 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and joining me for this segment is Brian Graceley, welcome to CUBE Conversations here from the Wikibon office in Marlboro, Massachusetts. We're really going to dig in and discuss hybrid clouds. So hybrid clouds, a topic that we've talked about here on the CUBE Lots, obviously in our research, something we've been doing for many years. But Brian, let's step back for a second because you and I have lived through the definitional wars, we've talked to so many customers, seen public cloud exploding the last few years, especially now that numbers are a little bit more visible. Wikibon's putting out its forecast on the numbers. When you think back to the practitioners you talk to, companies you work to, talk to, it's not just, hey, I read about this in magazine and I should go do it, what is the imperative? Why does the C-suite need to consider cloud and why is it hybrid cloud in today's world? Right, I think at the core it's really two things. The first is, IT organizations are hearing from their development groups, their lines of business, shadow IT, whatever we want to call them, that they want to deploy applications faster. Everybody talks about going faster, but it's ultimately, I have a business idea, I have a business opportunity, how do I execute on that faster? So they're hearing that directly from the lines of business, or they're seeing shadow IT doing things and they're getting attitude to support it. And the second piece is really very simple, when the CIO sits down at the table with all of his peers, for the most part the IT organization is the last organization that really has adopted a hybrid approach. Finance leverages all sorts of outside resources, marketing leverages outside resources, human resources does, but IT, other than maybe a few SaaS applications, typically is very insulated, very insular and a lot of times the CEO, the board, the financial groups are saying, why aren't you leveraging the things that are outside that'll help us move faster? And so it's to those two things that are driving the why am I not doing hybrid cloud or why do we want hybrid cloud? Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned kind of the everything going on with stealth IT. There was a great sound bite I got from Alan Cohen who's currently with Alumeo, and he said what we need to get is if you've got the triangle, you've got the people that go, the people that are slow, and IT's traditionally said no, and we're trying to get everybody into kind of that go move because traditionally IT has been right. We slow roll it or we tell you no. It was a cost center and not something that was responsive to the business unit and that was why the business unit said, hey, let me go to Amazon, let me go to other alternatives, let me do it myself because IT wasn't doing what they needed to to move the business forward. Do you see as IT, the typical enterprise IT shop, where are they along that spectrum of having a handle for wrapping that whole cloud story in, readjusting what they're doing and leveraging multiple cloud services? Yeah, so for the companies that I talked to, the CIOs, practitioners I talked to, couple of things. Number one, they're open to the idea of hybrid cloud. I think in a lot of cases they're exploring it, they're beginning to try and gain those skills. A lot of cases in public clouds because they want to know how those things work, how they differentiate from their current best practices. They're trying like crazy to automate their private cloud environment, they're internal because they know that's a skill they're going to have to have no matter what. But I think there's a level of frustration because when they look at what's available to them, most IT departments don't do a lot of custom development, they don't do a lot of their own infrastructure development. They look at what's out there and they go, where are the tools that let me manage a VMware or an open stack private environment and an Amazon or an Azure environment through one set of tools? And those are limited if they exist at all. Or in some cases they exist but they're really kind of targeted to just modern cloud native next generation applications and they're saying what about what I have today? And so there's a sense of them trying to figure it out but to a certain extent they're struggling because the tools in the marketplace aren't great for them and they're trying to answer the question of going, but I have all these GRC requirements, I've got compliance and I've got security, how do I deal with that, help me with that? And that's not a prevalent story from a lot of vendors as to how I help you with that. They really tend to be more infrastructure-based or PAS-based. Yeah, I mean unfortunately that story of management has always typically lagged, the rest of the pieces of IT. Are we making progress? I mean, I think back even five years ago we were talking about this. If I was using public cloud, if I had my own environment and I've got SaaS applications, helping to choose and migrate and do that is very much something that I had to do myself and it wasn't something programmatic and one of the big advantages of moving to something like public cloud is I should be able to get more kind of management and orchestration built into the environment. So why haven't we moved forward? Service riders are building some of their own tools in there but is that maturing? Yeah, I think the way to think about this is a lot of times, and this goes all the way back to 2009, 2010 when people like VCE and EMC kind of came out and tried to define hybrid cloud as being private plus public, right? That sort of private plus public, slow progress, some progress, slow progress. Where we've seen a lot of progress is really companies that are figuring out how to leverage more than one public cloud or they're leveraging a single public cloud like an Amazon and then a number of SaaS tools to help them manage that and that becomes their sort of hybrid. So it's, my infrastructure comes from one cloud, my tools and management come from a set of SaaS services and they're able to leverage that and say it leverages, it helps me operationally, it helps you with skill set going faster and it gets me more into that OPEX model. But I think too much we depend on this idea that one end of the pipe and the other end of the pipe have to be the exact same technologies. Too many people got caught up in this idea of cloud bursting and sort of moving things back and forth, too complicated, data's heavy to move, doesn't want to move. So I think we're going to begin to see more and more shift in how do I define hybrid cloud and then what do I consider success where you'll have a lot of things stay private and you'll have a lot more people looking at how do I better leverage more public cloud as my sort of default first choice for where applications go. Yeah, so a couple of years ago, we saw a number of acquisitions of small software companies, so Cisco made a number of acquisitions, Dell bought the folks at the Stratius. I feel like the discussions move more to the application layer, the platforms there is that management of kind of the multi-cloud, if you will, starting from the public cloud, is that still a growth space or is it moving more to the platforms? Yeah, so I think the mistake that happened or the problem that happened with those acquisitions was they were great technology, so in Stratius or some others, we talked about some of the other companies, they ended up going to hardware-centric companies and those companies struggled because they focused just on infrastructure. Where we're seeing progress though is like you said on the PAS platforms, so what Cloud Foundry, that whole Cloud Foundry ecosystem is doing, they're seeing them spin up public clouds, you're seeing them get deployed privately, it's easy to push an application from one to the other, you're seeing companies like Apprenda, another PAS company who has a very unique way of looking at hybrid cloud and how to rebuild applications. I think hybrid cloud really needs to be thought of at the application layer. If you're thinking about it from an infrastructure perspective, you're going to struggle because the odds that your Cisco or VMware or Dell hardware will be the exact same in another cloud, odds are very slim. The odds that your PAS platform will be similar in your private environment or across multi-clouds, much higher chance of that and you're abstracting at the right level. Yeah, I guess that you bring up a really interesting point here. Today, cloud is not a utility, cloud is not homogeneous across multiple environments. We often talk about portability, but it's more about, I don't know, am I going to have similar services and does my application work across multiple environments? I'm not necessarily going to pick up something, especially if it has storage attached to it and move it. So there's so much misnomer. What's kind of real in leveraging services across multiple environments versus what don't you do today? Right, I think the biggest thing, so if we were to go back to a word like portability, which is a buzzword, a hot buzzword, cold buzzword, people would love to just say, take it as is, pick it up and move it, just like you would a storage container or you move your house. I think the reality is applications are gaining portability. Docker is helping with that, Paz is helping with that and what people are taking advantage of is Dev and test environments, rapid innovation for applications, but then where the bottleneck still is in production. When I've got production levels of data, production quantities of data, that's where we still have some work to do and that's unfortunately where you get, you've got to involve networking, you're going to involve VPN, you're going to involve security and storage and we still have a ways to go with that and that's again, that's why I think we're going to see more and more wherever people start applications that want to stay production, they're going to leave them in that place and we won't, I think eventually we'll get away from this premise that you'll do Dev and test in the cloud and then you'll pull it back in for private for production, it's going to stay where it begins if that's where the data is. Yeah and that's actually the next point I want to go to is today you have so much, you do Dev and test in the public cloud and then I need to pull it into my own configuration and there's the hassle of how to convert that from a virtualization standpoint, if I'm doing AWS in the public cloud, kind of the majority of the people today and I'm doing VMware, my on-premises, it's different so it doesn't work the same, it's not seamless, there's another companies that are helping to bridge that piece, we've seen some, there's some infrastructure technologies that are allowing me to get better performance and much better usage for test Dev on site so it's one of those things that I look as an air gap in the environment today is they say I'd love to have kind of multiple environments that do the same but I can't do it today and I'm not buying it that way so where do you see, what's the state of it today and where's it going for that dichotomy? It's the perfect sort of example what you talk about between, you never want to be in a market where there's not really a problem you've got great technology, in this case we've got real problems, people have, they need to go faster, they need to be more innovative, so the problems exist, the technology's behind which is typically not the case, we typically are the other way around, we're trying to find uses for cool new technology. I'm surprised that more of the infrastructure centric companies haven't made investments in those kind of companies like a Rivello systems or some other who can take an entire application and can kind of encapsulate it and then move it to sort of any cloud, there's several others that do that. I'm surprised more of them haven't, I think again what it comes back to is the vendors tend to think about what their problem is which is I want to sell equipment, they sort of forget sometimes that their customers have broader problems and they don't want to think about a world that goes well, workloads move outside of the private cloud. I mean it's funny, I think back to, I worked for a big infrastructure company and you talked about how many different ways they had to migrate from a storage space from one environment to another and we stopped counting when we found 50 and just because in the field we do that and it's very ad hoc and it's because one environment compared to the others there's so many differences that it's much more as services engagement using some software and various tools. So we're in that interoperability problem which as we said Docker is trying to help solve as one of the issues. So yeah I mean just containers give portability we talked about is a little bit of a nuance discussion. But it's not necessarily about moving it, it's about can I do this application in multiple environments. Well and I think from an end user perspective, customer perspective, there's a few positives that are right around the horizon are right in front of them. So obviously we're seeing Amazon begin to do more enterprise types of things, they're beginning to extend some of their VPC capabilities so that there's that. Microsoft is making a much bigger push to sort of link Windows server to Azure, there's better technology there. But even more so you're seeing companies like Cisco who are investing in MetaCloud and doing hosted offerings. You're seeing IBM buy Blue Box, they're doing hosted offerings. You're seeing EMC buy Virtustream, they're doing more hosted offerings. I think there's becoming more of a realization by the vendor community that a lot of these companies trust that I've got to offer you things that aren't private first, they're really sort of public or hosted first and that changes the mindset. You're going to see a new set of tooling around that, you're going to see better ways to leverage these on-demand resources. So while we said that hybrid has sort of struggled up until this point, I think we're beginning to see a tipping point that the way companies are going to engage their vendors and their technology is going to be more in line with that help me move faster, help me align costs to that business opportunity. Yeah and so much of that struggle has been just because it's not something that I just buy on a skew. It's something that I have to put together. So let's kind of get down to specifics. If we're talking to a CIO today and saying, okay, am I a broker of services now? If it's that multi-cloud, multi-environment, am I just helping choose them and doing am I now the chief integration officer? Am I a broker of services? What's the CIO's role in helping to put together that hybrid cloud strategy? Yeah, I believe in that. I believe that philosophy of sort of broker of services, manager of multiple clouds. The way to think about that is think about it just like your financial controller or as a CIO, you have projects that come in, you can assign a priority to them, you can assign a cost to them, and you can assign what's the best way to cut. You should look at your clouds or your data centers as just like those sort of resources. I should be able to normalize them. I should be able to say this is a cost for this and a cost for that. As a CIO, you should be pushing towards that and you may realize not only does that help you do more things faster, but it's also going to drive efficiencies inside your own data center because you have to say my costs need to be relatively aligned, maybe not exactly the same, but relatively aligned for certain projects. Okay, let's look at the chief technology officer. So one of the biggest things we push here at Wikibon is that companies need to get rid of the undifferentiated heavy lifting. All too often we see what am I spending my time on and how does that drive back to the business? So what's your advice for the CTO as to how he looks at the technology segment today? Yeah, there's a great quote. We did some work with the CIO of Royal Phillips a couple of months ago and his CEO flat out told him 85% of the spend that you guys have is going towards undifferentiated things. Andy Jassy from AWS likes to call it undifferentiated heavy lifting. That, those are those applications that you look at them and you go in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s, they drove productivity improvement for your workers. Email and ERP systems and those types of CRM systems. Nowadays everybody has one, they're all exactly the same and that's why you're seeing a huge growth in them becoming SaaS applications. You're seeing Office 365, you're seeing Workday, you're seeing Salesforce and other things. That's a huge opportunity to help take cost out of the business in terms of moving from a big monolithic thing to a SaaS application. That doesn't necessarily make your business go any faster but it is one way if you're not doing custom development to go, I can drive us to be faster. I can make it simpler and a better experience for my end users. Okay, and if we bubble up to the CEO, what does Hybrid Cloud mean to the company overall? What should the CEO be thinking about that and the role of IT in general underneath him? Well, I think it goes back to the first comment I made. The CEO needs to be able to go sit at the table with his staff and look at every single one of them and say, look, I need every single one of you no matter what discipline you're in to say, business opportunity to business execution, how fast can you make that for me? Or how efficient can you make that? And if IT struggles for that efficiency, that idea to execution because they don't have, they're not using hybrid resources, then the CEO is going to start looking for other people to run it or they're going to look for other ways to solve that. So it's not just an IT problem, but the problem is IT is sort of the last to adopt this model. Every other discipline at that table has already adopted it and is well on their way. Okay, last piece I want to ask you, Brian, is what about the vendor ecosystem? You know, what are we missing out there in the marketplace today? You know, what do you want to see from the vendor community to help make this easier for the practitioners? Right, I want to see the vendors, you know, realize that that public cloud market that you looked at as competitive, you've got to interoperate with it. You may have ways to compete with it, but you've got to interoperate with it. You've got to think, how do I help my customers if they decide to go public first and then want to integrate their private environments or multiple clouds? And I want to see them, you know, begin to understand that this is not just about, you know, selling more into the private space. It's how do I help that business, again, from idea to execution? And not enough of them are doing it today. Too many of them are trying to completely lock it in from a vendor perspective. And I think that that's going to backfire on a lot of them because some of them aren't moving fast enough to lock them in. Yeah, it's interesting. If you think about kind of the big cloud players today, you know, Google's made a lot of interesting partnership announcements and we've wondered if they're serious about trying to take a big part of the market. Right. Microsoft has been working, you know, obviously to grow what they're doing in both, you know, Azure, you know, in the public cloud and in private cloud, but they're also starting to do some partnerships and they're heavily engaged in certain environments. Amazon is the one that, you know, isn't partnering with the big traditional companies all that much and is usually enemy number one for a bunch of the companies out there. So do you really expect that, you know, we're going to see public cloud and, you know, more traditional infrastructure vendors working together? I think we already are. So we talked about this yesterday on a show. You've got Google partnering with VMware as a way to get into the enterprise. You've got Microsoft, 25% of Azure is Linux hosts. So are they partnering? No, not necessarily, but they're more open about what's available. That's not just Windows. And if you look at Amazon, you could say Amazon's the greatest lock-in, but at the same time, the ecosystem of SaaS companies that work with Amazon is enormous. And so they give you as much choice as you want for logging and monitoring and application enablement and all those sort of things. So there's choice within those ecosystems. There's not yet choice to where they look completely ubiquitous. And I think it really comes down to, what applications do I have? What am I trying to drive with them? One of the possibilities, and this is what we're all sort of hoping for, and we'll see where it plays out, is what does Docker do in all this? Does Docker become the great unifier as a container to let you move things around? Or does it just become another sort of lock-in technology down the road, depending on how it plays out? All right, so Brian, you've talked a lot to practitioners in this space. What's, on the last word on this, what's the biggest misconception you see out there that if we said if we could just get beyond this, maybe we could move things forward? I think the biggest misconception is this premise that they're going to constantly move stuff back and forth. I think the reality is wherever your heavy data is, is where it's going to reside, and you have to think of ways to move around that, whether it's partially replicating enough to build a new application or, but the whole premise of lots and lots of movement, get away from that type of thinking. It's too complicated from a data perspective. Yeah, absolutely. Storage is often a challenge and a limiter. There's big opportunities to do changes here, but need to take strong consideration into that because I haven't heard IBM research come up with breaking the laws of physics just yet. So, or anybody else for that matter. So, Brian, excellent stuff. Look forward to talking to you much more on this, reading the research. Of course, go to wikibon.com to catch all the research. Catch us on video at siliconangle.tv and feel free to hit us up on Twitter with any questions you have, others you'd like us to dig deeper into, and thank you so much for watching.