 Live from the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California. It's The Cube at Google Cloud Platform Live. Here is your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out through the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE on The Cube and we're joined here with Dave Tucker, senior director of Platform.org, work Eva, work Eva, work IVA, I type T-Bay in there, but that's okay, Eva, also misspell. You can be a work Eva too, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, thanks for having me here today. So obviously Google Cloud, you guys filed your S1, so we're not going to talk anything about the quiet period you're in. But really this is a tech show. I mean, this is about Google coming out, aggressively communicating what they're working on and going out belly to belly to developers. It's about applications that bring a lot to the table. If you're not born in the cloud these days or have a SaaS model, it's really difficult to survive because time is of the essence. Literally applications getting to the market. Talk about that dynamic, because you guys are playing in this space, SaaS is huge, what's going on in the SaaS world? Tell us what's up with you guys and what's the dynamic in the industry around SaaS in particular? Is there a formula for it? Is there a certain operational model? You bolt on sales after, what's going on with SaaS? How is it disrupting the marketplace? For us it's been really interesting because we started out on Cloud Platform. We started about six years ago at that time when cloud was just emerging and many of us had come from kind of enterprise background. And so we kind of understood. The big license. The big license, the pain of trying to deploy into an enterprise data center. And so we first came across Google App Engine and kind of fell in love with that technology and we've built everything on top of Cloud Platform as we've been growing and building new products. It's exciting, Dave, is that the whole world is just trying to figure out SaaS now in terms of, oh, they get it, okay, I can understand, buy it by the train, I don't want to stop. But there's really a bigger dynamic. Talk about that because you've been on both sides. The old school enterprise software was a groove swing for many decades. Now it's at risk. Why is it at risk and what is some of the factors? Well, partly just the economics. Being able to start and just build functionality, focus on building functionality and letting somebody handle all the scaling problems in terms of building and scaling an application and a pay as you go model is great for companies like ours. When you're starting out, you're able to sort of pay as you go and as you grow, get more customers, the scaling is handled for you. And for us and companies like us, that's a great solution. So talk about the technology risk because in the venture community, they talk about product market fit. Have you guys gone through that iteration early on? And you were a cloud before cloud was cloud, right? I mean, Salesforce was pioneering, you guys were pioneering. It was kind of not an obvious thing, but how did you guys build that in? How did you get the flywheel going? Well, for us, it was just really focusing on what's the pain point and trying to build a great product. That's been our thing from the beginning, was focused on building the product that kind of met needs that people had and really addressed those pain points. And that's one of the things again, cloud has enabled us to do is just focusing on those specific use cases and pain points that our customers have. You know, talk about your business, give a quick update on what you guys do. Obviously, we're seeing SaaS companies come out of the woodwork and scaling up fast, reinvesting all their profits and back into growth, building some muscle, Splunk, Tableau, to name a few. This is like the early stars coming out of this second wave of SaaS with this kind of platform aspect. So now Google sees that opportunity and wants to enable more companies like that. So what, talk about your business and how you guys tapped into that growing trend. Well, our WDesk platform really lets you collect and collaborate on critical enterprise data in real time and giving people that ability to collaborate, to work real time, to get immediate answers to their questions has just been a very compelling business for us. In terms of product teams, you guys do things differently. How are you guys looking at the product market? How do you guys go to market, sales, et cetera? I mean, how does that work? I mean, Susie, compare and contrast that to the old way. Well, we're very much an agile based shop. So we focus on kind of the lean startup model. We focus on building our minimum viable product and iterating that on customers. So a rapid turnaround, we do updates to production daily and just continually work and iterate and try and refine our products. Is it DevOps? DevOps is key to our success, being able to quickly build turnaround software, put it out to production and just learn from our customers as we grow. So what do you think about this conference here this year? What do you think Google's saying? What is that vector into the trend, trend lines? And is it relevant? And what's your commentary? Well, what I really like, what they introduced is the whole Google Container Engine model because if you look at companies like us, that's one of the reasons we first really fell in love with App Engine, this ability to just write some code and have it managed. And as we've grown, as our platform has grown, we've had to go through different server configurations and it gets more complex. And Container Engine, to me, is really that ability to take any kind of software that we want to deploy, just build it into that container and have it managed. That's really, again, the promise of the cloud, but instead of just being in a certain type of runtime, it's basically any type of runtime that we want to deploy. So what are you guys using for Google products? The bevy of all the tooling is specific product? We use just about every part of Cloud Platform today. We build on App Engine, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, BigQuery we use for a lot of our analysis. And so really every part of Cloud Platform today we leverage. So we got a comment here from the crowd, Mark Field. Containers offer much reduced overhead, improving server CPU utilization and performance. Do you agree with that statement? I do. I mean, I think they offer a lot of that, but for me the thing that's really compelling is just this ability to package and manage your code through the lifecycle. Our ability to focus on small containers and microservices, build those and then hand them off to somebody else to manage and scale. So it's really that simplicity of the model and scaling is what's the most compelling thing. A lot of people like the compatibility, being able to run as a developer, not getting into the weeds on infrastructure. Most developers aren't really networked. They don't want to get involved in getting down and dirty in the infrastructure. Exactly, and that's our case as well. We've been able to hire developers to really focus on the customer's problem and their pain point, right? Not everything else. Oh, we had the film guy on earlier. It said more creativity, right? So you're seeing developers, if they don't have to get dirty in the infrastructure, they're cleaner from a creativity standpoint. They're not distracted, not worrying about provisioning, not orchestration, all that stuff's off their shoulders. It allows them to be more productive. Are you guys seeing that same trend and what examples can you guys provide us? Well, you know, again, that is very much the trend, to have your developers just focus on solving the problem, writing code. I think that the thing that appeals to us as well is just the whole developer experience, right? Being able to have this entire platform running on your laptop and with the Docker image, being able to take that and then move it into the cloud for running and testing and scaling. You know, it's a great model to work in as a developer. You know, we were commenting on theCUBE and we made the observation that was awesome about this inflection point and shift, because it's kind of, they're both happening. People are shifting to the cloud and there's an inflection point, which is changing the industry landscape, is that the developers are now moving closer to the action, more of the front lines. So like, it used to be in the old days, I mean, I'm in my late 40s, you know, developers kind of in back room, kick out the product, PRD, go to QA, and then bang, it's in the market, you know, months later, development life cycle, and I'm pretty standard stuff back then. Developers never talk to customers. Right now, comment on that. Are you seeing it the same way? Are you seeing more action closer to the front lines and how is that changing the kind of profile of the developer? I mean, I think that's been key for us. Our developers, we put in front of customers all the time, it's just part of a, you know, partnership that you build and our developers love interacting with customers, and I'd say developers are very much closer to the front line than they have been in the past. It used to be an expression, don't bring a developer in front of a customer, I'm with the sales guys would say, no, it's actually the other way around. The whole world's flipped around where they want to get the developer in front of a customer because they're actually working on real time problems and focusing on the buzzword that we hear all the time on theCUBE, business outcomes. I mean, I think there's realization, that's how developers learn is talking to people and interacting with customers and, you know, we try to give them their space to go back and then work on solving the problem, but those touch points are key if you're really going to build a good product and that's our main focus is just building great products. Yeah, and I think also the social aspect of developers, you're seeing it here at the Google event where they roll out the red carpet, I just had lunch, it was fantastic, a lot of people networking, it's really laid back, it's not a hardcore in your face environment, a lot of people changing ideas. This is the new collaboration, people are connected on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the different social networks and then when they come to a physical event, it's very much the content, what's new plus talking appears. Do you guys have that same dynamic where you have kind of like peer reviews and social interactions? We do, I mean, everything we do is kind of a peer review process. Everything as it's going out gets reviewed and there's a lot of discussion, it's a very open, dynamic environment. Very different than probably when you and I were starting out. This is a great time to be a developer. I mean, there's so many tools and so much power at your fingertips. It's hard to imagine when we're starting. I was interviewing an IBM executive and I said, everyone wants to win the developers and she stopped me right there. She goes, that's the problem, you don't win developers, they're people. And I think that is what's come up with my chat with Greg from Google where he says they want to go through where the developers are and not vice versa, where IT and traditional, quote, enterprises, they would pull the developers into the process that they wanted, not the other way around. So are you seeing that? And two, how do companies fix that? Is there a magic process? Is it just agile? Is it more of a management culture? What's your take on that? I think it's really a mindset about how you go about approaching products and really understanding your customers and understanding what they need and what they're really trying to do and their jobs day to day. And it's something I think that continues to evolve all the time and developers have a lot more access to customers and that kind of input than they've ever had before. So talk about work either where you guys have a product and talk about specifically the products. I'll see reporting, compliance reporting, measurement reporting, I'll see all cloud. So you know, someone can say, this is blocking and tackling in the enterprise, in the weeds, so you got process improvement going on, but you're really talking, you talk to a business user, it looks like. How has the cloud being born in the cloud kind of really as a pioneer of the cloud, changed the product? Can you be specific, talk about like, okay, we would not be able to do X without the cloud? Can you comment on some of the things that you've done that might not have been possible without the cloud? Well, you know, we've been able to take a process and make it very collaborative and very real time and have it directly in people's hands and scale as we added customers. So that ability to quickly iterate and turn out new product iterations. So it's really new features. It's been keyed to us and solving the problem of allowing people to collaborate in real time and make decisions in real time on their day-to-day jobs. It's just the next step in kind of what's possible or the way people can work with cloud. So what you're saying is you shorten the cycle time between putting, hearing a customer, say the customer's usually the way it works is, one customer says, hey, I want that feature, then you hear it so many times, you go, okay, broader market opportunity, that becomes a feature, boom, it's in the product. So you're saying you shorten the cycle times down between that kind of identification to operationalizing in the product. Right, from the time that we learn what they're doing, learn how they're working, internalize that, turn around, when we release every day, we're able to sometimes listen to customers, focus on, oh, what's the problem that they're having? Do another iteration on it, put it out, let them try it, and just do that every day after day. All right, Dave, we're gonna do a little fun game here. Pretend I'm a cop, pretend you and I are a team and we get hired by big enterprise in the middle of America, big bank or big company and we have to reel that. They're stuck in the 80s, kind of hot tub time machine, you know, IT department in the early 90s, give them early 90s, and we got to come in there and we got to rehaul the whole thing, what do we do? What do we do? You and I are going there, what do we do? First thing we do? Well, the first thing we do is we sit down and we take a product like WDesk because we don't have to go to the IT and get permission to use it. We're able to start up, bring up, start working on. So kill IT. That's the problem we have today. No, that's not exactly, that's not exactly, but we're trying to just free people to be able to figure out how to solve their problems. There's friction for the user to get to a solution that really is going to empower them. And we said all cloud or mix of cloud, kind of we take it slowly, how do we turn that around? Well, I think a lot of work is done in Excel and other products on the desktop today and we allow them to take those processes they're doing and do it collaboratively now, all working together at the same time. So collaboration, real time, get mindset of iterating quickly. Right. So I got to ask you the final question. What's going on the show here? Explain to the folks out there, what's going on in the show? What's the vibe? What's the key theme? What's your observation? How's it hanging together? I've seen a lot of excitement today. I had some great presentations, announcements. Reducing prices never hurts. That's always a great thing. Increase performance, lower price. Yeah. And a playbook on Amazon's. That's always a great thing. Container engine, you know, a great story. The expanded more partners, some great partners downstairs. So just a lot of excitement in the air and it's great to see this kind of investment in the platform. They're bringing a lot of muscle to the App Engine. Definitely. And the Compute Engine too, looking pretty good. Yeah, I think across the platform, App Engine, Compute Engine now. And, you know, for us, less than even the distinction between the two, right? The ability to just write code and have that code deployed and managed. All right, Dave Tucker's here inside the queue. We're breaking it all down. We're in the hallway here. We're getting all the actions. This is the queue. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. Live in San Francisco at the Google Cloud Platform Live event, Google's Developer Conference. Really talking about applications in the cloud, on-premise, other people's clouds, Google's doing it all. We'll be right back with more action after this short break.