 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, joined of course by my esteemed co-host, Sue Miniman. We have one guest for this segment, Bernard Golden. He is the Vice President of Cloud Strategy at Capital One. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Bernard. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be on. You are famous in the world of cloud. Your name by wire.com is one of the most 10 influential people in cloud computing. I'd love to just ask you a very broad question to start, and that is where are we right now with the cloud? Where do you see, what are sort of the biggest issue, the biggest challenges that you see with companies adopting and embracing the cloud right now? Well, unlike a lot of people, I think we're still a lot earlier in cloud adoption than other people do, maybe. If it were a baseball game, I'd say maybe the pitchers coming out for the top of the second inning. And I think the barriers tend to be twofold. One is, for traditional enterprises, there's still a lot of, well, we have a lot of embedded, a lot of legacy, a lot of investment, sunk costs. How can we step away from that? Should we step away from that? So you hear a lot of discussion around what's the right role, hybrid cloud support, so on. For companies like Capital One that have said, we're going all in on cloud, and Capital One has announced it's going all in on public cloud, then the challenge becomes, how do I adopt the practices of the organizations that are on the frontier of cloud? Because you have to really adapt a whole range of things. It's not just, you know, like a lot of people treat cloud computing as kind of like, it's a data center at the end of a wire. I have my traditional practices, my traditional models, my traditional tools, my traditional cost models. All of those things have to change. And so I think for companies like Capital One, and we certainly have faced those things I would say, but for those companies that make the break to say, yeah, we're going to go all in on cloud, then it's how do I restructure the entire way I do information technology? Yeah, and Bernard, I agree with a lot of what you were saying. You and I have had conversations about cloud over the years. I've read lots of what you've written. Amazon would agree, it's still day one, right? That's their phrase. Yeah, it's the one they did. Microsoft, I want to get you, not as Capital One, but just as a watcher of the industry. I remember a few years back, like Microsoft put out TV ads like to the cloud, at least made me cringe when I saw some of it. When I look at Microsoft today, they play strongly in SaaS, they've got public cloud, they've got all the virtualization in various business products for private cloud. So they play a lot of places, they have a lot of strengths, they understand applications, they understand data, they're well positioned, they might not be number one in many of these areas, but strong customer base, and they're doing good, but I'd like to see them do even more. I'm curious to your viewpoint. Well, I guess what I'd say is, if you look at the universe or the aggregate of cloud providers, I mean, Gartner says there's three that really matter, up in the upper right hand quadrant of the magic quadrant, and that's what I call AMG, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. And if you look at Gartner, they've said these are the three that really have both a vision and the ability to execute, and so. I believe Alibaba might be making its way in there at this point, but. Well, Alibaba's quite interesting. I've had some interactions with Alibaba before I joined Capital One, and they're tremendously capable technically, they have huge ambition, so I wouldn't dismiss them or write them off. They don't have much presence in the US, and for at least Capital One is primarily a US based company, but also because of the fact that Alibaba doesn't have much presence in US and not that much in Europe, they tend to not to be so present, but I would definitely follow them going forward, for sure. All right, sorry, I took you off track talking about Microsoft positioning in the marketplace. Yeah, well, so they're clearly one of the three players. I would say they've had a pretty dramatic turnaround from where they were, say, four or five years ago, you can track that maybe to their CEO, and so I think they're making a strong play in this space, and obviously are committed to it. I've seen Capital One is an adopter in pushing on many of the disruptive technologies. I remember the first Echo Dot that I got was actually a Capital One giveaway at a conference. I bumped into you at the serverless conference. A lot of this show is talking about the business productivity, the applications. There's lots of Azure, but I haven't heard as much about Azure. There's some announcements around Kubernetes. I had a great conversation in the serverless booth, but if you look at the cloud pieces, want to get your viewpoint as to how Microsoft's doing, where customers are. I know we're especially serverless in very early days, but get your viewpoints on how those fit into the overall position, and anything you could say about Capital One there would be great too. Well, I mean, Capital One, as I said, is all in on public cloud computing. It's announced it's going to close all of the data centers. And as I said, the second challenge that organizations face is really when they go all in, they go, now I have to really adapt all my practices. So Capital One is looking at things like containers, serverless, it sponsors serverless conference. So it's very much engaged with those kinds of things. This conference, I mean, unlike AWS, that basically says all we do is AWS, Microsoft is a very broad range of products, and they have to represent all of them at their conference. So it's certainly not an all, all, or I should say only Azure conference, and that's to be expected. I've sat in a number of the sessions, and as part of my job, I have to track what's going on with all these providers. And so I've tracked what's gone on in the sessions. I've been pretty impressed with some of the stuff that Azure has put forward. And, you know, but there's other sessions as well. So, and they have to cover all the rest of their stuff. So as you said, Capital One is all in on the public cloud, but it is a multi-cloud world, and a lot of companies are still struggling to figure out how do I make this work? Where do I go? Can you walk us through the decision, your decision process at Capital One, and then also maybe tease out some best practices about how other organizations should make decisions? Yeah, well, I can't say a ton about Capital One and how we've looked at it, other than what we've publicly announced, which is we're all in a public cloud. Our CIO has been up on stage at AWS, very strong adapter of AWS. But what I would say is that for most organizations, they should, there's sort of two factors you might think about in terms of looking at using multiple clouds. One is from a risk mitigation strategy. Do you want to have all your eggs in one basket? And that's probably for most enterprises that not much of a problem in the sense that they own something of everything no matter what. You'll never find any enterprise that only uses one thing in any technology place. And even if they do, then they buy another company that's on a different one. But from a risk mitigation strategy, you might want that. And then you might also be looking at opportunistic deployment of workloads if you want to take advantage of superior functionality available from one cloud provider or the other, or another. So, do you really like the machine learning that comes out of Azure? Well, you might just decide to put workloads based on that. Or if you like something about certain kinds of database offerings, you might look at that. If you want certain breadth of services, you might look at AWS. So there's a sort of criteria you'd have to establish about what you want to accomplish with your applications or what you want to do around risk management. Great. Bernard, what other things have you been seeing at the conferences? What's exciting you, any takeaways for people that haven't been at the show or things you'd recommend people go poke at? Yeah, as I said, I attended a number of sessions yesterday. I was pretty impressed with the Cosmos DB multi-master. And I used to run engineering groups at a database company. And I'll tell you, there is a huge revolution going on in databases from all the providers. And having some domain experience, there's stuff that gets announced, I go, how do they do that? I mean, that's amazing. So that was pretty impressive. There were a couple of announcements around express route. One, they've announced the 100 gig connectivity, which is pretty amazing, I think. And the second thing, and this didn't get a lot of coverage and all that is, they announced that basically, let's say you're a corporation with stuff in Argentina and Switzerland. You can basically put our express route connections into the Microsoft fiber backbone and then just transit your data across their private fiber backbone, which is pretty, pretty interesting. So I thought that was pretty interesting. I think the rest of my mind at the moment is pretty interesting. And I tell you, that is fascinating. Cause I mean, I remember I've been watching since when AWS came out, had Direct Connect. It was, well, this is really interesting. There's some use cases, but Amazon, the Azure and Google, all of those versions, just hearing massive adoption as people, they go to a hosting, Kolo service provider and that can get them, I have the stuff that I'm going to own and then I'm going to have the stuff that the public cloud and it, physics is still exist, but I'm going to get them closer with high bandwidth, low latency connections. So it's a real game changer as to how I build my applications and build that, the hybrid cloud, which is our multi-cloud, which something we've been kind of looking at as, it's a challenging thing to do over time. Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting cause there was a time when the huge challenge was the skinny straw. You know, and if you had a hundred megs, that was a pretty skinny straw. And now that's really opened up a lot and these Direct Connects, you know, are pretty good, pretty good cross-connect performance. So that's, that was a pretty interesting area, I thought. Great. Bernard, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in coming up in just a little bit.