(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation run welcome to this cube conversation I'm John Fourier with the cube host the cube here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of covin 19 we're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio we got a great guest here from Google we'll Grannis managing director head of the office of the CTO with Google cloud thanks for coming on we'll appreciate you you spend some time with me Oh John's great to be with you and as you said in these times more important than ever to stay connected yeah and I'm really glad you came on because a couple things one congratulations to Google cloud for the success you guys had so a lot of big wins under your belt both on the momentum side on the business side but also on the technical side meat is available now for folks anthos is doing very very well partner ecosystem is developing got some nice used cases in vertical marker so I want to get in and unpack with you but really the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before was ready for it and that is the at scale challenge that the Cova 19 has shown everyone we're seeing you know the future has been pulled forward we're living in a virtualized environment it's funny to say that virtualization has a server virtualization is a tech term but that enabled a lot of things we're living in a virtualized world now because we have to but this is gonna set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many many years but now as a provider of Google cloud you guys have to operate at scale you have and now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal and so you guys have had some successes I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes I mean everyone's at home that's a disruption that was unfortunate whether it's under provisioning VPNs NIT to a surface area for security to just work and play and activities are now confined so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue what's your take on all this well I mean to your point just now the fact that we can have this conversation we can have it blue idli from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we say and for Google Cloud this is not a new thing and for Google this is not a new thing for Google cloud we add a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments and so many companies that we've been working with they've already been on the path to operating an environments that are digital that are fluid and you think about the cloud that's one of the great benefits loud is that scalability income with the business demand and it also helps the scale situation without having to you know do the typical what you need to find the procurement people we need to find server vendors we need to get the storage lined up it really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unfortunate situations whether that's customer demand or you know in this case the global endemic yeah one of the things I want to get in with you I want to get you have explained your job is there because I see Google's got a new CEO now for over a year Tom's Korean came from Oracle knows the enterprise up and down you had Diane Greene before that again another enterprise leader Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google cloud to be very enterprise centric you guys have great momentum and and this is a world where cloud native is going to be required I mean everyone now sees it the the tide has been pulled out there everything's exposed all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint it's kind of exposed and so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying double down on that let's kill that we don't want to pay that supplier they're not core to our business this is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud native reality whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever they're gonna have to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweek to come out of this crisis so it's gonna be very cloud native this is a big deal can you share your your reaction to that absolutely and so as you pointed out there are kind of two worlds that exist right now companies that are moving to become more digital and transform and you mentioned the momentum I mean in Google cloud just over the last year greater than 50 percent revenue growth and you know and I greater than 10 billion dollar run rate business and adding customers that are really quick flip you know including you know just yesterday slung and you know along the way Telecom Italia Major League Baseball Vodafone Lowe's Wayfarer Activision Blizzard's so this is not you this transformation and this digitization is not just for you know a few or just for any one industry it's happening across the board and then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across you know Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it you know already has a little bit of a head start of this transformation so you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation and then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider and you know Shopify is a really good example of how seeing you know drastic uptick in demand they're able to responding you know roughly half a million shops up and running you know during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or you can get online well what is your role at Google I see you're the managing director title is managing director ahead of the office of the CTO we've seen these roles before you know head of this CTO you're off see technical role is it partnering with the CEO on strategy is it you kick tire kicking new things are you overseeing any strategic initiatives what is what is your role so a little bit of all those things combined into one so I I spent the first couple decades of my career on the other side of the in the non-tech you know community no in the enterprise where we were still building technology and we were still you know digitally minded but not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley and so you know spending a couple decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem and when I came to Google five years ago yeah selfishly it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side and I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted the leverage that technology for problems that I was solving whether it was aerospace public sector manufacturing what-have-you and so it's been great it's the it's the role of a lifetime I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal and we do two things one is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path loud and 2 we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming we learned so much John about what we need to build as an organization so it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation yeah and I could I can attest that we didn't watching you guys from the from day one hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know so you getting the enterprise chops and staff and getting you seeing some progress I have to ask you though because I first of all a big fan of Google at the scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now the there was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers it was goes along the lines like this I want to be like Google because you guys had a great network you had large-scale you've had all these things that were like awesome and then they realized what we can't be like Google we don't have that sorry we don't have large-scale data centers so there was a little bit of a translation and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand and you guys had since realized that you didn't it wasn't just people gonna bang your doorstep and be adopting Google cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google then leveraging Google in their business as they transform so as you guys have moved from that what's changed they still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security got a great network you got that scale and it prizes a little bit slower to adopt that which you're focused on now what is that the story there because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing okay Google now understands me they know I'm not as fast as Google they got super great people we are training our people we're treating you know retrain them this is the transformation that they're going through so you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly but now they need to level up how do you respond to that well a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting you know over the last year plus and it comes in kind of three very operation or technical pillars that I think the first we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing themes you know three times what they were before because we need to be there we need to be in those situations we need to hear from the customer mean to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve so we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem we actually get very visceral understanding of what trying to solve but you have to be there the game that empathy and that understanding and so one is showing up and that you know has been mobilizing a much larger engine the customer facing out personnel from Google second it's also been really important that we evolve our own you know just as Google brought sre principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out for the world we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience so you've seen you know that evolution under on this as well with cloud changing you know moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience that white glove experience that our customers get our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through and then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across be priority industries for us and you know that's again that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industry and then developing the solutions that progress those companies so again not this isn't about taking you know a principle and trying to apply it blindly this is about adding that connection that really deep connections to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company the best support them over a long period some of these deals we've been announcing these are 10-year five-year multi-year strategic partnerships they go across the campus of you know all of you and you know those are the really exciting scaled partnerships but you know to your point you can't just take SR re from Google and apply it to company X but you can take things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of sree and you can apply them over the course of developing technology collaborating innovating together yeah and I think cloud native is gonna be a key thing and yeah I think what it's just my opinion but I think one of those situations where the better mousetrap will win if your cloud native and you have api's and you have the kind of services that people will will know beaded to your doorstep so I have to ask you with Thomas Korean on board obviously we've been following his career as well at Oracle he knows what he's doing comes in to Google it's being built out it's like a rocket ship at this point what bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers what's the if you have to boil it down to Google clouds big bet what is the bet on the technology side and what's the bet on the business side sure well I've already mentioned you know I've already Internet's you know the big strategy that Thomas is brought in and you know that is the that's again those three pillars making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization and making sure that we transitioned from you know a typical support mindset into more of customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries if I was to add you know more color to that I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving as he's been converting us to a partner LED is and a partner led organization and this means a lot of investments in large mobile systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte but this also means that like the Splunk announcement from yesterday that isn't just the cell >> this is a partnership it goes deep across go-to-market product and self do and then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a SATA or a rack space for migrations and as a result the already we're seeing really incredible lifts so for example nearly 200 percent year-over-year increase in partner influenced revenue Google cloud and almost like a 13 X year-over-year increase in new customers one-bite partners that's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper scale does it's just saying you mentioned Splunk I want to get that in a second but I also notice there was a deal with Dallas group on ECM subscriptions which kind of leads me into the edge piece there's a real edge component here with Google cloud and I think I'd Akashi edge with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google Network I mean a lot of the scuttlebutt around the valley and the industry is you know Google's got an amazing network store a software-defined networking is gonna be a hot program programmable area so you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security these are killer areas that need innovation could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree I'm out see with you have a killer Network and you're leveraging it what's the can you just give some insight into what's going on those those two areas network and then the edge yeah I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of an of the progression of cloud generally what do I mean by that you know started out as like get everything to the data center you know we kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and they could redistribute out the results and you know drive the latency down over time so we span the portfolio of applications and services that would be relevant over time and what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution >> more of a layered architecture and that layered architecture includes you know poor data centers that includes CDN capacity points of presence that includes edge and just in that list of customers over the last year I there were at least three or four telcos in there and you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from asks in recent announcements I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about how can we pick big technology like anthos for example and how could we orchestrate workloads create a common control play and you know manage services across those three shells if you will of the architecture and that's a that's a very strategic and important area for us and I think generally for the cloud industry easy it was expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens and you can look at you know Google Phi you look at stadia you can look at examples within Google they go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of creature all right so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google both groups and Microsoft well all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side that's a tailwind I get that but as it continues we're expecting post kovat some you know redistribution of development dollars and projects whether it's IT going cloud native or whatever new workloads we are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge and this is gonna create some lift so I want to get your thoughts on you guys strategy with go-to market as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with ai and data there seems to be a trend towards the vertical ization of whether its sales and go to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct value in these verticals so it really seems to be a I won't say ratification but in a way that seems to be the norm whether you come into a market you have specialization but the date is there so apps can be more agile do you are you guys seeing that and is that something that you guys are considering from from an organization standpoint and how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers yeah I I bring this to and where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well which is we've moved from you know here are storage offers for everybody and here's you know basic infrastructure everybody and now we've said how can we make sure that we have solutions that are tailored with very specific problems that customers are trying to solve and we're getting to the point now where your performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to compose very specific solutions and if you think about the substrate that has to be there you know we mentioned you have to have some really great partners and you have to have you know roadmap that is focused on priority solution area so for example at Google cloud you know we're very focused on six priority vertical areas so retail financial services health care manufacturing and industrials health care life sciences public sector and you know as a result of being very focused in those areas we can make more target investments and also align our entire go-to-market system and our entire partner ecosystem ecosystem around those beers specific priority areas so for example we worked with SATA and HDA Healthcare Rob very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal Berko vat19 and that's to help better inform communities and hospitals we can use looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance on nonprofit and that helps monitor patient system symptoms and risk factors so you know we're using you know a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem - you know ferry tailored solutions you know you can also look at I mentioned Shopify earlier that's another great example of how in retail they can use something like Google meat inherent reliability scalability security to connect their employees during these interesting times but then they can also use GCP at Google cloud platform to scale out and as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers for their shops they can rapidly deploy to your point and those you know those solutions and you know how the database performs and how those tiers perform you that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams yeah one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the kovat is that you know when the world gets back to normal it'll be hybrid and it'll be a hybrid between reality not physical and 100% virtual hybrid and that's going to impact events to media to everything every vertical will be impacted and I want to point out the Splunk team bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk to you and in context to Splunk has a cloud they got a great slogan data for every everywhere everywhere dated to everywhere I think it is but the cube we have a cloud every company will have a cloud scale at some level will progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data how are you guys powering those clouds because I think the Splunk deal is interesting their partner their stock price was up out on the news of the deal a nice bump their first Blunk shout out to those guys but they're a data company now they're cross-platform but they're not Google but they have a cloud so you know saying so they need to play in all the clouds but they need infrastructure they need support so how do you guys talk to that customer and that says hey the next pandemic that comes the next crisis that's going to cause some either social disruption or workflow disruption or work supply chain disruption I need to be agile I need have full cloud scale and so I need to talk to Google what do you say to them what's the pitch and as does a Splunk deal Samir some of those capabilities or tie that together for us the spunk deal and how it relates to sure for example proof themselves for the future sorry for example with the cloud deal you take a look at what Google is already really good at data processing at scale log analytics you take a look at what Splunk is doing you know with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest it a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google cloud not only they get highly performant infrastructure but they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools data analytics tools machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhance services so not just about acity going up and down your periods of band but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers and we see that you know it's a really big trend and you know this gets it something you know John a little bit bigger which is the two views of the world and we talked about very tailored focused solutions Splunk is an example of making a very methodical approach to a partnership developing a solution specifically you know with partners and you know in this case Splunk on the security event management side but we're always going to provide our data processing platform our infrastructure for companies across many different industries and I think that addresses one part of the topic which is you know how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing this deals back to the foundational elements of like AI infrastructure as a service and elasticity and we're gonna provide a platform infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of you know it's hard to forecast and/or demand may rise and fall you know in very interesting ways but then there's going to be funds where you know we we because they're not a necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution so for example like in the oil and gas industry we don't develop custom AI ml solutions the facility upstream extraction for example but what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out the but I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and so classic and able mint model where you're enabling your platform for your customers okay so I got to ask the question I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon you know has their own sass stuff but but really more of an tend the better products usually on the ecosystem side you guys have some killer sass cheap tree-sweet where customer if we use the g sqweep really deeply we also use some BigTable as well I want to build a cloud we have a cloud cube cloud but you guys have meat so I want to build my product on Google cloud how do I know you're not going to compete with me do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between you know the pure Google services which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are gonna be great markets potentially huge markets that are out there well this is the power of partnership I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas is made has been developing a sense of partners and it kind of blurs the line between traditional what you would call a customer what you would call a partner and so having a really strong sense of which industries were in which we prioritize Plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where you know our customers and partners want to add that value that's that's the foundational that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a you know here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle but one of the things Thomas has also done in the East rata jia is has been to make sure that you know the Google cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google and also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than you know having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank for example well I got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go I know you got some other things going I really appreciate you digging the time sharing this great insight and updates as a builder you've been on the other side of the table now you're at Google heading up the CTO I was working with Thomas understanding them go to market across the board and the product mix as you talk to customers and they're thinking the good customers are thinking hey you know I want to come out of this Cove in on an upward trajectory and I want to use this opportunity to reset and realign for the future what advice do you have for those enterprises there could be small medium sized enterprises to the full large big guys and obviously cloud native we talked some of that already but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize as some things are now exposed the collaboration the tooling the scale all these things are out there what have you seen and what advice would you give a CX o or C so or leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing how they should plan execute and move forward well I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job which is interacting with the c-suite and boards of you know companies and partners around the world and they're obviously very interested to learn or you know get a data point from someone at Google and the the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions out one collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is and I think you're seeing this right now across every industry and it you know whether you're a small medium-sized business or you're a large company if the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways to share information rapidly to do it securely with high reliability that that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to you know applications to build services to enable actually succeed in production and over the long haul is that culture of innovation and collaboration so absolutely number one is you're having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective a collaboration perspective and the and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else second piece of the you know advice especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty is where can you buy down uncertainty with vets that aren't you know that art you can you can learn without a high penalty and this is a this is why cloud I think is really really you know finding you know super scale it was our it was already on the rise but what you're seeing now and you know as you've linked back to me during this conversation we're seeing the same thing which is a high increase in demand of let's get this implemented now how can we do this more this is you know clearly one way to move through uncertainty and so look for those opportunities I'll give you a really good example mainframes one of the classic workloads of the you know on-premise enterprise and you know there's all sorts of there are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes but a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have performant workload maybe you start chunking at a part and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than you know just one thing but there are a lot of years and investments in a workload that might run on a mainframe and that's a perfect example of out you know biting off too much it might be a little bit dangerous but there is a path to and so for example like we brought in a company called cornerstone to help with those migrations but we also have you know partnerships with you know data center providers and others globally from us our own built infrastructure to allow even you know a smaller stuff per site or more like post proximity location in the workload it's great you know everything had as a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a Internet digitally connected world we're living in you know the notion of a digital business was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years but I think now kovat 19 you're seeing the virtual or digital it's really digital but you know virtual reality augmented reality is going to come fast to really get people to go WOW virtual virtualization of my business so you know we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke but it's really more about okay this is about a new world a new opportunity to think about when we come out of this we're gonna still go back to our physical world now the hybrid now kicks in this kind of connects all aspects of business in every verticals not leahey I'm targeting like the this industry so there might be unique solutions in those industries but now the world is virtualized it's connected it's a digital environment these are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a fringe lunatic fringe idea but now it's brought mainstream this is gonna be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and app application software this is gonna be we think a big thing what's your reaction to that which your based on your experience what do you see happening do you agree with it and you have any thing you might want to add maybe you know one kind of philosophical statement and then one more you know I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration first from a philosophical standpoint the greater the crisis the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get and so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing you know with all of the customers that I work with directly plus our partners you know Googlers everybody's rallying together to think about this world differently and so to your point you know a shift in mindset you know there are there are very few moments where you get this pronounced a change and everyone is going through it all at the same time so that creates a you know an opportunity a scenario where the old thinking new strategies creativity you know bringing people in in new ways collaborating a new way and offer a lot of benefits more you know practically speaking and from my experience you know building technology for a couple decades you this is a it has an interesting parallel to you know building like tightly coupled really large maybe monoliths versus micro services and debate around you know do we build small things that can be reconfigured and you know built out by others or built on by others more easily or do we credit Golden Path and a more understood you know development environment and I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better is that's what's still a raging debate and I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver the customer that one of our customers wants to deliver to their cost and thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in its what its power its core functions and then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions that is a you know that's a real opportunity and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where you know if you want to run across multiple clouds yeah this is the anthos conversation where you know recently g8 you know a global scale platform you know multi cloud platform that's a pretty big moment in technology and that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking you know an application service and making it real well I think you're right on the money I think philosophically it's a flashpoints opportunity I think that's going to prove to be accelerating gonna see people win faster and lose faster you can see that quickly happen but to your point about the monolith versus you know service or decoupled based systems I think we allow a live in a world where it's a systems of you now you can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems that's distributed computing I think this is that the trend it's a system it's not one thing or the other so I think the debate will continue just like you know VI versus Emacs we know you don't know right so you know if people gonna have this debate but it's just if you think about as a system the use case defines the architecture that's the beautiful thing about the cloud so great insight I really appreciate it and how's everything going over there Google Cloud you got meat that's available how's your staff what's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google cloud team tell us what's going on over there people still working working remote how's everyone doing well as you can as you can tell from my scenario here my my backdrop yes still hard at work and we take this as a huge responsibility you know these moments is a huge responsibility because there are you know educators loved ones medical professionals you know critical life services that run on services that Google provides and so I can tell you were humbled by the opportunity to provide you know the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help and I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investment in technology to help or people that really gets at the root of who we are so while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality what really fires us up and what really a chart is because is that this is a moment where what we do really well is very very important for the world in every geo in every vertical in every use case and every solution type so we're just take we're taking that responsibility very seriously and at the same time we're trying to make sure that you know all of our teams as well as all the teams that we work with our customers and partners are making it a human moment not just the technology moment well congratulations and thanks for spending the time great insight will appreciate will Grannis Managing Director head of Technology office of the CTO at Google cloud this certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time which is DevOps large-scale role of data and technology now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits and thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers so thank you so much for all that way effort and thanks for spending the time here in the cube conversation appreciate it thanks for having John okay I'm John Farah here in Palo Alto Studios for remote cube conversation with Google cloud get in the update really looking at the future as it unfolds we are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level cloud native and change not only the tech industry but society I'm John Fourier thanks for watching

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back they're ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been here on before Mohit ladee is the CEO and co-founder of Thousand Eyes mode great to see you great to see you as well as pretty to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with Thousand Eyes tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background as a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's going to be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the Internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was gonna go to that next step in terms of the internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm here I think I think Salesforce was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function which just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of his ability to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move to cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're done great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight too it's an it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take the 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah an important public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructure is that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to until every jamel and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify it so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques to get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I've just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so I didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data that's a big difference to make it actual it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they are in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's what we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so ya fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong yeah I think I think you guys you guys crystallize very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yep right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the Internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack T or data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running it because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so I see you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you all right so you've got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google ad your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as Internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so in just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting it where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimising and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com service like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and read all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straight forward if you know what you are trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan software-defined man in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T may connect to where I is in this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talked about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants a digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud so one can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the modern when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our Palo Alto studio is having a cube conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a cube conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been around before Mohit lad he is the CEO and co-founder of thousand ice mode great to see you great to see you as well thrilled to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with thousand ice tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background is a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on Internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's gonna be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was going to go to that next step in terms of the Internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes so we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm curious force was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function with just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of visibility to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move the cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're run great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight to its and it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah and a point in public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructures that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation in what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the Internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to leverage ml and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get in get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques you get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I was just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so they didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data makes a big difference to make it action it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they're in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data of the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta or they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's why we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so yeah fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the Internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong I think I think you guys you guys crystallized very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yeah right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack to your data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running in because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so easy you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you alright so you got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk to people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google as your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so it just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting at where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimizing and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com sir is like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and let all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straightforward if you know what you're trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right as now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan Software Defined one in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is Internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T might connect to Verizon this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese Internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talk about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants the digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud someone can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the MA when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always a fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our power out the studio's having a cute conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Narrator: Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its Ecosystem partners. (soft music) >> Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Medias coverage of theCUBE, here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. We had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack the project, where this show itself is going. First of all John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here, city I fell in love with last time I came here, and let's get into the show itself, too. >> Sure, sure, I mean the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year, or a couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller, and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions, have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack, or about to run OpenStack, or upgrading their OpenStack, or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talk to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So, I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue and a beautiful city allows for a really productive community-oriented event, so that's been great. >> Alright, so John come on, on the analysis segment we're not allow to pull any punches. Attendance, absolutely is down. Three years ago when we were here it was around 5500. Mark Collier, on our opening segment, said there was about 2600. But two-year point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here that was like, "Oh boy, nobody's here, "it's not goin' on." Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time, but why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about Edge Computing. Hot topic, we've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in Containers. Containers for more than three years, been a topic conversation. There's so many other sessions of people digging in. The line you've used a couple a time is the people here are people that have mortgages. In a good way, it means these are jobs, these are not them, "Oh, I heard about "this cool new thing, and I'm going to "go check out beautiful Vancouver." Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others, and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome, but there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversation. Many of the people we've talked to, even if they're not the biggest OpenStack fans, they're like, "But our customers are using this in a lot of different ways." Let's talk about OpenStack. Where is it, where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? >> Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in, from outside the community there was a lot of conversation, even backchannel, like why are you going to OpenStack Summit? What's going on there, is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project, or where it is on the hype cycle. In terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. At this point OpenStack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution, seems to be mature. Seems to be inside every Telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. People who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged OpenStack now. That seems stable. What was interesting here is, that that doesn't speak to the health overall, and the history of, or the future of the project itself, the foundation, the Summit, I think those are separate questions. You know, the infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, this show is not just about OpenStack now. It's about Containers, it's broadening the scope of these people informally known as infrastructure operators, to the application level as well. >> Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more, some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist. Been here for almost every single one of the OpenStack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable cloud with OpenStack but it's like if some of the big China Telecom, big China cloud companies. Oracle and IBM have lots of OpenStack, in what they do, and yes there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big used case. We had some Canonical customers talking about Edge as in a used case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. If I talk, kind of the typical enterprise, or definitely going the SNE piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have OpenStack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, "Oh, I had my VMware environment "and I want to go from virtualization "to private cloud" OpenStack is not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that, and we'll be talking to them more about that today. Randy Bias is the other one, take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the Foundation. He's in the networking space now, and he says even though he's not a cheerleader for OpenStack, he's like, "Why am I here? "That's where my customers are." >> Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned. AWS, Google, et cetera, but it's not top of mind for a lot of these folks, and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on, kind of, the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit. Red Hat, with their story, and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talked public cloud for folks. Then they cross-cloud, hybrid-cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. I think basically, kind of maybe, depends on the approach of the different players in the market, Stu. I know you've been talkin' to different folks about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like, Margaret Dawson at Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid-cloud works because here, I hate to say it's, some oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive. You're renting, it's always going to be more. It's like, well no, come on, let's understand. There's lot of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together, I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though John, OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So, Kata Containers, something that was announced last year, and we're talking about there's Edge, there's a new CI/CD tool, Zuul, which is now fully under the project. Yes, joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there's only Zuul. There are actually, there's another open-source project named Zuul too, so boy, how many CI/CD tools are out there? We've got two different, unrelated, projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations, if this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say, the big player in this space is Linux Foundation which includes CNCF. >> That's a good one. I mean, in some sense like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking. Just growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The Foundation is global in scope and continues to run this. I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of this cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF, you know, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CNCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab-bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CNCF either. I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. >> Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa-Marie Namphy who is an OpenStack Ambassador. She holds the meat up in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud-native and its about all these things. So like, Kubernetes is front and center whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, "Oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack." That's still the dynamic here was, "Oh, we go great together." Well, sometimes thou dost protest too much. Kubranetes doesn't need OpenStack, OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this Container, cloud-native Kubranetes world. There's lots of other places we can learn about Kubranetes. It is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero-sum game. There's absolutely lots, then we have, I actually was real impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility, and not just people that were on the keynote stage. Not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since very early in the alphabet, now we're at queens. >> Right. >> Anything more from the customers or that Container, Kubranetes dynamic that you want to cover? >> Sure, well I mean just that, you know, Containers at least, Containers are everywhere here. So, I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project, after this week, than before. I think I can constantly look people in the eye and say that. The interesting thing for me though, coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth, and new startups, and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer basis is finite. It's not growing at 100% a year. Sometimes the press has a hard time covering that. Analysts have a hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already, there's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self-identified. >> Alright, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah. Big thank you to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for years. Six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor, Red Hat, had some great customers. Talked about this piece, and kind of we talk about it's practically Red Hat month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks, all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage in the past as well as where we'll be. Hit John Troyer, J. Troyer, on Twitter or myself, Stu, on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here. Thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and of all of us. Check out all the interviews. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we're at the mill pedis at an interesting event is called the auto tech council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event so a lot of talk about autonomous vehicles so it's a lot of elements to autonomous vehicles this is just one small piece of it it's about mapping and navigation and we're excited to have with us our first guest again and give us a background of this whole situation just Derick Curtin and he's the founder and chairman of the auto tech council so first up there welcome thank you very much good to be here absolutely so for the folks that aren't familiar what is the auto tech council autofit council is a sort of a club based in Silicon Valley where we have gathered together some of the industry's largest OMS om is mean car makers you know of like Rio de Gono from France and a variety of other ones they have offices here in Silicon Valley right and their job is to find innovation you find that Silicon Valley spark and take it back and get it into cars eventually and so what we are able to do is gather them up put them in a club and route a whole bunch of Silicon Valley startups and startups from other places to in front of them in a sort of parade and say these are some of the interesting technologies of the month so did they reach out for you did you see an opportunity because obviously they've all got the the Innovation Centers here we were at the Ford launch of their innovation center you see that the tagline is all around is there too now Palo Alto and up and down the peninsula so you know they're all here so was this something that they really needed an assist with that something opportunity saw or was it did it come from more the technology side to say we needed I have a new one to go talk to Raja Ford's well it's certainly true that they came on their own so they spotted Silicon Valley said this is now relevant to us where historically we were able to do our own R&D build our stuff in Detroit or in Japan or whatever the cases all of a sudden these Silicon Valley technologies are increasingly relevant to us and in fact disruptive to us we better get our finger on that pulse and they came here of their own at the time we were already running something called the telecom Council Silicon Valley where we're doing a similar thing for phone companies here so we had a structure in place that we needed to translate that into beyond modem industry and meet all those guys and say listen we can help you we're going to be a great tool in your toolkit to work the valley ok and then specifically what types of activities do you do with them to execute division you know it's interesting when we launched this about five years ago we're thinking well we have telecommunication back when we don't have the automotive skills but we have the organizational skills what turned out to be the cases they're not coming here the car bakers and the tier 1 vendors that sell to them they're not coming here to study break pad material science and things like that they're coming to Silicon Valley to find the same stuff the phone company two years ago it's lookin at least of you know how does Facebook work in a car out of all these sensors that we have in phones relate to automotive industry accelerometers are now much cheaper because of reaching economies of scale and phones so how do we use those more effectively hey GPS is you know reach scale economies how do we put more GPS in cars how do we provide mapping solutions all these things you'll set you'll see and sound very familiar right from that smartphone industry in fact the thing that disrupts them the thing that they're here for that brought them here and out of out of defensive need to be here is the fact that the smartphone itself was that disruptive factor inside the car right right so you have events like today so gives little story what's it today a today's event is called the mapping and navigation event what are people who are not here what's what's happening well so every now and then we pick a theme that's really relevant or interesting so today is mapping and navigation actually specifically today is high definition mapping and sensors and so there's been a battle in the automotive industry for the autonomous driving space hey what will control an autonomous car will it be using a map that's stored in memory onboard the car it knows what the world looked like when they mapped it six months ago say and it follows along a pre-programmed route inside of that world a 3d model world or is it a car more likely with the Tesla's current they're doing where it has a range of sensors on it and the sensors don't know anything about the world around the corner they only know what they're sensing right around them and they drive within that environment so there's two competing ways of modeling a 3d world around autonomous car and I think you know there was a battle looking backwards which one is going to win and I think the industry has come to terms with the fact the answer is both more everyday and so today we're talking about both and how to infuse those two and make better self-driving vehicles so for the outsider looking in right I'm sure they get wait the mapping wars are over you know Google Maps what else is there right but then I see we've got TomTom and meet a bunch of names that we've seen you know kind of pre pre Google Maps and you know shame on me I said the same thing when Google came out with a cert I'm like certain doors are over who's good with so so do well so Eddie's interesting there's a lot of different angles to this beyond just the Google map that you get on your phone well anything MapQuest what do you hear you moved on from MapQuest you print it out you're good together right well that's my little friends okay yeah some people written about some we're burning through paper listen the the upshot is that you've MapQuest is an interesting starting board probably first it's these maps folding maps we have in our car there's a best thing we have then we move to MapQuest era and $5,000 Sat Navs in some cars and then you might jump forward to where Google had kind of dominate they offered it for free kicked you know that was the disruptive factor one of the things where people use their smartphones in the car instead of paying $5,000 like car sat-nav and that was a long-running error that we have in very recent memory but the fact of the matter is when you talk about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles now you need a much higher level of detail than TURN RIGHT in 400 feet right that's that's great for a human who's driving the car but for a computer driving the car you need to know turn right in 400.000 five feet and adjust one quarter inch to the left please so the level of detail requires much higher and so companies like TomTom like a variety of them that are making more high-level Maps Nokia's form a company called here is doing a good job and now a class of car makers lots of startups and there's crowdsource mapping out there as well and the idea is how do we get incredibly granular high detail maps that we can push into a car so that it has that reference of a 3d world that is extremely accurate and then the next problem is oh how do we keep those things up to date because when we Matt when when a car from this a Nokia here here's the company house drives down the street does a very high-level resolution map with all the equipment you see on some of these cars except for there was a construction zone when they mapped it and the construction zone is now gone right update these things so these are very important questions if you want to have to get the answers correct and in the car stored well for that credit self drive and once again we get back to something to mention just two minutes ago the answer is sensor fusion it's a map as a mix of high-level maps you've got in the car and what the sensors are telling you in real time so the sensors are now being used for what's going on right now and the maps are give me a high level of detail from six months ago and when this road was driven it's interesting back of the day right when we had to have the CD for your own board mapping Houston we had to keep that thing updated and you could actually get to the edge of the sea didn't work we were in the islands are they covering here too which feeds into this is kind of of the optical sensors because there's kind of the light our school of thought and then there's the the biopic cameras tripod and again the answers probably both yeah well good that's a you know that's there's all these beat little battles shaping up in the industry and that's one of them for sure which is lidar versus everything else lidar is the gold standard for building I keep saying a 3d model and that's basically you know a computer sees the world differently than your eye your eye look out a window we build a 3d model of what we're looking at how does computer do it so there's a variety of ways you can do it one is using lidar sensors which spin around biggest company in this space is called Bella died and been doing it for years for defense and aviation it's been around pointing laser lasers and waiting for the signal to come back so you basically use a reflected signal back and the time difference it takes to be billows back it builds a 3d model of the objects around that particular sensor that is the gold standard for precision the problem is it's also bloody expensive so the karmak is said that's really nice but I can't put for $8,000 sensors on each corner of a car and get it to market at some price that a consumers willing to pay so until every car has one and then you get the mobile phone aside yeah but economies of scale at eight thousand dollars we're looking at going that's a little stuff so there's a lot of startups now saying this we've got a new version of lighter that's solid-state it's not a spinning thing point it's actually a silicon chip with our MEMS and stuff on it they're doing this without the moving parts and we can drop the price down to two hundred dollars maybe a hundred dollars in the future and scale that starts being interesting that's four hundred dollars if you put it off all four corners of the car but there's also also other people saying listen cameras are cheap and readily available so you look at a company like Nvidia that has very fast GPUs saying listen our GPUs are able to suck in data from up to 12 cameras at a time and with those different stereoscopic views with different angle views we can build a 3d model from cheap cameras so there's competing ideas on how you build a model of the world and then those come to like Bosh saying well we're strong in car and written radar and we can actually refine our radar more and more and get 3d models from radar it's not the good resolution that lidar has which is a laser sense right so there's all these different sensors and I think there the answer is not all of them because cost comes into play below so a car maker has to choose well we're going to use cameras and radar we're gonna use lidar and high heaven so they're going to pick from all these different things that are used to build a high-definition 3d model of the world around the car cost effective and successful and robust can handle a few of the sensors being covered by snow hopefully and still provide a good idea of the world around them and safety and so they're going to fuse these together and then let their their autonomous driving intelligence right on top of that 3d model and drive the car right so it's interesting you brought Nvidia in what's really fun I think about the autonomous vehicle until driving cars and the advances is it really plays off the kind of Moore's laws impact on the three tillers of its compute right massive compute power to take the data from these sensors massive amounts of data whether it's in the pre-programmed map whether you're pulling it off the sensors you're pulling off a GPS lord knows where by for Wi-Fi waypoints I'm sure they're pulling all kinds of stuff and then of course you know storage you got to put that stuff the networking you gotta worry about latency is it on the edge is it not on the edge so this is really an interesting combination of technologies all bring to bear on how successful your car navigates that exit ramp you're spot-on and that's you're absolutely right and that's one of the reasons I'm really bullish on self-driving cars a lot more than in the general industry analyst is and you mentioned Moore's law and in videos taking advantage of that with a GPUs so let's wrap other than you should be into kind of big answer Big Data and more and more data yes that's a huge factor in cars not only are cars going to take advantage of more and more data high definition maps are way more data than the MapQuest Maps we printed out so that's a massive amount of data the car needs to use but then in the flipside the cars producing massive amounts of data I just talked about a whole range of sensors I talked lidar radar cameras etc that's producing data and then there's all the telemetric data how's the car running how's the engine performing all those things car makers want that data so there's massive amounts of data needing to flow both ways now you can do that at night over Wi-Fi cheaply you can do it over an LTE and we're looking at 5g regular standards being able to enable more transfer of data between the cars and the cloud so that's pretty important cloud data and then cloud analytics on top of that ok now that we've got all this data from the car what do we do with it we know for example that Tesla uses that data sucked out of cars to do their fleet driving their fleet learning so instead of teaching the cars how to drive I'm a programmer saying if you see this that they're they're taking the information out of the cars and saying what are the situation these cars are seen how did our autonomous circuitry suggest the car responds and how did the user override or control the car in that point and then they can compare human driving with their algorithms and tweak their algorithms based on all that fleet to driving so it's a master advantage in sucking data out of cars massive advantage of pushing data to cars and you know we're here at Kingston SanDisk right now today so storage is interesting as well storage in the car increasingly important through these big amount of data right and fast storage as well High Definition maps are beefy beefy maps so what do you do do you have that in the cloud and constantly stream it down to the car what if you drive through a tunnel or you go out of cellular signal so it makes sense to have that map data at least for the region you're in stored locally on the car in easily retrievable flash memory that's dropping in price as well alright so loop in the last thing about that was a loaded question by the way and I love it and this is the thing I love this is why I'm bullish and more crazier than anybody else about the self-driving car space you mentioned Moore's law I find Moore's law exciting used to not be relevant to the automotive industry they used to build except we talked about I talked briefly about brake pad technology material science like what kind of asbestos do we use and how do we I would dissipate the heat more quickly that's science physics important Rd does not take advantage of Moore's law so cars been moving along with laws of thermodynamics getting more miles per gallon great stuff out of Detroit out of Tokyo out of Europe out of Munich but Moore's law not entirely relevant all of a sudden since very recently Moore's law starting to apply to cars so they've always had ECU computers but they're getting more compute put in the car Tesla has the Nvidia processors built into the car many cars having stronger central compute systems put in okay so all of a sudden now Moore's law is making cars more able to do things that they we need them to do we're talking about autonomous vehicles couldn't happen without a huge central processing inside of cars so Moore's law applying now what it did before so cars will move quicker than we thought next important point is that there's other there's other expansion laws in technology if people look up these are the cool things kryder's law so kryder's law is a law about storage in the rapidly expanding performance of storage so for $8.00 and how many megabytes or gigabytes of storage you get well guess what turns out that's also exponential and your question talked about isn't dat important sure it is that's why we could put so much into the cloud and so much locally into the car huge kryder's law next one is Metcalfe's law Metcalfe's law has a lot of networking in it states basically in this roughest form the value of network is valued to the square of the number of nodes in the network so if I connect my car great that's that's awesome but who does it talk to nobody you connect your car now we can have two cars you can talk together and provide some amount of element of car to car communications and some some safety elements tell me the network is now connected I have a smart city all of a sudden the value keeps shooting up and up and up so all of these things are exponential factors and there all of a sudden at play in the automotive industry so anybody who looks back in the past and says well you know the pace of innovation here has been pretty steep it's been like this I expect in the future we'll carry on and in ten years we'll have self-driving cars you can't look back at the slope of the curve right and think that's a slope going forward especially with these exponential laws at play so the slope ahead is distinctly steeper in this deeper and you left out my favorite law which is a Mars law which is you know we underestimate in the short term or overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term that's all about it's all about the slope so there we could go on for probably like an hour and I know I could but you got a kill you got to go into your event so thanks for taking min out of your busy day really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to our next one my pleasure thanks all right Jeff Rick here with the Q we're at the Western Digital headquarters in Milpitas at the Auto Tech Council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event thanks for watching

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional Ecosystem as support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer. This is Silken Angle Media's production of the Cube at OpenStack Summit. We're the world wide leader in tech coverage, live tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program someone we've had on so many times we can't keep track. He is the creator of the term Pets versus Cattle, he is one of the OG of The Cloud Group, Randy, you know, wrote about everything before most of it was done. So good to see you, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Randy, coming into this show we felt that it was a bit of resetting expectations, people not understanding, you know, where infrastructure's going, a whole hybrid multi-cloud world, so, I mean you've told us all how it's going to go, so where are we today, what have people been getting wrong, what's your take coming into this week and what you've seen? >> Well, I've said it before, which is that the public clouds have done more than just deliver compute storage and networking on demand. What they've really done is they've built these massive development organizations. They're very sophisticated, that are, you know, that really come from that Webscale background and move at a velocity that's really different than anything we've seen before, and I think the hope in the early days of OpenStack was that we would achieve a similar kind of velocity and momentum, but I think the reality is is that it just hasn't really materialized; that while there are a lot of projects and there are a lot of contributors the coordination between them is very poor, and you know it's just not the, like architectural oversight that we really needed isn't there. I, a couple years ago at the Openstack Silicon Valley gave a presentation called The Lie of the Benevolent Dictator, and I chartered a course for how we could actually have more of a technical architecture oversight, and just that really fell on deaf ears. And so we continue to do the same thing and expect different results and I just, that's a little disappointing for me. >> Yeah. So what is your view of hybrid cloud? You know, no disagreement, you look at what the public cloud companies, especially the big three, the development that they can do, Amazon, a thousand new features a year, Google, what they can do with data, Microsoft has a whole lot of applications and communities around them. We're mostly talking about private cloud here, it was a term that you fought against for many years, we've had great debates on it, so how does that hybrid play out? Cause customers, they're keeping on premises. Edge fits into a lot of this too, so it's, there's not one winner, it's not a zero sum game, but how does that hybrid cloud work? >> Yeah so, I didn't fight against private cloud, I qualified it. I said if it's going to be a private cloud it's got to be built and look and smell the way that the public cloud was. Alright? If it's just VM ware with VM's on demand, that's not a private cloud. That was my position. And then in terms of hybrid cloud, you know, I don't think we're there yet. I've presented on this at many different OpenStacks, you can see it in the past, and I sort of laid out what needs to happen and that didn't happen. But I think there's hope, and I think the hope comes in the form of Kubernetes, and to a certain degree, Helm. And the reason that Kubernetes with Helm is very powerful is that Kubernetes gives us a computive traction, so that you don't care if you're on the public cloud, or you know OpenStack or Vmware or whatever, and then what Helm gives us is our charts, so ways to deploy services, not just software, and so what we could think about doing in the future is building hybrid cloud based off of Kubernetes and Helm. >> Yeah, so Randy since last time we talked you've got a new role, you're now with Juniper. Juniper had done a Contrail acquisition. You know, quite a few years back you wrote a good blueprint on one of the Juniper forums about the OpenContrail communities. So tell us a little bit about your role, your goals, in that community. >> So OpenContrail has been a primarily Juniper initiative, and we're going to press the reset button on the OpenContrail community. I'm going to do it tonight and call for people to sort of get involved in doing that reset, and when I say reset I mean, wipe the operating system, reload it from scratch, and do it really as a community, not just as a Juniper run initiative, and so people inside Juniper are very excited about this, and what we're trying to do is that we believe that the path forward for OpenContrail is ubiquitous adoption. So rather then playing for just the pieces that we have, which we've done a great job of, we want to take the world's best SDN controller and we want to make sure everybody uses it, because we think aggregate that's good for not only the entire community but also Juniper. >> So, love the idea of kind of rebooting the community in the open, right, because you have to be transparent about these sort of things. >> Randy: Yeah, that's right. >> What are the community segments that you would like to see join you here in the OpenContrail? What kind of users, what kind of companies would you like to see come in to the tent? >> Well anybody's welcome, but we want to start with all of our key stakeholders that exist today, so first one, and arguably one of the most important is our competitors, right so we're hoping to have Mirantis at the table, maybe Ericcson, Huawei, anybody. Cisco, hey come join the party. Second is that we have done really well in Sass and in gaming, and we'd like to see all of those companies come to the table as well, Workday, Symantech, and so on. The third segment is enterprises, we've done well in financial services, we think that that's a really important segment because they're leading edge of enterprises typically, and the fourth is the carrier's obviously incredibly important for Juniper, folks like AT&T, Direction Telecom, all those companies we'd love to see come to the table. And then that's really the primary focus, and then anybody else who wants to show up, anybody who wants to develop in Contrail in the future we'd love to have there. >> Well with open source communities, right, there's always a balance of the contributors and developers versus operators, and we can use the word contributors in a lot of roles. Some open source communities, much more developer focused, >> Randy: That's right. >> Others more operator focused, where do you see this OpenContrail community starting out? >> So where it's been historically is more of our end users and operators. >> I think that's interesting and an interesting twist because I think sometimes open source communities get stuck with just the people who can contribute code, and I'm from an operator community myself, >> Randy: Right. >> So I think that's really interesting. >> We still want all those people but I think what has happened is that when people have come in and they wanted to be more sort of on the developer side, the community hasn't been friendly to them. >> John: Okay. >> Randy: And so we want, that's a key thing that we want to change. You know when we were talking, to certain carriers they came and they said look, it's great you're going to do this, we want to be a part of it, and one of the things we'd like to contribute is more advanced testing around VMFs. And I just look at that and I'm just like that's what we need, right? Juniper is not, can't carry all the water on having, you know, sophisticated test suites for VMFs and more advanced networking use cases, but the carriers are deep into this and we'd love to have them come and bring that. So not just developers, but also QA, people who want to increase the code quality, the architectural quality, and the aggregate value of OpenContrail. >> Okay, Randy can you help place OpenContrail where it fits in this kind of networking spectrum, especially, there's open source things, we've talked about about VPP a couple times on theCube here. The joke for many years was SDN still does nothing, NFV solutions have grown, have been huge use case, is really where the early money for big deployments have been for OpenStack. Where does OpenContrail fit, where does it kind of compare and contrast against some of the other options out there. >> I'm going to answer that slightly differently. I've been skeptical about SDN overlays for a long time, and now I am helping with one of the world's best SDN overlays, and what's changed for me is that in the last year I've seen key customers of Contrail's, of Juniper's actually do something very interesting, right. You've got an SDN overlay, it's complex, it's hard to void, you got to wonder, why should I do this? Well I thought the same thing about virtualization, right, until I figured out, sort of what was the killer app. And what we've seen is a company, one of our customers, and several others, but one in particular I can talk about publicly, Riot Games, take containers and OpenContrail and marry them so that you have an abstraction around compute, and an abstraction around networking, so that their developers can write to that, and they don't care whether that's running on top of public cloud, private cloud, or in some partner's data center globally. And in fact they're going to talk about that today at OpenContrail days at 3:30, and are going to present a lot more details, and that's amazing to me because by abstracting a way and disintermediating the public clouds, you actually have more power, right. You can build your own framework. And if you're using Kubernetes as a baseline you can do a lot more on top of that computing network abstraction. >> You talked about OpenContrail days, again my first summit, I've actually been impressed by the foundation, acknowledging there's a huge landscape of open source and other technologies around there, OpenStack itself doesn't invent everything. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of attitude of bringing, I mean we talk about Kubernetes and that sort of thing, but all the other CNCF projects, monitoring, even components like SCD, right, we're talking about here at this conference. So, can you talk a little bit about how OpenStack can interact with the rest of the open source and cloud native at-large community? >> That's sort of a tough question John. >> John: Okay. >> I mean the reason I say that is like the origins of OpenStack are very much NIH and there has been a very disturbing tendency to sort of re-invent the wheel. A great example is Keystone, still to this day I don't know why Keystone exists and why we created a whole new authentic standard when there were dozens and dozens of battle-tested, battle-hardened protocols and bits of code that existed prior. It's great that we're getting a little bit better at that but I still sense that the origins of the community and some of the technical leadership have resistance to organizing and working with outside components and playing nice. So, it's better but it's not great, it's not where it should be. Really OpenStack needs to be broken down into a lot of different projects that can compete with each other and all run in parallel without having to be so tightly wound together. It's still disappointing to me that we aren't doing that today. >> Randy, wonder if you could give us a little bit of a personal reflection, you've been involved in cloud many years, we've talked about some of the state of it, where do you think enterprises are when they think about their IT, how IT relates to business, some of the big challenges they're facing, and kind of this rapid pace of change that's happening in our industry right now >> Yeah well the pressures just increase. The need to pick up speed and to move faster and to have a greater velocity, that's not going away, that seems to be like an incredible macro-trend that's just going to keep driving people towards the next event. But what I see is that the tension between the infra-structure IT teams and the line of business hasn't really started to get resolved. You see a lot of enterprises back into using DevOps as a way to try to fix the culture change problems but it's just not happening fast enough. I have a lot of concerns that basically private cloud or private infra-structure for enterprises will just not materialize in the way it needs to for the next generation. And that the line of business will continue to just keep moving to public cloud. All the while all the money that's being reinvested in the public cloud is increasing their capabilities in terms feature sets and security capabilities and so on. I just, I don't see the materialization of private cloud happening very well at this point in time and I don't see any trendlines that tell me it's going to change. >> Yeah, what recommendations do you give today to the OpenStack foundation? I know that you haven't been shy in the past about giving guidance as to the direction, what do you think needs to happen to be able to help customers along that journey that they need? >> I don't give any guidance to the OpenStack Foundation anymore, I'm not on the Board of Directors, and frankly I gave a lot of advice in the past that fell on deaf ears and people were unwilling to make the changes that were necessary I think to create success. And even though I was eventually proven right, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change. I would say that the hard partition between the Board of Directors and the technical committee that was created at the outset with the founding of the Foundation has let to a big problem which is that there's simply business concerns that are technical concerns and there are technical concerns which are business concerns and the actual structure of the Foundation does not allow that to occur because that hard partition between them. So if people on Board of Directors can't actually tell the TC that they'd like to see certain technical changes because they're business concerns and Technical Committee can't tell the Board of Directors they'd like to see business changes made because they're technical concerns around them. And I think that's, it's fundamentally broken until the bylaws are fixed. >> So Randy beyond what we've talked about already what's exciting you these days, you look at like the serverless trend, is that something that you find intriguing or maybe contrary view on it, what's exciting you these days? >> Serverless is really interesting. In fact I'd like to see serverless at the edge. I think it would be fascinating if Amazon webservices could sell a serverless capability that was actually running in the mobile carriers edge. So like on the mobile towers or in essential offices. But you could do distributive computation for IOT literally at the very edge of the network, that would be incredibly powerful. So I am very interested in serverless in that regard. With Kubernetes, I think that this is the future, I think I've seen most of the other initiatives start to fail at this point. Docker Incorporated just hasn't made the progress they need to, hopefully a change in leadership will fix that. But it does mean that more and more people are gravitating towards Kubernetes and that's a thing because whereas OpenStack is historically got no opinion, Kubernetes is a much more prescriptive model and I think that actually leads to faster innovation, a greater pace of change and combined with Helm charts, I think that we're going to see an ecosystem develop around Kubernetes that actually could be a counterweight to the public clouds and really be sort of cloud agnostic. Private, public, at the edge, who cares? >> Randy Bias, always appreciated your very opinionated viewpoints on everything that are happening here. Pleasure to catch up with you as always. John and I will be back will lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston, thanks for watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's The Cube. Covering open networking summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux foundation. >> Welcome back. We are live in Santa Clara at the open networking summit 2017. Been coming here for a couple years, it's a lot of open source going on in storage, for a long time, a lot of open source going on in compute for a long time, and you know, networking was kind of the last one, but we had Martin Casado on on earlier today. He says it's 10 years since he started Nicira. And now, it's a billion dollar revenue run raid inside vmware, so I think the software defined networking is pretty real. We're excited for this next segment, Scott Raynovich, been cohosting all day, good to see you again, Scott. But we're kind of shifting, we're going to add to open networking, we're going to add to open, not compute, but OpenStack, I get them all mixed up, we were just-- >> It's all infrastructure, it's all in the family. >> All right, so our next guest here, representing the OpenStack foundation, is Ildiko Vancsa, get that right? She is the ecosystem technical lead for OpenStack, welcome. And Lisa-Marie Namphy, she's now officially the OpenStack ambassador, which if you follow her on Twitter, you would have known that a long time ago. >> For the U.S. There's several others globally, but for the U.S., yeah. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> And what is the OpenStack team doing here at open networking summit? >> So OpenStack itself is a multipurpose generated cloud platform, so we are not just looking into enterprise, IT use cases, but also trying to address the telecom and NFV space. And this is the conference where we are finding many of our ecosystem member companies represented, and we are also learning what's new in the networking space, what are the challenges of tomorrow and how we can start to address them today. >> Right, 'cause the telco is a very active space for OpenStack as well, correct, there's been a good market segment for you. >> Yes, it is an emerging area. I would say we have more and more telecommunications company around and they are also more and more involved in open source. Because I think it's kind of clear that they are also using open source for a while now, but using open source and participating in open source, those are two different things. So this kind of mindset change and transition towards participating In these communities and going out to the public field and do software development there and collaborate with each other and the enterprise IT segment as well, this is what is happening today and it is really great to see it. >> Host: Great, great. >> And you've seen more and more telco's participating in the OpenStack summits, there was an NFV day, I think, even going all the way back to the Atlanta summit. And certainly, in Barcelona, Ildiko was actually doing one of the main stage key notes, which was very focused on telco. And some of the main sponsors of this upcoming summit are telco's. So there's definitely a nice energy between telco and OpenStack. >> Now, why do you think the telco is just the one that's kind of getting ahead of the curve in terms of the adoption? >> Scalable low class clouds. (all laugh) >> Right, and we had John Donovan from AT&T said today that they're either rapidly approaching or going to hit, very soon, more than 50% of software defined networking within the AT&T network. So if there's any questions as to whether it's real or still in POC's, I think that pretty much says it's in production and running. >> I'm doing a lot more of that, so I also run the OpenStack user group for the San Francisco bay area and have been for the last three years, and if we're not talking about Kupernetes, or Docker and OpenStack, we're talking about networking. And tonight, actually, we're going to, the open contrail team is talking about some of the stuff they're doing with open contrail and containers and sort of just to piggyback off of this conference. And next week, as well, we're talking about the network functionality in Kupernetes at OpenStack, if you want to run in down to the OpenStack cloud. So it's a huge focus and the user group can't get enough of it. >> and your guys' show is coming up very, very soon. >> The OpenStack summit? >> Yes. >> Oh, absolutely, May 8th through 11th in Boston, Massachusetts. >> Host: Like right around the corner. >> Yeah. >> The incredible moving show, right? It keeps going and going and going. >> Yeah, yeah, there's going to be 6,000 plus people there. There was just some recent press releases about some of the keynotes that are happening there. There's a huge focus on, you know, I keep calling this the year of the user, the year of OpenStack adoption. And we're really, throughout the meetups, we're really doing a lot to try to showcase those use cases. So Google will be one that's onstage talking about some really cool stuff they're doing with OpenStack, some machine learning, just really intelligent stuff they're working on, and that's going to be a great keynote that we're looking forward to. Harvard will be up on there, you know, not just big name foundation members, but a lot of use cases that you'll see presented. >> So why do you think this is the year, what's kind of the breakthrough that it is the year of the user, would you say? >> Well, I think that just the reliability of OpenStack. I think enterprises are getting more comfortable. There are very large clouds running on OpenStack, more in Asia and in Europe and Ildiko can probably talk about it, particularly some of the telco related ones. But you know, the adoption is there and you see more stability around there, more integration with other, I don't know what to call it, emerging technologies like containers, like AI, like IOT. So there's a big push there, but I think enterprises have just, they have adopted it. And there's more expertise out there. We've focused a lot on the administrators. There's the COA, the certified administrator of, you know, OpenStack administrator exam you can take. So the operators have come a long way and they're really helping the customers out there get OpenStack clouds up and running. So I just think, you know, it's seven years now, into it, right, so we got to turn the corner. >> So there have been some growing pains with OpenStack, so what can you tell us about the metrics today versus, say, three or four years ago in terms of total installations, maybe breakdown of telecom versus enterprise, what kind of metrics do you have you there? >> I'll let you take that one. >> We are running, continuously running a user survey and we are seeing growing numbers in the telecom area. I'm not prepared with the numbers from the top of my head, but we are definitely seeing more and more adoption in the telecom space like how you mentioned AT&T, they are one of the largest telecom operators onboard in the community, and they are also very active, showing a pretty great example of how to adopt the software and how to participate in the community to make the software more and more NFV ready and ready for the telecom use cases. We also have, as Lisa-Marie just mentioned, the China area and Asia are coming up as well, like we have China Mobile and China Telecom onboard as well. Or Huawei, so we have telecom operators and telecom vendors as well, around the community. And we are also collaborating with other communities, so like who you see around OPNFV, OpenDaylight, and so forth. We are collaborating with them to see how we can integrate OpenStack into a larger environment as part of the full NFV stack. If you look into the ETSI NFV architectural framework, OpenStack is on the infrastructure layer. The NFV infrastructure and virtual infrastructure manager components are covered with OpenStack services mostly. So you also need to look into, then, how you can run on top of the hardware that the telecom industry is expecting in a data center and how to onboard the virtual network functions on top of that, how to put D management and orchestration components on top of OpenStack, and how the integration works out. So we are collaborating with these communities and what is really exciting about the Upcoming summit is that we are transforming the event a little bit. So this time, it will not be purely OpenStack focused, but it will be more like an open infrastructure, even. We are running open source days, so we will have representation from the communities I mentioned and we will also have Kubernetes onboard, for example, to show how we are collaborating with the representatives of the container technologies. We will also have Cloud Foundry and a few more communities around, so it will be a pretty interesting event and we are just trying to show the big picture that how OpenStack and all these other components of this large ecosystem are operating together. And that is going to be a super cool part of the summit, so the summit is May 8th through 11th and on May 9th, the CNCF, the Linux foundation, actually, behind this, the CNCF day, they're calling it Kupernetes day. And the whole day will be dedicated, there will be a whole track dedicated to Kupernetes, basically. And so they did another call for papers and it's like a little mini conference inside the conference. So that's kind of what I was saying about the adoption of other technologies. I'm sure the OpenStack foundation is putting those numbers together that you asked about and probably Jonathan or Bryce will stand onstage on the first day and talk about them. But what I think is more interesting and what I would encourage people to go, there's a Superuser magazine. Superuser does a great job telling the stories of what's happening out there, and some of these use cases, and who's adopting this technology and what they're doing with it. And those stories are more interesting than just, you know, the numbers. Because you can do anything with numbers and statistics, but these actual user stories are really cool so I encourage readers to go out to Superuser magazine and check that out. >> It's like, Lego uses it. >> There you go. >> I had to check real fast. >> Lot of information on there. They do a good job of that. >> Lego alligators. >> So you talked about this day with the Linux foundation, is there increasing amounts of cooperation between OpenStack and Linux foundation? Given all the projects that seem to be blossoming. >> Yeah, I don't even know that it needed to increase, there's always been nice energy between the two. There is, you know, Eileen Evans, who we know very well, was on the board of both, the first woman on both boards. She was my colleague for many years at Hewlett-Packard. She's still on the Linux foundation board and there's been a lot of synergy between those foundations. They've always worked closely together, especially things like the Cloud Foundry foundation that came out of the Linux foundation has always worked very closely with OpenStack, the OpenStack foundation, and the board members, and it's all one big happy family. We're all open source, yeah. >> And you talked about the enterprises being, you know, they've been using open source for a long time, Linux has been around forever. They're really more adopting kind of an open source ethos in terms of their own contributions back and participating back in. So you see just increased adoption, really, of using the open source vehicle as a way to do better innovation, better product development, and to get involved, get back to their engineers to get involved in something beyond just their day job. >> It is definitely a tendency that is happening, so it's not just AT&T, like, I can mention, for example, NTT DoCoMo, who now has engineers working on OpenStack code. They are a large operator in Japan. And it is really not something, I think, that a few years back, they would've imagined that they will just participate in an open source community. I've been involved with OPNFV for, I think, two years now, or two and a half. I'm an OPNFV ambassador as well, I'm trying to focus on the cross-community collaboration. And OPNFV is an environment where you can find many telecom operators and vendors. And it was a really interesting journey to see them, how they get to know open source more and more and how they learned how this is working and how working in public is like and what the benefits are. And I remember when a few people from, for example, DoCoMo came to OPNFV and they were, like, a little bit more shy, just exploring what's happening. And then like a half year later when they started to do OpenStack contributions, they had code batches merged into OpenStack, they added new functionalities, they kind of became advocates of open source. And they were like telling everywhere that open source is the way to go and this is what everyone should be doing and why it is so great to collaborate with other operators out in the public so you can address the common pain points together, rather than everyone is working on it behind closed doors and trying to invent the same wheel at the same time, separately. >> Right. >> So that was a really, really Interesting journey. And I think more and more companies are following this example. And not just coming and giving feedback, but also more and more participating and doing coding documentation work in the community. >> And I think if I can understand, what I think, also, the question you might have been asking, there wasn't a ton of python developers in the beginning and everybody's like how do we get these OpenStack developers in the company, you know, it was this huge shortage. And Linux was the little hanging fruit, it's like well, why do we just hire some Linux developers and then teach them python, and that's how a lot of OpenStack knowledge came into companies. So that was the trend. And I think enough companies, enough enterprises do see the value of something like OpenStack or Linux or Kupernetes or whatever the project has, Docker, to actually dedicate enough full time employees to be doing just that for as long as it makes sense and then maybe it's another technology. But we saw that for years, right, with OpenStack, huge companies. And there still are. Not always the same companies, depending on what a company needs and where they are, they absolutely find value in contributing back to this community. >> Okay, and you said you got a meetup tonight? >> I do, yeah. >> Give a plug for the meetup. >> Juniper, it's open contrail talking about open contrailing and containers. And it's at Juniper here in Sunnyville, so if you go to meetup.com/openstack, that's our user group. We're the first ones, we got that one. So meetup.com/openstack is the Silicon Valley, San Francisco bay area user group. And then next week, we're talking about networking and Kupernetes. >> All right, it's always good to be above the fold, that's for sure. All right, Ildiko, Lisa-Marie, great to see you again and thanks for stopping by, and we'll see you in Boston, if not before. >> Absolutely, we'll both be quite busy, we have four, both four presentations each, it's going to be a nutty week. So I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in Boston, always a pleasure, thanks for inviting us. >> Absolutely, all right, thanks for stopping by. With Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching The Cube from open networking summit 2017. We'll be back after this short break, thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara, California it's theCUBE. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara at the Open Networking Summit 2017. We haven't been here for a couple years. Obviously Open is everywhere. It's in hardware, it's in compute, it's in store, and it's certainly in networking as well. And we're excited to be joined first off by Scott Raynovich who will be co-hosting for the next couple of days. Good to see you again Scott. >> Good to see you. >> And our next guest is Ihab Tarazi. He's the EVP and CTO of Equinix. Last time we saw Ihab was at Open Compute Project last year, so great to see you again. >> Yeah, thank you very much, good to be here. I really enjoyed the interview last year so thanks for having me again. >> Now you set it at the high bar, so hopefully we can pull it off again. >> We can do it. >> So first off for folks that aren't familiar with Equinix, give them kind of an overview. Because you don't have quite the profile of Amazon and Google and the other cloud providers, but you're a pretty important piece of the infrastructure. >> Ihab: Yeah absolutely. While we're nowhere close to the size of those players, the place we play in the universe is very significant. We are the edge of the cloud, I would say. We enable all these players, they're all our biggest customers. As well all the networks are our biggest customers. We have over 2,000 clouds in our data centers and over 1,400 networks. We have one of the largest global data center networks. We have 150 data centers and four eMarkets around the world. And that number is going to get a little bigger. Now we announce the acquisition of Verizon data center assets. So we'll have more data centers and a few more markets. >> I heard about the Verizon acquisition, so congratulations, just adding more infrastructure. But let's unpack it a little bit. Two things I want to dig into. One is you said you have clouds in your data centers. So what do you mean by that? >> Yeah the way the cloud architecture is deployed is that the big cloud providers will have these big data centers where they build them themselves and it hosts the applications. And then they work with an edge for the cloud. Either a caching edge or compute edge, or even a network edge in data centers like ours where they connect to all their enterprise customers and all the networks. So we have a significant number of edges, we have 21 markets around the world. We have just about the big list of names, edges, that you can connect to automatically. From AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, anybody else you think of. >> So this is kind of an extension of what we heard back a long time ago with you guys and like Amazon specifically on this direct connect. So you are the edge between somebody else's data center and these giant cloud providers. >> Absolutely. And since the last time we talked, we've added a lot more density. More edge nodes and more markets and more new cloud providers. Everywhere from the assess to the infrastructure as a service provider. >> And why should customers care? What's the benefit to your customers for that? >> Yeah the benefit is really significant. These guys want direct access to the cloud for high performance and security. So everybody wants to build the hybrid cloud. Now it's very clear the hybrid cloud is the architecture of choice. You want to build a hybrid cloud, then you want to deploy in a data center and connect to the cloud. And the second thing that's happening, nobody's using just one cloud. Everybody's doing a multi-cloud. So if you want 40, 50 clouds like most companies do, most CIOs, then you're going to want to be in a data center that has as many as possible. If you're going to go global, connect to multi-cloud and have that proximity, you're going to have a hard time finding somebody like Equinix out there. >> Yeah but I've got a question. You mentioned the Verizon deal. There was a trend for a while where all these big service providers were buying data centers, including AT&T, CenturyLink, and now the trend appears to have reversed. Now they're selling the data centers that they bought. I'd love your insight on that. Why that just wasn't their core competency? Why are the selling them back to people like Equinix. >> Yeah that's a good question. What's happened over time as the cloud materialized, is the data canters are much more valuable if they're neutral. If you can come in and connect to all the clouds and all the networks, customers are much more likely to come in. And therefore if a data center is owned by a single network, customers are not as likely to want to use it because they want to use all the networks and all the clouds. And our model of neutrality and how we set up exchanges, and how we provide interconnection, and the whole way we do customer service, is the kind of things people are looking for. >> So you're the Switzerland of the cloud. >> And so the same assets become much more valuable in this new model. >> And I don't know if people understand quite how much direct connection and peer-to-peer, and how much of that's going on, especially in a business-to-business context to provide a much better experience. Versus you know the wild wooly internet of days of old where you're hopping all over the place, Lord knows how many hops you're taking. A lot of that's really been locked down. >> I think the most important step people can think about is by 2020 90% of all the internet, or at least 80 to 90, will be home to the top 10 clouds. Therefore the days of the wild internet, while that continues to be significant, the cloud access and interconnection is very critical, and continues to be even bigger. >> Go ahead. >> So tell us what the logistics are of managing the growth, like you opening how many data centers a year, and how much equipment are you moving into these data centers. We spend over a billion dollars a year on upgrading, adding capacity, and building new data centers. We usually announce five, six, new ones a year. We usually have 20 plus projects, if not more, active at any time. So we have a very focused process and people across the globe manage this thing. We don't want to go dark in any of our key matters like Washington DC, the D.C. market, or let's say the San Jose, Silicon Valley, etc. Because customers want to come in and continue to add and continue to bring people. And that means not only expanding the existing data centers, but buying land and building more data centers beside it, and continue to expand where we need to. And then every year or so we go into one or two more emerging markets. We went into Dubai a while ago and we continue to develop it. And those become long term investments to continue to build our global infrastructure. The last few years we've made massive acquisitions between Telecity in Europe, Bit-isle in Japan, and now the Verizon assents that expanded our footprint significantly into new markets, Eastern Europe, give us bigger markets in places like Tokyo which helped us get to where we are today. >> One of the themes in networking and cloud in general is that the speed of light is just too damn slow. At the end of the day, stuff's got to travel and it actually takes longer than you would think. So does having all these, increased presence, increased egos, increased physical locations, help you address some of that? Because you've got so many more points kind of into this private network if you will. >> Oh yeah absolutely. The content has become more and more localized by market. And the more you have things like IOT and devices pulling in more data, not all the data needs to go all over the globe. And also there is now jurisdiction and laws that require some of the content to stay. So the market approach that we have is becoming the center of mass for where the data resides. And once the data gets into our data center, the value of the data is how you exchange it with other pieces of information, and increasingly how you make immediate decisions on it, you know with automation and machine learning. So when you go to that environment you need massive capacity, very low latency, to many data warehouses or data lakes, and you want to connect that to the software that can make decisions. So that's how we see the world is evolving now. One thing we see though is that complementing that will be a new edge that will form. A lot of people in this conference were talking about that. A lot of the discussion about the open networks here is how we support the 5G, all the explosion of devices, and what we see that connecting to that dense market approach that we have where the data is housed. >> That's interesting you just mentioned all the devices which was going to be my next question. So the internet of things, how will this change the data center edge, as you refer to it? >> Yeah that's the biggest question in the industry, especially for networks. And the same discussion happened at Mobile Work Congress here a little while ago. People now believe that there'll be this compute edge, that the network will be a compute edge. Because you want to be able to put compute, keep pushing it out all the way to the edge. And that edge needs to support today's technologies but also all the open wireless spectrum, all the low powered networks, open R which is one of the frequencies for the millimeter frequencies, and also the 5G as you know. So when you add all that up you're going to need this edge to support. So all the different wireless options plus some amount of compute, and that problem is very hard to solve without an open source model, which is where a lot of people are here looking for solutions. >> It's interesting because your definition of the edge feels like it's kind of closer to the cloud where's there's a lot of converstion, we do a lot of stuff with GE about the edge, which is you know right out there on the device and the sensor. Because as you said depending on the application, depending on the optimization, depending on what you're trying to do, the device is some level of compute and store that's going to be done locally, and some of it will go upstream and get processed and come downstream. But you're talking about a different edge. Or you know of see you guys extending all the way down to that edge. >> We don't see ourselves extending at this time but definitely it's something we're spending a lot of time analyzing to see what happens. I would say a couple of big stats is that today our edge is maybe 100 milliseconds from devices in a market or a lot less in some cases. The new technology will make that even shorter. So with the new technology like you said, you can't beat the speed of light, but with more direct connections you'll get to 40, 50 milliseconds, which is fantastic for the vast majority of applications people want. There'll be very few applications that need much slower latency all the way down to the sub-10 millisecond. For those somebody like a network would need to put compute at the edge to do some of it. So that world of both types will continue. But even the ones that need the very low latency, for some of the data it still needs to compare it to other sources of data and connect to clouds and networks but some of the data will still come back to our data centers. So I think this is how we see the world evolving but it's early days and a lot of brain power will be spent on that. >> So as you look forward to 2017, what are some of the big items on your plate that you're trying to take down for this calendar year? >> The biggest thing I want on our list is that we have an explosion of software model. Everybody who was a software now has a software platform. When we were at OCP for example you saw NetApp, they showed their software as an open source. Every single company from security to storage, even networking, are now creating their platform available as a software. Well those platforms have no place to go today. They have no deployment model. So one of the things we are working on is how we create a deployment model for this as a service model. And most of them is open source, so it needs decoupling of software and hardware. So we are really actively working with all these to create an open source software and just software in general, ecosystem plus this whole open source hardware. >> So do you guys have a pretty aggressive software division inside Equinix, especially in these open source projects? Or how do you kind of interact with them? >> Our model is to enable the industry. So we have some of our tools but mostly for enabling customers and customer service, as well as some of the basic interconnection we do. The vast majority of all the stuff is our partners, and these are our customers. So our model is to enable them and to connect them to everybody else they need at ecosystem to succeed and help them set up as a service model. And as the enterprise customers come to our data center, how to they connect to them. So I would say that's one of the most sought after missions when we go to conferences like this. Everybody who announced today is talking to us about how they enable the announcements they make and given our place in the universe, we would be a very key player in enabling that ecosystem. >> Do you have like a special lab where you test these new technologies? Or how do you do that? >> Yeah that's the plan. And we connect this effort to also what we're doing with OCP and Telecom Infrastructure Project where we have a leadership position and highly engaged. We are creating a lab environment where people can come in and test not only the hardware from TIP and OCP, but also the software from open network, but many other open source software in general under the Linux Foundation or others. In our situation not only can they test it against each other, but they can test the performance against the entire world. How does this work with the internet, the cloud? And that leading us to deployment and go to market models that people are looking for. >> Alright sounds pretty exciting. Equinix, a company that probably handles more of your internet traffic than you ever thought. >> Ihab: That's very true. >> Well thanks again for stopping by. We'll look for you at our next open source show. >> Thank you very much. >> Ihab Tarazi from Equinix. He's Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017, see you next time after this short break. (techno music)