 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, Cube Nation. I'm Sam Cahane. Thanks for watching The Cube. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman here today. He is STU on Twitter. So Stu and I are going to be digging into the 2019 predictions and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with The Cube this year. I personally did over 20 shows and over somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews. Out of, we as a team did over 100 shows, over 2,000 interviews. So really great to be in the community and immerse ourselves as we drink from the fire hose and swim in the data. So over 400 interviews this year. That's amazing. What are some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, so Sam, my premise when I'm going out is how are we maturing? My background as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was networking. I worked on virtualization and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So about two years ago, it was software companies. How are they living in these public clouds? So Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it'll be a multi-cloud world. The update really for 2018 is we've gone from really how do I live in those public clouds to how are we maturing, we call it hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise of Kubernetes as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments and how they get their arms around that is a serious challenge out there today. So how are the suppliers and communities and systems integrated like helping customers with this really challenging new environment that we have today? I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? So it's interesting. When I think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. So IBM, you know, company used to work for Sam buying Red Hat, company I've worked with for about 20 years for $34 billion. I mean Red Hat has been the poster child for open source and the exemplar of that. And it was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time how important developers are and how important open source is. And there's nothing like seeing, you know, big blue, 107-year-old company putting, you know, huge dollars to really, not just validate because IBM's been working in open source and working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but really the middleware. Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. I mean Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio and was kind of a little surprised actually at the sticker shop. $550 million, great team. You know, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people back when they were at Google. But some big dollars being thrown around in this space. And, you know, as we said, the big one in the world is Amazon. I mean one of the stories that everybody tracked all year was, you know, the whole HQ2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny as, you know, okay, Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle for the first time this year. And somebody told me if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43 and add them together to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, you know, right in the Queens in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of D.C., 25,000. But the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers in, like, pretty much every country. And they're going to have employees all around the world. This isn't just AWS, but Amazon overall. So Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people that have joined them, some that have left them. But, you know, it's almost everything that I talk about tends to come back to Amazon and either what they are doing or how people are trying to compete or live in that ecosystem. You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? Yeah, so, you know, living in this new world, you know, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, it's my networking background. The Cisco DevNet team read by Susie Wee is a really phenomenal example. And one of my favorite interviews of the year is actually got to talk to Susie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is great validation. But what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform. And it's not about, oh, we have some products and developers love it, but it's the marketplace that they live in really have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco Live in Barcelona. And, you know, Cisco going through this massive transformation to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. I mean, you know, Cisco is the networking company. And when they say, when you think of us five to ten years from now, you won't think of us as a networking company. You think us as a software company. That's massive. They were one of the, you know, four horsemen of the Internet era. And if Cisco is making that change, you know, everything changes. You know, IBM, you know, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, you know, is there danger in future? So everything is changing so fast. It is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. And I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later also. So Susie, we, one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give a top three interviews? So first of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. So, you know, a few of the practitioners I love talking to. At the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show is Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, and he said Northern Trust is one of the, you know, most conservative financial companies. And they are all in on containerization, modernize their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. And that's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another one, it was actually, it's funny enough, another Nutanix show at London had the Manchester City Council. So the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing for digital transformation, how they're thinking of IoT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years have been in the government because you don't think of government as innovating, but they're usually resource constrained. They have a lot of constituencies and therefore they need to do this. The Amazon Public Sector Show was super impressive. And everything from my interview to a person from the White House Historical Society, they brought on Jackie O's original guidebook of being able to tour the White House. So some really cool human interests, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry specific areas is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done are super impressive. Another small show that really impressed me was UiPath. Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, been called the Gateway Drug to AI. Really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations. And one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97% to 98% compliant and standardized. But when they put an RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%. And usually that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process if people aren't involved. And this has been the promise of automation and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions this year has been, we've been talking about things like automation and intelligence in systems for decades, but now with the advent of AI, machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence and what they are learning, but the programming and learning models that can be set up and trained and what they can do on their own are super impressive and really poised to take the industry to the next level. So I want to fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? So 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid, multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about is we talked a lot about Amazon, but VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from VMware and we joke with my friends to say, okay, you've learned a lot from them, means that maybe I don't need them in the long term, but in the short term, great move for VMware really solidifies their position with customers, customers feel happy as to where they live in that multi-cloud environment and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid and multi and things like that. When I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation, they're worried about their business, yes, they're doing cloud, so, sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense and modernize, beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer, it could be a piece of the overall puzzle to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding edge thing is, Sam, and the thing I've been looking at deeply the last two years has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal, it could just disrupt everything we're talking about and Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon show that we were just at, so just the final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people at some of the most amazing companies and even those, you know, the PhDs, the people inventing stuff, they're like, I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, let alone what's going on in the industry. So that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we help to do is to help extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts to help you understand some of the basics and where you might want to go to learn more. So we're all swimming in this, you know, the only constant Sam in the industry is? Change. Absolutely. So things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? So it's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is when you have the 100-year flood, you always say, oh gosh, we got through it and we should be okay. No, no, no. The concern is if you've had the 100-year flood or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, maybe even more or less, but rather soon. So a couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's going to go public December 28th. So interesting moves, billions of dollars, as Larry Ellison said. Michael Dell, he's no dummy when it comes to money. He is going to make personally billions of dollars off of this transaction and overall looks good for the Dell Technologies family as they're doing. So that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably going to see a $10-20 billion acquisition this year. Not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, like Veeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north, the $200 million worth of revenue, I'm trying to remember, $200-250 in run rate right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. That space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity. You've got a whole lot of players that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say, but customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things because their environments are changed. They've got lots of stuff in SAS, got to protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core when we actually did our predictions for 2018. Data is at the center of everything when we talk about Wikibon, and it was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there's some hesitancy in the enterprise of I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday, I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe allowing people to have data. There's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit when you talk about things like repatriation, I know I'm not going to trust the cloud. Look, the public clouds are more secure than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest sins we have in IT is that I put something in and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant, and it was something I wrote about Red Hat actually as a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that's dealt anything with Linux or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening on, you know, not only weekly but a daily basis that they help bring a little bit of order and adult supervision to what is, what most people would say is chaos out there, and that's the kind of thing we need more in the industry is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is you don't go to a company and say, hey, what version of Azure are you running? You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday or 08. I've got that thing that's going to slow down my system for a while. Well, Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. Great. What's your number one company to watch this upcoming year? So is it Amazon Sam? I mean, you know, so look, I mean, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While, you know, Amazon adds more in revenue than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time this year and Microsoft's super impressive. They focus on your business applications and, you know, customers love it. You know, Office 365 really helped, you know, move everybody towards SaaS in a big way and that's a big service in the industry. And Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem in 2019 and beyond. But Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the cube in 2019 than we did, like, our first couple of years. I mean, they do over, they have, of course, Amazon re-invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second tier, it's about 20 shows that they do and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit and the San Francisco Summit. I already mentioned their public sector summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users. And I already told you how I feel about talking to the users. So it's great to hear what they're doing and those customers are moving things around. So look, Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene's one of the big gets of the year for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person because I actually have some background. I work with Diane back, you know, before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with VMware when they were, like, a 100-person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career and I'm still a little bit of Gog. I mean, you know, I was in my mid-20s working with this little company of about 100 people, signed like an NDA, started working with them, and, you know, that's VMware with 600,000 customers. I've kind of watched their ascendancy. It's been, you know, one of the pleasures of my career. So those small ones, I mean, heck, you know, Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working with them when they were real small. They're over a billion in revenue, new pure since the early days. There's some companies that have done really well. So, you know, the cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing, we got into a bit. I'm surprised we, you know, got almost 20 minutes into this conversation without mentioning it. So, you know, that, the whole IoT space and edge computing really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC here in Boston, you know, got to talk to, you know, the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. You know, how are they going to become real? I mean, we've got, you know, a fun virtual reality place right next door that the guy running the cameras for us, you know, the huge VR enthusiast. So, you know, how much will those take the next step and how much are things stulling out? I was having conversations. You know, autonomous vehicles, we've been looking at the space, been talking about it, you know, will, you know, it really start to accelerate or have we hit roadblocks and it's going to get delayed because in some of these, or technology, some of these are, you know, policies in place and governance and the like. And that's still one of the things that slows down cloud adoption. You know, GDPR was a big discussion leading into the beginning of 2018. Now we barely talk about it. Now there's more regulations coming in California and the like. But, you know, we do need to worry about, you know, there's some of those macroeconomical and political things that sometimes get in the way of some of the technology pieces. Great. So, Stu, I'd love to put something out into the universe here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. So, look, you know, it's amazing to me, Sam. You know, some of the interviews we've done, I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal. Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program the first time. Now we interview him two or three times a year. And, you know, really to get to talk to him and, you know, there is the founder culture. John Furrier always talks about, you know, some of these founders are very different. You know, Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special and there was a reason why he's a billionaire and has done very well for himself. So, you know, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers. It was one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't going to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the show. So, you know, when I look at, you know, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, you know, I'm amazed. I read his bio. I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. You know, Kara Switzer did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60-minute interview was decent this year. Joe Rogan won this award as well. So, yeah, you know, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute rapid-fire conversation like we usually have, but we do some longer forms sit-down. So, he'd be one. You know, Andy Jassy, we've interviewed, you know, a number of times now, phenomenal. We've not had Jeff Bezos on the program. So, you know, some of the big, you know, tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program. We've had lots of the Oracle executives, you know, Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have, you know, so many customers and have strong power in the industry. So, there's some big names. You know, I do love some of the authors that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. So, you know, every time we go to a show, it's like, yeah, I was a little disappointed. I didn't get to interview, you know, Jane Goodall when she was, you know, at a show. It was at things like that. So, we ask and never know when we can get them. And but as I said, Sam, a lot of times it's those individual stories of the users which are phenomenal. And there's just, you know, thousands of good stories. And that's why, you know, we go to some small shows. We make sure we always have some editorial coverage so that if there's customers that are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation. Our research was founded on peers sharing where their peers and some of those powerful stories of change and taking advantage of new technologies and really transforming, you know, not just business but, you know, healthcare and finance and government. There's, you know, so much opportunity for innovation and drivers in the marketplace today. Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us and giving us the predictions. Cube Nation, you heard it here. We got to get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the Cube this year. We could use your help. So, Stu, thank you. And Cube Nation, thank you for watching.