 Hello and welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Pella Alto studios. We're going across the pond, across the United States, then the pond to Bill Mu, who's the founder of Mu-era Consulting. We're going to talk privacy, and we're going to talk about the challenges with cloud, cloud scale, and also privacy. With the recent report, Facebook behaving like digital gangsters, as the report from the parliament came out, the huge focus on this big tech data problem around privacy and user rights. So Bill, welcome, good to see you. Thanks for coming on camera. I know you're in London area, so you're in the UK, so great to see you. Well, it's really great to join you, and I'm glad the technology's allowing us to chat from this great distance. Well, we'd love to bring the conversations, which are very robust on Twitter. Obviously, at Furrier, at Bill Mu, and all our friends, Sarbite, Tim Crawford, Stu Miniman, the whole set of cloud influence has been really talking a lot lately around digital transformation. You know, it's the classic, you know, cliche. Oh, digital transformation, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really about cloud. It's about cloud scale, about data. But now, as people start to realize the scale and some of these immediate benefits of DevOps and agile development, in comes the privacy conversation. In comes the, where's the data? The moving data around is expensive. Managing data and privacy is hugely expensive, and there are consequences. And one of the most obvious news stories, just in the past, you know, 24, 48 hours, is the parliament report that says Facebook has been acting like digital gangsters. Now, this puts it on the main stage. Unpack this for us. Well, I come from a cloud background, and I'm not a sort of rabid privacy campaigner by any stretch of the imagination. I've been a passionate supporter of cloud and worked with UK cloud who've been almost unique in being a company that took on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the cloud market and beat them all at their own game. Here in the UK, we have a procurement framework that the government hosts called G-Cloud for public sector technology, and UK cloud captured something like 30, 35% of the market with Amazon way down on 12%. So it was almost a unique instance. I can't think of a single other market anywhere in the world where these guys have been beaten at their own game, sort of in the cloud market, but with a very specific niche. And the niche that K-Cloud focused on was differentiating themselves around data sovereignty, higher levels of assurance and security, and making sure that they're really sensitive government data, be it your tax records or possibly your criminal record if you have one, or medical records or whatever, all this data is kept safe. And it's really, it's been really interesting to see the news recently and some of the hysteria around privacy. I have seen as all of us have the tech revolution and the cloud and how all of this has come to fruition and enabled so much. And now we're seeing the tech backlash and I think that's at its full force at the moment. One of the trends that we're seeing, and I want to get your thoughts on this is that on the one extreme is users own their own data. And you got to see things like blockchain and some interesting progressive solutions around the supply chain of users owning their own data. And then just the natural trend of edge computing where the data is closest to the, whether it's the people or devices, the, you call it the internet of things or edge computing is now becoming part of cloud. And with the global distributed nature of how the cloud is built, the emphasis on regions. So you see, you know, certain every country has might have their own characteristics. How is this changing the digital transformation equation? Because, you know, on one hand, you see people saying, look at you know, you pick the right cloud for the right job. And then the other one saying, no, it should be all a vendor procurement decision, not so much a cloud decision. So there's kind of like two camps going on here. One saying, let procurement drive the decision. And the other one saying, let the apps or the workloads drive the architecture and cloud decisions. Your thoughts on this, this kind of mega trend of data at the edge, ownership of data, cloud selection. It's kind of a nightmare. It's kind of confusing your thoughts. I think we're definitely seeing an acceptance that we're in a multi-cloud world. I think there are hardly any companies out there that don't have an element of cloud in a number of different places. And that you may have dictated a strategic alignment about one particular cloud vendor, but you're bound to have some legacy stuff as well. You may well have some SaaS applications. You may have Salesforce or any other thing. And therefore by, by almost by default, almost every organization is in some form of a multi-cloud environment anyway. And therefore we need to accept that as a reality. And as what we've seen is a cloud migration and people taking various different workloads to the crowd, people have naturally started with the easy stuff, the low hanging fruit. So typically you're taking virtualized workloads to easy environments like a VMware cloud or something like that. You're taking net new, the sort of green field developments into sort of cloud native environments. And those are the sort of places where you're really breaking ground with all of this. And this is going to be leaving behind certain legacy applications, which is a sort of the really difficult stuff that you'll leave till later. And a lot of people have already cracked much of the easy stuff, the low hanging fruit. And they're now having to face up to the more difficult stuff. But I think one of the things you would need to be aware about here is that it's not just about a focus on applications and workloads. One of the things that you find is that typically you may have a few new applications that you're developing, you may sort of have the odd sort of change from time to time. But typically the number of applications you use and the nature of those applications doesn't actually change enormously. What does change is the data volume. So whilst people are overly focused on well which applications are going to be moving and in which order, not enough companies are actually thinking really seriously about well, what are we going to do with the data? People have budgets that are either stationary or possibly in decline and they have data volumes that are going through the roof. And the moment we have Edge and the moment we have 5G this is going to come home to really hold them. And you'd actually need to have a really sensible data strategy to get ahead of this problem. Otherwise you're going to be facing big ingress and egress charges because getting data in and out of the cloud isn't cheap. And also you're going to have integration problems. But on top of that, you have the privacy issue because a large chunk of that data is going to be sort of personally identified viable data. It's going to be the type of data covered by GDPR and possibly new regulations, whatever's coming up next in the US. A lot of the data won't be covered this because it'll be data that isn't privacy sensitive. But if you don't have a really sensible data strategy, first of all, you're not going to be able to deal with the massive growing volumes of data which are just going to get worse with 5G and Edge. But also you're going to face real problems with privacy if suddenly people say, I want this removed or I want that taken down or something like that. And you go, well, what on earth is it? How do I do that? Where's the story? What service is it on? So Bill, I got to get your thoughts on this. You mentioned migration tool in the news today. Google acquired cloud migration platform, Aluma, which has only raised 15 million in funding, shows that Google is trying to catch up. Amazon touts highly their migration tool for moving off Oracle. So you're seeing migration is a big part of it. So I want to get your thoughts on the cloud players. You got Google nipping at the heels of Azure, Azure nipping at the heels of AWS. And you got IBM and Oracle kind of kind of in the back falling behind. I want you to get your thoughts on the top three and then IBM and Oracle, do they have a shot? And your thoughts of IBM think was just last week. A lot of conversations around IBM and the cloud with their cloud private solution. Your thoughts, Amazon, Azure, Google, and then IBM and Oracle. I'm going to take this in two different ways. First of all, I'm going to say, well, here's what we're seeing at a general market level. And secondly, I'm going to say, well, what have I seen on the ground? On the ground, maybe I'll start with that. I worked in the UK public sector and we've been out there competing and winning a lot of business and doing really very well. One of the things that we've seen is that having established a lead in this market and a point where we're the people everyone are gunning for, which is stranger to be ahead of the big hyperscalers in this market. We found that Amazon and certainly Azure are all over our accounts. We almost never see a competition or any sort of capacitive bids from companies like Oracle or IBM that they're just not in the market. We don't see them at all. And certainly for IBM, in the UK, the finance sector and the public sector are meant to be the main markets they're focused on. And if we're not seeing them, we just got to worry about how credible they are in those markets. Now, if you look at a sort of global scale. Hold on, just to interrupt, we lost you for a quick second and it'll glitch on the screen on the connectivity. But did you mention Oracle, I mean Google? What's Google like out there in the ground? Anything? Okay, from a global perspective, there is obviously AWS or way ahead. You've got Azure, who are very credible second player and they've got a lot of strength. I mean, they've got a foot both in the public cloud but also in the hybrid cloud. I think you shouldn't overlook the strength of the Azure Stack offering. And also they've got an enormously strong partner ecosystem with CSPs and MSPs that are going to take a lot of their technology forward. So I think they're going to be credible across the space. Google are in an interesting position. I think they're investing heavily. They have deep pockets. They are some distance behind. I'm not seeing them in any competitive bids that we're entering into. So you've got to worry about how much traction they're really getting in the market. But they've certainly got very deep pockets and you shouldn't dismiss them. There are likes of Alibaba who, you know, they may not be present in this market at the moment, but again, you can't dismiss them. The companies that you possibly might dismiss as serious cloud players are maybe Oracle and IBM. Because we're not seeing them in any of the shortlist that we're up against. We're not seeing them in the market. We're not seeing them put in the level of investment, the billions of infrastructure investment that you need to have to keep up in this market. And I actually think IBM are in a very strong position. When I said earlier, we've moved a lot of low hanging fruit and then we're now getting onto difficult stuff. IBM have the services business to help the big companies with the complex migrations and the really challenging stuff. And I think that's where IBM is going to play. And I think they have a very strong role to play there. I just don't see them as a cloud player. And maybe we should just be describing them as a services company now. I want to get your thoughts on, that's maybe a little bit tangent to the cloud, but it's kind of related with multicloud on the horizon or actually here, everyone has a lot of different clouds. When you put the connective tissue together for multicloud, you can't help but ignore Cisco and VMware. Both have presence in enterprises. Thoughts around the network layer, get NSX on VMware, and you got also Cisco moving up the stack with their DevNet program, developer program, we're seeing a lot of action going on around the software defined data center as it relates to on-premise and multicloud. Your thoughts on that market, can you share any insights there? Yeah, I mean, I've come from a company that was hosting possibly the largest VMware cloud in Europe, and we're very familiar with some of these technologies. And I think VMware has had a very good position in the market. I'm not sure that they are going to be able to sustain that, we're seeing a lot of people who saw the ability to move virtualized workloads to VMware cloud environment as a compelling proposition. But that's a one-off shift, and the moment they have the opportunity to go cloud native, they're going to take it off. And I don't see VMware really holding the control point now that you sort of got VMware on all the different platforms, and it's being controlled by the likes of AWS and others who can sort of assist their customers to go into whichever environment within their state that they want. I think Cisco are coming from an interesting position where they've got us some really great security portfolio, and in fact, we've used a lot of their hardware, but I don't see them actually, again, having a particular control point in the market. Talk about, before we close out here, I want to get your thoughts on what's going on on Twitter. Obviously, you're highly engaging, you're an influencer on Twitter, subject matter expert, great on camera, obviously here with theCUBE remote. What's the sentiment going on around digital transformation? Sarpit and the crowd all talking, Stu Miniman and I and Dave Vellante and the CUBE team and the whole community has really been chirp and obviously because IBM think was last week around the context of cloud on-premise digital transformation. What's the general sentiment in the social media channels that you're hearing? What's the top story? What's the most important story that's being discussed? You can't get away from the whole privacy debacle. I mean, we have seen the tech revolution. We're now seeing the sort of tech backlash where certain companies who have made big mistakes and many, many mistakes, I mean, Facebook, you can't avoid mentioning them and there are others, but Facebook at front and center, I think they have... Looks like we lost you a little bit there, Bill. Okay, you're back, you're back. All right, so final question for you. So if Facebook's the digital gangster on social networking, is there a cloud gangster? I'm not sure if I want to point to any fingers anyway. I think a lot of companies that are particularly muscular in the market and have a particular market position and you can't avoid looking at Amazon there, but I think there's going to be an enormous fragmentation. On one side, we're talking typically about a hybrid environment. You're talking about a mixture of public cloud and private cloud on a permanent edge and whatever. In the public cloud, it's going to be concentrated down to possibly three players and therefore they're going to have an enormous control. Then you look on the other side of the hybrid equation to the private legacy, whatever, that's going to be massively fragmented. I mean, companies like IBM who are... I'm going to be doing some of the complex migrations for some of the big organizations using their massive services army may have a control on some of the big instances, but there's going to be a massively long tail with all sorts of MSPs and CSPs providing bespoke solutions and value right down the chain. And that's where I think the channel ecosystems come into play and those companies that are cloud players that also have a strong channel ecosystem, they're going to be the ones that come out at the end of the day. I think the ecosystems right on, great point. Bill, thanks for spending the time joining us here on theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with here in Palo Alto for a conversation with the influencers, experts around cloud privacy. This is the big deal. What are you doing with all that data coming in? How's it being managed? How's the value being created? This is the digital transformation challenge. It's theCUBE conversation in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.