 from Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 17. Hi, and welcome to the second day of live coverage here of theCUBE covering Google Next 2017. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley here at our 4,500 square foot new studio in Palo Alto. We've got a team of reporters and analysts up in San Francisco checking out everything that's happening in Google. I was up there for the day two keynote and happy to have with me as the first guest of the day, friend of theCUBE, Mark Farley, Vulcancast, guy that knows clouds, worked for one of the big three in the past and kind of helped me break down some of what's going on in the marketplace market. It's great to see you. Oh, it's really nice to be here too. Thanks for asking me on. Oh, I'm always happy to hear that. And what a lot of fun stuff to get into. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, this is, you know, what we love. It's, you know, we talked about, you know, I wonder, Amazon re-invent is like the Super Bowl of the industry there. What's Google there if, you know? Well, Google pulls a lot of resources for this, right? And they can put on a very impressive show. So if this is the, if Invent is the Super Bowl, then maybe this, maybe next is the college, championship game. I mean, it's, you know, I hate to call it college, but it's got that kind of draw. It's a big deal. Yeah, maybe it's like, you know, it's that, is it that, you know, I don't want to say arena football. It's the up and coming. Oh, it's a lot better than that, right? I mean, Google really does some spectacular things, you know, at events. Google, come on, we all use Google. We all know Google. They're Google. 10,000 people showed up. There's a lot of excitement. So what's your take of the show so far and Google's positioning in cloud? Well, you know, it's nothing like the introduction of glass, you know? And of course, Google Glass is a thing of the past. But I don't know if you remember when they introduced that. I do. When they had the skydivers, you know, skydivers diving out of an airplane and then climbing up the outside of the building in Moscone and all that, it was really spectacular. I mean, so it's kind of, nobody can will ever reach that mark again, probably not even the Academy Awards, right? But, you know, so, but you asked the second part of the question, what's Google positioning in the cloud? I mean, I think that's going to be the big question moving forward. They are obviously committed to doing it and they're bringing, you know, unique capabilities into cloud that you don't see from either Amazon or Microsoft. Yeah, I mean, coming into it, there's certain things that we've been hearing forever about Google and especially when you talk about Google and the enterprises. Are they serious? Is this just beta? You know, are they going to put the money in? I thought Eric Schmidt did a real good job yesterday in the close of the keynote and he's like, look, I've been telling Google to push hard in the enterprise for 17 years. Look, I signed a check for $30 billion. $30 billion. Yeah, and, you know, I talked to some people, they're a little skeptical and they're like, oh, you know, that's not like it all went to build the cloud, some of it's for their infrastructure, there's acquisitions, there's all these other things, you know, but I think it was infrastructure related, but, you know, look, there shouldn't be a question that they're serious and Diane Greene said in a Q and A she had with the press, you know, that thing about like, we're going to tinker with something and then kill it. I want to smash that perception because there's certain things you can do in the consumer side that you cannot get away with on the enterprise challenge and she knows that they're putting a lot of effort to transform their support, transform the pricing, you know, dig in with partners and channels and some of it is, you know, they've gotten the strategy together, they've gotten the pieces together, we're moving things from, you know, beta to GA and they're making good progress. So, you know, I think they have, you know, addressed some of the misperceptions, that being said, everybody usually it's like, oh, well, I've been hearing this for five years, it's probably going to take me a couple of years to really believe it. Yeah, but you know, the thing is, is for people that know Diane Greene and have watched, you know, VMware over the years and then, you know, her being there at Google is a real commitment and, you know, she's talking about commitment, she's, you know, when she talks about that business, you know, it's full pedal of the metal, this is a very serious, it's more, the thing that's interesting about it, it's a lot more than infrastructure as a service, right, and I mean, the kinds of APIs and apps and everything that they're bringing, this is a lot more than just infrastructure, this is Google, you know, Google developed, Google, if you will, proprietary technology, I know that they're turning to the external world to use and that's, and there's some really sophisticated stuff in there. Yes, so before we get into some of the competitive landscape, you know, some of the things you were pretty impressed with, I think everybody was, the keynote this morning definitely went much better, day one keynote, little rocky, didn't hear, you know, the biggest applause were around some of the, you know, International Women's Day, which is great that they do that, but, you know, it's nice when they're like, oh, here's some cool new tech, or they're like, oh wow, this demo that they're doing is, you know, some really cool things and products that people want to get their hands on, so, you know, what jumped out at you at the keynote this morning? I'm trying to remember what it's called, it's the stuff around personal identifiable information that they're doing, right? Yeah, so that's what they call DLP here, it's the Data Loss Prevention API. Thank goodness for my Evernote here, which I believe runs on Google Cloud, keeping up to date, so I'm gonna take some other notes. Data loss prevention shouldn't be so hard to remember, right, and it. Anyway, you said like, you know, proprietary stuff, one thing about Google is, you know, that data loss prevention, it's an API, they want to make it easy to get in, a lot of what they do is open source, they feel that that's one of their differentiations, is to be, you know, we always used to say on the infrastructure side, it's like, everybody's thumping their chest, who's more open than everybody else? Google, you know, lots of cool stuff, everything from the TensorFlow and Kubernetes that's coming out, where some of us are like, okay, how will they actually make money on some of this, will it be services, but yeah, data loss prevention API, which was like a really cool demo, it's like, okay, here's a credit card, the video kind of takes it and it redacts the number, it can redact cell security numbers, it's got that kind of machine learning AI with the video and all those things built in to try to help security and encrypt and protect what you're doing. It's mind boggling, right, you think about, you know, they do the facial recognition, but they're doing content recognition also, right, and you could have a string of numbers there that might not be a phone number, it might not be a social security number, and the question is, you know, would DLP flag that too? Who knows, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that they can actually do this, right? And if you, you know, as a storage person, you know, you get involved in compliance and risk and mitigation and all these kinds of things, right, over the years, and it's hard for software to go in and scan a lot of data to just look for, you know, text, not images of numbers on a photograph, but just text in a document, whether it's a Word file or something, right, and you say, oh, it's not so hard, but when you try to do that at scale, it's really hard at scale. And that's the thing that I really wonder about DLP, are they gonna be able to do this at large scale? And you have to think that that is part of the consideration for them because they are large scale. And if they can do that, Stu, that is going to be wildly impressive. Yeah, Mark, everything that Google does tends to be built for scale, so you would think they could do that, right, and I think about all the breaches, it was usually, oh, oops, we didn't realize we had this information, didn't know where it was or things like that. So if Google could help address that, you know, they're looking at some of those, you know, core, you know, security issues, they've talked about, they've got a second form factor authentication with a little USB tab that can go into your computer end-to-end encryption if you've got, you know, Android and Chrome devices. So a lot of, you know, good sounding things on kind of the encryption and security. Yeah, and, you know, one of the other things they notice, I don't know if this is part of the same thinking, right, but they talk about 64 core servers and they talk about, or VMs, I should say, 64 core VMs and they're talking about getting the latest and greatest from Intel. What is it, Skylink? Skylake. Skylake, yeah, thanks. They had Regine actually up on stage, Regine's skilling, Kubellum, you know, know her well, was happy to see her up on stage, you know, just showing off what they're doing and not only just the chipset, but, you know, Intel's digging in, doing development on Kubernetes, doing development on TensorFlow to help with really performance. And we've seen Intel do this. They did this with virtualization with the extensions that they did. They're doing it with containers, you know, Intel gets involved in these software pieces and make sure that the chipset's going to be optimized and, you know, great to see them working with Google on it. Well, my guess is they're going to be using a lot of cycles for these security things also, right? Security is really hard, it's front and center, you know, in our lives these days and just everything. And, you know, I think Google's making a really interesting play, you know, they take their own internal technology, the security technology that they've been using and they know it's compute heavy. You know, the whole thing about DLP, it's extremely compute heavy to do this stuff. Okay, let's get the biggest, fastest technology we can to make it work and then, you know, maybe it can all seem seamless. I'm really impressed with how they've figured out to take the assets that they have in different places. Like from YouTube, you know, these other things that you would think, is YouTube really an enterprise app? No, but there's technology in YouTube that you can use for, you know, enterprise cloud services. Very smart, I give them a lot of credit for looking, you know, broadly throughout their organization which, in a lot of respects, you know, traditionally has been a consumer oriented, you know, experience and they're taking some of these technologies now and making it available to enterprise. It's really, really hot. Absolutely, you know, they did a bunch of enhancements on the G Suite product line, you know, it felt at times a little bit, it's like, okay, wait, I've got the cloud and I've got the applications. There are places that they come together, places that, you know, data and security, you know, flow between them, but it still feels like a couple of different parts and, you know, how they put together the portfolio, but, you know, building a whole solution for the enterprise and, of course, something, you know, we see similar things from Microsoft, not as much, you know, from Amazon. You know, I'm curious what your take is as to, you know, how Google stacks up against Microsoft who disclaimer, you did work for at one time, you know, on the infrastructure side. Yeah, you know, that's a whole interesting thing. You know, Google really wants to try to figure out how to get enterprises that run on Microsoft technology, you know, moving to Google Cloud. And I think it's going to be very tough for them. You know, Satya Nadella and Microsoft are very serious about making a seamless experience for end users and administrators and everybody along, you know, managing the systems and using their systems. Okay, can Google replicate that? Maybe on the user side they can, but certainly not on the administration side. And, you know, there are hooks between the land-based technology and the cloud-based technology that Microsoft's been working on for years. Question is, can Google come close to replicating those kinds of things? And on Microsoft's side, do they get enough, do customers get enough values? Are there enough magic there to make that automation of the hybrid IT experience, you know, valuable to their customers? And I just have to think, though, that there's no way Google's going to be able to beat Microsoft at hybrid IT for Microsoft apps. Just, I just don't believe it. Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the, you know, not-so-secret weapons that Google has there is what they're doing with Kubernetes. So, you know, they've gotten Kubernetes in all the public clouds. It's getting into a lot of on-premises environment. You know, everything from we were at the KubeCon conference in Seattle a couple of months ago. I hear DockerCon and OpenStack Summit are going to have, you know, strong Kubernetes, you know, discussions there. And it's growing. It's got a lot of buzz. And, you know, that kind of, you know, portability and mobility of workload has been something that, especially as guys that have storage background, we have a little bit of skepticism because, you know, physics and, you know, the size of data and that whole data gravity thing. But that being said, if I can write applications and have, you know, ways to be able to, you know, do similar things across multiple environments, you know, that gives Google a way to spread their wings beyond what they can do in their Google Cloud. So, I'm curious, you know, what you think about, you know, containers, Kubernetes, you know, serverless, you know, type activity that they're doing. Yeah, I think within the Google Cloud, they'll be able to leverage that technology pretty effectively. I don't think it's going to be very effective, though, in enterprise data centers. I think, you know, all the open stack stuff has been a really hard road and it's a long time coming. We don't know if it'll ever get there. So then you've got a company like Microsoft that is working really hard on the same thing. We don't, it's not clear to me what Microsoft's orchestrator is going to be, right? But they're going to have one, right? Are you bullish of, unlike Azure Stack that's coming out later this year? No, not really, yeah. I think Azure Stack's a step in the right direction and Microsoft absolutely has to have it, not so much for Google, but for AWS to compete with AWS. And I think it's a good idea, but it's such a constrained system at this point, right? I mean, it's going to take a while to see what it is you're going to have, you know, HPE and Lenovo and Cisco, you know, all have in Dell, all having the same basic thing, right? And so you ask yourself, what is the motivation for any of these companies to really knock it out of the park when Microsoft is nailing everybody's feet to the floor on what the options are to offer this? And, you know, I understand Microsoft wanted to play it safe and saying, we want to be able to support this thing, make sure that when customers install it, they don't have problems with it. And, you know, Microsoft always wants to voice the support burden onto somebody else anyway. We've all been working for Microsoft the whole lives, right? If the old Dilbert cartoon, as soon as you open that software, you're all of a sudden, you know, Microsoft's pool boy. You know? I love that, yeah. So, you know, Azure Stack's going to be pretty constrained and they keep pushing it further out. And so like, so what's the reality of this, right? You know, and Azure Pack right now is a zombie. Everybody's waiting for Azure Stack, but Azure Stack keeps moving out and Azure Stack's going to be small and constrained. So, you know, this stuff is hard. There's a reason why it's taking everybody a long time to get it out. There's a reason why Open Stack hasn't had the adoption that people first expected. There's going to be a reason why I think Azure Stack does not have the adoption that Microsoft hoped for either, right? And it's going to be an interesting thing to watch over what, you know, play out over the next five or six years. Yeah, I mean, for myself, you know, I've seen this story play out a few times on the infrastructure side. Remember, you know, the original, you know, precursor to Vblock with Acadia and the go-to-market. VMware, when they did the V-SAN stuff, you know, the generation one of Evo really went nowhere and they had to go. A lot of times it takes, you know, 18 to 24 months to sort out some of those basic, you know, pricing, packaging, partnering, positioning type things. And even though Azure Stack's been coming for a while, how would I say, TP3 is like, you know, here and we're talking about it and it's going to, you know, GA this summer, but it's once we really start getting this customer environment, people start selling it that, you know, we're going to find out, you know, what it is and what it isn't. Well, I mean, it's interesting, right? You know how important that technology is to Microsoft. And it's, in many respects, Satya's baby, right? And it's so important to them. And at the same time, you know, it's not there, it's not coming, you know, it's going to be constrained. It's like, whew. Yeah, so Mark, you know, unfortunately, you and I could talk all day about stuff like this and we've had many times, you know, at conferences that will spend a long time. I want to give you just the final word, you know, just wrap up, you know, the intro for today on what's happening at Google Next and what's interesting you in the industry. Well, I think the big thing here is that Google, Google is showing that they put their foot down and they're not letting up, right? It is, they're serious about this business, they made this commitment. And, you know, we sort of talk and we give lip service a little bit to the big three. Well, we've got Azure, we've got Amazon and then there's Google, right? I think every year at Google does more and they're proving themselves as a more capable cloud service provider. You know, they're showing the integration with HANA is really interesting, right? SAP, I should say, not HANA, but SAP, you know, they're going after big applications, they've got big customers, you know, every year that they do this, it's more of an arrival. And I think, you know, in two years' time, that idea of, you know, the big three is actually going to be big three. It's not going to be two plus one, you know? And that is going to accelerate more of the movement into cloud faster than ever because the options that Google is offering are different than the others. These are all different clouds with different strengths. And of the three of them, Google, I have to say, has the most, if you will, computer science behind it, right? It's not that Microsoft doesn't have it, but Google is going to have a lot more capability in machine learning than I think what you're going to see out of Amazon ever, right? They're just going to take off and run with that. And Microsoft is going to have to figure out how they're going to try to catch up or how they're going to parlay what they have in machine learning. It's not that they haven't made investment in it, but it's not like Google has made investment in it. Google's been making investment in it over the years to support their consumer applications on Google, right? And now that stuff is coming, like I said before, the stuff is coming into the enterprise, I think there is a shift now. And, you know, we sort of wonder, is machine learning going to happen when it's going to happen? It's going to happen. And it's going to come from Google. All right, well, great way to end the opening segment here. Thank you so much, Mark Farley, for joining us. We've got a full day of coverage here from our 4,500 square foot studio in the heart of Silicon Valley. You're watching theCUBE.