 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in San Francisco. We're live at Google Cloud's conference next 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Next guest is Deep D. Cervasta, product manager for Cloud Spanner, one of the most important products within Google Cloud. Certainly very controversial in its disruption. We're going to get into that. And Danielle Roxton, CEO of Optiva, customer of Cloud Spanner. Deep D, great to see you. Good to see you too, John. Congratulations on one of the most powerful women at Google Cloud. I've written on the Forbes, my Forbes column. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you for writing this. Cloud Spanner's your baby. You're the lead product manager for that product. You got BigQuery, you got huge scale with Google Cloud. You got Spanner. Kind of the core building blocks of Google Cloud. I really want to get some insights. I didn't have enough time to get this into my article, but Cloud Spanner's not like a, Johnny come lately kind of thing. It is really hardened from years of internal Google work. And your customer is the internal Googlers who are, that's a high bar. Yeah, definitely. Talk about that dynamic and how that shapes the public product now. Absolutely, thank you. So yes, it's definitely been a hardened product over the years. We've been using it internally for about seven-ish years now. You know, the paper came out in 2012. And we've been using it for the most mission critical systems within Google, you know, from AdWords to Gmail to Google Photos. And so it's definitely had a lot of use internally. And we've definitely, you know, it's not something that we launched it last year, but it's actually been tried and tested and battle tested really over the last many years. And it's not like, I mean, people talk about dog food, he's been a term or drink your own champagne. Google although does that, it's not like they're going to give you a pass. Is this strict requirements there? Absolutely, because, you know, we were created to host some of the most mission critical, business critical applications databases for Google. This was launched as a service within Google and it was used and has continued to gain more and more and more applications over the years. So it wasn't something that, you know, we dog fooded and we just threw over the table or over the fence to use for the public cloud. Any updates on stats, number of customers that you could share? What are some of the, any things that you'd like to talk about the product, any new data? So I internally, you know, almost all mission critical systems and most of the database uses, relational databases use are on spanner at this point. You know, we have petabytes of data for databases and, you know, multiple thousand internal customers. You know, you're a customer, you're using it. Yeah, so we're an enterprise software company. We make software for telcos. And, yeah. And so what we do is we have a charging engine. This is the monetization software for telcos. So every time you are making a phone call, you know, downloading a video off of YouTube, right? The telcos are trying to monetize that and track it to charge the different customers. And so today we've been running on Oracle. Oracle to date was the world's best database. And every telco out there wants 10 times the scalability of Oracle and they want to get off the 10s and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars they pay Oracle every year. And when we looked at spanner, it was not only capable of replacing Oracle, but it gave us that 10 times faster at the reduced cost. Right? And so this is a game changer for a telco. I mean. Can you just go slower for me on this one? You're like. So Oracle was the best database, used to be the best database. Okay, I love that. But tell about the cost. You said millions are going in in savings and 10x performance of spanner for less price. Yeah, so my customers today have been largely on-premise, right? The telcos have their data centers. They like to, I like to say hug their servers. They like to see their servers. And every time they capacity plan, they have to plan nine months in advance because for Christmas, right? For whatever's coming, whatever growth they're anticipating, they have to plan those data centers, procure the servers, set them up, test them, disaster recovery, blah, blah, blah. And so they pre-purchase all that compute power. When you look at spanner and then Google Cloud, now we're not having to pre-purchase that. It can literally auto scale. There's a negative event in the country like let's say an earthquake, right? Some sort of natural disaster. You'll see a spike on the use of the network. Calls being made, data being downloaded, texts being sent. And so with spanner and Google Cloud platform, now we can auto scale and the telcos do not have to pre-purchase all that compute power. So that's a lot of savings. And we, our analyst team at Wikibon does a lot of work on this and just share some stats. Usually when you do TCO analysis, the operational cost, the human, the labor cost are by far the biggest factor. Except in Oracle, license and maintenance costs are about two thirds of the TCO because of the licensing policies. So that's a huge problem, obviously, for people. So the only way you can cut the cost is to cut your database. Yep, exactly, exactly. And sort of Oracle's pretty famous about how once they get you, they like to really keep you. And our customers have been asking us for ways to reduce the TCO. And to date it's been really hard to get around the database problem, right? It's a core part of our application. It's a very right, intensive application. And so we're like, without using Oracle, what are the databases? Well, right, I mean, if you think about databases, transactional databases with asset properties, there's Oracle, there's DB2. Yeah, I had SQL servers not in that class. And now Spanner is entering with a completely new architecture using just radical approaches. Maybe talk about that a little bit. Absolutely, right, so I think, Spanner was born, it's cloud native, it was born in the cloud to be having the best of both worlds, right? So you have their relational semantics and familiarity of tooling and all that with the relational semantics, as well as the horizontal scaling and the performance that comes with it and the availability, right? So we are the only relational database that can scale globally, right? While providing asset transactions, and we can do this with up to five lines of availability. And it's all elastic, it's in the cloud, you don't have to pre-provision the whole thing, you can grow it by growing, you can just add the number of nodes and the data rebalances, and then when you don't need all those nodes, you can reduce the number of nodes and just data rebalances again. And so it reduces maintenance, it reduces complexity, and allows you to focus on your business, which is what Danielle is seeing. And the tech behind it, we've talked in theCUBE, there's a small little company called Wendisco, they use this thing called the PAXIS algorithm, it's a consensus algorithm, you use an atomic clock to rationalize time, and it's just amazing. If you go and read the paper, if you want some detail on it, it's just fascinating stuff. So I'm interested in this Oracle thing, because obviously Amazon is targeting Oracle, you hear the rhetoric there, you guys have a solution that's targeting Oracle, just be hearing it from the customer directly. And telcos, by the way, they need pressure to monetize, that's a huge big data problem, microtransactions just starting to see. And they're getting killed over the top. They need to have better customer intimacy, it's a big data problem. So how do you actually rip and replace or move off Oracle? It was actually, for us, pretty easy. Maybe we were lucky, but the database layer was pretty abstracted from our application, right? Now, Spanner works in a little bit of a different way, all of our stuff was SQL based. We moved over to RPC to take advantage of some key features within Spanner. And so to be honest, we would have put our entire engineering budget and team to change out from Oracle to Spanner because it was such a game changer for our customers in terms of the speed we were getting and the reduced TCO. I mean, this is our opportunity to go from, we're a $120 million company, which is maybe startup world kind of big, but the people I'm going up against, Huawei, Ericsson, Andox, multi, multi, multi billion dollar company. So this is my big chance to come out big. This is a huge idea. I think it's massively disruptive to the telcos. They like to hold on to their servers, so we're trying to educate them on why public cloud is so game changing for them. And when they think about it, they think about lifting up their data centers as is and putting them into the cloud. And I'm really trying to educate them about the elasticity and the auto scaling of like, you don't need a capacity plan for just above your spikes all the time. Auto scales up and then the cost goes away. And what are they responding to? How's the response from them? Head turning, I mean, spinning heads. Mind blowing. So what are they saying? What are they like? Oh my God, we're going to double down. Can I start a proof of concept? I want to start one right now. People are saying congratulations to me and I'm like, whoa, buddy, like let's like get it, let's get it going. Let's get to the POC first. How about you sign like an agreement here? But no, I think people are just cheering. They're like, this is, I mean, this is an old problem. The monetization of charging, right? This is a new, I mean, cell phones have been around forever, right? Rate plans have been around forever. And so when I first came in, I'm the new CEO of 18 Months In, right? Into a turnaround situation. Everyone told me, this is a commodity product. You can't do anything new. And I was like, really? Like, let's start to look at where we're spending time. Let's look at the cost. Let's talk to our customers. And we looked at it. We're like, and then Spanner, the press release came out the day I started. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like so lucky. I'm so lucky. Now, are you a technologist by background? Yeah, I have a computer science degree from Stanford. So you had a great gut feel about this as well. You had the chops to be able to evaluate this. I think that, you know, this is a great example of how, you know, the older industries are moving to the cloud. And this is a great, you know, cloud Spanner provides that disruptive technology for them to really make the move. And there are things that we're, you know, if you come to our session, there are things that we're announcing and sort of demoing in our session, like, you know, import exports. So you can take your data and export it out of Spanner and then move it to another database if you so choose and, you know, I think Spanner is transformative. And to your point about the old guard, you know, Oracle of the world, it's kind of like, we just talk about horse and buggy versus cars. Like, yeah, things kind of go away because we don't have horses anymore. We go with cars as a whole new mindset shift. You see a lever of innovation with the Spanner being comm sci you go, I know my problem. Here's my contingencies and my dependencies. I can actually make that go away and get value and shift value and make the turnaround much faster. So this is different. So customers have to kind of get this, that it's not horse and buggy, old way of doing databases, old way of doing software. This isn't marketing fluff. There's really technical differentiation with Spanner. It is a different database. And like I said, we would have put our entire engineering budget to make this work. What's different about it? How would you summarize the difference? Well, first of all, I mean, Deepjee's going to help me with this, right? Cause she's going to know it. She's like, you're going to say this wrong. But, you know, I think the big tech diff is around true time, right? Being able to synchronize all those. I mean, like I said, we're a right intensive application. People on the same plan are using their watch, texting on their phone, using their iPad. And that's hitting the same billing, you know, information for that subscriber. And so this needs to be atomic. It needs to be right. It's revenue. Like this isn't a selfie that we're uploading, right? This is their- Transactions. Transaction volume is huge. Latency needs to be low cause people aren't going to wait to call their mom while the charging engine takes, I mean, we're talking millisecond. So when we look at this. Yeah. We handled all of these problems for us. And with the true time distributed right, asynchronous right, that was like, okay, light bulbs went off and it was crazy. Synchronous right. Synchronous right. Sorry. But I think if I were to summarize in a nutshell, basically you don't have to make trade-offs anymore. It's the no compromise database because you get performance and scale and flexibility and manageability in one product. And that's what allows customers like Danielle to really make that transition. And it's not just a little bit better, right? It's a game changer and it allows them to move, like, you know, rethink their business processes so that they can like, just monetize and move to the next next generation. I would think deep into the one of the challenges you have in Danielle, one of the opportunities or advantages you have is the good all-boy network is a distributed database. It'll never work, right? So you love to hear that from your competitors and of course, Deepty, you want to break through that. I mean, you mentioned that earlier. We launched last year on Valentine's Day. So, you know, we are relatively new to the market, to the external market, but we've been doing this enough years that we are based on a very strong foundation and we understand the challenges that come with doing this. And so really it's been an incredible journey to like educate the market and to really say, you know, you don't have to make these compromises. You can actually think about moving to the cloud and gaining all of the advantages of it without having to compromise on performance or scale or, you know, flexibility or reliability. Well, you changed, again, again, back to the transformational capabilities. It literally is the old databases, was the horse and buggy, IT, people buy IT. That's not happening anymore. They're moving to services, a service-centric world where the differentiation has to shift. So the competitive advantage, you kind of have to kind of, what was once the sacred cow of operations. We spent a lot of time tuning our Oracle databases with triggers and stored procedures, just trying to eke every little ounce of performance because when we're capped out on capacity, you got to do all the capacity planning, new data center, machines, all of that stuff. What's the personnel impact? Obviously, one guy quits. You know, he was the guy tuning. Well, he's on vacation. Does Spanner have a personnel challenge the same as Oracle? What's the impact? I mean, it's kind of a different set of people that will sit around now our application, right? A set of people in data centers, hands on machines, right? Now it is a service, which we get to focus on making software and having a business app impact on our customers so that they run their businesses better instead of capacity planning like these crazy spreadsheets of how much machine you should buy, how much compute power, right? And that's not what we want to be good at. So database consolidation, we were talking about. Danielle, I want to ask you a question. If you can just share your personal perspective, people watching might say, hey, you know, I kind of need a competitive advantage. Why should someone look at Spanner, Cloud Spanner? What's the aha moment that you had that someone might be wanting to look at for Cloud Spanner? What's the big deal? Right, I mean, for us, it was a low latency, the global scale sitting on, tried and true as we've been discussing product. It wasn't new. It's not like, I mean, there's some vendors out there, CockroachDB is trying to do something very similar, right? But it doesn't have the proven chops of Google sitting on and in Google data centers, running, Google runs internet. So, right, I mean, it was just, it was kind of a no-brainer. Here at the time, the clock's pretty important there, too. And the quality too. I mean, that's why people stay with Oracle. It is a high quality database. It's proven, it's low risk, and it's expensive. Right? And you know, my customers are running their business, right? This is their revenue. And so to get them off of Oracle, I need to have eye-popping numbers, right? It needs to be 10 times faster, and a tenth of the cost, right? For them to move, because if it's two times faster, they're going to stick with Oracle. If it's just as expensive, they're going to stay with Oracle. So my engineering teams, I'm like, I don't care what you need to do, figure it out. 10 times faster, 10th of cost, let's go do it, and thankfully it was really easy. Well, this is a power engine for you, but other customers just say, hey, Oracle's like plumbing, it runs our CRM and billing systems, we just put containers and run Kubernetes around it, and we roll in some all the other stuff, it's cloud native. Yeah, I mean, it's not just the cloud play is about reducing your IT costs so that you can focus on your business application. And now there's IaaS, there's PaaS, and now there's really services. Database is a service, and we take away the burden of maintenance and managing of the infrastructure of the database, right? And tuning even of the database, because we do automatic sharding, we do automatic load balancing, et cetera. So you don't even have to do that level of management anymore. So there are other products that do manage databases, but this one allows you to really focus on the business and not have to ever worry about scaling up or availability or management. What about the consistencies around the database? It's one of the things that I think that's important to highlight is global is a huge deal. Obviously, you talk to Calcos, they want to be global, maybe also have regional issues around data sovereignty. But this consistency around the Spanner product, just quickly highlight, is that the differentiation for you guys or not? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it is the only database in the world that does strong consistency across the globe, across oceans, right? So there are products that can do strong consistency within a particular region or within even a continent, but doing strong consistency with performance across the globe, using your database as a CDN, as a content distribution network for your transactional asset consistent data. I mean, that's what we do. And you don't have to have the big applications. This is the other thing I want to talk about, right? Like it's a lot of customers think, oh, I have to have a petabyte scale database or I have to have global data. You don't, you can start very small. You can have a few gigabytes, but the point is you get all of that infrastructure and even if you grow to all of that scale, you can just turn up the dial and get it, right? What's the expression? It's not your grandfather's database anymore. What's the future of databases? Because when you look at what you're saying here, it's not about the database anymore. It's about the data that happens to have databases sidecarrying it. With Kubernetes and Istio around the corner, data is everywhere. What is the future of databases? Is this going to be the power of software development? How would you describe how Spanner is enabling the future of databases? Yeah, absolutely. I think we think Spanner is a future of databases, right? Because it gives you that best of all worlds with scale performance, manageability and lower total cost of ownership in most cases. So we actually have a spotlight session that focuses exactly on this. And we think that allowing customers to focus on their business problems rather than maintaining and managing of their, because the data is their crown jewel, right? So they can stop stressing about that and how to scale and how to grow it. Then they can focus on the business and that's what we're here to do. Then you're your happy customer, seeing excited. Right, we're a partner. Yes, yes. And we're so excited, right? I mean, I'm always testing my messages with my customers and I'm turning those heads and I know I'm onto something really, really great. It's thankfully to Spanner, Kubernetes, Google Cloud. And it's early days, right? The ecosystem is just starting. It's just, yeah. You're like on the Gen 1 ecosystem. It's going to be the cloud visionary in Telco. I'm bringing cloud to Telco. Where are you located? Where's your headquarters? I'm in Austin, Texas. Austin, Austin. I'm changing. Game changing for a turnaround business that was a commodity, now it's... Yeah. Phoenix from the ashes. 10X, I love it. Yeah. It's crazy. Daniel and Octavia are really pioneering this by moving a traditional industry to the cloud, so kudos to them. It's not a pivot, it's just a reset. Yeah. It's a total reset. Awesome. Congratulations on your success. Thank you. I saw the magic secret weapon in his pan or turned it around. Great to see you. Yeah, great to see you. Congratulations on your success as product manager. One of the hottest products in the Google Cloud, Cloud Spanners. The Cube Coverage bringing you all the hottest action here at Moscone. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante for Cube Coverage. Stay with us, we'll be right back with more after this short break. See ya.