 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone here. Live, CUBE coverage in San Francisco for Google Cloud's conference called Google Next 2019. Hashtag Google Next 19, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante with a special CUBE Insights guest, Corey Quinn, cloud economist at Duckbill Group. They'll also be filling in as a host on theCUBE at a variety of cloud-native shows. Corey, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see me again. Thank you for having me. And Stu, you're looking beautiful and brilliant as always. Dave, you're handsome. Okay, we're here in theCUBE. We're breaking it down. Alright guys, seriously, let's wrap this up real quick and then we'll get into some of the fun conversations around some of the observations. But day one's over. Clearly, Anthos is not just a rebrand, although the CMO clearly talked about while he's done that. They want to add more stuff into it. So that's the big topic here. We saw the migration tool, Anthos Migrate, and then a lot of some apache here, APIs, thoughts on day one, Stu. Yeah, so John, Anthos, I'm still trying to squint through it a little bit and it's more than just Kubernetes. We know that Google has a strong position in being the open cloud, as they've been saying for a couple of years, but what are these services? Who are the partners? How is this different from the dozens of Kubernetes solutions that are out there? So there's great buzz here at the show, really good attendance here. A lot of really smart people, so you expect that coming to a Google show. So good start day one. I was really excited to dig in with you on some of the Anthos stuff, as well as some of the serverless pieces, which I've got some commentary on. Well, Parna and Chen, Chen a lot of time on this. They dug in. Corey, I know you've been putting your ear to the ground. What's happening? What are you seeing? What are you reporting? What have you collected? I think one of the biggest things that I'm seeing in this entire conference to date has been almost a mind shift change. I mean, this conference is called Google Next and for a long time, that's been one of their biggest problems. They're focusing on what's next rather than what is today. And they're inventing the future to almost at the expense of the present. I think the big messaging today was both about reassuring enterprises that, yes, they're serious about this, and also building a narrative where they're now talking about coming at this from a position of being able to embrace customers where they are and speak their language. I think that that's transformative for Google and it's something I don't think that we've seen them do seriously, at least not for very long. Dave, we've been talking about this all the time. Do they have the enterprise chops? We've been following the new team when Diane Green came in here to put the pieces together. It was a tough job she had. They put the pieces together, but as Corey's pointing out, it's almost like they're growing up now saying, okay, hey, we got to realize that customers matter, not just the tech or the future. This has been an Amazon playbook. Customer, customer, customer, and build products with customers. It seems to be your thoughts on this. Well, so I think, Corey, you made a good point is they're always looking at the future. And if you want to get beyond search, mail, and maps, you got to solve a problem today. And I'm not sure exactly, like you said, Stu, what problem Anthos is solving. I think it may still be a little early for this multi-cloud management, but I think it is coming. You know, look to think about how Amazon talks. Well, we're going to eliminate the heavy lifting. Microsoft clearly is, you've got a software state that they can help you connect. You know, Oracle, same, same. So Google, it's always been about the tech and the future. And they're starting to get there, but still about to me, the tech and the future. Yeah, it's interesting. Corey, I remember, I believe you were quoted in a news article recently is that Amazon listens to customers and Google historically talks to customers and tells them this is the way you should be doing it. Is it a new Google now? I don't know. I don't think you change anything as big as Google overnight. I think that there's a long story tradition of the Google engineer being the smartest person in the room, just ask them. I'm kidding, you won't have to ask them. They're going to tell you on prompted. And I think that has to change because fundamentally addressing developers is a great way of building traction. It's a great way of getting to where they tend to be, but developers generally do not sign $50 million deals. Well, more than once anyway. Well, this is a good point. This brings me to customer traction, which I think they've shown chops for. The work they're doing at CNCF with the continued open source, great. But then when you got to go support the open source, when you got to start putting SLAs together, this is where you start to get into procurement, some requirements, operation security, a whole new level of grinding it out. I mean, the enterprise is a grind it out game. Google now has to go down that road. Stu, Dave, Corey, do you think they're ready? You think they're ready to grind it out? Well, you know, we talked about in our kickoff this morning, partnerships are critical and they had a bunch of really good ones up on stage this morning. You know, Cisco, VMware, some good ones to hang your hat on. You know, would like to see more from an application standpoint as to where they sent but Dave, there's no question. I mean, I think there's an emphatic yes, why? Because they got the global scale, they got the world's biggest cloud, they got a ton of dough. You know, we always say, oh, the best tech doesn't always win, and that's true. But usually the best tech runs out of money or they give up, you know? I don't see that happening at least in the midterm or even a semi long term for Google. So I do think they have the chops to grind it out. I mean, I think they have the tech. I've always said that, love some of their tech. But they try to force Google tech down the enterprise throats over the years. And I think Diane Greene realized that and that was the start of seeing real product management chops start to come in, some of the work that they know they got to get down and dirty on. But to me, it's a story that matters. It's a story has to be there. I think we're starting to see here at least from my observation, the story of customers get in, solve, create value. I think this whole positioning of we want to be the open cloud where they say, oh, you want to negotiate your contracts, you don't want lock in, you want developer productivity and you want operations. I think it's a smart play by Google's too. I think that's a good move. And again, they're the dark horse on this. They don't have a lot to lose by going, changing the game, changing the rules. Amazon certainly in the lead has a lot to lose but there's so far ahead, Google can just kind of catch up pretty quickly if they make the right moves. TK is making a lot of the right moves but there's only so much that can be done so quickly. When you wind up in a story, like we're seeing right now, with customers who are taking workloads that haven't really been touched in their on-prem environments since 1998 and they're migrating them into a GCP environment and GCP's formal deprecation policy says we'll give you one year's notice before turning anything off. Once it goes GA, that's no time at all for an enterprise. Wait, we might have to move again? Absolutely not. It's still a language. It takes the enterprise a year just to figure out should we move and where do we do? Exactly, their enterprise that go out of business and some of their divisions wouldn't know for five years. So as Google, what's their reaction when you press them on this? It usually starts with well actually and then they reach for a whiteboard to show me exactly why I'm wrong and then I lose interest and wander off at which point they realize, wow, you have no attention span for anything. Would you like to work here? And so far no dice but we'll see. So, well that's a good business model, right? I mean, still your reaction to that. I mean, look at Red Hat, they support RHEL for what, like zillions of years, right? This is what an example of how an enterprise needs to behave. Well, right, John, the question we've had for a number of years is, can companies be more googly? And the message here seems to be more, we're going to meet you where we are, we're going to be able to work with you on that, but there's some of those underlying things that Corey brings out that need to change here. So that's a big change for Google. So what is the story that we heard from Thomas Curiant today? He said, a hybrid cloud and a multi-cloud, a consistent framework with standard infrastructure and a platform to secure and manage data across the enterprise. Okay, sounds good. A lot of work to be done there. If you think about, I mean, look at Amazon, hybrid cloud, announced outposts, doesn't shift to later this year, it's a one small slice. There's got to be partnerships, there's got to be an ecosystem to deliver on those three components of the vision and the story. And I say there's a lot of work to be done there. Now, what I do like about it is, I do think that multi-cloud is a problem. I don't think thus far, for most enterprises, it's a strategy, I think it's been multi-vendor. And so it will become a problem. The question I have is, who's going to be in the best position to solve that problem? And you pointed out today, Stu, well, Google has got VMware as a partner, Cisco as a partner, Red Hat as a partner, IBM and Red Hat sort of lining up on that. Maybe ServiceNow tries to get into that game, but it's a wide open space, it's jump ball. Yeah, it's interesting, one of the things I worry a little about, and I love Corey's opinion on this, is Google, absolutely, if you talk about the container space, clear leadership. First time I heard about containers, Google was front and center, they're leading this Kubernetes march, but Kubernetes isn't magic. And even their serverless movement, John and I interviewed Pali today, and it's very much K-native, we're going to take your containers and Kubernetes and extend it to serverless. That's not what I hear from customers that I talk to today that are doing serverless. Corey, what's your take there? I think that you sort of see almost the same problem emerging both with that narrative and the current multi-cloud approach. It's not the fact that I can take this arbitrary code and run it anywhere that makes something serverless. I mean, I have a wristwatch that'll run code or a Raspberry Pi or a burning dumpster with an enterprise IT logo on the side of it. That isn't what's interesting, that isn't what delivers value to customers. It's the event model for starters, and I think right now that it's not quite there. A lot of the stuff that's been announced and is coming out as we speak in various blog posts is still HTTP endpoint activated, which means that you're not quite to an event model. Separately, what we're seeing with Anthos and the current approach to multi-cloud is you can deploy this to any cloud provider you'd like. Well, yes, insofar as a cloud provider to you is a bunch of disk, a pile of VMs and a network, and that's about it. That's not cloud in the modern sense. That is effectively outsourcing your data center and you'll find it runs on money pretty quickly once you start down that path. It's the higher level services, the deep integrations. And this brings up a great point, and I think what I'm seeing, and this is what I think a lot of people, there's very aspirational views on Google. People love Google, they love, they know about Google, and they hope that they're as good as Amazon tomorrow. And let's just face it, Amazon is way out front. So I think there's expectations for Google that are a little bit too high. And I think what I'm hearing the executives, at least the positive side would be, they understand where they are. I mean, the fact that we're not talking about Edge and IoT and all these other things, means that they're still in foundational mode, in my opinion. So, I mean, think about it. They're just getting their act together, building that foundational thing. So I think they're cautious because we're not hearing about the IoT. We're not hearing about some of the more advanced challenges that the enterprises are having. We heard a little bit about from the SI the group that came on about data migration. Sada. Sada. So, okay, they got database, they have the big cloud, big table, big query, okay, great stuff, ML. So data is certainly in their wheelhouse. But outside of that, I mean, they're still foundational. So, well tomorrow's product day though. So, you know, maybe hear more there. I'm surprised we didn't hear more about machine intelligence. You know, they talked about it a little bit, but this company is, you know, the leader in AI. And maybe that's part of the issue. I think that there is no question that when you want something far future that looks like robots from space built, you go to Google, you know that. I think there's a lot less of an awareness that, okay, I just need a bunch of VMs to run somewhere. And I feel like that is more or less the story of today. Yeah. And you know, Google, I mean, I like their story. You know, I love the code, cloud code, cloud run, cloud building. They have all the right like DevOps, like linguistic that gets my attention. And it's kind of like, it feels like it's, it feels like they're really close. It does. I get it seen so far away. Culture is also extremely hard. You have a bunch of execs that have just shown up from Oracle, seemingly yesterday in these terms. And there's a lot of knee-jerk reactions of, oh, Google is now taking on a bunch of Oracle approaches, like hiring salespeople and talking to customers. That's not a bad thing. Meanwhile, the executives who come out of Oracle after decades there and are now working at Google are having to adjust to a more rapid pace of innovation to this new world in which they have customers that don't actively hate them. And it's turning into a very different story for everyone involved. I'm curious to see what comes out of it, but it's still very much early days. I think they can build fast. I mean, like you said, they like Google. The partners like them. What they don't like about Google is responsiveness and being the white gloves. They need to have that kind of serviceability. And Google also by having a single overarching brand, in the term of the word Google, is their consumer efforts do wind up playing into people's perception through the cloud. Like, yes, we want Google to listen to us. No, not through our thermostats. Well, they got a lot of regions developing. They got the footprint, guys, great job. Stu, any final comments? Yeah, I mean, just you talk about the customer you've heard. There was, you know, my comment on Twitter this morning that got the most reaction is, you know, question to retailer, why are you choosing Google Cloud? Answer is you're not Amazon. And, you know, long and short, being the alternative to the leader in the market today, not a bad thing. So Google has, you know, a good position at the market. They, we always knew that they had great tech. So, you know. Also thing on that comments, Stu, is that I think in watching Google, I think I personally am critical of what they need to do more, obviously. But they're, the people are doing the work. I mean, you got to grind it out. To me, this is a grind it out game. It's only early. You got to get the discipline up there. They got the right product management type chops in there. Can they get those things done that Thomas, Kurian, Amit, Xavier can bring to the table and kind of shed the oracle and put the New Jersey on and fight the battle with the new Google way. That's going to be the tell sign. Well, the hard part for me is it's hard to measure. You see some logos. You don't know what they're really buying. I mean, with Amazon, you know, it's infrastructure as a service. Microsoft, okay, you're not sure how much is there, Oracle, clearly not sure, you know, et cetera. But so, look at, the proof was talking to customers. Right? How much they're actually adopting this stuff for real business problems. Yeah, it's not multi-cloud if your infrastructure runs on a different cloud provider, but you're using G Suite. I mean, that's not really what people think of when they say multi-cloud, but that is what analysts chalk it up as sometimes. Yeah, right. It's a battle. At least the competition is lining up. You got Amazon, Microsoft, Google lining it up. This is theCUBE coverage. Wrapping it up with the team here. Day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Stay with us. Go to thecube.net to check out all the videos, silkenangle.com. We have a special report and a lot of content flowing there. And we'll be back with more coverage tomorrow, day two. Thanks for watching.