 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for CUBE's coverage of Google Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman also doing interviews without getting reporting and collecting all the data and we're going to bring it back on theCUBE. Our next two guests, Mark Ianelli, who's the Senior Technical Account Manager, AccuWeather, Ed Enough, who's the Director, Product Management, Google Cloud Platform. Now, welcome back to theCUBE. Ed, see you next week, thanks for coming on. Thank you. So you got a customer, big customer focus here this year, step function of just logos, growth, new announcements, technical, really good stuff. Yeah, yeah. What's going on? Give us the update, API economies here, full throttle. I mean, you know, the great thing is it's APIs on all fronts. So what you saw this morning was about standardizing the APIs that cloud infrastructure is based on. You saw, you know, how do we build applications with APIs at a finer-grained level, microservices, you know, and we've had a lot of great customer examples of people using and that's what, you know, with AccuWeather here talking about how do you use APIs to service and build business models, reach developer ecosystems. So, you know, as I look at everything today, it's every aspect of it brings it back home to APIs. It's all, it's just, it's so exciting because we think about the service model of cloud and on-premise and now cloud. It's integration and APIs are key, key and only getting more functional. Talk about your implementation, AccuWeather. What are you guys doing with Apigee, Google Cloud? Just share what your implementation is. So AccuWeather has been running an API service for the past 10 years and we have lots of enterprise clients but we started to realize we are missing a whole business opportunity. So we partnered with Apigee and we created a new self-serve API developer portal that allows developers to go in there, sign up on their own and get started and it's been great for us as far as like basically unlocking new revenue opportunities with APIs because as you said, everything is APIs and we also say everything is impacted by the weather. So why not have everyone use AccuWeather APIs to fulfill their weather needs? What was it like early on when you guys were making this call? Was it more like experimenting? Did management have a clue? Were they like use APIs or did it start grassroots? No, I mean, we knew right away like we were working very heavily with our enterprise clients but we wanted to really cater to the small businesses, to the individual developers, to weather enthusiasts or students even. So we wanted to have this easy interface that instead of talking to a sales rep, you could just go through this portal and sign up on your own and get started and we knew right away there's money to be left or money to be had, money left on the table. So we knew right away by working with Apigee and creating this portal, it would run itself. Everyone uses APIs and everyone needs to weather. So to make it easier to find and use. And what's it like now? What's the outcome? We've been using it now for about two years and it's been very successful. We've seen great revenue growth and more importantly, it's worked as a great sales channel for us because now instead of just going directly to an enterprise agreement and talking about legal terms and contracts, you can go through this incremental steps of sign up on your own, do a free trial, then you can buy a package, you can potentially increase your package and we can then monitor that, let them do it on their own and it allows us the ability to reach out to them and see could this be a new partner that we want to work with or is there a greater opportunity there? So it's been great for us as far as a lead generator and a sales channel to really get more revenue, more opportunities and just more awareness. And change the old process, a whole new business model. Yeah, it's a more awareness to accurate weather APIs. Instead people are trying to find us, now it's out there and people see, great, now I can use it and get started. I'm interested in the backend, the National Weather Service obviously, the government's putting up balloons, taking data all in there, presumably an input to your models. How are they connecting in to the APIs? Maybe describe that whole process. Well yeah, so AccuWeather works with multiple weather providers and government agencies from around the world. It's actually one of our strengths because we are a global company and we have those agreements with all kinds of countries from around the world. So we ingest all of that data into our backend database and then we surface it through our APIs to our end users. Okay, so they're not directly sort of plugging into that API economy yet? Not yet, so we have to get there. No, I mean, for now we have the direct data feeds that we're ingesting that data and then we make it available through the AccuWeather service and we kind of ingest that data with some of our own algorithms to kind of create our own AccuWeather forecast too. That's actually a barrier to entry for you guys, the fact that you've built those pipelines from the backend and then you expose it at the front end and that's your business model, so. Yeah. Okay. I love that we're at where it goes from here because this is a great example of obviously the old way, papering, legal contracts. Now you go, hey, expose some APIs, exposing that data. Where does it go from here? Because now you've got, as workloads get more complex, this is part of the whole announcement of the new rebranding and the new capabilities around Anthos, which is around, hey, you know, you can move complex workloads. Certainly the serverless piece, we saw great news around that. So as it gets more complex, would this appache go from here? How do these guys go to the next level? So, you know, I think that the interesting thing is, is when you look at some of the themes here that we've talked about, it's about unlocking innovation. It's about providing ways that developers in a self-service way can get at the data, the resources that they need, as they need them to build these types of new types of applications. And that's your weather experience and their journey on that's a great example of it. Look, you know, moving from, from a set of enterprise customers that they were serving very well to the fact that really a whole ecosystem of applications needs access to weather data, and they knew that if they could just unlock that, that that would be an incredibly powerful thing. So we see a lot of variance of that, and in fact, a lot of what you see on the announcements this morning with Google Cloud is part of that. You know, Google Cloud is very much about taking these resources that Google has built that were available to a select few and unlocking those in a self-service fashion. But in a standard way that developers anywhere, and now with Anthos, which is hybrid and multi-cloud, wherever they are, being able to unlock those capabilities. So I view this as a continuation of the API promise. And you know, we're very excited about this because what we're seeing is more and more applications that are being built across using APIs in more and more environments. The great thing for Apigee is that anytime people are trying to consume APIs in a self-service fashion, an agile way, we're able to add value on that. So Allison, wagging her earlier, we asked her about the brand promise, and she said, we want our customers' customers and we want to help them innovate all the way down to our customers' customers' level. So we're thinking about weather. Weather gets a bad rap, right? I mean, for years, I've been making jokes about the weather, but the weather has been uncannily accurate these days. It used to be art, now it's becoming more science. So in the spirit of innovation, talk about what's happening just in terms of predicting whether it's, you know, big events, hurricanes, tornadoes, and some of the innovation that's occurring on that end. Well, I mean, let's look at from a broader standpoint too, the weather impacts everything. I mean, as we say, you look at all the different products out there in the marketplace that use weather to enhance them. So there's things you can do for actionable decisions too, it's not just what is the weather, it is how can the weather impact what I'm doing next, what I'm doing, where I go, what I wear, how I feel even, except every day you make a conscious and subconscious decision based on the weather. So when you can put that into products and tools and services to help make those actionable decisions for the users, that makes it a very, very powerful product, so that's why a lot of people are always seeking out weather data to use it to enhance their products. So give us an example. So a famous story I even told just in my session earlier, a connected inhaler company named Cohiro. They use our APIs by calling our current conditions. Every time a user had a respiratory attack. Over time it started to build a database as the user is using their inhaler. It then used machine learning to kind of find potential weather triggers and learn pattern recognition to find in the future, based on our forecast API, when might that user have another attack. So by this, it's a connected health product that's helping them monitor their own health and keep them safe and keep them prepared as opposed to being reactive. So the inhaler is instrumented. It's sending data to the cloud. And that's just one product. I mean, there's all kinds of things, connected thermostats and connected homes. This talks about the creativity of the application developer. And I think this highlights to me what DevOps is all about and what cloud and APIs is all about because you're exposing your resource, your product. You don't have to have a biz dev guy going, hey, let's target the pollen application market. Well, what the hell does that mean? You put the creativity in the edge, the data gets integrated into the application. This kind of kind of hits it on the core cloud value purposes, which is let the data drive the value from the app developer. Without your data, that app doesn't have the value. And there's multiple instances of what it could mean. The most valuable. It could be a golf app for around a lightning app. It could be whatever. Exactly. So this is kind of the notion of cloud productivity. Well, it's a notion of cloud productivity, but it's also this idea of a digital value chain. So, you know, data is products and APIs are products. And so now we see the emergence of API product managers. You know, this idea that we're going to go and build a whole ecosystem of products and applications that meet a whole set of customer needs that you might not even initially or ever imagine. I'm sure you folks see all the time new applications, new use cases. The idea is, you know, can I take this capability or can I take this set of data, package it up as an API that any developer can use in any way that they want to innovate and build new functionality around. And it's very exciting time. It makes developers way more productive than they could have been in the past. And this talks about the CI, CD, pipeline, end-to-end, programmable, programmable APIs. But you said something interesting I want to unpack real quick. Talk about this rise of API product managers because this is really, I think a statement that not only is APIs around for a long time to stay but this is instrumental value. What is an API product manager? What do they do? So it's a new concept that has, well, I shouldn't say it's totally a new concept. If you've talked to companies that have provided APIs you go back to the early days of folks like eBay or Flickr or all of these. The idea was that you can completely reinvent your business in the way that you partner with other companies by using APIs to tie these businesses together. And what you've now seen has been really, I'd say over the last five years, become a mainstream thing. You've got thousands of people out there in enterprises and internet companies and all sorts of industries that are API product managers who are going and looking at how do I package up the capabilities, the business processes, the data that my business has built and enable other companies, other developers to go and package these and embed them in the products and services that they're building. And that's the job of API product manager. It's just like a product manager that you would have for any other product but what they're thinking about is how do they make their API success? And to Mark's point, they saw money being left on the table, small little tweak now opens up a new product line and an economic model of cost structure that's pretty damn good. It's shifting to this idea of platform business models. And it's a super exciting thing that we're seeing. The companies that successfully do it, they see huge growth. And we think that every business is going to have to transition into this API product model eventually. Mark, what's the role of the data scientist? Obviously very important in your organization. And the relationship between the data scientist and the developers, and then specifically what is Google doing to help them coordinate and collaborate better, instead of wrangling data all day. Yeah, I mean, so for a data scientist, I mean, we actually have multiple areas, obviously. We're studying the weather data itself but then we're studying the use case of the data, how they're actually ingesting it itself, but... Incorporating that into our products and services. I mean, I don't know, I mean, that's kind of a... I mean, that data is everywhere. The key is the applications have the data built in. This is to your point about the data. Not necessarily incorporating it in, but to collaborate on creating products, right? I mean, you're doing a lot of data science. You got application developers, right? You're talking about tooling. Right. Are they just sort of separate silos or are they... No, I mean, we obviously have to have an understanding of what data's going to be successful, what's going to be ingested, and the easiest way to ingest it as well. So we obviously are analyzing it from that sense. Guys, take a step back for a second. This is Google Next. Mark, what's your impression of the show this year? What's the vibe? What's the day one storyline in your mind? You had a session, you were in earlier. What's been some of the feedback? What's it like? For me personally, it's that APIs power everything. So that's obviously what we've been very focused on, and that's what the messaging I've been hearing. But yeah, I mean, the vibe has been incredible here. You'd obviously be around so many different great minds and the creativity. It's definitely been a lot of fun. What was the talk, what was the session that you did? What was the talk about? How's the APIs, what were some of the feedback? Yeah, I mean, so the session I gave was how AccuWeather unlocked new business opportunities with APIs, and we got great feedback. It was a full house. I had lots of questions afterwards that followed me out into the hallway as well as actually running here because I was being held up, but lots of people are interested in learning about this. How can they unlock their own opportunity? How can they take what they have existing and bring it to a new audience? What's some of the questions that were kind of thematic? Kind of, you can stack rank the categorical questions. What were the main points? The biggest thing was like trying to make decisions about how for us, for example, having an enterprise model already, transitioning that to a self-serve model that actually worked. Before we were kind of engaging with clients directly, so having something that users could look at and on their own, immediately engage with and connect with and find ways that they can utilize it for their own business models and purposes. And you got to be psyched. API is a business model. You got API product managers. You got the cloud, Anthos, spanning now multiple domain spaces, on-prem, hybrid, multi. Well, those last points are very exciting to us. So, you know, if you look at it, you know, it was about two and a half years ago that Apigee became part of Google and GCP got into hybrid and multi-cloud with Apigee that we were, you know, the definitive API infrastructure for APIs wherever they lived. And what we saw this morning was GCP doubling down in a very big way on hybrid and multi-cloud. And so this is fantastic for this message of APIs everywhere. Apigee is going to be able to sit on top of Anthos and really wherever people are looking at either producing or consuming APIs, we'll be able to sit on top of that and make it a lot easier to do, capture that data and build new business models on top of it. Well, I'm going to make a prediction here in theCUBE that Apigee is going to be at the center of the value proposition as those apps get built, people go to the business model, connecting them under the covers is going to be a very interesting opportunity with you guys. It's very exciting, very exciting for us. You can hear it here first on theCUBE. Of course theCUBE's looking for a product manager, API to handle our CUBE database. So, if you're interested, we're always looking for a product manager, API economies here. I'm Jeffery DeValante. Here at theCUBE, day one coverage at Google Next. Stay with us for more of this short break.