 Good evening everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE live at Google Cloud Next 23. Lisa Martin here with some really smart analysts. We're going to be breaking down for you in about 15 to 20 minutes. What we learned today, day one of Google Cloud Next. John Furrier, our co-host and co-founder of theCUBE is here. We've got Rob Stretches here, industry analysts with theCUBE and Dustin Kirkland, new CUBE analysts here with us. Guys, great to have you. You had loads of conversations. You got to have some free briefs as well. John, I want to start with you. Today was a slew of announcements during the keynote. You guys had a pre-briefing of that, but what do you see? This is the first Next since 2019 in person, obviously. Google's competitive strategy. What are your thoughts on it? What's their position in the marketplace? And what are their prospects as a competitor going forward? That's great. It was a good setup. I think the number one thing walking away from 2019 to here is the stark difference between how they're presenting the content. In 2019, it was speeds and feeds, big query. They get a lot of cloud goodness, a lot of tech, but it's not clear how it's all worked together. In Google fashion, they're all proud, loud and proud about their tech, which is phenomenal and nothing to shake a stick at. This year, they had some of those cool features, but it was more about the roadmap of the company. It was more about where they're going and why they exist. And I think they're really taking a grab at this cloud meets AI. And to me, they can go for this AI cloud positioning. So I think, to me, I look at what Google's doing here is very, very clear opportunity for them to change the game on who they are in the cloud business to the customer, multiple customer stakeholders, and potentially shake it with some growth to change their position from three to two and maybe put a shot and punch up to AWS. As I said, in our opening keynote analysis, they got a line of sight on developers, the new generation, all use Google Docs since middle school. They'll naturally use the AI tools that'll come out. That's the next startups. That's the next batch of unicorns. That's the next batch of big new brands that will emerge out of these cycles. And it's only going to be more, more another decade or two more of that, like the web had. And then they got the solutions. They're not competing with Amazon with the speeds and feeds. They're going at the solutions, which goes out to Microsoft, Microsoft made hay out of putting packages together for the enterprise. And finally, the ecosystem. If they hit the ecosystem like it's growing right now, ISVs, GSIs, and giving them enablement to make money and drive value for customers, they'll hit the trifecta. That would be, that is very possible. And that's a competitive strategy and they're going to go all in on this and you can see the movement. And the AI is a massive gift because Google already had chops in AI because of their scale and size. So they're lining up to match up with the number one and two players for multiple years of possible competition. And I think their prospects are very good. If they nail one of those three things, they're good. If they nail two, they're great. If they nail three, it's a home run. Did you want to add something to that? I mean, first of all, my observation, the last time there was a Google Next 2019, I was actually a product manager at Google launching a product, right? And so it's been really amazing to watch what's happened in four years. The big difference here this year from then, it's just the enterprise adoption of Google. There was certainly no talk of AI, meaningful talk of AI in 2019. I think that's played really well to Google's strength, strength around data, strength around search, strength around just intelligence of connecting all of those dots. And that's created as an incredible delivery mechanism for the goodness of Google's enterprise capabilities into a need that enterprises have that they didn't know they had that need three or four years ago. Rob, bring us your thoughts on Spicative Enterprise, some of the announcements today, GKE for Enterprise. Yay? Yeah, well, I think it's nice that they finally got there and they're more or less killing Anthos with it. I mean, that's the new Anthos, I guess you could say. And GDC around their deployment in other clouds and kind of hardware-based approach. In fact, it's listed on the board behind us here with Intel prominently focused, which is not just all their own chips. They're also partnering around this and they're also partnering with NVIDIA. I think to your point on ecosystem, this actually broadens their ecosystem where they can go to sovereign clouds. And I think it helps them with their story about how we're being better with people's data as well by, hey, you want to have your data on GKE in somebody else's cloud, we're going to go and help you build that with GDC in Orange or in KPN or who knows, SingTel or some of the others around the world where they can then get that foothold. I think I said it earlier, this is what Outpost should have been five years ago. Outpost took a very different approach going out. They were- AWS Outpost. Yeah, AWS Outpost, when they launched, and Amazon launched Amazon Outpost and AWS Outpost, that was more focused at the enterprise customer and it was a rack of 42 U of server and storage. You had to buy in all on that. I think the way they're doing it, more modular, having it through the service providers in a big way, allowing enterprises to go down this path as well, very similar to what OCI and Oracle, that Oracle Cloud does, makes a lot of sense. It's kind of a hybrid model in between that and I think GKE, enterprise, I'll get that right one of these days. Really, they're kind of going after and positioning with OpenShift and they've seen the success. They're partnered with OpenShift and Red Hat very deeply. It's one of their platforms. I think they've seen that success and they're trying to kind of emulate that a little bit more. I think they had to play catch up on some of the enterprise class features that people needed. I like to add one thing to my prospects prediction. Although I'm very glowing for Google, as you can tell, because they did a good job and I like the line of sight of what I said on the trifecta, I think it's going to happen. It could happen, I should say. The fatal flaw in all of this, I want to get you guys' reaction, at least in my opinion is, if they compete with their ecosystem, Rob, that could be dangerous, okay? So we had Elastic on here in theCUBE, extensions, Elastic, you mentioned Red Hat, OpenShift. So at what point does Google have to stare down the barrel of a choice Amazon clearly made? Now they only compete in, they say only end-to-end Amazon only deals. Do they take a card out, playbook out of AWS or they go Azure? Dustin, what's your reaction? I mean, I think this is kind of the fatal flaw of a fortune, whatever, 50, 100 company. At some point you get so big, like channel conflict is inevitable. Now I think what, just to like, I don't know, get on a high horse and... With a cue, bro, high horse, high horse here. 20 foot stage. You kind of have to hope that large companies don't take advantage of that to totally squash competition, certainly not unfairly or illegally, but even just like immorally or unethically. There's going to be channel conflict, right? Elastic is a great example who has a product, a search product, what do you know? That works well inside of Google Cloud and with Google Cloud customers and that's a place where I think Google has left a little bit of room for innovation and that's just one example of hundreds here. I mean, I would say a third to half of the vendors here compete with Google in some way. It's just a matter about doing that fairly and ethically, leaving room. Well, easy, let's just unpack that a little bit because I think that's the key word, trust. Now remember, we're speculating about how it's early growing with the ecosystem. Trust is key, but enabling the partners to be successful, right? This is going to be the key word. Like Amazon's got red ship, a snowflake's in there and Databricks is in there. They have to deal with that at the internal levels, right? And make sure that they're at least putting them on an equal footing. Amazon did that and Amazon did that, I think where they got a foul with AWS did with Elastic was how they were trying to overutilize, I guess you could say, the Apache licensing and things of that nature. I think it's different now with Elastic. Elastic has a very different approach. They're in Azure already, so it's not like they're not other places. The only place they're not right now is really Amazon. So I think, again, to Dustin's point, you're going to have this anyways. I think they can manage through it. I think they're going to have competition. Growth solves a lot of problems, right? Growth solves a lot of problems. And at the end of the day, it's consumption. It's consumption of Google services that are going to drive. If Elastic goes and drives more search, and by the way, Elastic's really focused at very different use cases for the majority of their use cases. So I think that will also carry a very different weight than when they're talking about vertex AI search, for instance, which we had on earlier today. I think that's a very different focus of what they're going after. And the key is early on during the growth years, Google might not be best in class for say a feature they might have that a partner could do better on. That's always been Andy Jassy's answer to me. When I've interviewed him on theCUBE, he always says, look at some customers want Amazon, all Amazon. And we want to let our customers be good too. But they get paid on it anyway, because it's live anyway. While we're on that sort of startup note, one interesting observation here, and I'll say this as a former Googler, as a Zougler, as we call ourselves. So many of these AI startups have a ton of former Google DNA in them. And so Google expanded so much, and there's this huge alumni network, incredible IQ amongst those former Googlers have spun out all over the world and planted the seeds of dozens, if not hundreds of startups that I think are each of which are going to change the world. And their research investment, by the way, deep mind and deep learning areas are deep. With pedigree. I mean, Coheer and AI21 were on stage earlier today as customers, not as partners, but as customers, which was, I think in hearing them and the DNA they have out of, specifically with Coheer, what they have from Google and Google Brain, it's not surprising. The truth has is going to be consumption, who's consuming which cloud services, and how much of a customer are they vis-a-vis the engagement and follow-through. I will say though, in the startups, during the lunch break, I went out to meet Don Klein in the lobby as he was up there with some CUBE customers, and the Google startup area was packed. Wall-to-wall people. And they're supposed to, these weren't plants, these were legit VCs, legit entrepreneurs, bankers, I mean, the AI wave is just got a frothy capital market right now. It's hot. That's a great description. It is frothy. It is frothy. But Justin, my question for you, now I know you're a Zuggler, I'll be using that in my interest. Now I chose for you now. Thank you. By the way, on the AI front, why now, why AI now, why did it just explode in the last year? I've spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, I'll date myself here and say, I was taking AI classes in college in 1997, and it wasn't even like new science then, and you know, you read science fiction and it's been around since the 70s, right? Moreover, if you've ever played a game and you go into like first person play against the computer mode, you're playing against what? The AI, my kids play Minecraft all the time and they're playing against the AI and that's been around forever. But what we're talking about here is completely different and it's this generative AI, it's the learning, it's the inferencing, inferencing is making decisions. What's changed there is a couple, two things I would boil it down to. One is this rocket machines right behind us, these incredible TPUs, tensor processing units and NVIDIA Jensen came on earlier this morning talking about the NVIDIA GPUs. Of course, Intel and AMD have a dog in that race as well. The hardware has changed. Fundamentally, it has allowed for massive scale unlike anything that we've dreamed of. Now you couple that with more data than you know, we've ever had in human history being created every single day and the marriage of those two allows for that artificial intelligence to truly be intelligent and that's different. That's materially different than a game bot deciding balls from strikes in a baseball game. Yeah and I would say too, the cloud scale and the machines and as SAS becomes platformized, you're seeing with AI the LLMs bring new kind of things like vector database embeddings, the idea of extensions. We were talking to a VC from Madrona, John Truro who's in the hallways here. He was excited about the idea that you can do stuff now with compliance built into runtime in these apps and the demos are legit next level. The legit next level things that weren't even possible in old AI because generative AI is generating new AI. It's not like some artifact that's sitting there that goes to a library call, you call a database and do something. It's completely different functionality. So the LLMs and foundation models do change the game with the scale and if you start coding that and getting some of these advances in coding, these apps are going to be completely different. There's some pretty obvious places where I think it will genuinely benefit our lives. We heard today from a guest helping doctors and hospitals summarize to the patients this really complicated diagnosis and all that information. Imagine walking away with like an automated summary from that doctor. Imagine who here reads the terms of service of some massive legal document. If that could be summarized into a couple of salient points. What am I agreeing to? Okay. I need a lawyer. And a lawyer bought good. But I also think that one of the things that was missing for me today and maybe we'll see it tomorrow to kind of back to the different question is the fact that the data layer and what they're doing in data is missing. And I think maybe we'll hear about that tomorrow. I'm hoping to because I think a lot of these things use a lot of data. And that was kind of just magic behind the UI that was happening and you're making connections with extensions but to a few new companies. But that really doesn't solve that, hey, I do have data living in BigQuery. I have data in other databases. I have data on a Mongo. And so how do I utilize all of that with these services? And I would say Lisa, one other thing on the data that's key to the why now is that the AI needs data to be available to make it smarter and useful to unlock that value. So you got to have high availability of data and make it highly available. Meaning you got to have a horizontal scalability data which it wasn't really built for in the previous generations. Data warehouse silos. Lockdown capability. So horizontally scalable data while making it compliant and safe and secure is a freaking hard problem. And so that's where you start to see the light and then these demos is like, wow, I see it. That's legit. That's making data available in real time. Low latency. It's incredible. That code that gets cracked opens up more functionality. That's why we love the data developer angle because data is now part of the app in code. That was never on the horizon in data analytics ever. Or databases. So, you know. King of or something Rob said which is what he wants to hear more of tomorrow. I want to hear a little bit more about the edge. And you know, this is Google Cloud but we GKE enterprise. The product I was responsible for before GKE on-prem. There is, you know, Google's done a fair amount of work to go out and make some of these technologies available at the edge, at cell phone towers, at points of sale, retail points of sale. I'd like to hear a bit more about that, you know, over the next day or two. I don't know, what are you? Yeah, what are you thinking? I think, you know, I like the customer reference. I'd like to see real stats on these unicorns. What about the 70% of unicorns using Google? I would like to see their engagement levels and compare that. That's something that I hope that they can provide. But I think it is the data thing. I want to see that developer. I want to see more developer focused data interaction tooling. Because I think the success is going to come from who's going to come out of the woodwork in the bottoms up open source and the coding world. I think once someone pops a use case, everyone's going to jump behind it. You just have to see an entrepreneur or some innovator go, I see a problem that's new or I couldn't get at before. I'm going to make it easier, simpler, I'm going to unlock that. I'm going to make it available fast. And it's going to be lucrative. It could be a new company. It could be a new feature. I'm looking for those signals that'll give the developer the power to unleash their entrepreneurial creativity. So right now the demos, they do it really. The do it AI was impressive. So I thought, you know, that was good. I want to see that. I want to see the data developer traction. That's what I'm looking for. Data developer traction, edge, the data story, the data plays and what we're looking hopefully to see tomorrow guys from your perspectives. Yeah. How does the data, how do all these databases work? They got big query. They got big query studio is a lot of integration. Will databases become part of the furniture, so to speak, in the room? Will it just become unbedded in to the application where we don't even talk about databases anymore? I mean, we debate about vector embeddings. Like why are we talking about that? That's like talking about the bark on the tree inside the bark. Right? It's like, like, like, like. That's a good answer. That's too mad. Look at how the tree's blowing right now. I mean, the market's good for Google. Google, Google's in a good position. I'm very excited for them. Yeah. Final thoughts guys in our last couple of minutes here in terms of like the words that you would describe day one, the energy, the momentum, the voices of the ecosystem that you heard on theCUBE. What words come to mind? I think cloud plus AI is in my head right now because I thought Databricks did a good event where they had data plus AI, how they put data and AI together. I think Google, you know, cloud meets AI really sets them up for the AI cloud. So to me what that's kept on coming in my head was, wow, Google could come out tomorrow and say, we're the AI cloud and run the table with the younger generation. And that alone could be game changing. So, you know, Amazon's got to respond. So like AWS might not be known for the 24 year old who's graduated college and got some coding shops. You give them a Cody and some code assistance. They could be whipping up code and writing apps that rupture and get traction like really fast. And that's the value of the next unicorn who knows. And they might not even think about AWS at all. That's a problem for AWS, the number one player. And Microsoft's kind of stuck in that, in the middle of a, are we an older company? Are we old guard? Or are we young and fresh? Right, that's a great point. Cool and relevant wins the game in my opinion. Those are the two words. Yeah, it sucks to be middle age, right? I also know those, cool and relevant. Cool and relevant. Cool and relevant. Well, they're a tweener. I mean, AWS is, I think, stuck in that tweener spot right now where they tried to hard make a left turn and go enterprise from the developers who'd gotten them there. They didn't quite make it across the chasm to really hardcore enterprise. Microsoft kind of stopped them a little bit there. If they pivoting back towards engineer and the devs, what ones they pick up? I think that to our point, if you're one, two or three in which markets, AWS never wants to be number three in any market. In fact, they went and got rid of Honeycode. So what's going to replace that as their low-code, no-code portion of their portfolio at Reinventus Europe? There's got to be something there that they got to be moving to. But you had GitLab and Google. You have GitHub and Microsoft. That puts Amazon distant third in this market. I don't know how they're going to leapfrog. They're going to go buy Honeyface? I mean, they just invested in them. I mean, I don't know. What else are they going to do? Which monopoly you want to bet on? Amazon, Microsoft, or Google? And if you're wondering the same questions, stick around on the queue because you're going to find the answers. Tomorrow we start at 9 a.m., but we've got a keynote analysis at 11.30. We get to start, go to the keynote, bring you that fresh news. John, Dustin, Rob, thank you so much for unpacking. Day one, your synopsis, your crystal balls, we're spot on. We appreciate your insights, your time. We look forward to tomorrow. All right, thank you, Lisa. Of course, day two coming up for my fellow analyst, co-host Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. See you tomorrow.