 Hi, welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman here from the Wikibon office in Marlboro, Massachusetts and really excited to introduce a new member of the Wikibon team to the community. Joining me all the way from across the pond is Steve Chambers. Some of you on Twitter might know him as Stevie Chambers. Steve, thank you for joining me today and welcome to the Wikibon team. Thank you very much for the warm welcome, Stu. It's great to be here. I can't believe it's taken me 20 years of my career to finally land at Wikibon. Well, I've been coming after you for a couple of years, so you've had a really interesting background. I want to talk about where things are in cloud, but first I want you to really introduce a little bit on your background, especially as we talk about this whole cloud thing as to where you got into it and what your journey's been for the last few years. Yeah, I'm absolutely happy to do that. I think I would never have thought that 20 years ago I would have been a mainframe systems programmer of the early tender age of 21 and how that would have been relevant to cloud computing today. Maybe that'll come clear during this call, but I started life in the banking industry and then I joined this kind of crazy startup called LaoCloud with a guy that you might be familiar with, Mark Andreason. They were doing this kind of interesting thing where they would run the infrastructure, not let anybody dictate how they did that and then give the customer this nice easy front end to consume it and a very prescient name in LaoCloud. So that was kind of my early introduction to what year was that because everybody says that cloud started with Amazon in like 2007. I think they definitely created the infrastructure as a service market, but before then LaoCloud was around late 90s. I think it was split up and acquired by HP and ADS around 2003, something like that. If I can just comment on that, it's the old what we used to call the XSP market back in the 90s and it's funny. I remember in the early days of cloud why did those XSPs failed and security was a problem and networking, which both you and I have some background in, was a real challenge and we'll get into that as we talk about cloud as are we still having those same problems. But sorry, let's please pick up the conversation, just good stuff. Absolutely, because what we were doing at LaoCloud was we were doing a lot of scripting and automation behind the scenes to allow applications to scale out. That was a kind of new idea in that days. A lot of the cloud, not cloud, the hosting providers in those days, they would send an engineer into the data center and he would build a server, rack stack and do all that good stuff. What LaoCloud were doing and the software that they wrote of course became Opsware. They were automating a lot of that and in fact customers were allowed to push their own code. It was a brand new idea at the time. But yeah, you're right, we still had a lot of challenges. For example, we did a lot of work with the UK government and they had specific security requirements. So there was still a lot of custom stuff at the back. But I moved on from there because this company called VMware was starting this crazy revolution called virtualization and nobody believed it would work. I remember people saying all that long time ago, it's just a fad Steve, it will never work. Who would want to virtualize servers? What's the point in that? Of course, history has told us a different lesson and it's amazing to think, I joined you 2004, joined VMware but it would been going for a few years since then. But history tells itself what a dominant thing they did. Yeah, funny Steve, you think back, you started with mainframe. Well, mainframe invented virtualization. I remember, I started working with VMware back in 2002 and right. At first, people thought it was some weird Linux derivative or they didn't really know what to make of it. And of course, no, it couldn't work. I mean, because especially, I remember when they came to us and they said, we've got this cool new thing. It ended up being called vMotion eventually and they're like, we can move a workflow without anybody knowing. And it's like, we say in tech, there's no FM, right? There is no silly magic, I guess would be the F or FM. But of course, VMware has been amazing, what they've done and you were there through some of the early days. And now, of course, VMware is a significant player in the whole cloud conversation. But go ahead, pick up from VMware. Absolutely. I mean, the company did a fantastic job and there's many a story about VMware. I think what's interesting though is certainly, in the UK and across Europe, I would say a lot of the Europeans are quite cynical when it comes to new technology, perhaps a little bit less easy to embrace brand new things, right? So just think about cloud, just leaving that to one side of the head at the moment. One of the things we had to do back in the early VMware days was convince enterprises that they would not only benefit from things like virtualization, but there were barriers that could be overcome. Just one simple example that I got every single place that I went was in North America in Europe was when you have to speak to the networking guy. So this server virtualization also introduces things called the virtual switch. So you have to go to a network guy and say, hey, I want a trunk port from your switch that you manage into this server, which had never really been done before. And they were like, no way, that's crazy. I'm not having server guys. And we started to see the silos emerging, these enterprises and think we're going to have to win over each one of these enterprises, the management people, network people, the storage people. You see what I mean? All these different people were brand new to virtualization and we won them over bit by bit. And that for me is kind of similar to cloud these days because this is also changing the way these traditional silos do their jobs. So you come in up against, it's a different barrier, but you still get the barriers in the organization. And sometimes now you get the virtualization guys who didn't exist 10 years ago, the virtualization guys are saying, hey, I'm not sure these public clouds are good idea. I've got all this flexibility on premise, how times change. Oh gosh, Steve, you're preaching to the choir on here as I've often said, it's a general saying we have, especially in the networking world is that the technology stuff is pretty easy. If you take the seven layer stack, it's always layers eight and nine that trip us up. So the organizational, political that are going to trip us up. And boy, VMware made a lot of things awesome in IT, but we also spent over a decade trying to fix some of those interlocks between networking and storage. And starting to finally get to the end of fixing some of those issues, but boy, it's been a long hard road and created a whole lot of other organizational challenges and other inefficiencies. I mean, hey, quick, so quick question for you. Back when I was in the vendor world, and when I joined the analyst world, we said, the challenge with IT is we spend only about 10 to 20% of our budget on the actual gear and licensing and everything. And we spend the other 70, 80 plus percent of it on keeping the likes on, doing break fix, tweaking everything out like that. The sad thing I'd say is I don't think VMware moved the needle. I don't think we've got any change in the efficiency of IT. Absolutely, I got greater efficiency with some of our hardware, but it seemed like it kind of got made up with having to work a little harder on the storage or the networking of the interlock. And there's new solutions today, I think, that are starting to move that needle. I'm not trying to blame VMware for that change, but I'm just curious your response on that statement. Yeah, I could think of an example of where you could see problems happening, not with virtualization, but how companies were using it and the benefits they were getting. And I remember working with a customer in the US and they had more ESX hosts, VMware hosts, and they had virtual machines, which was really strange because today you get, what, 15 to 30 or whatever virtual machines per host, depending on the host. But they had more hosts because they were really good at deploying hosts, but they were really bad at getting application people to use them. And what was happening was they were going to the application teams and they were saying, hey, come and use this virtualization platform because it saves our team money. And so the application guy is going, well, what's the benefit for me? And so there were many examples like that around the world of where the virtualization benefits were good for one team, but they asked another 15 teams around them in IT to change the way that they operated. So those barriers were kind of interesting. So the other thing that I saw as well, and this made me move, believe it or not, and everyone said I was crazy to go from VMware to Cisco in that a lot of the virtualization programs, and especially if you think about today's mantras about software defined and software-led infrastructures, a lot of the virtualization programs founded because the hardware wasn't right. So you had this great virtualization platform that would work really well on the latest and greatest hardware from AMD back in those days and Intel, but a lot of the hardware wasn't configured right, it didn't work right. And then Cisco came out with this, hey, we're going to do the infrastructure underneath differently, and it's just going to be virtualization aware, the network will be aware, the storage will be aware, and the servers will be aware. I thought that was a big change. So I decided to jump to Cisco at that point. All right, great. So we're almost 10 minutes in and we're still, a couple of years back in your career. So all right, VMware, you're doing Cisco, Cisco of course, a huge player in the data center. When they really entered the compute business, even though they weren't looking to become a general-purpose compute platform, really build a lot of the converge solutions out there, build compute with virtualization, really had a huge ripple effect through the whole industry there. So bring us through from Cisco kind of up to the modern day and the roles you played and how cloud played an even bigger part in what you've been doing. Absolutely. So the thing I saw when I was at Cisco was, that's great, that's solving another problem, but of course then another problem appears, right? So they made the virtualization and the service easier, but then it was like, how are you connecting to the business? And we were working on a project for a bank in the UK where it still took a team of 15 bright people from multiple different vendors and partners and from in the customer to build the kind of total solution. And that's where the converged infrastructure market came from. And I think VCE did a great job of taking away another problem of bundling all together under one skew, all the infrastructure you need, all the way up to the hypervisor, don't worry, we've solved all those problems for you. And in fact, I remember just as I was leaving VCE, they were getting so good at that and so fast at it, they were going too fast for customers because customers are used to projects, infrastructure and virtualization projects taking multiple months. And here's VCE delivering this in six to eight weeks. So that was kind of interesting. But again, once you solve that problem, then another problem appears. And that's when we started to get into, you know, we've been delivering these infrastructure projects to service providers, to banks, cloud was starting to emerge. Of course, Amazon have been doing a great job over a number of years. I can't believe it's nearly 10 now. So customers were saying, well, how do I get all those cloud benefits in my own environment? Now we're hearing service providers doing that. We're hearing large banks do that. And I decided at that point to go and join Canopy Cloud to be their CTO to see if I could help solve the next problem, which was how to make cloud easier for a range of customers. Excellent. Yeah, so talk for a minute about just Canopy Cloud, you know, what did they focus on? Who did they target? Where do they fit in kind of that whole cloud picture over in Europe? Yeah, so Canopy, it was a standalone entity, it was invested by Atos, EMC and VMware. You know, if you put those components together, you've got customer base, established markets, established contracts with big companies that are looking to move to the cloud and they're looking to work with a trusted partner because I think, you know, everyone realizes who's tried that or who's thinking about it and those that have done it. There's a lot of risk in moving to the cloud, right? And I think, you know, we've been talking about the hybrid cloud, which I think we'll get to. So what Canopy was doing was saying, look, there are some proven technologies and some proven methods so we can at least give you some cloud capabilities on your own premise. And that's where products like the Enterprise Private Cloud came together. So we built and tested an Enterprise Private Cloud. We effectively simplified it down to a few SKUs. So instead of you having to go out and hire a project team, you know, the infrastructure team, the virtualization team, we did all that for you and we'd run it for you as well. So effectively, it was making your cloud a lot easier. And then customers were saying, well, I like working with a service provider. In fact, I like hosting my stuff with Atos for example. So we would be doing a service provider cloud for them. And then customers were saying, well, how do I join that service provider cloud with my own premise stuff? And I also like to use Azure, I like to use Amazon or Google. How do I connect those? And so, you know, we've moved through the decades, we've moved through all these problems one by one. And I think we're now a cloud interconnection problem. And that was the one that we were solving at Canopy now to connect the different clouds. Okay. Great. So after Canopy, you went to another very large player in the cloud environment. Let's talk about Microsoft and the Azure group. I've been on record saying that when it comes to hybrid cloud, you know, Microsoft probably has the best story out there. And definitely if you look at just the customer base they have in both on-premises and public cloud, they play both sides of that real well. You know, VMware, of course, great position on-prem, but still early days on the public cloud. Amazon, you know, really didn't even admit that there was such a thing as on-prem until really recently in a real position in the public cloud. And Microsoft really does span both those environments. So bring us through your time at Microsoft. Well, you nailed it. I mean, that's why I joined Microsoft, right? So at Canopy, I realized that, you know, to be fair, I think the marketing was ahead of where the products were at when it came to building a cloud. My personal experience of being a CTO is that it was a struggle to get the components to work well together. I found where to spend quite a lot of money on getting the right brains in the room to solve the problem. And there were indicators like that and quite a few of us, I'm thinking the vendors are not quite there yet, right? If I just followed some of the marketing online stuff from many of the vendors, if I wasn't as cynical as I am with my British cynicism, I would believe it was here today. I would believe that private cloud and hybrid cloud was here today and I could just go and buy it from an online or sweet to sales guy. That is definitely not the case. You can see vendors, I wouldn't say they were pivoting their products, but they're evolving them as we speak, which is a bit of a problem when you're a cloud service provider and you're going out selling a capability almost in line with the way the vendors are developing the products, because if a vendor chooses to go a different direction, you're left holding the baby with a promise and a contract with a customer and, of course, you're executives expecting some revenue. So I looked around and I thought, who's doing this best? And I genuinely believe Microsoft had the right approach in that they had the application and the data parts of the portfolio. So cloud is not just about infrastructure, it's about applications. That's what businesses care about right at the end of the day. They had the ID part down. So they had the Azure directory. That often gets glossed over, but it's incredibly important if you and we have this challenge at Canopy about how you synchronize customers, SaaS applications with their past platforms and their on-premise hell of a challenge to fix doing ID. They also had nice little things like store simple, so they have the cloud converge storage where you have an on-premise unit which connected back to Azure storage, you have the concept of hot and cold. It's almost like a layered model. Microsoft seemed to have an answer for every layer and under Satya's direction, cloud's becoming foremost. You could see them starting to coalesce their architectures together and their applications and I just thought they were going in the right direction. So I think back a couple of years ago, one of the challenges we had understanding kind of that on-prem piece is what's the difference between advanced virtualization and cloud? Microsoft, great story there because they start everything cloud first. They've got the Hyper-V solution, but the code starts in the public cloud and when you get the on-prem version, it's going to be a lot of the same code. It's really the management and orchestration. I'm just curious, do you have a viewpoint as to it sounded like you were saying the vendors are all pivoting and they all had, I've got virtualization and I've got some kind of automation, orchestration, bits that I'm putting together, but in your mind, what's the difference? First of all, I hate to get in the definition of words, but are there private clouds? Is the on-prem version cloud or is it just something that attaches to something outside our data center? Put you on the spot and what's your thought on that whole debate and how that's played? I think a lot of what people call private cloud is advanced virtualization. I really think it is. My interpretation of if something's a cloud or not is I look at it from a user point of view and I look at how I interface with something. I want to use an API because I'm an advanced user, but I want my non-advanced users and business users. One of the things we're looking at can appear is who are the people using the cloud? You have managers giving approvals, you have business people and procurement needing to procure things through your cloud interface. A lot of those functions don't really exist in some private clouds. I think some of the vendors are bolting those things on. If you look at some acquisitions that some vendors have done over the years, they started buying business frontends to put onto their clouds. You can see that they thought that was missing at the end of the day, but I think some of these things don't work well together. You have this advanced virtualization platform in the middle that, yes, you can give Joe blogs a logon and you can go and deploy virtual machines, but do you know what? I think that's fallen out of fashion. Deploying virtual machines, is that really what the cloud's all about? When I was at Microsoft, we ate our own dog food. I was using Office 365 online. I was storing data in the cloud and on-premise. For me, there was the whole cloud application piece, the SAS bit. That's definitely cloud, to any business user. I was at an event yesterday. It was an SME event. I was talking to both consumers of IT and some of the partners that delivered to the SME community, and they just talk about apps. I said to some of the guys, there was one company, they were an audit company. I said, so what kind of virtual machines do you consume? Now, I knew the answer, but I was just trying to be controversial. He's like, what on earth are you talking about? He said, all I need to do is make sure my bookkeeper can access this. All they care about is the applications. I think sometimes in the industry, we're asking the wrong question and trying to solve the wrong problem. People in the industry that we know, Stu, they think moving a virtual machine between on-premise and a public cloud is the panacea of cloud. I don't believe that's true. I think we all need to get to the bottom of really what cloud is. I think the best place to do that is from the consumer's point of view, not from the vendor or the cloud service provider's point of view. Yes, Steve. Once again, boy, we're in agreement because as an infrastructure guy, I've known the only reason infrastructure exists is to serve that application. The problem that we have is there's what we would call the legacy application was built with the bottlenecks and challenges that infrastructure has traditionally had. Wikibon's co-founder, head of research, David Floyer often says databases were designed knowing that there was a disk with this kind of latency. There's only so many checks and locks that a database will set up because it was designed for the infrastructure it was going to sit on. Today, if I can remove those bottlenecks with things like Flash, with really scalable architectures, the applications that I had can't take advantage of it. Wait, what can I build a new application that can just get orders of magnitude more performance and deliver that value back? It's not, oh, who has better IOPS? The user, can they get greater productivity, can they just accomplish a lot more? When we say in the big data space, it's about taking that data that I had and allowing me to create new businesses or get new insights so much faster or just that I couldn't do before, new sources of information. Infrastructure and cloud needs to be an enabler for that application. It's really about that application modernization that's going on, that infrastructure needs to support it is kind of where I look at things and as infrastructure and as cloud, you're the servant for those kind of pieces. Yeah, I don't know, Stu, what do you think? Is it like the human condition where we have to have one answer for every problem? It seems we're not okay having three answers for a business because I know some people who still work in the banking industry and they tell me there is no way these applications are going to move off the IBM mainframe. They run best there, we're really happy with it. We love what IBM are doing with their latest release for the Zed series. We get some parallel security and inspection on the mainframe. Why would we want to move it? But we do want to put some of our new stuff on the cloud, so it's okay, isn't it, to have some mainframe, some on-premise data, some cloud stuff. I think it's fine to have a mix but sometimes when you talk to industry people like you and I, sometimes it has to be all cloud and in fact we've just seen that recently with the UK government that there's some great strides being made towards cloud first policies, except some of the customers are saying we're now getting fed up of this digital by default dogma. So that's what non-technical people are accusing the IT industry of doing. So I think we need to listen to these people. So Steve, there's like a bunch of different points there that we're probably not going to have time to get into but absolutely look. I always look at our job is to help give guidance to the user as to the spectrums of offering. It's not a one-size-fits-all and one of the biggest challenges you have is there's 50 solutions out there and I can't even compare 20 of any of those together because even just take Amazon, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, there's some pieces that line up pretty straightforward and there's others where it's just like there's, can I build something like this on Amazon to compete with that? Sure. Or can I run some of this over here? Yes, but it really is what we always say. It's horses for courses. There are many solutions out there. That being said, sometimes having, I want the default to be this new choice is to help us get over that inertia because this is the way we've always done it and it has sucked, but it works. So can we get people to make that change, take advantage of that opportunity? But some things aren't going to change. Even Amazon, who is the king of saying, it's all going in the public cloud and we're going to do everything. When we pushed Andy Jassy at AWS re-invent with the analyst crew, we're all sitting there, room of analysts in a nice private meeting and we're like, all right, what percentage of Amazon.com runs on AWS? And the answer was most of it because in a deep dark corner somewhere, there's that financial application that runs the company's finances that's not running on it. And it's probably got something that looks much more like what your banking customers have in their data center that they don't want to get up, get rid of. So it's great to say, we all want to be digital. We all want to be in the cloud, but the reality is there's usually going to be a natural equilibrium for most customers. In some cases, it's great to be all in. And in other cases, there's mostly in, but there's some pieces we're going to get out. A big challenge that users have is IT is always additive. We never get rid of anything. So we had the mainframe, we added the open systems and we kept some mainframe. We added on top of that software defined in cloud and I've got all these pieces. And from an operational standpoint, you've got stovepipes and silos. And I can't share all my information well. So yeah, can it all be open source and all be Linux flavors underneath somewhere? And we'll just containerize the whole thing. We've got 25 minutes. And the first time I'm going to say the word Docker. I mean, come on, Docker is going to solve all these problems for us. Probably within the next 18 months, I figure. So at least, look, I mean, everybody knows that if they followed me, I'm a huge fan of what Docker is doing. Containerization, I think, is a huge wave. But it is not a silver bullet panacea to solve all of these challenges. I love, Steve, you're bringing up things like Active Directory in the cloud gets glossed over by most people. It's one of the foundational things that Microsoft has always done well. And you're starting to see some of the other cloud providers, the big guys, talking about it and trying to catch up in that space. So for you, Steve, what is the state of hypercloud? The title we put on this segment was, is it reality or hype? I'll tell you, from my standpoint, most customers have something on param that they feel is getting towards cloud. Whether or not it fits there is probably up for debate. And everyone is using some public cloud, and they're all using some kind of SaaS. You go to most, especially enterprise customers, you know, you have Salesforce, of course, I'm using that, I'm using other SaaS applications. IT is either running some Amazon instances or some business unit went off and did it. And if I go check all my IPs, I have to figure out how much I have. And then I've got, you know, my internal IT, which I'm trying to make more cloud like. So I say today, you know, hybrid cloud is where most people are, but there's no set definition and everybody's hybrid cloud looks totally different. And it's a mess. And there's a lot of work to be done. What's your view of the world? Well, I agree with you, but I think it's okay to be a mess, right? I mean, that's just what life's like. And I, after the experience I've had of selling cloud related products and then building cloud services and seeing how hard it is and then seeing how customers have so many different requirements, I could never see the day that there's going to be one kind of, I just don't think it'll exist. There'll be one hybrid cloud kind of definition. It's necessarily abstract. And I think that's cool. I do think though, you know, and I don't want to sound, you know, but cloud is a journey, not a destination, right? And I just think we're going through a transition like we did with virtualization, you know, I mean, think back to the old days, building, I still remember building a cluster of eight hosts, putting VMware on it, deploying some virtual machines and standing back and saying, now what? Right? So that's not an end, right? That was just a way of us improving things. In this case, getting more density, you know, return investment, TCO, that good stuff. I think cloud is going to be the same. I mean, I just love the innovative stuff that Amazon are doing, Azure are doing. I saw yesterday, the concept of machine learning in the cloud explained to 200 SME businesses in the UK and it blew their mind. And the first question is, what is it? And the second question was, how do I get it? And I said to the ones that I spoke to, whatever you do, don't go to the Microsoft trial page because it'll just blow your mind, right? You need help to understand it. And so I think not only is it not well defined today, but it's changing constantly. So moving target and hopefully we can help some of these customers understand that and separate the week from the chat, if you like. Yeah, great point, Steve. So right, just to your point, number one is cloud is not a winner take all. Secondly, you know, the survey we recently did on infrastructure as a service, we've written a couple of pieces up on premium.wikibon.com is that most customers today have a multi-cloud environment. And that's their strategy. It's even, you know, the people I'm all in on Amazon, AWS, you know, the main customers that they brought up when I go talk to them and said, Hey, are you guys using Office 365? Oh, yeah, of course we're doing that. And, you know, we're doing Salesforce. So, you know, there's pieces and there's a lot changing out there and there's lots of solutions. So I want to push back on you, Steve, because when I look at cloud, there's strata today. So first, there's the big guys. It's Amazon, it's Azure, and maybe Google. And beyond those three, I don't put anybody else at their level. Then there's the next year, there's some companies doing great stuff. I mean, you know, the traditional hosting guys gone and hosted private clouds like Rackspace, you know, IBM and the software acquisition, what they're doing with Bluemix, HP with Healion, a whole bunch of other open stack people with VM with VMware, the V cloud, EMC with EMC hybrid cloud. You know, there's lots of room for them to grow and they will find revenue and markets and they've got customers. But I still kind of say there's the mega clouds. And then there's the other vendors who are also trying to help all these service providers. And you know, are there going to be dozens, hundreds or thousands of service providers is up for a lot of debate. And, you know, so yeah, I mean, I knew you had a comment there. I'm curious as to where you kind of segment and look at the market today. Yeah, I'm used to you pushing me around, Stu, right? So I think, but I mean, what's the stat? Is it from IDC that public cloud represents like 7% of IT spending? I have to dig into those numbers. But, you know, if it is such a small amount, they've got a huge influence, right? I mean, I think the influence is way bigger than that number would suggest. I mean, look at how they're disrupting the CISCOs, the IBMs, as you've just said. But again, if I put myself as the CTO of the customer, and I'm looking at this, you know, the realities are sometimes your procurement strategy dictates your IT strategy. Now that might sound crazy. And to a real, you know, technology propeller head, you think you've got to go for Amazon because it's the coolest thing ever. Well, do you know what? I've got a three year agreement with vendor X. And it means I can do it even cheaper than Amazon with the discounts I get. You know, the realities behind the doors of an enterprise are very, very interesting. And, you know, I think we'd be foolish to ignore those and just think, you know, Amazon's cool. I love the Azure stuff. That's really cool. The realities of doing business, you know, the procurement, the business heads, the grown ups, you might say, inside some of these businesses, like the banks and the retail and the education, you know, there are lots of reasons why they will go to IBM and they will go to VMware rather than use a public cloud. Yeah. I mean, Steve, you bring up some great points. The financial levers are a big thing in there. I mean, look at converged infrastructure. When companies like VCE first came out, the challenge that they had was that, you know, the compute budget, the storage budget, the network budget were all owned by different people and in different upgrade cycles and trying to align those and put those together. What a mess. Yeah. Gave it a couple of years and most customers are working those out. You either start with a project or you align it and convergence and hyperconvergence grow in, you know, gangbusters. You know, so a premise we would put out there is that we think most users are going to move to more of a consumable, buy by the drink, not be locked into certain environments. Doesn't mean that they're not going to buy equipment, but I mean, companies have always had, you can buy our gear, but we're only going to charge you for what you're using. We have financial practice do there. The CFO absolutely wants certainty. He doesn't want to say, oh, hey, we went to this great cloud because it saved us money this month and the next month you blew your budget for the rest of the year and we need to sort that out. So I mean, do you see that as just, you know, a temporary thing that we're going to sort out or is this an impediment and, you know, we've overblown this whole public cloud thing and people are going to own their own gear a lot more. I think if I just think back, you know, especially last year when I was at Microsoft and we spoke to quite a few customers, large customers who had lots of on-premise stuff usually run by an incumbent service provider, right? So this might not apply to the SME kind of market, but a lot of big companies, they out, not fully outsourced, but they get someone to run their stuff for them, right? And I'm not sure if this answers your question fully, but, you know, whether they wanted to use public cloud or not. And I can remember one example where we were trying to get the customer to use Azure Storage because we did the sums and he could save a fortune and he thought it was great. He had to consume that via his service provider and there the problem started, right? So I think there are lots of barriers that perhaps people who are very technology focused perhaps might not get that, you know, the guys signing the checks have got lots of pressures on them. Sometimes they have to do a public cloud deal through a provider that incurs lots of other overheads and then public cloud isn't that cheap to them anymore. I think it's a very, very complex meshed market out there and looking forward to shining some light on it. All right. So I just want to give you the last word here, Steve. Lots more we'll discuss over coming weeks. I know people are going to look forward to all the research you're going to put out on our sites too, but you were just in an event last night. You talked to lots of users from big financials to kind of the SMEs of the world out there. What's their perception? Is cloud a top of mind issue for them or are other things kind of driving it and bringing cloud into the conversation? Where does cloud fit in their mindset today? So the whole event really was held by what I would call a disruptive or challenger bank in the UK for our North American readers. The UK banking market because of the problems we have has become much more open and competitive, which is great for business. I don't think that's any mistake in that the British economy is growing really fast because there's more investment in business thanks to that competitiveness. So it's about destructive and challenges. They had people like Uber there. They had people like Poundwell, the chief executive Poundwell and they had Microsoft there. They were just showing that these sometimes big companies were disrupting themselves in their own markets and sometimes new entrants were creating markets and that was the whole kind of thing. And then one of the sub themes in there was how technology sometimes it feels like a prison. You know, we're a prison to our mobile devices. We keep looking at it instead of talking to our family when really we always thought in the 60s and 70s in science fiction that technology was going to free us. And one of the things that cloud does or the uses of cloud is that it's helping to free people. So small businesses because it was an SME event, you can get someone to do your bookkeeping online. You don't have to go down to local bookkeeper. You can get it done online. You can get all these new services like SaaS applications online. You don't have to buy your own equipment. You know, and basically the message was your cost of entering a market because of cloud is much lower. And I think it's something Amazon talk a lot about, right? You can set up a business much cheaper these days because of cloud and that really resonated with the SMEs that I saw yesterday. All right. Hey, so Steve, we're going to wrap it there. You give great setup actually for the first event we're going to get you on camera of The Cube live at an event, MIT at their IDE event, which is focused on really the future of the digital economy. It's got people like Andy McAfee and Eric Brunyonson, which says, what does all this automation and robots and the whole digital economy, what's that going to do to jobs? Andy's very optimistic when it comes to these things and says we're going to find new places and jobs. But the service economy is under attack. If things go to cloud, what does that mean to all the administrators? So I'm sure we've got some really techy things that we're going to dig into that, but a little more high level business from the MIT Sloan School to talk about that. So looking forward to seeing you in London on that. It's that Friday, what's that April 9th or 10th? April 10th, we'll have that online. People can check that out on siliconangle.tv. Look for lots more from Steve and myself on premium.wikibon.com. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter with any questions or events we should be at, articles you'd like to see us cover more. Push back on us on any of the premises that we've got. What are you seeing out there in the world? We always love it, Wikibon. We were founded on allowing the IT practitioners to share with their peers. We want to help start that conversation, continue it, and share all the great things that the user community is using out there. So Steve, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks everybody else for tuning in for this segment and we will see you on the road and from our studios. Thanks for joining.