 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. Hi, this is Peter Burris from Wikibon SiliconANGLE stepping in for John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Continuing with our CUBE coverage here at Google Next 2018 from Moscone South. An impressive array of talent and that includes my next guest, John Thomas. John is the Director of Product Management for Digital Services Management, Cloud Services at BMC Software. Welcome to theCUBE, John. Thank you for having me. You know, this is a really interesting topic for me because as an old infrastructure hack, someone who's been in IT operations in a couple of different worlds as well as being an industry analyst in infrastructure, it's important that we not lose sight of the fact that there's a lot of expertise out there regarding how we run complex systems. That the cloud companies are demonstrating but the business as it adopts cloud services nonetheless has to sustain. So talk to us a little bit about what BMC is doing to try to bring some of that knowledge over 30 years of working in the data center and apply it for businesses as they become better cloud citizens. Yeah, thank you for asking. So BMC has worked with some of the largest IT organizations, in fact, over 80% of the Fortune 500 use BMC software to help them manage IT. And at this point, when I go out and talk to those customers, they're all on a cloud journey. And the really exciting thing is that the conversations stop becoming if we're going to use public cloud, but it's going to be a how to use public cloud and really at this point, it's about how do we use it in a way that we can scale that out, scale that innovation out within the organization. And we're seeing that those organizations are actually, and a lot of times they're reorganizing in order to really facilitate that innovation. And so BMC, like you said, is taking that expertise that we've had and helping them to manage the data center assets and to apply those same learnings that we had with a new spin to actually work with the public cloud as they start to adopt public cloud. So give us an example of a few of the more modern approaches in the cloud that are being employed by BMC to ensure that you get the type of control, manageability, and automation that BMC customers have gotten used to on premise. Yeah, I mean, one great example is for a very long time BMC has had the BladeLogic product line. And we've helped customers to make sure that they can harden their servers and their network devices and their databases on premise. Now as they move to public cloud, there's a big question. What does it mean to even harden a public cloud configuration? And a lot of organizations are trying to understand what is their responsibility in that shared responsibility model? And so one thing that we've done is take that knowledge about hardening assets and apply it to public cloud resources and also just in the way that we do it. You know, if you think about it traditionally, IT's gotten a bad rap as being Captain Know. And now with the public cloud and the ability of application teams to go directly to the public cloud, IT has to just change the way that it's providing its services to their consumers, their internal consumers. So now instead of putting a big block in the process, instead we're enabling IT to provide services because application teams, they don't want to be insecure. They're not out there nefariously trying to break things and leave data out there. They may sometimes not know when they're not being secure. Exactly, and so IT's new and changing role is about how do you provide services and consultation to your business to be a facilitator? And so with the products that we're offering now, we think we've taken that history and that legacy in our heritage and hardening in the data center and then applying that same model to the public cloud but in a model that fits for how you leverage public cloud resources. I presume that a customer that decides to go with, say Google or Google cloud, or that decides to go with Amazon or AWS is going to use your product and exploit the best or the capabilities of both clouds as they are uniquely provided, is that accurate? Absolutely, yeah, when we talk to our customers, very few of them have the luxury of only using one public cloud vendor. Whether it's based off of decisions from application teams or even acquisitions, a lot of times they have to manage across multiple clouds on top of all of that on-premise infrastructure that they still have to manage. And so we do, we try to help to simplify that complexity for them by bringing it all together into one disability into what is the state of the risk of their cloud services. But to employ or to be able to exploit the best that each of those platforms has, while at the same time from an overall manageability standpoint, being able to provide a common view to those different resources, have I got that right? Exactly, exactly. Now how does that tie back into the data center? One of the things that we've seen over the course of the last week is something that Wikibon has been calling the true private cloud. The idea that there are going to be circumstances when an enterprise's data requires that you move the cloud to the data as opposed to moving the data to the cloud. And there's no doubt, there's going to be a lot of data that's going to, for any number of physical, legal, intellectual property control reasons, will be on premise or within the confines of the business. So how do you envision that the practices and tooling and automation regimes that are currently on premise and what we're doing now in the cloud are going to start together, come together over the next few years so we can put data where it naturally should be? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So some of the tools and some of the reasons that we're able to help our customers on their cloud journey is because we have that knowledge of their on premise infrastructure. So being able to do things like discover what they have on prem and understand the dependencies helps us to be really uniquely positioned to help them with cloud migration. And migration might not be just from on premise to cloud. It could be from cloud back to on premise. It could be between clouds or even between different regions based off of the need of the business at that time. So that's migration. What about overall classes of integration that might allow a DevOps person, for example, to be able to look at an application that spans multiple cases or multiple locations but still be able to administer it as a coherent resource? Yeah, as well. So in that same discovery capabilities that we have, we've extended those out to the public cloud as well. So we can discover on premise in the public cloud so that whenever you need it, you can go to a single place and understand what's the state of your infrastructure no matter where it exists. So what do you think of Google Next? Are you having good conversations with customers? Do you see Google coming on, Google Cloud coming on more? And how does BMC going to make it easier for everybody? Absolutely. We're really excited by the progress that Google Cloud is making. And we're seeing a lot of adoption in, in particular, certain segments of our businesses are really, really fond of Google Cloud. And what we're doing is trying to make sure that from the tools that we have that we're integrating into Google Cloud so that it gives our customers that choice to pick what's the right cloud for them at the right time and for the right circumstances and then still get that simplification by putting it all into the same tool where they can get it in a single view. Now every company has a challenge as they migrate to the cloud, both from a standpoint of where their applications are being developed, where their applications are being run, but also strategically, the cloud has a pretty significant impact. BMC seems to be one of those companies that's able to partly be, or I would presume, in large measure because of 30 years of really working well with customers, is having a relatively facile time enacting that transformation. Give us a sense, especially in the product management domain, thinking about how BMC is going to provide value in the cloud. What does BMC think the future of cloud and cloud management looks like? Well, we see it's evolving. Right now, a lot of organizations are creating centralized cloud centers of excellence just to figure out how, like I said, to scale out best practices within their organization. And right now, those teams really have a couple areas of focus. Number one is the migration, so figuring out how to do their migration projects. Number two is, how do we do security of those resources? So being able to understand what's their risk posture and set up some governance around that. We say cloud with guardrails. And the last thing is, last year was really a time of customers coming to us because they had 10x million dollar surprise bills. And so one of the things that we want to do to help facilitate the use of public cloud because we believe that it can be as safe or safer, as efficient or more efficient, is to take away those concerns that would keep a company from feeling like they're able to migrate more workloads to the cloud or build more applications in the cloud. So John, I'm going to do kind of a lightning round here. I'm going to put something in front of you and I want you to respond as best as you can from a standpoint of how the value proposition is going to play out. Let's start with speed to value. How does the tooling that you're providing improve speed to value, especially for those companies that are looking for greater flexibility in their strategies? Well, on speed to value, one of the biggest things is in order to have real data up in the public cloud, organizations just need to understand what is their risk posture. Make sure that those services that they're creating are hardened and so with our two-site cloud security products, we're able to give them that visibility so that they can get the check mark to move quickly to go to market with the solutions that they're creating in the public cloud. The second thing, modern application development. Containers, Kubernetes, those types of things. Yeah, absolutely. So that in the same platform that we support the public cloud, it's really all new modern innovations. So we also support Kubernetes and Docker as well so you can bring that all into the same platform and the same visibility. Big data, advanced analytics and AI. So as companies want to leverage AI, that's one of the examples where they're trying to figure out as they do it, what are their costs going to do? New services, we've heard stories where people turn on a brand new service and then find out that that service costs them a lot of money. And so with some of our expense management for cloud tools, we're able to do baselines of their spending and start to forecast out and identify when you have something that is going to come and surprise you later on. Can't talk about cloud without talking security. Absolutely. Yeah, so through TrueSight Cloud Security, we're helping organizations to not only identify where they might have risky configurations that might leave them open to data breaches but also built in automated remediation so that you can take action and to bring yourself to a very safe place. One of the big challenges of the cloud on a global basis is privacy, trust, local. How does GDPR fit into this mix, for example? Well, one of the requirements that GDPR is really to have state of the art, that's what they say. And so you have to have state of the art controls in place and so with our solution, especially TrueSight Cloud Security, that allows organizations to be able to not only have state of the art processes in place and tools to assess their risks, but to also prove it. And I think that's a big aspect. IoT. IoT is also something that's coming up a lot in our customer base. So being able to manage those same cloud resources in terms of the cost of the resources and the security as well. Serverless? Yeah, serverless. In fact, internally when we developed our application, we use a lot of serverless. So we love cloud native artifacts. We believe that they really can help application teams to develop applications quicker. And so one of the things that we provide is the ability to look at hardening of applications built on cloud native resources. Now you've already mentioned cost, but let's hit cost too. How do you use the tooling to get the most out of your expenditures in the cloud? So first off, we give you the visibility into what you're spending and then run that through machine learning to start to do forecasting to help you to identify when you're going to overrun your cost. But the second part of that is to actually look at optimization. So we're examining out your accounts to understand do you have idle VMs that are out there? Do you have ones that were over provision? Different ways that we can help you to bring down your cost to make it sure that you're maximizing your cost in the public cloud. Okay, so the next two years at BMC going to continue to drive its affinity with these new cloud-based workloads. What are you most excited about as you look out at working with customers over the next couple of years? Really looking at the adoption going bigger. Right now, and they talked about it in the keynote this morning, the number of workloads in the public cloud is still relatively small to what they have on-premise. And so we believe that as organizations start to do hardware refreshes, start to do data center consolidation projects, they're going to start looking to public cloud more and more, and we're going to see more and more resources making their way to the public cloud, and we find that very exciting. A lot of opportunity for thought leadership, isn't there, John? Absolutely. All right, John Thomas, who's been crucial to driving a lot of the product management efforts around some of BMC's cloud management software. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE, John. Thanks for having me. Okay, we'll be right back with more coverage from Google Next. Thanks for watching.