 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next on Air 20. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud Next 20 on Air. It's week seven of nine. Google, of course, took their event that was supposed to be in person in Moscone. Spread it out online. It's all available on demand. Every Tuesday they've been dropping it in theCUBE. We've got a great lineup that we're going to share with you of our coverage of Google Cloud Event. This is our analysis segment joining me to help dig into where Google Cloud is, everything happening in the ecosystem. Happy to bring in Dave Vellante and John Furrier, our co-founders, co-CEOs, and always hosts of the program. John and Dave, it was great last year being in the middle of the show floor with the whole team and the great glam, beautiful booth that Google built. Well, we're remote, but we're still in the middle of all the topics, the big waves and everything like that. So thanks so much for joining me and look forward to digging into it. Hey Stu. Great to see you remotely. We got to get these events back because virtual events are nine weeks, three weeks for AWS, all day events, DockerCon, virtual floors, no ecosystem support. I mean, this is really an interesting time and I think Google has laid out an interesting experiment with their multi, I call it summer of cloud program, nine weeks of just sustained demand for your attention. It's been a challenge. We'll take it. The question always, John, can they keep their attention? John, you laid out the Cube 365, we're there 365 days a year, help extract the signal from the noise, help engage with the community. So absolutely want to kind of peel back the onion and see what we think of the event, but let's start with Google. Dave, you've been digging through the numbers as you always do. We're more than a year since Thomas Kurian came in. What are you hearing? What's the data showing you as to where Google really sits in the marketplace? How are they doing? Well, Stu, you're right. I mean, Thomas Kurian's now, I think he's about 18 months in and one of my previous breaking analysis, I kind of laid out a four point plan for Google and we can talk about sort of how they're doing there, but really the first one is product maturity and there's a number of things that we can assess as it relates to product maturity. The second we talk about it all the time is go to market. I think the third one is really around differentiation. How does Google uniquely differentiate from the other cloud service providers? I think the fourth, and we saw this earlier this year with Looker, is M&A. Google's got a war chest and they can use that to really beef up the cloud. And I think if you look at it, Google's done a pretty good job with things like FedRAMP. I mean, these are table stakes in the big cloud. They're starting to do more things around SAP, VMware, windows. I mean, again, these are basic things that you have to do as part of any large cloud provider. I think the other thing we talked about, go to market, they've done a number of things there. Kurian's really focused on partnerships. He wants to be 100% channel. At the same time, they're hiring salespeople. I think they're up over 1500 salespeople right now, which is, you know, we're getting there. I think it was less than that, obviously, when he came on, that's kind of the benchmark, although we don't really know exactly what the numbers are. They've kind of launched into public sector. They see what's happening with Amazon there. They see great opportunities. They see, you know, what Microsoft is doing. And so public sector, they have to put out bake-offs. So you got to be in there. And at differentiation, still a lot of, okay, how can we leverage Alphabet, our search business and retail, our business and healthcare and Edge, things like autonomous vehicles. There's some opportunities there. And then as I said, they're doing some M&A, two plus billion dollars for Looker, you know, great capability. So I think they're executing on those four. And we can talk about what that means in terms of, you know, revenue and position in the market. Well, yeah, Dave, maybe it makes sense to, let's walk through the revenue just so that people understand, you know, where they sit for the longest time. It's been, you know, they number three or they number four, where Alibaba sit compared to them, but they are still far behind AWS and Azure. Have they been closing the gap at all? Well, guys, if you could bring up that chart, that first one, this is our, we really are estimates. You remember now, AWS every quarter gives us a clean number for their infrastructure as a stirrer. And what we've got here is estimates for full year 2018, 2019, that's calendar year, the growth rates and then Q1 and Q2 with a trailing 12 month view. And I think there's a couple of points here. One is, you can see the growth. Google grew 89% last year. They were 70% in Q1, 59% in Q2. So even though it's somewhat declining, they're growing faster than both Azure and AWS, of course, from a smaller base. I think the other thing, if you go back and look at 2019, relative to AWS, Google was one-tenth the size of AWS. Now they're, AWS only 8x, so they're starting to close that gap, but still very much quite a distance from the leaders. Yeah, John, maybe if we look at Google under Thomas Kurian, of course there's been a real growth in hiring. So, you know, you're there in the Valley, John. We know lots of really smart people that have joined Google, some great enterprise pedigrees there as well as the ecosystem that wants to be able to partner with Google. You know, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? Like one of the interviews you did, Sunil Poti was the number two over at Nutanix, and now we've got an important role in Google Cloud. Google's hiring great people. I got to say, one of the things I'm impressed with is I've always liked the product people. They have great product chops. Obviously Google has come from a position of strength on the tech side, being Google. And but the enterprise business is hard, Stu, and they got to hire more enterprise DNA. They're trying to do that at the same time they're trying to make the table stakes stuff done move faster on the product side. And then at the same time, create the game-changing products with like Anthos, for instance, and then have all those new features. So they're running as fast as they can. They're building products as fast as they can. So you got, you know, developer, operator efficiency, which I love the strategy. However, when you run that fast, there's definitely debt you take on, both technical and market debt around trying to make a shortcut. So Google, to me, the word on the valley is, great stuff with the people, product is awesome, getting better, good product people, but still those enterprise features, product reliability in terms of not sunsetting products early too, you know, making sure the right support levels are there. These are like the little details that make the difference between an enterprise player and someone who's essentially, you know, moving too fast, getting new products being too agile. So, you know, it's a double-edged sword for Google. We've said this all the time, but, you know, overall I'd give them, you know, solid number three position and still haven't seen the breakout yet. I think Anthos can be that if they keep pushing on this operator efficiency, but I just don't think the enterprise is ready for Google yet. And I think, you know, there's issues there. Yeah, John, you bring up a great point. I know the last couple of times we've been at the show, I feel like I'm scratching my head. It was like, wait, when did lift and shift become sexy? Yes, you want to meet the enterprises where they are, but how is that different from the message that we hear from Microsoft, that we hear from AWS? One of the bigger announcements during the Infrastructure Week was about a new program, the Rapid Assessment and Migration Plan, or RAM, to help customers get from where they are or where they need to be. It's interesting because of course, if you, you know, for reinvent for years, we had all the systems integrators helping customers move and migrate, both AWS and Azure have lots of migration solutions out there. So, you know, how will Google differentiate themselves and make it so different there? Well, they don't really know. I mean, they have put stuff down on paper, but here's the problem that Google has to overcome to make it a truly fast-growing cloud player. They got to nail the product features that they need to be in the marketplace. And the ecosystem really wants to work with Google. Obviously, retail is the layup for them and they're doubling down on that. They got smart people working on this, but the ecosystem and adding product features are two major heavy lifts. Ecosystems about money making. At the end of the day, I know that sounds kind of greedy in this era of empathy and missions and values, but at the end of the day, if you're not making your ecosystem money, which means keep products around, support them for a certain number of years and have incentives economically for people to build software, they're not going to work on your platform. And I think Google needs to understand that clearly. I just don't see it. I mean, I just don't see the people saying, I love Google so much, I'm making so much cash and success. And they got some good products, you know? Like I said, products and ecosystem are things they got to ratchet up super fast. Well, there's a couple of places, couple of partners they've highlighted. Like I said, Curian wants to be 100% channel-based, channel fulfillment. And when you talk to the channel, they do tell you, yeah, Google, they're being aggressive. Deloitte, you know, they try it out as a big partner, HCL. Now, of course, those guys are all working with everybody, but they're starting to put resources around that in terms of training and certification and of course, other, you know, much smaller resellers and partners. So that's interesting, right? That being really super channel-friendly, that's a differentiator to your point, John, that's about making money. And Google can do that because they're not coming from a position of strength. No, they are channel-friendly. You can say you're channel-friendly, but if your product doesn't work, the channel will reject you instantly. They're a tough critic and they need to have reliability. So again, this is not really a problem with Google, it's just their product is evolving fast. At the same time, they're trying to roll out a channel. So if you want to have a good channel strategy, you got to have a good one in posture and programs, but the product has to be enabling and reliable. And if someone's building software on top of a cloud platform and stuff doesn't work or changes, that's more cost. More cost means more training, more hiring. If someone leaves, how does it scale? These are like really important things around channel because they have to sell to the customer and support their names on the line. So again, channel is an easy to say thing to do, but to actually do it with a product is hard. And I think Google has that challenge. And again, it's a challenge, but if they overcome, it'll be a great opportunity. Well, and I think that's a good point because it wasn't, it was 2019, when I was like VMware, SAP, you know, they've got your full blown windows support. I mean, that's really late for the game. And so as I say, product maturity is critical, but there are some winners there, obviously in analytics. I think BigQuery gets very, very high marks. So there's some real pockets of positivity there, but I would agree that the maturity is a key factor for the channel to really go on. Well, right, if you look, John, you mentioned Anthos. Anthos was the story last year and we're all talking about multi-cloud. Much of the multi-cloud discussion has been due to Kubernetes. And if it wasn't for Google, we wouldn't have Kubernetes. The concern, of course, is that Google took it, it's open source, the CNCF took it as a foundation and customers went nuts with it. And the other public cloud and even smaller cloud providers are getting as much if not more value than Google is. So what you hear in the back channels when you say, boy, Google brought this technology out, this should really help enable their platform. Well, AWS is still winning. AWS has plenty of solutions. They've got interesting things to get deep solutions leveraging Kubernetes. And if you look at Google, they announced Anthos last year, it's gone through some updates this year. You both mentioned working with the partners. One of the things that jumped out at me, there's now something called Anthos Attached Clusters, which means that if I have somebody else's Kubernetes that is fully certified, I can plug that in and work with Anthos. It was one of the gaps that I saw last year. You hear Google saying, we're partnering with VMware, we're partnering Pivotal, but here's Anthos. And if you want to use OpenShift or PKS, you need to come over to work with Anthos. Here, we are understanding that customers are going to have multiple environments and often multiple different Kubernetes solutions out there. Dave, you mentioned VMware, of course, is a really important solution. VMware moving along and supporting more Kubernetes. And the update for the solution is the Google Cloud VMware Engine. And absolutely the number one use case they talked about is take your VMs, get them in the cloud and then start using those data and analytic services that are in the public cloud. So we're seeing some maturity here, but Dave, if you look at the multi-cloud market, Google's not the first company that typically comes to mind. VMware, Red Hat, even Microsoft probably are a little bit higher on people's thoughts. What have you been seeing? It's an area we've been spending a lot of time the last couple of years, hybrid and multi-cloud. Well, we have some data on this guys if you would pull up that next graphic and this is from survey data from our data partner, ETR. And what this shows on the vertical axis is the spending momentum. So you're spending more or less and then it's really a net score, which in other words, to subtract the less from the more and what you have left over. That's the vertical axis, higher is better. And then the horizontal axis is market share really presence in the data set. And you can see the hyperscaler guys, you know, that's where you want to be. Microsoft, AWS, they're always sort of separating from the pack. You'd love to see Google because they're a hyperscaler out there with those guys, but they're not. One of the interesting things that we're seeing in the data set, Stu and John, VMware cloud on AWS has really popped up. So this thing of this notion of hybrid as part of the cloud ecosystem and multi-cloud is really starting to have legs. And you can also see red hat with open shift and believe it or not even open stack as a telco. You see in that pop up as well as at VMware cloud which comprises cloud foundation and other components. So you see that hybrid and multi-cloud zone. And I think you got to put Google, you know, right there. You can see where IBM and Oracle are for just for context. They don't have the momentum. They don't have the market presence in cloud, but they have a cloud. So that's kind of how the landscape is. And I think Google from a standpoint of Anthos, again, they have to be trying to be open, leverage their Kubernetes chops and try to differentiate from certainly AWS. I think your point is right on. I think Microsoft has a pretty strong story there, but Google's got a clean story and they're investing. And I think it's a good position for them. Not as good as the other two, but when you're coming from behind, you have to try to differentiate and they are. Yeah, well, Dave, you've always said the rich get richer in these markets, but now with COVID that they are getting richer. Amazon is obviously stock, I'm trilling $2 billion valuation for Apple. Google on the cloud side. This is, I think that if they had a more product leadership in certain areas, I think they'd be doing more with their cloud, but they have some IP that could come out of this post COVID growth strategy for them, where it could be a game changer. So if you look at security and you look at identity, and one of the things that got my attention in the Anthos announcement was this identity service that they have, which is like an open ID kind of connect thing. Identity will be critical because Google has so much IP around user login information around the mobile, on the mobile side, and Jennifer Lin on this many times, that they could leverage that and really help the edge secure from a user access standpoint, having identification in the Anthos would be great. And this whole modern application trend is kind of where the puck is going. So they're kind of skating to that puck area. And also they're focused on operators. This multi-cloud thing hits a home run with operators because if you can create an abstraction layer between multiple clouds and have this modern kind of top layer to it, you're in a good position. But the insiders here in Silicon Valley and in the industry that I talked to you were all saying that Google has huge IP in their network. They have a very solid network. So what's interesting to me is if Google can take leverage some of those network pain points and then bring Anthos as that connective tissue, they got a real opportunity, but they got to pull it off. So COVID hitting probably the worst thing that could have happened to Google because they were just a couple feet from the goal line on this market in terms of really exploding. But I think they're well positioned. I'm not down on Google at all. I think that, you know, I'm glad you brought that up, John, because I think COVID is a two-edged sword for them. I just published last week in my breaking analysis, this weekend actually, that there were three big tailwinds in security as a result of COVID and identity was one of those. Cloud, of course, was the other one and then endpoint security was the third. And so that's a kind of good news for identity. The flip side of it is if you go back and look at where Amazon and Microsoft were in terms of their growth, relative to where Google is now, Amazon and Microsoft appear to have been growing larger. Now, these things go in an S curve, you know, it's kind of an O guide, starts out slow and then gets really steep. So we may actually see Google accelerate, but I think you're right in that it may have to wait until after COVID. So it's really a two-edged sword. Good news on the identity side and Google's well positioned, but necessarily bad news from a growth standpoint. Well, there's three areas too that you and I have been riffing on lately and we haven't published a lot yet because we're going to wait until we have our event, CubeCon event in October, but there's three areas I think Anthos points to and they even say this kind of in their own way. Multi-cloud, which is customers, connecting customers anywhere and any device and whatnot. So customer connection points, customer enterprises, improved developer, modernized developer, the developer market and then three operator. Three areas that are all moving trains, they're all shifting under their feet. So I think they're doing great on developer side because they have great traction. We've covered that with CubeCon and other areas have done amazing work. Operator efficiency, no problem. I think they got a lot of great cred there and are building and adding new stuff. It's the customer piece that's weak. They, I think they really got to continue to double down on what is the customer deployment because let's face it, enterprise customers, aren't as savvy as Google or the hyper scaler. So when you roll into Main Street enterprise, especially with COVID Dave, as you pointed out, are they sitting there really grokking? Kubernetes on bare metal and Anthos? They're like, shit, how do I keep my network alive? So IT, I just think isn't along yet operationally on the customer side. And I think that is a weakness on Google's formula and they got to just make that easier. Yeah, no, no, great, great points there. Absolutely. And talking to a lot of the cloud customers, if they already have an existing relationship, just expanding or accelerating that is a lot easier than choosing a new environment. So as Dave said, the rich get richer. So I mentioned at the start, this is week seven of nine of what Google is doing. Want to get both your viewpoints on this event, how they laid it out, nine weeks, it's all on demand. I know when they had the opening keynote, there was a decent rally point. You saw the usual Twitter stream out there. They had a nice media and analysts program that kicked off at the beginning. For me personally, there's been some stuff that I've gone back, Infrastructure Week I watched, this week for app modernization. There's definitely some announcements that I'm digging into. But I think overall, what I see out there is people rallied at the beginning and then they kind of forgot that the event was going on. What are you seeing? What's the new best practice on how long should an event be? How do you deliver it? How do you get engagement? Well, I mean, Stu, you know, Dan Dave will weigh in, but I'm pretty hardcore on my criticism of most of these virtual events. Mainly because virtual event platforms and virtual event executions are not well known. It's a first kind of generation problem. No one's really been under this kind of disruption when they got to replicate their business value this quickly. In an environment, they weren't optimized or have the personnel for. So you're seeing a lot of gaps in these virtuals, kind of like multi-cloud and hybrid, you have 10 different definitions of how to do it. I think Google went to nine weeks because they really didn't know what to do. And they left a lot of their ecosystem hanging out there because normally Google Next is a huge show with great content presentations. Everything's up on YouTube anyway, so on-demand is not a build value. The real value of Google Next was the face-to-face interactions, the show floor, the ecosystem, the expo hall. That is completely absent from the show here. And this is consistent with other events. And obviously it's over nine weeks. Amazon re-invent is going to be over three weeks. And last year, they had a music festival. How are they going to replicate that? Again, this is a huge negative shift for these vendors because they rely so much on these events to get the word out. So it's really hard. So I'm really impressed with the nine-week program and the sense of kind of staging it out and kind of the summer of cloud. I would have done things a little bit differently if I was them in terms of making it more exciting. But it's just really difficult to command attention for the audience over nine weeks. And I think that's, if they had to go back and do a mulligan, they probably would have done more activation around the digital rather than a bunch of on-demand videos. So at least they did something and didn't cancel. Now the good news is there's a slew of news we can collaborate on. The virtual space is the internet, so people are talking. It's just that it's all distributed and no one knows who's there. So it's not like an industry event, it's just an online collection of videos like on YouTube. So I felt that lack of intimacy was probably my biggest critique. But again, I think they just wanted to move forward and get this behind them. I think you nailed it, John. I mean, on the one hand, they made it harder for themselves stretching it out over nine weeks. On the other hand, they kind of took the easy way out as putting it up on demand. Yes, they had analyst programs too, but I felt like they weren't certainly not even close to what you have in physical. And it's really hard to obviously replicate physical. But I've seen other programs where the intimacy with the analysts and the journalists was much higher and opportunities to have interactions with executives. I felt it was just a little bit removed, actually quite a bit removed, would have loved to have seen just a more intimate one-on-one activity, maybe not one-on-one, but one-to-many with a smaller group of analysts and journalists. I think that would have gone a long way. And that was missing for me anyway. I mean, they could have done nine micro events every week with like a rallying point. It's two pointed out. It's just really difficult. I mean, who was executing this event? I mean, they have an events team that's used to doing physical events at Moscone and whatever. It's just they didn't, I don't think had the time to figure it out, to be honest with you. I mean, Google is a company known for search relevance, find what you're looking for and organizing content. I just think they didn't do a good job at all. I think I didn't have any much attention cycles to it because I was kind of keying in the news, but I didn't know where my friends were. Who's rallying? It's Stu there. I didn't even ask Stu's tweeting. I'm not following it or I missed his tweet. So there's a lot of asynchronous stuff going on but there's no gravity around a community or ecosystem kind of moment where I could schedule an hour at 10 o'clock or multiple times a day to check in and go to the watering hole or some sort of hub or instance like that. So something that we're thinking a lot about, Dave, as you know, and I think this is a moving target, but what's clear is that you can create synchronicity and still have the asynchronous program. So at least we learned that with the DockerCon event that we did and the software that we're building. So virtual events isn't about just the event, it's about what happens inside the event, outside the event, after the event. I think people are too hung up on this. I got to have a portal walled garden model. So I think it's going to be a learning curve for everybody. And I think Google may or may not do nine weeks. We'll see what re-invent does with three weeks. How do you keep people's attention about three weeks when they're not in Vegas? You know, I think that physical or virtual, it's your opportunity to write the narrative, to set the tones or set the narrative. And you're seeing this with the conventions, with the political conventions, you know, they're actually, you know, you don't necessarily watch the whole thing, but you get a good sense, you know, post virtual event, what the narrative is. And I think that's cause, you know, the media picks it up. And I think it's imperative to really do a good job of interacting with the media, you know, the analysts, the ecosystem, the partners. I haven't talked to a ton of partners who have been, you know, totally engaged other than, you know, their one-on-one activity. So I think there's an opportunity there to really write that narrative, to set that narrative, and keep it alive. And that entices people to go back and watch the audience. And then I just didn't feel that hook here. Here's the problem that I see with lies, when Google has this problem, and Dr. Khan did not have the problem, and you know, self-serving, we did that software, but we designed it for this purpose. When I go to an event, you do guys too, but personally when I go to an event, face to face, I like to get a sense of what the collective group that the event is thinking. I fly there, I'm present, I can see the presentation, I can see the packed breakout sessions, I know it's not packed. I can get a sense visually and with my senses on what the collective voice of the group is at an event. Does it suck? Is it good? How's the band? What's the hallway conversation? So I can feel that. I had none of that with Google Next, okay? Like I had no vibe, no, other than some random things on Twitter, I had no sense what the collective ecosystem thought of the event. And I think a lot of the events have that problem where you can do both. You can have the rallying moment where there's a group collective coming together and send people to do that and still have the asynchronous consumption organizing the content. But that's one of the main benefits. What's going on with the voice of this collective? How are people thinking about this? And who's there? Who can I connect with and maybe follow up with? I didn't feel that. This was simply a bunch of videos posted on demand. Yeah, absolutely, John. If you can't feel that energy, is there a Slack channel? Is there some chat group? Is there some way that you can be involved? Definitely a missed opportunity, especially Google's got great collaboration tools. They're tied into all of our calendars. Would have been something that they could make ways that we could engage and find out. All right, John and Dave, thank you so much for helping us, really dig through a lot going on. As we said, this nine week event, we've got a playlist that we're gonna be broadcasting for some of the key executives. Got a lot of the news here. And after this week, which is at modernization, we do have a couple other interviews that will be coming out when we have them. But be sure to check out thecube.net for all the upcoming, as well as search to be able to find the previous content there. Reach out to, at Furrier, at Devalonte, or me, at Stu for any feedback or comments. We'd love to get your feedback, especially in these times when we can't all be together. So thanks, John and Dave, for joining. And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching thecube.