrastructure consumption by default. On security as well as a cloud player, it has to have world-class security, and Azure does. There's not a lot of debate about that, but the knock on Microsoft is Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday because Microsoft releases so many patches, it's got so much Swiss cheese in its legacy estate and patching frequently, it becomes a roadmap and a trigger for hackers. Hey, patch Tuesday, these are all the exploits that you can go after so you can act before the patches are implemented. And so it's really become a problem for users. As well Microsoft is competing with many of the best-of-breed platforms like CrowdStrike and Okta, which have market momentum and appear to be more attractive horizontal plays for customers outside of just the Microsoft cloud. But again, it's Microsoft. They make it easy and very inexpensive to adopt. Now, despite the outstanding presentation by Satya Nadella, there are a couple of statements that should raise eyebrows. Here are two of them. First, as he said, Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries. I had a conversation with Sarbjeet Johal about this, to make sure I wasn't just missing something and we were both surprised, somewhat, by this claim. I mean most certainly AWS supports more certifications for example, and we would think it has a reasonable case to dispute that claim. And the other statement, Nadella made, Azure is the only cloud provider enabling highly regulated industries to bring their most sensitive applications to the cloud. Now, reasonable people can debate whether AWS is there yet, but very clearly Oracle and IBM would have something to say about that statement. Now maybe it's not just, would say, "Oh, they're not real clouds, you know, they're just going to hosting in the cloud if you will." But still, when it comes to mission-critical applications, you would think Oracle is really the the leader there. Oh, and Satya also mentioned the claim that the Edge browser, the Microsoft Edge browser, no questions asked, he said, is the best browser for business. And we could see some people having some questions about that. Like isn't Edge based on Chrome? Anyway, so we just had to question these statements and challenge Microsoft to defend them because to us it's a little bit of BS and makes one wonder what else in such as awesome keynote and it was awesome, it was hyperbole. Okay, moving on to Google Cloud Next. The keynote started with Sundar Pichai doing a virtual session, he was remote, stressing the importance of Google Cloud. He mentioned that Google Cloud from its Q2 earnings was on a $25-billion annual run rate. What he didn't mention is that it's also on a 3.6 billion annual operating loss run rate based on its first half performance. Just saying. And we'll dig into that issue a little bit more later in this episode. He also stressed that the investments that Google has made to support its core business and search, like its global network of 22 subsea cables to support things like, YouTube video, great performance obviously that we all rely on, those innovations there. Innovations in BigQuery to support its search business and its threat analysis that it's always had and its AI, it's always been an AI-first company, he's stressed, that they're all leveraged by the Google Cloud Platform, GCP. This is all true by the way. Google has absolutely awesome tech and the talk, as well as his talk, Pichai, but also Kurian's was forward thinking and laid out a vision of the future. But it didn't address in our view, and I talked to Sarbjeet Johal about this as well, today's challenges to the degree that Microsoft did and we expect AWS will at re:Invent this year, it was more out there, more forward thinking, what's possible in the future, somewhat less about today's problem, so I think it's resonates less with today's enterprise players. Thomas Kurian then took over from Sundar Pichai and did a really good job of highlighting customers, and I think he has to, right? He has to say, "Look, we are in this game. We have customers, 9 out of the top 10 media firms use Google Cloud. 8 out of the top 10 manufacturers. 9 out of the top 10 retailers. Same for telecom, same for healthcare. 8 out of the top 10 retail banks." He and Sundar specifically referenced a number of companies, customers, including Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, John Hopkins, Prudential, Minna Bank out of Japan, ANZ bank and many, many others during the session. So you know, they had some proof points and you got to give 'em props for that. Now like Microsoft, Google talked about infrastructure, they referenced training processors and regions and compute optionality and storage and how new workloads were emerging, particularly data-driven workloads in AI that required new infrastructure. He explicitly highlighted partnerships within Nvidia and Intel. I didn't see anything on Arm, which somewhat surprised me 'cause I believe Google's working on that or at least has come following in AWS's suit if you will, but maybe that's why they're not mentioning it or maybe I got to do more research there, but let's park that for a minute. But again, as we've extensively discussed in Breaking Analysis in our view when it comes to compute, AWS via its Annapurna acquisition is well ahead of the pack in this area. Arm is making its way into the enterprise, but all three companies are heavily investing in infrastructure, which is great news for customers and the ecosystem. We'll come back to that. Data and AI go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of data talk. Google didn't mention Snowflake or Databricks specifically, but it did mention, by the way, it mentioned Mongo a couple of times, but it did mention Google's, quote, Open Data cloud. Now maybe Google has used that term before, but Snowflake has been marketing the data cloud concept for a couple of years now. So that struck as a shot across the bow to one of its partners and obviously competitor, Snowflake. At BigQuery is a main centerpiece of Google's data strategy. Kurian talked about how they can take any data from any source in any format from any cloud provider with BigQuery Omni and aggregate and understand it. And with the support of Apache Iceberg and Delta and Hudi coming in the future and its open Data Cloud Alliance, they talked a lot about that. So without specifically mentioning Snowflake or Databricks, Kurian co-opted a lot of messaging from these two players, such as life and tech. Kurian also talked about Google Workspace and how it's now at 8 million users up from 6 million just two years ago. There's a lot of discussion on developer optionality and several details on tools supported and the open mantra of Google. And finally on security, Google brought out Kevin Mandian, he's a CUBE alum, extremely impressive individual who's CEO of Mandiant, a leading security service provider and consultancy that Google recently acquired for around 5.3 billion. They talked about moving from a shared responsibility model to a shared fate model, which is again, it's kind of a shot across AWS's bow, kind of shared responsibility model. It's unclear that Google will pay the same penalty if a customer doesn't live up to its portion of the shared responsibility, but we can probably assume that the customer is still going to bear the brunt of the pain, nonetheless. Mandiant is really interesting because it's a services play and Google has stated that it is not a services company, it's going to give partners in the channel plenty of room to play. So we'll see what it does with Mandiant. But Mandiant is a very strong enterprise capability and in the single most important area security. So interesting acquisition by Google. Now as well, unlike Microsoft, Google is not competing with security leaders like Okta and CrowdStrike. Rather, it's partnering aggressively with those firms and prominently putting them forth. All right. Let's get into the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft and Google are positioned in four key markets that we've mentioned before, IaaS, BI analytics, database data platforms and collaboration software. First, let's look at the IaaS cloud. ETR is just about to release its October survey, so I cannot share the that data yet. I can only show July data, but we're going to give you some directional hints throughout this conversation. This chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the data, i.e., how pervasive the platform is. That's on the horizontal axis. And we've inserted the Wikibon estimates of IaaS revenue for the companies, the Big 3. Actually the Big 4, we included Alibaba. So a couple of points in this somewhat busy data chart. First, Microsoft and AWS as always are dominant on both axes. The red dotted line there at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated spending velocity and all of the Big 3 are above the line. Now at the same time, GCP is well behind the two leaders on the horizontal axis and you can see that in the table insert as well in our revenue estimates. Now why is Azure bigger in the ETR survey when AWS is larger according to the Wikibon revenue estimates? And the answer is because Microsoft with products like 365 and Teams will often be considered by respondents in the survey as cloud by customers, so they fit into that ETR category. But in the insert data we're stripping out applications and SaaS from Microsoft and Google and we're only isolating on IaaS. The other point is when you take a look at the early October returns, you see downward pressure as signified by those dotted arrows on every name. The only exception was Dell, or Dell and IBM, which showing slightly improved momentum. So the survey data generally confirms what we know that AWS and Azure have a massive lead and strong momentum in the marketplace. But the real story is below the line. Unlike Google Cloud, which is on pace to lose well over 3 billion on an operating basis this year, AWS's operating profit is around $20 billion annually. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud generated more than $30 billion in operating income last fiscal year. Let that sink in for a moment. Now again, that's not to say Google doesn't have traction, it does and Kurian gave some nice proof points and customer examples in his keynote presentation, but the data underscores the lead that Microsoft and AWS have on Google in cloud. And here's a breakdown of ETR's proprietary net score methodology, that vertical axis that we showed you in the previous chart. It asks customers, are you adopting the platform new? That's that lime green. Are you spending 6% or more? That's the forest green. Is you're spending flat? That's the gray. Is you're spending down 6% or worse? That's the pinkest color. Or are you replacing the platform, defecting? That's the bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now one caveat here, which actually is really favorable from Microsoft, the Microsoft data that we're showing here is across the entire Microsoft portfolio. The other point is, this is July data, we'll have an update for you once ETR releases its October results. But we're talking about meaningful samples here, the ends. 620 for AWS over a thousand from Microsoft in more than 450 respondents in the survey for Google. So the real tell is replacements, that bright red. There is virtually no churn for AWS and Microsoft, but Google's churn is 5x, those two in the survey. Now 5% churn is not high, but you'd like to see three things for Google given it's smaller size. One is less churn, two is much, much higher adoption rates in the lime green. Three is a higher percentage of those spending more, the forest green. And four is a lower percentage of those spending less. And none of these conditions really applies here for Google. GCP is still not growing fast enough in our opinion, and doesn't have nearly the traction of the two leaders and that shows up in the survey data. All right, let's look at the next sector, BI analytics. Here we have that same XY dimension. Again, Microsoft dominating the picture. AWS very strong also in both axes. Tableau, very popular and respectable of course acquired by Salesforce on the vertical axis, still looking pretty good there. And again on the horizontal axis, big presence there for Tableau. And Google with Looker and its other platforms is also respectable, but it again, has some work to do. Now notice Streamlit, that's a recent Snowflake acquisition. It's strong in the vertical axis and because of Snowflake's go-to-market (indistinct), it's likely going to move to the right overtime. Grafana is also prominent in the Y axis, but a glimpse at the most recent survey data shows them slightly declining while Looker actually improves a bit. As does Cloudera, which we'll move up slightly. Again, Microsoft just blows you away, doesn't it? All right, now let's get into database and data platform. Same X Y dimensions, but now database and data warehouse. Snowflake as usual takes the top spot on the vertical axis and it is actually keeps moving to the right as well with again, Microsoft and AWS is dominant in the market, as is Oracle on the X axis, albeit it's got less spending velocity, but of course it's the database king. Google is well behind on the X axis but solidly above the 40% line on the vertical axis. Note that virtually all platforms will see pressure in the next survey due to the macro environment. Microsoft might even dip below the 40% line for the first time in a while. Lastly, let's look at the collaboration and productivity software market. This is such an important area for both Microsoft and Google. And just look at Microsoft with 365 and Teams up into the right. I mean just so impressive in ubiquitous. And we've highlighted Google. It's in the pack. It certainly is a nice base with 174 N, which I can tell you that N will rise in the next survey, which is an indication that more people are adopting. But given the investment and the tech behind it and all the AI and Google's resources, you'd really like to see Google in this space above the 40% line, given the importance of this market, of this collaboration area to Google's success and the degree to which they emphasize it in their pitch. And look, this brings up something that we've talked about before on Breaking Analysis. Google doesn't have a tech problem. This is a go-to-market and marketing challenge that Google faces and it's up against two go-to-market champs and Microsoft and AWS. And Google doesn't have the enterprise sales culture. It's trying, it's making progress, but it's like that racehorse that has all the potential in the world, but it's just missing some kind of key ingredient to put it over at the top. It's always coming in third, (chuckles) but we're watching and Google's obviously, making some investments as we shared with earlier. All right. Some final thoughts on what we learned this week and in this research: customers and partners should be thrilled that both Microsoft and Google along with AWS are spending so much money on innovation and building out global platforms. This is a gift to the industry and we should be thankful frankly because it's good for business, it's good for competitiveness and future innovation as a platform that can be built upon. Now we didn't talk much about multi-cloud, we haven't even mentioned supercloud, but both Microsoft and Google have a story that resonates with customers in cross cloud capabilities, unlike AWS at this time. But we never say never when it comes to AWS. They sometimes and oftentimes surprise you. One of the other things that Sarbjeet Johal and John Furrier and I have discussed is that each of the Big 3 is positioning to their respective strengths. AWS is the best IaaS. Microsoft is building out the kind of, quote, we-make-it-easy-for-you cloud, and Google is trying to be the open data cloud with its open-source chops and excellent tech. And that puts added pressure on Snowflake, doesn't it? You know, Thomas Kurian made some comments according to CRN, something to the effect that, we are the only company that can do the data cloud thing across clouds, which again, if I'm being honest is not really accurate. Now I haven't clarified these statements with Google and often things get misquoted, but there's little question that, as AWS has done in the past with Redshift, Google is taking a page out of Snowflake, Databricks as well. A big difference in the Big 3 is that AWS doesn't have this big emphasis on the up-the-stack collaboration software that both Microsoft and Google have, and that for Microsoft and Google will drive captive IaaS consumption. AWS obviously does some of that in database, a lot of that in database, but ISVs that compete with Microsoft and Google should have a greater affinity, one would think, to AWS for competitive reasons. and the same thing could be said in security, we would think because, as I mentioned before, Microsoft competes very directly with CrowdStrike and Okta and others. One of the big thing that Sarbjeet mentioned that I want to call out here, I'd love to have your opinion. AWS specifically, but also Microsoft with Azure have successfully created what Sarbjeet calls brand distance. AWS from the Amazon Retail, and even though AWS all the time talks about Amazon X and Amazon Y is in their product portfolio, but you don't really consider it part of the retail organization 'cause it's not. Azure, same thing, has created its own identity. And it seems that Google still struggles to do that. It's still very highly linked to the sort of core of Google. Now, maybe that's by design, but for enterprise customers, there's still some potential confusion with Google, what's its intentions? How long will they continue to lose money and invest? Are they going to pull the plug like they do on so many other tools? So you know, maybe some rethinking of the marketing there and the positioning. Now we didn't talk much about ecosystem, but it's vital for any cloud player, and Google again has some work to do relative to the leaders. Which brings us to supercloud. The ecosystem and end customers are now in a position this decade to digitally transform. And we're talking here about building out their own clouds, not by putting in and building data centers and installing racks of servers and storage devices, no. Rather to build value on top of the hyperscaler gift that has been presented. And that is a mega trend that we're watching closely in theCUBE community. While there's debate about the supercloud name and so forth, there little question in our minds that the next decade of cloud will not be like the last. All right, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Sarbjeet Johal, and my business partner, John Furrier, for their input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does some wonderful editing. And check out SiliconANGLE, a lot of coverage on Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always get in touch with me via email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai, the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. Pretty good attendance here. I'd say over 3000 people, great buzz, a lot of really technical sessions. There's an executive session going on. There's a financial analyst session. So a lot of diversity in this attendee base. Vadim Supitskiy is here. He's the CTO of Forbes and Abdul Razack is the vice president of Solution Engineering at Google. Gents, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> Happy to be here. >> So, Forbes, very interesting business. I'm interested in what occurred during the pandemic for you guys. Right? Everybody went digital. Obviously you guys have a tremendous brand. We all, in the business world reaped from it, but what happened during the isolation era? What happened to your business? >> Yeah, so we've been innovating and going through digital transformation for years, since we launched our website probably 25 years ago. >> But during the pandemic, because of our coverage, our foresight to create a breaking news team, our audiences and readership really skyrocketed. >> Really? >> Yeah, and at that point, we were very happy and really lucky to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. So when the audiences went up, we didn't feel any impact, right? Our environments auto-scaled and our users didn't experience any issues at all. So we were able to focus on innovation, our users loyalty and really building cool products. So we were very lucky and happy to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. >> So Abdul, the solution and the title you provided, obviously worked. How did you guys end up getting together? What was that like? >> Yeah, I mean, like Vadim said, maybe there's a little bit of the right place at the right time in this case, but you can see the need for digital transformation and the pandemic really accelerated that. And like Vadim said, primarily Forbes wanted to focus on innovation and customer loyalty and the way that comes to bear, is that you have a technology platform that can serve those needs. Right? Whether it is through unique applications that can be delivered, the ability for developers to build those applications quickly and seamlessly and then remove the intangibles of scalability, performance, latency, and things of that nature. So, you can see this all coming together in this scenario. >> So as consumers, we see the website, we read online, maybe sometimes in the laptop, mostly on mobile. What is it that we don't see? I mean, the apps that Abdul talked about, community. What else is there? Paint a picture of that for us. >> Yeah. There is a lot going on behind the scene. Right? So focusing on audience, building communities, but also what it allowed us to do while everything was working well, we were scaling up. Right? We were able to focus on a lot of innovation. And one of those was first-party data platform that we built. We call it Forbes One. And that's in the center of everything that we do at Forbes right now. Right? So it allows us, one, to connect our partners, advertising partners with the audiences that they're looking to engage and to connect with. And then we are growing our consumer business as well and what that allows us to do is target the right products at the right time, to the right people, on the web website and our domain. So, that's just one of the examples that we've built our full first-party data platform on these technologies and we now know our customers so well that we are able to provide them with what they want. >> So the first-party data platform is what? A self-serve for advertiser, so they can identify? >> Not just advertisers. So it's in the center of everything. So advertiser comes in, we provide the segments and users that they want to reach. Now, we are creating products as well, building cool, innovative products and offering our journalism and everything there to our readers and we are able to connect them to the right audiences at the right time, as well as personalization. Right? You come onto the website, you want to read what you want to read. So we able to create that as well, using machine learning and AI. >> So a product, it might be a data product or it might be a content product? >> It could be a data product. It could be like just personalization or something like that. It could be newsletter. Right? It could be a stand-alone product, like investing product. So, there is a lot going on there, but we want to offer the right ones at the right time, to the right audiences and building that platform has allowed us to do that. >> Okay. Now Google's got great tech. What's the tech behind all this? >> Yeah. So when Vadim talked about segmenting to personalize something that is relevant to you and providing recommendations to you. Right? And all that is based on machine learning, AI technology. The fact that Vadim has all the data curated in a in a first-party data platform gives the ability to create a seamless profile. Right? You could be interested in a couple of products. Right? And then the underlying technology can tailor that to bring what is it that you're looking for at the right place at the right time. Right? So those are recommendations, things of that nature that's all powered by AI and machine learning technology. >> So it's running on Mongo, and then you're bringing in Google AI and machine intelligence tools? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah. It's basically a combination of both, using both platform to the deploy it and we embrace Cloud. Right? So we using all the Cloud native technologies. Right? We didn't want to just lift and shift. We wanted to make sure we do it right. And we focused on automation, even if we had to take a step back, we knew that automating things was a key for us. So yes, it's been really successful, but also really informative for us to use the right tools for the job. >> And you had prior experience with Mongo, or? >> We did. >> What's your journey been like there? >> Yeah, we actually were one of the first clients of Mongo. I think we were number 11 at that time. >> 10gen. >> Yes. It was. >> We remember. >> Many years ago it was MongoDB one, right? >> Yeah. >> And at that time we we introduced contributor network for us and our audiences were scaling as well. And we used Out-of-the-Box WordPress as our publishing platform, which couldn't scale. So we had to rethink and figure out, "Alright, so what do we do?" We compared couple of no SQL databases and Mongo was a winner because they checked all the boxes and developers loved it right away. Right? They're like, "All right, this is so much faster to develop on. It's just a great tool for the job going from SQL to, to no SQL". And we scaled and we never looked back. And then obviously Atlas came, so there are kind of two inflection points here. One switch into no SQL and two going away from managing databases. Like we don't want to be in that business. Right? Updates, patches, all of that, that we had to do manually, over-provision in our environments and kind of wasteful. So being on Atlas, that was a second kind of inflection point for us, which opened it up for us to do even more innovation and move faster. >> Okay. And you're happy about this partnership, despite, I mean, you partner with Mongo obviously, Google has its own databases, that's just the nature of the world we live in, isn't it? >> No and fundamentally like that, we always believe that customer choice is the primary notion. Right? I mean, and Google Cloud platform is more of a platform and the ecosystem is critical to that. Right? It's imperative. So, like Vadim said, the combination of Google and Mongo provides a truly Cloud native platform that can serve the needs for years to come, rather than from looking at it from a legacy perspective. And that's the way we look at it. Right? I mean, there is choices all the time and sometimes it's competition. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you're still selling a lot of compute and storage and machine intelligence, so machine learning. This morning in the keynotes, we heard a lot about a lot of different capabilities. We've certainly watched Mongo evolve its platform over the last half a decade or more really. But you've mentioned the developers loved it. Right? As Mongo evolves its platform, is there trade off from a developer simplicity standpoint? Are they able to preserve that from your perspective? >> I think with Atlas, it actually makes it easier now. So when they need to create an environment, they can do it on the fly. When they need to test something, also things available to them right away. So it actually, in general, as the platform becomes more mature and more stable, which is very important, but at the same time, the flexibility remains for development and for creation of environments and things like that. So we've been pretty happy with how it transitioned, to being a more mature platform. >> Did the move to Google Cloud and Atlas change the way that you're able to deliver high availability versus what you were doing when you were self-managing? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in a data center, so kind of one location and moving to MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud, now we're multi region. Right? So we have a full DR strategy and we feel a lot more secure and we feel very confident that anything that happens, we can scale, we can fail over. So absolutely, this helps us a lot. And the feature that was introduced probably a few years ago to auto scale MongoDB environments as well, that has been really key for us, so we can sleep well. >> Meaning you can scale while you sleep. >> Right, exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. Plus the other part is you don't size for peak. right? You size as you grow, and then you, you have that elasticity built in. Right? That it is the nature. And then Mongo is available on multiple Google Cloud regions. So as you expand, you don't worry about all the plumbing that you need to do and things of that nature. >> They asked us serverless this morning. >> Yeah. >> How does that affect what you guys are doing together and what are your thoughts from Google's perspective and then of course, from Forbes? >> And that's the trend that we see constantly. Right? Serverless really decouples the tie to the VMs. Right? And so it makes it much more easier to provide the elasticity and have function calls across. Right? Function as a service and things of that nature. Right? So we see a lot of promise in that. Right? We do that even within our own products and we see that giving the ability to decompose and recompose applications and would love to hear how you're leveraging that. Right? >> Yeah. We fully embrace serverless. So we use all the tools you provide, I think. If you look at our architectural diagrams, it's like all these pops-up, cloud functions, composer, app engine. So we use the full suite and we love it. >> Yeah, Yeah. Okay. And then you talked this morning about the eliminating, the trade-offs with serverless of having to either when you dial it down You have to restart, but you've solved that problem, or I guess Mongo's helped you solve that problem. Can you explain that a little bit from a technical standpoint? >> Yeah. From a technical standpoint, if you look at, like as a developer, right? If you're building an intelligent app, it has multiple components within it. Right? There is pops-up for messaging, there is cloud functions and things of that nature. So you don't worry about, when it's encompassed in a serverless architecture, you don't worry about a lot of the complexities that go on behind it and so that makes the abstraction much more easier. And it eliminates the friction that a developer goes through. I think they've talked about removing friction and that's the primary source of productivity loss, which is the friction. We used to come from a world where developers were more worried. 80% of the time they would spend on plumbing this thing and then only 20% writing code. Right? And then now this whole paradigm should flip that. Right? That's where we see the promise of it. >> Do you still do stuff on Prem or are you pretty much all in the Cloud? >> Fully in the Cloud. >> How long did that take? What was that like? >> It actually was really fast. We had a real aggressive timeline. It took us six months. >> Really? >> Yeah. Yeah. And it was aggressive, but I was happy that we did it in a short period of time. >> And what was the business impact that you saw moving to the Google Cloud? >> Yeah, so obviously after we moved to the Cloud, we wanted to measure, especially the first year, how it affected us and what were the positives out of it. And yeah, we've seen tremendous results. 58% increase in speed to market. We were releasing four times more often than when we were on Prem. We saw 73% increase in initiatives delivered and while our velocity was scaling up, we also saw 30% decreased in hot fixes and rollbacks. So it became more stable while we scaled up the velocity and obviously very happy with those results. >> Wow. Do you golf? >> I don't actually. >> Do you golf? >> No. I watch golf. >> I used to watch. Okay. Do you know what a mulligan is? >> Yeah. >> Okay. mulligan is like a do-over right. If you had a mulligan, would you do anything differently? >> You know, we learned a lot and one of the keys for me was definitely automate everything, make sure that you automate as much as possible, even if it slows you down because in the future that will help you so much and use the platform and the tools that available to you. So, serverless. Right? Use Cloud the way it's supposed to be, as much as possible and I think that's the advice I would give. >> Are there any cautions with regard to automation, either of you that you see? I mean because sometimes automation brings unintended consequences and "Oops" happens really fast. >> Yeah. It's a little bit of a process. Right? If you take a step back, right, and typically what people tend to do is, there is a standardization process and once it's standardized, the next step is you gain efficiencies by automation. Right? In this whole thing, what is underestimated is change management. And we see a lot of room for improvement around educating on change management, getting ahead of that so that you can see what is coming. So that the organization moves across that. I don't know if you saw that in your case, but we see this predominantly in other other cases. >> Yeah. I mean, for us, we wanted to make sure that all the testing was in place and things like that. So not just automation of deploying or anything like that, but make sure that there is something there to catch if something goes wrong and roll back and things like that. So you want to make sure that you protected in many areas. >> So square this circle for me, because especially with COVID, so many unknowns and one of the benefits of document database is you're not tied into a schema. You got a flexible schema. Okay. So you're changing, you can change things much more easily. So when you talk about standardization, you're talking about standardizing, what at the infrastructure layer, or where does that standardization occur? Where should it occur. >> I mean, you could have it at the business process level. >> Okay. >> You could have it at the infrastructure level. You could also have it on the administration aspect of it. So there are three areas where you could apply automation to. >> So is there an analog to flexible schema at the business process level? Is that kind of how to think about it, whereas I'm not locked into a business process schema? I have to build flexibility into that as I change my? >> No, I mean, you can apply it any which way. I mean, I don't think the schema matters so much. Right? Like, for example, if you take the Forbes US case. Right? There is content curation, for example. Right? >> Yeah, okay. >> You could take content curation. Content curation in the previous world, like in the WordPress world, was not very flexible. Right? Like that it wouldn't scale. And now you are in a world where you have a very flexible schema, but the process of curating the content can be standardized. Right? And then the next step of that is to automate that. Right? And so you could apply it in any manner if you will. >> So have you built a custom CMS? Is that what you've done there? >> Yeah. We built our own custom CMS. It's AI powered. We want to make our journalist lives easier. So we're constantly trying to figure out what can we give them to make their day-to-day job much easier. >> So the machines can curate and find the best content. >> We do recommend things. Yes, absolutely. We curate, we tell them what would be the best headline, for example, what would >> Prior to them publishing? >> Yeah. Yeah. What would be the better keywords to include and things like that, what images. Just recommendations. >> And you can automate the insertion of those WordPress to go every time they do, even though they're writing about the same topic. >> It's a recommendation process obviously, but >> There is a human intelligence to that at the end. Right? I mean, but you can create a much more informed view by curating and recommending content rather than a myopic view. >> And you're eliminating that mundane keystroke task. Wow. Amazing story guys. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Absolutely. >> All right. Keep it right there. We're live from MongoDB World 2022 in New York city. Be right back. (upbeat music)

(soft intro music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Brian Schwarz is here. We're going to stay on cloud. He's the director of product management at Google Cloud. The world's biggest cloud, I contend. Brian, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. >> Long time infrastructure as a service background, worked at Pure, worked at Cisco, Silicon Valley guy, techie. So we're going to get into it here. >> I love it. >> I was saying before, off camera. We used to go to Google Cloud Next every year. It was an awesome show. Guys built a big set for us. You joined, right as the pandemic hit. So we've been out of touch a little bit. It's hard to... You know, you got one eye on the virtual event, but give us the update on Google Cloud. What's happening generally and specifically within storage? >> Yeah. So obviously the Cloud got a big boost during the pandemic because a lot of work went online. You know, more things kind of being digitally transformed as people keep trying to innovate. So obviously the growth of Google Cloud, has got a big tailwind to it. So business has been really good, lots of R&D investment. We obviously have an incredible set of technology already but still huge investments in new technologies that we've been bringing out over the past couple of years. It's great to get back out to events to talk to people about 'em. Been a little hard the last couple of years to give people some of the insights. When I think about storage, huge investments, one of the things that some people know but I think it's probably underappreciated is we use the same infrastructure for Google Cloud that is used for Google consumer products. So Search and Photos and all the public kind of things that most people are familiar with, Maps, et cetera. Same infrastructure at the same time is also used for Google Cloud. So we just have this tremendous capability of infrastructure. Google's got nine products that have a billion users most of which many people know. So we're pretty good at storage pretty good at compute, pretty good at networking. Obviously a lot of that kind of shines through on Google Cloud for enterprises to bring their applications, lift and shift and/or modernize, build new stuff in the Cloud with containers and things like that. >> Yeah, hence my contention that Google has the biggest cloud in the world, like I said before. Doesn't have the most IS revenue 'cause that's a different business. You can't comment, but I've got Google Cloud running at $12 billion a year run rate. So a lot of times people go, "Oh yeah, Google they're third place going for the bronze." But that is a huge business. There aren't a lot of 10, $12 billion infrastructure companies. >> In a rapidly growing market. >> And if you do some back of napkin math, whatever, give me 10, 15, let's call it 15% of that, to storage. You've got a big storage business. I know you can't tell us how big, but it's big. And if you add in all the stuff that's not in GCP, you do a lot of storage. So you know storage, you understand the technology. So what is the state of technology? You have a background in Cisco, nearly a networking company, they used to do some storage stuff sort of on the side. We used to say they're going to buy NetApp, of course that never happened. That would've made no sense. Pure Storage, obviously knows storage, but they were a disk array company essentially. Cloud storage, what's different about it? What's different in the technology? How does Google think about it? >> You know, I always like to tell people there's some things that are the same and familiar to you, and there's some things that are different. If I start with some of the differences, object storage in the Cloud, like just fundamentally different. Object storage on-prem, it's been around for a while, often used as kind of like a third tier of storage, maybe a backup target, compliance, something like that. In the cloud, object storage is Tier one storage. Public reference for us, Spotify, okay, use object storage for all the songs out there. And increasingly we see a lot of growth in-- >> Well, how are you defining Tier one storage in that regard? Again, are you thinking streaming service? Okay. Fine. Transactional? >> Spotify goes down and I'm pissed. >> Yeah. This is true. (Dave laughing) >> Not just you, maybe a few million other people too. One is importance, business importance. Tier one applications like critical to the business, like business down type stuff. But even if you look at it for performance, for capabilities, object storage in the cloud, it's a different thing than it was. >> Because of the architecture that you're deploying? >> Yeah. And the applications that we see running on it. Obviously, a huge growth in our business in AI and analytics. Obviously, Google's pretty well known in both spaces, BigQuery, obviously on the analytics side, big massive data warehouses and obviously-- >> Gets very high marks from customers. >> Yeah, very well regarded, super successful, super popular with our customers in Google Cloud. And then obviously AI as well. A lot of AI is about getting structure from unstructured data. Autonomous vehicles getting pictures and videos around the world. Speech recognition, audio is a fundamentally analog signal. You're trying to train computers to basically deal with analog things and it's all stored in object storage, machine learning on top of it, creating all the insights, and frankly things that computers can deal with. Getting structure out of the unstructured data. So you just see performance capabilities, importance as it's really a Tier one storage, much like file and block is where have kind of always been. >> Depending on, right, the importance. Because I mean, it's a fair question, right? Because we're used to thinking, "Oh, you're running your Oracle transaction database on block storage." That's Tier one. But Spotify's pretty important business. And again, on BigQuery, it is a cloud-native born in the cloud database, a lot of the cloud databases aren't, right? And that's one of the reasons why BigQuery is-- >> Google's really had a lot of success taking technologies that were built for some of the consumer services that we build and turning them into cloud-native Google Cloud. Like HDFS, who we were talking about, open source technologies came originally from the Google file system. Now we have a new version of it that we run internally called Colossus, incredible technologies that are cloud scale technologies that you can use to build things like Google Cloud storage. >> I remember one of the early Hadoop worlds, I was talking to a Google engineer and saying, "Well, wow, that's so cool that Hadoop came. You guys were the main spring of that." He goes, "Oh, we're way past Hadoop now." So this is early days of Hadoop (laughs) >> It's funny whenever Google says consumer services, usually consumer indicates just for me. But no, a consumer service for Google is at a scale that almost no business needs at a point in time. So you're not taking something and scaling it up-- >> Yeah. They're Tier one services-- for sure. >> Exactly. You're more often pairing it down so that a fortune 10 company can (laughs) leverage it. >> So let's dig into data protection in the Cloud, disaster recovery in the Cloud, Ransomware protection and then let's get into why Google. Maybe you could give us the trends that you're seeing, how you guys approach it, and why Google. >> Yeah. One of the things I always tell people, there's certain best practices and principles from on-prem that are just still applicable in the Cloud. And one of 'em is just fundamentals around recovery point objective and recovery time objective. You should know, for your apps, what you need, you should tier your apps, get best practice around them and think about those in the Cloud as well. The concept of RPO and RTO don't just magically go away just 'cause you're running in the Cloud. You should think about these things. And it's one of the reasons we're here at the VeeamON event. It's important, obviously, they have a tremendous skill in technology, but helping customers implement the right RPO and RTO for their different applications. And they also help do that in Google Cloud. So we have a great partnership with them, two main offerings that they offer in Google. One is integration for their on-prem things to use, basically Google as a backup target or DR target and then cloud-native backups they have some technologies, Veeam backup for Google. And obviously they also bought Kasten a while ago. 'Cause they also got excited about the container trend and obviously great technologies for those customers to use those in Google Cloud as well. >> So RPO and RTO is kind of IT terms, right? But we think of them as sort of the business requirement. Here's the business language. How much data are you willing to lose? And the business person says, "What? I don't want to lose any data." Oh, how big's your budget, right? Oh, okay. That's RPO. RTO is how fast you want to get it back? "How fast do you want to get it back if there's an outage?" "Instantly." "How much money do you want to spend on that?" "Oh." Okay. And then your application value will determine that. Okay. So that's what RPO and RTO is for those who you may not know that. Sometimes we get into the acronym too much. Okay. Why Google Cloud? >> Yeah. When I think about some of the infrastructure Google has and like why does it matter to a customer of Google Cloud? The first couple things I usually talk about is networking and storage. Compute's awesome, we can talk about containers and Kubernetes in a little bit, but if you just think about core infrastructure, networking, Google's got one of the biggest networks in the world, obviously to service all these consumer applications. Two things that I often tell people about the Google network, one, just tremendous backbone bandwidth across the regions. One of the things to think about with data protection, it's a large data set. When you're going to do recoveries, you're pushing lots of terabytes often and big pipes matter. Like it helps you hit the right recovery time objective 'cause you, "I want to do a restore across the country." You need good networks. And obviously Google has a tremendous network. I think we have like 20 subsea cables that we've built underneath the the world's oceans to connect the world on the internet. >> Awesome. >> The other thing that I think is really underappreciated about the Google network is how quickly you get into it. One of the reasons all the consumer apps have such good response time is there's a local access point to get into the Google network somewhere close to you almost anywhere in the world. I'm sure you can find some obscure place where we don't have an access point, but look Search and Photos and Maps and Workspace, they all work so well because you get in the Google network fast, local access points and then we can control the quality of service. And that underlying substrate is the same substrate we have in Google Cloud. So the network is number one. Second one in storage, we have some really incredible capabilities in cloud storage, particularly around our dual region and multi-region buckets. The multi-region bucket, the way I describe it to people, it's a continent sized bucket. Single bucket name, strongly consistent that basically spans a continent. It's in some senses a little bit of the Nirvana of storage. No more DR failover, right? In a lot of places, traditionally on-prem but even other clouds, two buckets, failover, right? Orchestration, set up. Whenever you do orchestration, the DR is a lot more complicated. You got to do more fire drills, make sure it works. We have this capability to have a single name space that spans regions and it has strong read after write consistency, everything you drop into it you can read back immediately. >> Say I'm on the west coast and I have a little bit of an on-premises data center still and I'm using Veeam to back something up and I'm using storage within GCP. Trace out exactly what you mean by that in terms of a continent sized bucket. Updates going to the recovery volume, for lack of a better term, in GCP. Where is that physically? If I'm on the west coast, what does that look like? >> Two main options. It depends again on what your business goals are. First option is you pick a regional bucket, multiple zones in a Google Cloud region are going to store your data. It's resilient 'cause there's three zones in the region but it's all in one region. And then your second option is this multi-region bucket, where we're basically taking a set of the Google Cloud regions from around North America and storing your data basically in the continent, multiple copies of your data. And that's great because if you want to protect yourself from a regional outage, right? Earthquake, natural disaster of some sort, this multi-region, it basically gives you this DR protection for free and it's... Well, it's not free 'cause you have to pay for it of course, but it's a free from a failover perspective. Single name space, your app doesn't need to know. You restart the app on the east coast, same bucket name. >> Right. That's good. >> Read and write instantly out of the bucket. >> Cool. What are you doing with Veeam? >> So we have this great partnership, obviously for data protection and DR. And I really often segment the conversation into two pieces. One is for traditional on-prem customers who essentially want to use the Cloud as either a backup or a DR target. Traditional Veeam backup and replication supports Google Cloud targets. You can write to cloud storage. Some of these advantages I mentioned. Our archive storage, really cheap. We just actually lowered the price for archive storage quite significantly, roughly a third of what you find in some of the other competitive clouds if you look at the capabilities. Our archive class storage, fast recovery time, right? Fast latency, no hours to kind of rehydrate. >> Good. Storage in the cloud is overpriced. >> Yeah. >> It is. It is historically overpriced despite all the rhetoric. Good. I didn't know that. I'm glad to hear. >> Yeah. So the archive class store, so you essentially read and write into this bucket and restore. So it's often one of the things I joke with people about. I live in Silicon Valley, I still see the tape truck driving around. I really think people can really modernize these environments and use the cloud as a backup target. You get a copy of your data off-prem. >> Don't you guys use tape? >> Well, we don't talk a lot about-- >> No comment. Just checking. >> And just to be clear, when he says cloud storage is overpriced, he thinks that a postage stamp is overpriced, right? >> No. >> If I give you 50 cents, are you going to deliver a letter cross country? No. Cloud storage, it's not overpriced. >> Okay. (David laughing) We're going to have that conversation. I think it's historically overpriced. I think it could be more attractive, relative to the cost of the underlying technology. So good for you guys pushing prices. >> Yeah. So this archive class storage, is one great area. The second area we really work with Veeam is protecting cloud-native workloads. So increasingly customers are running workloads in the Cloud, they run VMware in the Cloud, they run normal VMs, they run containers. Veeam has two offerings in Google that essentially help customers protect that data, hit their RPO, RTO objectives. Another thing that is not different in the Cloud is the need to meet your compliance regulations, right? So having a product like Veeam that is easy to show back to your auditor, to your regulator to make sure that you have copies of your data, that you can hit an appropriate recovery time objective if you're in finance or healthcare, energy. So there's some really good Veeam technologies that work in Google Cloud to protect applications that actually run in Google Cloud all in. >> To your point about the tape truck I was kind of tongue in cheek, but I know you guys use tape. But the point is you shouldn't have to call the tape truck, right, you should go to Google and say, "Okay. I need my data back." Now having said that sometimes the highest bandwidth in the world is putting all this stuff on the truck. Is there an option for that? >> Again, it gets back to this networking capability that I mentioned. Yes. People do like to joke about, okay, trucks and trains and things can have a lot of bandwidth, big networks can push a lot of data around, obviously. >> And you got a big network. >> We got a huge network. So if you want to push... I've seen statistics. You can do terabits a second to a single Google Cloud storage bucket, super computing type performance inside Google Cloud, which from a scale perspective, whether it be network compute, these are things scale. If there's one thing that Google's really, really good at, it's really high scale. >> If your's companies can't afford to. >> Yeah, if you're that sensitive, avoid moving the data altogether. If you're that sensitive, have your recovery capability be in GCP. >> Yeah. Well, and again-- >> So that when you're recovering you're not having to move data. >> It's approximate to, yeah. That's the point. >> Recovering GCV, fail over your VMware cluster. >> Exactly. >> And use the cloud as a DR target. >> We got very little time but can you just give us a rundown of your portfolio in storage? >> Yeah. So storage, cloud storage for object storage got a bunch of regional options and classes of storage, like I mentioned, archive storage. Our first party offerings in the file area, our file store, basic enterprise and high scale, which is really for highly concurrent paralyzed applications. Persistent disk is our block storage offering. We also have a very high performance cash block storage offering and local SSDs. So that's the main kind of food groups of storage, block file object, increasingly doing a lot of work in data protection and in transfer and distributed cloud environments where the edge of the cloud is pushing outside the cloud regions themselves. But those are our products. Also, we spend a lot of time with our partners 'cause Google's really good at building and open sourcing and partnering at the same time hence with Veeam, obviously with file. We partner with NetApp and Dell and a bunch of folks. So there's a lot of partnerships we have that are important to us as well. >> Yeah. You know, we didn't get into Kubernetes, a great example of open source, Istio, Anthos, we didn't talk about the on-prem stuff. So Brian we'll have to have you back and chat about those things. >> I look forward to it. >> To quote my friend Matt baker, it's not a zero sum game out there and it's great to see Google pushing the technology. Thanks so much for coming on. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Our next guest will be up shortly. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at VeeamON 2022 and we'll be right back. (soft beats music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. We have a very interesting subject to discuss. I have two special guests from Google to join me in a conversation about the financial services space. I'm joined by Yolande Piazza, vice president of financial services sales for Google Cloud and Zac Mauf, managing director for global financial services solutions for Google Cloud. Yolande and Zac, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having us. Looking forward to it. >> Well it's great to have you here. You know, financial services is really an interesting area when you talk about cloud because I'm sure you both remember a time, not that long ago, when we could ask a financial services organization, what their plans for cloud or what their cloud strategy was, and they would give a one word answer and that answer was, never. (laughing) So Zac, let's start out with you, what has changed? Are you and Yolande going to tell us that in fact, financial services organizations are leveraging cloud now? >> Yeah, it's a very exciting time to be in the cloud space, in financial services, because you're exactly right David. People are starting to make the transition to cloud in a real way. And a lot has gone into that, as you know, it's a highly regulated space and so there were a lot of legitimate reasons around getting kind of the regulatory frameworks in place and making sure that the risk and compliance pieces were addressed. But then there was also, as you know, technology is a major backbone for financial services. And so there's also this question of, how do we transition? And a lot of work and time has gone into moving workloads, thinking about like, what is the sort of the right migration strategy for you to get from the current situation to a more cloud native world. And to your point, we're really early, we're really early, but we're very excited and we've been investing heavily on our side to get those foundational pieces in place. But we also realized that we have to think about what are the business cases, that we want to build on top of cloud. It's not just a kind of IT modernization, which is a big part of the story, but the other part of the story is once you get all of this, technology onto the cloud platform, there are things that you can do that you couldn't do in on-prem situations. And a lot of that for us is around the data, AI and ML space. And we really see that being the way to really unlock huge amounts of value. Both of them require massive amounts of compute and breaking down all of these silos that have really developed over time within financial institutions. And really moving to the cloud is the way to unlock a lot of that. So we're really excited about a lot of those use cases that are starting to come to life now. >> Yeah. So I want to dig a little deeper on some of that Zac, but before we do, Yolande make this real for us. Give me some examples of actual real-life financial services organizations and what they're doing with Google Cloud now. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're really proud to be able to announce, a number of new partnerships across the industry. You think about Wells Fargo, you think about Scotia Bank, you think about what we're doing with HSBC. They really are starting to bring to life and recognized that it's not just internally, you have to look at that transformation to cloud, it's really, how do you use this platform to help you go on the journey with your customers? I think a move to a multi-cloud common approach for our customers and our clients, is exactly what we need to be focused on. And the other- >> Hold on, hold on, Yolande. I'm sorry. Did the Google person just say multi-cloud? Because multi- cloud doesn't sound like, only Google Cloud to me. Can you- >> No, and I think Wells, absolutely, and I think Wells announced it's taking a multi-cloud approach to its digital infrastructure strategy, leveraging both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And the reason being is they've openly communicated that a locked in and preparatory systems, isn't the way to go for them. They want that open flexibility. They want the ability to be able to move workloads across the different industries. And I think it's well known that this aligns completely with our principles and at Google we've always said that we support open multi and hybrid cloud strategies because we believe our customers should be able to run what they want, where they want it. And that was exactly the philosophy that that Wells took. So, and if you look at what they were trying to do is they're looking to be able to serve their customers in a different way. I think that it's true now that customers are looking for personalized services, instant gratification, the ability to interact, where they want and when they want. So we're walking with the Wells teams to really bring to life through AI, our complex AI and data solutions to really enable them to move at speed and serve their customers in a rapidly changing world. >> So Yolande, part of the move to cloud includes the fact that we're all human beings and perception can become reality. Issues like security, which are always at the forefront of someone's mind in financial services space, there is the perception, and then there is the reality. Walk us through today where perception is in the financial services space. And then Zac, I'm going to go back to you to tell us what's the reality. And is there a disconnect? Because often technology in this space has been ahead of people's comfort level for rational reasons. So Yolande, can you talk about from a perception perspective where people are. >> So I have to tell you, we are having conversations with both the incumbents and traditional organizations, as well as, the uprising, the fintechs, and the neobanks around how does technology really unlock and unleash a new business model. So we're talking about things like how does technology and help them grow that organization. How does it take out costs in that organization? How do you use all cloud platform to think about managing risks, whether that's operational, whether it's reputational, industry or regulatory type risk? And then how do we enable our partners and our customers to be able to move at speed? So all of those conversations are now on the table. And I think a big shift from when Zac and I both were sitting on the other side of the table in those financial services industries is a recognition that this couldn't and shouldn't be done alone, that it's going to require a partnership, it's going to require, really shifting to put technology at the forefront. And I think when you talk about perception, I would say a couple of years ago, I think it was more of a perception that they were really technology companies. And I think now we're really starting to see the shifts that these are technology companies serving their customers in a banking environment. >> So Zac, can you give us some- Yeah. Yeah. Zac, can you give us some examples of how that plays out from a solutions perspective? What are some of the things that you and Yolande are having conversations with these folks in? >> Yeah. - I mean, absolutely. I think there's three major trends that we're seeing, where I think we can bring the power of sort of the Google ecosystem to really change business models and change how things are done. The first is really this massive change that's been happening for like over 10 years now, but it's really this change in customers, expecting financial institutions to meet them where they are. And that started with information being delivered to them through mobile devices and online banking. And then it went to payments, and now it's going into lending and it's going into insurance. But it changes the way that financial services companies need to operate because now they need to figure out how to deliver everything digitally, embedded into the experience that their customers are having in all of these digital ecosystems. So there's lot that we're doing in that space. The second is really around modernizing the technology environment. There is still a massive amount of paper in these organizations. Most of it has been transferred to digital paper, but the workflows and the processes that are still needing to be streamlined. And there's a lot that we can do with our AI model and technology to be able to basically take unstructured data and create structured data. Thank Google Photos, you can now search for your photo library and find, pictures of you on bridges. The same thing we can now do with documents and routine interactions with chat bot. People are expecting 24/7 service. And a lot of people want to be able to interact through chat versus through voice. And the final part of this that we're seeing a lot of use cases in is in the kind of risk and regulatory space. Coming out of the financial crisis, there was this need to massively upgrade everybody's data capabilities and control and risk environments, because so much it was very manual, and a lot of the data to do a lot of the risk and control work was kind of glued together. So everybody went off and built data lakes and figured out that that was actually a really difficult challenge and they quickly became data swamps. And so really how do you unlock the value of those things? Those three use cases, and there's lots of things underneath those, are areas that we're working with customers on. And it's, like you said, it's really exciting because the perception has changed. The perception has changed that now cloud is the sort of future, and everybody is kind of now realized they have to figure out how to engage. And I think a lot of the partnership things that Yolande was talking about is absolutely true. They're looking for a strategic relationship versus a vendor relationship, and those are really exciting changes for us. >> So I just imagined a scenario where a Dave, Zac, and Yolande are at the cloud pub talking after hours over a few pints, and Dave says, "Wow, you know, 75%, 80% of IT is still on-premises." And Yolande looks at me and says, "On-premises? We're dealing with on-paper still." Such as the life of a financial services expert in this space. So Yolande, what would you consider sort of the final frontier or at least the next frontier in cloud meets financial services? What are the challenges that we have yet to overcome? I just mentioned, the large amount of stuff that's still on premises, the friction associated with legacy applications and infrastructure. That's one whole thing. But is there one thing that in a calendar year, 2022, if you guys could solve this for the financial services industry, what would it be? And if I'm putting you on the spot, so be it. >> No, no. I'm not going to hold it to just one thing. I think the shift, I think the shift to personalization and how does the power of, you know, AI and machine learning really start to change and get into way more predictive technologies. As I mentioned, customers want to be a segmentation of one. They don't want to be forced fit into the traditional banking ecosystems. There's a reason that customers have on average 14 different financial services apps on their phones. Yep. Less than three to 5% of their screen time is actually spent on them. It's because something is missing in that environment. There's a reason that you could go to any social media site and in no time at all, be able to pull up over 200 different communities of people trying to find out financial services information in layman's terms that is relevant to them. So the ability and where we're really doubling down is on this personalization. Being way more predictive, understanding where a customer is on their journey and being able to meet them at that point, whether that's the bright offers, whether that's recognizing, to Zac's point, that they've come in on one channel but they now want to switch to another channel. And how do they not have to start again every time? So these are some of the basics things, so we really doubled down on how do we start to solve in those areas. I think also the shift, I think in many cases, especially in the risk space, it's been very much what I would call, a people process technology approach, start to imagine what happens if you turn that around and think about how technology can help you be more predictive internally in your business and create better outcomes. So I think there's so many areas of opportunities, and what's really exciting is we're not restricted, we're having conversations that are titled, the art of the possible, or the future of, or help us come in and reinvent. So I think you're going to see a lot of shift probably in the next 12 to 18 months, I would say, and the capabilities and the ability to service the customer differently and meet them on their journey. >> Well, it sounds like the life of a cloud financial services person is much more pleasurable than back when it consisted of primarily running into brick walls constantly. This conversation five or 10 years ago would have been more like, please trust us, please. Just give us a shot. >> I think Zac and I both reminisce that we couldn't have joined at a more exciting time. It's the locker or whatever you want to call it, but it is a completely different world and the conversations are fun and refreshing, and you can really start to see how we have the ability to partner to change the landscape, across all of the different financial services industries. And I think that's what keeps Zac and I going every day. >> And you said earlier that you alluded to the idea that you used to be on the other side of the table, in other words, in the financial services industry on the customer side. So you pick the right time to come across. >> Without a doubt, without a doubt. Yes. >> Well, with that, I want to thank both of you for joining me today. This is really fascinating. Financial services is something that touches all of us individually in our daily lives. It's something that everyone can relate to at some level. And it also represents, that tip of the spear, the cutting edge of cloud. So very interesting. Thank you both again, pleasure to meet you both. Next time, hopefully it will be in-person and we can compare our steps that we've taken during the conference. With that I'll sign off. This has been a fantastic Cube conversation, part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, Thanks again for joining us. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(peaceful music) >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am delighted to welcome back to the cube, cube veteran, Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering from Google. Chen, welcome back to the cube. >> Hey Dave, super happy to be here. >> Absolutely delighted to have you here. Let's dive right into this conversation. There was a, there was a blog post this week, talking about Google Cloud putting a lot of weight behind this idea of principles for software development. What are those principles and why are they important? >> The three principles that we put in that blog post is open, easy, and transformative. And I think what's really important to recognize with the three principles that those are not new principles, not for Google Cloud, and definitely not for me. I joined Google about, a little bit over five years ago. Right when just Kubernetes started to lead Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes engine team. And we immediately recognized, the idea of open and the importance of flexibility and choice is a foundation to the idea of Kubernetes and portability workloads. But pretty early on, it was clear that it's not enough just to have portability and flexibility because it creates a lot of complexity. So how can we still have that without creating a trade-off or tension for our customers? So really making sure that everything is also easy. You know, and one of the things, I use, I like to say it's not just portability of workloads, but also portability of skills and you achieve that through consistent experience, right? A lot of automation. And when you bring all of those things together, what I love about Google Cloud is that, you know, I'm an infrastructure person. I've always been infrastructure person. And what excites me the most is seeing others take this innovation and, and really empowers developers to make amazing, or, you know, unique ideas, a reality. And that's really the foundation principles for Google Cloud. >> So how does that translate into, from a customer perspective? >> So I would just start with some customer examples, right? Starting from, their perspective. So when we think about open, this is actually part of the, our customers cloud strategy, right? You say cloud, you immediately think only about public cloud, but from our customer perspectives, right? They think about public clouds, right? Most of them have more than one cloud, but they also think about the private cloud, you know, IOT edge and having that openness and flexibility to choose where they can run their workload, is critical. It's critical for them. What I hear mostly is of course, innovation, managing costs, and also making sure that they are not locked out of innovation that happens for example, in any cloud or, or somewhere else. So that's a really a key consideration for our customers when they think about their cloud strategy. The second thing that open matters is that it's really hard to hire talent that is expert and has the right skills. And we see that by using a leveraging open source technologies, it actually makes it easier to our customers to hire the best talent there is in the industry. At one of the previous Google Cloud Next sessions, we had the Loblaw for example, which is the biggest grocery in Canada. And, you know, we were joking on stage, that even though at our hiring for grocery shop, they still can hire the best talent because they are using the best technologies out there in the industry. So that's one, if you think about the importance of easy, I would just call out Western Digital that we've just announced how they decided to standardize on Anthos for their cloud strategy, right? Both of course, Google cloud platform, but On Prem and the Edge. And for them what's important is that when they have all of their amazing developers and operators, how can they provide them reach experience, right. We don't want our developers or operators to spend time on things that can be automated or managed by others. So having a smooth, intuitive experience is really critical. And we we've been announcing some new stuff like a, a Google Cloud deploy and really integrating the entire experience, especially integration for managing, deploying directly to Google Kubernetes engine. And of course, one of my favorite is Jiechi autopilot, which really takes all the goodness with Kubernetes and automatically managing. And then transformative, this is like what I said before, unleashing innovation. And we see Wendy's, for example, right, they want to actually have AI machine learning at run time at their branches, which will allow them to create a new experience for their customers. So this is how we see customers really appreciate these three principles. >> So whenever the subject of Kubernetes and Google comes up, we have to talk Anthos. We're now into what year three of Anthos. How has adoption looked what's the latest on that front? >> That has been really great. We actually have been seeing a 500% growth on the end of Q2 of year over year. And it's important you know to mention that the journey with Anthos is not something new, but something that we have built with our customers when they really love the experience they have on GCP, but needed to innovate elsewhere and not just on Google Cloud. So we've been seeing that, you know, I mentioned the Western Digital, blah, blah, and Wendy's we also have customers like MLB, which is really exciting how they've changed their entire fans' experience using Anthos. And for them, again, it was both the easy part, right? How can I deal with that complexity of having compute and storage everywhere in every one of the stadiums, but also how can I use AI and machine learning, which is unique to Google Cloud in order to create unique experiences for the fans, at real time, of course. >> Yeah. Now you've, touched on this a bit already, if you had to, if you thought about someone reviewing Anthos, their Anthos experience, because we're in the midst of people adopting Anthos and becoming new to Anthos at this point. What does a delighted customers response sound like to you? What is that Yelp review that they would write? If they were telling people we, doubled down on Anthos and we are thrilled because, fill in the blank for a second. >> The first thing that comes to mind is that it works everywhere and the developer experience that comes with it, right? So we have, of course the platform and the infrastructure, but where Anthos really shine is that experience, on top of thinking about all developers and operators that can really work in every environment without paying too much attention to that. And just having that intuitive experience, right? If you go to the Google Cloud console, you see all your clusters, and now we're actually also going to add your VMs into that view, and you can use tools like Anthos config managers, and Anthos service mash to manage your security posture or the configuration in all of those environments. >> So we hear a lot about Multicloud. Multicloud is fantastic, but it sounds like, dealing with the complexity associated with Multicloud is something that Anthos definitely helps with. >> Yes, you know, Google is best with complexity at scale, we've been running containers and really large environments for many years. And some of those principles really, you know, have been fundamental to the way we've started with Kubernetes. So the idea of the declarative intent and automation is really critical in managing large environment and high complexity because in those environments, lots of things can change, but with the declarative approach, you don't have to anticipate everything that is going to change, but you need to know what is your desired state. And that's really one way that Anthos is leveraging the Kubernetes primitives and those ideas to manage different types of environments. In addition to that, it's actually really adding that layer that I talked about before, around the easy can I make sure that my tools, right, if it's, for example, a cloud hybrid build or cloud deploy or Anthos service manager, Anthos config manager, can I make sure that this UI, the CLI the API will be consistent in all of those environments? Can I view in one place, all of my clusters, all of my applications, and this is really where Anthos shines. >> So the cloud data foundation had a, had to get together at the same time as, Google Cloud Next. And there's been a lot of discussion around topics like security. I just like to get your thoughts on, you know, what what's at the forefront of your mind, working in engineering at Google, working in this world where people are deploying Anthos, working in a world where in a multi-cloud environment, you don't necessarily have control as vice president of engineering at Google over what's happening in these other clouds. So what are some of the things that are at the front of your mind is security one of them, what are your thoughts? >> Security is top of mine. Similar to all of our customers and definitely internally. And there are many things that we are very worried about or create some risks. You know, we've just started talking about the secure central supply chain, by building with open source, how can we make sure that everything is secure, right? Then we know what is the contribution that's from the software that we are delivering, how can we make sure that the security posture is portable, right? We talked about workloads portability. We talked about skills portability, and experience, but really I think the next phase for us as an industry is to think about security posture portability. Can I really apply the same policy everywhere and still make sure that I have the right controls in place, which will have to be different depending on the environment, and to make sure that that really is the case. So lots of work around that, and again, talking about the other things we talked about. We talked about open and flexibility, how can you make sure that it's easy? One of the areas that we are very excited about is really around binary authorization, for example. So when you use our tools like cloud build, cloud deploy, artifact, registry, you can get your container images automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and tools like onto service mesh, which allows you to actually manage your security posture, traffic management, who can access what without doing any changes to your applications. >> Fantastic stuff. As we, as we wrap up our time here, do you have any final thoughts on the direction of cloud where we are in the adoption curve? You know, by some estimates, something like 75% of IT is still happening on premises. There've been some announcements coming out of Cloud Next regarding the ability to run all sorts of Google goodness on premises. So we seem to all be acknowledging that we're going to be in a bit of a hybrid world, in addition to a multicloud world, moving forward. Do you want to place any bets on, on when we'll hit the 50, 50 mark or the 25% on premises, 75% cloud mark. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm not the best gambler to be honest, but I do have a thought about that. I think what's interesting is that customers started to talk, you know, few years back, it was, hey, I have my on-prem environment and I have the cloud. How can they, these two work together. And now what we see our customers talking, you know, they're on premises, their edge is part of their cloud strategy. It's not separated. And I think this is what we'll see more and more of, right? Regardless if this is your private cloud or public cloud, your edge, we would like to have a cloud like experience in that environment and consistency. And of course, we would love to leverage all the goodness of the cloud. If it's like machine learning, AI, and other capabilities, automation, everywhere we go. So I think this is the biggest change we're starting to see. And in addition to that, I think we will see, today everybody are already multicloud cloud, right? If it's recquisitions and just by cause of bottom up culture, you know, people choose different services. And I expect we'll see more strategic thinking about our customers multicloud strategy. Where do I deploy my workloads? What are the benefits? If it's latency, if it's specific services that are available, maybe cost, we'll see the customers becoming more intentional about that and this is really exciting. >> Well Chen, amazing insights. It's obvious why you're a cube veteran. It's obviously why we seek you out for your counsel and guidance on a variety of subjects. Thank you so much for spending time with us today in this cube conversation. With that I'd like to thank you for joining us. Until next time, I'm Dave Nicholson, thanks for joining (peaceful music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to the new abnormal. Yes, you know, the pandemic, it did accelerate the shift to digital, but it's also created disorder in our world. I mean, every day it seems that companies are resetting their office reopening playbooks. They're rethinking policies on large gatherings and vaccination mandates. There's an acute labor shortage in many industries, and we're seeing an inventory glutton in certain goods, like bleach and hand sanitizer. Airline schedules and pricing algorithms, they're all unsettled. Is inflation transitory? Is that a real threat to the economy? GDP forecasts are seesawing. In short, the world is out of whack and the need for fast access to quality, trusted and governed data has never been greater. Can coherent data strategies help solve these problems, or will we have to wait for the world to reach some type of natural equilibrium? And how are companies, like Google, helping customers solve these problems in critical industries, like financial services, retail, manufacturing, and other sectors? And with me to share his perspectives on data is a long-time CUBE alum, Bruno Aziza. He's the head of data analytics at Google. Bruno, my friend, great to see you again, welcome. >> Great to see you, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So you heard my little narrative upfront, how do you see this crazy world of data today? >> I think you're right. I think there's a lot going on in the world of data analytics today. I mean, certainly over the last 30 years, we've all tried to just make the life of people better and give them access more readily to the information that they need. But certainly over the last year and half, two years, we've seen an amazing acceleration in digital transformation. And what I think we're seeing is that even after three decades of investment in the data analytics world, you know, the opportunity is still really out wide and is still available for organizations to get value out of their data. I was looking at some of the latest research in the market, and, you know, only 32% of companies are actually able to say that they get tangible, valuable insights out of their data. So after all these years, we still have a lot of opportunity ahead of us, of course, with the democratization of access to data, but also the advent in machine learning and AI, so that people can make better decisions faster than their competitors. >> So do you think that the pandemic has heightened that sort of awareness as they were sort of forced to pivot to digital, that they're maybe not getting enough out of their data strategies? That maybe their whatever, their organization, their technology, their way they were thinking about data was not adequate and didn't allow them to be agile enough? Why do you think that only 32% are getting that type of value? >> I think it's true. I think, one, digital transformation has been accelerated over the last two years. I think, you know, if you look at research the last two years, I've seen almost a decade of digital acceleration, you know, happening. But I also think that we're hitting a particular time where employees are expecting more from their employers in terms of the type of insights that can get. Consumers are now evolving, right? So they want more information. And I think now technology has evolved to a point where it's a lot easier to provision a data cloud environment so you can get more data out to your constituents. So I think the connection of these three things, expectation of employees, expectation of customers to better customer experiences, and, of course, the global environment, has accelerated quite a bit, you know, where the space can go. And for people like me, you know, 20 years ago, nobody really cared about databases and so forth. And now I feel like, you know, everybody's, you know, understands the value that we can get out of it. And we're kind of getting, you know, in the sexy territory, finally, data now is sexy for everyone and there's a lot of interest in the space. >> You and I met, of course, in the early days of Hadoop. And there were many things about Hadoop that were profound and, of course, many things that, you know, just were overly complex, et cetera. And one of the things we saw was this sort of decentralization. We thought that Hadoop was going to send five megabytes of code to petabytes of data. And what happened is everything, you know, came into this centralized repository and that centralized thinking, the data pipeline organization was very centralized. Are you seeing companies rethink that? I mean, has the cloud changed their thinking? You know, especially as the cloud expands to the edge, on-prem, everywhere. How are you seeing organizations rethink their regimes for data? >> Yeah, I think, you know, we've seen over the last three decades kind of the pendulum, right, from really centralizing everything and making the IT organization kind of the center of excellence for data analytics, all the way to now, you know, providing data as a self-service, you know, application for end-users. And I think what we're seeing now is there's a few forces happening. The first one is, of course, multicloud, right? So the world today is clearly multicloud and it's going to be multicloud for many, many years. So I think not only are now people considering their on-prem information, but they're also looking at data across multiple clouds. And so I think that is a huge force for chief data officers to consider is that, you know, you're not going to have data centralized in one place, nicely organized, because sometimes it's going to be a factor of where you want to be as an organization. Maybe you're going to be partnering with other organizations that have data in other clouds. And so you want to have an architecture that is modern and that accommodates this idea of an open cloud. The second problem that we see is this idea around data governance, intelligent data governance, right? So the world of managing data is becoming more complex because, of course, you're now dealing with many different speeds, you're dealing with many different types of data. And so you want to be able to empower people to get access to the information, without necessarily having to move this data, so they can make quick decisions on the data. So this idea of a data fabric is becoming really important. And then the third trend that we see, of course, is this idea around data sharing, right? People are now looking to use their own data to create a data economy around their business. And so the ability to augment their existing data with external data and create data products around it is becoming more and more important to the chief data officers. So it's really interesting we're seeing a switch from, you know, this chief data officer really only worried about governance, to this we're now worried about innovation, while making sure that security and governance is taken care of. You know, we call this freedom within the framework, which is a great challenge, but a great opportunity for many of these data leaders. >> You mentioned several things there. Self-service, multicloud, the governance key, especially if we can federate that governance in a decentralized world. Data fabric is interesting. I was talking to Zhamak Dehghani this weekend on email. She coined the term data mesh. And there seems to be some confusion, data mesh, data fabric. I think Gartner's using the term fabric. I know like NetApp, I think coined that term, which to me is like an infrastructure layer, you know. But what do you mean by data fabric? >> Well, the first thing that I would say is that it's not up to the vendors to define what it is. It really is up to the customer. The problem that we're seeing these customers trying to fix is you have a diversity of data, right? So you have data stored in the data mart, in a data lake, in a data warehouse, and they all have their specific, you know, reasons for being there. And so this idea of a data fabric is that without moving the data, can you, one, govern it intelligently? And, two, can you provide landing zones for people to actually do their work without having to go through the pain of setting up new infrastructure, or moving information left and right, and creating new applications? So it's this idea of basically taking advantage of your existing environment, but also governing it centrally, and also now providing self-service capabilities so people can do their job easily. So, you know, you might call it a data mesh, you might call it a data fabric. You know, the terminology to me, you know, doesn't seem to be the barrier. The issue today is how do we enable, you know, this freedom for customers? Because, you know, I think what we've seen with vendors out there is they're trying to just take the customer down to their paradigms. So if they believe in all the answers need to be in a data warehouse, they're going to guide the customer there. If they believe that, you know, everything needs to be in a data lake, they're going to guide the customer there. What we believe in is this idea of choice. You should be able to do every single use case. And we should be able to enable you to manage it intelligently, both from an access standpoint, as well as a governance standpoint. >> So when you think about those different, and I like that, you're making it somewhat technology agnostic, so whether it's a data warehouse, or a data lake, or a data hub, a data mart, those are nodes within the mesh or the fabric, right? That are discoverable, accessible, I guess, governed. I think that there's got to be some kind of centralized governance edict, but in a federated governance model so you don't have to move the data around. Is that how you're thinking about it? >> Absolutely, you know, in our recent event, in the Data Cloud Summit, we had Equifax. So the gentleman there was the VP of data governance and data fabric. So you can start seeing now these roles, you know, created around this problem. And really when you listen to what they're trying to do, they're trying to provide as much value as they can without changing the habits of their users. I think that's what's key here, is that the minute you start changing habits, force people into paradigms that maybe, you know, are useful for you as a vendor, but not so useful to the customer, you get into the danger zone. So the idea here is how can you provide a broad enough platform, a platform that is deep enough, so the data can be intelligently managed and also distributed and activated at the point of interaction for the end-user, so they can do their job a lot easier? And that's really what we're about, is how do you make data simpler? How do you make, you know, the process of getting to insight a lot more fluid without changing habits necessarily, both on the IT side and the business side? >> I want to get to specifics on what Google is doing, but the last sort of uber-trends I want to ask you about 'cause, again, we've known each other for a long time. We've seen this data world grow up. And you're right, 20, 30 years ago, nobody cared about database. Well, maybe 30 years ago. But 20 years ago, it was a boring market, right now it's like the hottest thing going. But we saw, you know, bromide like data is the new oil. Well, we found out, well, actually data is more valuable than oil 'cause you can use, you know, data in a lot of different places, oil you can use once. And then the term like data as an asset, and you said data sharing. And it brings up the notion that, you know, you don't want to share your assets, but you do want to share your data as long as it can be governed. So we're starting to change the language that we use to describe data and our thinking is changing. And so it says to me that the next 10 years, aren't going to be like the last 10 years. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think you're absolutely right. I think if you look at how companies are maturing their use of data, obviously the first barrier is, "How do I, as a company, make sure that I take advantage of my data as an asset? How do I turn, you know, all this information into a sustainable, competitive advantage, really top of mind for organizations?" The second piece around it is, "How do I create now this innovation flywheel so that I can create value for my customers, and my employees, and my partners?" And then, finally, "How do I use data as the center of a product that I can then further monetize and create further value into my ecosystem?" I think the piece that's been happening that people have not talked a lot about I think, with the cloud, what's come is it's given us the opportunity to think about data as an ecosystem. Now you and I are partnering on insights. You and I are creating assets that might be the combination of your data and my data. Maybe it's an intelligent application on top of that data that now has become an intelligent, rich experience, if you will, that we can either both monetize or that we can drive value from. And so I think, you know, it's just scratching the surface on that. But I think that's where the next 10 years, to your point, are going to be, is that the companies that win with data are going to create products, intelligent products, out of that data. And they're just going to take us to places that, you know, we are not even thinking about right now. >> Yeah, and I think you're right on. That is going to be one of the big differences in the coming years is data as product. And that brings up sort of the line of business, right? I mean the lines of business heads historically have been kind of removed from the data group, that's why I was asking you about the organization before. But let's get into Google. How do you describe Google's strategy, its approach, and why it's unique? >> You know, I think one of the reasons, so I just, you know, started about a year ago, and one of the reasons for why I found, you know, the Google mission interesting, is that it's really rooted at who we are and what we do. If you think about it, we make data simple. That's really what we're about. And we live that value. If you go to google.com today, what's happening? Right, as an end-user, you don't need any training. You're going to type in whatever it is that you're looking for, and then we're going to return to you highly personalized, highly actionable insights to you as a consumer of insights, if you will. And I think that's where the market is going to. Now, you know, making data simple doesn't mean that you have to have simple infrastructure. In fact, you need to be able to handle sophistication at scale. And so simply our differentiation here is how do we go from highly sophisticated world of the internet, disconnected data, changing all the time, vast volume, and a lot of different types of data, to a simple answer that's actionable to the end-user? It's intelligence. And so our differentiation is around that. Our mission is to make data simple and we use intelligence to take the sophistication and provide to you an answer that's highly actionable, highly relevant, highly personalized for you, so you can go on and do your job, 'cause ultimately the majority of people are not in the data business. And so they need to get the information just like you said, as a business user, that's relevant, actionable, timely, so they can go off and, you know, create value for their organization. >> So I don't think anybody would argue that Google, obviously, are data experts, arguably the best in the world. But it's interesting, some of the uniqueness here that I'm hearing in your language. You used the word multicloud, Amazon doesn't, you know, use that term. So that's a differentiation. And you sell a cloud, right? You sell cloud services, but you're talking about multicloud. You sell databases, but, of course, you host other databases, like Snowflake. So where do you fit in all this? Do you see your role, as the head of data analytics, is to sort of be the chef that helps combine all these different capabilities? Or are you sort of trying to help people adopt Google products and services? How should we think about that? >> Yeah, the best way to think about, you know, I spend 60 to 70% of my time with customers. And the best way I can think about our role is to be your innovation partner as an organization. And, you know, whichever is the scenario that you're going to be using, I think you talked about open cloud, I think another uniqueness of Google is that we have a very partner friendly, you know, approach to the business. Because we realized that when you walk into an enterprise or a digital native, and so forth, they already have a lot of assets that they have accumulated over the years. And it might be technology assets, but also might be knowledge, and know-how, right? So we want to be able to be the innovation vendor that enables you to take these assets, put them together, and create simplicity towards the data. You know, ultimately, you can have all types of complexity in the backend. But what we can do the best for you is make that really simple, really integrated, really unified, so you, as a business user, you don't have to worry about, "Where is my data? Do I need to think about moving data from here to there? Are there things that I can do only if the data is formatted that way and this way?" We want to remove all that complexity, just like we do it on google.com, so you can do your job. And so that's our job, and that's the reason for why people come to us, is because they see that we can be their best innovation partner, regardless where the data is and regardless, you know, what part of the stack they're using. >> Well, I want to take an example, because my example, I mean, I don't know Google's portfolio like you do, obviously, but one of the things I hear from customers is, "We're trying to inject as much machine intelligence into our data as possible. We see opportunities to automate." So I look at something like BigQuery, which has a strong affinity in embedded machine learning and machine intelligence, as an example, maybe of that simplification. But maybe you could pick up on that and give us some other concrete examples. >> Yeah, specifically on products, I mean, there are a lot products we can talk about, and certainly BigQuery has tremendous market momentum. You know, and it's really anchored on this idea that, you know, the idea behind BigQuery is that just add data and we'll do the rest, right? So that's kind of the idea where you can start small and you can scale at incredible, you know, volumes without really having to think about tuning it, about creating indexes, and so forth. Also, we think about BigQuery as the place that people start in order to build their ecosystem. That's why we've invested a lot in machine learning. Just a few years ago, we introduced this functionality called BigQuery Machine Learning, or BigQuery ML, if you're familiar with it. And you notice out of the top 100 customers we have, 80% of these customers are using machine learning right out of, you know, BigQuery. So now why is that? Why is it that it's so easy to use machine learning using BigQuery is because it's built in. It was built from the ground up. Instead of thinking about machine learning as an afterthought, or maybe something that only data scientists have access to that you're going to license just for narrow scenarios, we think about you have your data in a warehouse that can scale, that is equally awesome at small volume as very large volume, and we build on top of that. You know, similarly, we just announced our analytics exchange, which is basically the place where you can now build these data analytics assets that we discussed, so you can now build an ecosystem that creates value for end-users. And so BigQuery is really at the center of a lot of that strategy, but it's not unlike any of the other products that we have. We want to make it simple for people to onboard, simple to scale, to really accomplish, you know, whatever success is ahead of them. >> Well, I think ecosystems is another one of those big differences in the coming decade, because you're able to build ecosystems around data, especially if you can share that data, you know, and do so in a governed and secure way. But it leads to my question on industries, and I'm wondering if you see any patterns emerging in industries? And each industry seems to have its own unique disruption scenario. You know, retail obviously has been, you know, disrupted with online commerce. And healthcare with, of course, the pandemic. Financial services, you wonder, "Okay, are traditional banks going to lose control of payment systems?" Manufacturing you see our reliance on China's supply chain in, of course, North America. Are you seeing any patterns in industry as it pertains to data? And what can you share with us in terms of insights there? >> Yeah, we are. And, I mean, you know, there's obviously the industries that are, you know, very data savvy or data hungry. You think about, you know, the telecommunication industry, you think about manufacturing, you think about financial services and retail. I mean, financial services and retailers are particularly interesting, because they're kind of both in the retail business and having to deal with this level of complexity of they have physical locations and they also have a relationship with people online, so they really want to be able to bring these two worlds together. You know, I think, you know, about those scenarios of Carrefour, for instance. It's a large retailer in Europe that has been able to not only to, you know, onboard on our platform and they're using, you know, everything from BigQuery, all the way to Looker, but also now create the data assets that enable them to differentiate within their own industry. And so we see a lot of that happening across pretty much all industries. It's difficult to think about an industry that is not really taking a hard look at their data strategy recently, especially over the last two years, and really thought about how they're creating innovation. We have actually created what we call design patterns, which are basically blueprints for organization to take on. It's free, it's free guidance, it's free datasets and code that can accelerate their building of these innovative solutions. So think about the, you know, ability to determine propensity to purchase. Or build, you know, a big trend is recommendation systems. Another one is anomaly detection, and this was great because anomaly detection is a scenario that works in telco, but also in financial services. So we certainly are seeing now companies moving up in their level of maturity, because we're making it easier and simpler for them to assemble these technologies and create, you know, what we call data-rich experiences. >> The last question is how you see the emerging edge, IoT, analytics in that space? You know, a lot of the machine learning or AI today is modeling in the cloud, as you well know. But when you think about a lot of the consumer applications, whether it's voice recognition or, you know, or fingerprinting, et cetera, you're seeing some really interesting use cases that could bleed into the enterprise. And we think about AI inferencing at the edge as really driving a lot of value. How do you see that playing out and what's Google's role there? >> So there's a lot going on in that space. I'll give you just a simple example. Maybe something that's easy for the community to understand is there's still ways that we define certain metrics that are not taking into account what actually is happening in reality. I was just talking to a company whose job is to deliver meals to people. And what they have realized is that in order for them to predict exactly the time it's going to take them from the kitchen to your desk, they have to take into account the fact that distance sometimes it's not just horizontal, it's also vertical. So if you're distributing and you're delivering meals, you know, in Singapore, for instance, high density, you have to understand maybe the data coming from the elevators. So you can determine, "Oh, if you're on the 20th floor, now my distance to you, and my ability to forecast exactly when you're going to get that meal, is going to be different than if you are on the fifth floor. And, particularly, if you're ordering at 11:32, versus if you're ordering at 11:58." And so what's happening here is that as people are developing these intelligent systems, they're now starting to input a lot of information that historically we might not have thought about, but that actually is very relevant to the end-user. And so, you know, how do you do that? Again, and you have to have a platform that enables you to have a large diversity of use cases, and that thinks ahead, if you will, of the problems you might run into. Lots and lots of innovation in this space. I mean, we work with, you know, companies like Ford to, you know, reinvent the connected, you know, cars. We work with companies like Vodafone, 700 use cases, to think about how they're going to deal with what they call their data ocean. You know, I thought you would like this term, because we've gone from data lakes to data oceans. And so there is certainly a ton of innovation and certainly, you know, the chief data officers that I have the opportunity to work with are really not short of ideas. I think what's been happening up until now, they haven't had this kind of single, unified, simple experience that they can use in order to onboard quickly and then enable their people to build great, rich-data applications. >> Yeah, we certainly had fun with that over the years, data lake or data ocean. And thank you for remembering that, Bruno. Always a pleasure seeing you. Thanks so much for your time and sharing your perspectives, and informing us about what Google's up to. Can't wait to have you back. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. Appreciate you watching this CUBE Conversation, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(cheery music) >> Thanks, Adam. Thanks for everyone in the studio. Dave, we've got some great main stage CUBE interviews. Normally we'll sit at the desk, and do a remote, but since it's a virtual event, and a physical event, it's a hybrid event. We've got two amazing Google leaders to talk with us. I had a chance to sit down with Amol who was gone yesterday during our breaking news segment. They had the big news. We had two great guests, Amol Phadke. He's our first interview. He's the head of Google's telecom industry. Again, he came in, broke into our segment yesterday with breaking news. Obviously released with Ericsson, and the O-RAN Alliance. I had a great chance to chat with him. A wide ranging conversation for 13 minutes. Enjoy my interview with Amol, right now. (cheery music) Well welcome to the CUBE's coverage for Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE. We're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. We're on the ground at Mobile World Congress, bringing all the action here. We're remote with Amol Phadke, who's the Managing Director of the Telecom Industry Solutions team at Google Cloud, a big leader, and driving a lot of the change. Amol, thank you for coming on theCUBE here in the hybrid event from Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me, So, hybrid event, which means it's in person, we're on the floor, as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal. Kind of highlights where we are in this telecom world, because the last time, Mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the Edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard. Multi-cloud is being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal, what is your take? And so it's pretty active in your industry. Tell us your opinion. >> Yes, John I mean the last two years have been seismic to say the least, right? I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to do. You know, John, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over the CSP infrastructure right now, and everything that we are doing in the last two years, whether it's working, or studying, or entertaining ourselves, all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national global information fabric on which the society is actually depending on. And that we see at Google as well, in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand, John, in the last two years, for that infrastructure. And then when we look at the industry itself, unfortunately all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue, because as an industry, the revenue is still flat-lining. In fact, the forecasted revenue for globally, for all the industry over the next 12 months is three to five per cent negative on revenue, right? So one starts to think, how come there is so much demand over the last two years, post-pandemic, and that's not translating to revenue? Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant CapEx and OPEX investments in the infrastructure, as much as eight to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure, from our perspective, Which means it's really a perfect storm. John, We have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue, and the crux of all this is customer experience, because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience, right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry, and that really sets the stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole, grow top line, radically transform CSPCO, at the same time, reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiencies. It's almost an impossible problem to find solution. >> It's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned CapEx and OPEX. That's obviously changing the investments of their post-pandemic growth, and change in user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure, that's changing. All of this is being driven by Cloud Native, and that's clear. You're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, IT and OT coming together, whatever you want to do, this is just, it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things. And this positive innovation coming out of it. So I have to ask you, what are you seeing as a solution that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders, because they're digitally transforming, so they got to re-factor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. >> Yes. So John, from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as Google Cloud, was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSP industry, we are seeing Google being transformed over the last two decades or so, right. And it's important to understand that there's a lot Google data over the last two decades that we can actually not externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multicloud, was originally built for all the Google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's YouTube, or email or maps, you know. Same infrastructure, same open source, same multicloud. And we decided to sort of use the same paradigm to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next, right. So that's important to bear in mind, that those assets were there, and we wanted to externalize those assets, right. There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, John. You know, number one to your point, is how can they monetize the Edge? All of this happens at the Edge. All of this gets converged at the Edge. We believe with 5G acting as the brilliant catalyst to really drive this Edge deployment. CSPs would be in a very strong position, partnering with Cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for their top line, but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that Edge. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing, to create end solutions in a post-pandemic world. Solutions like contact-less shopping, or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant, without the need for having a human there, because of the digitalization of workforce. Which meant these kinds of solutions, can actually work well at the Edge driven by 5G. But of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSPs. We bring our set of solutions, and we actually launch in December 30 partners that are already on our Google Cloud Solutions. And then we partner with the CSPs based on our infrastructure, and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this all to life at the end customer, which often tends to be an enterprise, whether it's a manufacturing, plant, or a retail chain. >> Yeah, you guys got some great examples there. I love that Edge story. I think it's huge. I think it's only going to get bigger. I got to ask you while I got you here, because again, you're in the industry, you're the managing director, so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry. But it's bigger, it's beyond Telecom, where it's now Telecom's just one other Edge network, piece of the pie of the surety computing, as we say. So I got to ask you, one of the big things that Google brings to the table is the developer mojo, and opensource, and scale obviously. Scale's unprecedented, everyone knows that. But ecosystems are super important, and Telco's kind of really aren't good at that, right? So, you know, the Telco ecosystem was, I mean, okay, I'd say, okay, but mostly driven by carriers and moving bits from point A to point B. But now you've got a developer mindset, public cloud, developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSPs and how is it changing this cloud service provider's ability to execute, because that's the key in this new world? What's your opinion? >> Absolutely, John. So, there are two things, there are two dimensions to look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with AnToks, we recognized exactly what you said, John, which is the world is moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and API. And that platform had to by definition, work not just from Google Cloud, but any cloud. It could work on any public cloud, can work on CSP's private cloud. And of course, supports on some Google Cloud, right? The reason was, once you deploy and cause, once as a seamless application development platform, you could put all kinds of developer apps on top. So I just talked about 5G Edge John, a minute ago, those apps can sit on Antoks, but at the same time, IT to your point, John, IT apps could also sit on the same AnToks paradigm, and network apps. So as networks start becoming Cloud Native, whether it's SRAN, whether it's O-Ran, whether it's 5G core, same principle. And that's why we believe when we partner with CSPs, we are saying, "Hey, you give this AnToks to an ecosystem of community, whether that community is network, whether that community is IT, whether the communities Edge apps, all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of AnToks fabric, John. >> Yeah, and that's going to set the table for multicloud, which is basically cloud words for multi-vendor, multi app. Amol, I've got to ask you while I have you here, first of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's really great industry perspective. And obviously Google Cloud's got huge scale, and great leadership. And again, you know, the big, cloud players are moving in and helping out, and enabling a lot of value. I got to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, if someone asked you, "Amol, tell me about the impact that public cloud is having on the Telco industry." What would you say? What's the answer to that? Because a lot of people are like, okay, public cloud, I get it. I know what it looks like, but now everyone's knows it's going hybrid. So everyone will ask you the question, "What is public cloud doing for the telecom sector?" >> Yeah, I think it's doing three things, John, and great question by the way. Number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insights on data that the CSPs traditionally already had, but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at it. Whether that insights are at the network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front-end systems. Or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers, and so on, and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help with, right. So that's a very important point, because we do have a significant amount of leadership, John at Google Cloud on analytics and data and insights, right? So, and we offer those roads to these people. Number two, is really what I talked about, which is helping them build an ecosystem, because let's take retail as an example. As a minimum, there are five constituents in that ecosystem, John. There is a CSP, there is Google Cloud, there's an actual retail store. There is a hardware supplier, there's a software developer. All of them as a minimum, have to work together to build that ecosystem, which is where we give those solutions, right? So that's the second part. And then the third part is, as they move towards Cloud Native, we are really helping them change their business model to become a DevOps, a Cloud Native mindset, not just a Cloud Native network or IP. But a Cloud Native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. So those are the three things I would say, as a response to that question. >> And also the retail's a great vertical for Google to go in there, given the Amazon fear out there. People want this for certainly low hanging fruit. I think the DevOps piece is going to be a big, winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point. Amol, that's really great insight. A final question for you, while I got you here. If someone says, "Hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019?" Last time we had Mobile World Congress, they were talking speeds and feeds. Now the world has changed. We're coming out of the pandemic. California is opening up. There's going to be a physical event. The world's going hybrid, certainly on the event, and certainly cloud. What's different in the telecom industry, from, you know, many, many months ago, over a year and a half ago, from 2019? >> I would say primarily, it's the adoption of digital everywhere, which previously, you know, there were all these inhibitions and oh, would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer AR VR experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing, you know. And suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, "Oh, even post-pandemic, half my customers are always going to talk to me, via our digital channel only." Which means the way they experience us, has to be through these new experiences whether it's AR VR, whether it's some other thing or applications. So that has been accelerated John, and the CSPs have therefore really started to go to the application, and to the services. Which is why you are seeing less on, you know, speeds and feeds because 5G is here, 5G's been deployed. Now, how do we monetize 5G? How can we leverage that biggest number? So that's the biggest- >> There's down stack, and then there's a top of the stack for applications. And certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value, a lot of refactoring going on, and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Well, thank you, Amol Phadka, Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions. Thanks for comin' on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Thank you having me. >> Okay, Mobile World Congress here, in person, and hybrid, and remote. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo Community Area. Thanks for watching. Okay, that was us. That was me, online. Now, I'm here in person, as you can see Dave. That's a lot of fun. I love doing those interviews. So we had a chance to grab Google's top people when we could. They're not here, obviously. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, the three hyperscalers, Dave, didn't make it out here. They didn't have a booth, but we had a chance to grab them. And that was head of the industry marketing, and I mean the industry group. So he's like the managing door. He runs the business side. >> It's an important sector for Google. You know, Amazon was really first, with that push into telco. Thomas Curran last March, laid out Google strategy for Telco. It's a huge sector. They know it. They understand how the cloud can disrupt it, and play a massive role there. >> Yeah. >> And Google, of course. >> They're not going to object to the public cloud narrative that Danielle Royston- >> No. >> I think they like it open source, Android coming to telco. Who knows what it's going to look like? >> That's what we call digital- >> So the next interview I did was with Shailesh Shukla. He is the Senior Vice-president. He's the Senior Leader at Google Cloud for Networking. And if you know, Google, Dave, Google's networking is really well known in the industry for being really awesome, because they power obviously Google Search, and a variety of other things. They pioneered the concept of SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, which is now a de facto position for DevOps, which is a cloud now persona inside almost every company, and certainly a very important position. And so- >> Probably the biggest global network, right? Undersea cables, and- >> I mean, Microsoft's got a big hyper-scale, because they've had MSN, and bunch of other stuff, infrastructure globally. But Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have massive scale, and Google again, very well engineered. They're total, and they're as we know, I live in Palo Alto, so I can attest that they're very strong. So this next interview is really from a networking perspective, because as infrastructure, as code gets more prolific and more penetrated, it's going to be programmable. And that's really going to be a key new enabler. So let's hear from Shailesh, Head of Networking at Google Cloud, and my interview with him. (cheery music) Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space, in Barcelona for the first time, since 2019, and virtual worlds connecting. I've got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Shukla, Vice-president and General Manager of the Networking Team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE for the special presentation from Mobile World Congress. Obviously, the Edge networking core, Edge human devices, all coming together. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again. And it's always a pleasure talking to theCUBE. And I want to say hello to everybody, from, you know, in Mobile World Congress. >> Yeah, and people don't know your background. You have a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly, big companies that were now known. Big names are all there. But now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress, since 2019. Think about that. That's, you know, many months, 20 something months gone by, since the world has changed in telco. I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that. Since 2019, a lot's changed in telco. Cloud-scale has happened. You've got the Edge developing. It's IT like now. What's your take? Shailesh, tell us. >> Yeah, John, as you correctly pointed out the last 18 months have been very difficult. And you know, I'll acknowledge that right up front, for a number of people around the world. I empathize with that. Now in the telecom, and kind of the broader Edge world, I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative. O-RAN, it turns out was a very interesting sort of, you know, driver of completely new ways of both living, as well as working, right, as we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So, what we are seeing is the following. Number one, a number of telecom carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5G, right, and deployment process. And that actually changes the game, as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incalculable bandwidth, right. Much lower latency, as well as, much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network's licensing, as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type, and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is an incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of Cloud Native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming, you know, kind of mainstream, right. And then the third thing is that increasingly it's a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications, in the enterprise world, right. So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities right, around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence, and so on, with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have. And with the combination of 5G, brings it to the telecom world. And those, you know, I started to call it, as a kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider, and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real business problems. >> Yeah, and it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us, coming out of it now, that cloud-scale matters. And you look at all the successes between work, play, and how we've all kind of adjusted, the cloud technologies were a big part of that, those solutions that got us through it. Now you've got the Edge developing with 5G. And I got to ask you this question, because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry, or customers in the enterprise, and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end-to-end visibility into the workload. You're starting to see more and more of that. You starting to see more open source in everything, right. So okay, I buy that. You got an SRE on the team, you got some modern developers, you're shifting left, you've got Devs set up. All good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this. Routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end-to-end visibility, you got to have end-to-end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion here at Mobile World Congress. Okay, I buy Cloud Native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security, and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this, is first and foremost, you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given, and of course, you know, Google with its kind of global infrastructure, and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that present, right. So that's important. Second is, to be able to abstract a way that underlying infrastructure, and make it available to applications, to a set of APIs. Right, so I'll give an analogy here. Just as you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google, in the following way. What it did, was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs northbound. So then application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, a ton of kind of creativity right, around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end-to-end observability basis, right? If you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure, provide the right APIs, the right kind of information around observability, around telemetric, instead of making, you know, cloud and the infrastructure, the black box. Make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications. Bring that to the applications, and let the thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant, because there are independent software vendors. There are systems integrators. There are individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now, is utilizing open source technologies, such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market. And it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right, for everything from application development, to observability, you certainly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISC and the developer community. So that's the approach that we are taking, John. >> I love the Android analogy of the abstraction layer, because at that time, the iPhone was closed. It still is. And they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open, went open abstraction. Now abstraction layers are good. And now I want to get your thoughts on this, because anyone in operating systems knows abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece. Putting it into the operator's hands, how do you guys see, and how do you guys talk about the Edge service offering? What does it mean for the telco? Because if they get this right, this is going to be in telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a telco cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of telco system. How do you see that rolling out in real world? >> Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5G, the kind of cloud capabilities and the Edge is, you know, very clear to me that it's going to unleash a significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages, no question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying what exactly is Edge, right? So the way I look at it, is that the Edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IOT device in automobiles, right? Or an enterprise Edge, like a factory location, or a retail store, or kind of a bank branch. To the telecom Edge, which is where the service providers have, not only their points of presence, and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent RAN sites as well, right. And then the, kind of public cloud Edge, right. Where, for example, Google has, you know, 25 plus kind of regions around the world. 144, you know, PoPS, lots of CDN locations. We have, you know, few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content, and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy, compute, storage and intelligence act, right. And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity, and run the inferencing at the Edge, very Edge, at the point of sort of a sale, or a point, a very consumer standing. Now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of Edge applications. So going back to the new question, what have we seen, right? So what we are seeing, is depending on the vertical, there are different types of Edge applications, okay. So let's take a few examples. And I'll give you some, a favorite example of mine, which is in the sports arena, right? So in baseball, when you are in a stadium, and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right? And a pitcher is throwing the pitch, right, the trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is, and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed, and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence, and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience. Even though you may be in the stadium, looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of Edge compute, and the power of AI ML, right, can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML, and the power of the Edge and 5G coming together, to find where the defects are, in a manufacturing environment, right? So every vertical, what we're finding is, there are very specific applications, which you can call as kind of killer apps, right in the Edge world, that over time will become prevalent and mainstream. And they will drive the innovation. They will drive deployment, and they also will drive ultimately, kind of the economics of all of this. >> You're laying out, essentially the role of the public cloud in the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts, because a lot of people are saying, "Oh, the cloud, it's all Edge now. It's going back to on-premises." This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick, the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the Telecom Edge, because now they're working together. You've got abstraction, you mentioned that Android-like environment coming, there's going to be an Android-like effect, that abstraction. You got O-RAN out there, creating these connection points, for interoperability, for radio signals, and the End Transceivers or the Edge of the radios. All of this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? >> Yeah, so let me first talk about genetically the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google, okay, in particular. So, if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner, right? So what do you like, if you look for that as the goal, then the public cloud brings, you know, three fundamental things. Number one, is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility, right? So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, Edge is not one place, it's a variety of kind of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane, and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage, and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally if you think, think about it like an effortless Edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability, and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said, earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud. Inferencing, at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, you know, elasticity and flexibility that cloud can bring. Second is, intelligence. The whole notion of leveraging the power of data, and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of, write once, deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that when open, kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in, right? Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public cloud brings. And Google strategy very simply, is to play on all of these, right? Because we, you know, Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second, is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Key Native, and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third, is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year we actually announced 200 applications, you know, from 30 ISVs in multiple verticals that we're now going to be deployed on Google Cloud, in order to solve specific business pain points, right. And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers, with systems integrators, with equipment players, is the way that we believe Google Cloud can make a difference in this world of developing Edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, you know, whether it is in the carrier world. Carrier such as Orange, Telecom Italia, TELUS, SK Telecom, Vodafone. These have all publicly announced their work with Google Cloud, leveraging the power of data, analytics, AI ML, and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players, in the industry. As an example, Nokia, right, Amdocs, and Netcracker, and many others. So we are really excited in the traction that we are getting. And we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. >> Shailesh, it's great to have you on. Shailesh Shukla, VP and GM of Networking at Google Cloud. And I would just add to that final point there, that open and this Android-like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom. Those are new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the Telco Cloud. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Google Cloud, you guys are about the data, and being open. Thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you, John. Good to talk to you. >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Mobile World Congress. Google Cloud, featured interview here on theCUBE. Really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it. It's the cloud, cloud and Edge with 5G, making a big difference and changing the landscape, and trying innovation for the telco space. I'm John Furrier, your CUBE host. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that's the Google support. They are obviously singing the same song as Danielle Royston, every vertical. >> Two great interviews, John. Really nice job. We can see the tech. The strategy is becoming more clear. You know, one of the big four. >> Yeah, I just love, these guys are so smart. Every vertical is going to be impacted by elastic infrastructure, AI, machine learning, and this new code deployment, write once, deploy anywhere. That's theCUBE. We love being here it's a cloud show now. Mobile World Congress, back to the studio for more awesome Cloud City content.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space in Barcelona for the first time, since 2019 and virtual worlds connecting. I've got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Shukla, Vice President General Manager of the networking team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, great to see you. Thank you for coming on the Cube for the special presentation for Mobile World Congress. As the edge networking core edge human devices, all coming together, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again. And it's always a pleasure talking to "theCUBE" and I wanted to say hello to everybody from, you know, in mobile world Congress. >> Yeah, and people don't know your background. You've got a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly a big companies that were now known big names are all there, but now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress 2019. Think about that, that's, you know, many months, 27 months gone by, since the world has changed in TelcoOR I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that since 2019, a lot's changed in TelcoOR cloud is scale has happened. You've got the edge developing. It's IT like now, what's your take Shailesh tell us? >> Yeah John, as you correctly pointed out, you know, last 18 months have been very difficult and you know, I'll acknowledge that right upfront for a number of people around the world. Empathize with that now in the TelcoOR and kind of the broader edge world. I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative COVID it turns out was a very interesting sort of, driver of completely new ways of both living as well as working right, as we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So what we are seeing is the following, number one, number of TelcoORs carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5g right? And deployment process. And that actually changes the game as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incredible bandwidth, right? Much lower latency, as well as much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network slicing as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is a incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of cloud native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming, you know, kind of mainstream, right. And then the third thing is that increasingly it's, a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications in the enterprise world, right? So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities, right around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence, and so on with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have. And with the combination of 5g brings it to the telecom world. And those, you know, I started to call it as a, kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real business problems. >> And it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us coming out of it now that cloud scale matters. And you look at all its successes between work play and how we've all kind of adjusted the cloud technologies. We're a big part of that, those solutions that, that got us through it. Now you've got the edge developing with 5g. And I got to ask this question because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry or at customers in the enterprise, and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end to end visibility into the workload. You start to see more and more of that. You starting to see more open source in everything, right? And so, okay. I buy that. You've got an SRE on the team. You've got some modern developers you're shifting left, you've got Develops, all good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this, routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end to end visibility, you got to have an end to end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion at here at mobile world Congress. Okay, I buy cloud native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this is first and foremost you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given and of course, you know, Google with its kind of global infrastructure and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that presence, right. So that's important. Second is to be able to abstract away that underlying infrastructure and make it available to applications through an set of APIs, right? So I'll give an analogy here just as you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google in the following way. What it did was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs not bound. So that application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, it ton of kind of creativity right around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end to end observability basis, right? What if you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure provide the right API the right kind of information around observability around telemetric instead of making, cloud and infrastructure, the black box, make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications, bring that to the applications and let the let a thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant because there are independent software vendors. There are systems integrators, they're individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now is utilizing open source technologies, such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market. And it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right? For everything from application development to observability, you certainly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISV and the developer community. So that's the approach that we're taking John >> I love the Android analogy of this obstruction layer, because at that time the iPhone was closed. It still is. And they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open when open abstraction now obstruction layers are good. And now I want to get your thoughts on this because anyone in operating systems knows abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece, putting it into the operator's hands. How do you guys see and how do you guys talk about the edge service offering? What does it mean for the telco? Because well, they get this, right. This is going to be in telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of telco system. How do you see that rolling out in the real world? >> Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5g, the kind of cloud capabilities and the edge is, you know, very clear to me that it's going to unleash and significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages. No question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying what exactly is edge, right? So the way I look at it is that the edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IOT device, an automobile, or an enterprise edge, like a factory location or a retail store, or kind of a bank branch to the telecom edge, which is where the service providers have. Not only their points of presence and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent land sites as well, right? And then the kind of the public cloud edge, right? Where, for example, Google has, you know, twenty-five plus kind of regions around the world, 144, you know, pops, lots of CDN locations. We have, you know, a few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy compute storage and intelligence act, right. And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity and run the inferencing at the edge, very edge at the point of sort of a sale or a point a very consumer standing. Now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of edge applications. So going back to the new question, what have we seen? So what we are seeing is depending on the vertical, there are different types of edge applications, okay. So let's take a few examples and I'll give you some, a favorite example of mine, which is in the sports arena. So in baseball, right, when you are in a stadium and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right. And if pitcher is throwing the pitch, right, the trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience even though you may be in the stadium, looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of edge compute and the power of AI ML, right, can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML and the power of the edge and 5g coming together to find where the defects are in a manufacturing environment, right? So every vertical, what we're finding is there are very specific applications, which you can call us kind of killer apps, right in the edge world, that over time will become prevalent and mainstream and they will drive the innovation. They will drive deployment, and they also will drive ultimately kind of the economics of all of this. >> You're laying out, essentially the role of the public cloud and the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts because a lot of people are saying, "Oh, the cloud, it's all edge now it's still going back to a on premises." This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick, the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the telecom edge, because now they're working together, you got a distraction, you mentioned that Android leg environment coming, it's going to be an Android, like effect that eked abstraction, you got old ran out there creating these connection points for interoperability, for radio signals and the in transceivers or the edge of the radios. All of this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? >> Yeah, so let me first talk about generically, the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google, okay. In this, in particular. So if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner, right? So what do you like if you look put that as the goal, then the public cloud brings, you know, three fundamental things. Number one is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility, right? So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, edge is not one place. It's a variety of kind of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage, and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally if you think about it like an effortless edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said, earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud, inferencing at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, elasticity and flexibility that the cloud can bring. Second is intelligence, the whole notion of leveraging the power of data and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of right once deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that open kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in. Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public law brings. And Google strategy very simply is to play on all of these. Because Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open, as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Guinea native, and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year, we actually announced 200 applications, from 30 ISV in multiple verticals that we're now going to be deployed on Google cloud in order to solve specific business pain points, right. And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers with systems integrators with equipment players is the way that we believe Google cloud can make a difference in this world of developing edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, you know, whether it is in the carrier world, you know, carrier such as orange telecom Italia, telus SK Telekom, Vodafone. These have all publicly announced their work with Google cloud, leveraging the power of data analytics, AIML, and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players in the industry, as an example, Nokia, right. Am docs and Net cracker and many others. So we are really excited in the traction that we are getting, and we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. >> Shukla it's great to have you on Shailesh Shukla VP and GM of networking at Google cloud. And I would just add to that final point there that open and this Android like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom those, a new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the telco cloud. So, congratulations, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights on Google cloud, you guys are about the data and being open. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Great to talk to you, okay. >> It keeps coverage of mobile Congress, Google cloud featured interview here on theCUBE. Really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud. Whatever you want to call it, it's the cloud cloud and edge with 5g making a big difference and changing the landscape in front of innovation for the telco space. I'm John Farrow, your CUBE host, thanks for watching.

>>Yeah. Welcome to the cubes coverage for mobile world Congress 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube we're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event were on the ground. Mobile concert green. All the action here were remote with vodka, who is the managing director of the telecom industry solutions team and google cloud, a big leader and driving a lot of the change. Well, thank you for coming on the cube here in the hybrid event from over world Congress. >>Thank you john thank you john thank you for having me. >>So hybrid event which means it's in person were on the floor as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal kind of highlights where we are in the telecom world because last time mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard Multi cloud is being set being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal. What is your take it? It's pretty active in your, in your industry. Tell us your opinion. >>Yes, john, I mean the last two years have been >>seismic to say the >>least, right. I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to >>do, you >>know, jOHn uh, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over a CSB infrastructure right now and everything that we're doing in the last two years, whether it's working or studying or entertaining ourselves all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national, global information fabric on which the society is actually depending >>on and >>That we see at Google as well, in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand John in the last two years for that infrastructure. And then when I look at the industry itself, unfortunately, all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue because as an industry, the revenue is still flatlining, in fact the forecasted Revenue for globally for all the industry over the next 12 months is 3-5% negative on revenue. Right? So one starts to think how come there is so much demand over the last two years post pandemic and that's not translating to revenue. Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant Capex and Opec's investments in the infrastructure, as much as 8 to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure from >>our perspective, >>which means it's really a perfect storm, john that we have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue. And the crux of all this is customer experience because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience. Right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry and that really sets the stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole growth up line? Radically transformed PST CEO at the same time reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiency, it's almost an impossible problem to solve them. >>It's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned Capex and Opec's that's obviously changing the investments. Are there post pandemic growth and changing the user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure. That's changing all of this is being driven by cloud native and that's clear. And you're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, I T and O. T. Coming together whatever you want to do, this is just it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things and this positive innovation coming out of. So I have to ask you, what are you seeing the solutions that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders because they're digitally transforming so they gotta re factor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. >>Yes. So john from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as google cloud was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSB industry, we are seeing google being transformed over the last two decades or so. Right. And it's important to understand that there's a lot google did over the last two decades that we can actually now externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multi cloud was originally built for all the google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's Youtube or mail or maps, you know, same infrastructure, same open source, same multi cloud. And we decided to sort of use the same paradigms to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next. Right? So that's important to bear in mind that those assets were there and we wanted to externalize those assets right. There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, john you know, number one to your point is how can they monitor? Is the edge all of this happens at the edge. All of these kids can watch at the edge we believe with five G acting as a brilliant catalyst to really drive this edge deployment, CSP s would be in a very strong position, partnering with cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for that offline, but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that age. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing to create a solutions in a post pandemic world solutions like contact less shopping or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant without the need for having a human there because of the digitization of workforce, which meant these kind of solutions can actually work well at the edge Driven by 5G, but of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSP s, we bring our set of solutions and we actually launched in december 30 partners that already on our google cloud solutions and then we partner with the CSP is based on our infrastructure and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this ball to life at the end customer which opened, tends to be an enterprise, whether it's a manufacturing plant, you >>guys got some great examples there, I love that edge story, I think it's huge and it's only gonna get bigger. I gotta ask you, Well, I got you here because again, you're in the industry the managing director, so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry, but it's bigger. It's beyond telecom right now, telecoms. Just one another. Edge network piece of the pie. And the distributed computing, as we say. So I have to ask you one of the big things that google brings to the table is the developer mojo and open source and scale obviously the scales unprecedented. Everyone knows everyone knows that. Um, but ecosystems are super important and telcos kind of really aren't good at that. So, you know, the telco ecosystem was, I mean, I'd say okay, but mostly driven by carriers and and moving bits from point A to point B. But now you've got a developer mindset, public cloud developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSP and how are they changing how is it changing this cloud service providers ability to execute? Because that's the key in this new world. What's your opinion? >>Absolutely, john So there are two things, there are two dimensions. Look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with anti offs, we recognize exactly what you said, jOHn which is the world is moving to multi cloud hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and A P I and that platform had to, by definition work not just from google cloud but any club. It could work on any public cloud can work on CSP s private cloud And of course for >>some google cloud. Right. >>The reason was once you deploy and tossed once as a seamless application development platform, You could put all kinds of developer acts on top. So I just talked about 5GH John a minute ago. Those acts can sit on Santa's but at the same time I did to your point John I thi apps could also sit on the same and toss paradigm and network apps. So as network start becoming cloud native, whether it's ran, whether it's all ran, whether it's five G core same principle and that's why we believe when we partner with the SPS were saying, hey, you give this Antos to an ecosystem of community, whether that community is network with the communities, it with the communities, edge apps, all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of Antos fabric. >>And that's going to set the table for multi cloud, which is basically cloud words for multi vendor, multi app. Well I got to ask you while you have here, first of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's really great industry perspective and it's a google clouds got huge scale, great leadership and again, you know, the big, the big cloud players are moving in and helping out and enabling a lot of value. I gotta ask you if you don't mind sharing. If someone asked you him all, tell me about the uh impact that public cloud is having on the telco industry, what would you say? What's, what's the, what's the answer to that is? A lot of people are like, OK, public cloud, I get it, I know what it looks like, but now everyone knows it's going hybrid. So everyone ask, we'll ask you the question, what is public cloud doing for the telecom sector? >>Yeah, I think it's been treating john and great question by the way. Um number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insight on data that the CSP traditionally already had but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at whether that insights are at the network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front end systems or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers and so on and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help, Right? So that's that's a very important point because we do have a significant amount of leadership johN at google cloud and analytics and data and insects. Right? So and we offer goes to overseas people. Number two is really what I talked about which is helping them build an ecosystem because let's take retail as an example as a minimum. There are five constituents in that ecosystem, jOHN there is a CSP, there is google cloud, there is an actual retail store, there is a hardware supplier, there's a software developer, all of them as a minimum have to work together to build that ecosystem which is where we give those solutions, Right? So that's the second part. And in the third part is as they move towards cloud Native, we are really helping them change their business model to become a deVOPS. A cloud native mindset, not just a cloud native network. Alrighty, but a cloud native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. So those are the three things I would say as a response to that question >>and obviously the retail, great vertical for google to go in there, given the amazon fear out there, people want this certainly low hanging fruit. I think the devops piece is going to be a big winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point and well that's really great insight. A final question for you. I got you here. Um, if someone says, Hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019? We last time we had multiple Congress, they were talking speeds and feeds. Now the world has changed. We're coming out of the pandemic California's opening up. Um, there's going to be in a physical event, the world's going hybrid certainly on the event and certainly cloud what's different in the telecom industry from, you know, many, many months ago, over a year and a half ago from 2019. >>I would say primarily it's the adoption of digital everywhere, which previously, you know, there were all these inhibitions and oh would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer a are we are experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing, you know, And suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, oh, even post pandemic, half my customers are always gonna talk to me why our digital channel only, which means the way they experience us has to be through these new experiences. Whether it's a are we are, whether it's some other types of applications. So that has been accelerated, johN and the C. S. P. S have therefore really started to go to the application and to the services, which is why you're seeing less on, You know, speeds and feeds because 5Gs here, five years being deployed. Now, how do you monetize? How can we leverage the biggest, so that's the biggest changes >>down stack and then there's the top of the stack for applications and certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value, A lot of re factoring going on and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Well thank you Wolf Pataca, Managing Director, telecom industry. So thanks for coming on the key. Appreciate it. >>Thank you john thank you for having me. Okay. >>Mobile Rule Congress here in person and hybrid and remote. I'm john for a host of the cube. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo community area. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it, we're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have Amol Phadke who's the Managing Director, Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring him in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is CLOUD CITY. We are in the CLOUD CITY. Amol, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC 21. >> Oh we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert and you're the only thing standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff so. >> A lot of people watching. >> Thanks for coming on. Seriously you guys got some big news first Ericsson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with anthesis as well as open O-ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge testament to the industry. Obviously Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you're no stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Ericsson news is so important. Let's start with the Ericsson announcement. >> Sure, so, John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Ericsson for the last few months, the partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. You in fact saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy. Because you will see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real team at the moment using Google Clouds solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos and Ericsson's cutting Edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can onboard this together at the CSPs, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point 1. Speed and agility is key John. But then point 2, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and so on. Which we are already starting to launch together with Ericsson. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuous wave of Cloud Native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really try and create this Cloud Native Application Suite for 5G over time. >> Talk about the innovations around Cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation and you know, I can be a little bit over the top and say, so the Telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, Cloud Native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that, encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replace, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the Telco's. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >> Spot on, John, spot on. We, we believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture, that we are trying to do, that's where the Cloud Native be really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with the operators at Telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to go create that again and again for every deployment. As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience everywhere. >> Yeah, John and I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the Edge. You're clearly doing that with your Distributor Cloud, building out a Telco Cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving and a lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about Edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >> Sure, so I think David first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the Edge, right? So we, we have realized that (connection disruption) is a very, very data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned, is definitely something that we can offload to the Edge? Why is that so important? In the pandemic era think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously, needing zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products and manufacturing. That's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the Edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google Cloud and Telecom Italia type of carrier, gives you that Edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run the AI influencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >> Great, thank you for that and now the other piece of the announcement of course is the open, Open RAN. We've been talking about that all week. And you know, you well remember when Cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course, now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the Telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually are pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component? Maybe first talk about the Open RAN piece, why that's important and how security fits? >> Sure, so first of all, Open RAN is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time. In the radio layer, we believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and desegregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spent globally is on radio across the entire infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution, that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware, software with open interfaces, is an extremely important cost dimension too. And on the revenue side, the things is that, the reason we got so excited with Open RAN was, you can now run a lot of API's on the radio net itself. That then suddenly brings a whole developer community on the radio layer. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level, from the cell tower. And so that really is what is driving us towards this Open RAN type announcement. >> John: Amol, we've only got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on Open Source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDr. She's a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone, 14 years ago was launched, okay. And you think about Open, and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G, and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure. Everyone wins, 'cause everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry, and Open Source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? >> Absolutely John and the parallel analogy that you raised is spot on. We believe in the Telco world Anthos multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation. Whether it's a radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere. That really allows you that whole CICD SRE type development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start, that would be for systems to come on. >> John: That's great stuff. And I was, just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amol, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Ran Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on theCUBE featured segments. So, watch that interview. >> Thank you John. Glad to be here. >> Thanks Amol. Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google, obviously player, he's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology to get the chops Dave, and we're going to now, bring on Danielle Royston, she's here, I want to bring her up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on, behind us, Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in CLOUD CITY. Dave, Bon Jovi is right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you have a mic. Great to see you. >> Oh, it's great to be here, awesome. >> We are going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. >> I know we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in CLOUD CITY. >> And Bon Jovi by the way. >> Day two, I mean really starting to get packed. >> And I mean, everyone's coming in, the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening. >> A lot of buzz about CLOUD CITY out there in the hallway. >> Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited >> Awesome. >> with how it's going, so yeah. >> Well, this is awesome, while we got you here, we want to put you to work being theCUBE analyst for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, so hard news Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually former Ericsson booth. They're not even here, it's now the TelcoDR booth. But that's and then Open RAN again, Open Source. You got 5G, you got Open Source all happening. What's your take on this, as you're seeing this? >> Yeah, I think, you know, there's two big, and I talked about in my keynote this morning, there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it--MWC 21 I certainly wanted to make it about the Public Cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is Open RAN, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. >> I loved your keynote, we were here live Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was going to do some research and getting some breaking stories. But you are on stage and, and we were talking, Chloe's like, these there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, that the money's in the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you onstage said there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You've got operators and builders trying to figure out, it feels like Dev Ops is coming in here. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's the, what do you? >> Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the Public Cloud, to double your ARPU without massive CapEx expenditure. And I think the CSPs has always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network, I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our ARPU, why not? We should do that absolutely. >> You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave. Got to ride the wave or become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the Telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the Edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the Edge and that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. But, obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have, they're going to have to embrace Cloud Native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. >> Well, I think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically they haven't had this opportunity. Historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented, it's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. And this might be the, the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. >> I think that's an important point because you've got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets, right? Those guys are going to be around. >> You think, I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. And like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. >> Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you've got to move fast. >> Yeah. >> That's the other piece of it. >> Yeah. >> You got to change your business model. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, you got to be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are, but now they're looking at other options. >> That is a great example, John. It really is, because there's a company that can move fast, but the same time they compete, but the same time they add incremental value. >> And so here you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering, Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well containers do, will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building CapEx and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle, love to get your thoughts on this, because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, >> Yeah. >> Then you can, don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or, what's your thought, I mean. >> Yeah, I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco, right. There, I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit and start to focus, and we heard Amol talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right, yeah. >> Well, you've talking about that many times that you exhibit, you're right. If the conversation has been, has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's got to be going to be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, ah great. >> Yeah. >> Tick that box. Right, it's those value added services that you're talking about. And it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in, and creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper. >> Well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right? We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did it? >> Facebook does? >> Right, Facebook. But you know who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother even, your Telco. >> Yeah. >> You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really great experience. >> And by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Totogi and the investment hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing and the there's a good, there's a whole new team, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I want to hold that, we're going to meet tomorrow. I want to, I want to, leave that here. >> Stay in the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That, it's that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now trillion dollar valuations. >> Yeah. >> It's all about the data and the Telco's have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >> I think there's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise, siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them, and you certainly do it without, and we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight , it's useless, right? And so to Totogi, we announced the launch of Totogi, I'll get a little to Totogi plug in there, right. Totogi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve it would have been solved already. But I think the key is leveraging the Public Cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue, right. And you know, we've heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, Telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? >> Yeah. >> Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they're happy to give you more money. >> Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. But one thing I will say, this Mobile World Congress, is that we've been having a lot of fun here in CLOUD CITY. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You have a spring to your step. CLOUD CITY is beautiful, spectacular here. >> Yeah. >> Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. >> Well number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered in and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes the attendance is reduced. You know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth. We're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the Public Cloud. >> Yeah, the pandemic helped. >> I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's Awesome. >> Do you think that, do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line, struggled and then winners. >> Yeah. >> Big time tale wind, booming. Obviously the Zooms of the world. Telco's did well. They were up and running, business was good. You think they might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >> Yeah, I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation. We're digital Telco, we're digitally enabled. And I think the pandemic really tested this, right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store, in person, to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of Telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver sims, and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. >> Agile. >> Right, agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big wake up call. >> Telemedicine booming. >> So If you were in a digital business during the pandemic. In general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a Telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh-oh, if we don't move. >> I mean, I am not kidding right. As an ex-CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, >> Facts. >> Right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and 2. And I'm like, how are you doing business, like that? That's like the dark ages. >> Yeah, this is where the crypto guys got it right, with know your customer. >> Yeah, right. >> 'Cause they have the data. >> Well, they had to, they had to. >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of things that's going wrong on crypto, we don't want to, we could do a whole show on that. But Danielle great to have you drop by, obviously Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy, Patriot's fan. >> Yeah. >> Dave, we love him. >> Fantastic. >> Well, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging like the way things have been done in Telco. Kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl, oh, so. >> Well we are punk rock. They're rock and roll. >> Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten The Clash, right. Black Flag, right. I'm a little bit older than you. >> Bon Jovi's good. >> Right, we'll go with Bon Jovi. >> We like both of them. >> Accessible, right. >> Once's more conservative rock and roll still edgy. >> Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met him before. And so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk, so yeah. >> Yeah, he's going to be inspiration he'll talk space, SpaceX, >> Oh yeah. >> And possibly Starlink. >> Talking about the edge. >> Starlink, right. >> Starlink. >> I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites and I think that's really interesting for rural. For rural right in Telco, right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower, I think. I mean, that's an interesting idea right there, yeah. >> It's exciting, he's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming in and saying why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. >> Yeah. >> I think eventually the generation shifts in time. >> It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it, yeah. >> Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >> Awesome team. >> I'm excited to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is, so thank you so much, yeah. >> TheCUBE, theCUBE's rocking inside the CLOUD CITY. The streets of the CLOUD CITY are hustling and booming. >> Packed. >> Packed in here. All stuff, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Yep, thanks so much. >> Bon Jovi is here, we got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? >> Yeah, there it is. >> There it is, yeah. >> Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

>> Welcome back to Cube On Cloud. My name is Paul Gillin, enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE, and I'm pleased to now have as a guest on the show. Amit Zephyr, excuse me, general manager, vice president of business application platform at Google cloud. Amit is a formerly EVP and corporate officer for product development at Oracle cloud, 24 years at Oracle, and by my account a veteran of seven previous appearances on theCube. Amit welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Paul, it's always good to be back on theCube. >> Now you are... one of your big focus areas right now is on low-code and no-code. Of course this is a market that seems to be growing explosively. We often hear low code/no code used in the same breath as if they're the same thing. In fact, how are they different? >> I think it's a huge difference, now. I think industry started as low-code mode for many, many years. I mean, there were technologies, or tools provided for kind of helping developers be more productive that's what low-code was doing. It was not really meant, even though it was positioned for citizen developers it was very hard for a non technologist to really build application using low code. No-code is really meant as the word stands, no code. So there's really no coding, there's no understanding required about the underlying technology stack, or knowing how constructs works or how the data is laid out. All that stuff is kind of hidden and abstracted out from you. You are really focused as a citizen developer or a line of business user, in kind of delivering what your business application requirements are, and the business flows are, without having to know anything about writing any code. So you can build applications, you can build your interfaces and not have to learn anything about a single line of code. So that's really no-code and I think they getting to a phase now where the platforms have gotten much stronger and better where you can do very good productive applications without having to write a single line of code. So that's really the goal with no-code, and that's really the future in terms of how we will get more and more line of business users, or citizen developers to build applications they need for their day-to-day work. >> So when would you use one or the other? >> I think since low-code you would probably any developer has been around for eight, 10 years, if not longer where you extract out some of this stuff you can do some of the things in terms of not having to write some code where you have a lot of modules pre-built for you, and then when you want to mix a lot of changes, you go and drop into an ID and write some code or make some changes to a code. So you still get into that, and those are really focused towards semi-professional developers or IT in many cases or even developers who want to reduce the time required to start from, write and building an application. so it makes you much more productive. So if you are a really some semi-professional or you are a developer, you can either use use low-code to improve your productivity and not start from scratch. No-code is really used for folks who are really not interested in learning about coding, don't have any experience in it, and still want to be productive and build applications. And that's really when I would start with.. I would not give a low code to a citizen developer or a line of business user who has no experience with any coding. And that's not really.. It will only productive, They'll get frustrated and not deliver what you need, and not get anything out of it and many cases. >> Well, I've been around this industry long enough to remember fourth-generation languages and visual basic >> Yeah and the predecessors that never really caught on in a big way. I mean, they certainly had big audiences but, right now we're seeing 40, 50% annual market growth. Why is this market suddenly so hot? >> Yeah it's not a difference. I think that as you said, the 4G deal and I think a lot of those tools, even if you look at forms, and PLC and we kind of extracted out the technology and made it easier, but it was not very clear who they were targeting with that. They're still targeting the same developer audience. So the they never expanded the universe of users. It was same user base, just making it simpler for them. So, with those low-code tools, it never landed them getting more and more user base out of that. With no-code platforms, you are now expanding the user community. You are giving this capabilities to more and more users than a low-code tools could provide. That's why I think the growth is much faster. So if you find the right no-code platform, you will see a lot more adoption because you're solving a real problem, you are giving them a lot more capabilities and making the user productive without having to depend on IT in many cases, or having to wait for a lot of those big applications to be built for them even though they need it immediately. So I think that's why I think you're solving a real business problem and giving a lot more capabilities to users and no doubt the users love it and they start expanding the usage. It's very viral adoption in many cases after that. >> Historically the rap on these tools has been that, because they're typically interpreted, the performance is never going to be up to that of application written in C plus plus or something. Is that still the case? Is that a sort of structural weakness of no-code tools or is that changing? >> I think the early days probably not any more. I think if you look at what we are doing at Google Cloud for example, it's not interpreted, I mean, it does do a lot of heavy lifting underneath the covers, but, and you don't have to go into the coding part of it but it brings the whole Cloud platform with it, right? So the scalability, the security the performance, availability all that stuff is built into the platform. So it's not a tool, it's a platform. I think that's thing, the big difference. Most of the early days you will see a lot of these things as a tool, which you can use it, and there's nothing underneath the covers the run kinds are very weak, there's really not the full Cloud platform provided with it, but I think the way we seeing it now and over the last many years, what we have done and what we continue to do, is to bring the power of the Cloud platform with it. So you're not missing out on the scalability, the performance, security, even the compliance and governance is built in. So IT is part of the process even though they might not build an application themselves. And that's where I think the barriers have been lifted. And again, it's not a solution for everything also. I'm not saying that this would go in, if you want to build a full end to end e-commerce site for example, I would not use a no-code platform for it, because you're going to do a lot more heavy lifting, you might want to integrate with a lot of custom stuff, you might build a custom experience. All that kind of stuff might not be that doable, but there are a lot of use cases now, which you can deliver with a platform like what we've been building at Google cloud. >> So, talk about what you're doing at Google cloud. Do you have a play in both the low-code and the no-code market? Do you favor one over the other? >> Yeah no I think we've employed technologies and services across the gamut of different requirements, right? I mean, our goal is not that we will only address one market needs and we'll ignore the rest of the things required for our developer community. So as you know, Google cloud has been very focused for many years delivering capabilities for developer community. With technology we deliver the Kubernetes and containers tend to flow for AI, compute storage all that kind of stuff is really developer centric. We have a lot of developers build applications on it writing code. They have abstracted some of this stuff and provide a lot of low-code technologies like Firebase for building mobile apps, the millions of apps mobile apps built by developers using Firebase today that it does abstract out the technology. And then you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting yourself. So we do provide a lot of low-code tooling as well. And now, as we see the need for no-code especially kind of empowering the line of business user and citizen developers, we acquired a company called AppSheet, early 2020, and integrated that as part of our Google Cloud Platform as well as the workspace. So the G suite, the Gmail, all the technology all the services we provide for productivity and collaboration. And allowed users to now extend that collaboration capabilities by adding a workflow, and adding another app experience as needed for a particular business user needs. So that's how we looking at it like making sure that we can deliver a platform for spectrum of different use cases. And get that flexibility for the end user in terms of whatever they need to do, we should be able to provide as part of a Google Cloud Platform now. >> So as far as Google Cloud's positioning, I mean you're number three in the market you're growing but not really changing the distance between you and Microsoft for what public information we've been able to see in AWS. In Microsoft you have a company that has a long history with developers and of development tools and really as is that as a core strength do you see your low-code/no-code strategy as being a way to make up ground on them? >> Yeah, I think that the way to look at the market, and again I know the industry analyst and the market loves to do rankings in this world but, I think the Cloud business is probably big enough for a lot of vendors. I mean, this is growing as the amazing pace as you know. And it is becoming, it's a large investment. It takes time for a lot of the vendors to deliver everything they need to. But today, if you look at a lot of the net new growth and lot of net new customers, we seeing a huge percentage of share coming to Google Cloud, right? And we continue to announce some of the public things and the results will come out again every quarter. And we tried to break out the Cloud segment in the Google results more regularly so that people get an idea of how well they're doing in the Cloud business. So we are very comfortable where we are in terms of our growth in terms of our adoption, as well as in terms of how we delivering all the value our customers require, right? So, note out one of the parts we want to do is make sure that we have a end to end offering for all of the different use cases customers require and no-code is one of the parts we want to deliver for our customers as well. We've done very good capabilities and our data analytics. We do a lot of work around AIML, industry solutions. You look at the adoption we've had around a lot of those platform and Hybrid and MultiCloud. It's been growing very, very fast. And this one more additional things we are going to do, so that we can deliver what our customers are asking for. We're not too worried about the rankings we are worried about really making sure we're delivering the value to our customers. And we're seeing that it doesn't end very well. And if you look at the numbers now, I mean the growth rate is higher than any other Cloud vendor as well as be seeing a huge amount of demand been on Google Cloud as well. >> Well, not to belabor the point, but naturally your growth rate is going to be higher if you're a third of the market, I mean, how important is it to you to break into, to surpass the number two? How important are rankings within the Google Cloud team, or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about... we are not focused on ranking, or any of that stuff typically, I think we were worried about making sure customers are satisfied, and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we're signing up, a lot of the large deals they didn't... do we need to look at the announcement we'd made over the last year, has been tremendous momentum around that. Lot of large banks, lot of large telecommunication companies large enterprises, name them. I think all of them are starting to kind of pick up Google Cloud. So if you follow that, I think that's really what is satisfying for us. And the results are starting to show that growth and the momentum. So we can't cover the gap we had in the previous... Because Google Cloud started late in this market. So if Cloud business grows by accumulating revenue over many years. So I cant look at the history, I'm looking at the future really. And if you look at the growth for the new business and the percentage of the net new business, we're doing better than pretty much any other vendor out there. >> And you said you were stepping up your reference to disclose those numbers. Was that what I heard you say? >> I think every quarter you're seeing that, I think we started announcing our revenue and growth numbers, and we started to do a lot of reporting about our Cloud business and that you will start, you see more and more and more of that regularly from Google now. >> Let's get back just briefly to the low-code/no-code discussion. A lot of companies looking at how to roll this out right now. You've got some big governance issues involved here. If you have a lot of citizen developers you also have the potential for chaos. What advice are you giving customers using your tools for how they should organize around citizen development? >> Yeah, no, I think no doubt. If this needs to be adopted by enterprise you can't make it a completely rogue or a completely shadow based development capabilities. So part of our no-code platform, one thing you want to make sure that this is enterprise ready, it has many aspects required for that. One is compliance making sure you have all the regulatory things delivered for data, privacy, security. Second is governance. A lot of the IT departments want to make sure who's using this platform? How are they accessing it? Are they getting the right security privileges associated with that? Are we giving them the right permissions? So in our a no-code platform we adding all this compliance, and governance regulatory stuff as part of our underlying platform, even though the end user might not have to worry about it the person who's building applications shouldn't have to think about it, but we do want to give controls to IT as needed by the large enterprises. So that is a big part of how we deliver this. We're not thinking about this as like go and build it, and then we write it once you have to do things for your enterprise, and then get it to do it again and again. Because then it just a waste of time and you're not getting the benefit of the platform at all. So we bringing those things together where we have a very easy to use, very powerful no-code platform with the enterprise compliance as well as governance built into that platform as well. And that is really resonating. If you look at a lot of the customers we're working with they do require that and they get excited about it as well as the democratizing of all of their line of business users. They're very happy that they're getting that kind of a platform, which they can scale from and deliver the productivity required. >> Certainly going to make businesses look very different in the future. And speaking of futures, It is January it's time to do predictions. What are your predictions (laughs) for the Cloud for this year? >> No I think that I mean no doubt cloud has become the center for pretty much every company now, I think the digital transformation especially with COVID, has greatly accelerated. We have seen many customers now who are thinking of pieces of their platform, pieces of their workflow or business to be digitized. Now that's trying to do it for all of it. So the one part which we see for this year is the need for more and more of efficiency in the industry are verticalized business workflows. It's not just about providing a plain vanilla Cloud Platform but also providing a lot more content and business details and business workflows by industry segments. So we've been doing a lot of work and we expect a huge amount of that to be becoming more and more core part of our offering as well as what customers are asking for. Where you might need things around say know your customer kind of workflow for financial services, Telehealth for healthcare. I mean, every industry has specific things like demand management and demand forecasting for retail but making that as part of a Cloud service not just saying, hey, I have compute storage network. I have some kind of a platform go add it and go and build what you want for your industry needs, We want to provide them that all those kinds of business processes and content for those industries as well. So we identified six, seven, industries. We see that as a kind of the driving factor for our Cloud growth, as well as helping our customers be much more productive as well as seeing the value of Cloud being much more realistic for them versus just a replacement for the data center. I think that's really the big shift in 21 I think. And I think that will make a big difference for all the companies who are really trying to digitize and be in forefront of the needs as their customers require in the future. >> Of course all of this accelerated by the pandemic and all of the specialized needs that have emerged from that. >> And I think the bond, which is important as well, I think as you know, I mean, everybody talks about AIML as like a big thing. No doubt AIML is an important element of it, but if you make that usable and powerful through this kind of workflows and business processes, as well as particular business applications, I think you see a lot more interest in using it than just a plain manila framework or just technology for the technology sake. So we try to bring the power of AI and ML into this business and industry applications, where we have a lot of good technologists at Google who knows how to use all these things. You wanted to bring that into those applications and platforms >> Exciting times ahead. Amit Zavery thank you so much for joining us. You look just as comfortable as I would expect someone to be who is doing his eighth Cube interview. Thanks for joining us. >> (laughing) Thanks for having me, Paul. >> That's it for this segment of Cube On Cloud, I'm Paul Gillin, stay tuned. (soft music)