 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting, Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Everybody to Cube on Cloud, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co-host John Furrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry, it's just precautionary. John, how are you doing? Hey Dave, good to see you, doing quarantine. My youngest daughter had COVID, so contact traced, I was negative, and the quarantine at a friend's location, all good. Well, we wish her and you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know, what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family, you're basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody, correct? No, I mean, basically just isolation, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living and kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. Yeah, one of the things we talked about at re-invent, the Amazon's cloud conference was the vaccine and just the whole workflow around that, it's got to get better. It's kind of really sucky here in the California area. They haven't done a good job. A lot of criticism around how that's rolling out and, you know, Amazon's now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the US government. So, you know, something to talk about, but certainly this has been terrible time for COVID and everyone and the deaths involved, but it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything in society. In fact, whether it's big tech, mid-disinformation campaigns, all these vulnerabilities in cyber, accelerated digital transformation, we'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave, you know, in modern society and the geopolitical impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined, you could be hanging out on these clubhouse apps late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on and it's interesting what's happening with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and US sovereignty, data sovereignty, misinformation, so much going on to talk about. And, you know, meanwhile, companies like Mark Dintresen's BC firm, starting a media company. What's going on? Hell's freezing over. So we're going to be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud, it's our very first virtual editorial event. And what we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's an open forum. And we're running the day on our 365 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEOs, CIOs, data practitioners. We got hardcore technologists coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long series and we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're going to unpack the future of cloud computing in the coming decade. As John said, we're going to talk about some of the public policy, new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in general? John, what can you add to that? Well, I think one of the things, and we talked about COVID, it's a personal impact to me, but other people as well, one of the things that people are craving right now is information, factual information, truth, tech truth as we call it. But here, this event for us, Dave, it's our first inaugural editorial event, Rob Bo, Kristen Nicole, the entire CUBE team, Silicon Angle. We're really trying to put together more of a cadence. We're going to do more of these events where we can put out and feature the best people in our community that have great, fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names, Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires, the people making things happen, but it's often the people under them that are the real newsmakers. Amidst Avery, for instance, at Google, one of the most impressive technical people, he's got a talk, he's going to present the democratization of software development and many more real people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element and we're going to do more of these. Obviously we have no events to go to with the CUBE, so we have the CUBE virtual software that we have been building in over years and now perfecting, and we're going to introduce that. We're going to put it to work. We're dog footing it and we're going to put that software to work. We're going to do a lot more virtual events like this, CUBE on cloud, CUBE on startups, CUBE on raising money, CUBE on healthcare, CUBE on venture capital, all those things. We can do anything. The question is what's the right story? What's the most important story? The who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and expose that and fast as possible. And that's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're going to add new features like pulling people up on stage, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction where people can meet each other and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase the cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day. It's going to be chock full of presentations. We're going to have moderated chat in these sessions. So it's an all day event. So people can come in, drop out and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But if you want to participate, come into the time slot, into the CUBE room or breakout session, whatever you want to call it. It's a CUBE room and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So when you're on that homepage, when you're watching, there's a hero video there and beneath that there's a calendar and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line, the vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions, it'll take you into the chat. We'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and take you through the day. What I wanted to do, John is try to set the stage for the conversations that folks are going to hear today. And to do that, I want to ask the guys to bring up a graphic and I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it's headed. So guys, if you bring up that graphic, when AWS announced S3, it was March of 2006. And as you recall, John, you know, nobody really in the vendor and user community, they didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year in August, that announced EC2, the people really started, they started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, kicking tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. What were you thinking at the time when you saw S3, EC2, this retail company coming into the tech world? I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking of working on, I was in between kind of startups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized EC2 was freaking awesome. And I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash to provision a data center or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state-of-the-art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. It was well past the whole proprietary thing, but you had to assemble, probably maybe five to eight grand a box and go in and put it on like a ghetto rack, which is basically, you know, you put it into some hosting location. It's like with everybody else and the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning. That's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there, it was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains, user interface, console got better and better, but it was awesome. Well, what we really saw of the cloud take hold, from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in 07 to 09. It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and of course, shadow IT departments. They wanted to get stuff done and take IT in OpEx bite-sized chunks. So it really was this cloud awakening. And we came out of that financial crisis and we're now in this 10-year plus boom, you know, notwithstanding, obviously the economic crisis with COVID, but much of it was powered by the cloud. And the decade, I would say, was really about IT transformation and kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic, it hits at the beginning of this decade and it creates this mandate to go digital. So you've said a lot, John, it's pulled forward, it's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but then we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature, but overnight, you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see, you know, what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decade? It's, I think it's safe to say the last 10 years were defined by, you know, IT transformation. That's not going to be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are, and I think this past election in the United States shows the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise, specifically around wood clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where it's different. It's not what people expect. It's edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot, but industrial IoT is really where the, where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities to actual disinformation, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks. So I think this network effect is going to be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society, geopolitical things is going to be also another one. I think the modern application development of how applications are written with data, you know, we've always been saying this day from the beginning of the cube, data is an integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm that cloud is now going next level with, is the software and how it's written will be different. You got to handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it going to be at the edge with all the server chips innovations that Amazon, Apple, Intel are doing? You're going to have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's the latency to that? It's, it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a systems impact kind of way. Now that's not necessarily new in the computer science and in the tech field. It's just going to be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite in my opinion of the software applications, which is why you're seeing Amazon, Google, VM where really pushing Kubernetes and these service meshes and these microservices because super critical that this technology becomes smarter, automated autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm than the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer is ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore in my opinion because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half but no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as full stack but really cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to do. Now you can manage it and do things with it. So, you know, there's some work to done but the heavy liftings been taken care of. It's the top of the stack that I think is going to be a really critical component. Yeah, and that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This thing becomes ubiquitous and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I want to take a look at the big three and guys, can we bring up the next graphic which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the big three. And John, this is I ask and pass spend for the big three cloud players. And it's an estimate that we're going to update after earning seasons. And I want to point a couple of things out here. First is, if you look at the combined revenue production of the big three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that, that's, was that incremental spend? No, it really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on-prem data center business for guys like Dell and, you know, DMC, now part of Dell, HPE split up, IBM, Oracle, I mean, et cetera, et cetera. They've all felt this sea change and they've had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data, it's true that Azure and GCP, they seem to be growing faster than AWS. We don't know the exact numbers because AWS is the only company that really provides a clean view of IS and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's undeniable that Azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance. The third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John, is this is nuance, but despite the fact that Azure and Google are growing faster than AWS, you can see those growth rates. AWS, I'll call this out, is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant, but what is significant is because AWS is so large, they're $45 billion last year, even at the slower growth rates, it's able to grow more in absolute terms than its competitors who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but you got to look at also the absolute dollars as well. Nonetheless, in Microsoft in particular, they're closing the gap steadily and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics, but I'd love to get your take on all this, John. Well, I mean, the clouds are going to win right now, big time with the one, the political climate, it's going to be favoring big tech, but more importantly with, we just talked about COVID impact and accelerating the digital transformation, is going to create a massive rising tide. It's already happening, it's happening. And again, the shift in programming models are going to really kind of accelerate and create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind that all three are going to win big in the future. They're just different. The way they're going to market and position themselves, they have to be Google, has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities than trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide how do I want to ride the tide if it's a rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first move of a pure public cloud. They are really awesome at pass and I as they've integrated in Gartner now reports and integrated I as and pass components. So Gartner finally got their act together and said, hey, this is really one thing. SaaS is a completely different animal. Now Microsoft's super smart because I think they played the right card. They have a huge install base, convert it to Kube Office 365 and move SQL server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible and cloud-ified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So, you know, as you're doing a trends job, they're just, it's just pedals faster than you can but Microsoft is willing to strategy, just go faster, try to keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network is strong and they have a lot of other big data capabilities. So they have to use those to their advantage. So there is, there is competitive strategy gamification happening with these companies. It's not like apples to apples in my opinion, never has been. And I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want to guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of the things that John just said are really relevant here. What we're showing is that it's a survey data from ETRs or data partners, like 1400 plus CIOs and IT buyers on the vertical axis is this thing called net score, which is a measure of spending momentum and the horizontal axis is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or number of mentions in the data set. And there's a couple of key points I want to pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see AWS and Microsoft, they stand alone. I mean, they're the hyperscalers, they're far ahead of the pack. And frankly, they have to fall down to lose their lead. They spend a lot on CapEx. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares. And so, but they're taking a different approach, John. You're right. They're living off of their SaaS estate, their software estate and they're building that in to their cloud. So they got this sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also, as we'll hear from Microsoft today, they're building more abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said, yeah, we don't want to be in that abstraction layer business. We want to have access to those, fine-grained primitives and so at an API level. So we can move fast with the market. But so those are sort of different philosophies, John. Yeah, I mean, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels and in its way that it has advantages. Again, they have a great SaaS and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SaaS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft and people can't get this wrong in the marketplace, especially in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale. So to say that Microsoft never had scale and that Amazon owned the monopoly and franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft has had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive, how they distribute browsers in multiple countries. Remember, they had the lock on the operating system and the browser until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997, Microsoft never, ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong and I think that chart demonstrates that. They're in the hyper scale leadership category hands down. The question that I have is that they're not as good in making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy card. So this is the classic innovators dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound, they're moving as fast as they can. But then they're not going to come out and say, we don't have the best cloud. That's not a marketing strategy. You have to kind of hide them and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft and they have a huge client base. So that's why their stock is so high and that's why they're so good. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to give you a little preview. I talked to J.G. Chirapyarath who's going to come on today and you'll see I ask him because the criticism of Microsoft is there, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked them, are you better than good enough? You know, the fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you can bring that, that graphic back up, I wanted to get into the hybrid zone, you know, where the field is. We've got some questions coming in on chat day. So we'll get to those. Great, awesome. So just real quick here. You see this hybrid zone, the field is bunched up and then the companies have a large on-prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included, there was mic, multi-cloud and Google's there too because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than AWS. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VMware cloud on AWS stands out as does Red Hat OpenShift. You've got VMware cloud, which is a VCF or a cloud foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HPE with GreenLake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovators dilemma, but they're at least in the cloud game and we can talk about that. But so John, you know, to your point, you've got to have different strategies. You're not going to take out the big two. So you got to play, connect your on-prem to your cloud, your hybrid, multi-cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just to that point, I think it's Jerry Chang's come on theCUBE many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with a featured startup, but he's always said on theCUBE, he's a VC at Greylock, great firm, but Jerry's cloud genius, he's been there. But he made a point many, many years ago, it's not a winter take all, it's a winter take most. And the big three, maybe put four or five in there will take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about, Dave, is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large-scale model. I don't want to say tier two cloud is coming to sound like it's sub-cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning, if you look at what Snowflake did, I think this is a tell sign to what's coming. VMware cloud on AWS has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think there's going to be a wave of a, a more of a channel model of an indirect cloud buildout where companies like theCUBE or us potentially for media or others will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that, okay? We'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what Snowflake did is all on Amazon. Now they kind of should go to Azure because it's politically correct to have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance, they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that because you're getting paid as variable. It's CapEx, OpEx, nice categorization. So I think that's a wave that we're watching. I think it's super valuable. I think we'll create some surprises in terms of who's might come out of the woodwork and be a leader in a category. Well, your timing is perfect, John. And we do have some questions in the chat, but before we get to that, I want to bring in Sarbjit Johal, who's a contributor to our community. Sarbjit, can you hear us? All right, so we got a... Well, I'll bring it in, Sarbjit. Let's go down some of the questions. So the first question, we'll get to Stu's second, his first question, but Ronald asked, can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities, yes, they can live if they have to have a story. Well, and if they don't own a public cloud, no. I would say, no, they absolutely cannot. Hey guys. Hey, Sarbjit, how you doing, man? Good to see you. So folks, let me bring in Sarbjit Johal. He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner. He's worked as a technologist and as a frequent guest on theCUBE. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. And good to see you guys too. Yeah, so we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape. We got so much to talk about. There's, I can say a number of questions coming in, but Sarbjit, we want to talk about what's happening here in cloud land. Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday, new regime, new inauguration. Do you expect public policy? You'll start with you, Sarbjit, to have what kind of effect do you think public policy will have on cloud generally, specifically the big tech companies, the tech lash? Is it going to be more of the same or do you see a big difference coming? I think there'll be some change in narrative, I believe. And that is mainly from the regulator side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, I think it matters with camp, you belong to left or right kind of thing, right? But part of getting booted out from AWS, I think that was huge. Like how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Like what is that line? Where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last two, three months is the solar winds hack, right? So not, US not sort of acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of posture on that, I think that's huge. I think public private partnership and security arena will emerge this year. Will we have to address that? Yeah, I think things are changing economics, economy will change gradually, you know? We are coming out of pandemic. The money is still cheap and will not be cheap for long. I think M&A activity will pick up. So those are my sort of high level. Thank you. I want to come back to M&A because there's a question in the chat about M&A. But John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google are in a slippery slope booting Parler off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening on Parler? Anything can happen on Clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, I can use AI to find that stuff. I mean, Amazon's right hiding, right? They're bunkered in right now from that bad situation because again, like we said, Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment, okay? Who wins with the US with the way we are? China, Russia, cloud players, okay? Let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, what better way than to change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared and then reset the entire global landscape and control all the cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theories. So you see the riches, you see the riches get richer. Yeah, well, that's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because of reason now, I'm not going to, I don't know the particular Parler, but apparently there was a reason, but this is dangerous, right? So what that's going to do is, and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether the political opinion is, it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for, that weren't people didn't vote for. So that's not a democracy, right? So that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right? So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized cyber punks out there who want to decentralize everything. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture and I had predicted this so many times on the cube day and countercultures coming. And you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking. And so I think Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level because if you can't get a, if you can't get by domain names and you're completely blackballed by organized players, that's a mafia in my opinion. So you have to be careful. And it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, hey, if that can be done to them, it can be done to me, just the fact that it can be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I mean, independent of, you know, again, like Sarbjeet said, your political views, I mean, Parler would say, hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up. Now, maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new Parler is, you think about early days of Twitter and Facebook. So they were sort of at a disadvantage trying to have- It was a- Parler was what it was. It was a right wing standup job of standing up something quicker. Security was terrible. If you look at, we had Corey Quinn on, it'd be great to have him and he did a great analysis on this because if you look at the lawsuit, it was just terrible security. It was just a half-ass. Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it was not a great app, but like you said, it was a quick standup for an agenda. But nonetheless, to Sarbjeet to your point earlier, it's like, hmm, are they going to shut me down if I say something that's out of line? How do I control that? Yeah, I remember like 2019 VMworld closing sort of remarks I was there, I was saying that these companies are going to be too big to fail. And also they are too big for other nations to do business with in a way. I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They are running the governments. They are. We have seen the proof of that in US this year. I mean, late last year and this year. Twitter last night blocked Chinese embassy in US from their platform last night. I was like, what's going on? So like we used to say like the Chinese tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government, right? Remember that? And now actually I think Chinese people can say the same thing about US companies. It's not a good thing. Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah, thank you. One was on M&A and Sarbjeet, you mentioned M&A. Who do you see as possible M&A targets? I mean, I can throw a couple out there. Some of the CDN players, maybe Akamai. I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? I think Hashi Corp and anybody who's doing things in the preferee is a candidate for M&A by the big guys, by the hyperscalers and number two, tier two of hyperscalers, right? And that's like sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Some companies, which I thought they will be a target, sort of M&A target, they are getting too big because of their evaluations. I think Hashi Corp is one. And they're bunching the networking space. Well, Tara, if I say the right, that was acquired by F5, this week, or last week, actually, late last week for $500 million. I know they're founders, so like I found that out. Yeah, there's a lot going on on the network side, on the, anything to do with data. Those are two hot areas in the cloud arena. Data protection, John, anything you could add here? And I think, I mean, I think Edge is going to be where the gaps are. And I think M&A activity is going to be where, again, the big or too big to fail, I would agree with Serbia on that one, but they're going to look at white spaces and say, a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a startup, right? So you're going to have these huge white spaces, opportunities, and I think it's going to be an M&A opportunity, big time startups to get bought in. You can give them the speed. And I think you're going to see it around databases and a range of things, right? And around some of these new service meshes and microservices, I mean, that's... Hey, there's a question here, somebody's at Don's asking, why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet, not at the same level as other two hyperscalers? I'll give you my two senses, because it took them a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece around that a while ago. And they just, they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just kind of got a late start. Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at who they're hiring on the Google cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Kurian hasn't yet sat down with us, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to compete. You can see it with some of the things that they're doing, but I mean, competed at the level of Amazon, but they have strengths and they're playing their strengths, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions of the people and DNA. And that, Dave, it takes time for people in the enterprise, it's not for the faint of heart, it's unique, there's details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying, we're going to own the enterprise because our tech's great. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you're going to see a lot of change. They got great people in there on the product marketing side, there's Dev, Solution Architects, and the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they can really add a lot of value in. So always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. Yeah, I think Google's problem, main problems are two, actually there are many, but one is that they didn't have the boots on the ground as compared to Microsoft especially and Amazon actually had the similar problem, but they had a wide breadth of their product portfolio. I always talk about a feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing and how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud provider? Or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have as compared to Google there's skills, gravity, lots of people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that they're more focused on, I believe on the data science part and they're sort of skipping the core components sort of of the cloud, if you will, where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network and that has to be well thought through. Yeah, I think, I think they will do good. Well, so later today, Paul Gillan sits down with a mid-zavery of Google used to be at Oracle, he's with Google now and he's going to push him on the numbers, you know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, just a preview of it's going to say, well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But John, you said something earlier that I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, is it a winner take all no, but it's a winner take a lot. You know, the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the market's big enough for three, but do you, you know, does Google have to really dramatically close the gap and be a much, much closer, you know, to the leaders in order to compete in this race or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue, put it out there? I mean, I wrote- Google definitely can compete. I think that's, look, Google's in it. They're not, they're not caving. They're expanding. But I wrote recently that I thought they should even, even put more of an emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe they're already, you know, doubling down, I'm going to triple down. I just, I think that is a multi-trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now maybe there's just so much you can do. There's a lot of challenges with these companies, especially Google, they're in Silicon Valley. You have a big social justice warrior mentality. There's a big debate going on in the back channels of the tech scene here. And that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy. And that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits, right? So, you know, Google has people within the company that will protest contracts because AI is being used for war. Yet, we have the most unstable geopolitical scene that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, yeah. Well, don't you think that's what happened with Parler? I mean, Rob Holt said, hey, the bar's pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. But Parler went over the line. But I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google or AWS as well, said, hey, why are we supporting, you know, this? And so, to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something that organizations was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government over. That's Rob's point. Yeah, it was for sure. Well, that's, I mean, I think they were in there to get selfies and being protested. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse private chats was there was overwhelming evidence on Parler. Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's all I'm saying. Well, though, if we have Google and you have Google and you have employees that say, we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that Jedi contract, for instance, right? The Microsoft one from maybe. So, I mean, that's the warning. Well, I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is they, Google is an alternative to AWS. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at, they had a, it's all virtual this year, but I saw a lot of IT practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to AWS. Just seeing now, we can talk about monocloud or multi-cloud, Andy Jassy has his narrative around and he's true, when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytics side in an alternative and hedging their bets and particularly use cases. So they should be able to do, so I guess the bottom line here is the market's big enough to have three leaders. You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I got to be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? I think so, but the data gravity and the skills of gravity are playing against them. Another problem which I didn't, I wanted to cover this earlier was Google ads. They have to boot out AWS, wherever they go, right? That is a huge challenge. Most of the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another, right? So they are the multi-cloud kind of player, another one. And just purely somebody going to 100% Google Cloud, those cases are kind of fewer, if you will. I think there's going to be absolutely multi-cloud. I think there's going to be a time where you look at the market place and you're going to think in terms of disaster recovery model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or look at the parlor or the next parlor or what if Amazon wakes up one day and says, hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events. So shut them down. We should have a failover to Google Cloud, should Microsoft be an option and what do people in Microsoft's ecosystem wants to buy services from us? We have to kind of co-locate there. So these are all open questions that are going to become certain pretty quickly, which is can a company diversify their computing and IT in a way that works? And I think the momentum around Kubernetes you're seeing as a great connective tissue between having applications work between clouds, right? And this is the directionally correct in my opinion because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I want to have choice? So let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, some ETR data with you. About half the companies will say, yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, that's one thing, I'll come back to that. About the other half are saying, yeah, we're predominantly monocloud, we just don't have the resources. But what I think going forward is that what multi-cloud really becomes, and I think John, you mentioned snowflake before, I think that's an indicator of what true multi-cloud is going to look like. And what snowflake is doing is they're building an abstraction layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say standing on the shoulders of giants. So they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it the data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today. But you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, hey, we're going to build value because so basically Amazon's not going to build that abstraction layer across multi-clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a real opportunity for people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but to date ourselves, Dave, I remember back in the 80s when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole revolution, OSI, open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for SNA, for IBM, deck, net, for deck, we all know those were proprietary stack. And then incomes, TCP, IP. Now, OSI never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layer is standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at AWS and some of the comments in the chat, AWS could be the SNA. Depends on how you're looking at it, right? You can say they're open, but in a way they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying, we love multi-cloud. Why would they promote multi-cloud? They are a one of the clouds. They want all the business. That's interesting, John. And then sub G does a cloud architect. I mean, it is not trivial to make your data cloud, if your snowflake work on AWS, work on Google, work on Azure, be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically that's not trivial. There are latency issues. So that's going to take a while to develop. What are your thoughts there? I think that multi-cloud for same workload and multi-cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multi-cloud in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi-cloud for the same workload, that's a complex problem to solve architecturally, right? You have to have common APIs and common control plan, if you will, and we don't have that yet. And then we will not have that for at least one other couple of years. So if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lowest common denominator in technical sort of stack, if you will. And then you are not leveraging the best of the breed technology out there from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And another thing is that I always say this, I'm always on the dev side, you're on developer side. I think to devs, public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture, right? So that's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower. So I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract these developers. And developers are the masons of this digital sort of empires. Amazingly, it's happening there, right? They are the masons, right? They hit on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't put extensive force behind educating the market, you can't put it off. Hey, I want to take another one. It's the same game, statement story. We're seeing some chat comments. She's a LinkedIn friend of mine. She's at Microsoft. If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer point, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company, right? So, hey. Who could forget? Developers, developers, developers, if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated as a part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were a competitor. And that was the ruthless time spent there. But again, that was where it was. Today, look at where the software-defined businesses at Sarvitzing, it's all about being developer-led in this new way to program, right? So, the cloud, next-gen cloud is going to look a lot like next-gen developer. And all the different tools and techniques are going to change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed and that's the power source. It's just going to look different. So, Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just don't want to answer his question about Elastic. Thoughts on Elastic. I tell you, Elastic has momentum. They're doing very well in the marketplace. The Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking to relative to Splunk, who people complain about the pricing. Now, of course, Splunk's got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with Elk Stack is, you know, it's open source, it gets complicated, you got to shard the databases, you got to manage it. So that's what Ed Walsh's company Chaos Search is all about, but Elastic has some real momentum in the marketplace right now. Yeah, Dave, you know, one of the things that come out of the chat, I was saying about the open systems, is Kubernetes, I always felt was, that's a bad metaphor, but bear with me. That was the TCPIP of this modern era. So, TCPIP created that disruptor to the SNAs and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what Kubernetes is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middleware kind of way. Kind of probably a bad analogy, but that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what's, it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP. It was people were trashing, oh, that is terrible. You know, it's not good. People were trashing because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. Yeah, that's a good analogy. Yeah, I think it's the RCA cable. I use the RCA cable analogy, like the VCRs, when they started, every VC had their own cable and they will work only with that sort of brand of TV. And the RCA cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR and the VCR industry took off. There are so many examples out there around standards and how standards can, you know, flare that fire if you will and for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys, I'm seeing is that from the consumer side, let's talk a little bit on the consuming side, is that the difference between B2B and B2C is blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user, like my door lock, the August door lock. I didn't just get the door lock and forget about that. Like I value the experience it gives me or problems it gives me on a daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So that the middle men or middle people are getting removed from the producer of the technology or the products to the consumer. Even the sort of big grocery players, they have their apps now, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff, that experience matters. In that context, I think having to be able to sell to these enterprises from the cloud providers, they have to have these case studies or these sample sort of reference architecture and stuff like that. I think whoever has that more push that way, they are doing better like Amazon is Amazon because of that reason. I think they have lots of sort of use cases developed on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy, right? So and other things as well, right? So I think that's a big trend. Yeah, it's great, great points of being. One of the things, there's a question in there about from Gaten who says, I like the developer led cloud movement, but what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? This comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big way to automate this, automate everything. And then everything as a service has become kind of the executive suite kind of like conversation. We need to make everything as a service in our business. You're seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything as a service is a business strategy, which it is at some level, but when they say, take that hill, do it, developers, it's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our CUBE conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the COVID with CUBE virtual, this has come up a lot Dave, this idea and start beating around. It's easy to say everything is a service, but to implement it is really hard. And I think that's where the developer led connection is where the executives have to understand that in order to just say it and do it or two different things, that digital transformation, that's a big part of it. So I think that you're going to see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HPE GreenLake, Dell's come out with Apex, IBM has its utility model. These companies are basically taking a page out of what I would call a flawed SaaS model. If you look at the SaaS players, whether it's Salesforce or Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle, these models are really, they're not cloud pricing models. They're basically, you got to commit to a term, one year, two year, three year. Well, we'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term, but you're locked in. And you probably pay upfront, or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model, and that's why I mean they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Datadog, for example, Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud, you know, pay by the drink pricing model. And to your point, John, to actually implement that is you're going to need a whole new layer across your company, and it's quite complicated, not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, et cetera. The APIs of your product, I mean it is, but that is a big C change that I see coming. Subjit, your thoughts. Yeah, I think like you can see it, and like some things for this big tech, X-AX are hidden in the plain site, right? They don't see it, they have blind spots. Like look at Amazon, they went from millisecond to 100th of a millisecond billing on serverless, right? And then here you are, like you're saying pay us for the whole year, if you don't use the cloud, you lose it, or we'll pay by month per user and all that stuff, right? That those are all models. I think these players will be forced to use that kind of pricing, like per minute or per second per user that way. I think the Salesforce model is hybrid, they are struggling in a way. I think they are trying to bring the platform by doing acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top of, but they are having a little trouble there because of their such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And again, I'm coming back to developers, like if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and curious code, and it is open enough, by the way, open and open source are two different things, we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have some problems in closing the deals. I want to just bring up a question good on chat around from Justin Fittis, who says, can you touch on the vertical clouds, as you're offering this? Oh, great question. Great question. ECP announcing retail cloud, and he mentions IBM Athena. Okay, I'm huge on this point because I think there's something that's saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization. And that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and the AI efforts coming out that's accelerated benefits there, you have to have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will, in the clouds that build on top of a control plane, whether that's data or whatever. This is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of AI implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So if you're going to have a data-driven cloud, you have to have this vertical feeling in terms of verticals, the data. And so I think that's super important. And again, just generally as a strategy, I think Google doing the retail cloud is super smart because their whole pitch is, we're not Amazon. And some people say, we're not Google, it's depending on what you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in areas and that scares companies. And some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason or some people will never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech business are like, we're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is, but this idea of vertical specialization, relevant and super important. I want to point out two sessions that are going on today and I think great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan Nance. He kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track. He's going to talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems. And we've talked about this a lot that to compete with Amazon, Google, Azure, you've got to have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then at 3 36 p.m. I know this times are strange, but I can explain that later. Hillary Hunter is talking about, she's the CTO IBM's financial cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving an audience. Subjeet, I think you have some thoughts on this. Actually, I lost my thought. I raised my finger. I think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you can build an ecosystem kind of back to Alan Nance's premise around data. Billions of dollars in their data. There's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session, but we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jassy and said, cloud's going to be a trillion dollars, right? And the point of Alan Nance's session is he's thinking from an individual firm, forget the millions that you're going to save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. Let's subjeet. Absolutely. The business value now, again, back to my half stack developer is the business value and I've been talking about this in the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there. The activity and the business value, that's the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you can see innovations in how work streams and workflows can be configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data. You can move quickly and take territory. That's a much different scenario than a decade ago. And the point I was trying to make earlier was, which I now remember is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important as compared to having vertical focus, you know, you're more healthcare focused. Like you have that sort of niche, if you will and you're an auto or financials and stuff like that, what Google is trying to do. I think that's a good thing to cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive away some developers who are, most of the developers at 80 plus percent developers are horizontal. Like look at the, look into the psyche of a developer. Like you move from company to company and only few developers will say, I will stay only in healthcare, right? So I will only stay in auto or something like that, right? So they, you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere. And then on top of that- I think that's true, but I'll take a little bit different take on that. I would say, yes, that's true, but remember the old school application developer, if someone was just called an application developer, all they did was develop applications, right? They picked the framework, they did it, right? So I think we're going to see more of that. There's just now more of under the covers developers. You've got more software defined networking and software defined storage, servers and cloud, Kubernetes and that's kind of like under the hood, but you've got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're going to see a lot of that come back in a way that's like, I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure as code. So I think there's both. Hey guys. I worked at PeopleSoft and still today, I say, in today's context, I would say ERPs are the ultimate low code, no code sort of thingies, right? And what the problem is they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it lightweight, right? Yeah. So I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff, right? But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't want to be in the applications division of PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies, SAP, Oracle, like companies that divisions, right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The best developers always go to the tooling. Hey guys, I'm sorry to interrupt, we're almost out of time. I just wanted to tease some of the sessions of the day. First of all, we got Holger Muller coming on at lunch for a little power half hour. You'll notice when you go back to the homepage, you'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about, that start times are kind of weird. Like for instance, Anapinzook's coming on at 124. And that's because these are prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So she's going to talk about people process and technology. We've got Kathy Southwick, who's a Silicon Valley CIO. Dan Sheehan was the CIO at Duncan Brands and he was actually the COO. So it's CIO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dinez is the CEO of UiPath. He's coming on at 247 PM East Coast time. One of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on, Dave Humphrey who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why. And then ironically, D Raj Pandey. Stu Miniman, our friend interviewed him. That's 335. One of the sessions I'm most excited about today is Jamak Deghani at 4.03 PM East Coast time. She's going to talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the transformation track. On the future of cloud track, we start off with the big three. Maylon Thompson Bukavek at one o'clock. She runs AWS's storage business. Then I mentioned JG Chirapirath at 130. He runs Azure's analytics business. It's awesome. Paul Gillan then talks about a Mits Avery at 159. And then our friend Stu talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching theCUBE on Cloud.