 From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Cube on Cloud brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Okay, we're back here live, the Cube on Cloud and this is Dave Lante with my co-host John Furrier. We're all remote. We're getting into the analyst power half hour. Really pleased to have Maribel Lopez here. She's the principal and founder of Lopez Research and Zia Caravalla, who is the principal and founder of ZK Research. Guys, great to see you. Let's get into it. How are you doing? Great. How you been? Good, thanks. Really good. John's hanging in there, quarantining and all healthy. So hope you guys are too. Hey, Maribel, let's start with you. You know, here we are on 2021, you know, just exited one of the strangest years, if not the strangest year of our lives. But looking back in the past decade of cloud and we're looking forward, how do you see that? Where do we come from? Where are we at and where are we going? Well, we obviously started with the whole, let's build a public cloud and everything was about public cloud. Then we went to the notion of private cloud. Then we had hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So we've done a lot of different clouds right now. And I think where we are today is that there's a healthy recognition on the cloud computing providers that you need to give it to the customers the way they want it, not the way you've decided to build it. So how do you meet them where they are so that they can have a cloud-like experience wherever they want their data to be? Yeah, and CSU, you know, observed this as well in the early days of cloud. You heard a lot of rhetoric. It was private cloud. And then now we're, you know, hearing a lot of multi-cloud and so forth. But initially a lot of the traditional vendors kind of poo-pooed it. They called us analysts. We said we were all cloud crazy, but they seem to have got their religion. Well, everyone's got a definition of cloud. But I actually think we are right in the midst of another transformation of cloud. As Maribel talked about, we went from, you know, private clouds, which was really hosting the public cloud to multi-cloud to hybrid cloud. And if you look at the last post that put out in Silicon Angle, which was talked about F5's acquisition of Olterra, I actually think we're in the midst of the transition to what's called distributed cloud. Where if you look at modernized cloud apps today, they're actually made up of services from different clouds and also distributed edge locations. And that's going to have a pretty profound impact in the way we build apps because those distributed edges, the Atelco Edge, Solar Edge, IoT Edge, whatever, the services that live there are much more ephemeral in nature, right? So the way we secure, the way we connect changes quite a bit. But I think that the great thing about cloud is we've seen several evolutionary changes to what the current definition is. And we're going through that now, which is pretty cool to think about, right? It's not a static thing. It's an ongoing transition. But I think we're moving into this distributed cloud era, which to me is a lot more complex than what we deal with in the past. I'm actually pretty excited about that though, because I think that this move to Edge and the distribution that you've talked about, it's like we now have processing everywhere. We've got it on devices, we've got it in cars. We're moving the data centers closer and closer to where the action's happening. And I think that's going to be a huge trend for 2021 is that distributed, that you were talking about a lot of edge discussion. The reason we're doing this too is we're moving the data closer to the user, right? And some, if you think you brought up the autonomous vehicle, right, or the car being an edge, you think of the data that generates, right? There's some things such as the decision to stop or not, that should be done in car. I don't want to transport that data all the way back to Google and back to decide whether I want to stop. You can also use the same data to determine whether a driver is driving safely for insurance purposes, right? So the same data can be located at the Edge or in a centralized cloud for different purposes. And I think that's what's kind of cool about this is we're being able to use our data in much different ways now. You know, it's interesting, is it so complex? It's mind-blowing and because it's just distributed computing, everyone kind of agrees, this is where it is. But if you think about the complexity, and I want to get your guys' reactions to this because some of the like side fringe trend discussions are data sovereignty, misinformation as a vulnerability. Okay, you get the chips now, you got Graviton with Amazon in-front, Apple's got their own chips, Intel's going to do a whole new direction. So you got tons of compute and then you mentioned the ephemeral nature. How do you manage those? What's the observability look like there? What's the trust equation? So all these things kind of play into it. It sounds almost mind-blowing just even thinking about it but how do you guys as analysts try to understand where someone's either blowing bullshit or kind of like has the real deal because all those things come into play. I mean, you could have a misinformation campaign targeting the car and say, hey, you know, that data needs to be, this is misinformation. And who's supposed to sovereignty on that? In a lot of ways, this creates almost unprecedented opportunity now for, for startups and for companies to transform, right? The fundamental kind of my research has always been share shifts happen when markets transition and we're in the middle of a big one. If the compute resources we're using, John and the application resources we use in order of femoral nature, then all the things that surround that the way we secure, the way we connect, those also have to be equally agile, right? So you can't have, you know, you think of a microservices based application being secured with traditional firewalls, right? Just the amount of, or even virtual, the way that the length of time it takes to spin those things up is way too long. So in many ways, this distributed cloud change changes everything in IT and that includes all of the services and the infrastructure that we use to secure and connect. And that is a profound change. And you mentioned the observability, you're right, that's another thing that the traditional observability tools are based on static maps and things and, you know, traditional up, down and we don't, things go up and down so quickly now that those don't make any sense. So I think we are going to see quite a rise in different types of management tools and the way they look at things to be much more, I suppose, you know, agile. So we can measure things that currently aren't measurable. So you're talking about the entire stack really changing is really what you're, I'm inferring anyway from your commentary. And that would include the programming model as well, wouldn't it? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, the thing that is really interesting about where we have been versus where we're going is we spent a lot of time talking about virtualizing hardware and moving that around and what does that look like and creating that as more of a software paradigm. And the thing we're talking about now is what does cloud as an operating model look like? What is the manageability of that? What is the security of that? What, you know, we've talked a lot about containers and moving into a different, you know, dev sec ops and all those different trends that we've been talking about like now we're doing them. So we've only gotten to the first crank of that. And I think every technology vendor we talked to now has to address how are they going to do a highly distributed management and security landscape? Like what are they going to layer on top of that? Because it's not just about, oh, I've taken a rack of something, server storage compute and virtualized it. I now have to create a new operating model around it. In a way, we're almost redoing what the OSI stack looks like and what the software and solutions are for that. So who's going to build that? Hold on, hold on, there's a link to the introduction because that OSI stack, that came up earlier today, Maribeth, we were talking about. Yeah, we were riffing on the OSI model back in the day. And we were comparing the SNA, Decnet, the proprietary protocol stacks that they were out there. And some were saying- John said Amazon's SNA, as I recall. I think that's what you said. Well, no, someone in the chat said to that comment like Amazon's proprietary meaning their scale. And I said, oh, that means they're SNA. But if you think about it, that's kind of, that can hang together if the Kubernetes is like a new connective tissue is at the TCP IP moment. Because I think OSI kind of was standardizing at the lower end of the stack, ethernet, token ring, you know, the data link layer, physical layer. And that when you got to the TCP layer, it really magic happened, right? To me, that's when Cisco's happened and everything started happening then. And then it kind of stopped because the applications kind of maintained their piece there. A little history there, but like this kind of happening now, if you think about it. And then you've put me a factor in the edge it just kind of really explodes it. So who's going to write that software? I think, you know, Dave, you've asked us to change where you build apps. It's already changed in the consumer world. You look at Uber and Waze and things like that. Those apps are already highly decomposed applications that make API calls and DNS calls from dozens of different resources already, right? We just haven't really brought that into the enterprise space. There's a number of kind of new or born in the cloud companies that have done that. But they're very few and far between today. And John, your point about the connectivity, we do need to think about connectivity at the network layer still obviously, but now we're creating that standardization that standardized connectivity all the way up to layer seven. So you look at a lot of the, you know, one of the big things now is the API API calls, right? You know, from different cloud purposes. And so we do need to standardize it every layer and then stitch that together. So that does make, it does make things a lot more complicated. Now I'm not saying don't do it because you can do a whole lot more with apps today than you could ever do before. It's just that we've kind of cranked up the level of complexity here and cloud isn't just a single thing anymore, right? That's what we're talking about here. It's a collection of edges and private clouds and public clouds that all have to be stitched together at every layer in order to work. So I was talking a few CIOs earlier in the day. We had them on, I was asking them, okay, so how do you approach this complexity? Do you build that abstraction layer? Do you rely on someone like Microsoft to build that abstraction layer? Doesn't appear that Amazon's going to do it. You know, where does that come from? Or is it dozens of abstraction layers? And one of the CIOs said, look, it's on us. We have to figure out, you know, and we get this API economy, but you guys are talking about a more complicated environment moving so fast. So if my enterprise looks like my iPhone apps, I mean, yes, maybe it's simpler on an individual app basis, but it's app creep and my application portfolio grows. Maybe they talk to each other a little bit better, but that level of complexity is something that users are going to have to deal with. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think quite what Xeus was trying to get at and correct me if I'm wrong, Xeus, right? We've gone to the part where we've broken down what was a traditional application, right? And now we've gotten into API calls and we have to think about different things. Like we have to think about how do we secure those APIs, right? That becomes a new criteria that we're looking at. How do we manage them? How do they have a life cycle? So what was a life cycle? Say an application is now the life cycle of components. And so that's a pretty complex thing. So it's not so much that you are getting app creep, but you're definitely rethinking how you want to design your applications and services. And some of those are going to do your shelf and a lot of them are going to say it's too complicated. I'm just going to go to some kind of SaaS cloud offering for that and let it go. But I think that many of the larger companies that I speak to are looking for a larger company to help them build some kind of framework to migrate from what they've used with them to what they need to have going forward. Yeah, I think where the complexity is, John, you asked who creates the normalization layer? You know, obviously, if you look to the cloud providers, AWS does a great job of stitching together all things AWS. And Microsoft does a great job of stitching together all things Microsoft, right? And same with Google. But then they don't, but if I want to do some Microsoft to Amazon or Google to Microsoft connectivity, they don't help so much of that. And that's where the third party vendors, that, you know, Aviatrix on the network side will tear on the security side of their companies. Like they even Cisco's been doing a lot of work with those companies. And so what we don't really have, and we probably won't for a while, is somebody is going to stitch everything together at every, you know, at every layer. So, and I do think we do get app creep, Maribel. I think if you look at the world of consumer apps, we moved to a lot more kind of purpose-built, almost throwaway apps. They serve a purpose or two, you use them for a while, then you stop using them. And in the enterprise space, we really haven't kind of converted to that model yet on the mobile side, but I think that's common. So we couldn't want to- Well, I think we started with micro-apps, right? That was kind of the issue with micro-apps. It's like, oh, I'm not going to build a full-scale app that's going to take too long. I'm just going to create this little workflow and we're going to have like 200 workflows on someone's phone. I think we did that. And not everybody did it though, to your point. So I do think that some people that are a little late to the game might end up in that app creep, but hey, listen, this is a fabulous opportunity to just, you know, throw a lot of stuff out and do it differently. What I think, what I hear people struggling with a lot is to get it to work, it typically is something that is more vertically integrated. So are you buying all into a Microsoft? Are you buying all into an Amazon? And people are starting to get a little fear about doing the full-scale buy-in to any specific platform. Yet in absence of that, they can't get anything to work. Yeah, so I think again, what I'm hearing from practitioners is I'm going to put a microservice. I think, Maribel, this is what you're implying. I'm going to put a microservices layer. Oh, if I can't get rid of them, if I can't get rid of my Oracle workloads, I'm going to connect them to my, and modernize them with a layer. And I'm going to in part build that. I'm going to, you know, partner to get that done. But that seems to be a critical path forward. If I don't take that step, I'm going to be stuck in the path, in the past and not be able to move forward. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you do have to bridge to the past. You aren't going to throw everything out right away. That's just, you can't drive the bus and take the wheels off at the same time. Maybe one wheel, but not all four of them at the same time. So I think that this concept of, what are the technologies and services that you use to make sure you can keep operational, but that you're not just putting only new workloads into the cloud or new workloads as decomposed apps, that you're really starting to think about, what do I want to keep and what do I want to get rid of? Many of the companies you speak to, they have thousands of applications. So are they going to do this for thousands of applications or are they going to take this opportunity to streamline? Yeah, well, a lot of the legacy number goes away, right? And I was, how companies make this transition is going to be interesting because there's no real de facto way. I was talking to this one company, this New York bank and they've broken their IT division down into modern IT and legacy IT. And so modern, everything's cloud first. And so imagine me the CIO of legacy IT. But to Maribos, but what they're doing is they're driving the old bus and then they're building a new bus in parallel. And eventually, slowly they take seats out of the old bus and they take the seat and they eventually start stripping away things that old bus, but that old bus is going to keep burning for a long time. And so stitching those different worlds together is where a lot of, especially big organizations that really can't commit to everything in the cloud are going to struggle. But it is a whole new world. And like I said, I think it creates so much opportunity for people involved in cloud today. That whole bus thing reminds me of movie speed where they had to drive around 55 miles an hour and they just put it out to the airport and it just blew up. That's IT, you know, that's legacy IT. We're on the road to the moon. Oh my God. But you know, we all say that things are going to go away but to Zeus's point, you know, nothing goes away. We're still in 2021 talking about mainframes just as an aside, right? So I think we're going to continue to have some legacy in the network, but the issue is a lot will change around that. And there are going to be some people that are going to make a lot of money selling little startups that just do one specific piece of that, you know? Well, this is a great point. We just do automation of X. So. Oh yeah, that's a great vertical app. This is the distributed network argument, right? If you have a note on the network and you can put a containerized environment around it with some microservices, some connective tissue, glue layer, if you will, software, abstract away some integration points, it's a note on the network. So if a mainframe or whatever, it's just, I mean, it makes the argument, right? It's not core, you're not doubling a platform around the mainframe, but if it's punching out a bank jobs on IBM kicks or something, you know, whatever, right? So. And if those workloads probably aren't going to move anywhere, right? Is there a point in putting those in the cloud? Like I said, just leaving where they are, put a connection to the past, the bridge. Hey, what was that bank where you talked to that bank guy we interviewed and you off the record after the CUBE interviews, like, yeah, I'm still running the mainframe. So I never get rid of it. I love it, run our kicks job. I would never think about moving that thing. It was a large, a large non-US bank who said, I buy the next IBM mainframe site unseen. And he's got no choice. They just write the check. Every millisecond is like a millions of dollars a millisecond for him on his back. So those aren't going anywhere, but then, but then, but they're not growing, right? It's just static. No, that market's not growing. It's, in fact, but you can make a lot of money and monetize in the legacy, right? So there are vendors that'll do that. But I do think if you look at the, we've already seen a big transition here. If you look at the growth in a company like Twilio, right? It obviates the need for a company to rack and stack your own phone system to be able to do, you know, calling from mobile apps or even messaging. Now you just do API calls, you know? And so it allows, in a lot of ways, this new world we live in democratizes development. And so any, you know, two people in a garage can start up a company and have a service up and running at a no time at all. And that creates competitiveness, you know, much more competitiveness than we've ever had before, which is good for the entire industry. And, you know, cause that, that keeps the bigger companies on their toes and they're always, you know, looking over their shoulder, you know, with the banks, you're looking at the Venmos and companies like that to try and figure out a way to monetize. So I think what we're, you know, well, that old stuff's never going away. The new stuff is where the competitors create the competitiveness is created. You know, it's interesting. Amidst Xavier earlier today, I was talking about no code and low code development and how it's different from the old four GL days where we didn't actually expand the base of developers. Now we are, you know, to your point, Zias, it really is democratizing and- Well, everybody's a developer. It can be a developer, right? A lot of these tools are written in a way that line of business, people can create their own, you know, apps through point and click interfaces. And so the barrier, it reminds me of when I started my career, I used to code in HTML to build websites. And then with the five years, people are using drag and drop interfaces, right? So that kind of job went away because it became so easy to do. Yeah, sorry. I think I'm in an operation. And we're getting a part with the data. Say again. I'm sorry. I was going to say, I think we're getting to the part where we're just starting to talk about data, right? So, you know, when you think of Twilio, that's like a service. It's connecting you to specific data. When you think of Snowflake, you know, there's been all these kinds of companies that have crept up into the landscape that feel like a very specific void. And so now the question is, if it's really all about the data, are there going to be new companies that get built that are just focusing on different aspects of how that data is secured, how that data is transferred, how that data, you know, what happens to that data? Because, and does that shift the balance of power about it being out of like, oh, I've created these data centers with large rackum and stackums that are virtualized to a whole other set of, you know, this is a big software play. And it's all about software. Well, we just heard from Jamak Tagani, you guys talking earlier about the distributed system. She basically laid down that, look, our data architectures are flawed. They're monolithic and data by its very nature is distributed. So that she's putting forth a whole new paradigm around distributed decentralized data models, which- And Howie Shue was just talking about who's going to build the visual studio for data, right? So programmatic kind of thinking around data. I think the other way we didn't touch on it too, because I do think there's an opportunity for that for data governance and data ownership and data transport, but it's also the analytics of it. Most companies don't have the in-house data scientists to build their own AI algorithms, right? So you're going to start seeing companies pop up to do very specific types of data. I don't know if you saw this morning, you know, Unifor bought this company that does, you know, video emotion detection. So they can tell on a video whether somebody's paid attention or not, right? And so that's something that it would be so hard for a company to build that in-house. But I think what you're going to see is a rise in these, you know, these types of companies that help with specific types of analytics. And then you drop the, you know, pull those in as resources into your application. And so it's not on the storage and the governance of the data, but it's also the analytics. And the analytics front, these were a lot of the differentiation for companies is going to come from. You know, Maribel's written a lot on AI as an AI. And I think that's one of the more exciting areas to look at this year. I actually want to riff off your point, Ziaz, because I think it's really important because where we left off in 2020 was, yes, there was hybrid cloud, but we just started to see the era of the verticalized cloud, the cloud for something, you know, the cloud for finance, the cloud for healthcare, the telco and edge cloud, right? So when you start doing that, it becomes much more about what is this specialized stream that we're looking at. So what's the specialized analytics stream? What's the specialized security stack stream, right? So until now, like everything was just trying to get to what I would call horizontal parity, where you took the things we had before, you replicated them in a new world with like some different software, but it was still kind of the same. And now we're saying, okay, let's try to, let's try to move out of everything, just being a generic sort of cloud set of services and being more specific set of cloud services. So that is the evolution of everything technology. The first move of everything we do in technology is we try and make the old thing, the new thing look like the old thing, right? First PC app was a main frame emulator. We took our virtual servers and we made them look like physical servers. Then eventually we figure out, oh, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that I can do that I couldn't do before. And that's the part we're trying to hop into now, right? It's like, oh, now that I've gone cloud native, what can I do that I couldn't do before? Right? And so we're just, we're sort of hitting that inflection point. And that's when you're really gonna see the growth take off. But for whatever reason in IT, all we ever do is we're trying to replicate the old until we figure out the old didn't really work and we should do something new. Well, let me throw something old and controversial, not controversial old, but old, an old trope out there. Consumerization of IT. I mean, if you think about what year was, first year you heard that term, right? Was it 15 years ago, 20 years ago? When did that first start? We were podcasting. Yeah, so that was a long time ago. You were doing a podcast. So if you think about it, like it kind of is happening now. What does it mean? Like what does that actually mean in today's world? Does it exist? Well, you heard like Fred Lutty, who's the founder of service now saying that was his dream to bring consumer-like experiences to the enterprise. Well, it didn't really happen. I mean, the service now pretty complicated compared to what we do here. But so it's evolving. Yeah, I think there's also the enterprise-ation of consumer technology. But John, the companies, you look at Zoom, they came to market with a highly consumer-facing product, realized it didn't have the security tools to really be corporate-grade, and then they had to go and invest a bunch of money in that. And so, I think that we can swing the pendulum all the way over to the consumer side, but that kind of failed us, right? So now we're trying to bring it back to center a little bit where we blend the two together. Cloud kind of brings that almost. I never looked at that one. That's interesting. It's surprising to have a consumer. Yeah, that's- All right, guys. Hey, we got to wrap ZS Maribel. Always a pleasure having you guys on. Great, great insights from the half-hour flies by. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you guys. All right, keep it right there. More great content coming from the Cube on Cloud, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. And a whole lineup still to come. Keep it right there.