 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to the third day of live coverage of theCUBE here in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. My co-host, Stu Miniman, Stu, good to see you this morning. Great to see you, John. Got a very special guest here. George Curry and the CEO of NetApp, not to be confused with Thomas Curry and his twin brother who's the CEO of Google Cloud. George, great to see you. Good morning, thanks for coming by. Thank you for having me. So when you've been walking through the hallways, you're getting like a lot of looks and some selfies. People want to take a selfie with you, thinking you're Thomas. Quite a few, quite a few. So what's it like? Oh, it's exciting to see all of the innovation here and the real commitment that Google's made to building out an enterprise platform. We've been working with them for many years and we're excited at all of the potential new opportunities that creates alongside Google's customers and ours. Yeah, George, it's going to be interesting. It's almost a little bit of a mirror image. Is Google looking to get deeper into the enterprise? And of course, we've been documenting NetApp for many years now, has moved beyond just being an enterprise company. You've been moving to the cloud. Maybe just go back, tell us a little bit some of the lessons you've learned and what you're seeing happen dynamics in the space. I think customers, Thomas said, many of the core tenets that we see, which is customers want to operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. They want to have cloud technology integrated into their data centers and conversely, their applications be portable with a common programming model. I think it's come a long way. I think our technology is now available natively in the Google Cloud. I think the programming model with microservices and containers and with Kubernetes as an orchestration layer truly allows this kind of hybrid world to operate. And I think our opportunity there is to help our customers use data properly across all of these landscapes, understand where it is, orchestrate new applications as well as traditional so that they can progress their business. And so it's, I tell you, coming to these conferences over the last three to five years, you can see the pace of change really start to accelerate. I'm interested in what you guys think about it. Well, one of the things we've been commenting on on theCUBE in our opening segments is kind of looking at how the transformation of Google Cloud from Google, a large scale, they know data, they know tech into becoming an enterprise. So a lot of window dressing around the event, digital transformation, all the right words. But they got the technology. And one of the things I'd love to get your perspective of because it's no secret that the Korean brothers, yourself and your brother, Thomas are, have great tech chops. Also have tons of enterprise experiences. You specifically have been involved in a lot of ecosystems. That's been a big topic here. Can Google really get an ecosystem up and running? I mean, they participate in the CNCF with cloud native, but as an organization, this is something that you're very familiar with, NetApp, you've been in many ecosystems. You've seen the formula. How should that evolve? Because it's changing the services base. I think you're part of the console, Google Cloud from what I've been reporting here. What's the ecosystem formula for, for this new cloud world? You know, I'll tell you that enterprises expect their providers to work together. That's always been the expectation. And we've had to coexist with even our competitors for a long period of time. I think the core ideas there are to keep the customer at the center of the discussion and figure out how to best solve their problems, regardless of whether it is having to coexist with someone else, right? I think what's been interesting to me is Linux has really become sort of the core underpinning of the cloud. And Linux was an open source technology that in the early years IBM backed and sponsored. I think containers together with, you know, what Google's doing to sponsor it has really become the opportunity to create the next kind of layer of, you know, common development model, programming model, common orchestration. I think there's that promise. I think it's got to be realized. George, you talked about the change that we see in the industry. And, you know, we know enterprise is not like, oh, let's just redo everything we were doing. Whether I'm a five year old or, you know, 150 year old company, I have things that I need to look at. And I mean, the applications are really tough. It'd be wonderful if I just had a clean sheet of paper and I can make it all serverless or containerize all my pieces there. The message I heard a lot this week is, you know, meeting customers where they are. It's not just Google we know has great tech and smart people, maybe a little too smart sometimes. But, you know, I'd love to hear your viewpoint as, you know, those enterprise customers, are they catching up to the pace of innovation faster and making more change? Or, you know, is it still one of these things that we're going to measure in decades as to how long it takes to move things? I think it, you know, I see it in a couple of ways. One is which industry are you in and the impact of, you know, transformation to your industry. I think if you are in a highly digitally oriented industry like media and entertainment, you've got to transform quickly because the whole industry is getting transformed, right? I think conversely, if you're an industry where digitization helps your workforce be more productive, I think you can take more time. What we see also is in the places that are common, for example, in how you evolve your customer experience and how you interact with customers, we see virtually every company needing to transform, right? And so I see that, you know, this is a long transformation. It's not going to happen overnight. I think that customers will pragmatically choose to, you know, either refactor existing applications or build net new on a case-by-case business process by business process basis. And that's why we see hybrid sort of being the de facto operating model. I want to get your thoughts on multi-cloud and hybrid. I've seen the modern application renaissance and revolutions kind of happening. What do you call it a renaissance or revolution? Applications are exploding. That's clear. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are key architectural shifts. I'm writing a story right now about the Department of Defense, a big contract that was awarded to, or to Shorthand, Microsoft, and AWS. But one of the things that people are arguing is that it should be multi-cloud. Now, the Department of Defense has an example, and this is public sector, but also enterprises have the same makeup. They have hundreds of cloud projects, hundreds. And the Department of Defense has 500 cloud projects. So it's not one cloud and that's not Amazon. So this is a world where workloads in cloud selection and the parts of the architecture have to support multiple clouds. Can you explain that kind of, what that means to customers? Because people get often confused, come from the old way. I'm buying IBM, I'm buying Oracle, I'm buying Google Cloud and we're done. No, it's really not that case. Can you kind of, can you react to that? Most enterprises that we speak to have hundreds of applications, everything from, you know, mainframe-based, core business processing to highly digital, you know, mobile-based customer interaction applications. I think they have sort of a portfolio approach to manage those where they say, hey, some of those are going to stay on-premise. Some of those are going to stay in a private cloud. And then I've got this palette of, you know, choices around whether I choose software as a service or infrastructure or platform as a service. And I think that when you look at a, you know, reasonably large company like ours, we run about 500 applications in the company. There's no single palette, right? You've got to have these inter-operate, I think, from a governance standpoint, from how you integrate the data across these landscapes, and from how you ensure compliance, security, and so on. So I think that, you know, whenever a company tries to say that I can do everything, I think that's a little bit fashisious, to be honest. And so the reality is multiple workloads, multiple cloud projects will happen, multiple vendors, but in a new way. Workload driven with the data, obviously the data's critical storage is key. Stu, you want to- Yeah, so I think back to the storage world. Storage was always a fragmented marketplace, and I have my application silos that I did this. Now, you know, what have we learned from multi-cloud, that from multi-vendor as we go into multi-cloud, and how can we allow customers to really unlock that value of data? Because if it all stays fragmented in silos, it's a lot harder to be able to actually leverage it, use it for all the, you know, AIML or data value. Absolutely, I think, you know, one of the long-term theses we've had is that the world gradually moves from system-centric or process-centric to a data-centric world, where the core asset that you're operating on is not the value of an individual business process, but the integration across your business processes, right? And so this is why we think in a hybrid world, you need something like a data fabric to stitch together all of these landscapes. Those landscapes need to increasingly be stitched together in real time, because of the speed of decision-making or the use of real-time analytics or real-time business processing. And so that's why we've integrated our technology into multiple landscapes, right? Both traditional, but increasingly containerized or cloud-based, cloud-native applications. And I think that's, again, a multi-year journey. I think IT has to transform, IT architectures has to transform, and frankly, businesses need to as well. They need to think about data as a property of the whole business, rather than of a function or a department. So just to double-click on that for a second, because what you're saying is a data fabric allows for multiple data to move around the workloads. So what you're saying is, if you want to take it, well, I'm saying, if you want to take advantage of machine learning and AI, the data has to be addressable in real time, meaning you don't have time to go fetch it from a database that may or may not be available at any given time, so making data addressable, horizontally scalable for whatever workload at any given time, from retail to personalization or whatever, right? Absolutely, right? So for example, if you look at the way a AI or an ML data pipeline works, there's a period in the pipeline which is about training and feature engineering, where you're trying to develop the model the right way, and then you're going to let the model run, but the model's going to be reacting to real-time data input and constantly making transformations to how the business reacts. I think that data input needs to be fed in from all of the business processes that support the business, right? Rather than a, hey, I'm going to create an artifact that's a static artifact that's trained once and then you're going to run the business. So that's why we think you've got to operate the hybrid world as an integrated world to have the data layer. George, one of the interests, there's a study that Google put out, they had acquired a group, Dora, that looks at high-performing environments and what differentiates the leaders in the pack. You talk to a lot of companies and I'm sure you must have some opinions on this. Tell us, what is separating the leaders in the end-user space from those that are following? I think that the leaders have the capability to transform themselves and transformation. People talk about digital transformation. I think the most important part of that is actually the transformation part and it's organizing people to allow experimentation, learning from experimentation to celebrate failure. I think that's hard for big companies to do, right? Because you're set up to ensure that you're managing the risk of not failing. On the other hand, I think in a world where there's a new game being created, you got to be able to allow the organization to try different things and it's okay to fail. And the speed pressure too to go faster. Certainly with cloud, everything's accelerated from time to market, time to value, technology development. And I think that is also one of the fundamental changes going on in the industry. We were at the end of a paradigm where there were horizontal slices of expertise, which is really the ultimate optimization of an existing paradigm. The new paradigm isn't exactly clear, so to move faster, IT is creating vertically-integrated squads. You look at Google's creation of a site reliability engineer. It's really a way to accelerate the creation of digital services and optimize the infrastructure associated with it. So, it's a time of change. I think our view is you got to lean into it. And you've got to trust the fact that the skills and the cultural values that you've brought are going to help you innovate into the future, not necessarily just the products and the ways that you've done them. And so that's why we think culture is a massively important part of these transformations. We're here at George Curry and CEO of NetApp. Not to be confused with Thomas Curran-C of Google, who's also walking around the floor, show floor talking to customers. George, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight. You guys are awesome. The twins are super smart. Running two big companies. Thanks for spending the time. Share a personal story with George. I mean, Thomas hasn't come on yet. I hope he's too busy. We'll get him later on the queue, but share a story about him. What's he like? Who wins the arm wrestling matches? What's he like? What's a personal story? I think he's shy. I think we're both really, we realize how lucky we are. We grew up in places where people, some of us had sort of unmerited grace, the blessings of being born to extraordinarily good families and parents. And so we're always cognizant of that. It's amazing that two guys in India who had never seen a computer till we left India to come to the United States now have the opportunity to be a big part of the computer industry. So we're just really grateful and God's been good to us. Well, congratulations. Love the tech chops. Valuing culture. Big deal right now. Thanks for spending the time sharing the insights. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. George Curie here on the queue with John Furry, Ms. Myself. Us too many men. More CUBE coverage after this short break.