 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services AWS re-invents annual conference. AWS re-invent 2016, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE Media, I'm theCUBE Miniman with Wikibon and our next guest, James Water, Senior Vice President of Product at Pivotal, also involved in driving a lot of the Cloud Foundry, but not part of Cloud Foundry. Pivotal has been a big supporter of it. James has been a friend in Cloud, a collision guru, friends at SiliconANGLE for years, watching it all play out. We are in the biggest Cloud collision. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again. Hey, it's pretty cool, like we talked about, I was just saying before we came on a camera, we were talking about this in 09 and like I would board John, like driving down the street in Palo Alto with all this stuff that was coming and now you're sitting here with like 35,000 people. It's very real, so great to be here. And the vision was kind of there. We were kind of looking at that original Cloud Foundry crew and by the way, it filled up like a small little ballroom of people, first a meetup and then it became group, but back then it was all the same. Community, open source, and then ultimately SOA like services, call them web services, Amazon web services. So what's different now? I mean, you're in the heat of the battle, through this SVP approach at Pivotal, they're obviously IBM, a big customer of yours, they're a big player in the Cloud, but BlueMix, by the way, Watson's been extremely successful with IBM and others. Seeing a new Cloud formation developing, not Amazon, what's the competitive landscape look like? We were just talking before we came on about this article about Andy Jassy, I think universally deserves respect, unbelievable respect for what he's built with AWS, period. But it's interesting that he kind of went on the offensive and said, and it's personal to me, because he said, look, if you just treat Clouds like compute and infrastructure, then you're not really our right partner for us and we're going to kind of steer people elsewhere. And there's a fundamental belief that I have that multi-Cloud is the future, like there will not be one Cloud that defines the entire phenomena. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how this community here accommodates that future, like where do they go from here? Do they understand that there will be multiple Clouds and play into that, or do they kind of build an enclave and go from there? And we've seen just incredible adoption of both Google Cloud as well as Microsoft Azure. So my read on the market right now is that those are very real phenomena that are not going away. James, so Pivotal, you guys partner across all the environments as you're layer underneath, you're mostly agnostic, whether it's on-prem, using your family type of technology with VMware or IBM, you've got partnerships with Google now, with the Home Depot, you've got Azure you're working with, you're doing Amazon. What do you've seen from your customers though? This whole kind of multi-Cloud, hybrid Cloud, you talk to Amazon and they're like, well, buying power, you should buy it all on us because then you'll get more discounts and we'll give you reserved instances and lots of ways to save you money on that. And maybe if you want to put 10% of it over here or something, that'd be okay. We understand second sources. What do you see from customers? How do they look at Cloud as a suppliers and who they should use? Yeah, I think that almost no enterprise in the Fortune 2000 really wants to go completely all in on one Cloud. But I certainly think that they don't want to have their next 20 years of legacy be wired into one Cloud. And we came to that same moment in Pivotal, so we're not as big as our enterprise that we sell to yet, but we had gotten to a point where we were spending eight figures a year on AWS and we called up our AWS rep and said, hey, we're not always able to plan our reserved instances purchases, but we're spending it volume. Can you take care of us? And I like to tell the story that they gave us a bucket and then some sand. And they told us that we had any concerns to talk to the bucket of sand. Physically told us to pound sand. And we said, okay, that's interesting. And so we actually, you know, Google Cloud approach that said, what about half? And the cool thing is within Cloud Foundry, we not only can run on multiple Clouds, but we were a little bit ahead of the game I believe because we have an open source library called the Bosch CPI that actually integrates directly at an API level into all of those Clouds to abstract them down to exactly what Andy said not to do, like exactly opposite of his words, which was compute, network and storage. And so we were able then to move our entire engineering organization of like 400 engineers to Google Cloud in about a month with that abstraction and save half. I mean, if anything I've learned about the enterprise, I mean, I was, when I was commenting on a thread about my days at HP from 1988 to 97, that was a mini computer generation, but similar dynamics around technology selection. But there was never one vendor that won. The IBM was the last known vendor that actually had full account ownership. That's right. Since the post mainframe, it's never been a one vendor world ever. Even Unix, right? There was three vendors in Unix and certainly x86. You could say the Intel and Red Hat have a pretty good, you know, monopolar kind of organization. Let's talk about that. So let's agree that maybe Jassy's a little bit off suggesting that they want to be the one supplier. Because that won't hold well in my opinion. I'll tell Jassy that next time I ask him on theCUBE next tomorrow, on Thursday, I should say. But to your question around competition and multi-vendor, where's the action right now? Because seeing things like, certainly we've talked in the past, containers, Kubernetes is hot. You now have Google taking a technology approach with virtually no sales force. Azure's got a sales force. IBM's got a sales force. Amazon doesn't really have a sales force per se. Startups want to find a partner. Chaotic environment to say the least. Your thoughts on the landscape vis-a-vis competing and providing a multi-vendor opportunity cloud. Yeah, I would say just start for Pivotal, just from where our grounding is, is we've had, you know, kind of great partnership with our clients around innovation and a cloud-native application. So we've got a framework, spring framework that has this way of developing cloud applications called Spring Boot and Spring Cloud that is just 10 million downloads a month, unbelievable, you know, hot. So in the enterprise space, they're starting there with us, and then we're advising them, you know, hey, if you go with Azure, you're actually going to get a compliment of Azure cloud architecture services. You know, they're going to help you really get going. I mean, Azure's investing 3,500 specialists already to do nothing but, you know, give architecture advice and help people get to cloud. If you go with Google, you've got some of the best machine learning and at-scale compute experts in the world. And I like to say it's kind of a gift to the world that Google took the world's largest infrastructure and let you use it now. Yeah, I'm sure Facebook's going to follow, too. It's going to be a matter of time, in my opinion, Facebook will follow. This is the real tension in the market, which is that, you know, Microsoft really rightfully owns enterprises in a big way. A lot of their architecture has for two decades, more. And Google really was the number one at-scale cloud provider always. They just chose to never offer it to others. So that's what makes this a really dynamic market and why I can't imagine a world where those two players aren't serious, serious concerns, despite the incredible momentum that we have here. Yeah. I got slammed dunked on Twitter by someone who said, you really mentioned Oracle as a cloud player on theCUBE. And Stu and I were talking before we came on camera that they have a database and they own that market. Now they put a cloud, their stuff together. But question, guys, is Oracle, in your opinion, a cloud player or is it just a database that happens to run on the cloud? I would honestly say not yet. I say there's no sign of there being an Oracle cloud yet. I think there's pretty big commitment. I heard they built about a 250-person team up in Seattle, hired the best cloud people they could to get going on that. And I think, you know, when you hear about- So they're late to the game. When you hear Larry talk about, we have innovation now, it's like they're doing bare metal provisioning. But the overhead of containers or VMs is really not a material 40% advantage, like you normally want in product differentiation. It's like two or three percent. So, John, we talked in the opening segment, follow the data, follow the applications. I mean, Oracle's got probably the biggest application out there and it's pretty darn sticky. So that being said, they're moving it to a cloud, but I think it's premature to mention them in the same sentence with the mega cloud guys like Amazon, like Google, like Microsoft. Well, I think to Amazon's credit though, let's talk about what they've done that's really nice. You have services like Elastic Cache, I went to that today, they've done some innovation of how do you make Redis do failover and clustering. The thing they did around SQS and messaging to make sure that, you know, you had scalable messaging. These are cloud patterns for applications that they've invested in. The problem with Oracle is they're kind of like the classic monolith, like which like put everything in one Oracle database and then if you want to do even basic ETL, do that as a stored procedure. So the problem is that their asset is the ultimate and non-cloud patterns. So James, I want to get your thought on something because we look at Amazon and they're like, we're going to build all the services. You're going to use all of our services. That being said, they're really attractive for developers. I mean, I see more hoodies at this show and I'd probably see anywhere other than like DockerCon. You know, so, you know, the serverless group is people are super excited. There's a big hackathon going on. The momentum in that space seems phenomenal. So, you know, are they a lock-in or are they great for developers? Can they be both, you know? I think it's to Amazon's credit that they've innovated in kind of more event-driven programming models like Lambda. I think it's great. I think, I don't see a world we want to rewrite every application of that. If you have applications that are programmable and friendly to those kind of event sources, that can be really cool. You know, and we're working in our world to bring function as a service to our platform for the programmers in general. So I think that kind of event-driven programming is part of large distributed systems. So it's to Amazon's credit. I think maybe to their discredit, you know, and I really, I'd love to ask Jassy this, Mr. Jassy. This work they've did with Redis to make it more cluster-friendly and cloud-friendly. Did they open source any of that? I don't think they did, and that's an open source product. And so the question is like, how is Amazon going to behave as part of the community? And you know, if you're betting all in on Amazon, you're kind of betting almost against the open source community over time because the open source community is going to want to run on every cloud. Well, James, and I tell you, it's an area we've actually poked and we've been critical of Amazon for a few years on this. They just hired Adrian Cockroft. He's relatively new here, but you know, we all know him in the open source community. You know, he's got a presentation on Thursday. So, you know, I'm willing to give them a little bit of opportunity to come and say it. He brings up a good point though. He brings up a good point that if you're taking from open source and not giving back. That's it, that Redis, do they do it? There is going to be a backlash at some point because at Amazon scale right now they could just take any successful project that they did not invent and reinvent it or innovate on it and bring it in and basically it puts open source out of business potentially. So a revolt will happen if that happens. Some of the same criticisms have been made of Google over the years. I think Google's been much better the last couple of years because it was always like, oh well what ends up in open source is what Google was using five or 10 years ago. So, you know, now that they seem to be engaging more, they're partnering more. We always knew, I mean, Google was like the number one company built off of open source components and now, you know, they were on it. Yeah, but they were search engines too. When you go into the enterprise it's a little bit different, Dinana. That's like saying Facebook. They have an application called social network. Google had searched. If Google tried to take in the enterprise business and take and not give back they would get their ass handed to in my opinion. But no one's going to look at a player and give them crap for taking open source and building a big business. And they give back a little bit, but they're not threatening anything. So the point is, that's the dynamic that is on the table. I mean, a revolt will happen. You know, I think the good news is- What's your vision on that? The good news is that we've had unbelievable success. We'll have, say more, you know, I have next year about it at Tivital right now and we're the fastest growing open source product company, you know, in terms of percentages or maybe raw dollars off our base right now in the world. And, you know, we're kind of the opposite of that vision. We are steadfastly open source. We're steadfastly multi-cloud. So we've really set ourselves up to be, you know, kind of the dark horse against the Amazon thesis of the market. So James, how are things under the new, you know, kind of parent ownership of Dell there? Do you all have Dell laptops now? Michael Dell's stopping by the office a lot. Yeah, well, you know, Michael's been on theCUBE several times and I'll just say that, you know, thank you for watching it. He's been incredibly supportive. And so what's happened now is that his incredible network of people that he knows and that trust him, he's literally gone to them like, you know, Pivotal is like my bet right now. That's the big, that's the big bet we're making. So it's been like a whole second wave of normalization within the market coming where the list of enterprise clients we're working with right now is really incredible. So I think Michael's been, and Dell technology in general has been an incredible boost for us because he sees how well we're positioned in the market with the trends that are going on. What's the roadmap look like for Pivotal? Obviously you're a senior vice president of the products. You got a lot of moving parts. You got some open source in there. You guys have enterprise attraction. The adoption curve is moving fast from on the progress side. Not, I won't even say close to maturity, but accelerating. What's going on with the product? Give us a quick update. It's been a minute to give a Pivotal update. I mean, I think one of the cool things we're doing just to stay on topic on the product is that we've got that open source library, the CPIs, and Google's got six engineers working full time right now making Cloud Foundry best on Google. So they're saying, okay, here's the core of Cloud Foundry and how do we add value? Okay, we make the CPIs the best. So now you get VM provisioning times in 30 seconds. That's unbelievably efficient. Then you say, oh, we're going to write brokers that are open source to get all of the advanced Google data services into your Cloud Foundry application. And so then Microsoft is also stepping up doing similar. So we really have a lot of multi-cloud but with best of cloud kind of product features that are coming right now, which is interesting that I think is great. The other thing that's going on is that Adrian Kockroff, who joined here at Amazon now, he had built a whole set of technologies with Netflix, Netflix OSS. We really are the company that has productized those in the enterprise. So a lot of big banks right now are building their apps on Netflix OSS stacks, things like Eureka, Spring Boot, et cetera. So we're taking banking right now to where Netflix was four years ago, which is actually an incredible fast pace. We're productizing all that on the platform. It's great to see you doing so well. Pivotal, former SiliconANGLE contributor in our early days when we founded. But you're in the action with a lot of customers. I see you flying around the world on Facebook. You're doing a lot of frontline work with customers. I do. When customers ask you, what's your answer when they ask you, James, help me make sense of my cloud decisions. What should I do? I think that they're, thanks, that's a great setup. And yeah, I was on this crazy five-week bender. This is nonstop. So when I have these opinions, I tend to field them very seriously because they kind of earned one flight at a time. A big debate out there right now, John, is really, okay, I want to do cloud. Should I take my legacy as it exists today, put it in some VMs and just stick it in Amazon? Or should I actually look at both the social and technological constructs of those applications as they exist and start to piece that apart into a more transformational view of where I go next? We call all that the cliffed and shift versus the lift and shift versus cloud ready. And what we're seeing is there's incredible benefits to cloud ready. And that's where we're advising people to go because you get to get to a modern CI CD style of practice. I mean, I think the one thing you could lose in a show like this is continuous delivery dev ops. These are really big concerns that are really driving this more than anything. And so just getting to an Amazon data center doesn't make you faster. Like it might make you provision a VM faster, but clients we have found say, oh, I can provision a VM but it still takes me three months to get my application deployed with all the complexity after that. The workload provisioning is still a big issue. It is. It's hard. And what we're really doing well with right now is partnering and how do you build or migrate to cloud ready applications? So that's the hot topic for us and what we're seeing is that people sometimes try, lift and shift and kind of bomb out on it. Whereas there are, you know, clients like Comcast who've gone public with us and said, hey, we had a 85% better developer experience using a platform and cloud apps and a 95% better operating cost. Like those are boardroom level metrics that are really changing our clients. That's awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you again. Any events that people can find you at are pivotal, any events coming up for you guys? Yeah, we got the cloud foundry summit coming up in spring and then we're gonna do our spring one platform in the winter next year. So those are our two big events next year. It'd be great to have you guys there. All right, James Waters, senior vice president of products at Pivotal, really creating the choice, play for the cloud, position, not all in an Amazon is good hedge. James, thanks for sharing. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break.