 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next on Air 20. Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Google Next on Air, nine weeks of cloud content. It was just a buffet of content that started out with sort of industry trends. We got into productivity, infrastructure, deep dive in security, analytics, database, app modernization, cloud AI. And we're wrapping up the nine weeks with business application platform. And with me is Amit Savri, who's the general manager and vice president of the business application platform at Google Cloud Amit. Always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. No, definitely thanks for having me, Dave. You're welcome. So tell me more about this role and kind of your swim lane, if you will. No, definitely, Dave. I think as you can imagine with especially all this digital transformation getting accelerated due to COVID, it's a huge amount of demand and interest from customers to be able to build applications, integrate them and modernize systems and automate all of them very quickly and easily in a cost-effective manner. So that has been driving a lot of the thinking at Google for quite a few years already, but I think it got a little more accelerated with some of the work we've been doing previously with our stack around API management, no-code app development, automation capabilities in a platform as well, and we're bringing a lot of these things together in an offering so that customers can take advantage of a lot of the innovation in this space and improve the digital transformation and innovate quickly as well. So that's what we've done with business application platform. We're providing capabilities for any kind of developers, be it the technical user who has a lot of programming experience, as well as the other spectrum, which are the citizens' developers, who don't really have any kind of software engineering background, but want to be able to build applications and automate and processes very quickly and easily. So we want to provide them all the tooling and capabilities so that they can do that and be more effective than they would otherwise be. I want to ask you about digital transformation. I mean, obviously it's a word that's thrown around or phrase that's thrown around a lot and there's a spectrum of what it means to people. I was talking to somebody the other day and this obviously will resonate with you with your background in enterprise apps, but they were talking about an ERP system that was put in 15 years ago before iPhone, before cloud. And it says, as you know, those systems are fossilized and the business has changed dramatically, but the ERP system hasn't. And to them, digital transformation was basically upgrading the system, but obviously to Google and your role, it means something much different, doesn't it? Well, it's a lot more, right? I think no doubt having a digital application, no doubt is important, it's a good starting point. But as you said, some of the systems are pretty old and they're not connected together between different parts of the business. And there's a huge amount of manual processes and there's a lot of, I would say, disparate species which never come together if you don't really put a well thought out digital transformation project or implementation around it. So a lot of times all these businesses, when they're connecting things together, they do need a platform to kind of bring their business processes, their workflows, their applications and the interaction between different users, be it external and internal, into a more and more automated system. And that's really the digital transformation really shines and improves a lot of the ability for customers to compete as well as meet their customer demands and be more effective than otherwise they would be. And cloud is critical there, but it's connecting to an ecosystem. So I want to ask you about your strategy of the business application platform. And of course Google's known for great tech. It's very open, a lot of downstream contributions. You think about Kubernetes and Anthos. So how does, how would you describe your group strategy and how does it dovetail with Google Cloud overall? Yeah, no doubt. I think the cloud is kind of the central team underneath the covers, right? So it does run on a multi-cloud and a hybrid mechanism. So that is available anywhere, as well as your choice of flexibility of deployment. It's also a platform on top of Anthos. So you have that advantage of multi-cloud as well as support for all the different systems you might have both on-prem as well as in various other cloud providers as well. And then other things we're doing is we're taking advantage of a lot of the AIML capabilities, a lot of our data analytics capabilities and bringing a lot of those underlying technologies and extracting it out through a SaaS-based offering on business application platforms. So the customer perspective, they want to build an application. They use, we recently acquired a company called AppSheet as start of this year. So they can easily now use AppSheet to build those applications without writing a single line of code. And then if you create that application, it provides connectivity and also a lot of other systems out there, be it applications like SAP, Salesforce.com, but also a lot of legacy systems in-house or custom systems you might have built and provide connectors to that. And then allows you to now monetize and take systems and provide APIs so that you can now extend it and bring it out into the partner community as well as customers to be able to build applications around that as well. So it connects all these things together, takes advantage of the Google Cloud and the ecosystem we have built and provides you customers and users much easier way to kind of build and deliver applications and automation on it. Okay, so that makes sense as to in terms of why you acquired and made that acquisition, but I want to talk about no code development as something that you've been talking about quite a bit lately. Tell the audience, what is no code development? Why do we need it? Yeah, I think if you look at some of these reports nowadays, I mean, there's a limited amount of capacity and capabilities IT can provide. And for complicated and very large systems, you of course need IT to kind of make your business efficient and implement a lot of the systems together. But there are a lot of other applications which departments and line of business users want to use and build and they can't wait around for IT. And I think if you look at some of the reports from Gartner, for example, they're going to be four times more developers inside, outside IT than they are going to be in IT. And those folks are not going to be software engineers, they're not professional programmers, but still they need efficiency and automation and application development tools. This is where no code really brings a lot of value. So tools like AppSheet, which we acquired, a market leading no code development platform, makes it very easy for anybody without any experience writing any code or building applications, they can point click and start building an application and be effectively produce something which they can collaborate and use between different users inside the company or outside, without spending a lot of months and time to deliver that. And that's why the no code application platforms are becoming very popular because it does make your business more efficient, makes your business more automated, is cost effective and it's very productive, right? So that has been the trend now more and more and we speak to a lot of, especially nowadays if you look at telehealth, you look at say if you want to do mortgage lending, you want to build an app easily quickly without having to wait around for it. You are interacting with a lot of people through digital mediums now and instead of paper using a lot of digital tools. And that's why I think this no code platform become much more important and powerful and usable in this mechanism as well. Okay, I think it's important to point out we're talking about no code here, not low code, no code. There's a difference. There's a big difference. I think the, see that low code was kind of the interim stage where customer tools which are coming out into the market were available to make it a little easier for development, but not enough to kind of democratize it for everybody. With no code, you are now allowing and opening it up to a lot more vast community of users who can also build applications and take advantage of a lot of technology innovation happening in the platform like cloud and other things as well. The reporting is another good example where you want to be able to build dashboards quickly and easily without again writing code. So the no code becomes a lot more important and usable for this kind of needs. So I wonder if we could stay on this for a minute. You've used the example of programming a VCR. Many of us remember how difficult that was early on and now it's just you talk to it and it works. You use that as an example of what no code is like. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, I think it's basically, it should be very natural, right? I think when we used to program our VCI, you have to read some manuals, you have to read some code, you have to kind of go through the whole process. I don't even know how many of our audience nowadays even know about that or even think about it. And he picks us all very dated, but it was a very cumbersome process. And then you would worry about whether you recorded it or not and that you got it on the right time and then you get the right show and then you end up deleting the wrong things or whatever may be the case. A lot of those things are now getting extracted and simpler in terms of the no code development where if you are looking for a particular application interface, if you're looking to build say a mortgage letting app, a lot of those building blocks are already available to you. You're kind of making it specific to your need, but really using a lot of the building blocks and get you the final solution versus learning about wiring everything yourself with a lot of pieces of code in there, right? So that's becoming straightforward. We have customers like Solway for example, which is a large chemical automation company and they are being able to build multiple applications with 400 plus users inside the company and deliver a lot more automation inside the organization than they would otherwise be. So you kind of touched on this with the different modules and capabilities and functions within an organization, but I think when I think about that VCR analogy, I mean it's doing one thing, you know, and that's pretty simple. How does that apply? And again, you kind of touched on it, but it seems like IT is much, or business is much, much more complicated. But so this actually works. Yeah, no, I think it works. We provide a lot of templates and system examples in the no code tooling, as well as there are a lot of complexity which is built underneath the covers, which is completely hidden from the user perspective, right? So when I'm building an application, I'm still getting the power of the cloud, I'm getting the power of our underlying platform, the scalability, reliability, the security, the integration, all that kind of stuff is brought into this tooling without you having to learn any of those things. And that really is where the power comes in and it's flexible enough that you can kind of pretty much do any kind of application development. I would not build a full blown e-commerce site with it, but I can do a lot of typical day to day kind of applications like vacation approval or things you might want to do for mortgage lending. I was telling a telehealth app for doctors. And so we're seeing a lot of, we had customers who were doing this for hospital bed tracking during the COVID current crisis going on, right? Where they want to know what kind of PPE is available, how many beds are empty. So tracking that at the hospital level at the healthcare departments, all that kind of stuff were done very, very quickly and powerfully than they were otherwise would have. Is there a concern amongst your customers about privacy, governance, compliance, security with all these citizen developers? How do you ensure that those fundamental edicts of the organization are preserved? Yeah, I think that this is a similar thing than any other system we would make available to our customers in the cloud. We guarantee that all the data is only available to the people who are allowed to based on the privileges and the security profiles and everything else. So there's not really any kind of fear from the system perspective that you will get access to something which you're not allowed to. You do log in, you do have to have an account. You do have to have all the relevant credentials before you get access to it. Same thing with privacy. We make sure that nothing is shared with anybody who's not allowed to. So we apply the same tenant, same kind of rules to any kind of data or information we keep in the cloud for any other application to open. What we're doing is abstracting it out and making it easier so that everybody who wants to build things don't have to learn 20 other things to kind of get going. So then the ability to do this in faster and quickly is there, but all the underlying philosophy and principles still remain intact into our products as well. Right, makes sense. You guys obviously you have this API first mentality. I've heard about things like API gateway, Apigee, data capabilities, automating app sheets. Can you bring us up to date on some of those innovations? Yeah, so we have, you will see a lot of updates in this area. So we've been innovating very aggressively. Of course we have a product called Apigee which is a market leading API management product in the industry today. It does the full life cycle of APIs, including testing, workman, publishing, monetization, security, all that kind of stuff for APIs. And we have thousands of customers using it today. Beyond that, what we've done is we've added a lot of ability from that stack to kind of expose APIs and consume them through AppSheet. So we have an API data source for AppSheet. So it's easy for you to find APIs and build an app is one. Second, we also released something called API gateway which is a very high performance, low latency, cloud native gateway running on serverless. So a lot of applications are built on serverless platform nowadays. And if you want to now manage that through an API layer, we provide a gateway on top of Google Cloud so anybody can also use it very quickly and easily as well. So that's another area which we added. And the third thing which we are announcing is something called AppSheet automation. So as I talked about AppSheet for app development, we're also now adding a lot of workflow and business process automation underneath the covers as part of AppSheet. That's something we're making available to a customer so they can automate a business process and connect things together very quickly, but also get the value of the automation in their application as well. So those are new innovations, new releases we're adding to our platform as part of business application offering so that anybody can take advantage of it. I mean, I love this trend because to the extent you can able, I mean, this is the holy grail. I mean, if you can enable business users, they're closer obviously to what's going on, closer to the customer, and they just, they can respond much more quickly. Are you seeing, for instance, a user builds an app, use an AppSheet, are you seeing because of the API richness, are you seeing other innovation around those occurring? Are we at that point yet? Or are they still kind of islands of business process? The scope of usage is growing very fast, right? We have more than 400,000 users on AppSheet now building applications. Thousands of thousands of applications been built on it, the millions of users kind of using it at the end from the logging in and using those applications as well. So I think the innovation is happening very fast where they're connecting different things as well as now building an ecosystem, even in Solvay as example I was giving you, the multiple apps in build by multiple departments, and they're kind of bringing those ecosystems together into reuse, be able to kind of find new use cases around it, those kind of things as well. Our organizations coming back to say, hey, we love this, but you remember when we first started spinning up VMs, it was so easy and are you seeing organizations say, hey, we need better line of sight on there, there could be a catalog of what we're doing or marketplace, are you seeing demand for that? Yeah, so we're seeing, no, I think there's a lot of views, like we have partners who also build applications and put that into our marketplace as well. And then we're also seeing a lot of interest from its solution providers who build applications on top of what you might have as modules and deliver to our end customers as well. So now there's a lot of interest in that regards and there's a lot of good examples coming out and we're seeing a lot of ways of bringing some of these things together as well. I mean, how does machine intelligence, AI, how does it fit into your whole agenda and strategy and what does it mean for a customer? Yeah, I think as you know, Google has been innovating and it's been one of the top AI, ML vendor out in the marketplace today. And we have definitely taken a lot of advantage of that innovation and experience in there. So for example, when I talked about automation, a lot of the automation in AppSheet is been done using AI ML technologies Google has built in terms of predicting the way the customer is going to use the application, how they're going to be able to take a business process and connect them together. A lot of that things have been built using AI ML technologies at Google Cloud. Beyond that on API management for operational dashboards and operational monitoring. So make sure that we can give you five nines of availability. We kind of really use a lot of AI ML technologies to understand anomalies, figure out where the issues might be and predict those things and make sure that we kind of fixing those things in advance before things go down. Same thing with security, abuse usage, any kind of DDoS kind of things or whatever maybe the security issues as well. We use a lot of AI ML capabilities to make sure we monitoring and securing our systems as well. So they're not in the middle of everything. Right. As the pandemic, the last 150 days obviously has changed things. We talked about digital transformation being accelerated. How are you thinking about sort of the go forward as a result of the post-isolation era? Yeah, I think this is probably going to be the, I don't think this is going to, once we get out of the COVID situation, whenever that happens, the way we work and the way we operate will definitely change than what used to be pretty much, right, in a way. So I do expect a lot more of video conferencing, for example. I do expect a lot of digitalization. I do expect a lot of automation requirements. Everybody trying to be more efficient and sharing things, working remotely, those kinds of things will continue as a trend. So from our perspective, the work we're doing around API management, around digitization, around digital transformation, around app sheet, automation, all those things are probably the right things for the right kind of future, where this technologies and offerings we do in Google Cloud, as well as other things we're doing broadly will make a big difference for everyone. Yeah, you know, recently, I want to kind of end, just to get your industry perspectives. Recently, I wrote a piece, did a video, just on the enterprise app space, kind of the systems of record. So these are entrenched companies, and even you see some of the new SaaS startups, but they're large companies and done very well. I was trying to sort of noodle on, where does the potential disruption come? Where's the new innovation? And I think some of the things that we're talking about here, there's no code, cloud. I mean, obviously you guys play in the application space, but it seems like a part of your strategy is to enable developers to really build new types of applications, and maybe that's where the next wave of disruption comes, perhaps in vertical industries, perhaps with this no code. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I know you're right. I think the productivity and the collaboration space, no doubt is going through huge transformation and change, right? I mean, Google been in the forefront of it with G Suite. If you look at some of the numbers and the metrics in terms of video conferencing, and this collaboration in general has been going through the roof in terms of usage. AppSheet combination with that, for example, right? So if you're building an application, you're doing video conferencing, I might be able to build a telehealth app very quickly and easily. So that's where the no code and collaboration, for example, and productivity becomes part of that story. Similarly, as you said, the industry solutions where you've probably heard some of the innovation we're doing in that area by specific industry with business processes, again, adding an API layer underneath the covers to connect different systems together and then publishing that through an application like AppSheet through AppSheet becomes, again, a very much great part out solution and very easy to kind of provide that to our customers as well. So changes in productivity and collaboration, changes in no code app development, having a platform to connect all these things and make it easy to adopt is really a big part of our story as we move forward. And that's the reason why we kind of increasing our investment in the business application platform and it's kind of poured to a lot of things we're doing. We did an acquisition of Looker, for example, for business intelligence. And that's an important part as part of business application platform to be able to provide intelligence to what people are doing, what data you have to be able to do self-service reporting and then publish that to on a dashboard as well, which might be created through AppSheet or custom, doesn't matter, but we provide you that whole end-to-end onto it. And then technology like Anthos kind of ties it together to give you multi-cloud as well as a hybrid kind of delivery mechanism. So your flexibility of choice, how you deliver and run those systems. Yeah, I love that Looker example for sure. I mean, we're basically seeing the democratization of business apps. Amit, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It was great to see you, hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face. Yeah, I look forward to it and thank you again for having me. And thank you for watching our continuous coverage on theCUBE of Google's next on air, nine weeks of coverage. Keep it right there, we'll be right back for this short break.