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