 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech FN coverage. This is our day three analyst wrap. We've been at Google Cloud Next for three days now covering content, but you know it because you've been watching Lisa Martin here with a table of industry experts, our co-founder and co-CEO, John Furrier, to my left, Dustin Kirkland is here, and Rob Strudte. And as you just heard, the exhibition hall is closing in 20 minutes, so we're going to give you all of our expertise in 20 minutes. John, Google Cloud Next 23, the first one in person since 2019, 20,000 people. There's still a ton of people here. What are your top takeaways from this year's show? I think the top takeaway for me is, we've kind of hit it on the other analysts, but this one kind of summarizes all that. Google in the past six months has changed the game on who they are, their narrative, they have absolutely thrown down the gauntlet that they are cool and relevant, okay? And I think if you look at how they're doing their show, it's all about the future, not about the past and they have the ability to do that because number three, they're punching up to AWS and Microsoft. And I think this is going to put pressure on the other clouds to answer because not only did they just say it with conjecture and their marketing, they delivered, they delivered great demos. Their ecosystem was buzzing, the cube could have had two sets here. The content was phenomenal. Conversations were on point. Again, very relevant. And they have a clear line of sight to execute and will France the CTO kind of laid out that they have a roadmap that he was kind of teasing us a little bit. There's more in there. But I think they're poised and they're looking good. They're on the track and they can make moves. They have the ability to make moves. It's clear that they are not going to sit around and be patient with the number three cloud position. So, you know, love the energy, the developer angle. I think they have a real workshop there. The solutions, probably talking about that and the ecosystem. This is all part of what the other clouds have as advantage. They will come down to which cloud is best for developers and the enterprise. That's going to be a great game to watch. It's going to ratchet game. It's going to be a one-upmanship of each cloud. We're going to see at each event ignite at Microsoft and then Amazon reinvent who lays down the best content, the best products. That's, it's cloud time. It's go time. It's go time. It is go time. Rob, some of your takeaways. You talked a lot about data this week. You guys had Will Branniston on Google Cloud CTO. What did you get from a data strategic perspective? Well, funny enough, from Google, not much beyond AI and AI uses data. I think what was really interesting to me and a very, I think actually a strong point was there was a lot of partners that came on both from the GSI side as well as the ISV side that are partnering up with Google to have that connective tissue between the data layer and the model layer. And I think that's super important as there seems to be some developing, I guess you could say white space as well as collaboration space in there where people are going to be able to play. Startups are going to be able to play beyond just being the 70% of the co-hears and AI 21s and that are building models on top of that infrastructure. It's also the people building the infrastructure. And I think there's enough space to play in there. And I think that was healthy and came out of day three. I mean, I tell people to go back and watch today. I mean, I've been ecstatic about it. We had PWC's chief data and AI officer on and talked about that. We talked about it with all treks. We talked about how that connective tissue really comes together. And to me, that is super exciting to hear. Dustin, what did you hear from, especially from the ecosystem, thriving ecosystem, SI perspective? Yeah, well, first of all, I think the energy here, we've said it over and over, it's palpable. I think there's been a lot of pent-up demand, frankly, to get back together in this expo hall, beautifully designed Google with the design elements, the red, yellow, greens, blues, purples, they're all over. It's just a bright and airy conference. And I think with that, you know, generates a sense of community and inventiveness. On the SI front, the system's integrator front, I'm blown away. I mean, frankly, blown away by how the SI's and the consulting agency showed up at this conference. We had at least PWC, Deloitte, Slalom. I'm sure I'm missing some of the others. They're all here on the floor. And what we heard over and over and over again is that Google Cloud is generating new business for them. They have clients coming to them saying, we need some generative AI. We need your help integrating that generative AI. And by the way, we have an opinionated choice here. We're seeing Google as the leaders in this space. I think the SI is a great point because it's a signal that the enablement of the cloud is key. Now, the secret to the cloud game is not well discussed in the media, but the cloud's a platform at the end of the day and platforms have to enable things to happen. Either disruptive enablement or financial enablement, solution enablement. And if you have an enablement, the SI is going to show up. If they have the ability to make money, their job is to put solutions together with customers. And I think that is a signal of relevancy and AI is perfectly positioned, the stuff they showed. I mean, it's fodder for the consulting agencies because they can do more. They're building platforms on top of the cloud. What I'm loving about that is unlike Google, unlike say an IBM with a professional service, global services agency, Google's professional services is relatively small. And I think in terms of some of the white space or the blank canvas that Google has left to others to help solve is very much in that partner ecosystem and that SI space. How is it an advantage for them? Well, I think it's an advantage because it took a very different approach than say an Amazon did, where Amazon actually went down this path quite a while ago. I think it'll be interesting to see from a margin play perspective how the GSIs and SI's and consulting firms long-term make out, but there was some things that Amazon did themselves even and brought in house and created different certification paths versus having a higher level app and tried to go after the higher level apps being built in. I think what's interesting with the approach that Google is taking is really, again, building a pathway to money for these GSIs. We had the Wipros, the HCLs, we had Pythian, we had so small and large all here on stage. Quantify all these guys. Yeah, all talking about how they're building on top and I think to your point and to John's point about it being a platform, they're really focused on the peoples and the processes, the technologies of Google. I think many of these companies have had AWS business units for quite some time. The fact that they're all now have Google business units inside there and their heads of Google business units are showing off. That's huge. You mean in their title? Yes. Yeah, I want to dive in on how it's an advantage to Google. I think that's a really insightful question. I think it's an advantage because customers are going to end up with less siloed solutions, right? It's not all in-house and frankly, John talks about SuperCloud. Part of what big enterprises want is a multi-cloud strategy. They want to use the best of the best here and there. And I think Google working with multiple systems integrators better addresses what customers at the enterprise actually want. Yeah, that's a good point about multi-cloud. Lisa, you know, it's hiding in plain sight right here. No one's talking about it, but it's right there. They're stitching it together. The demos would do it. Talk to us about all about cross application support, data control planes. We heard Alters with the split architecture. They got control planes and data planes. This platform that works across clouds is super relevant because you can have elements of cloud in your organization, but getting them to work together, that's going to be a great white space. I mean, to me, that's a white space that I think a new brand will fill. I don't think I'd see an existing brand. It could be an SI, by the way. Could be. And I think if you go around, you can see that the SIs and GSIs are all building out intellectual property in software. Some on top of Google, some that can be multi-cloud. I think it's very interesting to see how they're all bringing it together because you have Google distributed cloud now. What's that control plane when you have, you know, that out in a realm in a CSP at Orange over in France, yet I have my, some of my data here in the States. How do I bring all of that together? Use it for certain models, data governance, data protection, all of the security elements. There's a lot of white space that's going to be for these stretched, even stretched Google clouds. There's a lot that's going to go into that. What did you hear from a responsible AI perspective? You know, we talked a lot about AI. We always do. It was a huge focus of the show. We talk about ethics, responsibility. You can't not. What did you hear from Google? You want to get your three perspectives on where they're going from a responsibility angle. You know how I feel about this. I mean, look it, you got to be ethical with the AI but I don't think that should be the priority out of the gate right now in the industry. I think, you know, you hear words like guardrails. Those are like, I think, virtue signaling in the tech world because you got to let the AI run but you got to control it, right? I get that. I'm not saying to be unethical. I'm just saying, if you over rotate on compliance, you're never going to get the innovation. So I do like what's happening with the solutions and that is let's get the facts on factual stuff nailed down. For example, you can, extensions, great opportunity to create data that could be horizontally scalable while maintaining the policies that require access. That's just good compliance. So I think I would much rather see the conversation around trust, ethics, and fear, with solutions, not dogma. Like, I mean, I see a lot out there like, you know, we got to be careful. Don't let the AI run the society. It's a real concern and we're not going to be able to answer this in 60 or 90 seconds. I will say that there was a segment that Rob and I did yesterday with Deloitte and Toyota where Deloitte laid out their seven principles that Deloitte has defined for responsible artificial intelligence integration. It was actually one of the richest articulations I think I've seen and it's, you know, it's part of I think Deloitte's sales pitch, frankly, but I think it's an important part of, you know, how they're coming in. So where that is a primary concern, someone wants to adopt AI into their industry, but they maybe are regulated in such a way that they need to do so responsibly. Deloitte's coming at that head on as opposed to maybe thinking about it later as John says we should think about that later. Yeah. Well, I mean, guard rails is the safe word, right? The safe word is guard rails, right? Okay, it's a safe space, Rob. Oh, I love safe spaces. Sometimes not, but what are you doing here? We're gonna jump the shark, we're gonna jump the shark. So when you do actually jump the shark a little bit and I was talking to a few of the customers that they let us talk to here and I kind of, you know, went off to the side with them and a lot of them were talking about, hey, like for instance, a very large financial services organization was talking about, we put a human in the loop whenever it talks to one of our customers because we don't need hallucinations going out to that person because it's more about protecting brands. So I think to your point about it being a safe word, you know, the guard rails, it's more about protecting brand than it is about protecting people. And I think that is the key to guard rails right now, I think with AI is the big fear about brand, Wendy's giving me too much bacon or something like that. Can you have too much bacon? I don't know. I like the web though, I like the web. We talked about this in the last analyst thing, but like the web, the solutions are nascent early, right? So if we focus on making better, better every time, that's the iteration we want to see fast. Now there is danger and I think there will be an AI instance where people go, you remember Twitter, the plane landed on the Hudson River like, oh, I get what Twitter's good for, taking photos when the plane lands in the Hudson. You know, and you knew what the use case was, everyone kind of aware of the utility. I think AI is going to have that moment where it's either going to be good or bad, where they go, okay, we got to rein this in, but I don't think we're there yet. I think we are at a spot now where you got the rules of engagements and you got the innovation, but the key is getting those demos. Now talk about like scary workspace. You're going to let workspace read all your email? Yeah. I mean, that first thing that pops in my head is like, what's in my email? I already assumed it already was, but that's Google, right? So I use a lot of Gmail. And like we were talking about, I think that the people growing up now that have been using workspaces since middle school, they kind of assume that that stuff's just being read. They're on Signal, they're on WhatsApp, they're on, you know, they're doing encryption and snaps and all of this stuff. But I think what's really key to all of this is that you're right. It's not being afraid of the AI, it's trust but verify. And I think trust but verify is going to be here for a while. It's never going to go out of vogue. It's one of my favorite things anyway, so I'm going to keep reusing it, but trust but verify the AI, especially when it's protecting your brand and your customers. I think we should call this what it is though. Right now we're in a pretty unregulated state, you know? And we're I think still a couple of years away from actual AI regulation. If you just look at cryptocurrency for instance, it's still unregulated and you know, now crypto's gone on 10 years, 10 years old. Now I think arguably AI has far more reach into our personal lives and so maybe it will come a little more quickly, but part of why we're able to do everything everywhere is because there aren't really rules or laws or frameworks around it. The thing that Deloitte put together is a set of like principles and best practices. That's a great point, Dustin. I think that's a great point. Crypto and AI, again, come back to what I feel is a disruptive enabler. Whenever you have disruptive enablers like that, you disrupt something and people freak out. Yeah. That's just the way it is. So the old way of doing stuff becomes a new way and hopefully for the better. And I think that's what I saw with these web, these inflection points, they got to get better. If it doesn't get better, and crypto's kind of went a little dark, a little bit, I think it'll come back big. I mean, this is a whole different segment, but I think crypto's gone a little bit dark because it was so unregulated and you've got some massive theft and fraud, money laundering, everything that's gone through, what is otherwise a really brilliant set of technologies to drive the payment industry. Yeah, it's good to say it's the tech, the blockchain underneath the hood. The tech's incredible, but we also just enabled a whole bunch of people to steal money and launder money. But I also, they missed that train. But I think, yeah, I think the blockchain will actually may get a lift out of AI for being able to have the, using the distributed ledger to be able to track where data came from. Actually, blockchain may be a pretty good idea for that. So guys, I want to bring this up because we've talked about this before we came on, at least about the events. Love this event, again, I think Google has done some of the past six months that's going to change the narrative for them, certainly, and the industry. Reinvent's coming up, Microsoft's event ignites also before reinvent. The cloud guys got to get their events together. Now, the question is, with all this change happening, how do you run an event and stay on top of each other? Because what Google just did is lay down the gauntlet, so there's going to be one upmanship going on in the cloud world, and differentiation has to happen. Now, this literally, it's full out in the arena, showtime for the clouds. I, well, I don't know what they're going to say, but they're working on it right now, obviously. I think you will see both Microsoft and Amazon bringing customers like Google, bringing the Wendy's demo here. I think Microsoft and Amazon will have equivalent demos from customers who have leaned in early, maybe planted some flags in certain spaces, as this is our space. You'll probably see some acquisitions. I mean, both AWS and Microsoft have an acquisitive history, especially when they need to make up ground. I don't know, both predictions, Rob? Yeah, I mean, I think that AWS is in the toughest spot because Microsoft's event, Ignite, is two weeks before re-invent, and right now, just having been in the Amazon, their stuff is almost in the can at this point. It's, it- They're in the content. The content, the content in the services they're going to launch are baked. By the end of September, if you're not within your time window for launch, for at least private preview or, you know, better GA, you're not going. So I think they're in a tough spot with what they're going to get. I said this on my podcast, I'll say it again, so it's already out there. I think Amazon's event strategy has to move away from making money, about money-making, into really nurturing the ecosystem. And, you know, one of the things that they've got a lot of complaints on at AWS was the gouging the partners at re-invent. And so I got to tell you, this is real here at Google, and their ecosystem is flourishing. This could be the next AWS, Rob. Could be. Okay, it feels a lot like the early AWS days in the sense of the excitement. So, you know, it's competition time. So when you're competing on the value for your customers, you want to rethink about how you engage your customers because they can go somewhere else. So we even heard an interesting thing about Ignite, where they're only going to have little, the partners only get little demo boots or something weird about that. We're going to have to dig into that and find out what's going on there. But we'll be on the ground at AWS. We're going to be in the press room. We're going to get the stores went into a whole three days of coverage of re-invent. These cloud shows are going to be the tell sign. They'll be the canary in the coal mine for what's going to be happening because the impact of Google, Microsoft Azure, and AWS re-invent, those are going to set the agenda. And by the way, they're at war with each other. Okay, so. And where's the best place to go to get that coverage? They did a wartime conciliatory, Rob. Do they have to? Best place to go to get all the coverage on that is, of course, theCUBE. Guys, thank you so much for wrapping three days of Google Cloud Next content, getting your perspectives on what you saw here, what you didn't see, but also how the gauntlet's been laid down. You can find all of our content from Google Cloud Next on theCUBE.net on demand anytime. You can also find all of our editorial content on SiliconANGLE.com. Anything that you want to know about in terms of the cloud wars, you know where to go. For my co-hosts, John Furrier, Dustin Kirkland, Rob Stetsche, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our coverage of Google Cloud Next. We'll see you on the next show.