 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for CUBE's coverage of Google Next 2019. Hashtag Google Next 19. This is Google's cloud conference where their customers, developers all come together as theCUBE's three days of coverage. Day one, I'm John Furrier with my coach Dave Vellante as well as Stu Miniman who's out there doing some reporting. Our next guest is Allison Wagon, filled as the CMO of Google Cloud. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here. So I got to say, looking out on the floor here, we're in the middle of the floor, great demographics, a lot of developers, a lot of enterprise customers, a lot of, you know, sea levels and also enterprise architects and cloud architects. So this is not just a developer fest, this is a business developer conference. Yeah, so that's been a real change this year. Not only have we increased the numbers, I think I mentioned earlier that we have 30,000 people are actually probably even more than that. We had a cap registration we sold out last week, but the composition is different this year because this year we have over 70% from enterprise companies and then within enterprise companies, it's devs, IT decision makers, business leaders and then we have a whole executive track, a leader circle program as well. So it's been a really great mix of different energy, different questions and different sessions. You guys do a great job with the event, kudos to the team. I've been the original Google IO, it was great event that continues to be the consumer side of Google. You guys have that same kind of groove swing going on, a lot of sessions. Take a minute to explain the theme of the show, what's going on around the events, breakouts. What's the focus? Yeah, so the focus, well, there's a theme on a couple of different levels. The broad theme is a cloud like no other because we've introduced a lot of new different features and products and programs. We introduced Anthos this morning, which was really revolutionary way of using containers, broad laid multi-cloud hybrid cloud. So it's from a product standpoint, but it's also a cloud like no other because it's about the community that's here and it's truly a partnership with our customers and our partners about building this cloud together and we see the community as a really key part of that. It's really core to Google's values around openness, open source technology and really embracing the broader community to build the cloud together. And I thought it was interesting, the keynote was a phenomenal, you had the CEO of Google come out, Sundar Phukai and the new CEO's on the job for 10 weeks, TK, Thomas Kurian. A lot of action going on at Google Cloud right now. There's a lot going on. It's been great to have Thomas, Diane was phenomenal in building the business. It's wonderful to have Sundar here. He showed a lot of commitment, really engaged with our customers. And so it's a lot of energy and a lot of excitement at Google. I thought it was a very class act of Thomas Kurian. His first words on stage at the CEO was to give props to Diane Greene. Very respectful, that was great. I agree, it was very gracious of Thomas. Oh, sorry, he said the pressure there. One of the things I really like about Google is it's not afraid of hard problems. So I wanted to ask you, as a CMO, I always ask CMOs about brand promise. What's the brand promise that you want customers and the community to take away from an event like this? So the brand promise has a couple different areas. First and foremost, we want our customers to be successful with their customers. And so we think really holistically about, let's make sure that we're delivering the cloud technology so that customers can really serve everyone that they want to serve. Whether it's be a retailer that wants to create a wonderful offline and online experience, whether it's a healthcare provider that wants to ensure that every doctor knows all of the right data about all the patients or within a hospital. And so that's the way we're always thinking is how do we ensure that we help our customers set up to be successful? So one of the big themes we heard this morning was the industry focus. And you just referenced it again. It seems to be an increasingly important part of the messaging and the technologies that you're creating. And it ties into digital transformation. You're seeing every industry transform. Data is at the heart of that transformation. You're seeing big companies traverse different industries. So I wonder if you could talk about the industry focus. Where'd that come from? Where do you see it going? Yeah, so there's really three core parts of what we've been talking about today. First and foremost is the infrastructure and ensuring that we have the world's best infrastructure. Then on top of that, it's ensuring that we have all the right applications to help with digital transformation. And then as part of that further is the industry solutions because in our six focus industries, we want to make sure that we are really developing the right applications with the right solutions and have that deep expertise that companies are looking for so that we can really partner with them and really truly be innovative. And we can feel much more comfortable being innovative when we really understand our customer problems. The key part of that is the global SIs. You look out here and you see all the big names. I won't name them because I'll forget one, but there's two obvious ones right there. Because once you start to see those guys come into the ecosystem, that's when you can partner and get real deep industry expertise globally. I agree. And so we do have great partnerships, as you said here, with Accenture and Deloitte and Atos, or three of them, but many more that we're working really closely with. And they're really an extension of what we want to build because we know that we will not be able to create every single last mile industry solution in every single industry and working with those companies really helps us. I was on the plane last night watching the game, of course. I don't know if you guys got to see it, you were probably up here busy. But I focused, Google was all over the NCAAs this year. So this is our second year of our partnership with the NCAA and it's been great. There's a couple of dimensions to that partnership. First and foremost, we helped them analyze 80 years worth of data. And through all of that analysis, we've been working with them about making predictions about games and helping them understand players and coaches and teams better, everything from creating brackets to how do you, the fan experience. And then as part of that, we also had opportunity to do some advertising within their games. So you may have seen some of the TV spots that we did, which was about analyzing that data. And we put ourselves on the line by making predictions during the game about what we thought would happen based on all of our analysis. And then the big chef this year was we included students. So it was really exciting. This last year, we created all these models, but we did it within Google. We had Google Devs and Google engineers creating prediction models. And we said, like, what if we brought students in to help us? So we recruited 30 or so all-star students around the country from their schools, brought them together. They learned GCP like that. It was awesome. And then they started working together doing predictions. And so a lot of what you saw in the games and on our hub was actually students using Google Cloud Platform to make predictions about the games. So just to get this right, and this is referenced on stage by TK, the students. So you had data from the NCAA that was exposed to the students. They had a hackathon. How much lead time did they have? What was the- They did everything within 30 days. So the hackathon was about two or months ago or so. But within the last 30 days, they did all of these different projects. And they were actually doing really creative things about trying to come up with new types of stats, like explosiveness. What does that mean? Does it mean that you move in closer to the basket or does it mean that they're coming up with stats around pace of game and different elements of the play? So it was really fun. How many slam dunks, miss fouls. So question, who are you rooting for? I was rooting for Virginia. But let's say I was rooting for Virginia after my bracket got busted. And so I was allowed to kind of change a little bit in there in Michigan once they were gone. I was like, hmm. So I used no A.I., but I hit 99% tile. So there you go. I had Michigan State rather in Virginia in my final four. That's impressive. My final four, yeah, Michigan State lost, but still I would have been- That's pretty good. 99.9. Yeah. What other, what kind of predictions were the students doing? The students were doing predictions about everything from, well, last night we had some predictions about the number of two points. Last, we had about how many different times we were going to exchange. Like the ball would go back and forth between teams. We had predictions about three pointers in one game, everything. So it's been really fun to work with them. And kind of in-game predictions too? I see that a lot, right? Yeah, you probably saw some stats real time. Probability of victory, which of course last night, forget it. It changed so quickly. It was super fun. Great program. One of the things I want to ask you, not to change gears is you have a book in the press room called Customer Voices. Yes. So this has been a focus. And I think a lot of people have been like, oh, Google's got great tech, but not a lot of customers, which you guys are debunking with not only this, but here at the show with showing the logo slide. Really kind of showing the traction from a customer standpoint. Yes. Talk about the focus on the customer. How has that changed? How are you doing your job? How is the tech rolling out? Can you share some insight into the customer focus? This has been a really big step change this year. We have over 400 customers speaking throughout this event. And then we have a number of them that are on stage in the keynotes telling real stories. Two years ago, we had some customers speaking and they would say, oh, I'm dabbling in this, but now they're making real kind of bet the company decisions using our technology. And so this customer voices is looking at those companies. We have something called the Customer Innovation Series this afternoon where the CIO of HSBC will be talking about their evolution on Google Cloud two years ago. Jared West was on stage talking about just kind of what they were beginning to do with Google Cloud Platform. And now here we are two years later where they've made a lot of progress and we'll be sharing their stories. The Customer Innovation Series is one of my favorite parts at Next. You know, we cover a lot of events. Dave and I, as we like the ESPN of tech or Game Day, we go out on the shows. We see a lot of events and you kind of hear the key words over and over again, some of these events. Here we're hearing scale, which we've heard all the time, Google, scale, scale, solve our problems, but we're hearing more about customers. Okay, this has been a big focus. How have you guys shifted internally because this seems to have been around for a while? Like you said, I think it's a step function from what we're seeing as well. What's going on internally? How are you guys mobilizing? How are you guys taking this to the market because you've got great partnerships. So Cisco on stage, VMware is even up there. You've got an ecosystem developing, a lot of momentum. So we are truly this year enterprise ready to use a buzzword that comes up. So two years ago, we still had some holes in some of our technology stack and we were still really building the go-to-market teams. We still are vastly scaling that. So absolutely growing there, but we're in a whole different place as a business where we are able to serve really large enterprises at scale. Here at McKesson just announced, sixth largest company that they are moving and working with us at Google Cloud. I mean, so these are major companies that are making big decisions to work with us. And so it's at a whole different level this year and we're really proud that the customers have chosen to work with us and we're building the organization to ensure that they're successful. So that's our customer success program that's ensuring we have the right kinds of customer engineers working hand in hands with our customers. So it's a big focus of our whole group. It's a focus where Thomas Kurian has a lot of background serving enterprise customers at Oracle for 20 years, bringing that expertise. So you'll see that everywhere. So I'm glad you picked up on that and feel it because it really permeates everything we're doing at Google Cloud. And it's been a positive change in the results for there. What's the focus for you as you look forward? There's obviously a lot to do. You guys are a great opportunity. I always say Google's the dark horse. I'm now saying Amazon's got a good lead out there being first in, but you guys have a lot of tech. You got the customer focus. You got a lot of momentum on the tech side. Cloud native open source, partner ecosystem developing, customer ecosystem. So kind of balls in your core, so to speak. Yeah, we feel really well positioned. It's early. So in the whole market, a lot of people seem to think that, oh, like all these decisions, but it's really still 80% of workloads are in data centers of these big enterprises, everybody who's here with us right now. And most companies are choosing a multi-cloud strategy. This morning we announced a major product, Anthos, that really enables a multi-cloud strategy. So it enables Google to really be at the center of that multi-cloud and provide the services using containers and a lot of the biggest, best advances right now. And so as we scale or go to market, we can really bring this technology that we hear over and over again as the best technology in the business. Yeah, we hadn't really had to go to market in place to bring it to customers. And this is really where we're taking it so we can help get this awesome technology. It's so fun as a marketer to them, bring it to everybody. I always say it's so early. The wave is just getting started. There's more ways behind it. I'm very impressed and intrigued also by the rebranding of the Google Cloud Platform, which you guys announced last year. It's kind of a hybrid. Anthos is interesting because it's a rebrand slash new set of integration points. Cisco again on stage kind of integrating with your container platform is a key story that I think is nuanced, but kind of points to a whole new Google. What was behind the rebranding? Can you just share some insight to what the conversation was like? Google Cloud Platform is descriptive, but I mean, it says what it is. So there was a couple things. So Cloud Services Platform, when we chose that name last year was when we went into Alpha with the product. And frankly, within the marketing team, we kind of knew it was always a placeholder name. And then the debate was when do we change the name when we go to beta, which we did a couple months ago, or when we went to GA and we decided this would be a great opportunity to change the name. So we always knew it was, we're going to change the name. Picking a name is always complicated. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted that name to mean and what we wanted to stand for. And we really liked Anthos. It's a Greek word, it's a nod to the Greek aspects, the history of the product with Kubernetes and Istio and other areas. It means to blossom, it means to grow, it means all. And so words like anthology and things like that. So we liked both what it meant and we also liked that with all naming decisions, it's easy to spell, it's easy to find, it's all great. And it's super booming in California here as we speak, a little ironic. And it has an international flavor to it, right? You guys are taking this show overseas, right? They've got a big show in London in November, I know. Yes, we'll be in Tokyo in July next and then London in November. And then we do in between all of these, what we call Cloud Summit series, which are in country, slightly smaller, but we bring a lot of the same technology and speakers and sessions, just have a slightly scaled down version. Intimate. Well, we really appreciate your support. We love doing theCUBE here with a lot of tech athletes as we say here on the show floor. A lot of knowledge, good customer conversations. Allison, thanks for sharing the insight. Congratulations on the great show. Thank you, I love being here. Thanks for having me. And great rebranding. As the market shifts, great time to have a rebrand. Certainly when it means something more, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, Google Cloud Platform now, Anthos. theCUBE bringing the live coverage here from the floor at Google Next 2019. Stay with us for more after this short break.