 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco for coverage of Google Cloud Next 18. Hashtag Google Cloud Next 18. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, next guest, Anthony Live, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud Data Services Business Unit at NetApp. He has a business unit at NetApp storage in the cloud. Anthony, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you very much, nice to see you guys again. Great to have you on. I mean, we have been, first of all, very complimentary of NetApp over the years. We've been, we've been having some critical analysis. But one thing I will say that you guys were early on cloud. I remember talking to Tom Georgians years ago. Yeah. There was, you listen to customers and you saw cloud and there was some work going on. Now you're here at Google Cloud. You're in Amazon. Kind of not conventional wisdom for a storage company selling boxes to be living in a cloud where there's serverless and you suddenly will argue storage less soon. Well, you know, I mean, how did this happen? How did this business unit happen? Take a minute to explain. Well, I think George Kurian, our CEO, probably now about five years ago, I think saw that, you know, cloud computing had just too much, I think, going for it. Not for us to sort of pay attention to it. And he took the top 10 engineers at NetApp and said, you know, our flagship operating system on tap that runs on our engineered systems. He said, port it to Amazon. And so we spent time porting the operating system over directly to Amazon. And today now it's a real business. Fully funded, staffed, growing. And, you know, to your point, you know, who'd have thought, you know, NetApp would be, you know, cool in the cloud. And Google, you know, chose us. I got to get a big announcement today in the keynote. Yep. Right? NetApp's key partner. Turns out, turns out that, you know, enterprises need enterprise level files, whether that's NFS or SMB, and we're the best in the business to do that. So talk about that a little more more, because a lot of people get confused and they say, well, wait a minute. Why do I need NetApp on Google Cloud or AWS? Why don't I just use, you know, whatever object store the cloud provided gives me, explain that. Well, so I think there's a number of use cases. Certainly, if you look at legacy, there's a lot of applications, databases, that need and demand file. And, you know, customers would rather not have to do all the work to translate them over to something like objects. Now, you know, object is a very sort of descriptive, you know, storage protocol, but it's not as fast as file. So, you know, there are distinct advantages to file that I think the cloud companies have realized they need to win the enterprise business, whether it's the lift and shift business. There's a lot of applications. I mean, if you look at oil and gas, all that seismic data is in a file, you know, in a volume. If you look at CAD-CAM, all of those applications demand file. You know, Oracle Database runs incredibly fast on file. So, file is certainly not to be discounted, and I think it's very much now a hot topic in public cloud. And there's more to the story than just running in the public cloud. It's that there's a whole business model around the economics and the pricing. Can you explain that? Yeah, so we, the way we think about cloud is we think that we can build a business that's just in the cloud. We basically monetize a service, a set of services that we offer to our customers to help them manage their data, protect their data, secure their data, integrate and orchestrate their data, whether it's on one cloud or many, whether it's a combination of on-prem and cloud. And we charge, you know, very, very simply based on capacity or API call. We provide a full service. And that's what I think the cloud has done, is democratized and empowered many, many people to consume technology that prior to, you know, these big public clouds, you'd have to go to IT and wait six months and get charged a lot of money. The clouds make everything, you know, instantly available. It's wonderful. You guys have a great history. And again, we've been bringing, not critical, but complimentary of NetApp on, you listen to customers, got a very loyal customer base. No matter what the trend is against you, by the Appundance, you guys persevere as a company and it's been great to watch. Classic Silicon Valley, success story. But you got, I don't got solid fire, you got flash. You've been doing some kicking the tires early on cloud. Now you created a business unit out of it. As you listen to customers, when you see DevOps, you see infrastructure as code, massive amounts of new proliferation. There's going to be a renaissance in software development. It's coming very fast. You can almost see it coming, you know, very, very, very fast. What are the use cases for NetApp in the cloud? What are some of the things that customers are talking to you about? What are the top use cases and where do you think they're going to be? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so people have been very, you know, in Google we've been in a preview phase, onboarding customers to test the system out, sort of flush, you know, water through the pipes. And we've been very lucky at Google. We've had really every use case that we wanted to test, tested. At the low end, it can be as simple as just home directories shared, you know, across, you know, whether it's POSIX or Windows, people need access to those file systems. And NetApp is the only company that offers that sort of dual protocol access. So we do home directories at the low end, all the way up to genome sequencing databases, big data, relational databases, data warehouses at the high end. And what's nice about our services, we have service level objectives. So we, for the first time, have actually put a performance guarantee on the volumes. And what's nice about that is the customer knows that that's something that we stand to. What's really nice is the customer can dial up or dial down either the capacity that they want or the performance that they want. So they may say, Monday through Friday, we want to run the volumes at this basic service level. And then over the weekend, through an API, we're going to crank them up and make them run, you know, at 128 megabits a second. So we really are, I think, providing incredible value for all workload types. Yeah, and that you just described what I would consider true software defined strategy, programmable through an API. I mean, that's something that is nuanced, but dramatically simplifies. Well, you know, I'm an application developer. Yeah, I was going to say that. And I can tell you, the last thing application developers want to do is talk to IT. The second to last thing application developers want to do is mess around with UIs. So, you know, the cloud, while there are lots of pretty demos of Google console, which is a very, very, I think, well-written user interface, what we really want is the API. We want the code, our application code to tell the cloud what to do and how to do it. And so everything behind our cloud business is API first. The programmable aspect is critical. And this is where it's starting to see microservices become interesting phenomenon. Because now you can have pure application developers, never talking to anyone, but maybe other developers in collaboration space, they just collaborate and they go play in open source communities and they're happy as a clam. Well, so, you know, we've now got, you know, NFS, you know, persisting in containers. So we've done, we worked on a project called Trident, which is an open source project, and we contribute to that. And so, you know, on Google, you'll be able to mount file systems directly into containers and persist storage now with all the cool new Kubernetes things that Google brings. So, you know, files are a very integral part, I think, of technology and strategy. And we seem to have, you know, according to Google, the best one. So, what are the go-to-market aspects of your relationship with Google? Well, that's the other thing I tell you, I'm incredibly pleased with is Google sells our product. Google supports our product. Google builds the customers for our product. That's good. So, Google has kind of chosen us and Google wants it to be part of Google. So, the experience is completely native to the console. We sort of encapsulate all of the permissions, access control lists, it looks and feels exactly like any native Google service. And what's next now? It's a great relationship with Google. You're working, almost embedded in, operationalized with them. Congratulations. Thank you. But you're in early preview. What's next? What's going on? What's the agenda for you guys? So, for us, it's really increased investment in two dimensions. So, I think the first dimension is now the rollout. We've got a very aggressive schedule to roll this out to all the major Google data centers to support all the major regions. And that's probably a never-ending task as Google ups its ante and increases its data centers. So, that keeps us busy making the service available. The second thing then is sort of integrating that service with more of our own services and integrating our service into some of the other Google services like BigQuery or Spanner. Or, obviously, there's a huge opportunity for people to bring file-based data into Google Cloud and take advantage of AI and ML. That's interesting, the integration into Spanner. I mean, you pointed out that Oracle runs really well in file. You guys, decade ago or so, made that happen. We had a conversation yesterday with a customer that basically moved from Oracle to Spanner. So, that level of integration is one to really watch from a transaction database in the cloud standpoint. We, you know, our mission is to make file a first-class, you know, protocol. Yeah, what's interesting also about, this is George Curry and he's talked about this on the scene. I haven't yet interviewed him yet. I'll do that next time on theCUBE, but I've heard him speak publicly. I've seen comments. Software is critical. You're a software company. Yeah, exactly. You happen to have hardware here and there. So, this is actually. Yeah, we don't make the hardware, you know. This is the end of the middle. Right. Google loves software. Yeah. So, interesting. So, you have a lot of range, potentially, looking out in the future. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I tell you, you know, George asked me to come to NetApp and he gave me a blank canvas and told me to paint whatever picture I wanted. And so, as an application developer, I wanted to have a rich set of services to help me manage my data. And I wanted to be able to do it, you know, in the cloud. And you want to do it without storage. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you know. You're a developer. You just want to be there. Exactly right. You expect it to be like, you know, dial tone. When you pick up the phone at home, you don't ask yourself, how does it work? In order you want to ask the operator to connect it to you. Exactly right. And that's what's been unique. I've been following NetApp since they, you know, took on OSPEC. So, I've been watching it. Early on, we realized that this is a company who basically has storage services and makes calls to those storage services as required like a software developer would. Exactly. Not things that are locked into some piece of hardware. No, I tell you, I think what, the other thing that I'm particularly proud of is I think that all of those loyal customers who have, you know, built their careers on NetApp and OnTap, we've now given them the next part of their journey. Yeah. We've now made all of their skills relevant for Google. It's another 20-year lease. Wow, the other thing. It's a beautiful thing. The other thing you've done is it, by integrating with the cloud, you bring scale that has always been a challenge for clustered systems that the cloud resolves. Exactly. And it was a barrier to the adoption of cluster. I tell you, the other thing that customers say more than anything else is, you know, NetApp really provides probably the industry's best insurance. I mean, any customer that makes an on-premise decision of which there are still many, are choosing NetApp on-premise because NetApp is in the cloud. That's interesting. I mean, because you see, you know, Oracle's marketing with same-same, but Oracle's storage products are deficient. So... Well, we're going to start to see storage functions and, you know, terms like storage lists. We have server lists. I mean... I think there's, we have some, let me tell you, we have some pretty cool tricks up our sleeve. We're not going to, you know, show our hand just yet, but the stuff we're doing with the Google guys, you know, I mean, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of work that the teams have put into this. This is an amazing collaboration at the development level. It's something that I don't think Google has ever done before. And I think Google, like NetApp, we see each other as very, very strong partners at a very, very deep level. So you're talking about engineering resources that you're providing. I mean, can you help us understand that or quantify that in any way? Oh, yeah. So are you guys in a... No, no. In a laptop? Or are we talking about... It's a very large team and a growing team. You know, my team at NetApp, just building software on the cloud is, you know, 600, 700 people strong now, all product managers and developers. I mean, we take this business very, very seriously. This is the future of NetApp. This is a competitive strategy for you guys. You know, I think NetApp is cloud first. And just imagine, did you ever think you'd hear NetApp say, we're a cloud first company? Because that's what we are. We don't hear your competitors saying that. I can tell you that right now. This is NetApp's fifth life. Like I said, I've been following this company for a long time. It started with workstations. You brought a file to .com. Then you went hard, after that .com blew up, you went hard into the enterprise, bet the farm on virtualization, and now you're betting the farm on cloud. You know, I tell you the one thing that I've been at NetApp as I said for about 18 months, and the company has passion and conviction and belief. And what it does so amazingly well is it leans into the things that people think are going to kill it. Yeah. And the results are there. And you met Dave, right? You know, he's a wonderful guy. He founded the company. He's still involved in the company. He's here. He's learning cloud, and he loves it. We saw him last night. He's a great entrepreneur. And again, that's the kind of leadership. When the founders stay around, companies succeed. I've always said that. I wrote about it, and the statistically has proven. Lean into anything that you think will kill you will probably come out stronger. And that's really, that's an entrepreneurial lesson. Oh, I'll tell you the other thing that I would say more than anything else, and it was really the biggest part of my decision to join NetApp is a technical CEO. Yeah. You have to have a technical CEO. No disrespect to sales guys that become CEOs or finance guys that become CEOs. They're just not as good as the technical ones. And George is an engineer, and he gets it, and he's very passionate and committed about the product. And that, to me, I think it's just. More than ever now in a changing tide where technology decisions, the bets, could be company killing or company making about little things. How you deal with service meshes. Exactly right. How you deal with provisioning storage through software now. And these are new things. And this stuff, you know, this stuff doesn't happen overnight, right? It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Software engineering is something that takes time. Well Anthony, we really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCUBE. Pleasure. We love covering NetApp. We've been following your journey again. We see you at all the events. You guys are part of the CUBE community. We really appreciate that. And more than ever, we want to follow what you guys are doing in the cloud. We think it's a competitive advantage vis-a-vis the competition. And we want to see how it turns out, you know. So, you know. We're having so much fun. Let's keep in touch. So much fun. Thanks guys, very much. George List is a big trend coming. Trust me, you heard it here first on theCUBE. I don't think they use that term yet, Dave, in the industry, but we'll see if it sticks or not. All right, we'll be back with more live coverage. Day two is coming to a close. A couple more segments. Stay with us for our three days of coverage at Google Cloud, Google Next 2018. We'll be right back.