 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to our live covers to theCUBE here, exclusive covers of Google Cloud, Google Next 2018, I'm John Furrier, co-host with Dave Vellante, both co-founders of theCUBE at Silicon Angle here with our special guest, Diane Greene, who's the CEO of Google Cloud, a legend in the industry, former CEO of VMware, among other great things. Diane, great to see you, great to have you on theCUBE for the first time. Really fun to be here, I'm really happy to be here. So one of the things about Google Cloud is interesting is that we've been observing is, you mentioned that stage, two years now in, you're starting to see some visibility into what Google Cloud is looking to do. They're looking to make things really easy, fast, and very developer-centric at open source, culture of inclusion, culture of openness, but hardcore performance. Talk about that vision and how that's translating as you're at the helm driving the big boat here. Yeah, sure, I mean, obviously we had this amazing foundation with, you know, our modern enterprise company, Google Cloud, right? But what we've done with Google Cloud is we've realized that just, I mean, Google values engineering so much and so do our customers. So one is we're taking a very engineering-centric approach. People really love our open source philosophy and then, you know, we're so doubled down on both security and artificial intelligence. And so if you have this underlying, you know, incredibly advanced, scaled infrastructure, high performance, security, availability, and all the goodness, and then you start taking people somewhere where they can really take advantage of AI, where they can be more secure than anywhere else, and you have the engineering to help them, you know, really exploit it and to listen to the customers about where they want to go, that's, we're just getting incredible results. You know, people, I mean, I've been following Google since the founder when Sergey and Larry started. It's been fun to watch. They really are the biggest cloud ever to be built and Facebook certainly is built. We have seven applications that are over a billion active users. Massive scale. And actually, we're just this week on track to have the next one drive. 25 years of expertise, I've seen them move from buying servers to making their own better airflow, better days, just years and years of trajectory of economies of scale. And then when Google started Cloud a couple of years ago, it's like, oh great, everyone wants to be like Google, so we'll just offer our Googleness to everyone. And they're like, wait, that didn't really work. People want to consume what Google has, not necessarily be Google, because not everyone can be Google. So there's a transition where Google's massive benefits are now being presented and sold or offered as a service. This is a core strategy. What should people know about? Because people are squinting through all this market share, this company's got more revenue than that one, and if I bundle in AdWords and G Suite, you'd be the number one cloud provider on the planet by afar. So buyers are trying to figure out who's better for what. How do you talk to customers if someone says, are you behind? Are you winning? How do I know if Google Cloud is better than the other cloud? Well, the only way you're going to know is to kind of do a proof of concept and see what happens, pull back the covers. But what we can explain to people is that we're so, so one is it's all about information. That's why I say Google's a modern enterprise company because we are about, I said that in my keynote. We take information, we organize it, and we supercharge it. We give a lot of intelligence to it, and that's what every business needs to do, and we're the best in the world at it. And then AI is this revolutionary thing going on where you can just apply it to anything. Someone made a joke about cloud. They said it's like butter. It's better with everything. The cloud is better with everything. Well, I think it's AI actually. And so when you combine our ability to manage data, our ability to do artificial intelligence with our open source and then our security, not to mention the fact that the underlying infrastructure is everybody pretty much acknowledges the most advanced technology in the world. It's a pretty unbeatable combination. But the thing is, we needed to bring it to market in a way that everybody could trust it and use it. And so one of the first things we did, which we hadn't had to do as a serving our internal customers have roadmaps so customers can know what's going on and what's coming when and that we won't ever turn something off. And all those things that an enterprise company expects and needs for good reason, I have to say that our engineering team is loving working with external customers. And that was, everybody said you'll never get that engineering team caring about customers. And I knew we would because we had the same quality engineers at VMware and they loved it. And I knew it was just a matter of getting everybody to see how many interesting things are. And problems to solve by the way too. There's so many problems to solve and we're having even broader impact now going to the enterprise, going to every company. Well you said in your keynote, IT is no longer a cost center, it's a key driver of business. Tech is now at the core of every product. We think about, you go back 15 years, I remember somebody said to me, have you seen what VMware can do and how fast it can spin up a server? That was cost, right? So talk about the enterprise today. When you talk to customers, what are those problems they're solving? What are those opportunities? Yeah, well so there is a class of customers like typically the internet companies, they are looking for the best infrastructure, they are looking to save costs but they're also looking, people are realizing why should I do it all? Why don't I concentrate on my core competence? So we have, you know, it's well known we've had Snap from day one and we were in their prospectus when they filed to go public and then we have Twitter, we recently announced Spotify and so forth. So those are very technically sophisticated people, they come, they use BigQuery, they use our data analytics and our infrastructure but then you get into the businesses and we've taken this complete verticals approach and so they're coming to solve their, you know, whatever problems it is they have and because we have these exceptional tools and we're kind of building platform tools, a lot of them with applied AI and every vertical they can come to us and we can talk to them in their language and solve their problems and I talked about it in my keynote with ITB, you know, it's driving revenue it is everybody's re-engineering how they do business it's the most exciting time I've ever seen in the enterprise. I mean I've always thought tech was interesting but now it's the whole world. It's everywhere, I mean you have an engineering background went to MIT, studied there. If you were the lead engineer of most of these companies that are re-architecting and re-engineering, I mean they're almost re-platforming their companies. They let us think differently, it's not just an IT purchase because they're not buying IT anymore they're deploying platforms. Well and they're digitizing their whole business and they're using their information they're using their data, you know, that changes so many business processes it changes what they can do with their customers how they can talk to them, you know, it changes how they can deliver anything and so it's just a radical re-think of, you know, it's so amazing when we work deeply with a customer because, you know, they might start out talking about infrastructure and how they're going to move to the cloud and how we can help them and then, you know, we start talking about all the things our technologies can do for them and what's possible and they'll kind of pause and then they'll come back and they'll go holy cow we are re-thinking our whole company we're re-defining our mission we're much more asked for, you know, it's very exciting. I had a chance to interview some of your employees and the phrase comes up kid in the candy store a lot so I got to ask you with respect to customers is there more of an engineering focus as you see some of the adoption mentioned, Twitter, Spotify, these are internet companies these are nerds, they love to geek out they know large scale so not a hard sell to get them over the transom into the scale of the cloud as you get to the enterprise, is there a makeup is there an orientation that attracts Google to them and where, why are you winning these deals? Is it the tech, the people, the process well, I'm not sure the tech's solid but it's a combination of all of the above because what'll happen is we'll all come in and start pitching these companies and what we do, you know, we really understand what they're trying to do and then we send in the appropriate engineers for what it is they're trying to do and they, you know, you get this engineer-to-engineer collaboration going that, you know, lets us know exactly how to help that company. They give you a list and you go, check, I've done that, okay, next check, check, do you go down the check box? I mean, or is it joined? Well, we brainstorm with them and that's companies like that because they, you know, they don't necessarily understand all the technology. I always like to think what an engineering works does is one, it gets requirements from the customers about what they need and we call that all the table stakes and we get it done and some of it's pretty hard to do and but then, you know, the engineers, after they get to know customers, they can invent things that the customer had no idea was possible but that like solves their problem in a much more powerful way and so that's the magic and that's how we're going into the market and wherever we can, we'll take things and make it available to everybody. We're very, you know, that open source philosophy of all technology is for everybody and it's a very nice environment to work in. The number one sound by John and I have been talking to them all day about in your keynote was security's the number one worry, AI is the number one opportunity. I was like writing my keynote and it hit me, I'm like, oh, this is how it is. So please, when you talk to customers, how are you addressing that worry and how are you addressing the opportunity? Yeah, well, we're pretty proud of our security, you know, because it really is at every layer, very deeply integrated, thought through, I mean, we don't think in terms of a firewall because if you get inside that firewall, all bets are off and so it's really, everything you do needs to be looked at and you've got to make sure and that's why like the Chromebook with the hardware-based two-factor authentication and G Suite, I mean, you know, we had a Google which went to that and since we did, not a single one of our 85,000 employees have been phished. Kind of amazing, because it's the biggest source of that. Ear phishing is the easiest way to get in. Yeah, but you cannot do it once you have that combination. And so it's all the way up there, all the way down to proprietary chips that check that the boot hasn't been tampered with every time that you boot. Our new servers all have it, our Chromebooks all have it and then everything in between. So we think we have an incredibly powerful, we had to add in enterprise features like fine-grained security controls, ways to let our users manage their own encryption keys, but anyhow, we just did a really phenomenal and our data centers are so bullet-proof. We have those catchers that'll pick up a car. We even have one of those that we had a UPS truck try and tailgate someone in, got picked up in it anyhow. I mean, the magic of the engineering at Google, this is the value that we hear from customers is that, okay, we get that the technology and the engineers are there. We see the technology, but you've been involved in transformative businesses, BM where Dave was mentioning, certainly changed IT and it was new and transformed, clouds transformational as well. And we were just talking earlier about the metaphor of the horse and buggy versus the car. Yeah, things get automated away, which means those jobs now are gone with new functionality. And you're seeing a lot of automation machine learning. Auto ML is probably one of the hottest trends going on right now. AI operations seems to be replacing what was categorically an industry, IT operations. So, you're starting to see IT again being disrupted and then shifting into the value up the stack. And this is developers. That's the point, yeah. Because I don't feel like, yes, all those really painful jobs are going away. That no one wanted to do. That no one wanted to do anyhow. VMware was the same way. We eliminated tons of drudgery and AI is doing it systematically across every industry, but then you repurpose people because we still need so many people to do things. Like I gave the example in my keynote about the dolphin fins and using Auto ML to find them and identify them. Well, that was PhD researchers and professors. We're looking at that. Is that what they should be doing? I don't think so. You free them up and think of the discoveries they're going to make. I mean, humans are really smart. I think all humans are. We just have to do a better job in helping them realize their potential. I want to talk about that's a great point. Culture is everything. I also interviewed some of your folks. I just wrote an article on my Forbes call about the four most powerful women in Google that aren't Diane Greene. It was some of your key lieutenants. That was a great piece, yeah. And the human story came up where you have machines and humans working together. This is, and then one of the conversations was artistry is coming back to software development. We were on this thread of modern software developers is not just your software engineering. You don't need three PhDs to write code. The aperture of software development engineering and artistry and craft is coming back. What's your reaction to that? Because you're starting to see now a new level of range of software opportunities for everybody. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, my daughter is a computer science major and she just taught a coding camp this summer and they started from kindergarten and went up. And it was amazing to hear what those kids were doing. And so I think a lot of applications are almost going to be like assembling Lego. I mean, you have all these APIs you can put in. You have all these open source libraries. You have serverless. So you just plop it in these containers and everything is taken care of for you. It's like, you're right. It's like a new age in building applications. I mean, you will still need, I mean, Google needs system engineers. Under the hood, you got to fix some engines. You can get mechanics. Yeah, right. You guys talked about this in your article, like the shift sort of creativity becomes a much more important ingredient. And also the human computer interface and the user, you know, the UX. I mean, you heard from Target, I was talking to him, they do an agile workshop for six weeks for all their developers. And their productivity is, he said, an order magnitude higher. And I think the productivity of developers in the cloud with all these technologies is across the board in order magnitude better at a minimum. Yeah, Mike McNamara was CIO, at Target was up on stage today. Yeah, he's a really impressive person. Yeah. So I want to ask you about differentiation. You talked about open source and specifically your contribution to open source. That's different from most cloud players. The other thing you talked about, and I want to understand it better, that you provide consistency with a common core set of primitives. What do you mean and why is that important? Right. Well, so when we build out all our services, we want to have one uniform way of thinking about things. So how do you do queuing? It's common across every service. How do you do security? It's common across every service. Which means it's very intuitive and it's easy to use the system. Whereas if, now it slows you down, software development at that layer, when you have to do that, goes more slowly. And if you have to make a change in a core primitive, everybody's got a change, right? However, you take the other side where everybody just builds a service vertically and with disregard for how things are done. And now you've got this potpourri of ways to do things and everybody has to have specialized expertise in every service. So it really slows down the operators and the developers and you get a lot of inconsistency. So it's super high value and I have to believe that's really going to, people are going to start appreciating that and it's really going to pay off. I think it's a huge problem that people don't really understand because it just as an example, if you're building out a data pipeline and tapping all these different services, you've got then different APIs for every single service that you have to become an expert at. That's exactly right. And that's a real challenge. Now, like you said, from the software development. And it's annoying. Yes, and users who really understand this stuff are getting annoyed with it. But it's an interesting trade-off and a philosophy that you've taken that's quite a bit different. Well, Google has such a high bar for how they do things. Well, if you do the, that sounds foundational though. It's slower, but it's more foundational. But doesn't that accelerate the value? So the value's accelerated significantly. Oh, yes. So you go slower down here. Our going a little slower makes everybody else go way faster at a higher quality. So it's, you know, it definitely the trade-off, you know, it wins. Thank you for taking the time to join us on theCUBE today. I want to ask one final question. Culture in Google Cloud. What, how would you describe the DNA within Google Cloud? A lot of energy, a lot of enterprise expertise coming in big time. A lot of great stuff happening. What's, how would you describe the DNA of Google Cloud? I would say just tremendous excitement because we're just moving so fast. We're scaling so fast. We're sort of barely in control. It's moving so fast. But just such good things happening and the customers are loving us. And it's so rewarding. And, and so everybody's, you know, increasingly taking more and more ownership and, and you know, really making sure that we do super high quality work for our customers. And it just, everybody's proud. We're all really proud. What's the one thing that you want people to know about that they may not know about Google Cloud that they should definitely know about? Geez. You know, it's worth coming to and giving it a try because long, you know, this is, well, the biggest thing is how early we are in and you know, you, it's the right place to be because you want the highest quality you want. You want the most advanced technology and AI and security are pretty important. All right. Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud here inside theCUBE, live in San Francisco we're in the Moscone Center. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage. Stay with us for more from day one of three days of live coverage. We'll be right back.