 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hey welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco in Moscone South, we're on the ground floor here at Google Next, Google's Cloud Conference, I'm Trevor Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante's also hosting us out there, getting stories, our next two guests, Dana Berg, Chief Operating Officer Sada, and Chris Lieman, Head of Engineering Sada, guys welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us, we're here on the ground floor. Thank you. This is exciting, I feel like a movie star right here. It's game day here, all the tech athletes are out there, if you look at the show, look at the demographics, hardcore developers, a lot of IT leaders also here, cloud architects, a lot of people trying to figure it out, we heard the keynote, Google's bringing a lot to the table, so what's new with you guys, you guys recently sold your Microsoft business going all in on Google, talk about that relationship. We are, this is a brand new day for Sada, the energy around this place, where we are in the market and where we are with the expanded attendance here, has actually reaffirmed our business strategy to go all in with Google, I don't know if you're aware, but Sada has been around for almost 20 years, historically have always been leaders in bringing people to the cloud, even before there was really much of a cloud, we were a pilot partner within Microsoft and Google and had a great thriving Microsoft business, but an even bigger Google business, and we looked at the tea leaves, we looked at where we wanted to be and aligned with a company that shared our mission and values and it was a clear choice, we chose Google, we made a very specific and deliberate act to sell off our Microsoft business so that we could take the horsepower of all of our engineering staff and apply them to Google. It's interesting, we've been around for 10 years doing theCUBE, we've got a lot of events, I mean Dave Vellante, Stu and I have been around for 30 years covering the IT, you guys 20 years, you guys have seen many ways of innovation come and go. Now you're going all in on Google, what is it about this wave right now that made that decision, what do you guys see? You're seeing something early here, expand on that, give us some color commentary because there's a wave here, right? There's a combination of things, we saw the client server thing, we saw that movement, we saw the internet, we saw the web, mobile, now it's cloud, what's the big wave, what are you guys riding? I think there's a couple of things and I think it's unique to philosophically how we think of our real special relationship with Google. There is a momentum, right? And not to quote like a Bernie Sanders, but seems like there's a revolution going on here, right? And I think what we see when we look around and we hear conversations and even with our customers, the way that we're all winning together is because we're winning the hearts and minds of the people inside of our customer base that are actually the ones responsible for inventing and the ones that are responsible for building. So when we're in boardrooms and we're selling and along with Google, we're talking with developers, we're talking with designers, we're talking about people that are actually driving the vision for these business applications. We're not always talking to the CIO down, like some of our other competitors seems to have only been able to sell that way. We're talking about the people responsible for not only constructing it, but maintaining it. So that revolution is there. These folks are bubbling that up and they're seeing the real value inside of Google. And what is that value from our point of view and why did we make such a bold statement just to stick with Google is, and we saw Thomas today echo this, I think there's very few cloud providers that are bold enough to actually lead with the fact that we want our customers to have full choice. Whether you're using GCP or not, we want to build, architect, and manufacture a product offering that allows you to keep your stuff in your data centers. Move your stuff to AWS. That power of choice is really not like what we've ever heard anywhere else. And then on top of that too, you got application renaissance, right, a whole new way of coding, infrastructure that's programmable and going away. I mean, if you think about what that does to the existing infrastructures, they can now mix and match and re-architect everything from scratch and accelerate the app movement. Well, that's absolutely true. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are managed services in the cloud which makes it dramatically easier to build applications, of course. So there's no question about that. Some of the offerings on GCP are particularly attractive for our clients, particularly the managed Kubernetes service. That's where we're seeing, perhaps, most of the interest that we're seeing, like that's a very common theme. Also the ML stack is an area that our customers are very interested in. Yeah, sure. Chris, can you bring us in some of those customer environments? You know, one of the things you hear about most customers, it's, I've got my application portfolio, modernizing that is pretty challenging. There are some things that are kind of easy, some things that take a lot more work, but migration is one of those things that makes most people that have been in IT a while cringe because there's always the devil in the details and something goes wrong once you've gotten 95% done. What do you see? What's working? What's not working? How's the role of data changing and all of that? I think migrations are usually more complex than they at first appear. And so even with best intentions, thinking that customers can just move their workloads seamlessly to the cloud have actually in practice been more challenging. So some of the areas that we find challenges are around data migrations, especially in the context of zero downtime that's always more difficult than with applications. So that's definitely an area that we're spending a lot of time working with our customers to deliver. Just to add to that, I have to keep reminding myself of the name, but obviously the Anthos announcement today sounds incredibly intriguing as a lower barrier of effort to actually migrate. Our customers have been trying to really absorb and take a hold of Kubernetes and containerized methods for a long time. Some are having a harder time doing it than others. I think Anthos promises to make that endeavor much, much easier and I think about as we leave here this week and we go back and we re-educate our own engineering teams as well as our customers, I think we might see some highly accelerated project timelines go from here down to here. And the demo that Jennifer Lynn did was pretty impressive. I mean, using the running inside a container whether it's VMs and then having service batches on the horizon coming to the table is going to change the implementation delivery piece too in a massive way. I mean you got code build run on the cloud side but this kind of changes the equation on your end. Can you guys share the insight into that equation because Google's clearly posthumant to be partner friendly. You guys are a big partner now, you're going all in. This is an interesting dynamic because you can focus on solving customers problems. All this heavy lifting kind of goes away. Talk about the impact to you as a partner when you look at Anthem, Anthem migrate in particular some of these migration challenges with containers and Kubernetes. Seems like it's a perfect storm right now to kind of jump in and do more faster. Yeah. Well, it's certainly very interesting. We'll want to take a really hard look at it. I mean, very, very cool announcement. Moving to containers in the source prior to the migration obviously solves a lot of challenges. So for that reason it's definitely a move forward. And I think we always talk about in this industry the acceleration for consumption. But really that's a poor way of saying probably what we should be saying is an acceleration of value. So we're constantly in this battle to try and deliver value to our customers faster. That's what our customers want, right? And in essence, we see Anthos as being potentially a big game changer there. So that our CIOs that we're talking with can show to their various stakeholders that they are making very good proactive moves into the cloud at lower barriers of entry, right? Yeah, so you brought up the ML piece of Google. I wonder if you can help share a little bit on that. When I think back two years ago, data was really at the core of what a lot of what Google was talking about. I was actually surprised not to hear a lot of it on the main stage this morning. But AI, ML, what are you doing? What are your customers doing? Does Google have leadership in the space? Google certainly has leadership in the space. Our customers, I think, relatively universally think that their ML stack is the strongest among the competitors. But I think in practice what we're finding is there's a lot more urgency as far as just literal data migrations off of their data centers into the cloud. And I foresee a lot more AI and ML work as more move in. Yeah, so you might at our booth here, not to give a plug, but we've got a booth down at the end with a full-fledged racing car. Just to talk about the art of the possible with AI and ML, our engineering teams and the race teams that we sponsor, they're there, the driver's there. We should go down and talk to them. We've taken all of the race telemetry data for the last six months and all of his races and practices. We've aggregated that data all into GCP, run AI and ML algorithms on it, to provide his racing team some very predictive ways that he can get better and that team can get better. And so I'd invite just anybody that wants to kind of go there and take a look at, you know, even if you're in banking and if you're, or if you're in retail or if you're in healthcare, take a look at some of how that was done, because it's a very, very powerful way to answer your question, head and shoulders down why Google is actually accelerating and exceeding an AI. And one of the things that Thomas Curry and showed on stage was the recent hackathon they had with the college students with the NCAA data of the game that just finished and throughout that experience. This is a core theme of GCP and now Anthos, which is getting data in and using it easily. Yeah, right away. And scaling, at a scale level that kind of seems unprecedented. So this team seems to be the application, the new differentiator. I think it is, you know, I think that announcement, obviously the big three takeaways for us, you know, certainly scale, unmatched, certainly speed and migration with Anthos. If I could highlight one other, I was incredibly pleased with, well, I've been pleased since Thomas has a rival in general by bringing an enterprise class strategy within side of Google that I think are going to respond well to our enterprise customers. And part of enterprise class is also making sure that their partner community has amazing enhancement programs that really incentivize those partners that are actually in the full managed services space from cradle to grave, lifetime customer value. So we're very excited about even further announcements this week that no doubt have been inspired by Thomas to try and really take advantage of their partner community that are in the business of cradle to grave support of customers. So you feel comfortable with Thomas? You're talking to a lot of customers, he knows the enterprise. We've had an opportunity to meet with him. We've had some shared customers that have had a great privilege of getting to know him and support us and collectively them. He knows the partner equation pretty well by the enterprise. Without a doubt. It's about partnering because there's a monetization that's shared, go to markets together, talk about the importance of that and what's it like to be a partner? Yeah, without a doubt. Again, his embrace of the open source community that you saw today really taking advantage of highlighting partner value is wonderful but I think Thomas above anything else knows that Google needs to scale. They need to scale and then they have to have breadth and they have to have depth. And to get to where Google needs to be over the course of the next two, three years, it's wonderful, it's refreshing, it's 100% accurate that Google knows and Thomas knows that the path to do that is via partners. Partners that share in Google's vision that are 100% aligned to the same things that Google is aligned with. And I think that's why I'm so thankful to be at SOTA large in part because all of the things that we care about in terms of our customer success as well as Google's success, we all share that. So it's a great trifecta. It's a ground floor opportunity, congratulations. Guys, talk about your business. What's going on? You got some new offices I heard you opened up. What's going on in the state of the business? Obviously the Google focus that you're excited about obviously, they're at the beginning, I think, I called Google the dark horse. I think they were the tech that they have and the renewed focus on the enterprise, building on what Diane Greene had put foundationally. Thomas is meeting with hundreds of customers. He's so busy, he doesn't have time to come on the queue but he'll come on soon but he's focused. This is now a great opportunity. Talk about your business. What's the state of the union there? Tell us, give an update. I can take that one, if you don't mind. Go ahead. You can add poetic color if you want. Yeah, so, as I said, we're entering a new journey for SADA in light of renewed focus, renewed conviction to Google. We are investing more than we ever have into the common belief that Google is the one to beat in terms of momentum drive and ultimately winning the hearts and minds of who we've talked about. Over the last four months, we've opened five new offices in New York, Austin, Chicago, Denver. Our headquarters is in Los Angeles and just recently, we just opened a brand new office in Toronto so we can really help our Canadian customers really see the same type of white love treatment. We provide those customers in the States and so that's why, well, I wasn't earlier but I'm walking around with Canadian flag. We're very excited about the presence that we're going to have in Canada. It's Toronto, I always blow it. I call Toronto being the American that I am. It's Toronto. I've been a couple of times. Well, I'm glad you said it right. Good. On the engineering side, also you guys are on the front lines. There's also a sales development. There's also customer relationship. Engineering side, I'm sure you guys are hiring. There's some hard problems to solve out there. Can you guys share some color commentary on the type of solutions you guys are doing? What's the heavy, what solutions are you solving, problems that you're solving for customers? What are the key things that you got going on? Well, a lot of cloud migrations, a lot of web and application development, custom development, and data pipelines. I'd say those are really the three key focus areas that we're working on at the moment. One other thing too, so we believe that we want 100% customer retention, always. And that goes above and beyond an implementation. So the other big area of investments that we're making is in a whole revamped technical account management team. So for those of our GCP customers that have had the privilege to, we've had the privilege of working with N4, we are building out a team of individuals that will, well beyond the project, stay with that customer, work with them weekly, monthly, quarterly, and try to always find ways to expand and move workloads into the cloud. We think that provides stickiness, we think that provides ultimate value to try and help our customers identify where else they can take full advantage of the cloud. And it's a fairly new program. And in large part, I just want to thank Thomas and the partner team for new programs that are coming out to help us so that we can actually reinvest in things that go throughout the life cycle of the customer. So very good stuff. Data, Chris, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. We'll check out your booth, the car is there with the data. Bring that data exhaust to the table. Unintended, analyzing with Google Cloud, Anthos, good commentary. Thanks for sharing. I really appreciate that being on board. All right, great. Cube coverage here live on the floor in San Francisco. Google Next 2019, this is Google's cloud conference. Customers are here, a lot of developers, more action live on the day one of three days of coverage after this short break. Stay with us.