 Live from Mountain View, California, it's The Cube, and OpenStack Silicon Valley brought to you by headline sponsor, Mirantis. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Silicon Valley for the OpenStack SV conference. Go to our new CrowdChat application if you're from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Jump in on the hashtag crowdchat.net slash OpenStack SV, join the conversation. I'm John Furrier, this is The Cube. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We'd like to call it the ESPN of Tech and my co is Jeff Frick here with me this week. Our next guest is, I'm excited to have on because she was an amazing media person at Gigaome, Gigaome Research, now working for Google and the market intelligence for the cloud group. Joe Maitland, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for having me. We love what Google's doing right now. First of all, I'm a big fan of Google living in Palo Alto and watching them grow up through the years as a startup to a huge success story, right? But they never really were that outbound focus on their business because it was a cloud, right? Search engine, but now on the enterprise side with cloud huge opportunity. A lot of folks from Google actually going out in the market, pressing the palms, talking to people, having events. That's the group you're in. So give us the update. So you're a media person, analyst, now you're inside the Google, Googleplex. Tell us the story, how did that happen? It's been like, I think it's about seven months now. I've been at Google and it's just incredible to see the pace. Just within seven months I've been at the company that it has moved this business from being like sort of known among kind of hardcore cloud developer types to now being like a main street platform that the whole market is watching very closely. And even within the last three months even, you can see the momentum is just steam rolling out. So what do you analyze? You analyze market trends because you're, what's happening in media is interesting in the disruption side. People are vertically integrating kind of media because of the internet and mobile. You can do a direct business model. Certainly in the VC community, Andreessen Horowitz is programming directly, Wall Street Journal writers joining Sequoia Capital. People are bringing analysts in-house. I mean, this seems to be the trend, the democratization and the communications is about the content. Right, right, right. I think so, yeah. And I just, you know, from my perspective I've always had a kind of somewhat critical eye on the market and a healthy kind of skepticism. And, you know, I think big technology companies and Google's no different. You know, they, especially out here in Silicon Valley, you know, can be in somewhat of a bubble, right? And it's important to understand, you know, how the rest of the market perceives you. Most importantly, how customers perceive you and just sort of having that voice of the customer. So I think that sort of coming from a background of research and media and stuff where you're really close to, you know, the feet on the street is a useful position. So I'd love to follow up on that because I think most people's perception of Google rightly or wrongly is probably that they haven't really cared as much and they're delivering their products and they're rolling along and the adoption of those products has been really, really great. So they haven't necessarily had to, you know, kind of listen to the customer because they're kind of developing before we know what we need kind of an Apple-esque, if you will, with some of the stuff the job used to do. So how are they doing that and how are they doing that culturally inside what has been such a dominant engineering culture to now actually know they actually got to go sell and talk to people and have meetings and those types of things. You know, the cloud platform business is not a new business inside of Google focused on, you know, more the B2B space, right? The apps business, the Google apps business has been in the market for many, many years talking to enterprise customers, talking to small, medium-sized businesses and has built a large organization there that is what you would think of more as a traditional B2B-type organization. So the cloud platform business is basically in that group and building, you know, those same kind of core skill sets. So yeah, they led the way. Yeah, okay, interesting. So talk about the analysis. So let's put our critical eye on the market. And while you're here, we loved to have analysts on theCUBE last week at the Tableau conference we had analysts and that's a great company, like Google. It's hard to really find the flaws but there are things that people are working on. So what's your take of the cloud opportunity out there right now? Where's the hype? Where's the sizzle? Where's the steak? Who's got the meat on the bone? Talk about the horses on the track, whatever metaphor we want to use. What do you see out there right now as a big mega trend? What's the landscape look like from your perspective? Well, I think that now there's absolutely no question that it's kind of, it's the mainstream delivery mechanism for IT and consumption of IT now. Like there's no question of, you know, will we or won't we do cloud, right? It is the sort of de facto model for delivery and consumption of IT. So that's kind of the basis point. And then after that, I think, you know, we've had this constant debate for a long time about public versus hybrid versus, you know, and different vendors trying to slot in here. I think that that mantra has kind of gone away and the hybrid story is what the customer has been demanding for a long time. And, you know, that kind of brings us back around to sort of open stack and what its original promise was. We have some thoughts there about, you know, why that didn't necessarily take off in the way that people expected. Talk about Amazon, is it unstoppable strain at this point? Is it the tsunami that's going to take the whole beach head? How does Google put that seawall up, as we say, because certainly open stack's trying. I mean, Amazon is driving lower cost, which is commoditizing and they're innovating. So, you know, it's almost going to be free for developers soon if they keep on doing this at this pace. So they're adding more stuff and reinventing and expecting a big enterprise push. We'll be broadcasting live there. So how do you guys answer Amazon and what does the open stack community need to do? Developers want infrastructure as a code. Born in the cloud, developers love Amazon. But now, IT, they're born on premise. So they're going to do a little bit of born on premise and migrate to the cloud. That hybrid is the killer term. So how do you compete, how do you guys compete, how do everyone else compete with the wave of Amazon hitting the beach? So, I mean, Google's viewpoint on the market is really that, you know, to date, cloud has been sort of really hard to do. Looking at like all the players, right? Whether you're talking about open stack, you know, the big public, you know, clouds, it's been too hard, basically. And the viewpoint that we have is that it should be much more of a frictionless, you know, frictionless approach. And a lot of the efforts that Google has underway are about just basically making cloud super, super easy and simple to use. You know, we have sort of in our private lives, you know, all kinds of technologies that have won the day, just purely because they were easy to use, right? And then once you get inside of work, you know, it's the same, you have the same brain, right? You're not suddenly switching into this different person that sits, you know, working during the day. You want things to be simple. And the enterprise- So frictionless, frictionless and seamless for any developer, whether born on the cloud or in IT. Right, and the idea of sort of portability, right? The openness of it. So so far, clouds have been very closed, pretty much locked in. The promise of OpenStack was that you would be able to move workloads between different OpenStack clouds. That dream never happened. We think containers are a better way to do that. And the whole kind of docker momentum, which went from sort of nothing a couple of quarters ago to now being this hot thing. Docker experiments turned into the real deal. I mean, VMware just co-opeted. VMware always saw that announcement. But that really appeals to the developer, right? Yeah, it does. And I think, but if you ask any IT shop, right, they're trying to just make the infrastructure easier to use. And they're just, they're trying to make applications easy to consume for the end users. So anything that does that, I think it's going to be embraced by- So we have a question coming from our crowd chat here, which is our innovative LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter chat on the hashtag. And it comes from Stu Miniman. Either AWS or Azure is our active in OpenStack. Why is Google Cloud? And then someone said, that's probably a question for Amazon and Microsoft, not Google. But can you comment? I mean, obviously Google's always been open source. I've been friendly. But why are you guys involved in OpenStack and obviously Amazon? We definitely believe that, you know, open source is extremely important in this marketplace. And we think that OpenStack, you know, we will, we're going to back the OpenStack, but it's the preferred way to use OpenStack, right? There hasn't yet been a single semantic deployment model for OpenStack, which is why it's kind of merged in this sort of complex, still in stroller phase, you know, the technology. Once that's finally ironed out, then Google will be all over this thing like a rash, right? But until we get to that stage, in the meantime, containers we think will work very well, locally, within OpenStack, Red Hat's doing a ton of great work there with its atomic project. So I think that's probably- So you'll be all over like a rash. I love that phrase, because what you're implying then, if I can dissect that was, as the building blocks or Lego blocks get set, because that's the attractiveness of OpenStack from all the C level and IT guys you talked to. Hey, I want to program my own Amazon. So you're saying when the building blocks are there, the Legos, if you will, then you see it really coming together. Right, I think so. I think when there's a standard that everyone gets behind, you know, that's what we're watching for very closely. That makes a question. How far do you think we are away from that? Yeah, that's a good, I mean, we'll learn that here really at this show, but I think that there's still, you know, a lot of work to be done, right? The installer for OpenStack is something like 30,000 lines of code. If you make one mistake in the installation process, it falls over. So it's still incredibly hard to use and then get set up. So, you know, is that like a year's worth of work to get that, you know, fixed? I don't know, but, you know, it's considerable. It's still a ways to go. Yeah, that's always been the knock, right? But then we keep hearing that the distributions are getting closer and closer and closer, but then you talk to someone who's kind of kind of gentle to the world and they give you the wink, wink. No, not really. Well, you can't take one tool and point it at two different OpenStack. They're distros, right? They don't talk to each other. Yeah. So, yeah, that's hard if you're a customer. So, Tim Crawford mentions, when there's a single version, single direction of OpenStack, then you'll be all over it. Is that what you meant? Was it a direction? Was it the building blocks? No, it's the building, the actual semantic model, the deployment model of it. There is no single way that you deploy OpenStack today. It's 35 different ways to. So what's your commentary on Martin Miko selling Eupoliptus? Now, you've got a kind of a two hat. Put your analyst hat on. Take your Google hat off for a second and comment on Martin. Obviously, we love Martin's history. He's just a great guy. He's a tech athlete. My sequel is well-documented, but that's enabled. But real surprise to me to see that move. What's your take on that? Yeah, to know, I mean, in the past 12 months, he's definitely been in, you know, conversations on stage at Structure, you know, the giga-on event. He's definitely got more. Chum in the waters? Getting like warmer, shall we say, towards the Eupoliptus community. And he actually said to his credit, he said right from the very beginning, even the early days, when the APIs are ready, you know, when actually, he said when the APIs are ready, and by that he meant when OpenStack has 30% market share, they would get behind it. So I think, you know, he's kind of just, he's following his strategy. And he brought that up around keeping up with Amazon. I called it a moving train. Yeah. I mean, Amazon's unleashing new features at a pace that's pretty impressive. So I said, how do you keep up with that? He's like, well, just, we'd lock into the APIs. How do they keep up with Amazon? If they're going to have that fast follower strategy, is that sustainable in your opinion? How does OpenStack keep up? How does Martin's follow, if you could lift us having the AWS compatibility. Yeah. The fast follower is their strategy. He said that here is boring. That's pretty hard to do. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's actually hard for customers as well to keep up with that release train. You know, you watch sort of like, look at the customer base and talk to customers, how many of them are actually on the latest features, the latest products, how many of them have taken advantage of the latest price cuts? You know, do they even know about the latest price cuts? Sometimes like, you can get ahead of yourself in the acceleration and forget, you know, that customers need to come along with you. So, you know, that's an important piece of it. So talk about the API economy. I know you, you know, some of your writings and research, you know, we love that notion, but it's kind of an ambiguous term. You mentioned it, Martin, was obviously looking at the APIs. We've had API debates on theCUBE with Randy Baez and others around, you know, what should we do? Should we standardize around this? Shares are free for all. What does the API economy mean to customers? Well, I mean, how do you talk to folks about that trend? Because we are living in an API world. The container thing is, obviously from a REST perspective, it looks good. Stateless applications look great with Docker. Then you got stateful applications. All these new trends are kind of connecting in around the hybrid. So what is the API economy or landscape look like? What is the preferred state of that piece of the market? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, you know, there's always, it sort of goes back a little bit to your earlier question. I think that this is a huge market. There's going to be multiple players here. And what you're looking for from a customer perspective is, you know, stable APIs, consistent APIs, APIs that support, you know, services globally. So I think that's the kind of, you know, from the customer looking in, that's the bare minimum. And, you know, then there's, you know, there's always going to be emerging new things. And then it's just how well they talk to the existing world. Do you get to be critical internally at Google? Do they give you the latitude? Because that's, you know, you have that experience. They probably want that from you. They probably want you to be objective and say, hey, you know, we can't slap them around a little bit, slap them into shape, if you will. But the vendors that promote themselves too much tend to get a backlash. Hey, listen, everybody at Google is like that. Let me tell you, it's very... Like promoting themselves or understand the backlash? No, no, just debate internally. It's very, very vibrant discussion inside the company across like all parts of the organization. Vibrant is a gentle term for it. How are you handling that? Are you holding your own? Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. It's super healthy, right? And it's like, it's sort of the notion of Darwin, right? If everyone has, you know, is committing ideas and stuff, eventually the right idea will... So we have a recommendation if you can carry the flag for us into Google, because I've been to all the IOs since they were founded. Great event, always fun, get the great giveaways. Although I didn't go this year, I was out of town, but they're huge. So will there be like an I-O Cloud only event? Because it's so massive, I-O, it's so crowded. Oh, you already have it, GCP Live. So the first one was in March. The next one's going to be in November. What's it called? It's called GCP Live, Google Cloud Platform Live. And yep, it'll be probably a couple of thousand people there. It's at the Mission Bay Conference Center. GCP? GCP Live, yeah, Google Cloud Platform Live. November in San Francisco? Yeah. Great, I think we're going to be there. Cool, I hope so, yeah. Joe, any commentary for the folks out there? Last question. I mean, it makes sense to open stack. For the folks out there who are looking at this going, is this just another industry standard group that's going to be one big Barney deals and hugs and kisses and kumbaya? Will there anything come out of that? That's the critical eye of some folks. Like, I'm going to bet my career on this. I don't want to get stuck down this cul-de-sac of nothing. Where's the beef? Where's the meat on the bone? Break that down for the folks that want to understand, is it real? What do you think's going to happen? Yeah, no, it's real, for sure, it's real. And I think that it has to survive, it has to happen for the sake of all of these legacy IT vendors behind us. This is the, as we said, the table stakes now, right? It's cloud computing as a model of delivering consumption of IT. So the vendors, the guys behind us, HP, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, et cetera, they've made their bet and it's open stack as a model for cloud, right? And if the future model of IT is cloud and they've picked open stack, open stack has to work. So I think they have to kind of, for the longest time, whenever I heard from these companies, it was all about how we're going to differentiate, how we're going to differentiate. I think they actually need to come together and work on how they're going to be similar and what the core is and decide that and kind of get past some of that sort of actually competitive piece and make some decisions collectively and move the whole thing forward, right? Awesome. Well, we just got a text that says, it looks like we're going to be at the Google Cloud Platform event in San Francisco, but theCUBE, so we will be broadcasting live. So maybe you can co-host it with us. I'll hang out with you guys, yeah? You're awesome on theCUBE, but great to have the media background also helps because you understand the landscape. But you're now on the other side now, so good luck with everything and maintain that critical eye and healthy skepticism, I love that. That's a nice word to maintain. You can't say too critical. That's it. Maybe you'll be on the other side again, I think. But good to see Google out, Joe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. This is theCUBE live in Silicon Valley, breaking it down here at OpenStack, Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back into this short break.