 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. Live coverage here with theCUBE in San Francisco, California, Moscone South. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Here at Google Next 2019 and we have here in theCUBE for the first time as a Google employee, CUBE alumni and mid-savory head of platform of Google Cloud, great to see you. Thanks for having me, it's always pleasure to see you guys again. So you're just now on the job, not even two months, 25 years, 23? Close to 25, yes. Every year's an Oracle, TK's over here, CEO at part of Google. They got a lot of action going on here. Oh, definitely, it's very exciting times. I mean, I've spent some time kind of learning and hearing about what the vision at Google has been and it's very clear they're here to win it and we have the investment that they're making, and the innovation which is going on is very attractive and very exciting, I think. Always love our conversations in the past on theCUBE around platform, you got a deep technical background, you've been in the business, you've seen many ways of innovation, up and down the stack. So I don't think there's a move you haven't seen in the business. But cloud, there's some new things happening. But it's all part of other things kind of meshing together, pun intended, service meshes. But as customers move to the cloud from on-prem, having cloud, multiple clouds, multiple dimensions of change. What's your take on this? Because I think you have a unique perspective in that 20 something years of Oracle, leader in databases and software. Google's got great leadership in tech, but now they're standing up a whole new cloud business at a whole other level. Your thoughts? Yeah, yeah, I think if you look at what's going on, I talked to a lot of customers and developers and IT teams, and clearly I think they are overwhelmed with the different things which are going on in this space. So how do you make it simple? How do you make it open? How do you make it hybrid? So you have flexibility of choice, it's becoming top of the mind for many of the users nowadays. The lock-in which many vendors currently provide, it becomes very difficult for many of these users to kind of keep on moving around and meet the business requirements. So I think having a solution and technology stack, which is really understanding that complexity around that and making it simple enough to adopt, I think is important. Yeah, one of the things we watch these keynotes very carefully, especially when you have a new CEO, Thomas Currian, we follow NetApp as well, as his twin brother, but his first opening line was a little tip of the cap to Diane Green, I thought was very classy. You can hear all the other things, scale, and obviously the multi-cloud piece. And then Jennifer Lynn gave a great demo and she said something in her demo I want to get your reaction to. One of the business benefits of Anthos is negotiating contracts, meaning choice. Yes. So lock-in shifting, this means lock-in is not your grandfather's lock-in, you worked at Oracle which has an amazing lock-in spec in databases. This is a whole new world. It's capabilities, the new lock-in, or what is the new, I mean, I guess lock-in is a function of... I think that, again, it's not ideas, lock-in is definitely not the right way of kind of looking at it, right? The way to kind of really make sure you attract users and attract customers is to really make value-add capabilities in there, right? And then if the customers really love it, they go keep on using it, irrespective of whether you call it lock-in or you provide some proprietoriness or not, right? Value. Right, value is complete, exactly. So I think it's important to really think about how you build some of the services and technologies which give this value, but also give you the choice of moving if you want to. That, I think, if you start from the beginning that there's no choice, then the value doesn't come out ever. So value is the new lock-in. I mean, it has to be, it has to be. All right, talk about Apigee because you're one of the key pieces of the platform is Apigee. Talk about your focus, obviously you're still learning and getting your feet wet, but again, you get your running shoes on, you're experienced. What is that platform that you're handling? Give a quick description. No, Apigee, an acquisition which Google made a few years ago, I think it's a kind of center space offering which allows customers to really do the life cycle and digital transformation of the technologies they have in the back end, right? And the Apigee team has done a great job of keeping being the market leader and keeping on innovating. I think the next phase for us as we look forward is one is to make it very pure, completely integrated and make it very seamless with all the rest of Google properties we have and the assets we have. And second thing is to really add other capabilities around it so that customers, depending on what they want to do, like line of business or IT schemes, to be able to now unlock a lot of the application data they have and expose it to both the customers, partners, as well as internal employees in a simple, easy manner. So a lot of monetization can happen, monitoring, metering, all those things can be really great for them. So there's a lot of headroom in Apigee. Very, very much, yes. Technology and business benefit. So, head of platform. You know, we in the industry, we hear platform, we kind of understand what it's all about. People outside the industry, maybe, somewhat of an amorphous concept to them. My first question though, before we get into this, what attracted you to Google? No, I think that basically, if I look at the strength Google brings as an organization, be it in terms of innovation, be it in terms of investment, the infrastructure, and the willingness to invest in the long term. I think that is really, really attractive. I think for me to kind of have the ability to kind of invest and grow a lot of the footprint we have to offer to a customer, solve the business problems a little more longer term, then short term oriented, I think it's very, very exciting. So let's talk more about platform. So I think a platform is a set of capabilities steeped in sort of an architectural premise. There's maybe some dogma in there that you've got to have these capabilities. Then ultimately you're going to deliver value and turn it to products and customer value. What is platform to you and what's that sort of, how should we think about that flywheel effect? Yeah, the way I look at the platform is basically one, is a capability is a customer required, one to build an application, integrate it and be able to secure it and manage it. So all the different capabilities you require instead of having to get piecemeal of it and having to tie it all together yourself, you can now do it in a much easier fashion and a vendor provides you the capability as one integrated capability. So that's really what I think of the platform. So your constituencies are obviously your internal developers, your external developers, who are you serving with that platform? I think a few audiences, no doubt developers to be able to build an application. But I think the bigger audience, if you go beyond that is really apps IT and a line of business. So today more and more line of business are doing extension to an application. They're doing integration without having to write code. And if you can provide a powerful tool where any person who's not a professional developer can do that kind of tasks and get more power out of the application or of the business systems they're running, the value is immense. And that's really, I think the audience we need to be able to attract and be able to now cater to so that they have a lot more benefits from using the Google platform. Is that part technical capability, part, you know, go to market? How do you, what do you got? It's definitely a lot of work to be done from the product perspective to make it simple. Make it more consumable by apps IT and line of business user, versus professional developers. But also in terms of how you design it and make it self-service and attractive enough for an audience who is not really kind of having to deal with a lot of this of themselves. Okay, so that's presumably what we should be expecting from you. Maybe talk about your priorities and give us a little, you know, how should we be sort of judging you down the road, judging you are not the right term, but what milestone should we be looking for? It's a little too early. I mean, it's four weeks at Google, but I think the way to look at this is are we basically catering to all the new requirements you see from a lot of the next generation users. And I think the ability for us to kind of expand that capability in a platform offering, so it's not just catering to one kind of an audience, but also new buyers, which we are seeing as users coming into the platform. So over the next six months to nine months, you'll start seeing some of those things which we do. Is this a new role? Was it sort of by committee before? No, I think Google has been doing a lot of these things. I think we try to think about rationalize few of the areas and how do you keep on expanding? There's a lot of headroom for Google Cloud to go, and we continue to kind of look at where we need to be and how we can keep on expanding and meet those requirements. I mean, talk about Thomas Kurian, also known as TK on stage. He's been busy. He's going to come on theCUBE eventually. He's talking to a lot of customers we've heard. Hundreds of customers have been promoted. You worked with them at Oracle. What's he like? Share some color commentary on TK. He's got the chops, obviously, enterprise. What's he like? He's new CEO. I've worked with Thomas for 18 plus years and I think he's probably one of the smartest person I've worked with for sure. But I think it's very strategic vision and clear execution. I think combination is rare for a lot of people. We have a very clear vision, but how do you execute and get operationally make those things possible? I think that really what Thomas brings to any place he gets into, right? So he has a very clear idea of where we should be going. He talks to a lot of customers, get a lot of input and has a clear plan in terms of what we should be doing. And then he gets very involved with the execution, operational work which we do, right? So that is the unique thing he'll bring to the table. He can get down and dirty to you under the hood. Oh, very much, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So I think it's fun to work with him that way. So I want to ask you a personal question. I know we've been following your career. Certainly you've got a great, great technical background as well. As you look at the cloud and having all that enterprise experience, you've seen many ways of innovation, hardware, software, evolution to the cloud. As you look at the modern enterprise, you mentioned IT apps, apps IT. There's a whole new app revolution, Renaissance happening. You've got hybrid and multi-cloud. What does it mean to be enterprise ready? If you could take all the learnings in your career as you look at the new, out in the new pasture of the next 10 years plus, the seed change is happening. What's your vision? I think the enterprise is ready for us. I mean, I think that's what we are doing a lot of. If you start today from Thomas' announcement, there's a lot of things we are planning and we have been doing already and we need to do as well. But I think it's understanding the existing landscape of a customer. In the enterprise space, there's a huge amount of investment many customers have made and systems you can't replace instantly. And to be able to understand how you operate in that kind of constraints as well as context is very important when you build new generational applications. So kind of having the connectivity and the tissue of kind of making it all work together while you kind of modernize and digitally transform your offering, I think is a critical way of thinking. And I think that's what you'll start seeing a lot more of that from the product planning, product delivery perspective and understanding that get many customers have to pay before they can move everywhere. Right, so you saw today with Thomas' announcement about hybrid which allows you to kind of interoperate with existing investments. Multi-cloud because you might be running in multiple environments. As well as you saw some of the things we're doing to really make it easy and simple to integrate with the existing portfolio customers have. It was interesting is that, you know, he also mentioned industries. Which you guys at Oracle, certainly you know that, you know that every industry's got unique requirements. But it's interesting, it kind of validates on a cue we, Dave and I have talked for years that the cloud's horizontally scalable, yet with data and AI, you can be differentiated at the industry level. So you can actually have best of both worlds now. That's what I see kind of coming together at the platform. Because you have to have a platform that enables. How do you see that? Do you agree with that? Do you see that shaping out? How would you see that ability to take advantage of the horizontal scalability, connective tissue, plus enabling this horizontal specialization for industry solutions? Yeah, I think you saw again, some of the announcements around that. How do you make it more pertinent to a particular end user? Each industry has specific data models, specific use cases. And you need to be able to provide and cater to that. So you have to have an horizontal platform which can cater to multiple different things you want to do. But then you have to provide domain specific content. And that's what you'll start seeing as you're alluding that Oracle does some of these things, other companies do that. And we will do some of that stuff as well. Well, it's an interesting point because you're a point about horizontal scaling because it creates another disruption agenda. Yeah, you can disrupt search and productivity software, but you can also traverse industries with your partners. We were talking about Apache before with the API economy. You can see Googling as partners getting at the healthcare, financial services, autonomous vehicles. I mean virtually every industry because it's data. And that's an exciting part of the platform. No, no doubt. I think Google of course brings a lot of strength in terms of the modeling and the AI, ML work they've been doing for many years. And that can really accelerate capabilities around these things in a much, much more easier way than it would be otherwise. And you kind of have a clean sheet of paper in the enterprise in a big way, right? I mean, yeah. I mean, great to see you. I'm glad we can get your first public appearance at Google here in theCUBE. Appreciate the commentary. I want to final question is, personal question. If you were a cloud architect for a large enterprise that had complex to simple workloads and everything in between, what would you be doing and advising and setting up and architecting? What would you do? What would you do? I think that the best thing to do, I think, is to identify different categories of applications. I don't think one thing fits all, right? So define what are the categories of applications you have, some of them are cloud ready and make sure that you can start accelerating that adoption and moving to more agile delivery model. Second are the applications which you might want to now start thinking about rewriting and then having a roadmap associated with that. So you're not trying to go and rip and replace because that has an impact on your business capabilities, right? And then third things we might want to look at retiring some of the stuff and then, hey, you have to modernize. I mean, there's nothing, there's no way out of it. Just like software goes through cycles of innovation and changes every 10 years, you see a new stack of technologies come out and you have to remain competitive by adopting some of these things. So I think that's kind of recognizing what you have and how you adopt is probably the number one thing. Can you be probably driving containers throughout? No doubt, I think so. I think the technologies out there now with the containerization is much, much simpler to kind of go and run and write ones, run anywhere kind of thing. Those scenarios is kind of what the guy from Kohl's was saying today in the keynote. Yeah, they're very similar, yes. He didn't say this, there's one use case of just leave it there, which was interesting to me. So do nothing was not his strategy. It is for some. Amit Zevry here on theCUBE, great insight. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule. Amit Zevry, head of platform at Google Cloud here on theCUBE. I'm Trevor Dave Vellada. Stay with us for more day one coverage. We're here for three days live. We'll be right back after this short break.