 Hi, this is Stu Miniman coming to you from Wikibon World Headquarters in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Having a CUBE conversation on the clouds. Joining me for this episode is Steve Keniston, longtime friend of the CUBE, and Steve, the storage optimist. Steve, welcome to this CUBE conversation. Thanks, Stu, thanks for having me, and good to be in the World Headquarters here at Wikibon. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, cloud, of course, is this big mega trend we've been following for many years. We talked about last year it seemed that, you know, really hybrid cloud, you know, really is one of the hot topics of conversation, and with the CUBE, we've got a lot of shows that are going to cover cloud. We already had, earlier this year, we've done some open stack coverage, we were looking at the open compute summit, which is rather interesting. Want to give a little bit of preview in this segment of IBM Pulse going on next week, but, you know, Steve, I want to get your first thoughts. You know, where are we with the whole conversation cloud? What are you here in the marketplace? If you were talking to a CIO, you know, where is their mindset? Yes, do I think, it's interesting. I think there have been a tremendous number of conversations about cloud for a very long time. And, you know, pragmatically, I like to get when I'm in front of customers and I'm talking to customers about cloud and where they're at. I hear a couple of different things, right? I hear one, depending on the size of my company, and you know, as a lot of these conversations go, it depends kind of thing. If you're in the small and medium-sized business type space, I think a lot of folks have turned to the cloud as a way to digest what that technology is by leveraging it for a data protection type of environment. Now, maybe it's long-term retention, maybe it's a way to get data out of my data center and daily management type of set for things like, you know, off-siting tapes and that sort of thing. But they've been able to do things like test the security, test the performance, test recoverability so that I can handle and digest my stuff. If I'm at a larger type of a shop, I'm hearing more of things like, hey, I can spin up infrastructure and I do mean total infrastructure, like servers and storage in the cloud to be able to allow me to do test dev type stuff a lot faster than I might be able to do internally. So from a practicality standpoint and a realism standpoint, I'm hearing a lot of that type of things. Now, there are environments where, especially in startup land, where a lot of folks are starting their companies and leveraging clouds. I think you and I had a conversation about gaming is a great place to do something like that. So I think that's for the new company. So we've got the new, we've got the SMB and we've got the enterprise all leveraging the cloud in different ways. But I think today that's how it's taking form. Yeah, and Steve, you know, I think you brought up a lot of good points. So first of all, right, it's very much kind of, depending on what staff you have and what objectives you have, as well as what application fits. As we look at it, you know, if you talk to even a mid-sized company and you say, you know, are you leveraging, you know, software as a service? You know, absolutely. I mean, anybody that's got to sit, you know, some kind of, you know, field force is probably leveraging sales force. You know, they've been around a long time. There's many other services, companies like, you know, ServiceNow and Workday that are really, you know, offering new services that are, you know, transforming a lot of businesses. Then you say, are you leveraging public cloud? Well, you know, Amazon, you know, keeps growing. Latest numbers for 2013 look that they're probably over three billion dollars worth of revenue there. Of course, what solutions they're selling is a big question. We'd all kind of like to understand which piece of services they're offering because they kind of blur the line between infrastructure and a service where they just give you kind of that raw compute, you know, storage and network and, you know, some platform as a service because they really are offering more services going forward. You know, we covered it, re-invent many of the new services like desktop as a service or database as a service. They've got big data applications. Gaming, lots of services, streaming for gaming that are fitting in there. So, you know, lots of, you know, different services that they have. And then, of course, in my own data centers, people are trying to create more cloud. So hybrid cloud is usually, I've got some of all. But, you know, I think one of the gaps I've seen, Steve, is, you know, I've got all of these pieces, but, you know, as an IT organization, as a CIO, you know, how do I kind of manage all of those and how do I, you know, do I tie them all together or are they just, you know, all little pieces that I have to manage individually? Yeah, I think what ends up happening is, and again, I think you brought up a lot of good points, right? As a CIO looks to the cloud for answers to solutions for their, for things that are happening within their data center, I think they have to, they're obviously juggling things like cost, right? So cost is one of the objectives of how can I take that out of my IT budget and leverage some of that money that I would have, either that I would normally spend on IT, but put it towards those projects that are actually gonna make my business more money. So I think with, you talked about big data, I think big data and analytics is starting to drive even smaller companies to be able to be more competitive and really giving fuel to the fire so that if I'm a small bank, right, now there's probably apps, and I'll get into this in a second, apps that allow me to do fraud detection that large banks have been doing for years with a lot of analytics and compute, giving these small banks the ability to now to be competitive. So it's interesting. And what I think as CIOs look to the cloud is, okay, there's the ability and the need to be able to run my particular application. And the question is, is that something I want outside my four walls or not? And then I think a lot of CIOs are now turning to, if I look at the cloud, is there an opportunity there for me to be able to maybe leverage a new app that does similar things that I'm doing, but as an app, right? So if you think about, I always talk about kids coming out of college these days that are moving into data centers and computer science or whatever, running IT, they're used to the iPhone, right? They're used to the app. They're used to turn it on, it works, it runs, it's been tested, and I can get all the feature rich functionality, right? So can I, as a CIO, look to the cloud what's out there, what's available? And I think Amazon, like you had pointed out, right, is growing, if they adopt like an Apple iPhone app type model, right, that could be pretty huge. Yeah, and Steve, it's worth pointing out, it's not even a binary. Do I put it in the cloud or do it inside? There's lots of those modern applications where I can have all the processing be done in the cloud, but have my sensitive data stay inside. So obviously security is a top concern. I know you're going to the RSA conference next week. So any comments on kind of security and internal versus external that you want to touch on? Well, I do think that folks are looking at data, more the data side from the security piece. First of all, I find that there's one, from a security aspect, it boils it down, you got to boil it back down to the data. And I do find that a lot of folks don't really have a good handle on what data they have and where it lives. And that's why I think backup data into the cloud is kind of a handle on, it's kind of single-threaded. If I need to recover it, I'm doing like a file at a time. It's easy, it's encrypted, it's stored securely. I get that part, right? It's when you start to get a lot of these moving parts about the data that people start to go, well, I don't know if I want that piece outside of my infrastructure, that's with a database that might have social security numbers, but the rest of the analytic piece is this type of data. So I think it's a little tough. First, you got to have a good understanding of what data you have, and then secondly, I do think that we are still slowly marching forward on that secure trust in the cloud thing and where is it and who owns it and what's getting out and what's not getting out. Okay, so I mentioned at the top of the program that IBM Pulse is next week, and IBM is a very large company, lots of different shows, but Pulse is really the cloud show for them. When I look at IBM, they've got lots of entry points into the cloud. Obviously, they've got lots of infrastructure components. Their large acquisition of SoftLayer is one we want to talk about, and of course, IBM has lots of services to help people retrain their workforce, to look at their applications. They have a huge partner ecosystem. What's your take on, how's IBM doing in the cloud, Steve? So internally, I think that SoftLayer is doing really well, right? And I think that there's a lot of, IBM is heavily focused on cloud and cloud services moving forward, and they do talk a lot about infrastructure matters as a part of the cloud service, and so if I'm a CIO and I'm thinking about, okay, who am I gonna trust my external data to, right? Obviously, I probably want it to be someone like an IBM or even an Amazon. Someone who has a big name, who's probably spending some money on the back end and is taking into concern my concerns as a CIO, right? Security we just talked about, right? Am I staying up with the latest and greatest technology so that I'm getting the best overall cost per gigabyte or best overall dollar per IOP that I can out of the cloud? Because I'd like them to make sure that they're running their cloud the same way I would run my back end infrastructure, so I'm getting all the economies of scale I get as time moves forward. So a quick question on that, yeah? You say IBM cares that infrastructure matters, and I agree with you there, yet on the other hand, IBM has been shedding a lot of its hardware businesses, so how do we parse that out? Yeah, so I think they really care most about that the infrastructure that they're building the cloud on is tightly coupled and together in such a way that I can go ahead and do things like spin up virtual machines whether it's VMware or KVM, PowerVM, and have it also talk to storage in a seamless manner for the customer. So it's more than just the spinning disk or the CPU, I think it's a matter of what's the software components around that infrastructure that provide easy accessability to folks that want to spin something up. Yeah, so software really owns a lot of it. I had a chance to talk to some of the SoftLayer folks leading up to the event here. I know there's some big announcements coming which I can't preview here, but SoftLayer really is that core infrastructure as a service, so compute, networking, and storage. And on top of that, we're seeing IBM launch services. They already talked about Watson on top of SoftLayer and expect to see many other services that IBM's going to launch. So I think it's an interesting company. Some of the big guys like Amazon and Google and even Microsoft get a lot of the attention, but IBM could be a dark horse if they can really start delivering on these services and leverage their ecosystem. Yeah, I would agree with that. All right, so Steve, we've talked about a lot of different topics on cloud. Any kind of final talking points, you say, what should people be watching this year? What maturity you expect to see in the marketplace kind of the next six, 12 months or any other kind of key points you'd want to see IA to look at? Well, I think there are two things. One is, if you haven't taken that first step into the cloud, I think you pick an application in your environment and I think data protection is a good one. Whether it be backup or replication from a disaster recovery standpoint, I think you pick one of those and you start to give it a try. You not only try it from a technology aspect but you also start looking at it from a financial aspect. Then you start to look at different companies or different things that you could actually put into the cloud where it's going to be easier for you to run your backend business and if that's a particular database or a particular app or if it's test dev, then you look to the companies that allow you to do that provisioning very easily and quickly. Everybody talks about it because they know it's a requirement. The question is, who's providing that set of services for you today in a very fast and economical manner? Then you take that and you look at it from both a technology perspective and an economic perspective and then you slowly figure out which things make sense to move to the cloud. And I think, one, that's a direction and two, I think what you look for, you look for that ease of use because ease of use is really what's going to dictate the ability to be able to easily migrate your stuff into the cloud in a cost-effective manner. It's interesting, enterprise tech. We talk a lot about mergers and acquisitions that's going on. Talk about some of these multi-billion dollar acquisitions. Consumer tech just blew away enterprise tech this week because you turn on CNBC and all they are talking about is Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp. So I'm curious, Steve, is there lessons learned for the enterprise or what's your take on this 13 to 19 billion dollar acquisition of Facebook and WhatsApp? So I will tell you that one of my big interests around technologies or technology companies like Facebook, like Google, like Amazon, and I actually wrote about this in a blog piece right around the time Facebook went public. One of the things that's interesting to me, yes, it's a social media platform, but think about the fact that Facebook runs almost a billion email accounts and how often are they down? And name another enterprise in the world that does that, that doesn't have major issues, right? From a technology backend perspective, they had something interesting. So from an M&A perspective, which is kind of where you were going with this, my thought is I am curious to see how they integrate that into the overall Facebook experience, right? If they have an architecture, a backend architecture that allows that to happen seamlessly and easily, right? That's pretty impressive, right? I think a lot of IT shops would want to be able to, how many acquisitions do we hear about where, okay, they bought the company they brought them in and it's just kind of fludging around or whatnot, right? But if I can integrate and do that effectively, and I'm doing that in a cloud type of a platform, which they are doing that today, that's really, really interesting. So huge acquisition, very interesting. More interesting will be where does it go inside of Facebook? I think that'll be an interesting note. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people compare, Instagram has kind of been left a little bit on the side, hasn't been a lot of integration. Of course, the WhatsApp founders when they launched the site said, they're never gonna have any ads and of course, that's so much of the revenue on Facebook. So I heard people say 19 billion and no ads, there's no way that's gonna happen because if you're talking a dollar a year for some customers and let's say they got to a couple of billion users out there, it's still gonna take a long time to recoup that 19 billion dollar investment. So Steve, thanks as always for joining us here on this Cube conversation. Lots of events we're gonna be covering and expect we'll be getting you back here on the program often. So please be sure to tune in. If you go to siliconangle.tv, you can see all of our upcoming events and recent events, including all of the cloud ones that we have there, live.siliconangle.tv is the constant stream of content coming out of us. Siliconangle.com for all the news and wikibon.org for all of the analysis. This is Stu Miniman from the wikibon office in Marlboro. Thanks for joining us.